Comments by "Kim O\x27Brien" (@kimobrien.) on "Big Think" channel.

  1.  @scethabsent2745  That's because they a stuck in these obsolete religious faith ideas. They go around harassing women going to clinics that not only do abortions but are providers of birth control methods and women's healthcare in general. They aren't interested in protecting babies only in having the maximum number of children being born because that fits with their go forth and multiply religious dogma.
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  2. @Scott Covert The road to socialism is paved by the class struggle. Capitalism creates both the class that will replace them and the class struggle necessary. Ultimate victory is not inevitable but made possible from the lessons of the history of the class struggle itself. Creation of a Marxist cadre party of worker Bolsheviks stepped in the historical lessons of the class struggle is the most powerful weapon that can be used in the struggle.
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  3.  @alephii  We need to rebuild union power. Make every job a union job.
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  4.  @cherylfowler5983  You have the right to ignore doctors because medicine is considered voluntary but not the cops who will be required to enforce anti abortion laws.
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  5.  @cherylfowler5983  I don't vote for the politicians of the corrupt Democratic and Republican parties. Those are your politicians not mine. Legal and safe abortion allows a women to plan her life. Roe v. Wade was decided by a majority Republican court. Only one Democrat and one Republican descended from the 7-2 decision.
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  6.  @alephii  That's the company line that the union is a form of communism as in Stalinism and you need freedom to make your wage contract with the bosses alone. A union movement that can lead successful fight backs will be both democratic and have no problem with recruitment. With capitalism you're the slave of the capitalists power to set your wage and conditions. Union dues were collected voluntarily up until the beginning of WW2. You paid your dues and wore your monthly union button on your shirts lapel. There were no probation periods and scabs and freeloaders quickly learned the facts of life. No one was ever forced to attend a union meeting what your referring to is the so called right not to pay dues made into law by the anti labor Taft Hartley Act whose purpose was to halt further unionization after the war. The law allowed states to decide if a union contracts could include dues checkoff it was directly written for the Southern states where segregation was an obstacle to unionization. It also required union officers from the shop steward on up to sign loyalty oaths or lose all union bargaining rights and created the decertification process.
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  7.  @mtoohill  Abortion was never treated the same as murder even before Roe v. Wade. That's just rhetoric dreamed up by religious fundamentalists. These fundamentalist are as phony as a three dollar bill. Their real goal is maximization of births because their bible tells them to go forth and multiply. That's what is behind their anti contraception and anti abortion morality. Prior to DNA a man could not be determined to be the father with any degree of certainty so women were always the ones convicted or accused of violating the rules of monogamy. Monogamy itself was the way property and privilege of upper class was passed down through generations.
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  8.  @silverlegend1000  Rebuild the trade unions and organize a fight back.
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  9.  @letsgowinnietheflu5439  The 13th Amendment outlaws slavery. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." the 1st Amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" So. how is going on strike illegal?"
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  10.  @majesticgrey4769  "I never promised you a rose garden" nor does Cuba need to be a utopia? Why do people such as yourself think communists should leave? Is it because you're afraid we will convince a majority because capitalism is failing? After all if it so great and its political leaders so smart why do you worry about a few people like me?
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  11.  @Jerryman1158  And when Solzhenitsyn lived in Vermont he described the FBI as a "smarter" KGB. The NAZI's had been defeated long before Bertand Russel made that statement in the middle of the cold war. The historical origins of Stalin's regime and that of Hitlers are NOT the same. Stalin's came after a defeat inflicted on Russian capitalism by the Russian working class while Hitler was a victory for German capitalism over the German working class.
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  12.  @futilitariano  Socialism is the logical outcome of the class struggle.
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  13.  @futilitariano  The struggle in Venezuela continues. It has not been decided yet. This is the second major US organized coup attempt. The first which failed is documented in "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id--ZFtjR5c Massive demonstrations estimated in the millions have come out for the government go unreported in the US. The Imperialists seem to have painted themselves into a corner now. The Pope has come out against violence which essentially rules out an invasion for the time being. The last failed coup saw the disloyal officers head for Miami so not doing real well there either. Now US/UK banks have stolen Venezuelan money deposited in their banks saying it belongs to the coup leader.
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  14.  @penmaster003  Colorado has no special abortion laws so where all the infanticides you talk about? Your like someone who doesn't understand how to use a ruler. You know where the beginning is and where the end is but don't know what the in between markings are for.
