Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters" channel.

  1.  @Based_Stuhlinger  Thomas Sowell got over his Marxism over 60 years ago. Maybe you should, too.
    52
  2. You know who's running things when you know whom you may not criticize.
    26
  3. I was all primed to dislike David Starkey as another stuffy Brit. Then I watched his "Monarchy" series. Everything I've heard from him, since, has only made me like him, more. Usually, my first impressions are on-target, but that SOB grows on me.
    15
  4. You think like I think. When "hate crime" first got floated, I saw this coming, as did you. It's not exactly rocket science.
    13
  5. Top comment!
    10
  6.  @shrekt864  Fascism is a form of socialism. Hitler and Mussolini were socialists.
    9
  7. Wheeler still hasn't faced any consequences for the harm he has caused.
    9
  8.  @hayleylongster4698  It's a difference without a distinction. As the Birchers explained, decades ago, it doesn't matter if you own the factory or not, if you don't control the factory. The Krupps remained captains of industry (Krupp Steel) under the Nazis, but the Nazis told them what to make. And it's not as if the commissar for regional coal production or farm production didn't enjoy massive privileges compared to his comrades lower on the totem pole. Nazis weren't around long enough to see the kind of economies that evolve over the longer term. Soviet Russians were very inventive when it came to getting things done by going AROUND official channels. There's always a yin and a yang to these phenomena. Prosperity isolated Americans from each other. Tyranny built some tight-knit communities and a culture of people who kind of looked out for each other (just to survive). Some break it down this way: International socialism is class warfare. National socialism is race warfare. I prefer the old John Birch Society's economic definition: Socialism is ownership of the means of production by the state. Fascism is control of the means of production by the state. Functionally, they are indistinguishable, because control is the same. Another way of distinguishing the two: Socialism is international/globalist. Fascism is nationalist. I'm at the far end of the LINEAR spectrum from that. I'm just to the left of anarchy. Laws protecting persons and property and not much else. I despise regulations in most things, because it's so easy to subvert powerful enforcement agencies. I think better ways of doing things and higher standards should be a selling point, rather than a bureaucrat weighing in.
    6
  9.  @clarehidalgo  The slave trade pre-dates Dutch colonies.
    6
  10. Yes. And when Elendil solemnly bowed his head, humbly acknowledging her wisdom, I literally got chills.
    6
  11.  @ivanivanovic5857  Be ready to buy (have your financial shit together), and then don't be in a hurry. Amazing how good a deal you can get when you play competing dealers off against each other.
    5
  12.  @hayleylongster4698  Do you think there weren't any privileged industrialists in Soviet Russia? Some of the labels we use make distinctions without a difference. Like Democrats and Republicans arguing heatedly over the difference between $100 billion and $99 billion. "People will die if we don't get the full $100 billion!" "That's fiscally irresponsible! We shouldn't pay one cent more than $99 billion!" Meanwhile, I'm over in the corner asking "How about $0 billion?"
    5
  13. Brilliant!
    4
  14. A focus group found that "employee engagement" is important and that being mommy and daddy to the worker helps. All that worker engagement stuff just gets in my way at work. Company gym. Company masseur/masseuse. Mental health counseling. Safe spaces. All stuff I will never use, but somebody pays for. Free meals at meetings. There's a part of the workforce that loves this stuff and will never challenge inept, wasteful and self-indulgent management. I just want to provide the best service possible for my clients, but management squeezes my productive hours. I already had a full day before all the touchie-feelie stuff, and I resent it. And yes, I have to work overtime to provide the same quality of service that I've always provided.
    3
  15.  @eldermillennial8330  Fascists/communists believe that all means of production are under state control. ALL forms of collectivism only end up collectivizing those companies/industries it singles out. There's too much going on in an economy to be socialist about the whole thing. It's all pretty arbitrary. And they invariably destroy whatever industries they nationalize. The Nazis nationalized heavy industry, agriculture (more bread for the people!) and the railroads, among other things. Their ability to feed themselves was destroyed, because the bureaucrats had no idea how to run a business, as you say. People were freezing in winter because there was no coal. Actually, there was PLENTY of coal. They just couldn't get it from the mines to the people because the socialist government decided cheap train fares for family vacations were more important. No cars for coal. Not even enough for passengers, because the demand for the under-market train tickets was through the roof. It's all pandering and incompetence. The Nazis were terribly incompetent. Krupp Steel remained under private ownership, but it was more than happy to do and make anything the government told it to do or make. Some - like me - believe there is no functional difference between government ownership and government control. In either case, production is dictated by the government. Eventually, as is always the case, they needed slave labor to prop up their socialist project. They also needed to rob every Jew with two pfennigs to rub together. Privileges that accrue to industrialists under fascism also accrue to industrialists under communism. Big business welcomes government control. No more competition and too big to fail.
