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Perhaps this is a good example of observer bias.
If the observer is 6'8" tall and thinks this is slightly taller than average, then almost everyone else will be in his opinion abnormally short. He may be worried something is wrong with these people, perhaps they had poor nutrition as children, or were poisoned, after all how could they be so short compared to his only slightly taller than average height. If the observer is extremely far left, and thinks he is only slightly left of center, then almost everyone else will be in his opinion, right wingers and right wingers will be far right wingers. I'll love to comment more but I have to go to my Bund meeting. |
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Perhaps it's the oversimplification of what center really means that has everyone confused. Quote:
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will, you're a civil libertarian, but not a libertarian. A socialist can't recognize the sort of strong economic and property rights that libertarians do and still be a socialist.
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Spoil sport. |
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I thought I smelt something awry...
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Will's a kipper, not a fryer.
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nice red herring there, roachboy. gut it, scale it, put some salt on the fillets, grill them and you'll have something tasty.
actually, in Amsterdam they sell it raw at street kiosks, with chopped onions. Yum. |
i thought it was nice too.
but truth be told, it reproduced as a much bigger fish than i imagined. a reverse fish story. so it's kinda like following with alot of exclamation points!!! a point that didn't need them!!! anyway: you gots to get your head out of american paranoia about the old left. socialists (democratic socialists, french socialists etc.) aren't terribly radical politically, particularly not in terms of property claims/rights. they just work with a different conception of capitalism--a (to my mind) sane(r) one that assumes that markets left to themselves cannot be justified on utilitarian grounds and that the state should adjust for these effects. some of these adjustments involve wealth transfers---but these are matters of political consent and the arguments for them are utilitarian as well. there's a debate to be had about this--an old school one---but it's about how actual markets function and whether it makes sense for their long-term functioning that the social system be maintained. to turn it onto "respect for property rights" is the red herring. you must have been arguing on libertarian grounds---arthur darby nock and all that---but those grounds are at best eccentric. aside: it's a tiresome quirk of tfpolitics that anyone can say just anything about words like socialism. over and over and over it happens. i call it the ustwo effect, when i bother to call it anything. |
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As for socialists being property disrespecters? As rb said, we're not all extremists. We simply believe in economic equality of a certain degree. |
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Libertarian ideals are not compatible with western democratic socialism. Quote:
Libertarianism, not yours. |
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1) Education and study 2) Business Each person would have a vocation and an area of study, be it scientific, artistic, historical, philosophical (etc...). The hierarchy of labor would be similar to council communism, or a worker's democracy, and the educational hierarchy would be determined by levels of expertise. Labor would assist study and study would assist labor. I can't tell you what this system is called, because it's my last name. Do you see any redistribution of goods there? Edit: Oh, and it's also a work in progress. |
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your paraphrase doesn't capture it, ustwo. |
will, a form of what you described did actually exist in history. It was tribalism. You're apparently advocating a non-blood-based variant of tribalism. The big difference is that your'e positing its existence without hierarchy. But the basic community you're advocating is similar to a tribe. Good luck.
Roachboy, please don't attribute paranoia to my understanding of socialism; I'm not attributing any nonpositive attributes to your view of free market capitalism. Paranoia has nothing to do with it; I just don't understand socialism as anything other than the preference to use government to regulate economic behavior and plan economic activity, rhetorically supported by platitudes about the masses and equality. It's a preference for centralization and uniformity, backed by government power (i.e., from my point of view, coercion). It can be used with a heavy hand or not; it can be benevolent (and in most Western countries it is); but there is no denying it necessarily involves restriction of the economic liberties of its citizens, and replacing them with mandates from above, nor is there denying that it involves some serious circumscription of property rights. If you believe, as I do, that humans should be free to follow their individual muses, so long as it does not harm others, then that should logically include their economic muses. Pecunia non olet. |
loquitor: again if i strip away the libertarian eccentricites that shape your rhetoric, i can see that we're maybe not so far apart--but why should i have to do that if the idea is to have a debate or discussion? over and over it comes to the same thing--a little fight over who gets to control the rhetoric. we can agree that socialism departs from an understanding of capitalist markets--and maybe even that this understanding derives from the history of actual markets as opposed to their self-regulating floating-all-boats metaphysical duplicates (see? there it is already.) more neutrally--we have no agreement about which capitalism to look at in these debates---i prefer looking at historical capitalism, you know, the stuff that happens and that happened in the 3-d world---i dont know if you do--from your arguments here it doesn't sound like that.
