You can be a capitalist and still want proper social systems
You can also be a socialist and still want free-market capitalism.
"Leftism" isn't a monolith just like the right isn't a monolith. Esp when you consider a lot of neoliberals are also called "leftists" because they are progressive rather than conservative.
It's always fun when you realise that in the US Conservative libertarian capitalists like Newsom and actual social democrat mamdani are part of the same political party.
Those 2 would be each other their biggest opposites where I live
Nothing to do with left or right. In America, it's about control. The left or the right, once you get past the middle 80%, you've crept into extremist idiots who can be leveraged and puppeted for control.
There's no more oxymoron in saying leftist billionaire than saying alt-right billionaire. The only difference is what color you choose for your game of financial RISK.
A leftist billionaire isn't an oxymoron. However, Soros is as far as I know, not bankrolling the latest version of the Internationale of Socialist Workers' Associations nor a leading theorist of 21rst century socialism.
He is no Friedrich Engels, who would have been the namesake of socialism if his bankrolled buddy Marx hadn't been the one to literally redefine what socialism meant.
i know this is the internet and an especially unpleasant place in it aswell, but what a load of barnacles lol. "a leftist" is not a monolith, you can absolutely be "left winged" and be rich. we really gotta stop with the "not a true leftist" shit.
Couldn’t it be argued that leftism is used to mean progressivism so often that it has become a new valid definition of the term, since languages evolve?
That's because the left is literally liberalism and progressivism while the right is conservatism and traditionalism. Both function in a capitalist economy.
Social-liberalism is as left as liberalism goes and is more often than not more centric oriented rather than left. Bottomline is that they’re still capitalist by nature.
Just look at European parliaments rather than the (lack of) political spectrum in US politics.
Funny how you frame liberalism as something remotely associated with socialism when in reality it's the polar opposite. Liberalism in its definition means equality before the class and a universial franchise for all men.
So when it was only after it was "imported" to the U.S. that it was syncretized with the ideas of U.S. leftism and word alluding to leftist agendas in general (what people call social-liberalism). In essence, you arguing for the lack of spectrum in the U.S., but using the exact terminology budded out from itself. Now that's a real oxymoron.
Social-"liberalism", the existence of this ideology was created by the Americans who needed a vindication for their fanatic agendas. To be more specific, they architected it by welding progressive policies to the socialliberalism, which its namesake already existed in Europe.
So yes, you're correct for saying social liberalism is capitalistic, but from the way you used it, it was suggested that it was used as progressive policies used for pushing the progressive agendas, when in reality it's just another reactionary terminology for conservatism with a little sympathy for the poor of the 19th century.
Because the narrative spun by the right paints liberals as leftists and liberals, more often than not, lean into that and brand themselves as leftist while still upholding capitalist propaganda.
This distinction exists only on terminally online people. Leftist to anyone normal means someone who is firmly on the left on the left/right political spectrum. That spectrum is broader and includes more issues than economic distinctions.
Only a reddit-tier reductionist can think in such absolute terms.
One certainly can uphold left-wing principles in some key areas, while still engaging in capitalism. For example, a successful business owner can be in support of socialised health care. Just like a Marxist can still can be in support of commerce for selling his home made Che Guevara merch on the market for income.
I think the person above is using the specific term leftist which in terminally online political terms means someone that is a "true" socialist or something equivalent.
And as a Swede, I think it's debatable if the social democrats and especially Jan Emanuel are actually proponents of left-wing politics, I'd stretch the party as centre-left at most.
You also have to factor in the American Overton window. Just about anything that is Centrist or slightly left-of-center in the Nordic countries is equivalent to hyper-radical left-wing in the US.
It's not hyperbole to say thay the US doesn't really have a left-wing party - just a conservative party and a fascist party.
Absolutely correct, and unfortunately, in this country, it takes both curiosity about other people and places, and a fair amount of reading to learn otherwise.
Both things that Americans aren't typically big on, so ignorance persists, and the powers that be like it that way.
That’s not true. You can be a capitalist who wants capitalism to be the economic engine which funds government social programs through healthy taxation for the purpose of general redistribution. I think that would definitely put you over to the left side of things.
i know this is the internet and an especially unpleasant place in it aswell, but what a load of barnacles lol. "a leftist" is not a monolith, you can absolutely be "left winged" and be a capitalist. we really gotta stop with the "not a true leftist" shit.
I’m not even purity testing here, it’s just the actual academic political theory around Leftism. Many modern center-left perspectives accept capitalism as a necessary engine for innovation and wealth creation, aiming to democratize its benefits rather than replace it, but at that point it isn’t Capitalism anymore if the workers are no longer being exploited.
You know capitalism and socialism arent the only 2 economic ideologies that exist, and even if they were having aspects of one system does not disqualify you from using aspects of the other.
Plus if you're arguing that "Many modern center-left perspectives accept capitalism as a necessary engine for innovation and wealth creation", then how can you also argue that "You can't be a leftist and a capitalist, period.", those two statements seem to be incongruent.
Lastly; this no true Scotsman/purity test mentality just pushes away potential allies on major issues because of minor disagreements.
You might need to review... any economics. Literally from the start. Begin with The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I don't think you really understand what capitalism is? It quite literally began as a refutation of mercantilism and a belief that productive labour and consumer exchange is of greater importance to prosperity than the hoarding of gold.
Smith talked (at length) about how capitalists can only be incentivised through competition and that some services and all infrastructure should still be controlled and maintained by the government. This is theory from 1776, where the literal godfather of capitalism was theorising checks and balances for a capitalist system to not be exploitative to welfare in the book he invented it. He was anti-monopoly, pro-worker's rights, anti-colonial, and spent half his book talking about how workers were the most critical component of national prosperity.
But hey, no need to read theory or nuance when you define everything only by its most extreme limit.
When someone makes a statement like 'capitalism is incompatible with the left', all you can do is refer them to the basics and hope they'll look into it on their own time. No one ever changes their mind on the internet.
so whats the issue here, it sounds as if youre saying "many modern leftists arent really leftists because they are capitalists, but actually they arent capitalists either because what they want isnt really capitalism" not that youre wrong but whats the point of even considering this at all.
soros wants to call himself left winged and he does good while also doing bad? cool. one of us. money and power for our cause. very pog. maybe we can talk about this billionaire stuff later.
meanwhile our enemies: you hate jews? welcome. you hate black people? welcome. you hate women? welcome. you hate poor people? welcome.
Marx also spoke very highly of capitalism as a driver of immense economic growth abd improvement in people's quality of life. And, in addition to that, he was critical of capitalism as the ideal or end state economic organization.
In modern times when someone says they are a capitalist they usually mean that they believe capitalism is, in general, the best way to organize the economy.
Chinese communists also advocate for capitalist organization at this time but believe that under different circumstances, which capitalism is best equipped to usher in, the transition to a non-capitalist system will be superior
He was also the father of socialism during a time where you were either insanely rich or dirt poor, with very little in-between. I don't think Engels can be considered very relevant to modern left and right standards.
You could argue you can't be right-wing if you're a republican.
Most of the time people talk about left and right they men's within the overton window. By your definition, Bernie Sanders isn't a leftist and it therefore losing all real meaning in mainstream American politics - because it describes no one.
lol wat. you cannot be economically left wing and support neo-liberal economic policy. you are confusing social policy with economic policy. traditionally these terms apply to economic policy. right wing being in support of conserving capital for the class that already has it and left wing in support of distributing it more evenly among the general population through government policies like taxation and infrastructure, healthcare, education spending, etc.
Conservatives are definitely right wing as are liberals.
Leftism generally advocates for social equality, progressivism, and active government intervention. Rightism typically supports social hierarchy, traditionalism, individual liberty, and limited government
People misconstrue progressives and liberals as the same thing when they aren’t. Liberalism is more left than conservativism but in the grand scheme of things it is still on the right.
Nah. The use of 'liberal/progressive' vs 'conservative/traditional' is almost always descriptive rather than prescriptive. That's why this argument recurs. In the worldwide Overton window, all mainstream US politicians are firmly centrist. In the US Overton window they're more separated. In the European Overton window they're right wing and centrist. In the Scandinavian Overton window (nonsensically the one lots of people want to use here for this particular disagreement) they're both right wing, sure.
If we're trying to make the terms liberal/conservative have meaning in a conversation beyond pure theory, they have to be descriptive to the actual comparative state of politics in their context. If you want to have a theory divorced of context discussion, that's fine, but the insistence on applying a completely different frame of reference irritates me. There's no reason the Scandinavian perspective of the right-left dichotomy should be the one we're using to describe American politics.
There is this idea among Marxist that they own the term "left" despite it being a vague word that describes many political factions all across the world that believe wildly different things from each other where the only true commonality is that they all oppose a conservative or "right" political faction. The whole "left/right" idea can only describe vague things outside of the specific context of the French Revolution.
Don't delete your comment now, if your going to say you're got doxxed, then say it. I'm not the weirdo you are, I couldn't even imagine being a peasant defending a billionair who gave Haiti and Ukraine so much trouble. And collapsed whole nations around the world. You hide your posts and comments because you (think) you hiding them. But I found your comment history. You are a sick person. Your a sociopath
No you dont. You can be a leftist and still be a capitalist. Not every leftist is a marxist and not every leftist subscribes to something other than capitalism. There are leftists who want controlled capitalism and wage caps on ceos just as there a right wingers who want less immigration and there are right wingers who want to kill immigrants. Political leanings are a spectrum and you can be left and be a billionaire especially in todays age when you can literally use capitalism and markets to speculate yourself to insane wealth without realistically ever directly exploiting anyone.
Sorry but that’s wrong, leftists want to progress past capitalism, what you are describing is social democracy which is more a form of liberalism, not leftism
George Soros views capitalism as an efficient creator of wealth but inherently unstable and dangerous when market mechanisms are applied to all aspects of life, a concept he calls "market fundamentalism". While utilizing capitalist mechanisms, he argues that unregulated markets fail to serve the public interest, prioritize personal profit over collective needs (like environment or education), and threaten open societies.
You’ve not disagreed with my statement at all. You’ve just said he views capitalism favourably but doesn’t want all encompassing neoliberal free market capitalism. That doesn’t make him left wing, it makes him Keynesian, capitalist mode of production with regulation for stability.
So lets say a person is a right winger and makes their fortune and then later on starts giving it away in support of left wing causes and ideals he can himself never be a leftist and change his view?
You are essentially saying you can only be left wing if you are poor. And thats why the left will always lose. Because you will always exclude people who can actually bring about change with the resources they got while young. No true scotsman should be just replaced no true leftist.
Also love everyone schooling me about left wing when Im a socialist from eastern fucking europe where so many governments masquaraded as left wing while being total fucking opposites.
He doesn’t support anti-capitalist ideals so he isn’t a leftist. End of story.
You cant be a billionaire and a leftist. To achieve your riches you must build it off the poor and exploited. There is no other way in capitalism. Soros decided and continues to decide to do that. You can’t be rich and not profit of exploitation (professional athletes and the like), but it is impossible to do so and become a billionaire.
Where you are from and what you describe yourself don’t make you right.
Political science disagrees with you, you can be left and be a capitalist. Just because you redefine political science and economy discourse doesnt mean you are right or have any idea
This is equivalent to what you’re saying from the perspective of actual leftists. Leftism (whether you’re a democratic socialist, Leninist, anarchist, syndicalist etc etc) is about bringing about democratic ownership of the means of production, where workers own their means of production. Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production, where the workers sell their labour to a private owner. They are mutually exclusive, if you support capitalism as the base of your economic relations then you are not leftists, just like if you support feudal rule by bloodlines and divine right you cannot also support universal suffrage as the two are dialectically opposed.
Political science is almost entirely in the west defined within the zeitgeist of liberal attitudes, but please tell me how you define left and right if not on an economic basis. What do you personally consider left and right?
Its a spectrum, nordic countries often get misidentified with being socialist when they are capitalist but no one in their right mind would not consider them left and/or left leaning in all their public policy and views.
People often say thats "its not leftist thats liberal" and that infuriates even more when the has nothing to do with left and right. There wasnt a socialist country in the world that wasnt authoritarian by design. Call it transitory authoritarian but its less transitory to true liberty than capitalism is to socialism. And it was never a dictatorship of the masses so you can argue no country was ever socialist to begin with and thats the problem to sticking to puritan definitions set by Marx. Reality is often very different than what we want to define it as.
Not to mention that Yugoslavia where I am from was market socialist and it wad the most successful socialist state there was and yet it used capitalist ideals of a more free market and competiton paired with worker owned and operated collectives.
I’m not a huge fan of the Yugoslavian SFR’s model, but a market doesn’t mean it was capitalist, there was markets in the classical slave states, markets in feudal states, markets in capitalist states, and markets in socialist states. The ownership of the means of production is what defines them separately. Yugoslavian market was worker owner by worker enterprises.
According to marx and engels you cannot have a market for socialism. It has to be replaced by a planned economy. You cannot have exchange value in socialism only use value so you already stray from marx and his definiton. Which is exactly my point, we have moved away from that and in todays world we cannot limit ourselves to left only=workers controlling the means of production. There is nuances and you can be left and be in favour of a market and a mixed economy which would never be classed as socialism yet it would be left
You’re conflating communism and socialism, we have to progress through socialism to get to communism and a market will exist in socialism because we cannot immediately transition to commodityless moneyless society, there will be a long transition period whatever the approach is; whether it’s via worker enterprises à la Yugoslavia, planned economy à la USSR, hybrid economy etc etc.
If you are pushing for a progress into socialism or communism then you are left wing, because you are trying to move past the status quo of capitalism and toward a democratic economy, if you are pro capitalism and believe it can be regulated then you are not a leftist, you’re a social democrat. And historically social democrats betray leftists whenever capitalism is in crisis.
Agree to disagree, no where does marx say planned economy is something to be done later. By your definitions you can have a market and be socialist which cannot be true by marx. For me soros is pushing towards socialism in the only way the masses will accept in the 21st century so he is a leftist. There is no more armed revolution to be had as too many people are fine with being exploited. The left either updates to the 21st century or it keeps failing in its goals ad nauseam
I think you thoroughly misunderstand Marx, I’m not sure if you’ve ever read his work or have just heard about it, but Marx never instructs on how to achieve communism, except that there will be a transitional stage called the dictatorship of the proletariat (socialism). Within this transitionary period of course markets will exist in some form, even under central planning it is still state management of commodities including labour power.
Marx’s work was analytical and critical of capitalism and argued for progression past capitalism and into socialism and eventually communism, but there were no step by step instructions on how to achieve that because each nation, each period etc has its own material conditions and internal contradictions to contend with. This is why the Soviets, the PRC, the DPRK, the Yugoslav SFR etc etc had different material approaches of bringing about the dictatorship of the proletariat and handling the transitionary socialist phase.
What you seem to be arguing is that you and Soros are doing the same thing, that your analysis of material conditions has informed that democratic ownership of production is no longer viable and capitalist private ownership with labour commodity is the best we can do, and that this is somehow socialism/leftism.
I disagree thoroughly with this, especially as class consciousness and socialist appetite is rocketing up in the youth of today. I think Soros sees this and he isn’t trying to help aid socialism, he’s trying to prevent it by doing capitalism-lite. Because capitalists have two options, either make drastic concessions to the working class to keep them content, Soros’s view, or clamp down on the working class and use fascism to protect capital. Most are going for the latter.
No, someone can amass wealth through exploitation of labour relations and then come to the realisation that it is both empirically unstable and morally reprehensible and become leftist - these are capitalist class traitors and some of the most based leftists. Engels for example came from a wealthy factory owning family and turned that into progressing socialism via his writings and funding Marx’s writings.
But nothing you have offered suggests Soros is a class traitor, only that he wants a more regulated capitalism.
You call yourself a socialists yet are defending social democracy, and ergo capitalism.
Mixed economy and heavily regulated capitalism falls into leftist views as determined by the actual field that deals with this. Just because you dont think it should be left doesnt mean it isnt
I hope you realise that you and the people who talk like you are the reason why left wing ideology fails in the modern world. Ideological rigidity, promotion of infighting, and the adoption of positions that will clearly alienate mainstream voters.
If you spent more time unifying and compromising with the rest of the political left and less time conducting purity tests and conflating leftism with extremism beyond the Overton Window, the world would be a better place.
See, there is your issue raising its head. You are using incorrect terminology. The purity testing of left leaning ideology when what you really mean is "Marxist" or rather "Leninist", which is not the same thing. You avoid accurate labelling because you don't like the brush it paints you with. At least use "Radical Leftists".
To Americans everything to the left of Bush is leftist. The rest of the world's centrists are leftist, centre-right is leftist, SocDems are communists.
A net worth of 8 millions after about 15 years of actually working?
This is exceptional and a substantial amount, it allows for a VERY comfortable life, but this is not even remotely close to the politics-swaying power a multi-billionaire has.
Engels did own some shares in a factory to my knowledge but he would IMO be closer to a petty bourgeoisie then what billionaires are today. He was wealthy but the factory many people say he owned was AFAIK majority owned by someone else
The contradictiin between being a leftists and bourgeoisie comes from the fact that socialism promotes worker ownership of capital and therefore socialism halts anything more then petty bourgeoisie to exist if actually implemented since one can not accumulate such wealth as to be a billionaires without ownership of capital. Nobody works 100000 times harder then another and so one can not accumulate such wealth without owning capital and taking the surplus value which is what socialism is kinda centered around.
Engels was rich, for sure, but nowhere near billionaire rich.
I suppose the question is, what should he have done about it (given he was born into money) - given it away, maybe? You'd be hard pressed to find a charity that wouldn't squander it
Do you know that the Romans thought only people that inherited money were decent people?
They were adamant if someone becomes rich means he can't be a good person.
If giving away 99% of your wealth still left you with over a million dollars? Yes. If giving away 99% of your wealth could pick entire countries out of poverty with no significant impact to your own life? Yes. That's exactly what it means.
I don’t think you really know how much money the government actually spends in a single day. I don’t know the exact numbers of the top of my head but if we were to liquidate the assets of every billionaire on earth and give to the government it wouldn’t actually last that long.
Did I say give to the government? I don't think so. A lot of the systemic issues we face today no matter what country you're from comes from the modern neoliberal status quo that prioritizes Line Go Up over people, and that is being maintained by governments. Things like homelessness and housing crises can be solved right now in most places. Commieblocks and the like could be built to give folks with no roof somewhere to sleep and shower (they've done this in Finland and damn near fixed their homelessness issue) but the government doesn't do it. Because it won't immediately make Line Go Up.
And if you use those billions to promote left wing ideals all over the world and pour massive amounts of money into shifting societies left and the market to be more fair are you still a right winger? How tf does that work?
If you do those things, you are not explicitly a right winger, but you’re not a leftist. You’re probably just a liberal. Left-wing ideals are present in people all across the political spectrum. To have them doesn’t make you a leftist. You can be left in a relative sense but that doesn’t make you a leftist. These terms have actual meanings. Otherwise, why do we use them if they can just mean anyone and anything?
Because my definiton is the definiton by political science. You are all hell bent on shifting any form of capitalism into the right when it doesnt fit there according to the relevant field. Mixed economy and social democracy is defined as centre left to left leaning by every single definiton we have. Sorry that it doesnt conform to your belief of what it should be, apologies.
Just for the sake of argument cause no self a claiming leftist is asking any of this. But 1% of 75 billion is 75 million. If you can't live extremely comfortably off 75 million something is wrong with you.
That's why anybody with an ounce of empathy doesn't have an ounce of respect for billionaires when 700 million (or more) people in this world live below the poverty line.
I understand this and I hate the ultra rich as much as the next guy, but Soros is actively trying to make the world a better place without that much media attention. The most fame and infamy he gets is through conspiracy theories and bootlicking politicians blaming everything on him. He is not sitting on billions, he has those billions in foundations helping
He has financially supported Charta 77, a czechoslovak dissident group that played a huge role in combating Soviet propaganda within ČSSR and personally met with some of our most prominent leaders Václav Havel, considered an icon in democratization of eastern block, and Alexander Dubček, face of the Prague Spring, an early attempt at loosening Soviet grip on Czechoslovakia and democratization of communist regime.
His open society foundation played a big role in helping post Soviet and post communist countries to bounce back and democratize, as well as promoting social justice around the globe, which is why Soros and his organizations have been antagonized by the far right and dictators.
Soros gave away more than 32 billion dollars to at least try to make the world a better place, he should be among the last rich people for us to be complaining about
Wealth has naught to do with being a leftists. It is how you obtain it. For example in USSR in some eras there were people who were wealthy due to efficiency bonuses but they got such wealth through work and not owning the means of production.
Also if you are a multi billionaire you can donate 99% of your wealth and still be extremely wealthy and live like a king.....If one has billions and does not donate them then like that bloke just lacks empathy for their fellow humans. One can not ever consume such wealth. It is just hoarding while countless suffer from poverty.....
Theres not only socialism and communism on the left lol. Im more centre left/social democrat.
Also how is it not gov does things? Leftism is literally about pooling resources together to create some good/service. Free healthcare/daycare, government managed electricity, etc.
I beg of you to read a single leftist theory book ever. Hell, even do a basic google search even. Anarchism is a form of leftism. Anarchism has literally 0 government. Explain that one through your "left is when government" lens
Yes, sometimes there is a educational requirement before you can properly do something. "If one HAS to know how to read before they can consume a book, then whatever is in that book is comically unpractical at best". See how dumb that sounds
There should not be a single billionaire. Anything that accepts the existence of such wealth/power held by a single person is incompatible with left-wing ideas, yes.
What if he had a change of heart and now he’s using his money for the good things he believes in? What if he’s of the mindset that the only way to fix the system is to be in the system first?
Everyone is a hypocrite. Nobody is perfect. Your take is ridiculous.
The kind of traits that are likely to make an individual more wealthy are usually also the traits that allow the individual to care less about the well being of others.
This is not always the case, but it's not exactly surprising that the ultra-wealthy aren't known for their empathy.
If you hadn't made a remark about it I'd have assumed that you use the "american ideological categorization hellscape" lens, going from your last sentence. The right/left axis has formally little to do with personal finance nowadays.
“I don’t care if 99% of your views align with leftist politics you’re good at making money! You’re a right winger reee you can only be a leftist if you’re a loser and poor!”
Not what I’m saying. If he truly believed in left-wing ideology he wouldn’t hoard billions to himself and continue to screw over normal people just to make even more money, it’s not that he’s successful, he doesn’t have to be broke. I’m a right winger and I find his greed disgusting, any true left winger should agree, as should any right winger with any sense
George is one of the most prolific philanthropists in the world tf are you smoking? He has donated 10’s of billions of dollars.
But he can only meet your definition of a left winger if he donates an exact amount that makes him ‘not a billionaire’ because of some arbitrary association you’re making conflating wealth with political values.