    3
  16.  @malcolm_in_the_middle  So you're saying Mussolini tried to re-brand HIS form of socialism. These are artificial, word-salad distinctions that intellectuals LOVE, but which signify NOTHING.
    3
  17.  @jaydy71  Bunch of empty rhetoric. The forms are IDENTICAL. Collective > Individual. Your stuff are ours. Use of force good. End justifies the means. Leninism was class-based, but they ran their own pogroms against the Jews and other ethnic groups. It's all the same. The rationale is different. Dictatorship is dictatorship.
    3
  18.  @atriumfalanggaming6470  The USA adopted MANY fascist features in the war against fascism. Those features didn't go away over time. They were baked into the political economy and the culture as "good things." Surveillance state shifted to anti-communism, and grew into what can only be described as 21st-Century Cossacks. State-run media was achieved, functionally, by media who were given insider access in return for printing government (and corporate) press releases VERBATIM as "news." Stories embarrassing to establishment members were suppressed/censored. Indoctrination of children in state-run public schools has been going on since the turn of the 20th Century, if not before. State involvement in the health care industry has made a red-tape NIGHTMARE that's grossly overpriced for anyone who actually pays out of pocket. Socialized medicine was the thin edge of the wedge of fascism in Weimar Germany. Bismarck came up with the idea in the late 19th Century, because industrialization and a growing middle class was making the aristocracy (the ruling-class Junkers) obsolete. The model for socialized medicine was taking from Krupp Steel, which basically invented the company town. They spent their corporate largesse on a paternalistic business model. Company workers gave their loyalty oath to the company, and in return, the company "cared for them." Nobody thought to ask "If you can afford all these freebies, why don't you just pay your workers more and let THEM decide how to handle their health care needs?" Bismarck really liked the loyalty oath and the fanatical loyalty such patronage instilled in Krupp workers. Bismarck wanted that kind of unthinking, unswerving loyalty from the masses towards the state and hence towards the ruling elites. Free stuff from the state is just a way to perpetuate serfdom by another name. That's the upshot of all the Marxist theory. It's just a way for a small ruling elite to get control over us peasants. We want a NEW way, not some pseudo-intellectual justification for a return to the OLD WAYS, and that's all that government-paid "free stuff" amounts to. "Let's get 'em hooked on the government tit, and we can get away with ANYthing!" I'm sure that's not what Marx was thinking. Marx was an intellectual who wasn't paid what he thought he was worth. An overgrown child, who could spin any tale required to cast himself as poor and picked-upon, even though he was born with all the advantages of a good education and hard-working parents who'd built up a modest fortune, which he IMMEDIATELY squandered on himself. A political theory created by a spoiled narcissist doesn't carry much weight with me.
    3
  19. You can't impose your will on the majority against its will. That's democracy. Voting for stupid things that will store up trouble is also democracy. The balance is something like the U.S. Constitution, where only the stuff that 2/3 of the people agree on makes its way into law, and it'll take a 2/3 majority to overturn it. Majority rule is bread and circuses. Imposing your will on the majority is tyranny.
    2
  20. Women are bred to seek security and safety for themselves and their brood. The government proposes marriage and many women eagerly accept, and any threat to that government assistance is "life or death" for them, so they get hysterical. Being a good woman, taking care of yourself, and proving you're going to be a good partner with good morals for life is too high a bar for a few, and therefore unfair in the eyes of all. They're authoritarian because to them, authoritarianism is preferable to ANY kind of uncertainty, and government programs have no uncertainty, until of course, the wheels fall off society because of all the boys raised in fatherless homes, and other factors. The women don't see this. They just see a threat to next month's check. Many people will not strive to improve their situation if their needs are met without work. The lack of greed amongst such people is admirable, but what's not admirable is to think that everyone can be a net taker from the system, rather than a net contributor. We're in an era now where the contributors are being crushed by the recipients, and the bureaucrats whose wealth and status are derived from administering the re-distribution of wealth from contributors to recipients (and to corporations. Corporate welfare is also a thing.). Politicians LOVE constituents who live off the dole. Those are easy votes to win. Just promise more free stuff than the other guy, and you have a huge voting bloc.
