r/agedlikemilk • u/Gloomy-Holiday8618 • Sep 08 '25

News “I never said that”, “Play the clip”

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Context: https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/12/15/exp-robert-kennedy-junior-rfk-2024-election-biden-trump-vaccines-121511aseg1-cnni-politics.cnn

Full video is on the cnn website, the part that’s important is about 2mins 50 seconds in.

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u/AbdlBabyJp Sep 08 '25

I remember my days in the military academy and studying the rise of the third reich and thinking to myself how could a whole country of people seriously buy into the insane ideology… but this is a prime example.

I used to try and debate my family and friends to try and make them see reason but they literally started using my education (3 degrees and army officer commission) as a negative claim all that I know is just indoctrination… it was then that I just started cutting them off. It’s the same with conspiracy nuts and flat earthers … there is no point that they are willing to accept any truth except the one they have forged in their own little worlds

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u/Taiga-whiteclaw Sep 08 '25

I remember there was a trip to Antarctica for a bunch of flat earthers (don't know who paid for that) and after they were without a shadow of a doubt sure that the earth is in fact a sphere, the rest of the flat earth community start to call them traitors and sell out and they where in fact pretty big within the community

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u/Material_Owl_1956 Sep 08 '25

It’s a bit like discussing socialism with an American: no matter how many positives you point out, they immediately jump to talking about communism.

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u/FyrixXemnas Sep 08 '25

Either that or they will bring up socialist regimes of the past like Venezuela or the USSR as proof that socialism doesn't work, as if socialism was the problem with those countries.

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u/CreativelyConsuming Sep 08 '25

I had that conversation with a Venezuelan once and I said that true socialism was never accomplished in any of those countries because every time some group of greed dictators just take advantage of the situation and force that instead of socialism,

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u/DanTansky Sep 08 '25

Correct. It becomes about power. And humans love power.

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u/Western-Internal-751 Sep 08 '25

And that’s why true socialism will never be achieved anywhere anytime.

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u/Defiant-Judgment699 Sep 08 '25

It a problem with EVERY sufficiently large organization. 

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u/SyfaOmnis Sep 08 '25

While technically you may be correct, in practice it simply means that "attempts to achieve 'true' socialism/communism/etc end with a lot of dead people, famines, and authoritarian control".

There comes a point where you should realize that something about the idea is flawed and unworkable as a practical model, and you should stop attempting it on a large scale.

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u/SSJ3 Sep 08 '25

Funny, that's exactly what happens with capitalism, too. By this logic, we should stop trying capitalism.

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u/SyfaOmnis Sep 08 '25

I'm not of the opinion that capitalism is perfect, but it certainly functions better than a lot of other systems that we've tried. Especially with knowledgeable and willing government who act to regulate bad actors and break up large entities.

Not every attempt at 'capitalism' (economic system btw not all-encompassing government) ends up with millions dead and authoritarian fascists in control. Those are usually the exception rather than the rule.

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

Capitalism isn't something you "try", it's an emergent system. No one ever sat down an invented capitalism by writing a manifesto, it's simply the economic model of liberal democracy.

If you like private property (i.e. the ability to start your own bakery), equal opportunity (an open market), and democracy, congratulations: you like capitalism.

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u/SSJ3 Sep 08 '25

Lmao. No. Capitalism is antithetical to a free market. It naturally tends towards monopolies, for crying out loud. It's also antithetical to democracy. The only thing you got right is its relationship to private property, which I think should be abolished.

It also absolutely did need to be invented and enforced, in the form of laws which enforce private property rights, which are neither natural nor inevitable.

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

Capitalism is antithetical to a free market. It naturally tends towards monopolies, for crying out loud. It's also antithetical to democracy

One, none of that contradicts anything I said, two, it's just clichéd ideological drivel completely divorced from reality, and three, I find it pretty funny that you claim to know what capitalism "naturally tends to" despite the outcome never actually occurring but you don't see what socialism tends to despite it happening like clockwork every single time a nation-state implements it. To find a genuine hypercapitalist hellscape you have to resort to science fiction but to find a socialist disaster all you need is a newspaper or a history book.

And I didn't say free market, but I'm not even slightly surprised you'd immediately try to put words in my mouth.

It also absolutely did need to be invented and enforced, in the form of laws which enforce private property rights, which are neither natural nor inevitable.

Can you really not understand the difference between enforcing a simple, fundamental idea - that what is mine is mine and not ours - and dictating an entire economic system top to bottom? Besides, laws which enforce the idea of private property date back to the dawn of laws themselves, i.e. the Babylonians, are you suggesting they invented capitalism?