So is Bill gates lmao, they’re both still evil men who are actively fucking over normal people just to hoard even more money. They just donate large sums to “good causes” to improve their PR and they deduct some of it from their tax anyway
Soros isn't a left winger he's a liberal Democrat or a democratic socialist. Leftist is really far left. There's centrist, neoliberal, liberal, socialist, and everything left of that starts to be leftist.
Leftists are like Marxism, communism etc. They don't want to be associated with the Democratic party.
Soros is a good honest man but he's not a leftist. He isn't using his money to eliminate the concept of personally ownership, for example.
I don’t care if 99% of your views align with leftist politics
That's where your strawman argument fails because you (probably) don't understand leftwing ideologies. Soro's views absolutely do not 99% align with leftist politics, they're closer to diverging at 99%.
Does "leftist" just mean "left of center" to you? Bro is a democratic party establishment megadonor, backed Hillary in the 2016 primaries. If liberal and leftist are synonyms to you then that's your issue.
He's a liberal Democrat through and through. People are letting themselves be tricked by propaganda changing the definition of liberalism to be: anything left of conservative is a "leftist"
theres alot of lefty rich people. But not a whole lot of soros type of people who will fund and bankroll politicians that have nothing to do eith him but are left on the spectrum
Bill gates did the right thing focusing on vaccinating africans and he still gets shit on. soros is actually out there trying changing electoral outcomes. if any country did this shit everyone would be rightfully pissed.
And the funny part is that Sheldon Adelson was quite literally what conservatives think George Soros is, but because he’s on “their side”, they never made a peep about him
Shouldn’t be the background, category, or label of a person that causes detest; but the quality of their character and actions or words directly taken or stated. Even then, change and redemption is always feasible.
In terms of how he got his wealth he's one of the worse ones, but he's done some good with his wealth too. Like even on the right they would like his anti-communist efforts.
There's really only 4 ways someone gets that wealthy: building a company that grows massively, inheritence, corruption, or trading in financial markets. Soros got his money from that last one.
Not really sure why so many people see it as unethical, but that's a topic for another day lol
He donates heavily to progressive political organizations and nonprofit groups, which is why some people criticize him and argue he has outsized influence.
Okay with both. Billionaires existing is fine in a just and fair society; it is the society that must be fixed. The existence of jews does not and needs not justification; their existence is justice in and of itself.
The solution is taxation to the point a billionaire cannot exist. You came here saying they can exist in a fair and just society without a solution to how you will make their existence fair and just.
How did they get that money?
If the needs and wants of every citizen is met, and a man has saved and inherited a fortune that has amassed over generations but not over his own lifetime, and assuming we're not using a cringe communist definition of explotation (as in, =employment), I don't see that anything evil has occurred here. Do you?
I would argue that that amount of wealth could not be accrued without some unjust exploitation of the chain of production. What did one person do to generate that much more wealth than anyone else? And an even bigger question, what did their kin do to continue that amassing of wealth? I would argue that you are creating an example that would still be impossible for one family to achieve in a fair and just world
I think it’s possible, but extremely rare. JK Rowling became a billionaire off the Harry Potter books and movies, that didn’t seem wildly unethical or anything (her later revealed views on a bunch of stuff notwithstanding)
Being a billionaire in a vacuum is fine, however within the context of our current society they have way too large a share of the total resources available to humanity, and that level of wealth is only possible through the exploitation of masses of others.
So in a sense I agree that there is an issue between the current society and the billionaire class. If it's society that must be fixed, what ways are broken/wrong and how do we correct it?
If we got rid of every single Billionaire using a gun and redestributed the wealth of all of them in the most just and preferable way to make the most impact, nothing would change. There's gotta be policy that will fix the current problems, and that policy doesn't need to cut out the billionaires. It's a loser talking point that signals virtue and kills progress.
Pretty sure if we did that nobody would be jumping up and down to take the throne from those that were just murdered to expropriating the wealth of the masses...
It is sorta a self correcting issue once it gets to the guillotines.
I think that may be a little naive and idealistic, you might be very surprised how many people would be queuing up to take those thrones, just with a little more subtlety and personal security.
People frequently risk death and worse for much, much less than a billion dollars, and power vacuums not the kind of self correcting you should be looking for.
To be honest I think I agree with the sentiment, but not with the conclusion.
Saying that if we removed every billionaire and redistributed their wealth nothing would change is simply incorrect. There are actually benefits to the existence of billionaires too, not enough to make up for the negatives, but still they exist.
Plus billionaires almost necessarily manage large networks of other people, and have substantial influence over the power structures of the world, if they all disappeared overnight a hell of a lot would change.
With that said I agree in saying that billionaires are a symptom of broken societal structures, not the cause of them.
For being billionaires, no. But being Jewish shouldn't be a factor in criticism against them.
Like you wouldn't hate a black billionaire for being black, a gay billionaire for being gay, a trans billionaire for being trans, a woman billionaire for being a woman, no? You'd hate them for being a billionaire. Same shit here.
I hate that this concept flies out the window when they're Jewish which then gives free reign for others to hate on other Jewish people for being Jewish even if they're not billionaires. It's stupid and regressive.
Couldn’t care less about Jews but watching the rise of anti-semitism in this bastion of world-saving enlightened people has been interesting.
Aren’t we cheering for Iran currently, which is objectively about the worst country for women and minorities to live in, just because Israel and US have tomahawked half of their leadership in a month?
Isn’t it wild to see first hand how our completely confused moral fuckery is taking its first steps to the kind of thinking that gave us the holocaust.
And people wonder why countries like China are so mistrustful or even afraid of us. We’re even crazier than we are violent, and to top it all off we are absolutely convinced of our righteousness and willing to point that out at gunpoint.
That’s not me saying that those countries like China aren’t utter fuckheads themselves though.
I mean kind of but not really. People are happy to see the US get humbled, more specifically they're happy to see the trump admin get humbled.
No one (except a few absolute nutters) actually likes the IRGC itself, and most that are 'cheering' for Iran simply don't support western intervention there for a range of reasons.
The issue is that current gauge for the Trump admins competence, and the viability of western intervention is the continued survival of the IRGC and the possibility of US troops getting deployed and being harmed.
Legalizing and taxing a plant that we already know is an economic powerhouse is a strong case for someone that has a pulse for the economy. He isnt a pothead wanting to stay out of trouble for smoking a j at a concert.
Went through a really difficult patch in life and pot helped me a lot. Had it been any other thing I'd be dead months ago. Obv im not saying it magically cured me tho.
You linked a video of him talking about his experiences during the holocaust, when he was 14? How would that mean anything for his character overall? He was just trying to survive, And, for that matter, probably didn’t really have any understanding of what was happening at that age.
Also, it’s linked from r/conspiracy, from infowars. Neither of those are really the bastion of providing cold hard facts, and are much more willing to alter information to further their own agendas.
I understand what he said. He said he had no guilt because he was a kid, and didn’t know any better. Also, I’m not going to lie, I don’t think anyone who becomes a billionaire does so without throwing away all empathy/sympathy for others.
Like to become a billionaire you have to be a psychopath/sociopath. Which is exactly what it would take for doing what he did as a kid, and feeling no guilt now (if that is in fact the case.) or he understood it as the fact that the Jews were going to be turned in regardless, and he was doing it to protect himself.
You have to understand the types of rationalizations one makes when faced with death.
Lots of people did horrible shit to survive the holocaust, it was a fucked up situation.
I paid for people to shill feminism in the 70's, because he saw that 50% of the population wasn't contributing to his wealth. And now people can't afford to buy a home on a single salary due to the flow-on effects.
Ah yes, it’s not like reaganomics and a multitude of the economic reforms that occurred in the 60s-90s had anything to do with our current plight. Surely the clearly unsustainable economic system of infinite growth wouldn’t reach a failing point.
Nah it’s actually all feminism and one SPECIFIC billionaire.
I’m sorry but we are just reaping the benefits of a system that only benefited the generations that designed it, and now we are gonna have to handle its collapse.
The Vietnam war was unfunded unlike Korea and no rationing was implemented so the us had to compete with its own citizens for oil, steel, etc, which caused rapid inflation. Money sought safe shelter in a new investment that was created just before the war, reits, and public home building which generated a profit of 3 percent was ended for reits which demand 10 percent profit and will restrict home building and transportation to keep prices high. It was then that real estate prices began to climb.
Prior to the war, housing consumed 13-20 percent of most Americans annual earnings. Today it consumes 30-40 percent on average.
It's both. Not that I think women should go back to the kitchen, and it's good that they're able to be independent, but if you have now a bunch of dual incomes competing for the same houses, then the default for buying that will be a dual income.
The only thing to really counteract that is if we either doubled the houses, which is just a waste of land and resources, or reduced work hours to compensate for the increased labor pool. The latter is ideal, but we didn't do it due to our unsustainable economic system.
When you have double incomes now competing for the same houses, that becomes what you need to afford the house. Women's liberation was a good thing, but it should have come with a reduction in individual work hours too.
You can't just casually blurt out a direct connection between the random moral idea of feminism with a specific man's personal wealth without any context and make it sound sane.
The direct connection between epstein and /pol was epstein meeting with moot the day before /pol re opened and moot hard flipping from "I will never reopen pol because it was over run by nazis" to "yea its totally my idea to open pol"
Now we dont know what those guys talked about but the facts we DO know really insinuate that epstein had a meeting with moot and asked him nicely to open the nazi shitposting board
That might very well be the case, but I can count the number of times I've been harmed by "foreign invaders" on one hand, whereas the capitalist nation-state that's all homegrown and claims me as its citizen psychologically tortures me every single day.
Some people might be negatively affected because there's like a spooky scary immigrant who moved in next door and took their job and is selling döner kebap where previously a local was selling sausages.
Almost everyone on this Earth is negatively affected by the fact that a small parasitical elite of exploiters hoards the means of production to themselves and pits us all against each other in order to prevent the workers of the world to unite as one and rise up against this sick state of affairs.
You gotta have your priorities in order, and priority number one is the overthrow of the capitalist system, everything else is just smok and mirrors.
It's not "a dude moving in next door to sell doner". It's hundreds of thousands of migrants with utterly incompatible cultures illegally entering our countries and causing havoc. One look at London, Paris or Berlin tells me enough.
I was born in a white, christian country and I want it to stay that way. I want to live amongst my own people. This is a natural instinct.
(Had to cut 60% of my comment because Reddit being Reddit removed the previous one.)
It's hundreds of thousands of migrants with utterly incompatible cultures illegally entering our countries and causing havoc. One look at London, Paris or Berlin tells me enough.
Nice copy-pasting from Epstein's script you did there.
I was born in a white, christian country and I want it to stay that way.
Race is a bullshit social construct and god isn't real you superstitious fool.
There's nothing natural about you perpetuating the propaganda apparatus that keeps the capitalist-nationalist system up and running.
Maybe payment and rent would be a non-issue in a socialist planned economy where the workers cooperate for the greater good instead of being made to be at each other's throats for whatever scraps the capitalist parasites deign to grant them.
yeah because planned economies haven't failed utterly every single time they've been tried in over 70 countries at this point. The only people who hate capitalism are the people who don't know what it is and/or swallowed the propaganda that corporatism is the same thing.
yeah because planned economies haven't failed utterly every single time they've been tried in over 70 countries at this point.
Most of these countries only existed on paper but were in actuality just outposts and vassal states of the Soviet Union with no true self-determination, free press, or democratic checks and balances.
Saying communism is untenable because of the Soviet Union and its subjects is like saying republicanism (as in any form of government that is not a hereditary monarchy) is untenable because of Napoleon and his conquests.
The only people who hate capitalism are the people who don't know what it is and/or swallowed the propaganda that corporatism is the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
"Corporatism" is to capitalism what the butterfly is to the caterpillar.
Yeah. I live there. It is great. Probably the greatest time in European history in terms of living standards which is all that really matters. It is great here and it will keep being great unless weirdo right wingers(neolibs, conservicucks, christcucks, nationalists, etc) ruin it by their increasingly strong corporate cock sucking😒
Yes? We get nice kebab shops and better footballers and a more interesting culture. You right wing freaks are perpetually frightened of your own shadow. Anyway the foreign born pop in us vs eu are not so different, so be honest you're just talking about the big bad muslims not immigrants
Sounds good! Now that we've established that men = bad, are we gonna leave it at that or are we going to break that down further? Such as by, I don't know, let's say race. In fact, let's break it down even further! Let's break it down by both race AND wealth! What sort of funny things start to emerge?
Let's break it down by both race AND wealth! What sort of funny things start to emerge?
Why don't you tell me, oh wise man who is clearly very informed on this topic? You about to blow my mind by telling me that poor whites are all paragons of virtue who'd nary harm a fly, while poor blacks are but ravenous beats driven purely by instinct to smash and scream?
Aha, you jest! But verily, take heed! For the wealthiest of the black males commit violent crimes at a greater rate (read: per capita) than even the most destitute of white men! I can hear you now, "Lies and slander" you decry! Yet FBI crime statistics care naught for your feeble pleas. So, to answer your clearly sarcastic question, yes. Poor white men are, in fact, paragons of virtue compared to poor black men.
Oh no. How terrible. These invaders, what weapons do they have and how many? Do they have tanks, aircraft and drones? What about landmines and barbed wire?
You either lack the brains to understand that "invaded" by u/AlphaMassDeBeta is a hyperbole, or you are willfully (and dishonestly) ignoring it in order to shift the discourse to semantics. We all know it's the latter.
It's not fear, it's disgust. It stems from seeing them swarm women, shout and loiter in public. For every one that integrates well there's 100 that remain uncivilized pithecanthropi.
The intake of refugees during the Syrian crisis happened under center right governments in UK, France and Germany. And Soros is not leftist. People just vomitting anything
Just because I use Reddit daily, it doesn’t mean that I sympathize with the traditional “hive mind”. People have different uses for apps, you know? The “reddit” comment is clearly political.
He manipulated British currency and almost make Bank of England go bankrupt to make profit for himself.
He's funding think tanks in many countries which tell more or less that we should abondon current European countries and go for even stronger EU integration.
Or just don't bring them to countries where there is no instant cultural or religious compatibility and where they don't intend to spend enough time assimilating into the country's way of life. I know it's fucking easy to talk out of your ass when it's not your close ones who have to fear being robbed or raped at night, but maybe put a little more thought into what you say.
Good to know. I don't want to ask about your country for privacy reasons, but take a look at your country's immigration policy (how strict it is). If it's as open as in Sweden or Germany, where crime rates have almost doubled since 2015, either you live in a peaceful town where you haven't experienced any of that, or you just don't go out.
Poland and Hungary. Both countries are parts of Schengen and the EU, have taken in some refugees from the middle east, have taken in Ukrainian migrants and have a decently large population of foreigners.
Yep, and both of them have a much stricter imigration policyand catch a lot of flak for it, too. Hungary was fined for not fully complying with the EU's decisions. I haven't been to Poland yet, but Hungary felt much safer than Germany based on my experience and statistics as well.
I could read half of your deleted comment, but I'm still not sure where your argument was heading. Honestly, I don't understand why you keep accusing me of racism. What I'm talking about is not biological, it's cultural. If you knew anything about the topic, maybe you would have a better understanding of the situation and could offer some counter arguments.
Also who said they should be in camps? People with proper identification should be able to cross borders easily, and those without it should understand that a longer, more controlled process is the condition for us to help them, given their circumstances.
From an economic perspective, everyone has finite resources. My country, where most families live paycheque to paycheque, can't play the saviour. While some nations may be able to tank the costs, others are in a worse economic situation.
🤓 ackshully im not racist ☝️ ackshully i’m worried about how they behave different from me that will kill my whole family instantly. my big brain plan is hold the immigrants in camps until they learn my superior ways
I just don't get how people can, with a straight face, say that immigration is evil because... now we are less of a majority in our country? Who cares???? My country could go from 70% white to 70% everything else 30% white and I wouldn't bat an eyelid. Racial majority or demographics is not something you can actually value and try to defend without implicitly saying you value your own race over others. If you are no longer a majority, then tough luck. You don't get to enforce that if people are coming into the country in a legitimate way.
This isn't about race, unless you're a neo-Nazi, of course. It's about culture: the people who have migrated in large numbers to European countries since 2015 come from a completely different culture. Many of them come from countries where women are not equal, or where massacres of villages could happen at any time. This way of life is not instantly compatible with Western beliefs. While I agree that we should help them, mass migration is not the answer. They won't have time to assimilate into the country's way of life, and if we accommodate them in one place, they won't have to adapt. This leads to a nation where robberies, stabbings and rapes increase twofold. Around 70 per cent of people who migrated to Europe in the past 15 years were men aged 18–34.
I'm not suggesting that they should change their customs or religions, but they must accept that the country they have moved to has its own customs and traditions, and if they want to live there, they must respect them and integrate to a certain extent.
One of the main reasons behind the mass immigration into Europe since 2015 was to 'fix' the ageing society, which, given time, would be unable to take care of itself due to the declining birth rate. What is that if not replacement? It may be 80% now, but if we look at Sweden 30 years from now, the graph will look completely different.
America's whole idea was built upon immigration from the beginning, they built a new country and became a melting pot of different cultures. If you look at a European country the size of New York and allow any immigrants in without rules, the culture will inevitably change. What is Chinatown in New York would become a significant part of that country. Since they would not have to assimilate into the nation's way of life, there would be constant friction. Given time, if their birth rate stays the same and the native's population remains the same or decreases, they will become the minority in their own country.
This is so obvious that I can't understand how you can't see it. The solution to an ageing society is achieved through better government and a steady but controlled flow of migration.
If marbles have a limited lifespan and have a controllable chance to split into two more marbles and I actively agitate for adding more red marbles to the bag and incentivize splitting instead of trying to increase the amount of blue marbles in the bag, yes, red marbles will indeed replace blue marbles
His NGO want the liberation of 60k imprisoned gang members in my home country (El Salvador), while the literal majority of the population is very loudly against this. Some people think the torture and violence they see on shit like Narcos is just Hollywood violence, but these psychopaths have done this and worse. So no. Call me whatever you want, fuck this guy.
masiive influx of workers who are willing to work for less then the standards of a local area can only cause a quality of life decrease for the local workers, mass migriation is the billionaires weapon against the working class
"Good science predicts the automobile, great science predicts the traffic jam."
That may seem like a whimsical & abstract quote to use in this context, because it is, but the thinking behind it is relevant. Predictions are functionally limited by cognition which relies on current and past experience to make any prediction.
Some dude named R. K. Merton explored the idea of unintended consequences in sociological situations. When political/economic/social change happens, the systems reliant on, and effected by the change end up with first order effects and second order effects, essentially meaning the predicted effects, and the effects that were unexpected.
Furthermore, the complexity of any system dictates the complexity of the outcome. The variables at play in a crowd of 1,000 people are near infinite, at least to our little mokey brains. You have multi-dimensional political, religious, economic, etc. beliefs all interacting together. By its very definition, globalism would be the most complex system ever established. The variables are functionally infinite. What's the global population nowadays?
I agree with you that globalism is the future, however it is impossible to predict the problems globalism will create. As J. K. Galbraith wrote, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable"
That's true of course, but at least abstractly the wealth controlled by a central bank benefits the public. If you fuck over a commercial bank with market manipulation it only hurts the people who willingly invested in that bank. Fuck over a country's central bank and you're stealing money from that country's population.
He did by supporting left wing causes all over the world that benefit people more than a central bank the purpose of which was to prevent recessions and crises' and it fails to do so in the 10 or so we have had since the concept first came about
He's funding think tanks in many countries which tell more or less that we should abondon current European countries and go for even stronger EU integration.
Based. Fuck these insignificant tiny little nation states and fallen empires way past their prime. A united Europe could be a superpower, a fractured one is just easy pickings for the yankies and the ruskies.
Just ignore all the rewards from colonialism we reaped, it's easy since the victims are far away and most of them drown in the sea if they try to get here!
Love the self-awareness and I genuinely don’t understand the downvotes other than this subreddit is full of edgy jackasses.
I’m an American myself and I’d love to see a united Europe. Especially given all our meddling particularly recently in Hungary. You guys could be unstoppable.
Lmao do you honestly think that anyone could conquer Europe? Especially Russia, which is a complete joke of a nation that can’t even beat one of the poorest European nations?
Nobody needs to conquer Europe because they’re not united enough to do anything that challenges anyone else for their own benefit. Europe is just dying in front of everyone’s eyes and doing nothing about it.
that can’t even beat one of the poorest European nations?
Ikr, imagine if that poorest European nation got monetary support in the billions of dollars, intel from multiple top intelligence agencies and military gear
Part of that propaganda is to divide Russian resources from the Europe's tech. That would be a 100% superpower. But without manpower, army, and resources - it's a fail. The propaganda about Russians got into us deep, so is Putin doing everything to instill that message in ordinary Russians.
Was it Soros manipulating the pound? Or was the UK government artificially manipulating it with interest rates and Soros literally just bought and sold currencies? What happened was inevitable in a free market economy following the ERM.
Rich countries exploit poorer countries. Yes, they send money in direct transfers from EU to those in in need but also due to having more power over politics and economy they create conditions where their mega businesses can replace local smaller producers.
Overall it's already a transfer of money and power from poor to rich but with some current benefits for the poor countries. But in a long run it may not be beneficial for them.
A complete fucking moron’s understanding of the EU, maybe.
Every small country clamors to join. None of them want to leave once in. I’d explain how much of a raw deal their equal representation is, how small EU members frequently extort great powers with their vetoes, or how they get insane carveouts for things like immigration that others don’t, but I don’t need to. The fact they all beg to join and refuse to leave is overwhelming and obvious proof, on its face, that the EU is a great deal for them.
Oh and I’d add every EU country exhibits remarkable convergence to the whole. Poland being a notable example. But also Hungary and the Baltics and everyone else.
Anyone who claims the relationship is predatory, when in reality it’s the COMPLETE opposite (EU is basically a wealth redistribution from rich to poor) is a complete idiot.
He’s done it to other countries as well. He’s a financial terrorist, he has an obscene amount of money yet still is prepared to fuck over innocent working and middle class people just to hoard even more wealth that he couldn’t possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes
It’s really hard to argue nearly anyone has done as much for the working and middle classes as Soros. He’d be worth well over $100b today if not for his donations to progressive causes.
Don't forget the constant election interference all over the world and lobbying for the interests/profits of his inner circles and himself while making average working people finance it all
He didn't manipulate it. He was aware that the UK government was trying to hold an interest rate that wasnt unsustainable, which a lot of people were aware of. George Soros just knew when would be a good time to short the pound.
Oh no, not the stronger EU integration, let's keep our ownTM individualSovereignTM Prideful and NationalTM countries as isolated from one another and these pesky common taxation and common regulations, we wouldn't want to hurt the billionaires and the elites.
As was obviously the case, the very kind anti EU brexit people in UK, or the anti EU Orban were all about fighting the evil EU for the good of the common people.
Speculative attacks only work if the central bank tries to keep the currency stable.
