I'd say so

Our civilization has like 6 years left in it, we're living pic related

I'll never make as much as my dad does. I can't get a job based on hard work and inherent skill.

I'm pretty sure we're fucked. But then I'm just a pessimistic defeatist, right? ...Right?

All that privege bullshit is soooo fucking annoying. Reminds me of those social justice fags on tumblr... boring!

It's very simple, really.

Try to think of a decade where there wasn't a major financial or economic crisis-type situation.

2000s (so far): Lehman Brothers
1990s: Dot com bust
1980s: Reaganomics
1970s: Oil embargo
1960s: ????

I may just be rusty on my history, but it seems like the Baby Boomers had it best, in terms of both wealth and privilege/opportunity.

I fuking hate it, too much of durr hurr young liberals people will destoy our country, lets go back to the 20's mentality were everyone where so happy and america was #1 country so capitalism will survive for a few more years...

>>503
>so capitalism will survive for a few more years...
Captain Commie?

Really, I wouldn't give a second thought to this type of projection if not for the fact that the business back door has been sealed shut. If you don't graduate from somewhere, the only option you'll ever have is a McJob.

I've learned more in my spare time than everything after 3rd grade. But I can't apply any of this for a job because I need to complete a defined program of study with a piece of paper to get a job in a field that may not event have any relation to whatever I 'study'.

The system is fucked.

>>503
>>504
Why don't you just move to the People's Republic of Europe then? America still has plenty of opportunities for those willing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, because the system works, or at least isn't broken, and if it ain't broke don't fix it

>>505
I don't mean to be an asshole here, but I just wanted to say this somewhere, and I figured the half dead board of some nowhere chan would be a good place so as to not bother to many fucks.



Take "to pull oneself up by the bootstraps" literally. Do you see how it's supposed to be a miracle? Do you see how it's supposed to be impossible?

No? Okay. Picture someone literally downtrodden. Lying down, in the dirt. Now imagine them using their bootstraps - like shoelaces for boots - to pull themselves up.

Got it? Good.

Fuck you if you expect that everyone can do the impossible. Fuck you if you expect that everybody has a pair of boots. Some folk are in such hell holes that they had to eat them. Even in America.

That was a miracle when it made the headlines in 18-fucking-80. Then it lost all meaning, having been repeated enough times that it became a faceless virtue. Expecting everyone to have that ability is like expecting every Chris chan or Alog or Riga to clean their life up. Regardless of whether they should or not, some simply can't.



Also, I've heard people talk about privilege, privilege, privilege. Let me ask you this, what the hell sort of audacity do you have to tell people they can't improve the land they love? What the hell sort of right do you have to tell the people you don't like to go away like that? To do so means to abandon and separate families, friendships, lovers. To do so means to effectively abandon wealth, possessions - sentimental or otherwise - and identity. But most of all it COSTS MONEY. If you want to start a fund so everybody you dislike has the money to move to Europe or wherever, be my guess, but your cheap ass will never shit out that sort of compassion, naturally.

Here's the deal about democracy. It doesn't just happen. It wasn't those fucking cowards who abandoned their families for Burger King who liberated East Germany, it was the heroes who stayed in the borders, marching the streets singing the Internationale all the way back in 89. Fuck all y'all.


Sorry about that.

>>509
But MARXISM

>>510
>>509

Im whit this guy

>>505
If the system "ain't broke" then how come politicians can't get anything done? How come small businesses close while corporations get government life-support? How come the RIAA/MPAA can sue people out of house and home over a couple hundred dollars worth of unpurchased movies and CDs while completely legal sites like Wikipedia and Google are the only effective line of defense for net neutrality?

Don't tell me about the American dream. The American dream is exclusive to foreigners who have competitive education in their home country, or have become so accustomed to manual labor that they can lay shingles on a roof every day for 8 hours at the height of summer without passing out from sheer exhaustion.

Our own educational system has been spiraling downward for decades because of mismanagement, budgeted corporate handouts, tenure abuse, and hundreds or other things I don't need to go into.

Our government was built on the foundation that every American would take an active role in staying informed on the policies and decisions being made and would elect competent leaders and prune those who do not act in the national interest. Do I even need to tell you where that fell apart?

This isn't an election; it's a circus. Put on lots of make-up and travel around the country putting on shows for people and throwing mudpies at each other and hope that people pick you as the better clown. Oh, and then there's the campaign funding. Our government is deeper in debt than our entire GDP could fix. So what do we do? Spend spend spend to get our face on TV more than the opponent so we can be the head honcho for a few years. Last year our government very nearly shut down because it could not agree on a budget plan. Did you know congress still gets paid during a shutdown even though they are directly involved in the process that causes it? If you're gonna have a pissing match over how to divy out funding for public services, you fucking work for FREE until you get it done.

Until the American people as a whole wake up and take a look at the big picture rather than the distraction issues like abortion and gay marriage, we'll continue on with the current trend of unproductive waste, corporate favors, and party-line sabotage.