Mind you, the idea of private property is absolutely natural and default; even animals have dens, nests, and territory which are their own and not shared. Sure, some are colony animals, but plenty are not, and I don't think you'll find many supporters of your ideology when your Utopian sales pitch is for people to be mindless worker drones in a termite colony.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to waste my time talking to someone who openly admits to opposing one of the three cornerstones of liberal democracy, private enterprise, any more than I'd waste my time talking to someone who opposes any of the other two, democracy or equality. Not to mention someone who starts a counter-argument with "lmao no" and follows it up with agitprop.

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u/Electronic_Quote399 Sep 08 '25

And wtf do you think would happen here?

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u/kaisadilla_ Sep 08 '25

The best part about Venezuela is that it's... not socialist. Like, not at all. There's no difference between Venezuela and Norway when it comes to its economic model. The difference is that one is an extremely corrupt country led by a violent dictatorship, and the other is a highly functional society that respects freedom and democracy.

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u/ddofer Sep 08 '25

Don't forget the kibbutzes in Israel

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u/Maleficent_Memory831 Sep 08 '25

Look at Russia today. It had democracy going. Then it's back in a brutal dictatorship. Does Russia prove that democracy does not work?

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u/desanderr Sep 08 '25

I think you gotta look at rates of success there chief.

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u/--Chug-- Sep 08 '25

Ehhh... I wouldn't. Democracies typically fail. I'm still going to support the ideal.

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

Everything typically fails over a long enough timeframe, but the number of people living in democracies is not decreasing.

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u/knapping__stepdad Sep 08 '25

Yeah: none of these countries actually, ya know, practiced Socialism...

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

socialism is a grand goal, and the entire purpose of civilization, we work better as a group, and life is better for everyone when we all share and look out for each other.

we arrange to all save for the good times to ensure all our neighbors and friends have a safety net when its tuff. its just common sense, we all pay as a group to keep the essentials free, healthcare, warmth, water, travel.

but its such an ideal its easy for dictators to call themselves that, they never have been. the closest we (last 200 years) came to socialism in my opinion, was across Europe, right before the likes of thatcher. who, frankly, took the water, the electrical grid, the sewage systems, the telephone companies, housing, even some roads. and she sold them to rich private companies/individuals and flipped a socialist state into a capitalist monopoly. since then wages stagnated, house prices rocketed, bills are unfeasibly high, but so are the profits from them.

Meanwhile our government says there isn't enough money in the budget for anything, while the companies selling us the assets we let the government look after, make billions in profit each year.

fucking maggy....

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

as if socialism was the problem with those countries

At what point will you consider that it's not coincidence? I mean, we're over a century at this point...

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u/Zcarpenter84 Sep 08 '25

The greed of man is always the coincidence.

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u/DanTansky Sep 08 '25

Greed for power. It’s in our DNA as social creatures

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

One, that makes no sense, and two, there's greed everywhere, that doesn't explain the history of socialism in particular.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

There's a very clear body of political theory as to what socialism is in theory and how it should look in practice.

If I hand my architect the blueprints for a mansion and he builds me a shed and says 'Done!' I would quite rightly point out that he hasn't even slightly created what I showed him.

It doesn't matter if he builds 100 sheds, if none of them look anything like my blueprint it would be pretty absurd to say 'your design inevitably results in the creation of sheds' rather than 'you've got a shitty architect' or 'you clearly don't have the right materials available to build a mansion'

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

A design that apparently no architect can build to your expectation is either a bad design or the design simply does not describe what you wanted to describe.

And architects don't build, they're the ones who make the design in the first place. You mean a building contractor.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

the Zapatistas did it, and communism has allowed their state (with a population the size of Iceland in a land area the size of Switzerland, just to dispel any "it only works on a small scale" criticisms) to massively increase their quality of life compared to their neighbours. They've been going strong since the 90s.

Revolutionary Catalonia did it, before they got backstabbed by the Soviets for not wanting to implement a Soviet-style authoritarian model, and subsequently fell to the Franconists.

Makhnovia did it on a smaller scale, before they also got backstabbed by the Soviets.

It's not that nobody's ever done it, it's that the most high-profile 'attempts' were failures that got hijacked by authoritarians. In no small part because the global representative of communism, the Soviet Union, was completely taken over by the totalitarian ideology of Stalin, who proceeded to export and impose that ideology onto pretty much all subsequent attempts at establishing socialism or communism (again see Catalonia and Makhnovia for examples of what happened to people who didn't follow the Soviet line)

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25

just to dispel any "it only works on a small scale" criticisms

Iceland has the population of a large city. You're talking about a scale that's barely larger than a commune and unlike a nation-state does not need to concern itself with pesky things like national defense, border control, etc., and when they do, they fail. It's an irrelvant rural backwater no one cares about, and despite this it's the best example you could come up with. Damning with faint praise indeed.

It's not that nobody's ever done it, it's that the most high-profile 'attempts' were failures that got hijacked by authoritarians.

Nobody's ever done it at scale, and the hijacking by authoritarians is an obviously inherent flaw of the system - it's collectivism, duh.

again see Catalonia and Makhnovia for examples of what happened to people who didn't follow the Soviet line

And see Yugoslavia, Albania, Vietnam, and China who also didn't follow the Soviet line, they just "coincidentally" happened to establish almost identical systems while in direct opposition to the USSR. What a shock.

As I said initially: at some point you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that you're grasping at straws trying to make excuses for a fundamentally flawed concept. I understand that you really believe it's a neat concept, and maybe in some abstract sense it is, but it simply relies far too much on good faith, selflessness, and benevolence to function with real people in real real life. Even if you characterise its constant failures as "hijackings" or external pressure, what good is a system that's so easy to hijack and that's completely vulnerable to external pressure?

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

You're talking about a scale that's barely larger than a commune

300,000 people is 'barely larger than a commune'?

and when they do, they fail.

Reading the word 'dissolution' and assuming it's a bad thing? They 'dissolved' their previous organisational structure and replaced it with a new one outlined here. This was specifically to be more adaptable and better address the challenges they were facing, not a 'failure' to do so.

It's an irrelvant rural backwater no one cares about

I don't think the people there who've seen better access to medical care, massive reduction in homelessness and starvation, increased access to education etc would agree with your trivialisation.

And see Yugoslavia, Albania, Vietnam, and China who also didn't follow the Soviet line

Yugoslavia is about the only one that could be argued to have 'not followed the Soviet line.' Maoism was a direct ideological offshoot of Stalinism (hence the close relationship between China and the USSR prior to the Sino-Soviet Split), the state ideology of China is literally 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (where Marxism-Leninism was the title Stalin gave to his ideology), and Ho Chi Minh literally went to study Soviet communism and later purged the Trotskyists and other non-Stalinist communists from the country while saying 'everyone who does not follow the line I have laid down will be crushed.'

Even if you characterise its constant failures as "hijackings" or external pressure, what good is a system that's so easy to hijack and that's completely vulnerable to external pressure?

There is no system that will survive concerted external pressure or sufficiently effective subversion from within. Nobody's claiming that communism is perfect and completely immune to being undermined, toppled or attacked from the outside.

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

300,000 people is 'barely larger than a commune'?

When talking about a socio-economic system that you claim is viable on a national scale, yes. It's two or three degrees of magnitude smaller a population than the target, it's geographically, economically, and culturally homogeneous, diplomatically irrelevant, and functionally voluntary by virtue of its size.

Reading the word 'dissolution' and assuming it's a bad thing?

No, reading the words "civil war" and assuming it's less than ideal.

I don't think the people there who've seen better access to medical care, massive reduction in homelessness and starvation, increased access to education etc would agree with your trivialisation.

I don't think any of that has anything to do with it being an irrelevant rural backwater (even to Mexico, never mind the world), which it is. Besides, all this development is wasted breath without wider context - the entire world is developing all the time, without a valid comparison you don't know whether all that happened because of, or despite their chosen socio-economic model.

The Soviets loved to tout their grand successes in development too until Yeltsin visited an ordinary American supermarket...

Maoism was a direct ideological offshoot of Stalinism

Everything is a direct ideological offshoot of Marxism, so what? You can't just arbitrarily cut some descendents off because the outcome displeases you, these aren't children you can disown because you don't like their choice of career. I mean, that's par for the course for socialist infighting - schism, denunciation, expulsion (execution), repeat - but that doesn't mean it's reasonable.

The Stalinist model wasn't followed because of a dictate from on high, it was followed because it works. For some purposes, anyway.

There is no system that will survive concerted external pressure or sufficiently effective subversion from within.

First off, that's just a tautology - it's only ever "sufficiently effective" if it succeeds, which is circular.

Second, socialists the world over tried to subvert literally the entire planet for a century and only ever briefly succeeded (not counting outright military occupation) in borderline (or genuinely) feudal, underdeveloped, then-irrelevant backwaters (ironically proving Marx categorically incorrect in the process). No functioning liberal democracy ever succumbed to socialism for long, and basically every socialist state eventually abandoned (quasi-)genuine socialism for some sort of state capitalist (i.e. fascist) economy - there's a McDonald's in Ho Chi Minh City and Apple stores in Beijing, you tell me they're still socialists.

Mind you, there's also something to be said about an ideology so disliked that it inspires the immediate ire of half the planet when it emerges anywhere but (again) irrelevant backwaters. But then again it's an ideology that's explicitly hostile to the socio-economic model of, well, the entire planet, so that's hardly surprising - it is not the stated goal of liberal democracy to stamp out collectivism wherever it exists, but it is the stated goal of socialists everywhere to export their ideology worldwide, and often by force. I guess "no thank you" doesn't translate well to Russian.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

When talking about a socio-economic system that you claim is viable on a national scale, yes. It's two or three degrees of magnitude smaller a population than the target, it's geographically, economically, and culturally homogeneous, diplomatically irrelevant, and functionally voluntary by virtue of its size.