if there is no agreement about what is even meant by capitalism--in that i talk about historical forms and you talk about "self-regulating markets" or whatever---but in general, you seem to like ideal-types--then there is no argument, there's just a differend. i say that most democratic socialist arguments about wealth redistribution follow from the way they see markets working historically and the implications of this for the social context they operate in---you don't acknowledge the premise and then repeat stuff about "violation" or "circumscription" of property rights. this is metaphysics. but even in mideval metaphysics, debate was possible because there would be agreement that there is a debate because people would be talking about the same thing. term switching--which is all that is happening here--i go one way, you another--isn't debate. we keep doing this too. it isn't interesting--and it cant be much more interesting for you. so what are we talking about? i am not interested in fictions like hayek's markets--simply because in hayek's work THEY'RE FICTIONS. so if you want to talk about socialism==or democratic socialism---you have to abandon talking in terms of fictions as your point of departure. or we can just do something else. the world is big, this is small. |
Liq, what I described IS a form of socialism. Do you see centralization? Do you see government? Did you see anything about economic liberties?
Of course not. |
no, I don't see that as socialism at all. I understand you call it socialism, but you could call it "binky" just as easily. I don't know anyone who would recognize that as socialism. It's a tribal-style organization, and I don't see how it could help but be nontechnological (but that's a discussion for another day).
Will, if you want to call that socialism, you end up with anything communitarian being called socialism, including religious war parties, fascist dictatorships, Shakers, the Jim Jones group, etc etc........ It's like what Orwell said in the piece I linked up above - the word ceases to have a meaning by being applied indiscriminately. |
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It is ironic that you post "seems the liberal party travels far and wide". The following describes and documents "abuse". If anything, I have posted too feebly and infrequently in protest and opposition to this law breaking, unprecedented failure of leadership, and betrayal of this oath: Quote:
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Don't Rockefeller, Reid, and Pelosi seem like people who are acting as if they have sold out to this "putsch" or been co-opted by yet undisclosed threats of violence against themselves and their families? |
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what you just described is similar to Marx's end-state communism.
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Yes, it is, but have you ever told someone you were a communist? How did they look at you?
It's a flavor of socialism, though, which is undeniable. Just as communism and socialism are very closely related, end state (or the final step) of Marxism and my evolving idea of what things should be like share many attributes with socialism. It's why I used the term libertarian socialist. I'm a socialist who doesn't believe in big government. :thumbsup: |
Goodness, me...thank god for our own corporatist government, they'll save us! What a wonder it is to live in the greatest country on God's green earth, where we enjoy free and unfettered markets, unless they go in the wrong direction of where the oligarchy have placed their bets....
If you know you know what you're talking about, and you've been posting on this thread, raise your hands! Quote:
....a new police state update: Quote:
Nothing in the above article addresses a means for individuals to attempt to remove inaccurate information about themselves from the data banks. Most of you won't see a grave problem with the emerging neo-fascist, corporatist police state we're already living in, until you are too afraid of your government to post your concerns on a public forum like this. |
Reading through this thread has reminded me of the philosophy the head of the Pol Sci department had when I was in college. He considered the political spectrum less linear in nature and more horseshoe shaped. In this fashion, the more one moves to either extreme, the closer one actually comes to the opposite extreme.