    2
  21. West-supported Chiang Kai Shek was a train wreck. You don't get a communist takeover by Mao or Lenin without abject misrule to begin with. The commies suck, but authoritarian rulers sucked so bad, the commies took over. USA's headed down that same path. Should know better. Apparently doesn't.
    2
  22. 7 months later and Twitter has banned the term "groomer" from the platform.
    2
  23. Yes. "You're an ist and a phobe because you destroyed my argument. Now I'm going to use anger and bluster to try to win on fee-fees."
    2
  24. He has to bite his tongue to let the interviewer splat all over the subject.
    2
  25. Governments in the West are creating the chaos they need to justify the next round of police-state escalations, nationalization of local police, etc.
    2
  26. It is in Canada!
    2
  27. Twitter's had it both ways for a long time. I think their issues with bots are secondary to their issues with ideologues filtering out anything that's not on the "political-class-approved-content" list.
    2
  28. Uber and Lyft joined the BORG. Massive, sickening, establishment virtue signalers.
    2
  29.  @barryfleming8488  Money and power. The same thing.
    2
  30.  @nothanks3236  The olivine and hornblende sink. The plagioclase floats.
    2
  31. Have you seen the average 20-something American male? They're living in Mom's basement!
    2
  32.  @xnkatta  Critical race theory is one facet of critical theory. Critical theory's purpose is to de-construct capitalism and replace it with collectivism. I don't care if you call it communism, socialism, fascism, or Nazism. It's all the same thing, championed by the same kinds of people, for over a century.
    2
  33.  @jaydy71  They were at war with communists for supremacy. Nazi versus Communist is left eating the left. You've been raised on fallacies.
    2
  34. I've seen men who didn't carry their weight. I've seen women who don't carry their weight. Most of the time, I see a pretty solid division of labor that works well for both partners. But those are boring, so we never talk about relationships that really work.
    2
  35.  @jeffreywoods4040  Women are naturally attracted to the exotic, which to white women is black men. It's built-in to mix the genes and avoid inbreeding. In the old days, that guy with buck teeth from the next valley was a pretty hot commodity one winter when the village got snowed in. Eskimo women dang near threw themselves at explorers.
    2
  36. PayPal's arbitrary denial of service, like GoFundMe's, is a huge threat to free speech and liberty. It deserves to die. So does GoFundMe and any bank that plays the same "denial of financial services" tactic to crush anyone who speaks against The Message. I dropped PayPal years ago, because of this. If there were a free-speech version of PayPal, I'd be their customer.
    2
  37. @UrsineAutist It's definitely about the money, but more about the money made by billionaires and politicians by controlling what's talked about.
    1
  38.  @johannespilvikukka6003  Changing the rule set by political means always creates imbalance and hardship. Even if the original rule set was flawed, people learned to survive under those rules, and changing them yanks the rug out from under them. We see something similar happening in agriculture. Chemical farming isn't good for people or the land, but you cause more harm by using force to change things overnight. It turns out that markets achieve change far more rapidly and with less harm than government regulations.
    1
  39.  @MrEdrftgyuji  "Liberal" is another one. "Liberal" now stands for tyrannical nanny governments, who will destroy you in the name of saving you.
    1
  40. Male and female have always been idealized, sometimes to a ridiculous degree (Kardashian) in art and entertainment, since the first Earth Goddess carving. Standards of beauty drift over time, somewhat, but fast-forward to today, and I think our standards for beauty in media and entertainment are VERY different from standards of beauty in real life. Like the young lady said, if you're your best self, physically, as in diet, exercise and grooming, you will be attractive to the opposite sex. I can't tell you how many crushes I've had on different girls/women over the years, starting as a boy in 1st grade, with a crush on Dixie, who was the brightest and most vivacious girl in class. But if you put her - or ANY of my crushes - up against a tv/movie actress, she'll look dumpy or plain. But in real life, it's a totally different ballgame.
    1
  41. Wars of conquest and extermination weren't invented by the white man.
    1
  42.  @gantorisdurran710  The Commanche were pushed around for many years. And then the horse arrived and slaves became masters.
    1
  43. Child abuse allegations are mainly investigated against fathers who are trying to keep their teen-age daughters from drugs and fornication. Seen it many times. Actual abusers get multiple chances and tend to be ignored. But tell a high-spirited daughter "No" and the police will be at your door in 2.5 seconds.
    1
  44. It's DIE, not DEI.
    1
  45. Making a bed and sleeping in a made bed is extra work. I like to curl up in my blankets.
    1
  46. More lives were lost due to censorship of COVID information and clear government-sponsored misinformation. The biggest liars are the biggest fans of censorship. It has always been this way.
