This is how democracy dies - centralized control of EVERYTHING, even the election process.

@West

What makes you think America is #communist?

@West someone has no idea what the definition of #communist and #capitalist is

@ReggieHere I'm NOT saying that America IS communist, I'm saying that the "wolf in sheep's clothing" Donald #Trump (who has always been a New York liberal from birth and has only been pretending in the past two decades to be a "conservative"), wants to MAKE it a communist, totalitarian state, where he is the king and control/decide everything directly himself wherever possible.

@captainrob Yes, and I believe that's Mr. #Trump

@West you really don't understand. I'm sorry, you and your family must have to deal with a lot. My condolences. And best wishes to you.

@captainrob troll harder please! I don't even feel slightly agitated yet! =D Come on, you can do better than that I'm sure!

@West

You're referring to fascism rather than communism. Fascism is the combination of private ownership of government and authoritarian/totalitarian control.

Communist states might be totalitarian and authoritarian, but they are run bottom-up (literally the commune) rather than top down as the US is. Private industry (ie big corporates like Google or Lockheed) would be nationalised under communism, and Kings would be deposed in short time.

@ReggieHere oh I get what you're saying on a theoretical/ideal world scenario. I spent 3 of my 5 years in college studying #philosophy (going for a dual major, end up cutting the philosophy major because it made way less money than computer science), I know all about it.

But when it gets to the real world with real people, it falls apart fairly quickly.

Or are you suggesting that Xi Jinping is NOT running a totalitarian state? If so, I'd like to learn about the other parties that have a legitimate chance of vying for power in that country.

There seems to be an undercurrent in human history of a large portion of our population DESIRING to be controlled, just like Loki described in the first #Avengers movie. Certainly there are people like that brave old man in that movie that spoke up against him that will fight such things. I like to think that America's founding fathers were similar people to that old man. That's how we got America to begin with.

But, as we've seen in America in the past decade, there actually IS that undercurrent of, for the lack of a better word, "simps" that simply want to kowtow to a "benevolent dictator". Unfortunately, their choice of dictator is anything BUT benevolent.

Which is why we should be fighting this consolidation of control even HARDER. Our systems should BE decentralized, bottom-up, as you describe.

But, as we've seen, aside from small "communes", communism itself doesn't scale well. When the theory meets with real humans, it inevitably ends up a totalitarian state. We've seen it time and again.

Unless, that is, you can point me to a current communist state that is NOT totalitarian?