Essentially: you want to tank a ccurency. If you buy and then sell, nothing happens. You have to sell without buying. So you borrow pounds (in this case) and use them to buy dollars. Lots of them.
If the central bank does nothing, supply and demand balance themselves out. The price of the pound drops a bit, but when Soros starts paying interest he'll eventually have to give up and the pound goes up again.
But if the central bank "defends the currency"... Every time Soros sells pounds to buy dollars, the feds sell dollars to buy pounds. To prevent that big bad devaluations. When UK dollar reserves start getting low everyone smells blood on the water and start borrowing pounds to buy dollars. The UK runs out of dollars, slowly at first but then VERY quickly. The price drops all at once. Soros sells a tiny bit of his dollars to pay his pound debt, and keeps the rest.
It's the ultimate case of "do nothing, still win." Except politicians are allergic to doing nothing. They HAVE to pretend they're helping. And then it bankrupts the country.
`No Sense of Guilt'' for Confiscating Property from
Jews in Nazi-occupied Budapest. ``But there was no sense that
I shouldn't be there, because that was--well, actually, in a
funny way, it's just like in markets--that if I weren't
there--of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would
. . . be taking it away anyhow
``I am basically there to--to make money. I cannot and do
not look at the social consequences of--of what I do.''
George Soros, commenting on being blamed for the financial
collapse of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and Russia.
He didn't bankrupt anyone. Countries can't go bankrupt. He just took out a short position on the pound. Actually, it wasn't even him one guy working for his fund noticed the weakness and Soros just pushed him to take out a bigger position.
The bad economic conditions were already there the whole time. None of which was the fault of Soros.
That analogy doesn’t really hold. Selling weapons directly contributes to a war continuing because the weapons are the means of violence. Short-selling a currency doesn’t create the underlying economic weakness. It's just a bet that the weakness already exists.
In the case of the pound in 1992, the UK had already tied its currency to a rate it couldn’t realistically maintain. Speculators like Soros didn’t force that policy, they recognized it was unsustainable. If it hadn’t been Soros, it would’ve been someone else because the fundamentals were already pointing that way.
So it’s less like “selling weapons to wage a war” and more like “betting that a cracked dam is going to break.” The crack was already there.
Your right that it's not direct. One of my aquintences often buys share of companies that make and sell automated killer drones. He isn't the one killing them he is just making money from the cruelty of the war machine. Soros's bets undirectly ruined many lives, not just in europe but in asia aswell, people losing their pension funds, or seeing their life savings evaporate in a matter of days due to hyperinflation.
The 'cracked dam' analogy is clever, but it ignores the fact that a speculator isn't just a passive observer waiting for the break. When you put a massive, multi-billion dollar bet against a currency, you are actively swinging a sledgehammer at those cracks. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more you bet against it, the more panic you spread, and the faster the dam collapses.
The underlying weakness might not be Soros's fault, but profiting from the resulting misery is a choice. When the pound or the baht collapsed, it translated to real world proverty for millions of elderly people who couldn't bet on anything. They were the ones standing under the dam when it broke. It’s not just a game of numbers, it’s the systematic extraction of value from the vulnerable to the ultrawealthy under the guise of "market efficiency".
You're describing the human cost of currency crises, which is real. But you're still mixing up who caused the structural problem and who noticed it first.
Speculators can accelerate a collapse, but they can’t create the underlying imbalance that makes it inevitable. If a currency peg requires a central bank to burn through reserves or keep interest rates artificially high just to defend it, the system is already broken. The market pressure just forces the correction to happen sooner rather than later.
Take the pound in the ERM crisis. The UK government was trying to keep the currency at a rate that didn’t match the economy. Traders betting against it didn’t invent that mismatch, they exposed it. Even if Soros had never placed a trade, thousands of other funds and banks were seeing the same numbers and moving the same way.
Blaming the speculator is like blaming the person who shouts “the dam is about to break” for the flood. The real responsibility sits with the policies that made the dam unsustainable in the first place.
I get what you're saying about structural weaknesses, and I'm not defending the UK government here, I just think your dam analogy doesn't fully work. When someone has that level of capital, they're not just "pointing out a problem", rather they're actively pushing things in a direction.
If we stick to the dam metaphor there is a difference between a leak and a total breach. The systems could be repaired through gradual policy changes. However, massive short selling is like taking a wrecking ball to ensure the flood happens immediately on your terms, so you can collect the insurance money.
By speeding up the collapse for profit, speculators remove the time factor that would allow goverments or individuals to adjust. The speculators walk away with billions, and the pensioners, small business owners lose 30% of their purchasing power in a day.
It wasn't just a short position and countries can go bankrupt.
"Soros used his hedge fund, Quantum Fund, to borrow billions of pounds from various banks and sell them for other currencies, such as German marks or U.S. dollars. This created a huge demand for other currencies and a huge supply of pounds, which drove down the value of the pound in the market. Soros also used derivatives, such as options and futures contracts, to amplify his bets and increase his leverage." via Investopedia
Countries technically can default, but that’s not the same as “going bankrupt” the way a company does. Bankruptcy is a legal process for firms or individuals. Sovereign states like the United Kingdom can’t be liquidated by courts and their assets can’t be seized in the same way.
What actually happens is sovereign default—they stop paying or restructure debt (which has happened many times, e.g. Argentina). In the Black Wednesday case, the UK didn’t default or go bankrupt, it simply exited the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and devalued the pound. Speculators like George Soros can profit from pressure on a currency, but they can’t “bankrupt” a sovereign state.
True, he used heavy leverage and derivatives through the Quantum Fund to short the British pound sterling during Black Wednesday that part is accurate. But the key point is that the pound was already widely viewed as overvalued inside the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Soros didn’t create the underlying problem, he bet that the Bank of England wouldn’t be able to defend the peg. When the UK left the ERM, the country didn’t go bankrupt—its economy actually recovered fairly quickly afterward.
It wasn't even Soros who made that trade. It was a guy who was working for his fund that noticed the weakness in the pound. Soros just pushed him to take a huge position on it.
It's so good. What people trot out Soros as the lib big bad? The same people who made the guy who did the big bad thing for Soros the secretary of the treasury!
Do you realise that people in those countries can starve or freeze to death in winter? He did the same in Asia, ruining many lives in the process, not just countries. You absolute midwit.
ITT: people mad this guy profited off of various shit monetary policies rather than being mad at the people creating shit monetary policies. It's like watching The Big Short and thinking Steve Carrell is the main antagonist.
Why do people like him always bite the hand that feeds them?
Right wing idiot survives/benefits off of food stamps, social services, scholarships, welfare, foster care, immigration, federal loans, government jobs, affirmative action, and then grows up to be against these things.
Right wing business owners benefit off of illegal immigration too, but most of them are just about smart enough to keep their mouth shut. The dumb ones get caught saying “I didn’t think they meant my workers” when ICE raids their roofing business.
Nope. A lot of right wingers who survive off of social welfare programs have no power beyond their vote and voice, and they still use it to fight against their own interests, thinking that they'll somehow be the exception, or that it's okay for them to suffer so long as other people suffer more. It's not a matter of "people who started out good randomly got power dropped in their lap and it turned them evil." It's more "people who were already evil were able to become successful because they didn't have morality or ethics holding them back, and this resulted in them gaining exorbitant amounts of power."
Fascist and socialism are 2 sides of the same coin. While fascist generally supported private property, the control of that property was at the behest of the government.
Well given the amount of leaders that went from socialists to fascists I wouldn’t say so. It’s quite rare that people do a complete 180 on their beliefs.
Dictators when they try to go for a political career usually pick an popular ideology thinking people will just believe them to be leftist, it is nothing new. Many dictators also used socialism as a guise to rise to power and use the people to overthrow the previous government (whether so called "real socialism" would work tho is still questionable). The term I would call most communist countries from last century would not be communist, but authoritarian. You can be authoritarian without communism (like Nazis) or with.
What I am saying with above paragraph is that it is honestly irrelevant in practice if those dictatorship were socialists or not, it was just propaganda to control and use the population. You see now on news everyday how some people use identiy politics and transgenders to push an agenda, even if transgenders make up for like... 5%? While these same politicians push to raise taxes on people while lowering for richer and not really fixing any problems.
Not saying names but a certain president of USA from the last two decades was originally running as a Democrat.
Really just different versions of totalitarianism. It doesn’t help that they end up maintaining a regime of violence, since they usually rise and keep power using it. Nazis used their policy of widespread hatred, purges, and pogroms to keep the population angry and willing to die for them, because they knew that if they went for too long without an enemy, they would start looking at their own government. Hence Hitler Youth, where they formed kids at their most impressionable to hate and to fight an enemy they’ve never known or been hurt by for reasons unjust. The Communists rose in revolutions during war, and silenced dissent through secret police and forced labor. And although Hitler rose to his role with a legitimate political support base, he still used the SA (Sturmabteilung,) his paramilitary force, to intimidate voters and opponents to maintain power until the Reichstag fire happened, at which point he seized absolute power.
Comrade Stalin sided with the British and yankee imperialists during World War Two. Sometimes you gotta root for the lesser evil, and in this case that happens to be a billionaire funding some vaguely progressive causes because he has a shred of humanity.
He’s a financial terrorist who fucks over working and middle class people just to make even more obscene amounts of money, because a billion dollars is somehow not enough and he need even more
It's very odd how much money his given to soft on crime district attorneys across the country through PACS and The Open Societies Foundations.
Over the past decade, billionaire George Soros has spent at least $50 million* to elect scores of “social justice” prosecutors across the country. These district attorneys, who represent over 70 million people or more than 1 in 5 Americans, often pursue pro-criminal and anti-police policies.'
Billionaire who destroys national economies for personal gain, funds protests and organisations that try to flood Europe with illegals, and campaigns for soft-on-crime DAs.
His family were also accused of betraying other Jewish households in hiding to the Nazis, who would then confiscate their property in exchange for protection.
Correct me if I'm wrong, didn't he also betray the Jews to the Nazis or work for them?
I remember something about him being apart of an economic collapse or ransom.
I know there's more, but that's off the top of my head.
he kind of fucked over russia when they were rebuilding. he was one of the biggest proponents of shock doctrine until halfway through he realized the damage it would do.
this is unironically where a lot of conspiracy theorists comes from, since he "shaped" a society before he """might""" be able to do it again. disregarding that after 2 years of shock doctrine he had become the most vocal opponent of it
Shock therapy was successful in Poland and the Baltics. Soros is not a blip on the radar of causes for Russia’s deteriorating during the wild ‘90s. It is to do with an unplanned chaotic collapse of an empire, a civil war with literal bombing of the Parliament House, a civil war and Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, the bloody Aluminum Wars and Mining Wars where businessmen killed each other with mercenary armies to take control of Russia’s natural resources, a totally corrupt and incompetent Yeltsin at the helm, Russia de-valuing the Ruble in ‘97 and so much more. Soros is nowhere near even an honorable mention for Russia’s demise.
I'm not simping for anyone. You said the guy is bananas, I assumed you'd have a reason for saying so. At least that way if someone says he's great I'd have something to reply (after checking your claims of course).
A billionaire who has donated over 30 billion. What have you done for humanity, anon? How have you contributed? Let’s assume you have. But can your contributions match his?
If not, I think it is safe to deduce that your worth as a human being is far less than George Soros’.
human worth is not dictated solely by contribution to society, but even if it was, it is impossible to become a "self-made billionaire" without endlessly exploiting other people. if i had a billion dollars and donated a million, that isnt really the end all be all about my generosity as a person or my value to society, i mightve stolen that money from poorer people. and above all else, he is still a billionaire. he could've donated 50 billion, if hes still a billionaire then that says nothing. all that means is that he values his public perception
Absolutely false. Unlike other billionaires, this man has donated WAY more than he has kept for himself. Again you follow up with uneducated and wrong assumptions without an iota of research and you expect people to rally behind your “eat the rich” chant? Do better.
George Soros doesn’t actually advocate completely open borders. Through Open Society he supports refugee rights, humane treatment of migrants, and more coordinated immigration policies. During the European migrant crisis, he argued the European Union should accept more refugees and manage migration collectively.
People label this “open borders,” but his proposals are about managed migration and refugee protection, not eliminating border controls.
I mean the guy is just a fund manager and left-wing. That's it. Most of the conspiracy theories around him make no sense and are just made-up right-wing propaganda.
he wants so bad to rule a country, and uses shady tactics to influence politics and economies. He is heavily invested in my country, Albania and funds the goverment to further develop his interests
It's coz he's a leftist, so anyone remotely Centre right would naturally hate him. That's all it takes, coz unlike reddit, most people are low key Centre right in some way or the other, in the whole world I mean.
The core criticism of Soros is simple: he is a billionaire activist who uses his money to push a liberal political agenda across borders. Through NGO funding, legal advocacy, and Open Society networks, he supports causes many conservatives strongly oppose, including migration-related activism. Supporters call it philanthropy; critics call it elite ideological interference.
Wow...with tbe right meme and cherry picked facts. Redditors can convinve each other that Satan is God.....wait...might be too late for that analogy. Brb
When a foreign billionaire sponsors a political group(s) inside your country, which, after gaining power, then introduce(s) some not exactly purely beneficial policies (see 90s Russia where he pushed neo-liberalism or Europe where he promoted socialism), he IS going to become a VERY controversial figure.
Plus yeah, he is a billionaire. SO, evil by default
His relentless disruption of American society by funding seemingly well-meaning movements that are deviously designed to keep us fighting by race and gender lines instead of uniting into a national identity that would keep America strong on the international stage and help the working class negotiate more money and power.
He was one of the principal causes of Black Wednesday: he and his associates (legally) engineered crashes of the Italian lira (and the British pound) for profit, inflicting serious harm on my country.
I have no sympathy for him and I don't care that he is targeted by those crazy conspiracy theorists.
George Soros is a bit of a boogeyman, a bet noir, a black beast for much of the political right and some of the left, but he's also a bit of a black box because we don't really read him. So let me summarize his philosophy. In particular, let's interrogate the idea of a so-called open society — the cause Soros claims to champion, the concept he has promoted, opening up close societies, and on behalf of which he lavishes generous funding on all sorts of groups and projects now through his son.
He's a giant. He walks very small, careful steps so people don't hear him going boom, boom, boom. "If I weren't there, somebody else would be taking it away." Anyhow, I'm mainly drawing on two of Soros's works: a 97 essay, "The Capitalist Threat," and his 2000 book, "The Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism."
Now, the term open society was coined by Henry Bergson and developed by Karl Popper. Bergson came up with open society in his 1932 book, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion." He wrote: "Never shall we pass from closed society to the open society, from city to humanity by any mere broadening out. The two things are not of the same essence. The open society is the society which is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity, a dream now and again by chosen souls."
So Bergson writes that the closed society is natural. It is to humans what the ant hill is to ants. The open society breaks with nature. It isn't a development from the closed society, a broadening of that which is already in a traditional society. It's rather something that does violence to it. It's a break.
Karl Popper developed this concept further. Just as Bergson speaks of the open society as in principle embracing all humanity, so too Popper describes it as global. He wrote: "The idea that there exist natural units like nations or linguistic or racial groups is entirely fictitious. The state must protect the individual citizen, the international organization also must ultimately protect human individuals and not states or nations. The complete renunciation of the principle of the national state, a principle which owes its popularity to the fact that it appeals to tribal instincts, and the insight that human individuals and not states or nations must be the ultimate concern of all politics has important applications. We must realize that we treat individuals fairly even if we decide to break up the power organization of an aggressive state or nation to which these individuals belong."
As in Bergson, for Popper, past identity is to be transcended and indeed rejected. It represents the opposite of where we have to go. Bergson, Popper, and as we will see, Soros, frame the open society in radically progressive terms. Open society as Soros understands it is interchangeable to a degree with what he calls reflexivity and fallibility. So these two concepts are key for Soros.
Reflexivity describes a two-way interaction between thinking and reality, subject and object, where thoughts influence the reality they describe and vice versa, creating a feedback loop. Not in some mystical way, nothing spiritual about it, just in terms of us acting in certain ways that alter reality based on what we already think about reality. There's a dual function in thinking: the cognitive function which is to understand reality as it is, and the participatory or manipulative function which is to shape reality. Neither Popper's elegant model of scientific method nor economic theory recognized reflexivity. Popper took it for granted that in an open society the cognitive function takes precedence. In a democracy, political discourse is not aimed at discovering reality — that's the cognitive function — but getting elected and staying in power. That's the manipulative function.
And then we have fallibility, and specifically what Soros calls radical fallibility, which posits that all human constructs, ideas, institutions, ideologies are inherently flawed, deficient. In history, we end up with self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating cycles. Belief creates reality but eventually collapses because it's deficient. It fails to reckon with certain elements of reality. Radical fallibility underpins the concept of an open society. Whereas closed societies think they know the truth or at least some grand truth. So far so reasonable, even if we disagree. But it gets deeper.
Soros writes: "Radical fallibility is the cornerstone not only of my view of the world but also of my personal identity and as such it is reflected in my behavior. It has guided my actions. If there is anything original in my thinking, it is this radical version of fallibility." Even though all mental constructs are flawed, some of them are fertile. "Fertile fallacies are the equivalent of bubbles in financial markets." This lies at the core of his own radical version of fallibility. His working assumption allows him to operate with fertile fallacies which he applies to the outside world and to his own activities — opening up close societies.
And Soros gets personal when describing this: "Radical fallibility is for me not only an abstract theory, but also a matter of deep personal conviction. As a fund manager, predominant feelings I operated with were uncertainty and fear. I had moments of hope, even euphoria. But those emotions made me insecure. Worrying made me feel safer. So the only genuine joy I experienced was when I discovered what it was that I had to worry about. I could never acknowledge my successes. It might stop me from worrying."
There's no spiritual contemplation, no rest in a positive assertion or identity or vision of beauty. Happiness makes the believer in radical fallibility feel unstable. Safety is in fear. This constant seeking after anxiety, after sources of worry, characterizes how many people live, but he made it into an ideology. This is similar, by the way, to the Frankfurt school thinker Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics, so-called. And like the Frankfurt school, Soros critiques Enlightenment reason. In particular, he values free expression over truth, or thinks of free speech and other rights not as a good way to get to the truth or to do objective good, but as a way to find fertile fallacies.
As he puts it: "It is high time to subject reason as construed by the Enlightenment to the same kind of critical examination that the Enlightenment inflicted on the dominant external authorities, both divine and temporal. We have now lived in the age of reason for the past 200 years, long enough to discover that reason has its limitations. We are ready to enter the age of fallibility."
And he does think his moral relativism will lead to specific principles: "The freedom of thought and expression and the freedom of choice can be directly derived from our fallibility. Since the ultimate truth is beyond our reach, we must allow people to think for themselves and make their own choices. I derive human rights from being a thinking agent."
So where does authority or the exercise of power come in? Well, it's not enough to avoid the closed society, you also have to avoid total chaos. You need to have some control. Soros writes: "Instead of a dichotomy between open and closed societies, I now envision open society occupying a precarious middle ground. Some that would impose a closed society, others that would lead to the disintegration of society." Similarly, Soros rejects both capitalism and communism. So, while "the open society, like democracy, is a way of living together, not a blueprint for solving particular social problems," so not a closed society, the concept of open society is not empty. It's not social disintegration. Indeed, he says that it now needs to be redefined to include more than just freedom from officially imposed orthodoxy.
But how can recognition of our fallibility serve as the basis of a whole social order? Can we promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth? The answer, I think, requires a profound change in the role we accord. "Historically, beliefs have served to justify specific rules of conduct. Fallibility ought to foster a different attitude. But in the ultimate analysis, a belief in the open society is a matter of choice, not of logical necessity. A belief in our fallibility is a highly sophisticated concept, much more difficult to work with than more primitive beliefs such as my country or company or family, right or wrong."
We are the enemy. Our nerve makes them nervous. Now, practically, Soros does promote creating an open society alliance, kind of like a UN 2.0, but he describes it in pretty minimalistic terms. Anyway, the thinking here is relatively basic. Break down old certainties because they are believed to be false, but avoid the complete breakdown of society whose institutions and behaviors were actually based on those old certainties that you want to break down. People are supposed to be civilized without the traditional certainties that created civilization in the first place. How? Well, if you go down this route, you end up, I think, resorting to naked power because you have no real positive values to give people other than this faith, as he calls it, this choice to just believe in fallibility and in the open society as a consequence.
But Soros doesn't mean that there aren't any bedrock realities, any basic facts. "The fact that our understanding is imperfect does not mean that there is no ultimate truth. On the contrary, the lack of adequate knowledge implies the need for an element of faith." He writes: "My insistence on the importance of the objective aspect of reality is a matter of personal belief. Indeed, it has a curious resemblance to a religious belief. The objective aspect of reality as I have constructed it has many of the attributes of God. My commitment to the objective aspect of reality plays the same role in my thinking as religion does in other people's. In the absence of perfect knowledge, we need beliefs. I happen to believe in harsh reality while other people believe in God."
Speculation can't change certain economic fundamentals. For example, there are certain clear material realities we cannot alter. In the early '90s, Soros made a lot of money speculating on the British pound. And he did this because he thought there were real underlying weaknesses. But his speculation made it worse. But Soros can justify that because it exposes a weakness of the system of the closed society or relatively closed society. It's a traumatic lesson for people on the truth of fallibility. This is a bit like saying getting AIDS is good because it exposes your immune system's weaknesses. But there you go.
By the way, Steve Mnuchin, Trump's Treasury Secretary, was part of Soros's team at the time. The rumors of a devaluation meant that to hold on to sterling was a gamble. Banks, pension funds, international companies told their dealers to sell the pound and then the speculators joined the fray. George Soros gambled £5 billion selling while sterling was still high but intending to buy back cheaply if the pound devalued and make a fortune. The Bundesbank was basically egging on the speculators to speculate against the weaker currencies and they took their cue actually from the Bundesbank. The Bank of England hoped it could make George Soros lose his gamble. It planned to sustain the pound's value by buying pounds at the official high premium rate. Billions of pounds of public money were about to be thrown into the defense of the pound. They decided that as the London market came in, they would intervene on a scale which would make it quite clear that they were intervening. And that's what they did. And that was when they learned that the billion that they had put aside to defend the pound up to the weekend had gone in a few minutes. Opening up close societies. Boom boom boom.
Now for Soros, the economic fundamentals and in general the basic facts of life are just material realities. Again, not transcendent ideals. Obviously, at this point, you might be thinking, isn't this all sort of basic? Well, yes. Soros or his stated beliefs are not particularly sophisticated. The pre-Enlightenment belief in God was wrong. The Enlightenment faith in reason is also wrong. But the post-modern reaction, as he understands it, goes too far. We can't know truth, but we can find fertile dynamic fictions, fallacies. There is a reality out there, but it's often altered by humans, even by their misconceptions. That's reflexivity, and it can never really be known. We can have no real certainty. Radical fallibility. Some of the facts about that reality out there are solid and we can't alter them, although we don't know which ones exactly. So, he's a materialist.
