[A television shows people starving with the title “NEWS: FAMINE DEVASTATES A GLOBAL SOUTH COUNTRY” and the subtitle “Brought to you by AgriCorp™”]
[orange] That’s communism That’s why we hate communism so much
[green] But the trade sanctions come from capita…
[A television shows a rocket launch with the title “NEWS: ROCKET LAUNCHED, HUMANS ARE IN SPACE” and the subtitle “Brought to you by tax credits for billionaires”]
[orange] That’s capitalism That’s why we love capitalism so much
[green] But modern rocketry was pioneered by the soviet…
[A television shows police in a city and a graffiti with the title “14 MILLION CRIMINAL OFFENSES REPORTED IN THE US IN 2024” and the subtitle “This fearmongering is brought to you by Liberty Mutual Justice™”]
[orange] That’s anarchism That’s why we hate anarchism so much
[green] But the USA is quite literally a capitalis…
[A television shows kids starving in a school cafeteria with the title “SAD FACTS: 1 IN 5 KIDS IN THE USA FACE FOOD INSECURITY (2025)” and the subtitle “SnackCorp™ was here”]
[orange] That’s not capitalism It’s crony oligarchic neoliberalism
[green] But that’s quite literally…
[A television shows a reporter reporting on the end of the world with the title “BREAKING NEWS: MASS COLLAPSE OF SOCIETY AS CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSED BY BILLIONAIRES LEADS TO GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC FAILURE” and the subtitle “PetroCorp™ approves”]
[orange] I knew it! I knew communism would be the end of us all!
[green has no words, is just blasé]
You can’t reason with people who don’t have the same definitions as you do because reasoning takes a common body of knowledge.
And people who are the propagandized have an instinctual dislike towards people not sharing their same corpus of knowledge: you have to use their own language or chip away the wrong definitions/axioms one by one until the new sets become reliable enough to start building something worthwhile.
Note that this works the inverse way too, which is why we are in such a mess all around the world.
Lif iz hard wif stoopid ppl
Yeah, I’m a big fan of pulling out the concept of “rent seeking” as an ultimate evil and threat to capitalism, because you can explain why all the late stage capitalist horrors are actually anti-capitalist and get capitalists on side. Sometimes you don’t have to tear someone’s world view apart to get them to support making the world better
Huh, isn’t rent-seeking the basis of capitalism?
The theory is that profit seeking is “good” capitalism, where you make money by increasing overall productivity and skimming the extra off the top, but rent seeking is “bad” profiteering where you use your leverage to manipulate the situation so you can derive income without increasing productivity.
So building a factory on your land is capitalism, but leaving the hovels untouched and charging high rent because your tenants have nowhere else to go is rent-seeking.
In practise of course lots of rent seeking behaviour is done by people who claim to be capitalists, so it’s at least a good way to argue with them on their own terms