    1
  47. CRT is just the most visible and objectionable piece of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity poison that permeates all major American institutions. Obliterating CRT does NOTHING to eliminate DIE offices in institutions across the continent. The postmodernist project continues unabated. Conservatives can celebrate the defeat of CRT and still not even move the needle on Marxist critical-theory indoctrination that's EVERYwhere in academia.
    1
  48. I've never been on Reddit or Twitter and now I never will be. But I'm ashamed to be typing this in YouTube comments. I really should be using a paid service that does a better job on free speech than YouTube, with better user controls to filter as I see fit. I can afford it. Time to go silent on YouTube, except for their science and math stuff, which can be pretty good.
    1
  49.  @anilin6353  Yeah. She's edgy right when it becomes cliché.
    1
  50. When you reason from a falsehood, your conclusions are absurd.
    1
  51. She reminds me of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. She believes she's doing good by destroying young minds, and breaking them to HER way of thinking.
    1
  52. She's Queen of the USA. Didn't you get the memo?
    1
  53. Some teaching's worse. Some is markedly better. With Internet, there are models of ed as yet unimagined waiting to explode. I know there're good teachers. I know good content is scalable. Just a matter of time before a whole lotta people get a whole lot smarter.
    1
  54. And Peter Boghossian. Alan Sokal spoofed postmodernist journals back in the '90s, but didn't get as much attention as Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian, who co-authored some real humdingers that were peer-reviewed and published - even praised - by morally and intellectually bankrupt Humanities journals.
    1
  55. See "Whiskey Rebellion" and "George Washington." Anyway, the people who want to censor other people are NEVER the good guys.
    1
  56. Classic stuff. Cuts to the core of the current lunacy.
    1
  57. Schools in USA are paid for by property taxes. Anyone who owns or rents property pays towards education.
    1
  58. I'm a libertarian, and the non-force principle applies to sex with a minor. You can do anything you want, short of infringing on the natural rights of others, and because a child isn't equipped to give informed consent, an adult having sex with a minor is rape, plain and simple. Libertarians aren't opposed to laws protecting persons and property. It's all the OTHER stuff government sticks its nose into that we abhor.
    1
  59. They take their cue from American media who take their cue from the Democrat National Committee.
    1
  60. You guys are young. I've been black-pilled by the slow march of socialism throughout our institutions and culture for almost 50 years. Even when there's a Reagan Revolution or a MAGA movement, it's just a pause, at best, but the philosophical Rubicon was crossed in FDR's day and Lyndon Johnson brought us "What can your country do for you? Step right up! We've got money for miles! Vote for us! Get something free!"
    1
  61. The answer is simple: Your own community is the one closest to hand.
    1
  62.  @neil_mch  I don't know anybody who quit because of that punishment.
    1
  63.  @SvendleBerries  Dominating the public square and curating information is MUCH more profitable than anything earned by the companies participating. CNN investors don't care if CNN makes a profit, if it's influential enough to push the agenda(s) of the investors. Lose millions to make billions. Big Tech and legacy media will be propped up by the ruling class as long as they maintain the ability to influence public policy.
    1
  64. No. Just as full of propaganda in the '90s and early '00s, only they hid it better. Mostly factual reporting. The bias was in what stories got picked up. Also, the unity of legacy media censorship was still relatively unchallenged by independents. Now, it's a whole new ballgame, which is why the big censorship push on Big Tech. They're trying to homogenize the Internet the same way they homogenized all the t.v. and radio networks.
    1
  65. She's a religious Puritan intent on spreading the Word of her God.
    1
  66. College professor says "white people should commit suicide." My response: You first.
    1
  67. The leftists who accuse everyone of fascism are closer kin to fascists than anyone arguing for limited government.
    1
  68. Hey, Tommy Tommy!
    1
  69. The IRS does the same thing in the USA. Look for somebody in Texas who doesn't have an air conditioner on the theory that they're too poor to fight you.
    1
  70. HUGE up-surge in conservatism among black men (Black women are all-in for free stuff) and hispanics. This is alarming to the Demokkkrats, which is why they are increasingly authoritarian, to sustain their hegemony in the absence of the populist, free-stuff message that won them power in the first place. The thing about Obama's cloying and sibilant toxicity is he did such a good job creating division that the left is fragmented, and the right is growing.