This translates into a political project. Since there is no certainty, let's break down old certainties. They aren't real. Holding on to them makes us less adaptive to reality. So, let's transgress them — a bit nihilistic. Therefore, does he fund NGOs that further open borders, cultural groups that work against traditional gender roles, and so on, as well as justifying speculating on currencies. In particular, since there's an incentive in democracy for politicians to manipulate rather than grapple with harsh truths, as Soros sees it, which he thinks Popper missed, you have to work hard to promote truth-seeking. But what is truth-seeking? For Soros, it's what his foundations do: help people seek truth by destroying old inherited ideas of truth, identity, morality, etc. So very much not truth-seeking by traditional standards.
We are fallible. We can't really come to specific truths, but we can move in that direction by destroying old untruths. That's as much connecting tissue, as much of a logical link between believing in fallibility and being politically progressive as you really find in Soros. Again, we should break things down, the old certainties, but have enough power to avoid total chaos, social disintegration. That's why from the perspective of conservatives they see their values being attacked by a pretty authoritarian seeming power structure.
Beyond that, spiritually, since trusting in some truth keeps you from seeing the fallibility of your perception, you remain always uncertain, as he says of himself, fearful. You create, you act from that place of fear rather than faith. There's no spiritual groundedness, no contemplation of stable beauties, of transcendent truths. What this does is turn the human imagination perverse. It clouds the heart, inner vision. It's interesting to look at how his ideas really do end up in nihilism and how he gets there not through Freud and Marx like the Frankfurt school, but through Popper and the ostensibly liberal tradition.
Bankrolled progressive DA campaigns across many cities, leading to very soft on crime prosecutors who let many violent criminals back onto the streets.
His son is now in charge of his fortune and has been a massive donor to Democrat sycophants.
Soros is literally the incarnation of evil billionaire, the OP is just an idiot.
He caused multiple financial emergencies in Asia that caused many many people to lose their jobs, I think he did it through something called forex shorting. He is also involved in funding separatist movements in many different countries.
When Soros speculated against the Swedish krona, the losers was the Swedish central bank and indirectly the Swedish public. To defend the currency the Riksbank raised interest rates, at the peak to over 500%. That in turn hurt Swedish households and businesses.
The anti-Soros narrative also came from Orban who after being supported by him turned against him to help him get re-elected? Soros became the poster child of what Hungary then was perceived to be fighting against, and got picked up by the American right to undermine the EU generally. This overlaps with Russia's general interests too, so money can be seen infiltrating from all these entities.
All of this amplified the anti-Soros narrative. Personally I think Soros is an exemplary billionaire and demonstrates morality in a group that is otherwise devoid of it.
emaugustBRDLC@reddit
He has a history of funding activist leftist district attorneys across the USA, people are not so stoked on that.
GrantDN@reddit
he’s a leftist/left-leaning billionaire. That is unacceptable to conservatives. The rich can only like conservatives.
Diantr3@reddit
He's a liberal. Please don't assume the American hellscape applies to the rest of the world. A leftist billionaire is 100% an oxymoron.
Saiyan-solar@reddit
You can be a capitalist and still want proper social systems
You can also be a socialist and still want free-market capitalism.
"Leftism" isn't a monolith just like the right isn't a monolith. Esp when you consider a lot of neoliberals are also called "leftists" because they are progressive rather than conservative.
Diantr3@reddit
They are called "leftists" in the US maybe, where anything short of "we should grind the poor's babies into fuel for my gargantuan SUV" is socialism.
Saiyan-solar@reddit
It's always fun when you realise that in the US Conservative libertarian capitalists like Newsom and actual social democrat mamdani are part of the same political party.
Those 2 would be each other their biggest opposites where I live
No_Oddjob@reddit
Nothing to do with left or right. In America, it's about control. The left or the right, once you get past the middle 80%, you've crept into extremist idiots who can be leveraged and puppeted for control.
There's no more oxymoron in saying leftist billionaire than saying alt-right billionaire. The only difference is what color you choose for your game of financial RISK.
Diantr3@reddit
Go read a book bro
SergenteA@reddit
A leftist billionaire isn't an oxymoron. However, Soros is as far as I know, not bankrolling the latest version of the Internationale of Socialist Workers' Associations nor a leading theorist of 21rst century socialism.
He is no Friedrich Engels, who would have been the namesake of socialism if his bankrolled buddy Marx hadn't been the one to literally redefine what socialism meant.
theNickydog@reddit
Why is bro speaking English if he thinks America is a hellscape?
IrregularrAF@reddit
Wdym, Stalin and Kim Il Sung are the most successful and rich far leftists ever. 💀
Select_Angle516@reddit
i know this is the internet and an especially unpleasant place in it aswell, but what a load of barnacles lol. "a leftist" is not a monolith, you can absolutely be "left winged" and be rich. we really gotta stop with the "not a true leftist" shit.
twotokers@reddit
You can not be a leftist and a capitalist, full stop.
Spekpannenkoek@reddit
100% this. People confuse the left wrongfully with liberalism and/or progressivism all the time.
TheContentThief@reddit
The left is whoever I disagree with
FB-22@reddit
Couldn’t it be argued that leftism is used to mean progressivism so often that it has become a new valid definition of the term, since languages evolve?
tigertoken1@reddit
That's because the left is literally liberalism and progressivism while the right is conservatism and traditionalism. Both function in a capitalist economy.
Spekpannenkoek@reddit
Social-liberalism is as left as liberalism goes and is more often than not more centric oriented rather than left. Bottomline is that they’re still capitalist by nature.
Just look at European parliaments rather than the (lack of) political spectrum in US politics.
Certain_Hurry_7046@reddit
Funny how you frame liberalism as something remotely associated with socialism when in reality it's the polar opposite. Liberalism in its definition means equality before the class and a universial franchise for all men.
So when it was only after it was "imported" to the U.S. that it was syncretized with the ideas of U.S. leftism and word alluding to leftist agendas in general (what people call social-liberalism). In essence, you arguing for the lack of spectrum in the U.S., but using the exact terminology budded out from itself. Now that's a real oxymoron.
Spekpannenkoek@reddit
I’m doing no such thing. I’m only mentioning the existence of socialliberalism and say it’s still capitalist.
Certain_Hurry_7046@reddit
Social-"liberalism", the existence of this ideology was created by the Americans who needed a vindication for their fanatic agendas. To be more specific, they architected it by welding progressive policies to the socialliberalism, which its namesake already existed in Europe.
So yes, you're correct for saying social liberalism is capitalistic, but from the way you used it, it was suggested that it was used as progressive policies used for pushing the progressive agendas, when in reality it's just another reactionary terminology for conservatism with a little sympathy for the poor of the 19th century.
Shlafenflarst@reddit
What you call left in the US, maybe. But in reality the left is supposed to be against capitalism.
bremsspuren@reddit
I think this is a product of only having two parties.
It gives the false impression that the political spectrum only has one dimension.
Oklimato@reddit
Because the narrative spun by the right paints liberals as leftists and liberals, more often than not, lean into that and brand themselves as leftist while still upholding capitalist propaganda.
Standupaddict@reddit
This distinction exists only on terminally online people. Leftist to anyone normal means someone who is firmly on the left on the left/right political spectrum. That spectrum is broader and includes more issues than economic distinctions.
SyntheticDuckFlavour@reddit
Only a reddit-tier reductionist can think in such absolute terms.
One certainly can uphold left-wing principles in some key areas, while still engaging in capitalism. For example, a successful business owner can be in support of socialised health care. Just like a Marxist can still can be in support of commerce for selling his home made Che Guevara merch on the market for income.
WhoAmIEven2@reddit
Why not?
We have a social democrat called Jan Emanuelsson in Sweden who is also an entrepreneur and capitalist.
multickjohan111@reddit
I think the person above is using the specific term leftist which in terminally online political terms means someone that is a "true" socialist or something equivalent.
And as a Swede, I think it's debatable if the social democrats and especially Jan Emanuel are actually proponents of left-wing politics, I'd stretch the party as centre-left at most.
Firestar463@reddit
You also have to factor in the American Overton window. Just about anything that is Centrist or slightly left-of-center in the Nordic countries is equivalent to hyper-radical left-wing in the US.
It's not hyperbole to say thay the US doesn't really have a left-wing party - just a conservative party and a fascist party.
how-unfortunate@reddit
Absolutely correct, and unfortunately, in this country, it takes both curiosity about other people and places, and a fair amount of reading to learn otherwise.
Both things that Americans aren't typically big on, so ignorance persists, and the powers that be like it that way.
von_Roland@reddit
That’s not true. You can be a capitalist who wants capitalism to be the economic engine which funds government social programs through healthy taxation for the purpose of general redistribution. I think that would definitely put you over to the left side of things.
Select_Angle516@reddit
i know this is the internet and an especially unpleasant place in it aswell, but what a load of barnacles lol. "a leftist" is not a monolith, you can absolutely be "left winged" and be a capitalist. we really gotta stop with the "not a true leftist" shit.
twotokers@reddit
I’m not even purity testing here, it’s just the actual academic political theory around Leftism. Many modern center-left perspectives accept capitalism as a necessary engine for innovation and wealth creation, aiming to democratize its benefits rather than replace it, but at that point it isn’t Capitalism anymore if the workers are no longer being exploited.
Dragonacher@reddit
You know capitalism and socialism arent the only 2 economic ideologies that exist, and even if they were having aspects of one system does not disqualify you from using aspects of the other.
Plus if you're arguing that "Many modern center-left perspectives accept capitalism as a necessary engine for innovation and wealth creation", then how can you also argue that "You can't be a leftist and a capitalist, period.", those two statements seem to be incongruent.
Lastly; this no true Scotsman/purity test mentality just pushes away potential allies on major issues because of minor disagreements.
ImGrumpyLOL@reddit
You might need to review... any economics. Literally from the start. Begin with The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I don't think you really understand what capitalism is? It quite literally began as a refutation of mercantilism and a belief that productive labour and consumer exchange is of greater importance to prosperity than the hoarding of gold.
Smith talked (at length) about how capitalists can only be incentivised through competition and that some services and all infrastructure should still be controlled and maintained by the government. This is theory from 1776, where the literal godfather of capitalism was theorising checks and balances for a capitalist system to not be exploitative to welfare in the book he invented it. He was anti-monopoly, pro-worker's rights, anti-colonial, and spent half his book talking about how workers were the most critical component of national prosperity.
But hey, no need to read theory or nuance when you define everything only by its most extreme limit.
imreallyreallyhungry@reddit
Next thing you know you’ll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood.. how do you like them apples
ImGrumpyLOL@reddit
When someone makes a statement like 'capitalism is incompatible with the left', all you can do is refer them to the basics and hope they'll look into it on their own time. No one ever changes their mind on the internet.
Mr_Kittlesworth@reddit
Progressive taxation and strong safety nets within a capitalist system is not socialism, but it is left-of-center politics.
Select_Angle516@reddit
so whats the issue here, it sounds as if youre saying "many modern leftists arent really leftists because they are capitalists, but actually they arent capitalists either because what they want isnt really capitalism" not that youre wrong but whats the point of even considering this at all.
soros wants to call himself left winged and he does good while also doing bad? cool. one of us. money and power for our cause. very pog. maybe we can talk about this billionaire stuff later.
meanwhile our enemies: you hate jews? welcome. you hate black people? welcome. you hate women? welcome. you hate poor people? welcome.
Rikkushin@reddit
Yes you can you dumbass, Social-Democracy is a hybrid model between socialism and capitalism
VengineerGER@reddit
I am pretty sure there are degrees on the political compass for a reason. Not every leftist is Stalin and not every right winger is Hitler after all.
jfuss04@reddit
That doesnt seem right according to the debates ive seen on reddit
antonconandoyle@reddit
Not saying Soros is on the political left, but Friedrich Engels was a capitalist aswell.
userbrn1@reddit
Marx also spoke very highly of capitalism as a driver of immense economic growth abd improvement in people's quality of life. And, in addition to that, he was critical of capitalism as the ideal or end state economic organization.
In modern times when someone says they are a capitalist they usually mean that they believe capitalism is, in general, the best way to organize the economy.
Chinese communists also advocate for capitalist organization at this time but believe that under different circumstances, which capitalism is best equipped to usher in, the transition to a non-capitalist system will be superior
FullTimeHarlot@reddit
He was also the father of socialism during a time where you were either insanely rich or dirt poor, with very little in-between. I don't think Engels can be considered very relevant to modern left and right standards.
Gobbler_of_Cock@reddit
being a "leftist" just means you're left of center. You're acting like this term is clearly defined in all contexts and eras.
By your logic, there's literally no leftists in the world today
BambooSound@reddit
You could argue you can't be right-wing if you're a republican.
Most of the time people talk about left and right they men's within the overton window. By your definition, Bernie Sanders isn't a leftist and it therefore losing all real meaning in mainstream American politics - because it describes no one.
sebastianinspace@reddit
lol wat. you cannot be economically left wing and support neo-liberal economic policy. you are confusing social policy with economic policy. traditionally these terms apply to economic policy. right wing being in support of conserving capital for the class that already has it and left wing in support of distributing it more evenly among the general population through government policies like taxation and infrastructure, healthcare, education spending, etc.
Ninjalion2000@reddit
I got news for you: liberals aren’t left wing.
swagrabbit@reddit
Sure, and conservatives aren't right wing. They're both centrists in the grand scheme.
Ninjalion2000@reddit
Conservatives are definitely right wing as are liberals.
People misconstrue progressives and liberals as the same thing when they aren’t. Liberalism is more left than conservativism but in the grand scheme of things it is still on the right.
swagrabbit@reddit
Nah. The use of 'liberal/progressive' vs 'conservative/traditional' is almost always descriptive rather than prescriptive. That's why this argument recurs. In the worldwide Overton window, all mainstream US politicians are firmly centrist. In the US Overton window they're more separated. In the European Overton window they're right wing and centrist. In the Scandinavian Overton window (nonsensically the one lots of people want to use here for this particular disagreement) they're both right wing, sure.
If we're trying to make the terms liberal/conservative have meaning in a conversation beyond pure theory, they have to be descriptive to the actual comparative state of politics in their context. If you want to have a theory divorced of context discussion, that's fine, but the insistence on applying a completely different frame of reference irritates me. There's no reason the Scandinavian perspective of the right-left dichotomy should be the one we're using to describe American politics.
AbadeersGhost@reddit
There is this idea among Marxist that they own the term "left" despite it being a vague word that describes many political factions all across the world that believe wildly different things from each other where the only true commonality is that they all oppose a conservative or "right" political faction. The whole "left/right" idea can only describe vague things outside of the specific context of the French Revolution.
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
A leftist billionaires is a champagne socialist. A hypocrite and a fool of one at that, but what more can be expected from a student of Marx.
Victor-Baxter@reddit
Don't call him a moron bro
ExtremeGift@reddit
how dare you say we piss on the poor
SleepingPodOne@reddit
Saying we shouldn’t piss on the poor is commie talk
TheContentThief@reddit
Real shit I just drank 3 bottles of propel and I’m hitting the town. I’d say I’d paint the town yellow but I’m hella hydrated
DirtLight134710@reddit
Don't delete your comment now, if your going to say you're got doxxed, then say it. I'm not the weirdo you are, I couldn't even imagine being a peasant defending a billionair who gave Haiti and Ukraine so much trouble. And collapsed whole nations around the world. You hide your posts and comments because you (think) you hiding them. But I found your comment history. You are a sick person. Your a sociopath
DirtLight134710@reddit
Soros was a literal nazi in ww2, he would spy for the 3 Reich and find out were jews were hiding and turn them in to go to concentration camps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/ZHcaZawoKC
SleepingPodOne@reddit
I’m sure your post history is very interesting bub
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/hbHm4rNjcP
DirtLight134710@reddit
Speak for you self, you keep your hidden lol
-IoI-@reddit
Don't tread
on my right
to piss
on the poor
THESUACED@reddit
I AM NOT A MORON.
nadhari12@reddit
Don't call him a bro moron.
Pxel315@reddit
Why the hell do you not think you can be a leftist and a billionaire?
Diantr3@reddit
Because to become a billionaire you have to do things that are fundamentally opposed to left-wing ideas.
Pxel315@reddit
No you dont. You can be a leftist and still be a capitalist. Not every leftist is a marxist and not every leftist subscribes to something other than capitalism. There are leftists who want controlled capitalism and wage caps on ceos just as there a right wingers who want less immigration and there are right wingers who want to kill immigrants. Political leanings are a spectrum and you can be left and be a billionaire especially in todays age when you can literally use capitalism and markets to speculate yourself to insane wealth without realistically ever directly exploiting anyone.
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
Sorry but that’s wrong, leftists want to progress past capitalism, what you are describing is social democracy which is more a form of liberalism, not leftism
Pxel315@reddit
George Soros views capitalism as an efficient creator of wealth but inherently unstable and dangerous when market mechanisms are applied to all aspects of life, a concept he calls "market fundamentalism". While utilizing capitalist mechanisms, he argues that unregulated markets fail to serve the public interest, prioritize personal profit over collective needs (like environment or education), and threaten open societies.
Seems pretty leftist to me
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
You’ve not disagreed with my statement at all. You’ve just said he views capitalism favourably but doesn’t want all encompassing neoliberal free market capitalism. That doesn’t make him left wing, it makes him Keynesian, capitalist mode of production with regulation for stability.
Pxel315@reddit
So lets say a person is a right winger and makes their fortune and then later on starts giving it away in support of left wing causes and ideals he can himself never be a leftist and change his view?
You are essentially saying you can only be left wing if you are poor. And thats why the left will always lose. Because you will always exclude people who can actually bring about change with the resources they got while young. No true scotsman should be just replaced no true leftist.
Also love everyone schooling me about left wing when Im a socialist from eastern fucking europe where so many governments masquaraded as left wing while being total fucking opposites.
Defiant_Orchid_4829@reddit
He doesn’t support anti-capitalist ideals so he isn’t a leftist. End of story.
You cant be a billionaire and a leftist. To achieve your riches you must build it off the poor and exploited. There is no other way in capitalism. Soros decided and continues to decide to do that. You can’t be rich and not profit of exploitation (professional athletes and the like), but it is impossible to do so and become a billionaire.
Where you are from and what you describe yourself don’t make you right.
Pxel315@reddit
Political science disagrees with you, you can be left and be a capitalist. Just because you redefine political science and economy discourse doesnt mean you are right or have any idea
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
“You can be democratic and support feudalism”
This is equivalent to what you’re saying from the perspective of actual leftists. Leftism (whether you’re a democratic socialist, Leninist, anarchist, syndicalist etc etc) is about bringing about democratic ownership of the means of production, where workers own their means of production. Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production, where the workers sell their labour to a private owner. They are mutually exclusive, if you support capitalism as the base of your economic relations then you are not leftists, just like if you support feudal rule by bloodlines and divine right you cannot also support universal suffrage as the two are dialectically opposed.
Pxel315@reddit
You are wrong just by the basis of how political science views right or left leaning spectrum. Sorry that you dont like it but its reality
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
Political science is almost entirely in the west defined within the zeitgeist of liberal attitudes, but please tell me how you define left and right if not on an economic basis. What do you personally consider left and right?
Pxel315@reddit
Its a spectrum, nordic countries often get misidentified with being socialist when they are capitalist but no one in their right mind would not consider them left and/or left leaning in all their public policy and views.
People often say thats "its not leftist thats liberal" and that infuriates even more when the has nothing to do with left and right. There wasnt a socialist country in the world that wasnt authoritarian by design. Call it transitory authoritarian but its less transitory to true liberty than capitalism is to socialism. And it was never a dictatorship of the masses so you can argue no country was ever socialist to begin with and thats the problem to sticking to puritan definitions set by Marx. Reality is often very different than what we want to define it as.
Not to mention that Yugoslavia where I am from was market socialist and it wad the most successful socialist state there was and yet it used capitalist ideals of a more free market and competiton paired with worker owned and operated collectives.
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
I’m not a huge fan of the Yugoslavian SFR’s model, but a market doesn’t mean it was capitalist, there was markets in the classical slave states, markets in feudal states, markets in capitalist states, and markets in socialist states. The ownership of the means of production is what defines them separately. Yugoslavian market was worker owner by worker enterprises.
Pxel315@reddit
According to marx and engels you cannot have a market for socialism. It has to be replaced by a planned economy. You cannot have exchange value in socialism only use value so you already stray from marx and his definiton. Which is exactly my point, we have moved away from that and in todays world we cannot limit ourselves to left only=workers controlling the means of production. There is nuances and you can be left and be in favour of a market and a mixed economy which would never be classed as socialism yet it would be left
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
You’re conflating communism and socialism, we have to progress through socialism to get to communism and a market will exist in socialism because we cannot immediately transition to commodityless moneyless society, there will be a long transition period whatever the approach is; whether it’s via worker enterprises à la Yugoslavia, planned economy à la USSR, hybrid economy etc etc.
If you are pushing for a progress into socialism or communism then you are left wing, because you are trying to move past the status quo of capitalism and toward a democratic economy, if you are pro capitalism and believe it can be regulated then you are not a leftist, you’re a social democrat. And historically social democrats betray leftists whenever capitalism is in crisis.
Pxel315@reddit
Agree to disagree, no where does marx say planned economy is something to be done later. By your definitions you can have a market and be socialist which cannot be true by marx. For me soros is pushing towards socialism in the only way the masses will accept in the 21st century so he is a leftist. There is no more armed revolution to be had as too many people are fine with being exploited. The left either updates to the 21st century or it keeps failing in its goals ad nauseam
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
I think you thoroughly misunderstand Marx, I’m not sure if you’ve ever read his work or have just heard about it, but Marx never instructs on how to achieve communism, except that there will be a transitional stage called the dictatorship of the proletariat (socialism). Within this transitionary period of course markets will exist in some form, even under central planning it is still state management of commodities including labour power.
Marx’s work was analytical and critical of capitalism and argued for progression past capitalism and into socialism and eventually communism, but there were no step by step instructions on how to achieve that because each nation, each period etc has its own material conditions and internal contradictions to contend with. This is why the Soviets, the PRC, the DPRK, the Yugoslav SFR etc etc had different material approaches of bringing about the dictatorship of the proletariat and handling the transitionary socialist phase.
What you seem to be arguing is that you and Soros are doing the same thing, that your analysis of material conditions has informed that democratic ownership of production is no longer viable and capitalist private ownership with labour commodity is the best we can do, and that this is somehow socialism/leftism.
I disagree thoroughly with this, especially as class consciousness and socialist appetite is rocketing up in the youth of today. I think Soros sees this and he isn’t trying to help aid socialism, he’s trying to prevent it by doing capitalism-lite. Because capitalists have two options, either make drastic concessions to the working class to keep them content, Soros’s view, or clamp down on the working class and use fascism to protect capital. Most are going for the latter.
