This is OT but I wanted to ask before: what does the "Jacobin" in Jacobin Mag refer to? Presumably not the more genocidal fraction of the French Revolution which was my first guess?
It's become more of a broad term in politics that was at first mostly critical (implying much the same of what you're saying here) before being later adopted by the people who see themselves as _very_ left.
For more info, here is a great writeup by Alex Payne on why he made a large donation to Jacobin and joined their board: https://al3x.net/2015/03/03/jacobin.html
> Democratic socialist politics are my politics. I’m a socialist because I want to live in a just society. More than that, I want to live in a survivable society. The form of capitalism we live under does not present a viable future ecologically, economically, or socially. It is a system designed for the creation and preservation of capital, not human life. I’m a socialist because I believe that the wealth of society can best be harnessed through cooperation, not competition.
And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front. Sure, blame us for the Holodomor and the "Great Leap Forward" (and other similar artificial famines, disease outbreaks, etc caused by bad state-socialist policy), but don't act like your hands are clean when you support a system that kills, last I remember, 49,000 people each year simply by artificially refusing to treat their diseases, and kills further millions in its endless-yet-pointless foreign wars.
I fully support having a genuine contest of ideologies to see who can kill fewer people and save more lives, with greater health and happiness! But that means we have to admit, in the first place, that capitalism kills, which is more honesty than we get out of most people in Western societies today.
> And moreover, people who support capitalism don't get an automatic right to label socialists as "murderous" or "genocidal" simply because our revolutions kill people up front.
Um... that is exactly why we call them murderous. Because they killed people. A lot of them. In cold blood.
You mean, when capitalism isn't bringing unprecedented amounts of people out of abject poverty? (eg, cutting world poverty in half in the past 20 years)
Socialism is great, until you read a history book or look at its actual implementation. And no, don't bring up northern EU states that actually depend on quite free market capitalism to finance it (as well as unrealistic monocultures that are unrealistic for the USA, and lead to morally reprehensible immigration restrictions to keep the systems from being overwhelmed)
If it was written somewhere that people's stated political ideologies are required to be comforting to others, I could have sued Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan for millions.
Ah, well that's just bad phrasing. It's not "settling" because we'd prefer to kill more people, it's "settling" because we want to avoid counter-revolutions later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics)