This is a good and important question because people often confuse the two, thinking that Sweden, for example, must be a socialist country because it has strong welfare protections.

The welfare state arose in capitalist countries to preclude the appearance of socialist sentiments in the population. If life is good, if people know they will get help in times of need, why want a complete reformatting of society and call for the nationalization of everything?

A simple method of knowing if a society is socialist is to look at who owns your favorite restaurant, store, café, or car wash. Are they owned by the government? If all of what we know as “businesses” are owned by the government, that’s socialism. If not, it’s capitalism. Many capitalist countries have very strong welfare protections because they can afford them. Socialist countries often have no real welfare protections because their economic system doesn’t generate enough of a surplus to pay for them.

The number one difference between socialism and capitalism is the ownership of the means of production. In socialism, you can still have your private property but you are barred from using it to generate profit. Once your private property becomes a means of generating profit, that’s no longer allowed. For example, you can own a car but you can’t buy a fleet of cars and start a taxi service. There are some small areas for individual entrepreneurship in socialist countries that are taxed to the gill and regulated severely. But individual entrepreneurs can’t hire other people because that’s considered exploitation.

The difference between socialism and communism is that communism is the next stage. The state dies off and the means of production are owned collectively by the people. The issue of exploitation doesn’t arise because there no longer is any money, nobody is forced to work, everybody who does work does it completely voluntarily and for no additional consideration compared to those who choose not to work. Yes, it’s a fantasy, it never happened, it never will happen, but that’s the theory.

I always insist that we use terminology correctly because once we start slipping, we get ourselves mega confused and achieve nothing. Clearly, Sweden and the USSR have nothing in common. So how can we call them both socialist? All this does is obscure the terribly and unavoidably genocidal nature of socialism. Socialism always ends up oppressing and murdering people. It’s baked into the design. It goes completely against human nature. Once we start saying that Sweden is “also socialism”, we have not only sinned against the truth but whitewashed what socialism actually is.

“Ukraine has received only 10% of the aid package approved by the U.S. Congress in 2024,” Zelensky said.

https://x.com/KyivPost/status/1851603821266456755?t=Lp-Z2lYoAc45lSYa80lI6w&s=19

This has been a constant throughout the war. The Congress votes for aid, but the WH simply doesn’t send it. Remember all the bleating about how it was Republicans in Congress who were preventing aid from passing? Well, it was passed months and months ago but the WH is simply refusing to follow what the Congress mandated. No matter how you feel about foreign aid, this is an issue of the executive branch arrogating to itself the powers of the legislature. It’s exactly how it was during Obama.

We keep hearing about the threats to our democracy. And here’s the executive branch refusing to execute what the legislature mandated. What kind of a democracy is it? Why even have different branches of power?

In the same talk, Zelensky told about the confidential information he provided to the WH that was immediately leaked to NYTimes.

The Biden-Harris administration has been absolutely awful to Ukraine. It would be much better to say honestly, “Sorry, no aid, not our problem, figure it out yourselves, bye.” But to promise aid, use it to cudgel your domestic opponents, create false hopes, and then quietly do the exact opposite is immoral and low.

I’m just so annoyed by people who tell me I should vote for Harris because of Ukraine. It’s been almost three years. There are daily air raides. Daily deaths. And the Biden-Harris administration is gaslighting, betraying, lying, and offering succor to the enemy.

It’s us, Americans, that the WH is gaslighting and betraying, too. We are told absolute lies by them about Ukraine, as about everything else. They are spitting into the soul of every American who trusted them on this issue.

Kamala: It is in the White House that the work is going to get done and I want to help people visualize the place.

https://x.com/FreeBeacon/status/1851399205975142620?t=1G8bc8GIBDLaahlxsprmlA&s=19

Yes, we need a lot of help visualizing the White House. A lot of help.

In my TV show on Saturday I said that Kamala Harris reminds me of Soviet Komsomol leaders. But not the high-ranking ones because those were brilliant dudes. Manipulative, charismatic. Total bastards but very smart.

Harris, on the other hand, is like a low-level Komsomol apparatchik. They would recite slogans at you for hours. Glassy-eyed, incapable of even the most basic thought processes. Total lemmings but vicious.