>>523
Look, America is the best country in the world and we just need to believe it is again. As soon as the government gets out of everybody's business and stops sucking the blood of the people with taxation, trickle-down economics will kick in and the recession will end.

>>524
Richest ≠ Best

Nor has it ever.

The freedoms we praise are illusionary at best. In our country, freedom of the press meant freedom of a few megarich tycoons to spin whatever lies they wanted; in the day it was the likes of Hearst and Pulitzer, now, the likes of Murdoch, Koch (and Koch), Turner, Burke, Soros. Our so-called judicial rights mean that we still put dissenters behind bars - even moreso if they "look Muslim", Black, or Latino - in the day, this meant death camps, multinational genocide, and, simply to prove we aren't immune from political persecution, how about simply the deaths of the Rosenbergs? The right to protest has repeatedly been trampled upon as well, from history's various examples, possibly most famously the DNC, to more recent OWS.

I know that probably is getting you mad, but here's some cold hard facts relating to the latter:

In June 2012, a federal judge ruled that the protesters had not received sufficient warning that they would be arrested if they entered the roadway. While the police had argued that the protesters had received adequate warning, after reviewing video evidence, Judge Jed S. Rakoff sided with protesters saying, "a reasonable officer in the noisy environment defendants occupied would have known that a single bull horn could not reasonably communicate a message to 700 demonstrators"

In May, 2012, three cases in a row were thrown out of court, the most recent one for "insufficient summons". In another case, photographer Alexander Arbuckle was charged with blocking traffic for standing in the middle of the street, according to NYPD Officer Elisheba Vera. However, according to Village Voice staff writer Nick Pinto, this account was not corroborated by photographic and video evidence taken by protesters and the NYPD. In yet another case, Sgt. Michael Soldo, the arresting officer, said Jessica Hall was blocking traffic. But under cross-examination Soldo admitted, it was actually the NYPD metal barricades which blocked traffic. This was also corroborated by the NYPD's video documentation.


Naturally there's a bias in our police force. If I understand your position well, then you're about to say something like "yes we have problems but we're far from the worst". Well, to that, and I apologize if it's a strawman, I say this: when was the last time you heard a non-American and non-third-world child say something to the effect of "down with the po-po"? Believe it or not, some actual experience in the field of, just, say, education, is going to reveal quite a bit about minority's fears with regards to our system; this is how I know, but I know for a fact if you look in places where their fear is minimal, you'll find out a lot about a world you almost certainly don't know. And let me assure you, with my experience with even refugees from countries like Chile, Mexico, and immigrants from Germany (a Türk), France, and the UK, our racist Police force is quite really the exception, not the rule; only amongst developed/mostly developed nations do Japan and China seem to be more fixed against minorities, and China's judicial system is biased against everybody.


But let's get back to the basics. America is the land of life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness, yeah? Note that pretty much every nation claims this to a certain extant; liberté, egalité, fraternité; Thailand is the "Land of the Free", in Thai, and "Land of the Free" Belize's national Anthem. But one merely needs to look at our history of monopolistic practice (cf TVA or Bell (now AT&T)), unabashed corporatism (cf Apple and Microsoft wiping out competition; Starbucks wiping out local competitors, WalMart doing much the same), and discrimination that we should know our claim to a right to pursue happiness isn't anything special. Liberty I've gone over. Which leads to the question of life?

Freedom of life in America for many for a long time meant freedom to be lynched at the whim of the KKK; even today, hate groups such as the KKK, the neo-Nazis, and the neo-Black Panther Party are at a high, still murdering. In just murder, gang warfare is off the charts. And yet, our prisons are overflowing with petty criminals imprisoned for life, draining our budgets, making us simultaneously one of the richest nations and in the most debt.


Denying reality won't make us better. We aren't the best. And simply believing you're the best won't work. I mean obviously, it didn't work for Chris, now did it?

>>526
>UNAMERICAN
I bet you're about to say something lefty, like 'we're slowly sliding towards facism, seeing as facism was originally a merger of state and corporate power'. Don't you know that facism is socialism?

>>524
LOL no, Taxes are a necessary "evil" and for "trickle-down economics will kick in and the recession will end" part. damn so much nop, united states id the more indebted country in the hole world.

>>528
Only in the absolute loosest sense of the term; socialism was a term that existed outside of Marxism, you know.

Actually, if you don't mind, what do you think Fascism is?

>>532
Adolf Hitler was the original facist, and he was a National Socialist, ergo all facism is socialism.

>>533

{Response was too long. So it is attached. If you at all care; I'm just kinda going on and on, and a significant portion is copypasta. Sorry.}

>>534
Much of what you say is correct, but Hitler was a socialist. Nazi does mean National Socialism. The full party name was National Socialist German Workers' Party.