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  15.  @endriu55  No FDA Sure bring back the profit hungry unregulated drug market. Once enough people die of a drug in the market the market for it drops until it gets renamed. Going through another killing until enough people die making profit hungry companies and their owners rich beyond belief. Struggling to get rid of capitalism all together and then you can begin the process of ending the alienation that makes people turn to drugs to make them feel good.
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  16.  @icecold7184  The capitalist are already thinking about launching another World War in the drive to defeat their world market competition with the threats made against China.
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  17.  @majesticgrey4769 First you statement about innocent folks on holiday is just inflammatory nonsense like your early silliness about driving a people's car. None of that can be said about Cuba. It was also untrue about the Russian revolution before the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin and the counter revolutionary bureaucracy. In fact the arbitrariness probably didn't begin until near the end of Stalin's rule. Arbitrary arrests serve no purpose except to prove no one can escape state power. Such was also true during the red scare period in the USA when people were arbitrary accused of being communists and fired from their jobs. The government went to the extreme of going after supporters of Trotsky despite Trotsky been deemed one of the worst Enemies of the Stalin. A simular counter revolution was carried out in the United States after the victory in the civil war. The new Southern States Reconstruction governments were crushed in a counterrevolution recognized with the Hayes Tilden compromise. According to the Government the body count in Vietnam meant victory over communism. Seems rather hypocritical to be bringing up body counts since capitalism is responsible for the fastest methods of mass death nor is it innocent of anything claimed about either Stalin or Mao.
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  18. That's right and guess on who has big money to spend on a loud bull horn?
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  19.  @brandondavidson4085  Since the end of reconstruction rights under US capitalism have never been given but taken. The same goes for European capitalism any rights the workers have had to fought for and taken from the capitalist governments. Capitalist law grants nothing but words on paper. Every right in the US Constitution has had to be fought for over and over again because with capitalism no rights the workers ever have have any permanence. What they give one day while saying how grateful to us they are they look to take away by use of the other party tomorrow.
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  20.  @popopop984  The liberals who are trying to save capitalism are more dangerous then the Republicans because their hypocrisy is not as clearly visible as the conservatives. Both parties are reactionary and can not be reformed. Instead a new party based on a fighting union movement is what is needed.
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  21.  @kennethlauer4735  You and the "Pro Birthers" are the proto Fascists. Eugenics was invented in the USA not by Hitler. His Nuremberg laws were patterned on those passed by segregationist planter class Southern Democrats with Business class Republicans giving the stamp of approval. The NAZI's in their defense of their crimes said they did nothing the USA didn't do.
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  22.  @kennethlauer4735  Fact sheet answering the out of context claim made by Herbert Cain and the second out of context claim long with many others. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/8013/9611/6937/Opposition_Claims_About_Margaret_Sanger.pdf
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  23.  @letsgowinnietheflu5439  I probably break the law by waking up in the morning do you think I care?
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  24.  @digitalnomad9985  You just another sheep who believes whatever lie he is told by the US government. For you war is peace and peace is war. Saddam Hussein was a new Hitler with weapons of mass destruction. We supply Saudi Arabia with bone saws and sulfuric acid because we like the free press. We aren't fighting a war causing a famine and killing Yemeni children in school buses that's Saudi Arabia doing that. We just need the jobs from the military contracts. New Jersey use to be a prosperous state until it elected a government the other states didn't like so the good states decided to blockade evil New Jersey and sanction it and now New Jersey is a poverty hell hole after all the good stock brokers and hedge fund managers in Princeton left for Greenwich, CT. The evil Trump was made President by the Congress after counting electoral votes despite Clinton having the popular vote. Two years later Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker of the house by the Democrats. The Democrats with help from France then had a big 'women's march' in Washington and Pelosi declared herself to be President and Trump and his lackey Pence to be Dictators. France immediately recognized the Pelosi government as the real Peoples government and Canada and Mexico agreed. All the Banks in France and Canada would no longer allow the evil Trump to sign checks on French and Canadian bank accounts.
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  25.  @xincindyxu6963  Communist China who you think your kidding Mao gave up communism long ago with the Bloc of Four Classes. General Chiang had a guilty concise from his massacre policy and was afraid to join a coalition government being urged by Stalin and the US advisers. Afterwords the US Imperialist Congress debated "who lost China". The US Imperialist figured, their WW2 victory, made them the new owners of China and the rest of the Universe.
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  26.  @coreybrowning9659  Its not complicate at all women have the right to control their bodies. Not the Church or the State. Take your rotten apple cops, your corrupt politicians and your sky pilots leave on a trip for mars and don't come back.