On the next day after the show, I got a call from this author who said, “You are too young to have been in the Komsomol but you are spot-on. How did you know?”

I am too young but my father told me a lot. In Obama, we had the higher-level Komsomol leader. Now we have descended to a lower-level one.

From Bill Ackman:

The most powerful moment for me was that I truly believed that Trump had said the neo-nazis and the white nationalists were among the ‘very fine people’ who were protesting. It takes about two minutes to actually watch what he said and realize that he said precisely the opposite. He said I’m not talking about the neo-nazis and the white nationalists when he said, ‘very fine people.’

https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1851312944627531860?t=rG3OlGHRZ-7suWoe3D5vlw&s=19

I had the same reaction. The extent of the lie was so overwhelming that I had to find out what else was untrue.

Being bullied implies powerlessness and victimhood. If you actively seek an environment where you believe you will be bullied, you are a masochist. If you feel bullied here on the blog, you can easily and immediately remedy the situation by going away.

I don’t feel kindly towards imaginary victimhood.

So what really happened is that this austere religious scholar 23-year-old shooter yelled “Allahu Akbar” and shot a Jewish man walking to a synagogue in Chicago. EMTs and police came and he started shooting at them. Police returned fire. He was wounded.

Not that you would figure any of this out from the headline.

There are no words strong enough for this terrible, terrible journalism we get.

I have been discovered as a new conservative pundit of the post-Soviet media space, and it’s really cute. Everybody is interested in my trajectory and why I am the way I am. I spent hours on the phone today, talking about it all. I’ll be invited as one of those people who provide all-day coverage on election day. Which means I’m a real pundit. These are all people I see on TV, and now I’m one of them, and it will never be not funny.

I made one condition which is that there won’t be any members of the Russian opposition anywhere in my vicinity but I was assured that they are uniformly despised so I’m safe.

My vocal cords are going to give up any moment now because I also taught two classes today.

I read the article to discover what the racist rhetoric was. All I found were jokes about Puerto Rico (which can’t be racist because Puerto Rican is not a race), usage of the words “watermelon” and “pimp” (which are common usage and also can’t be racist “) and the statement “America for Americans” (which definitely can’t be racist because 41 million of Americans are black).

I would be voting for Trump if he hadn’t inflicted Vance on us. Vance is the standard “America bad” lefty. People who don’t recognize this framework for what it is simply haven’t spent as much time as I have on the far left.

It’s gotten to the point where it’s fine on the right to question the US contribution to the Allied victory in WWII. All of our greatest achievements are being shat on because leftism won. It won so big, the right is slavishly imitating it.

In four years, we will have two lefty “America bad” candidates running against each other, and that’s when it will really become gloomy.

Instead of trying to generate new ideas, American conservatives often hoover up after the Left. They pick up some deeply embarrassing leftist shibboleth and make it proudly their own.

One example is the notorious “Democrats are the real racists.” The underlying idea is that Americans are engulfed in racism and it’s our duty to explain everything that ails our society through that structural racism.

Another example is “crowds of black people are unfairly incarcerated and we need to release them ASAP.” Enter Donald Trump with his Kim Kardashian plan to do just that.

Yet another example is “America is a source of bad in the world, starting unnecessary wars and opposing dictators whom we need to worship precisely because of how much they despise America.” Enter JD Vance with his paeans to the poor, well-meaning Russia, grievously misunderstood by evil Americans.

Yet another example is the belief that the American institutions – the envy and wonder of the world – are inherently evil and need to be ditched in favor of a dictatorial model. It was the Left’s favorite pastime to moan about “the Deep State.” Now we have Glen Greenwald who lives in some third-world craphole lecturing us on how our institutions are evil.

In 1918 Lenin ordered that a concentration camp for university professors be created and 40 be executed at random. Now we are hearing from the right that we should just disband the US academia – the envy and wonder of the world – because we are too lazy and stupid to offer any ideas that would displace the bad ones that have taken hold there. But what are our ideas? What do we have except for the regurgitated slogans of the left?

I have one such idea – the nation-state. But it’s hard, it takes a lot of work, it’s not a magic pill. Who needs all that? It’s so much easier, instead, to hoover up somebody else’s trash and present it as our own, original thinking when it’s nothing of the kind.