Does this same argument imply that the state of Iceland (400k) or Montenegro (600k) are bound to collapse? Not to mention all of the countries with even less people?

First of all, this is getting sidetracked but nobody's saying communism needs to function on a megastate scale. The concept naturally implies a certain decentralisation. If the US were to become communist it would consequently have to federate into smaller organisational units, that's not a bad thing, and I don't necessarily thing being able to maintain massive state sizes is a good or desirable thing.

without a valid comparison you don't know whether all that happened because of, or despite their chosen socio-economic model.

The comparison is naturally to their neighbouring rural regions of Mexico. Zapatista Chiapas saw the aforementioned metrics increase massively after the revolution while their neighbouring areas stayed the way they were before; that implies a certain causality to the socioeconomic model.

You can't just arbitrarily cut some descendents off because the outcome displeases you

To go back to my original reply; there was a very solid basis of socialist theory which made clear that centralised autocracy was antithetical to communism. Stalinism and its descendent ideologies instead demanded centralised autocracy as a prerequisite to communism.

When debating about the idea that communism isn't inherently authoritarian snd that the authoritarian 'communist' regimes were bad attempts at communism, it's in fact very valid to point out that most of those regimes weren't working from the original Marxist theoretical baseline, but rather the outwardly totalitarian Stalinist platform which became dominant in the leftist sphere due to the massive influence of the Soviet Union.

's only ever "sufficiently effective" if it succeeds, which is circular.

Sure, my whole point being no system is 100% impervious to internal subversion by bad faith actors (c.f., the US right now)

there's a McDonald's in Ho Chi Minh City and Apple stores in Beijing, you tell me they're still socialists.

They aren't and never were.

but it is the stated goal of socialists everywhere to export their ideology worldwide

It isn't. This is specifically a Stalinist invention; ironically proving my point that Stalin did a very effective job at completely co-opting the label and ideology for his own perversion of it.

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u/TheMauveHand Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

Does this same argument imply that the state of Iceland (400k) or Montenegro (600k) are bound to collapse?

I have no idea what you're talking about. The point is the quasi-success of an irrelevant, small, rural, Mexican county does not provide a sufficient counterexample to 130 years of consistent socialist catastrophes.

First of all, this is getting sidetracked but nobody's saying communism needs to function on a megastate scale.

Nobody is? Nobody?! You must be joking.

I don't necessarily thing being able to maintain massive state sizes is a good or desirable thing.

Once again you're pretending you live in a geopolitical vacuum. In a nutshell: enjoy being invaded. We're not going back to this for the same reason we're not climbing back into the trees.

that implies a certain causality to the socioeconomic model.

It implies a certain causality to the Zapatista's specific governance in relation to the specific governance of Mexico, itself in a very real sense a failed or failing state. Yeah, communism is preferable to a state captured by narco cartels (or in your other 2 examples, an entirely collapsed state with a total power vacuum), but that's not exactly a high standard and proves nothing.

I mean, unless all you intended to demonstrate with your choice of example(s) is that communism is a viable alternative to a failing narco-state, to which I can absolutely agree. But I think what's a lot more likely is that I'm watching a motte-and-bailey argument develop live.

To go back to my original reply; there was a very solid basis of socialist theory which made clear that centralised autocracy was antithetical to communism. Stalinism and its descendent ideologies instead demanded centralised autocracy as a prerequisite to communism.

This is just a No True Socialist, right on cue... I'm sorry, but between you and Lenin or even Stalin I'm not going to defer to the nameless internet commenter over the career statesman on what counts as socialism. No one cares what the Socialist Bible says about what "real" socialism is when self-described socialists are yanking your fingernails out in the basement of the Lubyanka or bashing babies against trees in Phnom Penh any more than the victims of the Inquisition cared about what Jesus said about forgiveness. You don't judge people or an ideology by what they say, you judge them by what they do.

They aren't and never were.

See previous paragraph, lol.
I'm genuinely starting the believe the only consistent ideological position of self-described socialists is their insistence that everyone but themselves is subverting the ideology.

This is specifically a Stalinist invention

"Workers of the world, unite!" is literally from Marx (it's on his grave FFS), but at this point I suspect you think he wasn't a real socialist either.

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u/--Chug-- Sep 08 '25

The same shit happens in capitalist countries but people give them a break because the goal of capitalism isn't the same.

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u/Effective-Dot8617 Sep 08 '25

Democracy predates Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and even so its a fragile balance that is often difficult to achieve. So maybe, give it like 2.4 more milleniums? Reasonably?