Defiant_Orchid_4829@reddit
Cooked his ass
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
No, someone can amass wealth through exploitation of labour relations and then come to the realisation that it is both empirically unstable and morally reprehensible and become leftist - these are capitalist class traitors and some of the most based leftists. Engels for example came from a wealthy factory owning family and turned that into progressing socialism via his writings and funding Marx’s writings.
But nothing you have offered suggests Soros is a class traitor, only that he wants a more regulated capitalism.
You call yourself a socialists yet are defending social democracy, and ergo capitalism.
Top_Explanation_3383@reddit
Sounds pretty sensible to me. I'm pro capitalism, but market fundamentalism is an excellent phrase. I think we're slowly coming out of that
Pxel315@reddit
I would disagree, I think the sentiment is but the powers that be are pushing into market fundamentalism way more.
maninahat@reddit
That just seems like an argument for regulated markets. Lib soc dem, more than anything.
Pxel315@reddit
Mixed economy and heavily regulated capitalism falls into leftist views as determined by the actual field that deals with this. Just because you dont think it should be left doesnt mean it isnt
ImGrumpyLOL@reddit
I hope you realise that you and the people who talk like you are the reason why left wing ideology fails in the modern world. Ideological rigidity, promotion of infighting, and the adoption of positions that will clearly alienate mainstream voters.
If you spent more time unifying and compromising with the rest of the political left and less time conducting purity tests and conflating leftism with extremism beyond the Overton Window, the world would be a better place.
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
Every time leftists unify with liberals they betray us and leftists are arrested or executed, historically speaking.
Plus allowing liberals to claim to be left just pushes the Overton window right and makes democratic ownership seem radical and extreme.
ImGrumpyLOL@reddit
See, there is your issue raising its head. You are using incorrect terminology. The purity testing of left leaning ideology when what you really mean is "Marxist" or rather "Leninist", which is not the same thing. You avoid accurate labelling because you don't like the brush it paints you with. At least use "Radical Leftists".
Spacemint_rhino@reddit
How am I using incorrect terminology, do you think liberals are left wing?
ikonfedera@reddit
To Americans everything to the left of Bush is leftist. The rest of the world's centrists are leftist, centre-right is leftist, SocDems are communists.
Prism_Riot42@reddit
Hehe you said bush
n0thing0riginal@reddit
I would think highly regulated capitalism is more akin to a Social democrats position than a Leftist's
WeirdAssBird5@reddit
What about someone who’s very very rich and keeps actively making more money promoting socialism? Is that an oxymoron?
Diantr3@reddit
Yes, it is. Who are you talking about?
ThisUsernameis21Char@reddit
Breadtubers, I suppose. Hasan comes to mind.
Diantr3@reddit
A net worth of 8 millions after about 15 years of actually working?
This is exceptional and a substantial amount, it allows for a VERY comfortable life, but this is not even remotely close to the politics-swaying power a multi-billionaire has.
WeirdAssBird5@reddit
lmao
nsaisspying@reddit
What about engels? Was he a leftist?
Special-Remove-3294@reddit
Engels did own some shares in a factory to my knowledge but he would IMO be closer to a petty bourgeoisie then what billionaires are today. He was wealthy but the factory many people say he owned was AFAIK majority owned by someone else
The contradictiin between being a leftists and bourgeoisie comes from the fact that socialism promotes worker ownership of capital and therefore socialism halts anything more then petty bourgeoisie to exist if actually implemented since one can not accumulate such wealth as to be a billionaires without ownership of capital. Nobody works 100000 times harder then another and so one can not accumulate such wealth without owning capital and taking the surplus value which is what socialism is kinda centered around.
ZenPyx@reddit
Engels was rich, for sure, but nowhere near billionaire rich.
I suppose the question is, what should he have done about it (given he was born into money) - given it away, maybe? You'd be hard pressed to find a charity that wouldn't squander it
Diantr3@reddit
I know both Engels and Marx came from immense wealth. I'm talking about 2026.
twotokers@reddit
Marx was poor as shit and had basically his entire life funded with the help of Engels.
dekuius@reddit
Do you know that the Romans thought only people that inherited money were decent people? They were adamant if someone becomes rich means he can't be a good person.
RedexSvK@reddit
Everyone knows calling yourself leftist means you have to give away 99% of your earnings
Thatguyj5@reddit
If giving away 99% of your wealth still left you with over a million dollars? Yes. If giving away 99% of your wealth could pick entire countries out of poverty with no significant impact to your own life? Yes. That's exactly what it means.
VengineerGER@reddit
I don’t think you really know how much money the government actually spends in a single day. I don’t know the exact numbers of the top of my head but if we were to liquidate the assets of every billionaire on earth and give to the government it wouldn’t actually last that long.
Thatguyj5@reddit
Did I say give to the government? I don't think so. A lot of the systemic issues we face today no matter what country you're from comes from the modern neoliberal status quo that prioritizes Line Go Up over people, and that is being maintained by governments. Things like homelessness and housing crises can be solved right now in most places. Commieblocks and the like could be built to give folks with no roof somewhere to sleep and shower (they've done this in Finland and damn near fixed their homelessness issue) but the government doesn't do it. Because it won't immediately make Line Go Up.
Diantr3@reddit
I don't think you realize what a billion is. Nobody "earns" à billion.
You get a billion from others' work.
Pxel315@reddit
And if you use those billions to promote left wing ideals all over the world and pour massive amounts of money into shifting societies left and the market to be more fair are you still a right winger? How tf does that work?
SleepingPodOne@reddit
If you do those things, you are not explicitly a right winger, but you’re not a leftist. You’re probably just a liberal. Left-wing ideals are present in people all across the political spectrum. To have them doesn’t make you a leftist. You can be left in a relative sense but that doesn’t make you a leftist. These terms have actual meanings. Otherwise, why do we use them if they can just mean anyone and anything?
Diantr3@reddit
That makes him a liberal.
Pxel315@reddit
I dont think people know what a leftist is or how much of a spectrum it is
needszazz@reddit
It's pretty clear most of us disagree with your definition of leftism and yet you keep doubling down without adding anything meaningful.
But I'm sure you're not wrong, everyone else is
Pxel315@reddit
Because my definiton is the definiton by political science. You are all hell bent on shifting any form of capitalism into the right when it doesnt fit there according to the relevant field. Mixed economy and social democracy is defined as centre left to left leaning by every single definiton we have. Sorry that it doesnt conform to your belief of what it should be, apologies.
_who-the-fuck-knows_@reddit
Just for the sake of argument cause no self a claiming leftist is asking any of this. But 1% of 75 billion is 75 million. If you can't live extremely comfortably off 75 million something is wrong with you.
That's why anybody with an ounce of empathy doesn't have an ounce of respect for billionaires when 700 million (or more) people in this world live below the poverty line.
RedexSvK@reddit
I understand this and I hate the ultra rich as much as the next guy, but Soros is actively trying to make the world a better place without that much media attention. The most fame and infamy he gets is through conspiracy theories and bootlicking politicians blaming everything on him. He is not sitting on billions, he has those billions in foundations helping
He has financially supported Charta 77, a czechoslovak dissident group that played a huge role in combating Soviet propaganda within ČSSR and personally met with some of our most prominent leaders Václav Havel, considered an icon in democratization of eastern block, and Alexander Dubček, face of the Prague Spring, an early attempt at loosening Soviet grip on Czechoslovakia and democratization of communist regime.
His open society foundation played a big role in helping post Soviet and post communist countries to bounce back and democratize, as well as promoting social justice around the globe, which is why Soros and his organizations have been antagonized by the far right and dictators.
Soros gave away more than 32 billion dollars to at least try to make the world a better place, he should be among the last rich people for us to be complaining about
HighOverlordSarfang@reddit
1% of 75 billion is 750 million but I catch your drift.
_who-the-fuck-knows_@reddit
Ah missed a point in my head lol
Special-Remove-3294@reddit
Wealth has naught to do with being a leftists. It is how you obtain it. For example in USSR in some eras there were people who were wealthy due to efficiency bonuses but they got such wealth through work and not owning the means of production.
Also if you are a multi billionaire you can donate 99% of your wealth and still be extremely wealthy and live like a king.....If one has billions and does not donate them then like that bloke just lacks empathy for their fellow humans. One can not ever consume such wealth. It is just hoarding while countless suffer from poverty.....
Drayenn@reddit
Its really not? Leftism is your view on how gov should do more to help people via taxes.. not how much money you make.
Dude donated a lot cash. Seems pretty consistent with the leftist view the rich should contribute more.
Left is when poor is the dumbest shit
BasedJayyy@reddit
This is not even close to correct. You literally just did the "socialism is when the government does stuff" meme
Drayenn@reddit
Theres not only socialism and communism on the left lol. Im more centre left/social democrat.
Also how is it not gov does things? Leftism is literally about pooling resources together to create some good/service. Free healthcare/daycare, government managed electricity, etc.
BasedJayyy@reddit
I beg of you to read a single leftist theory book ever. Hell, even do a basic google search even. Anarchism is a form of leftism. Anarchism has literally 0 government. Explain that one through your "left is when government" lens
HawkeMesa@reddit
If one HAS to read theory to understand your politics then whatever you're selling is comically unpracticle at best.
BasedJayyy@reddit
Yes, sometimes there is a educational requirement before you can properly do something. "If one HAS to know how to read before they can consume a book, then whatever is in that book is comically unpractical at best". See how dumb that sounds
Diantr3@reddit
There should not be a single billionaire. Anything that accepts the existence of such wealth/power held by a single person is incompatible with left-wing ideas, yes.
SleepingPodOne@reddit
sir this is greentext. diet 4chan. do not come here with an actual understanding of anything
Diantr3@reddit
Habeeb it
VengineerGER@reddit
I couldn‘t care less if someone is a billionaire as long as they pay taxes like everyone else. Problem is that they don’t most of the time.
Diantr3@reddit
You don't get to a billion by paying taxes.
VengineerGER@reddit
By that logic you couldn’t amass any wealth at all by paying taxes. You’re out here acting like the government takes more than you make.
Diantr3@reddit
No billionaire pays their fair share of the burden they put on society. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to amass billions.
PlsDntPMme@reddit
What if he had a change of heart and now he’s using his money for the good things he believes in? What if he’s of the mindset that the only way to fix the system is to be in the system first?
Everyone is a hypocrite. Nobody is perfect. Your take is ridiculous.
Diantr3@reddit
Meanwhile I just pocketed a hefty 1300 karma I'm going to invest in the goon market.
You have already lost.
Dragonacher@reddit
So if a person is born incredibly wealthy it is impossible for them to support 'leftist' policies?
People with resources are actually useful to have on your side
Diantr3@reddit
Where are they?
Dragonacher@reddit
It depends who you're looking for.
The kind of traits that are likely to make an individual more wealthy are usually also the traits that allow the individual to care less about the well being of others.
This is not always the case, but it's not exactly surprising that the ultra-wealthy aren't known for their empathy.
darthmaui728@reddit
Dose LibrALs have taken Ar Johbss
DoctorPerverto@reddit
If you hadn't made a remark about it I'd have assumed that you use the "american ideological categorization hellscape" lens, going from your last sentence. The right/left axis has formally little to do with personal finance nowadays.
Mr_Ios@reddit
Awwww, pumpkin. For sure thats why. Not his skeletons in the closeet?
What skeletons? Never mind, never mind..
_Planet_Mars_@reddit
Holy American
SleepingPodOne@reddit
ITT: a whole bunch of people who do not understand leftism
croto8@reddit
Please define
Neomataza@reddit
The US politics understanding is a narrow band based entirely on which of the 2 main parties you would vote for in an election.
NOTaSerialKiller5@reddit
80% of billionaires donate to liberals so you’re wrong
BottomContributor@reddit
More billionaires supported kamala than they did trump, but hey, reality is inconvenient
PMurmomsmaidenname@reddit
Pick a lane
Matt_2504@reddit
If he’s a billionaire he’s not a real leftist lmao
Phazon2000@reddit
“I don’t care if 99% of your views align with leftist politics you’re good at making money! You’re a right winger reee you can only be a leftist if you’re a loser and poor!”
Matt_2504@reddit
Not what I’m saying. If he truly believed in left-wing ideology he wouldn’t hoard billions to himself and continue to screw over normal people just to make even more money, it’s not that he’s successful, he doesn’t have to be broke. I’m a right winger and I find his greed disgusting, any true left winger should agree, as should any right winger with any sense
Phazon2000@reddit
George is one of the most prolific philanthropists in the world tf are you smoking? He has donated 10’s of billions of dollars.
But he can only meet your definition of a left winger if he donates an exact amount that makes him ‘not a billionaire’ because of some arbitrary association you’re making conflating wealth with political values.
Stop talking shit.
Matt_2504@reddit
So is Bill gates lmao, they’re both still evil men who are actively fucking over normal people just to hoard even more money. They just donate large sums to “good causes” to improve their PR and they deduct some of it from their tax anyway
LibatiousLlama@reddit
Soros isn't a left winger he's a liberal Democrat or a democratic socialist. Leftist is really far left. There's centrist, neoliberal, liberal, socialist, and everything left of that starts to be leftist.
Leftists are like Marxism, communism etc. They don't want to be associated with the Democratic party.
Soros is a good honest man but he's not a leftist. He isn't using his money to eliminate the concept of personally ownership, for example.
Triple_Hache@reddit
That's where your strawman argument fails because you (probably) don't understand leftwing ideologies. Soro's views absolutely do not 99% align with leftist politics, they're closer to diverging at 99%.
shouldajustsaid_yeah@reddit
Does "leftist" just mean "left of center" to you? Bro is a democratic party establishment megadonor, backed Hillary in the 2016 primaries. If liberal and leftist are synonyms to you then that's your issue.
LibatiousLlama@reddit
He's a liberal Democrat through and through. People are letting themselves be tricked by propaganda changing the definition of liberalism to be: anything left of conservative is a "leftist"
Azylim@reddit
its a whole lot more than that.
theres alot of lefty rich people. But not a whole lot of soros type of people who will fund and bankroll politicians that have nothing to do eith him but are left on the spectrum
Bill gates did the right thing focusing on vaccinating africans and he still gets shit on. soros is actually out there trying changing electoral outcomes. if any country did this shit everyone would be rightfully pissed.
TurquoiseKnight@reddit
I knew a couple finance bros who worked for his investment firm but they would vote conservative.
Hanzoa@reddit
And the funny part is that Sheldon Adelson was quite literally what conservatives think George Soros is, but because he’s on “their side”, they never made a peep about him
theflying_egg@reddit
You can't be leftist and a billionaire. He's a liberal at best
StormOfFatRichards@reddit
Leftist who funds the Open Societies foundation? Lmao
DoublePepper1976@reddit
That's enough for a lot of people
amidoes@reddit
Jews that rightfully criticize Israel are based
YourBestDream4752@reddit
Muslims that rightfully criticise Palestine are based
JPowTheDayTrader@reddit
This probably sounded edgier in your head instead of sounding lame
MoscaMosquete@reddit
Palestine coordinates with Israel to take down terrorists, my friend.
Le_monde_est_a_nous@reddit
damn thought u did something huh
DarkSkyKnight@reddit
The most based group of people frankly. Israeli propaganda is so strong. Being able to break out of it as a Jew says something about their character.
az9393@reddit
And that gets the rest of em
CeolSilver@reddit
He became a billionaire by mogging the British government though so I think he gets a pass
pingpongpiggie@reddit
A Jewish billionaire; a dreaded combo for the conspiracy theorists.
Fauztinn@reddit
Shouldn’t be the background, category, or label of a person that causes detest; but the quality of their character and actions or words directly taken or stated. Even then, change and redemption is always feasible.
LionCashDispenser@reddit
Hard to be a billionaire ethically.
Altruistic-Local-541@reddit
hard is a bit of an understatement, but you can be evil and mega evil
I'd say Soros is not mega evil
viciouspandas@reddit
In terms of how he got his wealth he's one of the worse ones, but he's done some good with his wealth too. Like even on the right they would like his anti-communist efforts.
WordsMort47@reddit
So how did he get his wealth?
aTOMic_fusion@reddit
There's really only 4 ways someone gets that wealthy: building a company that grows massively, inheritence, corruption, or trading in financial markets. Soros got his money from that last one.
Not really sure why so many people see it as unethical, but that's a topic for another day lol
panicinbabylon@reddit
He donates heavily to progressive political organizations and nonprofit groups, which is why some people criticize him and argue he has outsized influence.
newgrounds@reddit
Wait so you are okay with them?
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
Okay with both. Billionaires existing is fine in a just and fair society; it is the society that must be fixed. The existence of jews does not and needs not justification; their existence is justice in and of itself.
SilliusS0ddus@reddit
billionaires cannot exist in a just and fair society
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
You lack creativity, or you lack a foundational understanding of the english language.
ReadThisIfYoureGay@reddit
You lack spine
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
You lack solutions and their vicar is virtue signaling.
Majestic-Owl-5801@reddit
The solution is taxation to the point a billionaire cannot exist. You came here saying they can exist in a fair and just society without a solution to how you will make their existence fair and just. How did they get that money?
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
If the needs and wants of every citizen is met, and a man has saved and inherited a fortune that has amassed over generations but not over his own lifetime, and assuming we're not using a cringe communist definition of explotation (as in, =employment), I don't see that anything evil has occurred here. Do you?
Majestic-Owl-5801@reddit
I would argue that that amount of wealth could not be accrued without some unjust exploitation of the chain of production. What did one person do to generate that much more wealth than anyone else? And an even bigger question, what did their kin do to continue that amassing of wealth? I would argue that you are creating an example that would still be impossible for one family to achieve in a fair and just world
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
The lottery, then? You just won 1,01 billion dollars in the Lottery. What crime did you commit?
SilliusS0ddus@reddit
the lottery is often run by the state in many countries.
it would be disbanded and it wouldn't give out such huge sums.
SilliusS0ddus@reddit
how are creativity and language skills relevant to the idea that billionaires cannot exist in a fair society.
CaviarCBR1K@reddit
It's impossible for a billionaire to exist in a fair and just society. Nobody amasses that much wealth with exploiting workers.
Real-Ad-1728@reddit
I think it’s possible, but extremely rare. JK Rowling became a billionaire off the Harry Potter books and movies, that didn’t seem wildly unethical or anything (her later revealed views on a bunch of stuff notwithstanding)
Whoop-Sees@reddit
Powerball? Surely a lottery can exist in a just and fair society
Dragonacher@reddit
Being a billionaire in a vacuum is fine, however within the context of our current society they have way too large a share of the total resources available to humanity, and that level of wealth is only possible through the exploitation of masses of others.
So in a sense I agree that there is an issue between the current society and the billionaire class. If it's society that must be fixed, what ways are broken/wrong and how do we correct it?
ThrowawayFuckYourMom@reddit
If we got rid of every single Billionaire using a gun and redestributed the wealth of all of them in the most just and preferable way to make the most impact, nothing would change. There's gotta be policy that will fix the current problems, and that policy doesn't need to cut out the billionaires. It's a loser talking point that signals virtue and kills progress.
Majestic-Owl-5801@reddit
Pretty sure if we did that nobody would be jumping up and down to take the throne from those that were just murdered to expropriating the wealth of the masses...
It is sorta a self correcting issue once it gets to the guillotines.
Dragonacher@reddit
I think that may be a little naive and idealistic, you might be very surprised how many people would be queuing up to take those thrones, just with a little more subtlety and personal security.
People frequently risk death and worse for much, much less than a billion dollars, and power vacuums not the kind of self correcting you should be looking for.
Dragonacher@reddit
To be honest I think I agree with the sentiment, but not with the conclusion. Saying that if we removed every billionaire and redistributed their wealth nothing would change is simply incorrect. There are actually benefits to the existence of billionaires too, not enough to make up for the negatives, but still they exist. Plus billionaires almost necessarily manage large networks of other people, and have substantial influence over the power structures of the world, if they all disappeared overnight a hell of a lot would change.
With that said I agree in saying that billionaires are a symptom of broken societal structures, not the cause of them.
BludgeonVIII@reddit
For being billionaires, no. But being Jewish shouldn't be a factor in criticism against them.
Like you wouldn't hate a black billionaire for being black, a gay billionaire for being gay, a trans billionaire for being trans, a woman billionaire for being a woman, no? You'd hate them for being a billionaire. Same shit here.
I hate that this concept flies out the window when they're Jewish which then gives free reign for others to hate on other Jewish people for being Jewish even if they're not billionaires. It's stupid and regressive.
pingpongpiggie@reddit
Jews or billionaires?
harbourwall@reddit
Bewish Jillionaires are ok.
drifters74@reddit
yes
croto8@reddit
His father was also pro-nazi. There’s an old interview where he fondly remembers his father confiscating his neighbor’s property.
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/ZHcaZawoKC
Sengfroid@reddit
Citing an r/Conspiracy post of a video from Alex Jones is hardly a smoking gun supporting any statement.
Even most self-respecting conspiracy theorists think Jones is a shill.
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/hbHm4rNjcP
DirtLight134710@reddit
I mean the interview isn't from Alex Jones, he is just showing it. It was on 60 minutes or some shit
alwaysnear@reddit
Half of reddit too lol
Couldn’t care less about Jews but watching the rise of anti-semitism in this bastion of world-saving enlightened people has been interesting.
Aren’t we cheering for Iran currently, which is objectively about the worst country for women and minorities to live in, just because Israel and US have tomahawked half of their leadership in a month?
Grundolph@reddit
Not to defend Iran but have you seen how women are treated in Afghanistan since the US let the Taliban take power? That shit is definitely worse.
Tomboolla@reddit
Lol so you're saying the US should've stayed in Afghanistan?
Grundolph@reddit
No. I‘m saying the US shouldn’t have left that abruptly leaving power and weaponry for the Taliban.
Capn_Phineas@reddit
Are you calling Reddit a bastion of enlightenment
swagrabbit@reddit
If you examine his comment carefully I think you will find he was being sarcastic about that
barryhakker@reddit
Isn’t it wild to see first hand how our completely confused moral fuckery is taking its first steps to the kind of thinking that gave us the holocaust.
And people wonder why countries like China are so mistrustful or even afraid of us. We’re even crazier than we are violent, and to top it all off we are absolutely convinced of our righteousness and willing to point that out at gunpoint.
That’s not me saying that those countries like China aren’t utter fuckheads themselves though.
pingpongpiggie@reddit
I mean kind of but not really. People are happy to see the US get humbled, more specifically they're happy to see the trump admin get humbled.
No one (except a few absolute nutters) actually likes the IRGC itself, and most that are 'cheering' for Iran simply don't support western intervention there for a range of reasons.
The issue is that current gauge for the Trump admins competence, and the viability of western intervention is the continued survival of the IRGC and the possibility of US troops getting deployed and being harmed.