    1
  71. Pride month? Jesus Christ, himself, gets 2 days.
    1
  72. UK is lost.
    1
  73. Yes. They want to be a white-supremacist cis-gendered shooter, so of COURSE they deny his expressly stated gender orientation! They're absolutists on gender affirmation until it conflicts with a stronger narrative they wish to maintain about evil right-wingers.
    1
  74. Yes. If the first thing you bring up in a conversation with ME is sex and YOUR sexual preferences in particular, I'm done conversing! You're just too creepy and obsessed with sex.
    1
  75. When they're talking about pronouns, they remind me of equally insufferable members of my church, growing up. The same "cleverness" on display, i.e., can recite dogma and insists on doing so, for a pat on the head from authority.
    1
  76.  @grantsamson2384  So are guys.
    1
  77.  @jitblues  Exactly! "Real communism has never been tried!" LOL! They're pathetic.
    1
  78. @Zealadinn That's a nice way of calling @Mini ShadowHawk Gaming a useful idiot.
    1
  79. The philosophical Rubicon was crossed in the late 1960s in the USA, with Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." Everything we see in the woke media is downstream of those entitlements. We went from "If the government leaves us alone, we will prosper and be free" to "If the government doesn't remove all bumps, bruises and obstacles for me, the government isn't doing its job."
    1
  80.  @thathandsomedevil0828  What good will Social Workers And Therapists do?
    1
  81. Europe went mad years ago. Making the USA their enemy is totally in line with their policies of the last x years. Anything constructive, they reject, for reasons. Anything destructive, they embrace, for reasons.
    1
  82. Stop giving money to people who hate you. Words to live by.
    1
  83. When you nationalize your health care, you hand over the judgement calls to strangers. In a PRICE-regulated free market, there's no faking it. And if the cost is too high, all the people who voted for free health care should put their money where their mouths are, and HELP. But in a free-market system, the people who will smooth the rough edges for the unfortunate by actually digging into their own pockets will mostly be people who voted against nationalized health care.
    1
  84. Anything that happens in South America has USA's fingerprints all over it. South America should be an economic giant, but somehow, all our "help" and "guidance" hasn't brought that about.
    1
  85. "Liberal" means tolerant of other views and limits on government power and scope. The term has been hijacked by the New Aristocracy, trying to make the New Serfdom palatable to unsuspecting masses.
    1
  86. Gay marriage/unions are an issue because of medical and pension benefits denied to members of such unions. I, personally, don't think it's the state's business to either approve OR disapprove of any kind of marriage, and especially not the state's business to award special privileges to people for being in a formalized relationship. You got married! Good for you! The advantages of teaming-up are many! Now get on with your damn life! But as long as benefits and pensions DO follow along marriage lines, gay people have a strong case. I just think the government has no business conferring advantages to HETERO couples. No tax breaks for being married. No tax breaks for having children. You want kids? Then plan and pay, accordingly. The long-term advantages of having kids are many. So, after years of paying taxes to support your kids, does that mean your kids are going to be a comfort to ME in MY old age? No! They're YOUR KIDS.
    1
  87. We're reaping the "benefits" of socialized medicine, with hopelessly politicized health care, and care rationing by bureaucrats.
    1
  88. USA still has a 1st Amendment. It's lying in tatters, but they don't arrest you for memes, yet.
    1
  89. Communism was quite popular between 1917 and the early 1920s. Then American leftists started going to the Soviet Union to learn more about it. They came away with stories of starvation and the gulag. That gave communism a black eye. George Orwell was one of those red-pilled socialists. His visit to the USSR is what inspired "1984." Socialism/communism were totally discredited in the 1920s. So the game shifted to de-constructing capitalism. Nobody openly promoted collectivism. Instead, they systematically attacked everything that was NOT socialism, thereby promoting socialism by process of elimination, indirectly. And here we are in 2021, with more than half of the USA indoctrinated into how "good" government is, and thinking "only a bad person would be against this new program." Now many are even openly socialist, because memories fade, and the absolute destruction of communism as a legit form of government has been forgotten.
    1
  90. I think the plural term is "agents provocateur," not "agent provocateurs." "Provocateur" is the adjective. Traditional taxi companies and hotels HATE competition from new business models. Rather than compete with them, they prefer to use force to eliminate them from the marketplace. I could make a living making shoes by hand, if those pesky shoe factories were shut down. It's a jobs issue. Shut them down!
    1
  91. The conquest of Spain and other bits of Europe by Islam pre-dated any of the Crusades.
    1
  92. ... because they do it, too.
    1