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Forbes | Communism Is The Reason For The Trade Deficit With China Forbes What a stunning turn of events over the last generation. Only in 1989, the year of the fateful events in Tiananmen Square, China was irrelevant in the world economy. The battered and brutalized giant had been growing, to be sure, since the agricultural ... |
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Communism Is The Reason For The Trade Deficit With China - Forbes
Dylan is a budding YouTuber who believes communism could save the United States.
Its 2017 and the communist revolution is being spearheaded online by a 10-year-old vegetarian with a preference for red shirts and a lot to say. If you frequent Reddit, Dylan, or Sceneable as hes known on YouTube, might have come into your sphere last week after his video, We Need Communism, climbed to the top of the socialism subreddit declaring him the smollest comrade.
If you havent yet been introduced to Dylan, well then, you are in for a treat. Select All caught up with the fourth grader via phone (with his dad also on the line) to discuss his political opinions, newfound viral fame, and his thoughts on President Trump.
Lets start by talking a bit about your channel, Dylan. How long have you been on YouTube? Well, I first uploaded my first video in March of 2015, but my original channel actually started out because there was a comment I wanted to leave. My channel was actually made in 2013.
What was the comment you wanted to leave that got you to join YouTube? I forget.
Then two years later you decided to start posting your own videos. What was the first video you uploaded?Um, well it was about a topic I cant I dont even have the energy or the will to talk about okay, so I used to like Pokmon. Im not interested in it anymore, and it was a video about that.
So youre totally over Pokmon now? I guess you probably didnt play Pokmon Go last summer then. No, that came out in 2016, and my video was in 2015.
You were way over Pokmon at that point.Oh, definitely. Definitely.
Ive watched lots of your videos, and I saw one where you talk about changing the name of your channel to Sceneable. Can you tell me about why you decided to change the name? I dont know. I just liked it better.
In the video, you talked a little bit about how you used to be emo, but now youre more scene. Can you explain what that means? I dont want to talk about that. I just dont want to.
Okay, no worries. How do you pick your video topics? A lot of times it just comes from inspiration in me. Fear, rage, disgust a lot of it is triggered by emotions.
So one of your big topics and obviously how a lot of people, myself included, have found your videos via Reddit is communism. What sparked your interest in communism? One day, I heard about it and so I found out more about it. I found out about its history of being, um it started when I first heard about communism and the idea of nations sharing the wealth. Oftentimes, schools just spread this propaganda about it being a bad thing, and say you shouldnt question it and you shouldnt think about the fact that it brings money to people who need it; you should just go along with the fact that its inherently evil, even though it would stop the problem of having so many poor people.
So thats what you like most about communism? The idea that wealth would be shared with poorer people? Yeah. Exactly. You got it in just one sentence.
But is there anything about communism that concerns you?Well, in the first video about communism I ever made, I said that I really dont like people like Joseph Stalin and or Mikhail Gorbachev however you say his name. People like that are people I could not support ever, which is why socialism is probably better than communism Im realizing.
Thats tricky. Somebody always has to lead and be at the top. Right. Leaders can definitely corrupt an idea. I mean, come one, lets think about Trump.
What do you think of President Trump? Um, how do I put this nicely [shouts into the phone] HES A BIG, FAT JOKE.
Thats putting it nicely, I guess. What concerns you the most about Trump? Starvation, stereotypes, war, but theyre just little problems.
You talk a lot about different forms of government, youve got some strong opinions of Trump, is politics something you could see yourself getting involved in as an adult? Yeah.
If you were president, what would be the first thing youd do? Okay, um, how about first of all, Id change capitalism to communism in a nanosecond. Actually, socialism. Not communism. Then Id move the troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Sounds like youve given this some thought.Definitely.
Youve got almost 20,000 followers on YouTube, and youve been posting videos for years, so Im guessing youve faced a fair number of trolls. I have found so many people who dont like me. Who just cannot believe me. A lot of them are people who completely hate communism with either very little facts or no facts. They call it stealing. If stealing and sharing were the same thing, theyd probably be the same word. I think people need to remember definitions are important.
Do you get a lot of positive feedback too? Definitely. I think this was on my video criticizing how people say God can be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient at the same time, which is one of my most popular videos. I forget the users name who left this comment, but he said, and I quote, This kid needs to be the president of every country.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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A Conversation With YouTube's Favorite 10-Year-Old Communist Vlogger - New York Magazine
"We're driving through Seattle right now. It's like an episode of Frasier," G.L. Jaguar says to me shortly after picking up the phone. He and his bandmates in Priests are bundled up in a van, embarking on a cross-country tour to promote their astonishing new album, Nothing Feels Natural. It's a playful and furious album one that feels perfectly suited to soundtrack the increasingly surreal and ominous times that we're living in right now.
Emerging from the D.C. punk underground, Priests have been turning heads for years with their fiery live sounds and chaotic, spirited records. Initially playing with explosive no-wave fury, they've evolved into a tightly coiled unit. On the mic, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer sounds like the long-lost love child of Poly Styrene and Mark E. Smith: Language just seems to pour out of her in manic, poetic fragments. Jaguar's guitar sputters and roars like a drowning surf rock band, and the rhythm section of Taylor Mulitiz's bass lines and Daniele Daniele's drumbeats holds it all together beautifully.
Priests also run their own record label, Sister Polygon. Talking with the quartet as they drove through Frasier Crane's hood, I asked them about the influences behind their new record and the struggles that can come from trying to run your own record label while staying true to your D.I.Y. roots.
New Times: How's the tour been so far?
Katie Alice Greer:It's nice to see so many people coming outwe haven't done a full U.S. tour since 2014. It's very exciting to play in all these cities that we haven't been to in years.