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  27.  @penmaster003  You a completely brainwashed idiot. You trust government fools to write laws on how to practice medicine. No one is aborting healthy 9 month old fetuses accept in the minds of the Plastic Jesus crowd.. Its just a political football so capitalist politicians can play the hero as another Clark Kent or Batman. You think Trump and Obama are saving the world. There is no need for limitations because the politicians are lucky to be able tell their ass from their elbow without a chart in a hearing room to begin with. They didn't have any limitations in Colorado. We don't need your false morality or you playing the well educated enlightened dip shit.
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  28. They why don't you need a certificate of conception instead of a birth certificate?
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  29.  @assurdo8888  I don't think we are talking about the same thing. Closing down the FDA so anyone can make any claim of a drugs suitability with neither proof of safety or effectiveness is one thing that I am against. As far as the Marijuana classification as a narcotic that is completely bogus. It belongs in the Tobacco and Alcohol category. People addicted to opiates need treatment not jail. Arresting dealer/addicts and then turning them into drug kingpins is just abusive. Arresting people who are dealers but not addicts should be the goal. You can't fix capitalism which is why you will never fix the drug problem with in the capitalist framework. A socialist revolution opens the door to solving social problems. Stalin effectively closed that door with the 1936 to 1938 purge trials of the old bolsheviks.
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  30. I don't want to work with people who are on the job drug abusers of any kind because they put me and the other workers in danger. The same goes with those using drugs while operating a motor vehicle. if you insist you don't need help than maybe jail is the right place for you.
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  31.  @assurdo8888  I'm in Texas a few miles from Mexico. The guy in the video being from Harvard makes him one of the elite thinkers of American Capitalism. The traditional reaction to capitalist corruption and greed has been the rise of the administrative state where three and four letter federal agencies make the rules for controlling greed after scandal. Now a whole group of 'radical' thinkers called libertarians want to eliminate them on the grounds that capitalism is self regulating. We'd like to have trade union control over on the job safety, production, and pollution. If we had socialism Medical Doctors would control medicines (Drugs). Of course your right about corruption of the FDA. There has also developed since the 1960's the class action law suite where lawyers get together clients to sue companies for wrong doing. Now they sued the makers of Xarelto in a class action and are now seeking more clients but the doctors are still prescribing as I have a prescription for it. Unlike other countries you must have a Doctor's prescription to buy any drug or medicine outside of a very few cough medicines, aspirin, NSAID's, topical antibiotics and toothpaste. Opiates from codeine to fentanyl come under both FDA and DEA regulation.
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  32. Life expectancy has gone down since the 2008 crisis. One driver was the prescriptions of the legal opiate Oxycodone. The Sackler family became billionaires with the sale of oxycodone with claims of little to no addiction problem. This is a crisis that can no longer be contained by the drug war such that politicians can no longer use drug crime as a way to gain votes.
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  33.  @assurdo8888  Many became addicts starting on legal drugs because these "Pain relief clinics" were set up to sell oxy. Everyone from the Purdue Pharma and the other even bigger drug companies, the distributors , prescribing doctor, and pharmacists were making big money. The cops at DEA were supposedly asleep at the switch to busy going after El Chapo whose was getting guns from the ATF I guess. I don't think you have any idea how many people were turned into addicts, cut off and then left to fend for themselves. Which is the way capitalism always works. (Hurricane coming then expect the mayor and cops to announce "Your on your own." Nursing home patients dying across the street from the hospital during a hurricane because of a power outage.) That's the true crime of private property along with a lack of available treatment. When they do get treatment many are left sitting at home with nothing to do. People such as this asshole making the video just wants an excuse to end all treatment for those who can't pay. Do you live in a country were daytime TV constantly advertises to the elderly and disabled audience for a better but private medical insurance plan if you sign your Medicare/Medicaid government paid healthcare benefits over to these parasites? "Medicare/Medicaid may not pay for vision and dental needs but call us because our plans let you keep your own doctor." they scream.
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  34. If you want to know more about the "opiate crisis" than search for podcasts on NPR (national Public Radio).
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  35.  @rs72098  Capitalism breeds alienation that's why drugs have a market in a capitalist economy.
