I think people should just say what they mean, and not let bad-faith mouth-breathers constantly redefine the words out of our mouths, so that we can’t even speak of the things we want.
People who espouse socialism – who give the word actual meaning – are not bothered by these right-wing playground word games.
No one looks to Skeletor to define “good deeds” when He-Man is standing there. This issue arises when the debate is between Skeletor and Mer-Man, making the term irrelevant to the conversation anyway.
Yes. I mean, it varies from person to person - some of the Republicans are at least knowledgeable enough to know what they’re saying is b.s., but are evil cynical bastards happily willing to lie, and some are totally ignorant, but ultimately, I think it’s worse than that - they don’t care what the truth is. Trump was very much an embodiment of the GOP at this point - the facts are irrelevant to the narrative they’re trying to create to take power. The power is everything, and if they come to power under false pretenses, that really doesn’t matter.
I’ve never heard that. Either they’re too ignorant to know how those words fit into anything, or they don’t want to confuse their intended audience with words they won’t understand. “Fascist” ends up getting used more often, because, y’know, it’s just a bad-word salad.
The irony is that those socialist countries have a disproportionate number of pop stars and artists in general compared to their population precisely because it’s a hell of a lot easier to become an artist when there’s a functional social safety net. It’s most obvious when you look at, say, Iceland which has a third of a million people in the entire country, yet there’s multiple internationally-famous pop groups that have come out of it. Even if we just count Sugarcubes/Bjork and Sigur Rós, that’s a lot more than have come out of, say, Henderson Nevada, and that’s hardly the exhaustive list of famous Icelandic groups.
At the risk of mixing GOP-isms of the month, Sen Marsha Critical Race Theoryburn might be onto something. Could the album ‘Back in Critical Race Theory’ have been made under Socialism?
Do these politicians really believe the shit that drops out of their mouths? I used to think no, but now I wonder if the right has just steadily selected for the dumbest folks around and this is the end result.
Nicky Wire was told that he couldn’t wear any of his dresses though. Maybe Marsha Blackburn and the Republicans have more in common with Marxism-Leninism than they want to admit. But then again Cuba is moving forward with LGBTQI+ rights, which the GQP seem to be incapable of doing.
Fixed a very common mistake there. There are other forms of communism that reject Bolshevism and everything that came from that ideology
I’ve read that music education (shaped in part by left wing parties) is also a big factor in the success of Swedish pop. IIRC everyone studies music at school and learns to play an instrument, so the talent pool is larger. Back in the 1950s, if I’ve got the story right, the right was having a moral panic about how the kids were listening to trashy American pop while the left wanted schools to encourage creativity and self-expression. They came together to support the development of music education based on the study of classical music and Swedish folk music, which satisfied both sides – and turned out to be good training for pop songwriting.
It’s not just music though, but artists in general, game studios… all sorts of creative endeavors that flourish there. When the UK had more generous unemployment benefits and a better functioning social safety net, you saw it there, too - tons of internationally recognized actors, musicians, artists.
But I think the problem is that only very few people actually talk about socialism and the vast majority of, even well-meaning, Americans that talk about things like tax-financed healthcare or social safety nets genuinely don’t know that that has nothing to do with socialism. They’re not playing word games, they just don’t know any better.
When I was a teeny sprat of 7 or 8, my mom took me to a Led Zeppelin concert that was WAY TOO FREAKING LOUD. I spent the entire concert with my head under her arm =x .