Has it been a challenge playing these new songs live as a four-piece band? You've incorporated a lot of new instruments and sonic touches on the album, like saxophones and pianos.
G.L. Jaguar: We don't have the additional instrumentation when we do it live... there's different ways that the songs play out in a live setting, like through pedals. There are definitely things we did on this record that we can't do live
Greer: This is the first time we've put out a release where we can actually play all the songs live because the basic structure was written by the four of us on our primary instruments. So it was very easy to transpose that into a live setting.
Daniele Daniele:About a month ago, we played a show at home. All the style of musicians who are on the album are DC musicians. So for that we got to have two of our friends come onstage and play those songs with us, songs that they had helped us record and play on. It was a blast.
I read a feature that SPIN recently did on Priests, and it'smentioned in there that Portishead's Thirdwas a big sonic reference point for Nothing Feels Natural. I was surprised by that, because I wouldn't have guessed at all from listening to the album that there was a Portishead influence on it. In what way did you draw inspiration from Third?
Jaguar:Since we tour so much, we're always listening to music in the van. Thirdis an album I really like to put on when I drive. It's a really good, almost-krautrock record where it's constantly flowing. The thing to me that was really appealing, from a sonics perspective, is that it had a lot of these very lo-fi raucous elements, but it was combined with big production values. It was a really good mix of the two. It helped us find a way to bridge our older material with the newer sound: to mix lo-fi rockin' sounds and fill it all out more with synthesizers, percussion, cello, and saxophones. So in that respect, that's how we draw from it sonically.
Speaking of road music, what are you listening to for this tour?
Daniele:As you called, we were just listening to Parliament.
Jaguar: The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, specifically.
That leads me to my next question. Katie, in "Appropriate," there's this line, "Is George Clinton the kinda story your adventure's looking for?" I was wondering what the meaning of that was?
Greer:That song is about cultural appropriation. What I meant with that line is is George Clinton's story really your story, or is it his story and it's something that you're trying on? If you're an artist who's relatively more privileged than someone else, you have access to all these different influences. It's important to be mindful of how you're bringing in your influences. I wrote that song almost as a dialogue between two people; the line before it is someone talking about maggots and bugs. One of my favorite records is [Funkadelic's] Maggot Brain, so it's kind of a nod to the monologue at the beginning of that song.
Considering your band's political beliefs and convictions, I was wondering how that has an impact on how you run your own record label.
Greer: It's important for us to own the means of production whenever possible. It's not always possible, but it feels good to us to have this little world for our music and our friends' music.
Daniele:It's really important to us to not have anyone do any work for free for us. And that goes for the band and the label. The downside to that is we're often paying to play, paying to put out sometimes we end up hitting ourselves financially cause we're trying to live up to that ethos. It's interesting because we want to practice ethos, but we're an island in a sea of capitalism in that way. ... We were in Vancouver last night, and we were talking about the real estate market there. There's all these empty apartments in Vancouverbecause in China you can't keep more than a certain amount of money in your bank account because it can be seized by the government. So all these people don't want to keep money in their accounts, so they just dump it in properties in Vancouver that they're not going to use. They just want to hold their money that way. And I was just like, wow, because China is a communist country essentially I'm not trying to be like "woo China" but I am "woo socialism" and different forms of economy. People are always like, "See? Communism doesn't work. Look at China, look at...," and that's not really fair, because the reason that fucked-up dynamic is happening is because it's one place within a larger capitalistic world economy. I'm not trying to endorse the Chinese economy because it's really fucked-up in a lot of ways. ... I just often feel that way with our record label and with how we run our band, that we're trying to live out certain ideologies but we keep butting our heads up against thisfucked-up system.
Priests will be performing with Olivia Neutron-John and Nanami Ozone at Valley Bar in Phoenix on Thursday, February 23.
Read more from the original source:
Priests Drummer Compares Running a Record Label to Chinese ... - Phoenix New Times
Vox | Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Discovers The Perfect Weight Loss Diet Forbes Is there nothing that that Bolivarian socialism cannot achieve? That anti-economic brainchild of the Chavistas which is so enriching the people of Venezuela has, at various times, managed to make the country run out of beer, Coca Cola and Big Macs--one ... Venezuela's economic crisis is so dire that most people have lost an average of 19 pounds |
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Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - Venezuela Discovers The Perfect Weight Loss Diet - Forbes
When the former administration expressed its desire for greater accessibility to health care, it was condemned as socialism. When it proposed regulations to rein in profiteering in financial institutions, again, these were railed against as socialism. There are many other examples. Yet no one admits that any and all corporate protections are a form of socialism--an intervention by a government designed to aid proponents of free enterprise.
So it really isn't free enterprise. Without corporate socialism, energy companies would ultimately have to contend with competition. Without corporate socialism, only extremely large farms would be able to withstand the ebb and flow of markets and the environment. Without corporate socialism, certain industries would not be propped up while others are left to flounder and fail.
It isn't really the evils of socialism that is at issue, is it? It's who a legislative body chooses to enrich. Protecting jobs is important. Protecting contributors to an economy is important.
But when a legislature opts to intervene on behalf of a company or an industry, with no guarantee of any quantity of jobs, or contributions to the common good, or agreements to the preservation of a natural environment, we are left to believe that the primary function is simply to enrich those who derive the greatest profit from these enterprises, and everyone else be damned.
The average citizen of this state gains little security from these interventions. The companies are still free to reduce payrolls, damage the environment, and behave in every manner contrary to the public good. And to ignore the validity of other perspectives, especially for long-term effect, is fundamentally dishonest.
Unrue lives in Fargo.
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Letter: Proposed moratorium on wind development is a form of socialism - INFORUM