>>535
lol I knew if i said enough stupid shit someone would come along and defend it

>>535
But not a Marxist, or even a religious socialist. The only left wing socialist he has any connection to is Blanqui, who's as well-regarded amongst left-wingers as ADF is to the modern democrats or (slightly better than) Breivik is to the right. He wasn't a left wing socialist; he only wanted a form of so-called "Sozialismus", i.e., redistribution, for his ideal, conservative to the point of reactionary idea of a perfect German.

His usage of the term, by his own writings, and indeed, to the consensus (albeit weak) of the historians, was to confuse those who weren't too familiar with Socialism and to steal away working class votes from the left.

He played with words, using a general sense of Socialism. It'd be like a man promising to cut government spending, getting to office, only cutting back on the growth of government spending (lowering the derivative, not the actual value), and technically not lying because of the ambiguity of the term.


You're not wrong in this sense. But you really aren't right either. I fear you've fallen for a distortion of the actual truth. Which, to be fair, is the nature of politics. Cheers.

Adolf Hitler was an advocate of capitalism. On his route to power, he courted rich industrialists, who saw the theat of a militant communist movement in post 1st world war Germany as a threat to their position, and so backed the fascist and and anti trade union movement created by Hitler.

Hitler openly admitted his use of the word 'socialist' (in the name of his national socialist movement) and the use of red in propaganda, was an attempt to tap into the support that left wing ideas had gained since the economic downfall prior to the Treaty of Versailles. Although an advocate of state intervention in the economy, Hitler was a friend of big business, and his suppression of communists, socialists and trade unionists in seeking to break the organised labour movement, was proof of this.

In conclusion, fascism was merely an extension of the capitalist system. Rather than see Germany move towards socialism, big business supported Hitler as the lesser of two evils. Under fascism, they could maintain their position. Communists were the first to suffer from this opportunism, and many were killed in the concentration camps, alongside the Jews, gypsies and other minorities.

Now someone explain that since Hitler was a racist, he could only possibly have been a lefty.

>>537
>>539
So... You're asserting that the party called the National Socialist German Worker's Party was such in name only, and asserting he was a capitalist in favor of big business, and I guess we should just ignore that by your own admission he was for wealth redistribution, they seized inherited wealth, and the justification for going after the Jews was largely that they were wealthy and controlled the banks, and thus was an obvious attack on the wealthy?

...Seriously?

>>543
So... You're asserting that the state called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was such in name only, and asserting is a tyrannical monarchy in favor of autarky, and I guess we should just ignore that by your own admission that the Kims say they are for wealth redistribution, they seized inherited wealth, and the justification for going after everybody was largely that they were wealthy and controlled the banks, and thus was an obvious attack on the wealthy?

...Seriously?


Actually that's not really what we said. At all.

Everything that is not laissez-faire is not automatically anti-capitalist; it simply isn't laissez-faire. It's not black or white.

The problem is that Sozialismus, wann es wie das benützen wird, that is, the German word Sozialismus, cognate to but not the same as the word socialism, when it was used like that, simply meant redistributionism. And that not all redistributionism is the same.


There are people who think wealth should be redistributed towards the working poor. We call these socialists now a days.

There are people who think wealth should be distributed towards cadres. The left calls them hypocritical traitors and the right calls them socialists and communists and democrats and whatever else they want to smear.

There are people who think wealth should be redistributed towards corporations or small business, which, do to the way the economy works, means other corporations or small businesses have to suffer. That's the heart of real fascism; syndacalism, then coupled with social-conservative (not the same as fiscal-conservative) values.

There are people who think wealth should be redistributed based on religion. There are people who think wealth should be redistributed based on sex. and there are people who think wealth should be distributed based on race. And there are people who think we should keep the system we have, which, due to the way that society has been arranged (a simple undeniable fact), means that wealth is distributed according to race, sex, business mode, political affinity, inherited wealth - in short, class. Not all ideas on how wealth should be distributed are the same.


Hitler was a redistributionalist. But he was not a Marxist, or any of its child systems - Luxembourgist, Leninist, Eurocom, whatever. there's a text doc up there that's ~19 pages long. Download it. Read it. You might learn something. You might ignore it.

>>543
>So you're saying everything I want to believe is true?

>>546
Truth lies beyond belief.

But saying the left is responsible for fascism is dishonest unless you include the fact that the right is just as responsible. Likewise, it's dishonest to say the right is responsible without citing the left wing methodology. Ever hear of lying by emission?

You're not wrong, but you aren't right. The thing about the fascists is that they did right wing things using left wing methodology in addition to a heaping helping of dishonesty, hatred, and violence not engendered to either "wing". They're neither; they're both.

>>547
*lying by omission

Goddamn, sorry

>>547
Lying by emission? By emission of what, you dang dirty lefty? Just admit that Hitler was a communist and the free market is God and I'll go easy on you.

>>549
>Hot air, from where a brain ought to be

Op i cant thank you enough for bring me to this video i have no idea, now i'll make some corn and laugh my ass off as i read all the comments and teir buthurt and rustled jimmies.