Econmajorhere@reddit
Ironically MAGA hates Soros quite a bit and their God-King is a recent billionaire who sucks Bibi’s dick
Skyhawk6600@reddit
The only reason I don't like him is he's extremely pro immigration. Other than that, idk the guy to have strong personal feelings about him.
Anzire@reddit
The legalise weed part seals the deal for the rest?
jaxonya@reddit
Legalizing and taxing a plant that we already know is an economic powerhouse is a strong case for someone that has a pulse for the economy. He isnt a pothead wanting to stay out of trouble for smoking a j at a concert.
ichigox55@reddit
Went through a really difficult patch in life and pot helped me a lot. Had it been any other thing I'd be dead months ago. Obv im not saying it magically cured me tho.
Ska82@reddit
"criticizes Israel"
enough for all the politicians and media
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/ZHcaZawoKC
Smurtle1@reddit
You linked a video of him talking about his experiences during the holocaust, when he was 14? How would that mean anything for his character overall? He was just trying to survive, And, for that matter, probably didn’t really have any understanding of what was happening at that age.
Also, it’s linked from r/conspiracy, from infowars. Neither of those are really the bastion of providing cold hard facts, and are much more willing to alter information to further their own agendas.
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/hbHm4rNjcP
Smurtle1@reddit
I understand what he said. He said he had no guilt because he was a kid, and didn’t know any better. Also, I’m not going to lie, I don’t think anyone who becomes a billionaire does so without throwing away all empathy/sympathy for others.
Like to become a billionaire you have to be a psychopath/sociopath. Which is exactly what it would take for doing what he did as a kid, and feeling no guilt now (if that is in fact the case.) or he understood it as the fact that the Jews were going to be turned in regardless, and he was doing it to protect himself.
You have to understand the types of rationalizations one makes when faced with death.
Lots of people did horrible shit to survive the holocaust, it was a fucked up situation.
DirtLight134710@reddit
He kept up that attitude after the war, he destroyed Haiti, helped destroy Ukraine. The Congo so many nations
Inevere733@reddit
I paid for people to shill feminism in the 70's, because he saw that 50% of the population wasn't contributing to his wealth. And now people can't afford to buy a home on a single salary due to the flow-on effects.
Soros psy-op if I've ever seen one.
Smurtle1@reddit
Ah yes, it’s not like reaganomics and a multitude of the economic reforms that occurred in the 60s-90s had anything to do with our current plight. Surely the clearly unsustainable economic system of infinite growth wouldn’t reach a failing point.
Nah it’s actually all feminism and one SPECIFIC billionaire.
I’m sorry but we are just reaping the benefits of a system that only benefited the generations that designed it, and now we are gonna have to handle its collapse.
xinorez1@reddit
This one isn't Reaganomics unfortunately
The Vietnam war was unfunded unlike Korea and no rationing was implemented so the us had to compete with its own citizens for oil, steel, etc, which caused rapid inflation. Money sought safe shelter in a new investment that was created just before the war, reits, and public home building which generated a profit of 3 percent was ended for reits which demand 10 percent profit and will restrict home building and transportation to keep prices high. It was then that real estate prices began to climb.
Prior to the war, housing consumed 13-20 percent of most Americans annual earnings. Today it consumes 30-40 percent on average.
viciouspandas@reddit
It's both. Not that I think women should go back to the kitchen, and it's good that they're able to be independent, but if you have now a bunch of dual incomes competing for the same houses, then the default for buying that will be a dual income.
The only thing to really counteract that is if we either doubled the houses, which is just a waste of land and resources, or reduced work hours to compensate for the increased labor pool. The latter is ideal, but we didn't do it due to our unsustainable economic system.
Wantitneeditgetit@reddit
Homie it didn't even benefit those generations, it just made sure to hurt other people more then them.
Social Status > wealth for almost everyone, and it's more important to not be at the bottom then to be at the top.
PM-ME-UR-PIZZA@reddit
The fact that a woman can be independent of me is the reason why I can't buy a house
viciouspandas@reddit
When you have double incomes now competing for the same houses, that becomes what you need to afford the house. Women's liberation was a good thing, but it should have come with a reduction in individual work hours too.
wordjedi@reddit
They killed the 1950s lifestyle where women were dependent on men for money, and now beautiful young women won't fuck ugly dudes just for having a job
CreamyMayo11@reddit
You can't just casually blurt out a direct connection between the random moral idea of feminism with a specific man's personal wealth without any context and make it sound sane.
Neomataza@reddit
The intermediate step is that Soros employed the shadow world government to boost feminism.
There, is that more sane?
Few-Requirement-3544@reddit
Indeed. People are doing the same guilt-by-association with Epstein and /pol/, as if /new/ wasn't already like that before.
seandoesntsleep@reddit
The direct connection between epstein and /pol was epstein meeting with moot the day before /pol re opened and moot hard flipping from "I will never reopen pol because it was over run by nazis" to "yea its totally my idea to open pol"
Now we dont know what those guys talked about but the facts we DO know really insinuate that epstein had a meeting with moot and asked him nicely to open the nazi shitposting board
servontos@reddit
Maybe moot met with Epstein and decided /pol/ wasn’t too crazy after all
airfryerfuntime@reddit
Lol what?
tdames@reddit
What an incel comment
Skruestik@reddit
You did?
jaxonya@reddit
Single handedly
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/zu8VtDYwZP
Dookie403@reddit
Not only that but is against a lot of stuff that the establishment wants
I9w0s@reddit
No_Chicken_9452@reddit
Salty that he got away
NotAPirateLawyer@reddit
Literally no mention of him selling out other Jews to the Nazis...
No_Chicken_9452@reddit
Don't know if this in reference to someone else, but I did not say that. I'm saying modern nazis are salty they couldn't get to him in time
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
This is what leftists do. They hook you in with some good ideas and the next thing you know your country is beibg invaded by foreigners.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Are these invading foreigners in this room with us now?
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
You know, just because they're not in my room right now doesn't mean its not a real problem.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
That might very well be the case, but I can count the number of times I've been harmed by "foreign invaders" on one hand, whereas the capitalist nation-state that's all homegrown and claims me as its citizen psychologically tortures me every single day.
ElegantNoise@reddit
"It doesn't happen to me so it's not a problem!" What an argument!
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Some people might be negatively affected because there's like a spooky scary immigrant who moved in next door and took their job and is selling döner kebap where previously a local was selling sausages.
Almost everyone on this Earth is negatively affected by the fact that a small parasitical elite of exploiters hoards the means of production to themselves and pits us all against each other in order to prevent the workers of the world to unite as one and rise up against this sick state of affairs.
You gotta have your priorities in order, and priority number one is the overthrow of the capitalist system, everything else is just smok and mirrors.
ElegantNoise@reddit
Stop the strawmanning lol.
It's not "a dude moving in next door to sell doner". It's hundreds of thousands of migrants with utterly incompatible cultures illegally entering our countries and causing havoc. One look at London, Paris or Berlin tells me enough.
I was born in a white, christian country and I want it to stay that way. I want to live amongst my own people. This is a natural instinct.
(Had to cut 60% of my comment because Reddit being Reddit removed the previous one.)
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Nice copy-pasting from Epstein's script you did there.
Race is a bullshit social construct and god isn't real you superstitious fool.
There's nothing natural about you perpetuating the propaganda apparatus that keeps the capitalist-nationalist system up and running.
ElegantNoise@reddit
You've coloured yourself nicely. I see that there is no point in even talking to you and your brainrot
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Maybe youd get paid more and rents would go down if you werent competing with thirdies.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Maybe payment and rent would be a non-issue in a socialist planned economy where the workers cooperate for the greater good instead of being made to be at each other's throats for whatever scraps the capitalist parasites deign to grant them.
ConscientiousPath@reddit
yeah because planned economies haven't failed utterly every single time they've been tried in over 70 countries at this point. The only people who hate capitalism are the people who don't know what it is and/or swallowed the propaganda that corporatism is the same thing.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Most of these countries only existed on paper but were in actuality just outposts and vassal states of the Soviet Union with no true self-determination, free press, or democratic checks and balances.
Saying communism is untenable because of the Soviet Union and its subjects is like saying republicanism (as in any form of government that is not a hereditary monarchy) is untenable because of Napoleon and his conquests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
"Corporatism" is to capitalism what the butterfly is to the caterpillar.
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Maybe it'll work this time.
Medical_Artichoke666@reddit
Have... you seen Europe?
fontaine33@reddit
For some reason I doubt you’ve ever been to Europe and have the financial resources to go
Medical_Artichoke666@reddit
keep that head canon going, it's doing wonders for you
Special-Remove-3294@reddit
Yeah. I live there. It is great. Probably the greatest time in European history in terms of living standards which is all that really matters. It is great here and it will keep being great unless weirdo right wingers(neolibs, conservicucks, christcucks, nationalists, etc) ruin it by their increasingly strong corporate cock sucking😒
Medical_Artichoke666@reddit
lmao
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
I've never seen anything else unless we count the sky and images.
baudmiksen@reddit
All I see is the wind and the rain
ZyklonFart@reddit
Do you even own a passport?
great_guiri@reddit
Yes? We get nice kebab shops and better footballers and a more interesting culture. You right wing freaks are perpetually frightened of your own shadow. Anyway the foreign born pop in us vs eu are not so different, so be honest you're just talking about the big bad muslims not immigrants
great_guiri@reddit
Right wingers live in perpetual fear of everything, it's intrinsic to their way of life
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Left wingers live in fear of the weather.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Yes, we live in fear of something that empirically exists and often kills people, you sure got us there.
NotAPirateLawyer@reddit
Oh this is fun! Do black people next!
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
How about I do gender instead? I'm sure there's tons of female serial killers, mass murderers, rapists etc. out there...
NotAPirateLawyer@reddit
Sounds good! Now that we've established that men = bad, are we gonna leave it at that or are we going to break that down further? Such as by, I don't know, let's say race. In fact, let's break it down even further! Let's break it down by both race AND wealth! What sort of funny things start to emerge?
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Why don't you tell me, oh wise man who is clearly very informed on this topic? You about to blow my mind by telling me that poor whites are all paragons of virtue who'd nary harm a fly, while poor blacks are but ravenous beats driven purely by instinct to smash and scream?
NotAPirateLawyer@reddit
Aha, you jest! But verily, take heed! For the wealthiest of the black males commit violent crimes at a greater rate (read: per capita) than even the most destitute of white men! I can hear you now, "Lies and slander" you decry! Yet FBI crime statistics care naught for your feeble pleas. So, to answer your clearly sarcastic question, yes. Poor white men are, in fact, paragons of virtue compared to poor black men.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Lol. Lmao even. Yes, that famously objectively correct arbiter of truth that is the US-American Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It seems I have no choice but to abandon anti-racism in the face of this overwhelming barrage of facts and logic.
whootang@reddit
Weather invaded my country. Can't go a single day without seeing it.
rosso_saturno@reddit
They are in the streets, parks and squares of my city.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Oh no. How terrible. These invaders, what weapons do they have and how many? Do they have tanks, aircraft and drones? What about landmines and barbed wire?
rosso_saturno@reddit
You either lack the brains to understand that "invaded" by u/AlphaMassDeBeta is a hyperbole, or you are willfully (and dishonestly) ignoring it in order to shift the discourse to semantics. We all know it's the latter.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Moving the goalposts, eh? I get it, gotta get your daily steps in somehow.
Knightrius@reddit
Just say you have a prey mindset and are afraid of everything
rosso_saturno@reddit
It's not fear, it's disgust. It stems from seeing them swarm women, shout and loiter in public. For every one that integrates well there's 100 that remain uncivilized pithecanthropi.
Knightrius@reddit
This is the most deluded pathetic thing I've read lmfao
rosso_saturno@reddit
I'm not taking offense from somebody who uses aLpHa MaLe expressions like "prey mindset" lmao
Knightrius@reddit
The intake of refugees during the Syrian crisis happened under center right governments in UK, France and Germany. And Soros is not leftist. People just vomitting anything
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Lol.
Lmao even.
z0inkSSc00by@reddit
What are they then, leftists?
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Idk, but I am sure asf they're not conservative.
AhoyLadiesSteve@reddit
Calling Merkel center right might be the most reddit thing I have ever read
Knightrius@reddit
So she's leftist? Guy with 3k reddit comments using reddit as slur
AhoyLadiesSteve@reddit
Just because I use Reddit daily, it doesn’t mean that I sympathize with the traditional “hive mind”. People have different uses for apps, you know? The “reddit” comment is clearly political.
Knightrius@reddit
And I barely use reddit and have no idea what you're blabbing about
Knightrius@reddit
Maybe get out of the basement once in a while
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Typical leftist argument.
ufailowell@reddit
most developed countries are under replacement rate for births. I’m not sure what you think gets us over it.
AlphaMassDeBeta@reddit
Japan is proof that youre wrong.
Buba_Fatt@reddit
He manipulated British currency and almost make Bank of England go bankrupt to make profit for himself.
He's funding think tanks in many countries which tell more or less that we should abondon current European countries and go for even stronger EU integration.
Pxel315@reddit
Wait so he stole from banks and wants more unity in Europe? How dare he
storman_sten@reddit
He has a lot of proxys & NGO's that lobby for the replacement of the native population in Europe. That is per definition evil.
cookiemaster01@reddit
Replacement of the native european popualtion how? The way youre phrasing that makes me think you subscribe to white replacement theory.
storman_sten@reddit
I hope you are trolling?
Imaginary_Sugar_3138@reddit
I mean just have more kids or move if you’re so scared of immigrants
Mathiasrex24@reddit
Or just don't bring them to countries where there is no instant cultural or religious compatibility and where they don't intend to spend enough time assimilating into the country's way of life. I know it's fucking easy to talk out of your ass when it's not your close ones who have to fear being robbed or raped at night, but maybe put a little more thought into what you say.
InspiringMilk@reddit
Yes, because I live in one of the safest regions in the world. That is to say, europe.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
Good to know. I don't want to ask about your country for privacy reasons, but take a look at your country's immigration policy (how strict it is). If it's as open as in Sweden or Germany, where crime rates have almost doubled since 2015, either you live in a peaceful town where you haven't experienced any of that, or you just don't go out.
InspiringMilk@reddit
Poland and Hungary. Both countries are parts of Schengen and the EU, have taken in some refugees from the middle east, have taken in Ukrainian migrants and have a decently large population of foreigners.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
Yep, and both of them have a much stricter imigration policyand catch a lot of flak for it, too. Hungary was fined for not fully complying with the EU's decisions. I haven't been to Poland yet, but Hungary felt much safer than Germany based on my experience and statistics as well.
Imaginary_Sugar_3138@reddit
hurr durr immigrants bad hurrr they look different im so scared durrr my family gonna die instantly hurrr durr
Mathiasrex24@reddit
Nobody is talking about race. Different cultures need time to integrate, which is not being provided by the current mass immigration to Europe.
Imaginary_Sugar_3138@reddit
looks like the mods are on your side lol
Mathiasrex24@reddit
I could read half of your deleted comment, but I'm still not sure where your argument was heading. Honestly, I don't understand why you keep accusing me of racism. What I'm talking about is not biological, it's cultural. If you knew anything about the topic, maybe you would have a better understanding of the situation and could offer some counter arguments.
Also who said they should be in camps? People with proper identification should be able to cross borders easily, and those without it should understand that a longer, more controlled process is the condition for us to help them, given their circumstances.
From an economic perspective, everyone has finite resources. My country, where most families live paycheque to paycheque, can't play the saviour. While some nations may be able to tank the costs, others are in a worse economic situation.
Imaginary_Sugar_3138@reddit
🤓 ackshully im not racist ☝️ ackshully i’m worried about how they behave different from me that will kill my whole family instantly. my big brain plan is hold the immigrants in camps until they learn my superior ways
domingodlf@reddit
I just don't get how people can, with a straight face, say that immigration is evil because... now we are less of a majority in our country? Who cares???? My country could go from 70% white to 70% everything else 30% white and I wouldn't bat an eyelid. Racial majority or demographics is not something you can actually value and try to defend without implicitly saying you value your own race over others. If you are no longer a majority, then tough luck. You don't get to enforce that if people are coming into the country in a legitimate way.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
This isn't about race, unless you're a neo-Nazi, of course. It's about culture: the people who have migrated in large numbers to European countries since 2015 come from a completely different culture. Many of them come from countries where women are not equal, or where massacres of villages could happen at any time. This way of life is not instantly compatible with Western beliefs. While I agree that we should help them, mass migration is not the answer. They won't have time to assimilate into the country's way of life, and if we accommodate them in one place, they won't have to adapt. This leads to a nation where robberies, stabbings and rapes increase twofold. Around 70 per cent of people who migrated to Europe in the past 15 years were men aged 18–34.
I'm not suggesting that they should change their customs or religions, but they must accept that the country they have moved to has its own customs and traditions, and if they want to live there, they must respect them and integrate to a certain extent.
ZyklonFart@reddit
In Europe? Where most countries are still 80% "native"? Or in America where half the country was Mexico in the first place?
You not being in a position to reproduce doesn't indicate replacement.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
One of the main reasons behind the mass immigration into Europe since 2015 was to 'fix' the ageing society, which, given time, would be unable to take care of itself due to the declining birth rate. What is that if not replacement? It may be 80% now, but if we look at Sweden 30 years from now, the graph will look completely different.
America's whole idea was built upon immigration from the beginning, they built a new country and became a melting pot of different cultures. If you look at a European country the size of New York and allow any immigrants in without rules, the culture will inevitably change. What is Chinatown in New York would become a significant part of that country. Since they would not have to assimilate into the nation's way of life, there would be constant friction. Given time, if their birth rate stays the same and the native's population remains the same or decreases, they will become the minority in their own country.
This is so obvious that I can't understand how you can't see it. The solution to an ageing society is achieved through better government and a steady but controlled flow of migration.
basilisk_boi2@reddit
ZyklonFart@reddit
I'm highlighting the fact that if the guy wasn't a worthless loser, he could directly take control of the issues he perceives with demography.
At least use the meme correctly, brainlet.
sonerec725@reddit
If I have a bag of 10 marbles, 8 blue, 2 red, and I add 3 more red marbles, are they "replacing" any of the blue marbles?
ThisUsernameis21Char@reddit
If marbles have a limited lifespan and have a controllable chance to split into two more marbles and I actively agitate for adding more red marbles to the bag and incentivize splitting instead of trying to increase the amount of blue marbles in the bag, yes, red marbles will indeed replace blue marbles
SirOtterman@reddit
They are when you continue to put more red in and take blue out.
cookiemaster01@reddit
Good
HelpRespawnedAsDee@reddit
His NGO want the liberation of 60k imprisoned gang members in my home country (El Salvador), while the literal majority of the population is very loudly against this. Some people think the torture and violence they see on shit like Narcos is just Hollywood violence, but these psychopaths have done this and worse. So no. Call me whatever you want, fuck this guy.
suchdogeverymeme@reddit
[citation needed]
FrenchAmericanNugget@reddit
masiive influx of workers who are willing to work for less then the standards of a local area can only cause a quality of life decrease for the local workers, mass migriation is the billionaires weapon against the working class
cunasmoker69420@reddit
works cited: [my crack pipe]
FrankSinatraCockRock@reddit
Baron_Flatline@reddit
lol
BrunesOvrBrauns@reddit
Only Nazis believe in great replacement theory
Arstanishe@reddit
or maybe people just like to believe in conspiracies
MorbiusFan31@reddit
Gets more based by the minute
Simplejack007@reddit
Globalism is aids
Neither-Phone-7264@reddit
bro likes being forced to stay in your nation with no real mobility
IKnowUselessThings@reddit
It's the future whether you like it or not, it solves more problems than it creates.
Shaggy1316@reddit
"Good science predicts the automobile, great science predicts the traffic jam."
That may seem like a whimsical & abstract quote to use in this context, because it is, but the thinking behind it is relevant. Predictions are functionally limited by cognition which relies on current and past experience to make any prediction.
Some dude named R. K. Merton explored the idea of unintended consequences in sociological situations. When political/economic/social change happens, the systems reliant on, and effected by the change end up with first order effects and second order effects, essentially meaning the predicted effects, and the effects that were unexpected.
Furthermore, the complexity of any system dictates the complexity of the outcome. The variables at play in a crowd of 1,000 people are near infinite, at least to our little mokey brains. You have multi-dimensional political, religious, economic, etc. beliefs all interacting together. By its very definition, globalism would be the most complex system ever established. The variables are functionally infinite. What's the global population nowadays?
I agree with you that globalism is the future, however it is impossible to predict the problems globalism will create. As J. K. Galbraith wrote, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable"
Simplejack007@reddit
Not if I have the ability to change it 😼
IKnowUselessThings@reddit
You don't. You're welcome, enjoy your new life with this change in perspective.
TwistedBamboozler@reddit
Kinda based honestly
TribeWars@reddit
You know the difference between commercial banks and central banks right?
Pxel315@reddit
Both steal from people in different ways
TribeWars@reddit
That's true of course, but at least abstractly the wealth controlled by a central bank benefits the public. If you fuck over a commercial bank with market manipulation it only hurts the people who willingly invested in that bank. Fuck over a country's central bank and you're stealing money from that country's population.
Pxel315@reddit
He did by supporting left wing causes all over the world that benefit people more than a central bank the purpose of which was to prevent recessions and crises' and it fails to do so in the 10 or so we have had since the concept first came about
TribeWars@reddit
Left-wing causes that coincidentally always line up with the interests of US-Israeli hegemony
HastoBeAThrowaway0@reddit
Don't they still give money to the Queen lol good take that $$$
IKnowUselessThings@reddit
The Queen is dead, so no. The Royal Family generate more wealth for the UK than they take back, so no on both counts.
SteveMemeChamp@reddit
Take that £££*
Kru1zer@reddit
Now ask who owns the Bank of England. He is mega based.
tutike2000@reddit
Not 'the banks' as in private banks, but the cental bank which will have messed with people's savings
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Based. Fuck these insignificant tiny little nation states and fallen empires way past their prime. A united Europe could be a superpower, a fractured one is just easy pickings for the yankies and the ruskies.
DungeonMercenary@reddit
Be Europe
Become greatest region of the world BECAUSE you have a bunch of tiny competing countries.
Watch idiots argue for unifying it.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Just ignore all the rewards from colonialism we reaped, it's easy since the victims are far away and most of them drown in the sea if they try to get here!
DungeonMercenary@reddit
And yet somehow the richest countries in Europe are either the ones with no colonies or very few ones.
Meanwhile the biggest colonialists ended up as the P and S in PIGS.
PlsDntPMme@reddit
Love the self-awareness and I genuinely don’t understand the downvotes other than this subreddit is full of edgy jackasses.
I’m an American myself and I’d love to see a united Europe. Especially given all our meddling particularly recently in Hungary. You guys could be unstoppable.
