California's Assembly Votes to Allow Communists to Hold State Jobs | Hacker News Reader

California's Assembly Votes to Allow Communists to Hold State Jobs

npr.org

8 pointsIXxXI14 comments

Fact: most Americans, much less Californians, don't understand the nuances between communism, socialism, and Marxism. America has been anti-socialism since at least 1919 in the era of the First Red Scare. Heck, Oklahoma was a hotbed of socialism. In most Americans' minds, little green men are trying to corrupt their childrens' precious bodily fluids with fluoride. In effect, anarcho-capitalism/libertarianism is the only politically-correct and acceptable belief system in the vast majority of Americans minds.

I guess it's just a label now but "true" communists are not compatible with US way of life. It's a fact.

But is it? Doesn't look like one in hindsight.

What do you mean by “US way of life”? Do you mean how US billionaires live? How the middle class lives? How people in New York live? How people in rural Idaho live? How people in Puerto Rico live? How poor people live? How people in Silicon Valley live? How immigrants live?

The US is a big country with countless ways of life. I’m not sure what you mean.

Please don't mistake communist party with communist government. Apple in a fruit basket vs apple tree

Really? How about an Islamist with Islamic rule?

Shall we try it again, since USSR, North Korea, Cambodia and the likes "didn't do it right"? It's all fun and games until communists confiscate your iPhone and laptop.

The communists won't confiscate your phone or laptop, that's personal property. They would take your factory away, yes.

They did it in Hungary.

Even the country had good telco infrastructure, only the armed chiefs, vets (important role in a self-sustaining economy), doctors had phones at home. I lived in a major city and only in 1996 you could get a landline. Personal computers were on COCOM lists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...

So yeah, they did take your personal belongings. If you had a pretty wife or daughter, the local armed chiefs might take them too.

^this. Thank you for providing some perspective. Both of my parents immigrated to the US from countries occupied or torn apart by Communism. I think the many downsides of the Communist ideology are lost to younger modern Americans (and I think many Western Europeans?)... the Cold War is not even a memory for many, and its easy to deconstruct its lessons as part of oikophobic self-criticism. It seems fashionable to expound Leftist ideology today and extol the virtues of Communism since "now we have the technology to do it right!". Even the "This time we'll do Communism right!" refrain is historically old.

For a more modern example of pervasive, invasive control, look no further than China. Why confiscate glitzy consumer toys when you can just monitor and control everything? ;)

I spent a semester in Budapest back in '92, and I recall a Central European History professor wryly observing: "The only Marxists left are all in the West."

China is not a communist country: they don't have the N1 criteria: "a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production".

Isn't The Party controls the means and The Party represent the people?

>>So yeah, they did take your personal belongings. If you had a pretty wife or daughter, the local armed chiefs might take them too.

Even worst, they had their way with females after arresting their husbands and fathers as enemies of the state. Now that was some consensual relationship...

> It's all fun and games until communists confiscate your iPhone and laptop.

Could be worse, they could starve you to death or send you to Gulag, because The Great Leader wants to spread the "world revolution". Or he just wants gold-plated iPhone.

I think our government likes all citizens conducting communications via electronic devices.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr...

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