@march I doubt that and if that's the case than how does America still exist with such a bad school system.

@p @matrix "Capitalism" began when Karl Marx coined the term to describe what Communism was intended to fix. Before then it was just "how things work".

Markets spontaneously exist where trade can occur, even as a black market below a tyrannically taxing feudal lord. The idea that markets should be laissez-faire (government hands off) is a Dutch/Enlightment thing.

Trade and private property is as old as tool usage. Even animals have a sense of property/territory ownership and defend and fight over it. Capitalism allows humans to negotiate and compromise and trade so that property can be exchanged without violence or domination.

Last I saw, Existential Comics drank the commie kool-aid, so I'd wager this tweet is unironic.

Too bad he doesn't mention "a famine" known as the Holodomor was a planned (central planning!) engineered famine to murder millions of successful farmers who were not loyal enough to socialism, by drastically raising their grain quota and taking away all their harvest before winter. Then banning them from traveling or begging in the cities. Then banning cannibalism (they literally put up signs saying not to eat people). Much cannibalism occurred anyway. Millions died. Then, the following years, other parts of the USSR starved, because they'd murdered their farmers.

so that's what "a famine" was, and how it could be pretty evil.

@aven @matrix Yep, I'm familiar. That and Lenin's hanging order, and his general policy of putting machine guns to peasants contributed, even before Stalin was at the top. Here's a fun bit: everyone knows about the ongoing disaster in Somalia that has made the place unlivable for thirty years, but ask people if they know what happened before that. (Turns out it was decades of brutal socialism, but I don't think anyone knows that.)

I've run into existentialcomics before. (I think they blocked me.) No schools in the US demonize communism, though. My history books even repeated the "Stalin bad, not real Marxism" meme. I don't think he's paying attention to what he's writing or trying to say anything that fits reality. "School teaches us X" is a sentence these people use all the time, up there with "Society tells X to Y" and other stock formulations like this. I think it's the best indicator that there is no thought behind a statement when someone uses one of those stock phrases and the sentence ends up contradicting reality.

@p @matrix

a horrible poem:

the banality of evil.
thoughtlessness.
the outsourcing of sense-making.
it's like discarding your personhood,
and it makes it easy to discard other people, too.
it's what lets sociopath manipulators run the show.
just following orders.
the banality of evil.

@p @matrix I used to like Existential Comics, too! Some of them were really good and funny! It's just even smart people can be seduced into bad ideas, and everyone has certain blind-spots in their thinking that can lead to pet delusions they get irrational about. I know I have some.

In fact, I'd dare say that no amount of intelligence can make one immune to some bad ideas, and that dialogue with others is a good way to get a different perspective to mitigate them. This is especially true for things outside a person's domain of expertise.

I like to think of Ben Carson's "The pyramids were used to store grain" gaffe as an example. Dude's a neurosurgeon and very smart and good in other ways, but don't trust him on Egyptology. :P

@aven @matrix

Michael Crichton had some thoughts on that.

> Pyramids used to store grain

I didn't know he'd said that (I made a conscious effort to avoid the day-to-day minutia during the last election), but maybe he was just thinking about Civ2. If you build the pyramids, it counts as an upkeep-free granary in each of your cities.

@p @matrix (((Cherry-picking the start date.))) Reminds me of that meme of all that propaganda that tracks terrorism since 2002. :^)
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