SyntheticDuckFlavour@reddit
Be Europe
Self annihilate many times over the centuries BECAUSE you have a bunch of tiny competing countries.
Watch idiots argue against unifying it.
Reydan42@reddit
self annihilate how exactly? Europe or more precisely european countries dominated the world for almost 500 years. Without being united
Edward_Boss@reddit
Can Canada Can into Europe
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Yes, if only because it would be very funny.
MolotovOvickow@reddit
australia as well
cjfbbdixksndj@reddit
Of course a German thinks like this
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Actually I'm Austrian, Europe's capital should be Vienna.
Azylim@reddit
brother, you are not helping your own case. Remember the other famous austrian fella?
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
Particular_Rice4024@reddit
We genuinely need to bomb Gunther Fehlinger with Shaheds
SirOtterman@reddit
It may be a rape capital soon.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
For that you're better off looking into rural areas and homeowners with oversized basements.
SyntheticDuckFlavour@reddit
Easy there, Fritzl.
SyntheticDuckFlavour@reddit
At least they are doing it right this time.
Matt_2504@reddit
Lmao do you honestly think that anyone could conquer Europe? Especially Russia, which is a complete joke of a nation that can’t even beat one of the poorest European nations?
Smelldicks@reddit
Nobody needs to conquer Europe because they’re not united enough to do anything that challenges anyone else for their own benefit. Europe is just dying in front of everyone’s eyes and doing nothing about it.
ThisUsernameis21Char@reddit
Ikr, imagine if that poorest European nation got monetary support in the billions of dollars, intel from multiple top intelligence agencies and military gear
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
They don't need to conquer us militarily if they can keep us dysfunctional via espionage and cultural subversion.
Aggressive-Lie-9447@reddit
Part of that propaganda is to divide Russian resources from the Europe's tech. That would be a 100% superpower. But without manpower, army, and resources - it's a fail. The propaganda about Russians got into us deep, so is Putin doing everything to instill that message in ordinary Russians.
JimKPolk@reddit
Was it Soros manipulating the pound? Or was the UK government artificially manipulating it with interest rates and Soros literally just bought and sold currencies? What happened was inevitable in a free market economy following the ERM.
jrh_101@reddit
Soros knew that Margaret Thatchers conservative policies were terrible so he shorted the British Pound and made bank.
Something like that.
dua_loafer@reddit
I’m restarted so can someone explain to me why it’s a bad thing to want a more integrated EU?
Buba_Fatt@reddit
Rich countries exploit poorer countries. Yes, they send money in direct transfers from EU to those in in need but also due to having more power over politics and economy they create conditions where their mega businesses can replace local smaller producers.
Overall it's already a transfer of money and power from poor to rich but with some current benefits for the poor countries. But in a long run it may not be beneficial for them.
Smelldicks@reddit
A complete fucking moron’s understanding of the EU, maybe.
Every small country clamors to join. None of them want to leave once in. I’d explain how much of a raw deal their equal representation is, how small EU members frequently extort great powers with their vetoes, or how they get insane carveouts for things like immigration that others don’t, but I don’t need to. The fact they all beg to join and refuse to leave is overwhelming and obvious proof, on its face, that the EU is a great deal for them.
Smelldicks@reddit
Oh and I’d add every EU country exhibits remarkable convergence to the whole. Poland being a notable example. But also Hungary and the Baltics and everyone else.
Anyone who claims the relationship is predatory, when in reality it’s the COMPLETE opposite (EU is basically a wealth redistribution from rich to poor) is a complete idiot.
Matt_2504@reddit
He’s done it to other countries as well. He’s a financial terrorist, he has an obscene amount of money yet still is prepared to fuck over innocent working and middle class people just to hoard even more wealth that he couldn’t possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes
Smelldicks@reddit
It’s really hard to argue nearly anyone has done as much for the working and middle classes as Soros. He’d be worth well over $100b today if not for his donations to progressive causes.
benedict250@reddit
It's the UK so it's fine.
OmNomSandvich@reddit
inshallah the dogs of perfidious albion shall be brought to their knees by the might of the faithful
TonyTheTerrible@reddit
yeah like wtf lol USA USA USA
BowlsDeepRamen@reddit
Don't forget the constant election interference all over the world and lobbying for the interests/profits of his inner circles and himself while making average working people finance it all
Jack-of-Hearts-7@reddit
He fucked over the limeys financially? Based.
holymacaronibatman@reddit
Importantly this caused Rupert Murdoch to lose a shitload of money and look bad, so then Rupert used his media empire to start smearing Soros
qoheletal@reddit
> He manipulated British currency and almost make Bank of England go bankrupt to make profit for himself.
As someone who really dislikes Great Britain... This is based, I would have done the same and if I could do it again, I would
cubicthreads@reddit
He didn't manipulate it. He was aware that the UK government was trying to hold an interest rate that wasnt unsustainable, which a lot of people were aware of. George Soros just knew when would be a good time to short the pound.
demaraje@reddit
Both good things
Mirdclawer@reddit
Oh no, not the stronger EU integration, let's keep our ownTM individualSovereignTM Prideful and NationalTM countries as isolated from one another and these pesky common taxation and common regulations, we wouldn't want to hurt the billionaires and the elites.
As was obviously the case, the very kind anti EU brexit people in UK, or the anti EU Orban were all about fighting the evil EU for the good of the common people.
Buba_Fatt@reddit
Yeah, Anti EU Orban who accepted everything except help for Ukraine, especially ETS2 and EGD. He was just a EPP politician.
nitonitonii@reddit
Okay now I do like him
chubbycanine@reddit
I don't know if this was supposed to make him sound bad but uh....seems decent to me
fullonroboticist@reddit
They made wrong decisions regarding their monetary policy, they got punished by the market. That's how finance works. Don't suck at your job.
Hackeringerinho@reddit
I don't think he manipulated it, he just exploited a weakness. And I don't even think he's the one who found it.
DungeonMercenary@reddit
Nah, it's even stupider than that.
Speculative attacks only work if the central bank tries to keep the currency stable.
Essentially: you want to tank a ccurency. If you buy and then sell, nothing happens. You have to sell without buying. So you borrow pounds (in this case) and use them to buy dollars. Lots of them.
If the central bank does nothing, supply and demand balance themselves out. The price of the pound drops a bit, but when Soros starts paying interest he'll eventually have to give up and the pound goes up again.
But if the central bank "defends the currency"... Every time Soros sells pounds to buy dollars, the feds sell dollars to buy pounds. To prevent that big bad devaluations. When UK dollar reserves start getting low everyone smells blood on the water and start borrowing pounds to buy dollars. The UK runs out of dollars, slowly at first but then VERY quickly. The price drops all at once. Soros sells a tiny bit of his dollars to pay his pound debt, and keeps the rest.
It's the ultimate case of "do nothing, still win." Except politicians are allergic to doing nothing. They HAVE to pretend they're helping. And then it bankrupts the country.
Ubera90@reddit
...based?
HastoBeAThrowaway0@reddit
Holy based
YoItsThatOneDude@reddit
Sounds like any old billionaire tbh
Boomer_Madness@reddit
I mean just take it from him
innocentbabies@reddit
I don't care if it was literally me making perfect decisions to make the world a better place. That much power is too much for one person to have.
Simple as.
I don't wanna, like, kill him though. Just take the money away from all the billionaires so they can't keep buying policy.
rasputin640@reddit
he literally grew his wealth by short selling currencies and bankrupting entire countries
podfather2000@reddit
He didn't bankrupt anyone. Countries can't go bankrupt. He just took out a short position on the pound. Actually, it wasn't even him one guy working for his fund noticed the weakness and Soros just pushed him to take out a bigger position.
The bad economic conditions were already there the whole time. None of which was the fault of Soros.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
And you don't think the people realised their currency was being devalued?
Also I'm just selling the weapons, I didn't wage war.
podfather2000@reddit
That analogy doesn’t really hold. Selling weapons directly contributes to a war continuing because the weapons are the means of violence. Short-selling a currency doesn’t create the underlying economic weakness. It's just a bet that the weakness already exists.
In the case of the pound in 1992, the UK had already tied its currency to a rate it couldn’t realistically maintain. Speculators like Soros didn’t force that policy, they recognized it was unsustainable. If it hadn’t been Soros, it would’ve been someone else because the fundamentals were already pointing that way.
So it’s less like “selling weapons to wage a war” and more like “betting that a cracked dam is going to break.” The crack was already there.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
Your right that it's not direct. One of my aquintences often buys share of companies that make and sell automated killer drones. He isn't the one killing them he is just making money from the cruelty of the war machine. Soros's bets undirectly ruined many lives, not just in europe but in asia aswell, people losing their pension funds, or seeing their life savings evaporate in a matter of days due to hyperinflation.
The 'cracked dam' analogy is clever, but it ignores the fact that a speculator isn't just a passive observer waiting for the break. When you put a massive, multi-billion dollar bet against a currency, you are actively swinging a sledgehammer at those cracks. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more you bet against it, the more panic you spread, and the faster the dam collapses.
The underlying weakness might not be Soros's fault, but profiting from the resulting misery is a choice. When the pound or the baht collapsed, it translated to real world proverty for millions of elderly people who couldn't bet on anything. They were the ones standing under the dam when it broke. It’s not just a game of numbers, it’s the systematic extraction of value from the vulnerable to the ultrawealthy under the guise of "market efficiency".
podfather2000@reddit
You're describing the human cost of currency crises, which is real. But you're still mixing up who caused the structural problem and who noticed it first.
Speculators can accelerate a collapse, but they can’t create the underlying imbalance that makes it inevitable. If a currency peg requires a central bank to burn through reserves or keep interest rates artificially high just to defend it, the system is already broken. The market pressure just forces the correction to happen sooner rather than later.
Take the pound in the ERM crisis. The UK government was trying to keep the currency at a rate that didn’t match the economy. Traders betting against it didn’t invent that mismatch, they exposed it. Even if Soros had never placed a trade, thousands of other funds and banks were seeing the same numbers and moving the same way.
Blaming the speculator is like blaming the person who shouts “the dam is about to break” for the flood. The real responsibility sits with the policies that made the dam unsustainable in the first place.
Mathiasrex24@reddit
I get what you're saying about structural weaknesses, and I'm not defending the UK government here, I just think your dam analogy doesn't fully work. When someone has that level of capital, they're not just "pointing out a problem", rather they're actively pushing things in a direction.
If we stick to the dam metaphor there is a difference between a leak and a total breach. The systems could be repaired through gradual policy changes. However, massive short selling is like taking a wrecking ball to ensure the flood happens immediately on your terms, so you can collect the insurance money.
By speeding up the collapse for profit, speculators remove the time factor that would allow goverments or individuals to adjust. The speculators walk away with billions, and the pensioners, small business owners lose 30% of their purchasing power in a day.
Buba_Fatt@reddit
It wasn't just a short position and countries can go bankrupt.
"Soros used his hedge fund, Quantum Fund, to borrow billions of pounds from various banks and sell them for other currencies, such as German marks or U.S. dollars. This created a huge demand for other currencies and a huge supply of pounds, which drove down the value of the pound in the market. Soros also used derivatives, such as options and futures contracts, to amplify his bets and increase his leverage." via Investopedia
podfather2000@reddit
Countries technically can default, but that’s not the same as “going bankrupt” the way a company does. Bankruptcy is a legal process for firms or individuals. Sovereign states like the United Kingdom can’t be liquidated by courts and their assets can’t be seized in the same way.
What actually happens is sovereign default—they stop paying or restructure debt (which has happened many times, e.g. Argentina). In the Black Wednesday case, the UK didn’t default or go bankrupt, it simply exited the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and devalued the pound. Speculators like George Soros can profit from pressure on a currency, but they can’t “bankrupt” a sovereign state.
True, he used heavy leverage and derivatives through the Quantum Fund to short the British pound sterling during Black Wednesday that part is accurate. But the key point is that the pound was already widely viewed as overvalued inside the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Soros didn’t create the underlying problem, he bet that the Bank of England wouldn’t be able to defend the peg. When the UK left the ERM, the country didn’t go bankrupt—its economy actually recovered fairly quickly afterward.
psychoCMYK@reddit
You make it sound like it wasn't Britain's fault for aggressively fucking with interest rates. The ERM was unsustainable with or without Soros
podfather2000@reddit
It wasn't even Soros who made that trade. It was a guy who was working for his fund that noticed the weakness in the pound. Soros just pushed him to take a huge position on it.
Mjohnson2278@reddit
Yeah, Scott Bessent
pacard@reddit
It's so good. What people trot out Soros as the lib big bad? The same people who made the guy who did the big bad thing for Soros the secretary of the treasury!
Spunge14@reddit
Those poor bankrupt countries. So they're dead now? Which dead countries are those?
Mathiasrex24@reddit
Do you realise that people in those countries can starve or freeze to death in winter? He did the same in Asia, ruining many lives in the process, not just countries. You absolute midwit.
Experience_Material@reddit
Holy based
bmoarpirate@reddit
And his prosecutors in the US seem to be backing lawlessness to induce chaos. And backs US pols with spending problems.
Given his history with currency, I imagine he is waiting to short the USD while encouraging political choices that will indeed destroy the USD
SteveFrench12@reddit
He backs pols with spending problems? That’s weird, i thought he was against republicans
Techiesarethebomb@reddit
Wait so he fucked over the UK? That's pretty based
Jack-of-Hearts-7@reddit
Britbongs deserved it.
scotty_doesknow@reddit
Wait, did he bankrupt the countries though?
Medical_Artichoke666@reddit
Yes
scotty_doesknow@reddit
Fucking legend.
Medical_Artichoke666@reddit
Dude, epic troll!
Will512@reddit
ITT: people mad this guy profited off of various shit monetary policies rather than being mad at the people creating shit monetary policies. It's like watching The Big Short and thinking Steve Carrell is the main antagonist.
WhiteSepulchre@reddit
Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones don't like him. And they're all the credible sources you need.
Maiq_the_liar_23@reddit
Unrelated but watching alex jones melt down over trump recently is life fuel.
xX_SkibidiChungus_Xx@reddit
Im too lazy to find clips plz post em they sound funny
Maiq_the_liar_23@reddit
I am also to lazy to find them for you
zombieGenm_0x68@reddit
i now pronounce you man and malewife, you may now kiss the bride
Maiq_the_liar_23@reddit
Which one am I?
splittingheirs@reddit
Me three! Where's my powerbro handshake?
xX_SkibidiChungus_Xx@reddit
I'm too lazy to find a gif to reply but hell yeah vro
DoctorProfessorTaco@reddit
Knowledge Fight is my preferred way to get the latest teardown of Alex Jones
Dark_Knight2000@reddit
They loved the narcissistic lunatic when his madness affected people they hated, now that he’s affecting them it’s suddenly a problem.
Literally everyone with a brain saw this coming.
Maiq_the_liar_23@reddit
I know people without brains who saw this coming!
Those people are me
THESUACED@reddit
Oh be nice to yourself, there's a brain cell in there somewhere.
Dark_Knight2000@reddit
I believed you until I saw your username. You are sheltering a brain your attic are you not?
drippysoap@reddit
Is a brain saw like bone saw?
khares_koures2002@reddit
THREE MINUTES OF PLAYTIME
Working-Tomato8395@reddit
He's back on the booze again and it's going to get stupider than hell real fucking quick. I hope he gets Star Wars and Highway Man drunk again.
Fuck his liver, let's go.
thereoncewasahat@reddit
He's not fucking wrong though.
fatherdoodle@reddit
Don’t forget Glen Beck. Back when I listened to him he would call Soros the “dude with the spooky voice”
airfryerfuntime@reddit
Rush Limbaugh, too. All the major conservative talk radio dorks would basically just repeat the same three Soros conspiracy theories over and over.
1tiredman@reddit
How is Ben Shapiro credible? He's a mossad agent lol
inoua5dollarservices@reddit
That’s the joke
storman_sten@reddit
Ben Shapiro.. cmon bro
Tricky_Ship9745@reddit
ask Viktor Orban (though even he might not be able to tell)
Houlilalo@reddit
Victor Orban received a scholarship from the Soros Foundation in 1989
Dark_Knight2000@reddit
Why do people like him always bite the hand that feeds them?
Right wing idiot survives/benefits off of food stamps, social services, scholarships, welfare, foster care, immigration, federal loans, government jobs, affirmative action, and then grows up to be against these things.
SteveMemeChamp@reddit
I mean right wingers don’t necessarily benefit off immigration (if said immigration was a net-positive, they wouldn’t be aware of it)
Dark_Knight2000@reddit
There are right wing immigrants, believe it or not
SteveMemeChamp@reddit
Yea most of the latino immigrants turn right wing
Prodigy0617@reddit
I’m so disappointed in my people man
Dark_Knight2000@reddit
Right wing business owners benefit off of illegal immigration too, but most of them are just about smart enough to keep their mouth shut. The dumb ones get caught saying “I didn’t think they meant my workers” when ICE raids their roofing business.
LieutenantOG@reddit
Because power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
Drafo7@reddit
Nope. A lot of right wingers who survive off of social welfare programs have no power beyond their vote and voice, and they still use it to fight against their own interests, thinking that they'll somehow be the exception, or that it's okay for them to suffer so long as other people suffer more. It's not a matter of "people who started out good randomly got power dropped in their lap and it turned them evil." It's more "people who were already evil were able to become successful because they didn't have morality or ethics holding them back, and this resulted in them gaining exorbitant amounts of power."
Rejndox@reddit
Because hurting others is more important than their own wellbeing.
PrrrromotionGiven1@reddit
Yeah man and basically every prominent 20th century fascist was a socialist in their teens/20s. You're talking about almost 40 fuckin years ago.
ButtersAndRowlet@reddit
Mussolini, the man who invented Fascism literally was a Socialist until he was kicked out of the party
Ninjalion2000@reddit
Fascist and socialism are 2 sides of the same coin. While fascist generally supported private property, the control of that property was at the behest of the government.
Tricky_Ship9745@reddit
thats a reach
Ninjalion2000@reddit
Well given the amount of leaders that went from socialists to fascists I wouldn’t say so. It’s quite rare that people do a complete 180 on their beliefs.
SecondSonThan@reddit
You didnt describe socialism but fascism.
Dictators when they try to go for a political career usually pick an popular ideology thinking people will just believe them to be leftist, it is nothing new. Many dictators also used socialism as a guise to rise to power and use the people to overthrow the previous government (whether so called "real socialism" would work tho is still questionable). The term I would call most communist countries from last century would not be communist, but authoritarian. You can be authoritarian without communism (like Nazis) or with.
What I am saying with above paragraph is that it is honestly irrelevant in practice if those dictatorship were socialists or not, it was just propaganda to control and use the population. You see now on news everyday how some people use identiy politics and transgenders to push an agenda, even if transgenders make up for like... 5%? While these same politicians push to raise taxes on people while lowering for richer and not really fixing any problems.
Not saying names but a certain president of USA from the last two decades was originally running as a Democrat.
LachlantehGreat@reddit
If I describe myself as a billionaire, that doesn’t make me one
IllPosition5081@reddit
Really just different versions of totalitarianism. It doesn’t help that they end up maintaining a regime of violence, since they usually rise and keep power using it. Nazis used their policy of widespread hatred, purges, and pogroms to keep the population angry and willing to die for them, because they knew that if they went for too long without an enemy, they would start looking at their own government. Hence Hitler Youth, where they formed kids at their most impressionable to hate and to fight an enemy they’ve never known or been hurt by for reasons unjust. The Communists rose in revolutions during war, and silenced dissent through secret police and forced labor. And although Hitler rose to his role with a legitimate political support base, he still used the SA (Sturmabteilung,) his paramilitary force, to intimidate voters and opponents to maintain power until the Reichstag fire happened, at which point he seized absolute power.
TechnoBacon55@reddit
Thankfully he’s kicked out now
SeingaltUNo@reddit
Funds any organisation that floods Europe with migrants
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Based.
_c0sm1c_@reddit
Rooting for a billionaire. Least confused tankie
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
Comrade Stalin sided with the British and yankee imperialists during World War Two. Sometimes you gotta root for the lesser evil, and in this case that happens to be a billionaire funding some vaguely progressive causes because he has a shred of humanity.
OtherUse1685@reddit
Comrade Stalin literally sided with Hitler to start WW2 btw
moverwhomovesthings@reddit
The US government?
Spunge14@reddit
Is the flooding in the room with us right now
Eminence_Front42@reddit
Look outside
Spunge14@reddit
Paranoid schizophrenic lol
Jack-of-Hearts-7@reddit
Based. Fuck Europoors.
Gimows@reddit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pcyXj59faw
Jack-of-Hearts-7@reddit
I already told you based.
ZyklonFart@reddit
Still 80% "native" after decades of post-colonial immigration. Put down twitter.
Simplejack007@reddit
80% is not the high number you think it is
ZyklonFart@reddit
It's significantly higher than the 56% faced Americans who think Europe is being invaded because Elon Musk and other jew pets told them it is.
Simplejack007@reddit
Getting mixed signals here. So are we fans of mass immigration perpetrated by Jewish entities or not?
podfather2000@reddit
All the "flooding" happened under conservative governments. No single organization had much impact on it.
Matt_2504@reddit
He’s a financial terrorist who fucks over working and middle class people just to make even more obscene amounts of money, because a billion dollars is somehow not enough and he need even more
TheLastLegionary@reddit
Yes but why is he singled out compared to the other parasites that lean more towards the right?
MrBingly@reddit
He's one of the richest people in the world that gets involved in politics instead of just focusing on his own business.
He has a clear political side of the left/right divide so gets attention from people on the other side.
He's actually competent, unlike Elon who is a joke, and so he is actually seen as a serious threat by those that disagree with him.
xtremebox@reddit
My conspiracy theory:
Soros is Israeli but spoke out against Israel.
Conspiracies came out about him running the world.
Epstein works for Israel Intelligence.
Epstein ran propaganda through 4chan.
Trump diddles children.
MrHyde42069@reddit
He donates big money to liberal candidates across the country that promise to push infringing gun laws onto their constituents
WinOwn1231@reddit
It's very odd how much money his given to soft on crime district attorneys across the country through PACS and The Open Societies Foundations.
Over the past decade, billionaire George Soros has spent at least $50 million* to elect scores of “social justice” prosecutors across the country. These district attorneys, who represent over 70 million people or more than 1 in 5 Americans, often pursue pro-criminal and anti-police policies.'
https://www.policedefense.org/sorosmap/
Nojay7@reddit
I’ll support anything that makes cops lives harder
Nikoviking@reddit
Billionaire who destroys national economies for personal gain, funds protests and organisations that try to flood Europe with illegals, and campaigns for soft-on-crime DAs.
His family were also accused of betraying other Jewish households in hiding to the Nazis, who would then confiscate their property in exchange for protection.
Foolishly_Sane@reddit
Correct me if I'm wrong, didn't he also betray the Jews to the Nazis or work for them?
