Objection

Forgive me for expecting an extremely basic level of political literacy.

No, all I have to ask is how in practice they are functioning differently.

How is a penguin different from Neptune? Clearly the assumption should be that they're the same until proven otherwise. This is how conversations work.

Lol no we haven't. We have not even begun a serious discussion about it.

To establish that they are at all similar, you need to establish the similarities between Trump's actions and Maoism, beyond, "They both made plans to industrialize" which is true of countless countries around the world that had nothing to do with Maoism. As I said, by your standard, Emperor Meiji would be a Maoist, which is absurd.

Since you have not, and refuse to do this, then obviously you have no real basis for making that claim. They are so different that it's utterly bizarre that anyone would ever compare the two.

On the one hand, someone who came to power via a revolution in a poor and undeveloped country with the support of landless agricultural workers who then redistributed land from the landlords to the peasants and then moved to develop the economy. On the other hand, a billionaire landlord who came to power in a rich developed country through a bourgeois election with the support of the wealthy who has, rather than giving poor agricultural workers their own farms, has been deporting them en masse to foreign prisons.

They are opposites in virtually every respect and the only similarities you've found are entirely superficial or are true of virtually everyone. This comparison is baseless, ignorant nonsense, and anyone making it has zero understanding of anything.

So when you said, "I’m not trying to be mean but how in practice is this substantially different than Maoism?" you weren't implying that Trump is a Maoist?

Ok so we're agreed then that Trump isn't a Maoist.

So you’re going to be rude instead of making a point?

I am making the point. The point is that you can't just take a handful of things Mao did, that tons of other people have also done, and say that anyone who does those things is a "Maoist." Whether it's "making a plan to promote industrialization with government involvement" or "writing words."

Virtually every country that went through a period of industrialization would be "Maoist" by this standard.

I didn’t define anything dipshit

Yeah and that's part of the problem. Because you have no understanding of what the label you're using actually means.

I asked how they were different not the same

The onus is on you to demonstrate how they're similar. It's like if someone said, "In what way is a raven different from a writing desk?" They're so different that it's virtually impossible to convince of any line of thought that would see them as similar.

You wrote down words, which is something Mao did too. Are you doing Maoism?

You're absolutely right. Any country that makes long term plans, seeks to develop it's industrial base, and "has socialist aspects" (which I assume mean, "the government does stuff") is Maoist.

Emperor Meiji was a Maoist.

This is a very reasonable and coherent worldview. You've definitely read plenty of theory to know that one of the core tenets of Maoism is "making plans."

No, it is not. "The government doing stuff" (including seizing property) is not communism. Lots of governments seize property for all sorts of reasons. Another example, when the US was building the transcontinental rail system, there were times when it seized land that was in the path of the planned railway and gave it to the rail companies. If that made a person or system communist, then I don't think I could name a single non-communist country in all of history.

A communist system can mean either a classless, stateless, moneyless society, the ideal that communists pursue, or it can mean a system run by communists in practice, since most communists would say that such a system cannot be implemented overnight. There is no universal, standard set of policies that makes a system communist, because communists (at least, Marxist-Leninists) believe that policies should be developed based on an analysis of a country's specific material conditions.

Trump is not seizing parts of businesses because he's applying some kind of Marxist analysis to conclude that that's the best way to advance the interests of the proletariat. He's just taking shit because he wants it and nobody can stop him. At that point, it's like pointing at two wild animals fighting over a kill and calling them communists.

Communists may be known for nationalizing corporations but that does not mean that anyone who nationalizes a corporation is automatically a communist.

A king in medieval times faces an economic crisis, blames and expels the Jews and seizes all their assets (as was their typical, go-to response).

Is that communism, in your eyes? The government is seizing parts of businesses, after all.

The thing to understand about Christianity is that it was originally a reaction against the Roman empire and then got co-opted and integrated into it. As a result, ever since like the 4th century Christianity has been about basically the opposite of what Jesus talked about. It turns out all that stuff about turning the other cheek stops being relevant if the emperor has his soldiers paint crosses on their shields while they're out conquering and enslaving the Gauls. Of course, you can keep all the mythological stuff, who cares, but anything relevant to politics or the material world mysteriously seemed to reverse once they entered the halls of power.

The carrot of being accepted into the empire was matched with the stick that if you didn't go along with the imperial-approved form of Christianity you'd be burned at the stake as a heretic. Any sects still clinging to anti-imperial sentiment get hunted down and exterminated just like when they were being fed to lions, but it's the Christians doing it to each other now, so you don't even have to get your own hands dirty. This approach worked way better at suppressing dissent than just trying to ban Christianity altogether.

Of course, a lot has changed over the centuries. And originally it wasn't perfect or anything either. But imo, it was when Rome Christianized that Christianity Romanized, and ever since its real values have had more to do with Rome than with Jesus. The meme's, "moneyless, classless, stateless" ideal of heaven is a relic of the original teachings that gets shunted off to the purely mythological side, where it not only doesn't matter, but also occupies a place in their brain that could have otherwise been sympathetic to making good things happen in the material world. That's already resolved, there's no need to worry about it, there'll be pie in sky when you die.

Poor guy was probably just born on 1/4/1988 and his real name is just Ayra N Soldier. People these days just call everybody a Nazi smh /s

My go to example is Bin Laden. Although to be fair Bin Laden probably killed fewer people and Luigi didn't have to jeopardize vaccine outreach programs in developing countries to get his target.