*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by ChaosEngine.

I thought it was 51% of every dollar funded the military...?

I've never understood how any soldier could rail against socialism. The US military is one of the most socialist institutions in the world. Housing, medical, leisure activities...everything...all payed for and run by the military for soldiers.
If you're in the military you're living in a socialist society. Yet the majority of soldiers I served with were conservatives who railed against liberalism.

What on earth does she mean "mostly" funded by you, the taxpayer? The military is 100% funded by the taxpayer.

It seems it's more like 18-19% of every dollar. It's around 54% of DISCRESSIONARY spending, but only 18-19% of the total spent by the fed (what's on the books, that is).
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/military-spending-united-states/
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/12/federal-spending-by-the-numbers-2014
http://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go

Well that is good news, of a sort!

Moving this video to enoch's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by eric3579.

#7. You think like a socialist. You know how you like to call yourself a dialectical materialist who ascribes to a realpolitik understanding of history as shaped by conflict over material needs? It turns out that this American pastime was actually not first invented by Edison flying a kite over the Potomac, but was originally invented by German socialists!

"America is already socialist".

No. America has some socialist policies and practices. There is a difference.

See, if you live in a society that needs videos like this one, you should know that your society is in big trouble. The word socialism alone implies community, togetherness and teamwork. It's quite telling about someone's character how they view that word.
I find it highly amusing that those, who consider socialism as a general idea a terrible thing, tend to flock to the biggest socialist figures ever written about in a book that promotes (among other things) radical socialist ideas. You know, like this Jesus fella. If we just had some sort of institution that could explain to them the meaning of words, 'irony' for example.

I find it interested that the right-wing and left-wing in the US love to describe the US as socialist. Though they have different motivations for doing so, they're equally incorrect.

Promote. Would bang.

'Jesus' wasn't a socialist, though. The ideas in the Bible aren't socialist; it's just that people have sloppily started to associate socialism with vague ideas like sharing and being good to your fellow man. Socialism is a specific economic and ideological model for explaining and directing societal phenomena, and it's sort of annoying that it has been turned into either a spooky bugbear or an adorable care bear. There's a reason why Marx called religion the opium of the people.

<Skip if you're not interested in semantics.>
Stating your annoyance about how people use a word and arguing the semantics of the word only contributes towards clogging up the discussion with waffle and painfully detailed point-counterpoint text-walls that everyone loses interest in immediately. I'm going to do the sensible thing and take the meaning of socialism from what the majority of socialists in the world argue for; things like state control being used to counteract the inherent ruthlessness of the free market (i.e. minimum wage, working conditions, rent controls, holidays and working hours), free education, free healthcare (both paid for by contributions from those with means), social housing or money to assist those who cannot work or find themselves out of work... without spending too much time on the close up detail of it, that's roughly what i'll take it to mean and assume you know what i mean (because that's how the word IS used now, like it or not).
<Stop skipping now>

So without getting upset about etymology, I think a reasonable argument could be made for Jesus being a socialist:
- he believed in good will to your neighbour
- he spent time helping and caring for those who were shunned by society and encouraged others to do so too
- he considered greed to be a hindrance to spiritual enlightenment and/or a corrupting influence (easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle and all that)
- he healed and tended the sick for free
- he fed the multitude rather than send them to buy food for themselves
- he argued against worshiping false gods (money for example)

If we believe the stories.

I also think that a good argument could be made for Jesus not being a socialist. You haven't made one, but one could be made.

Marx is open to interpretation, so you're going to have to make your point about his quote clearer. I could take it to mean 4 or 5 different and opposing things.

I came to hear the arguments. I stayed for the insanely beautiful video. The lady is not half-bad-looking either!

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.