It is not reasonable. It is the epitome of red scare paranoia. You are suggesting a ridiculous conspiracy is taking place with absolutely no evidence to support it.

So I went over there to try to hear their side of the story. Some of them are dicks, but in fairness you can barely go 5 comments in without seeing someone pop up tell them how they’re all terrible people

They’re into this weird dialectical idea - everything is in conflict with an opposing force, and they see the workers and landlords as in conflict. (I think it’s ridiculous because the universe doesn’t do things in twos, it does them in ones and many - there’s just people in a crappy system, they’re not opposed to us, they use us as the playing board for their little dominance games against each other)

But the centralization thing is based around a very optimistic “we need to come together and fix our world, and once we do we’ll figure out the step after communism”, not the authoritarian angle people are saying.

They didn’t deny what’s happening in China (which btw, is 100% a capitalistic country - it’s a form of regulated capitalism called “little dragons”, they’re authoritarian, but that’s a quality of their government system, not of their economic system), and they didn’t come to the defense of Mao or Stalin

Their main argument was that the US doesn’t actually care, and is exaggerating the issue with propaganda, which is very fair - every government has done terrible things, and the US is most definitely no exception.

Whataboutism isn’t an argument, but they didn’t push it past explaining why people are saying they’re denying what’s going on over there

When I gave my view that centralization is the great evil, they didn’t really have an answer except dielectrics… This is the part that made me skeptical of the claims against them (which I tried to find, but the source everyone is citing is a guy coming back and saying he changed his mind and couldn’t in good faith separate the artist from the art, and saying the posts were deleted and was pretty vague about what exactly he saw)

Organizations past the scale where the people making decisions don’t know each other have an alignment problem - they’re mostly a flawed meritocracy forced to promote based on metrics. In capitalism, that means there’s a perverse incentive to constantly, slowly push the boundaries of what is acceptable in the course of profit. No one has to be evil for it to do horrible things, humans base their morality off those around them “if I don’t do it, then someone else will”.

I really like the term malloc, the demon of game theory - once anyone starts doing something that benefits them but damages everyone, then everyone needs to do the same just to maintain balance

In a central bureaucracy proposed by Lenin, you can most efficiently distribute resources and better ensure sustainability. But you also introduce a perverse incentive - without capital as the metric, you have the effectiveness with which you serve a need - so the selection pressure is to stretch the truth to the breaking point.

And it’s not like people stop competing, it’s just not about money, it’s about positions of power. It’s a recipe for corruption, and they have no answer to why this same bad design would work if we do it again

Their ideas are a lot like Lenin’s - they have a nice goal and a rosy picture of the future, no practical ideas how to get there except “workers unite”.

BTW, if you read the community manifesto it says nothing about government - it does get very, very weird halfway through. He starts talking about communal possession of women, which is where Marx goes of the deep end

Me too…