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Marx noted, however, that socialism would have two phases: the lower phase, also known as "socialism," and a higher phase, "communism." The latter would be the ultimate good society benefiting all mankind. In the lower, socialist phase, the whole society would own its productive forces, or the economy, but work would still be valued and paid differentially and distribution of the society's goods and wealth would not yet be equal. To reach the higher, communist phase, two requirements had to be met. First, the productive forces of society, restricted by the capitalists in a vain attempt to prop up their profits, would be liberated, and the economy, hugely expanded by modern scientific and technological inputs, would become capable of producing "a superabundance of goods." This enormous output would permit everyone to have whatever they needed. Second, in counterbalance, an individual's needs would be limited and sensible, because society would develop, through education and by example, "a new-type socialist person." Reoriented individuals would desire only what was truly necessary to sustain life, eschewing ostentation and waste. They would also contribute to the socialist society altruistically, applying their work and varied talents to the common welfare. With the superabundance of goods and the new socialist individual, society could then be organized on the principle: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." Thus, communism would mark an end to coercion, want, and inequality. -From "Communism," Russian History Encyclopedia. |
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at the risk of being pedantic, the splitting of democratic socialism off from more revolutionary-oriented ways of thinking about/using the term happened just before world war 1 within the German SPD--the debate was basically over how important the creation of stock was for marxian economic theory, that it meant for the idea of concentration of wealth/increasing immiseration of the working class as the overall dynamic of capitalism and by extension whether revolution was a short-term possiblity or not. the SPD position (edouard bernstein) argued that revolution was an eventual goal but wasn't going to happen any time soon so tactically that meant integrating into the normal operation of capitalism and working to improve the material lives of working people was a good idea. the revolutionary wing didnt think that a good move, so they (around rosa lumxbourg) didn't go along with any of it. that's how the spd and kpd split. that's the big dividing line between democratic socialist and revolutionary areas of the workers movement.
so democratic socialists are different---it is not the same understanding of the word that you see in, say, pannekoek or the council communist tradition. they---the two understandings of the term "socialism"---have nothing really to do with each other. not since 1910 or so. that split is also a reason why the russian revolutionaries started calling what they were trying to instituted "communism" which had nothing to do with what marx had in mind--to the extent that he spelled it out (which he kinda hinted at, but didnt really spell out---there were a riot of others--especially early, like 1848, who spent all their time working out alternative possible arrangements--utopian socialists, saint-simonians, blah blah blah.) one of the problems with the left as it turned out is that terminologies were tossed about in a closed universe and everyone tried to elaborate their positions by taking over the same words. but its 2008. the democratic socialist tradition is huge everywhere except in the political backwater of the united states. it isn't new, it isn't a surprise: the nonsense you see here about the term is a simple reflection of parochialism. ============================================ note: baraka--that reads like old-school diamat. that is a particularly crude understanding of marx, not that it matters any more. |
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Baraka hit on why I'm a socialist. The only way to get from capitalism to communism is via socialism. I support socialism now and call myself a socialist because eventually I will be a communist.
SirSeymour: there are no leaders in communism. Not really. That's why it's failed before. Some weak people can't let go of capitalism; they're unable to live by what they preach. Me? It is, in my opinion, a more perfect way of being, therefore it seems reasonable to me that I would help to try and bring it about. I bring it about, and then I become just another worker. I'll answer questions if people ask, but I won't hold any place of power, nor do I want it. Mao, Lenin, and Castro were flim-flam men. They used the promise of what I seek in order to herd the sheep. |
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I guess it might be ok if everyone's motives are pure and everyone is giving the same effort but if that were not the case I would stop trying as there would be no incentive to work as hard as I do. |
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If one is a doctor under a capitalist system, one receives a lavish salary. If one is a fruit picker in a capitalist system, one receives barely enough to live on. Communism is, simply, that all contribution is rewarded with adequate means to live and pursue happiness (unless happiness is being better off than people around you). I've read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" about a hundred times. I do believe, though, that living counter to our baser instincts is the key to overcoming things like war and poverty; things that seem to come with a capitalistic system. Basically: we're stronger than our more visceral, animalistic natures. Therein lies the path to real equality. |
No logging....no record of what "the authority" is taking from our communications or our billing records.... no constitutional protections, anymore. But, they "promise" not to use what they've stolen from us, "abusively":
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&um...nG=Search+News So few of you will actually read this telecom consultant's 2/29/08 affadavit: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/fil...t-BP-Final.pdf What information is required to raise levels of concern? |
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This is the problem with socialism and communism at its core. Its attempting to force human nature into what its not. |
i like little logic exercises.
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because of the way you choose to oppose what you imagine socialism to be, it follows that you are yourself therefore a full manifestation of human nature. because human nature and you coincide in your mutual opposition to what you imagine socialism to be. so human nature is both parochial and smug. well played. |
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