I remember something about him being apart of an economic collapse or ransom.
I know there's more, but that's off the top of my head.
Lord0Trade@reddit
Talk to the Indonesians or the British. Soros basically broke the Indonesian currency and caused a run on the pound.
raihan-rf@reddit
Dude bankrupted Thailand which in return caused the Asian financial crisis
opticorange@reddit
billionaire
911roofer@reddit
Because aid is often not treated with gratitude when delivered in a way perceived as “condescending”.
ishetaltijdvoorbier@reddit
he kind of fucked over russia when they were rebuilding. he was one of the biggest proponents of shock doctrine until halfway through he realized the damage it would do.
this is unironically where a lot of conspiracy theorists comes from, since he "shaped" a society before he """might""" be able to do it again. disregarding that after 2 years of shock doctrine he had become the most vocal opponent of it
whootang@reddit
I'm to dislike him for this?
b3rn13mac@reddit
it’s almost like their stunted rebuilding might have something to do with their current state of affairs
42Ubiquitous@reddit
I think it much more likely stems from the general culture of Russia going back before Soros.
Adduly@reddit
Cultures can change. It not Europe would still be monarchies.
After the fall of the Soviet Union there was a real opportunity to democratise Russia. "Shock therapy" absolutely got in the way of that
42Ubiquitous@reddit
True on both counts
fontaine33@reddit
Shock therapy was successful in Poland and the Baltics. Soros is not a blip on the radar of causes for Russia’s deteriorating during the wild ‘90s. It is to do with an unplanned chaotic collapse of an empire, a civil war with literal bombing of the Parliament House, a civil war and Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, the bloody Aluminum Wars and Mining Wars where businessmen killed each other with mercenary armies to take control of Russia’s natural resources, a totally corrupt and incompetent Yeltsin at the helm, Russia de-valuing the Ruble in ‘97 and so much more. Soros is nowhere near even an honorable mention for Russia’s demise.
Bauld_Man@reddit
> he was one of the biggest proponents of shock doctrine until halfway through he realized the damage it would do
I mean the fact that he realized that he fucked up and changed course is better than pretty much every other billionaire on the planet
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/ZHcaZawoKC
DirtLight134710@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/s/hbHm4rNjcP
Fern-ando@reddit
He made his fortune ruining the economy of whole countries.
TrieMond@reddit
Him having morals makes him evil to those who don't...
AlexThePSBoy@reddit
He was made into a right-wing boogyman by Rupert Murdoch.
Novel_Purpose710@reddit
Tbh being against apartheid in SA in retrospect is probably a bad idea. That country went to shit almost as hard as Zimbabwe
Jack-of-Hearts-7@reddit
Almost everything the right accuses him of doing, Musk and the Koch brothers actually do.
cluelessguitarist@reddit
He broke the british bank in the 90s?
Jonnny@reddit
From a year ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1gsr3tu/comment/lxgipjl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Dreadsin@reddit
Look at what he did to the currency of Thailand with forex trading
Being a billionaire inherently involves exploiting or hurting someone, there’s really no way around it
Zuraj@reddit
So reddit likes billionairs if they worked with the nazi. I thought reddit disliked both those things. Im confused.
Accurate_College_864@reddit
anon is very simple minded, this guy is bananas.
GargamelLeNoir@reddit
Do you have examples?
Accurate_College_864@reddit
yes but i don't think you'd care. besides when did we start to simp for a billionaire? especially this one 🤢
GargamelLeNoir@reddit
I'm not simping for anyone. You said the guy is bananas, I assumed you'd have a reason for saying so. At least that way if someone says he's great I'd have something to reply (after checking your claims of course).
majoshi@reddit
how is him being a billionaire not enough
pursuitofmisery@reddit
A billionaire who has donated over 30 billion. What have you done for humanity, anon? How have you contributed? Let’s assume you have. But can your contributions match his?
If not, I think it is safe to deduce that your worth as a human being is far less than George Soros’.
majoshi@reddit
human worth is not dictated solely by contribution to society, but even if it was, it is impossible to become a "self-made billionaire" without endlessly exploiting other people. if i had a billion dollars and donated a million, that isnt really the end all be all about my generosity as a person or my value to society, i mightve stolen that money from poorer people. and above all else, he is still a billionaire. he could've donated 50 billion, if hes still a billionaire then that says nothing. all that means is that he values his public perception
pursuitofmisery@reddit
Absolutely false. Unlike other billionaires, this man has donated WAY more than he has kept for himself. Again you follow up with uneducated and wrong assumptions without an iota of research and you expect people to rally behind your “eat the rich” chant? Do better.
Mazen_Madrid@reddit
He has donated 10s of billions
GargamelLeNoir@reddit
The fact that billionnaires can be a thing is crazy. But him being one doesn't mean he's clinically insane no.
AntDracula@reddit
They’ll simp for one that pays for their causes (judges who let 27x felons go, prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, etc)
ZyklonFart@reddit
How many Epstein jews are in prison?
OpenSourcePenguin@reddit
Where's the arguments? You said the guy is nuts and nothing further
MaximusPrime5885@reddit
SeingaltUNo@reddit
Sure here is one (on the right)
Nerfme@reddit
Reddit tier post
Mnmsaregood@reddit
Tell me you know nothing about what he actually does
tacosandbananas123@reddit
Other billionaires probably thought he was a traitor to billionaires
outer_spec@reddit
he paid people to untie my shoelaces when i wasn’t looking
cocksherpa2@reddit
Served the Nazis, not survived. Big difference and not the only one.
Laxhoop2525@reddit
He’s tried to undermine various currencies just to make himself richer, for one.
You can’t do stuff like that, and then expect people to think that you have good intentions with everything else you do.
csky@reddit
Yes, leave the little detail that he agressively promotes open borders / unchecked immigration.
podfather2000@reddit
George Soros doesn’t actually advocate completely open borders. Through Open Society he supports refugee rights, humane treatment of migrants, and more coordinated immigration policies. During the European migrant crisis, he argued the European Union should accept more refugees and manage migration collectively.
People label this “open borders,” but his proposals are about managed migration and refugee protection, not eliminating border controls.
NOT_ImperatorKnoedel@reddit
That just makes him even more based.
JannyBroomer@reddit
Degenerate profile pic detected, moronic opinion rejected
RichyGamo@reddit
Anon based this entire post on his results after he asked chat GPT who George soros was, lol.
podfather2000@reddit
I mean the guy is just a fund manager and left-wing. That's it. Most of the conspiracy theories around him make no sense and are just made-up right-wing propaganda.
qoheletal@reddit
Soros is le bad. Very easy to understand.
Why do you need a reason? I assume you like facts too?
ancw171@reddit
"Survivied the Nazis" He worked for the Nazis
TheDetailsMatterNow@reddit
He's a financial terrorist.
Fishmongererererer@reddit
I literally don’t care what his politics are.
He’s a billionaire that is throwing his money at politics to try to enact his version of change. This guy is just like Koch but left leaning.
It’s not a good thing that billionaires have massive political influence regardless of their politics
rydolf_shabe@reddit
he wants so bad to rule a country, and uses shady tactics to influence politics and economies. He is heavily invested in my country, Albania and funds the goverment to further develop his interests
Dmannmann@reddit
It's coz he's a leftist, so anyone remotely Centre right would naturally hate him. That's all it takes, coz unlike reddit, most people are low key Centre right in some way or the other, in the whole world I mean.
cjfbbdixksndj@reddit
Soros funded post 😭
OdiProfanum12@reddit
It's always funny how he's the arch enemy of orban whose one of the most pro Israeli politicians in EU.
tdk779@reddit
easy, anon is an ignorant and doesn't know what things this evil billionaire has done around the world
dedemdem@reddit
The core criticism of Soros is simple: he is a billionaire activist who uses his money to push a liberal political agenda across borders. Through NGO funding, legal advocacy, and Open Society networks, he supports causes many conservatives strongly oppose, including migration-related activism. Supporters call it philanthropy; critics call it elite ideological interference.
theceure@reddit
Wow...with tbe right meme and cherry picked facts. Redditors can convinve each other that Satan is God.....wait...might be too late for that analogy. Brb
Glad_Fox_6818@reddit
When a foreign billionaire sponsors a political group(s) inside your country, which, after gaining power, then introduce(s) some not exactly purely beneficial policies (see 90s Russia where he pushed neo-liberalism or Europe where he promoted socialism), he IS going to become a VERY controversial figure.
Plus yeah, he is a billionaire. SO, evil by default
Res_Novae17@reddit
His relentless disruption of American society by funding seemingly well-meaning movements that are deviously designed to keep us fighting by race and gender lines instead of uniting into a national identity that would keep America strong on the international stage and help the working class negotiate more money and power.
Leonardo-Saponara@reddit
He was one of the principal causes of Black Wednesday: he and his associates (legally) engineered crashes of the Italian lira (and the British pound) for profit, inflicting serious harm on my country.
I have no sympathy for him and I don't care that he is targeted by those crazy conspiracy theorists.
Zermist@reddit
white_equatorial@reddit
Hungarian too
Dariosusu@reddit
I only know of him because cringe far right billionairs and grifters keep giving everyone enemas about him
TurboNinja80@reddit
Useful idiots hate him.
_Addi-the-Hun_@reddit
Annon realises he is the baddy this whole time. Dont get me wrong, the far left is also pretty unhinged, but they arnt democratic.
xCHEAPxSHOTx@reddit
He funds groups that push divisive policies. That’s the crux of it.
JackRonan@reddit
Black Wednesday. Shorting an entire currency for personal profit is pretty fucked up.
Medical_Artichoke666@reddit
Probably the closest thing to a supervillain on the planet
foukoshima@reddit
« Hey Gemini, who is George Sorros ? »
ViscountBuggus@reddit
Didn't he like fuck Poland's currency or something
ffgg333@reddit
George Soros is a bit of a boogeyman, a bet noir, a black beast for much of the political right and some of the left, but he's also a bit of a black box because we don't really read him. So let me summarize his philosophy. In particular, let's interrogate the idea of a so-called open society — the cause Soros claims to champion, the concept he has promoted, opening up close societies, and on behalf of which he lavishes generous funding on all sorts of groups and projects now through his son.
He's a giant. He walks very small, careful steps so people don't hear him going boom, boom, boom. "If I weren't there, somebody else would be taking it away." Anyhow, I'm mainly drawing on two of Soros's works: a 97 essay, "The Capitalist Threat," and his 2000 book, "The Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism."
Now, the term open society was coined by Henry Bergson and developed by Karl Popper. Bergson came up with open society in his 1932 book, "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion." He wrote: "Never shall we pass from closed society to the open society, from city to humanity by any mere broadening out. The two things are not of the same essence. The open society is the society which is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity, a dream now and again by chosen souls."
So Bergson writes that the closed society is natural. It is to humans what the ant hill is to ants. The open society breaks with nature. It isn't a development from the closed society, a broadening of that which is already in a traditional society. It's rather something that does violence to it. It's a break.
Karl Popper developed this concept further. Just as Bergson speaks of the open society as in principle embracing all humanity, so too Popper describes it as global. He wrote: "The idea that there exist natural units like nations or linguistic or racial groups is entirely fictitious. The state must protect the individual citizen, the international organization also must ultimately protect human individuals and not states or nations. The complete renunciation of the principle of the national state, a principle which owes its popularity to the fact that it appeals to tribal instincts, and the insight that human individuals and not states or nations must be the ultimate concern of all politics has important applications. We must realize that we treat individuals fairly even if we decide to break up the power organization of an aggressive state or nation to which these individuals belong."
As in Bergson, for Popper, past identity is to be transcended and indeed rejected. It represents the opposite of where we have to go. Bergson, Popper, and as we will see, Soros, frame the open society in radically progressive terms. Open society as Soros understands it is interchangeable to a degree with what he calls reflexivity and fallibility. So these two concepts are key for Soros.
Reflexivity describes a two-way interaction between thinking and reality, subject and object, where thoughts influence the reality they describe and vice versa, creating a feedback loop. Not in some mystical way, nothing spiritual about it, just in terms of us acting in certain ways that alter reality based on what we already think about reality. There's a dual function in thinking: the cognitive function which is to understand reality as it is, and the participatory or manipulative function which is to shape reality. Neither Popper's elegant model of scientific method nor economic theory recognized reflexivity. Popper took it for granted that in an open society the cognitive function takes precedence. In a democracy, political discourse is not aimed at discovering reality — that's the cognitive function — but getting elected and staying in power. That's the manipulative function.
And then we have fallibility, and specifically what Soros calls radical fallibility, which posits that all human constructs, ideas, institutions, ideologies are inherently flawed, deficient. In history, we end up with self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating cycles. Belief creates reality but eventually collapses because it's deficient. It fails to reckon with certain elements of reality. Radical fallibility underpins the concept of an open society. Whereas closed societies think they know the truth or at least some grand truth. So far so reasonable, even if we disagree. But it gets deeper.
Soros writes: "Radical fallibility is the cornerstone not only of my view of the world but also of my personal identity and as such it is reflected in my behavior. It has guided my actions. If there is anything original in my thinking, it is this radical version of fallibility." Even though all mental constructs are flawed, some of them are fertile. "Fertile fallacies are the equivalent of bubbles in financial markets." This lies at the core of his own radical version of fallibility. His working assumption allows him to operate with fertile fallacies which he applies to the outside world and to his own activities — opening up close societies.
And Soros gets personal when describing this: "Radical fallibility is for me not only an abstract theory, but also a matter of deep personal conviction. As a fund manager, predominant feelings I operated with were uncertainty and fear. I had moments of hope, even euphoria. But those emotions made me insecure. Worrying made me feel safer. So the only genuine joy I experienced was when I discovered what it was that I had to worry about. I could never acknowledge my successes. It might stop me from worrying."
There's no spiritual contemplation, no rest in a positive assertion or identity or vision of beauty. Happiness makes the believer in radical fallibility feel unstable. Safety is in fear. This constant seeking after anxiety, after sources of worry, characterizes how many people live, but he made it into an ideology. This is similar, by the way, to the Frankfurt school thinker Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics, so-called. And like the Frankfurt school, Soros critiques Enlightenment reason. In particular, he values free expression over truth, or thinks of free speech and other rights not as a good way to get to the truth or to do objective good, but as a way to find fertile fallacies.
As he puts it: "It is high time to subject reason as construed by the Enlightenment to the same kind of critical examination that the Enlightenment inflicted on the dominant external authorities, both divine and temporal. We have now lived in the age of reason for the past 200 years, long enough to discover that reason has its limitations. We are ready to enter the age of fallibility."
And he does think his moral relativism will lead to specific principles: "The freedom of thought and expression and the freedom of choice can be directly derived from our fallibility. Since the ultimate truth is beyond our reach, we must allow people to think for themselves and make their own choices. I derive human rights from being a thinking agent."
So where does authority or the exercise of power come in? Well, it's not enough to avoid the closed society, you also have to avoid total chaos. You need to have some control. Soros writes: "Instead of a dichotomy between open and closed societies, I now envision open society occupying a precarious middle ground. Some that would impose a closed society, others that would lead to the disintegration of society." Similarly, Soros rejects both capitalism and communism. So, while "the open society, like democracy, is a way of living together, not a blueprint for solving particular social problems," so not a closed society, the concept of open society is not empty. It's not social disintegration. Indeed, he says that it now needs to be redefined to include more than just freedom from officially imposed orthodoxy.
But how can recognition of our fallibility serve as the basis of a whole social order? Can we promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth? The answer, I think, requires a profound change in the role we accord. "Historically, beliefs have served to justify specific rules of conduct. Fallibility ought to foster a different attitude. But in the ultimate analysis, a belief in the open society is a matter of choice, not of logical necessity. A belief in our fallibility is a highly sophisticated concept, much more difficult to work with than more primitive beliefs such as my country or company or family, right or wrong."
We are the enemy. Our nerve makes them nervous. Now, practically, Soros does promote creating an open society alliance, kind of like a UN 2.0, but he describes it in pretty minimalistic terms. Anyway, the thinking here is relatively basic. Break down old certainties because they are believed to be false, but avoid the complete breakdown of society whose institutions and behaviors were actually based on those old certainties that you want to break down. People are supposed to be civilized without the traditional certainties that created civilization in the first place. How? Well, if you go down this route, you end up, I think, resorting to naked power because you have no real positive values to give people other than this faith, as he calls it, this choice to just believe in fallibility and in the open society as a consequence.
ffgg333@reddit
But Soros doesn't mean that there aren't any bedrock realities, any basic facts. "The fact that our understanding is imperfect does not mean that there is no ultimate truth. On the contrary, the lack of adequate knowledge implies the need for an element of faith." He writes: "My insistence on the importance of the objective aspect of reality is a matter of personal belief. Indeed, it has a curious resemblance to a religious belief. The objective aspect of reality as I have constructed it has many of the attributes of God. My commitment to the objective aspect of reality plays the same role in my thinking as religion does in other people's. In the absence of perfect knowledge, we need beliefs. I happen to believe in harsh reality while other people believe in God."
Speculation can't change certain economic fundamentals. For example, there are certain clear material realities we cannot alter. In the early '90s, Soros made a lot of money speculating on the British pound. And he did this because he thought there were real underlying weaknesses. But his speculation made it worse. But Soros can justify that because it exposes a weakness of the system of the closed society or relatively closed society. It's a traumatic lesson for people on the truth of fallibility. This is a bit like saying getting AIDS is good because it exposes your immune system's weaknesses. But there you go.
By the way, Steve Mnuchin, Trump's Treasury Secretary, was part of Soros's team at the time. The rumors of a devaluation meant that to hold on to sterling was a gamble. Banks, pension funds, international companies told their dealers to sell the pound and then the speculators joined the fray. George Soros gambled £5 billion selling while sterling was still high but intending to buy back cheaply if the pound devalued and make a fortune. The Bundesbank was basically egging on the speculators to speculate against the weaker currencies and they took their cue actually from the Bundesbank. The Bank of England hoped it could make George Soros lose his gamble. It planned to sustain the pound's value by buying pounds at the official high premium rate. Billions of pounds of public money were about to be thrown into the defense of the pound. They decided that as the London market came in, they would intervene on a scale which would make it quite clear that they were intervening. And that's what they did. And that was when they learned that the billion that they had put aside to defend the pound up to the weekend had gone in a few minutes. Opening up close societies. Boom boom boom.
Now for Soros, the economic fundamentals and in general the basic facts of life are just material realities. Again, not transcendent ideals. Obviously, at this point, you might be thinking, isn't this all sort of basic? Well, yes. Soros or his stated beliefs are not particularly sophisticated. The pre-Enlightenment belief in God was wrong. The Enlightenment faith in reason is also wrong. But the post-modern reaction, as he understands it, goes too far. We can't know truth, but we can find fertile dynamic fictions, fallacies. There is a reality out there, but it's often altered by humans, even by their misconceptions. That's reflexivity, and it can never really be known. We can have no real certainty. Radical fallibility. Some of the facts about that reality out there are solid and we can't alter them, although we don't know which ones exactly. So, he's a materialist.
This translates into a political project. Since there is no certainty, let's break down old certainties. They aren't real. Holding on to them makes us less adaptive to reality. So, let's transgress them — a bit nihilistic. Therefore, does he fund NGOs that further open borders, cultural groups that work against traditional gender roles, and so on, as well as justifying speculating on currencies. In particular, since there's an incentive in democracy for politicians to manipulate rather than grapple with harsh truths, as Soros sees it, which he thinks Popper missed, you have to work hard to promote truth-seeking. But what is truth-seeking? For Soros, it's what his foundations do: help people seek truth by destroying old inherited ideas of truth, identity, morality, etc. So very much not truth-seeking by traditional standards.
We are fallible. We can't really come to specific truths, but we can move in that direction by destroying old untruths. That's as much connecting tissue, as much of a logical link between believing in fallibility and being politically progressive as you really find in Soros. Again, we should break things down, the old certainties, but have enough power to avoid total chaos, social disintegration. That's why from the perspective of conservatives they see their values being attacked by a pretty authoritarian seeming power structure.
Beyond that, spiritually, since trusting in some truth keeps you from seeing the fallibility of your perception, you remain always uncertain, as he says of himself, fearful. You create, you act from that place of fear rather than faith. There's no spiritual groundedness, no contemplation of stable beauties, of transcendent truths. What this does is turn the human imagination perverse. It clouds the heart, inner vision. It's interesting to look at how his ideas really do end up in nihilism and how he gets there not through Freud and Marx like the Frankfurt school, but through Popper and the ostensibly liberal tradition.
SteveMemeChamp@reddit
I love how everyone here is talking shit about George Soros without giving any reasons why, or saying some vague shit
jim9162@reddit
Bankrolled progressive DA campaigns across many cities, leading to very soft on crime prosecutors who let many violent criminals back onto the streets.
His son is now in charge of his fortune and has been a massive donor to Democrat sycophants.
Soros is literally the incarnation of evil billionaire, the OP is just an idiot.
lyfeNdDeath@reddit
He caused multiple financial emergencies in Asia that caused many many people to lose their jobs, I think he did it through something called forex shorting. He is also involved in funding separatist movements in many different countries.
No_Mercy_4_Potatoes@reddit
His criticism comes from the right cause he's a big donor of the left. That's it
Ulvsterk@reddit
Exactly because of that, they want you to believe that those things are bad, and also because he is a jewish billionare.
roktoman@reddit
When Soros speculated against the Swedish krona, the losers was the Swedish central bank and indirectly the Swedish public. To defend the currency the Riksbank raised interest rates, at the peak to over 500%. That in turn hurt Swedish households and businesses.
kman2612@reddit
The Indian government and their followers absolutely loathe him as they feel he funds the left leaning government here.
DrVagax@reddit
We all need a Jewish, rich, progressive boogieman, Anon.
srnx@reddit
Damn, Anon discovers life outside their bubble
Im proud of you Anon
Juiceinmyoven@reddit
You left out the part that he ruins entire economies of countries.
Karvalics@reddit
People really defend this soulless piece of shit hahaha
3yearsonrock@reddit
Fake: OP already knows why George Soros is hated. Gay: OP posts bait because they long for any kind of human interaction
Futanari-Farmer@reddit
I wouldn't call him evil or benevolent, from what I've seen dude lives for chaos.
CrazyElk123@reddit
Insider trading though
THEPIGWHODIDIT@reddit
The anti-Soros narrative also came from Orban who after being supported by him turned against him to help him get re-elected? Soros became the poster child of what Hungary then was perceived to be fighting against, and got picked up by the American right to undermine the EU generally. This overlaps with Russia's general interests too, so money can be seen infiltrating from all these entities.
All of this amplified the anti-Soros narrative. Personally I think Soros is an exemplary billionaire and demonstrates morality in a group that is otherwise devoid of it.
ionevenobro@reddit
sounds like a cool guy
RichyGamo@reddit
Anon is at the very beginning of his political journey, be careful with anon.