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  36. US BLS Stat from Federal Reserve Bank http://www.thestand.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ss-productivity-earnings.jpg
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  37. The libertarians are in decline manly because they are utopian thinkers. Their ideas are basically ones that go back to the past and somehow they want to return back there. The most important revolutions of the 20th century were the Russian and Cuban. The others that lost and won were of secondary importance because they were all connected to Stalinism and the eventual clear defeat of the Russian revolution in 1991. There has been no libertarian revolution because the librarians reject revolution to begin with instead they propose adoption by thinking about how good libertarianism sounds. The Cuban revolution continues despite Washington's pronouncement of imminent demise brought on by wishful thinking since invasion is out of the question for the time being.
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  38.  @smalltown7773  You be under arrest for being a danger to your self. Than you will be sent to a mental institution. You tell the judge anything other than what he wants to here and its back for another six months.
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  39. @Sahnz :D Me too. TheMilitant.com
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  40.  @asalamander7182  That's right its just another do nothing political scheme. We need escalator clauses to fight inflation and a cut in hours with no cut in pay to fight automation.
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  41. The problem isn't Trump but capitalism. Science became the handmaiden of capitalism. Now you wonder why no one trusts you. Capitalism works against education because it always replaces higher paid skilled labor.with machines and unskilled labor first.
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  42.  @fin31337  The workers need to use union power to take control of industry. Then run it for human needs without the slightest concern for the bosses private property.
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  43. WTF do we need a betting parlor (stock market) for in the first place?
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  44.  @majesticgrey4769  Yes if you get into that car of yours that you family bought to drive to college and decide to go on trip like you say you'll end up in trouble with men who wear uniforms and carry guns. You may not like the free accommodations they provide along with the baloney sandwiches either. Best thing for you to do is your homework and stay out of trouble listen to what mom and dad say before "going communist.".
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  45.  @Ryanowning  Did your Professor tell you that? That America was the exceptional nation and world leader?
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  46.  @max2082  We need jobs at union wages not another way to save the capitalists on government overhead costs.
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  47.  @rjvowels  Communism is not a new doctrine with its holy priests. Rather it is ones sides history of both victories and defeats in the modern class struggle with the other important class in the modern world the capitalists. Socialist revolution is not inevitable defeat is also possible as in the rise of Stalinism and then the defeat in Germany flowing from the ultra left errors of the Stalinist in the class struggle. Then the swing to the right with the popular front ending in more defeats in France and Spain. The Moscow trials were the ultimate betrayal of a regime that had no possibility of self regeneration. It took until 1959 and the Cuban revolution before a genuine revival of the revolutionary movement would occur. The Cuban revolution continues to make history just like the early days of the Russian Revolution with the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky.
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  48.  @fin31337  In 1924 Lenin realized Stalin should be removed from his postilan as General Secretary because of his crudeness. He however died shortly afterwords. All knew from the great French revolution of the danger of bureaucracy but as mistakes were made it became clearer that Stalin was leading a self perpetuating privileged bureaucratic tendency feed by the mistakes especially in the countryside among the peasants. The bureaucracy began attacking the very theoretical truths of Bolshevism murdering all the old Bolsheviks in the 1936 to 1938 Moscow trials. A regime of central planners who are murders of the revolution can only move back to social differentiation with more and more privileges which can only move back to capitalism without a new revolutionary Marxist leadership developing to reverse that. Central planning is a technique not a principle. You can't plan everything centrally even if you wanted to.The commanding heights of the economy basic industry need central planing every barbershop does not. . .
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  49.  @fin31337  Well you can read the documents from when the arguments and events were taking place. Plus if you don't like my explanation which relies upon looking at human actions from their material interests then your end up looking at things in an idealist manner concluding with such simplistic theories like it doesn't work or it wasn't "real socialism" as if one can make things that aren't real or we are trying to build a perpetual motion machine. If you've got a better explanation I'd like to hear it. Something other than human nature as if human nature is fixed for all time and all places. What is possible in any society and the ideas of that society are determined by the level of material development and organization of the productive forces. It should be easier to advance beyond capitalism today because the productive forces are greater and the mistakes of the past are better understood. The last two most important revolutions of the 20 th century were the Russian and Cuba so it seems that we are overdue for another somewhere.
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  50.  @GregSmithFL  I don't think the country will split because the Red/Blue divide is based in the two capitalist parties. The workers who vote for those parties now will desert them for a new labor party. Unlike Russia the number of farmers is small so they may join the labor party of have their own small party. I don't think we need to worry about invasions that just leaves some kind of military or fascist attacks. Amusing we get past all that without a civil war than the problems post (1917) 1924 the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy should be avoidable since his rise was also connected to the destruction and poverty caused by the civil war.
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