In all honesty, oftentimes when I see Elvis I feel like needling him with that lie he told about the 9/11 “perps” and Montreal (and which he had always vigorously defended despite all evidence), but its probably because I don’t really know anything else about him.
There was something about Hilary Clinton, but I forget.
Even if we accept your premise, you are left with a thoroughly emasculated argument. So it is perfectly acceptable for your favored nations to kill/torture/deprive their citizens as long as some other nations do it more often? And where should we draw this arbitrary line that caps the acceptable number of murders/tortures/deprivations? I’m afraid that I cannot in good faith accept your position; an indecent course of action does not become decent simply because someone else happens to be a more egregious violator.
I notice that you neglected to answer my repeated requests to explain your self-asserted authority to make blanket statements about entire national groups and major philosophical movements. I’ll wait.
That’s fine; what I take issue with is you jumping from “I don’t see how a Communist would think X” to “No Communist would ever think X.” I trust that you will be able to see the major difference between these two statements. I may not be able to comprehend how rampant tax breaks can possibly be construed as being helpful to a national economy, but that will not result in me arguing that no person believes that tax breaks will help the national economy. Such a statement would be ignorant, factually erroneous, and a mirror image of the statements you’re currently in the habit of making.
You’re editorializing your question so as to fish for the answer you expect to hear. No dice. I support the current government of the Islamic Republic because it has saved the nation from the oppression of a bloodthirsty Western-backed tyrant, has turned it into a regional powerhouse, and has continuously disturbed Western plans for hegemony in the Middle East. That is enough for me. Iran’s domestic political wrangling is superfluous, and not relevant to the overall picture.
Pray tell, where exactly would that happen to be? Whence do you originate? I assume that this place must be teeming with Communists, since you have managed to form such a fine-tuned appreciation of all different strands of socialist philosophies.
More editorializing. While you yourself can choose to focus on one specific sub-issue at the expense of the larger picture, you will be unable to compel me to do likewise. Once again, I do not find Iran’s domestic political squabbles to be relevant to my support for its government.
No, because then I would turn into you. I will not play a ridiculous blowhard pontificating as to what “true Communists” are obliged to believe. I will tell you what I believe as a Communist, but I will make absolutely no guarantees as to what other Communists will or will not believe. If you want to know, ask them. I am merely human, and as such am not magically empowered to read the minds of other human beings. I do not share your inane delusions of grandeur and omnipresence.
I would still very much like to know how you acquired this incredible power to make blanket statements about a national group comprising many hundreds of millions of individuals. With powers like that, you’re really wasting your talents arguing with strangers on a silly online board.
We’re not talking a little more often. In the liberal democracies, abuses are unusual. In the totalitarian states, it is routine, practically mandatory.
But is it not logical to favour the governmental systems with the lowest rates of murders/tortures/deprivations? Canada - low. USSR - high. North Korea - high. I know you like to heap scorn on the U.S., but its rates are closer to Canada’s than the USSR’s or North Korea’s.
Commissar,
Thanks for the response. That was one of the most entertaining things I’ve read on this site.
I also noticed you never answered why someone who’s a communist would support the crushing of the Iranian Communist party and the torture and murder of it’s most prominent members.
Alright, everyone. I have an announcement to make.
pregnant pause
I’m a communist. Specifically, I’m the type of communist who is also a Christian, who supports democracy as the best contemporary form of government, feels that private property is a good idea, thinks corporations have some very good effects, and regularly votes against far left parties.
And who are you non-communist dogs to say I’m not a communist?
Here’s a suggestion for you, fool: How about you actually go back and actually fucking read that thread? You’ll find that your repeated characterization is a lie in itself. Your stalking is bad enough in itself, but your lameness about simply grasping the basic subject matter you’re stalking with is on a teabagger level.
Now where’s that Putz smiley when we need it? :rolleyes:
Apparently you missed Shodan’s hilarious complaint about people proclaiming their trollhood not getting nailed for it. THAT post was just a few days ago. Do you really think he’s learned a damn thing in the meanwhile? Really? :dubious:
Commissar, while plainly a troll himself, is at least entertaining in a way, and a very unusual way at that (who else even tries a Boris Badunov impersonation anymore?). But Shodan’s language skills are, unfortunately, limited to the level “Shut up, you fucking troll.” That’s entertaining the first time, sure, albeit on a much lower level, but with repetition it merely gets boring.
Shut up, you fucking troll.
Regards,
Shodan
So? Are you unable to start a thread quoting his post?
That’s cute and all, but your attempt at reduction to absurdity fails miserably. None of the factors you mention are incompatible with being a Communist, and some are even commonly accepted by significant numbers of current Communists. Let’s take a look:
How banal. Many, many Communists have always been and continued to be Christian (or Muslim, Jewish, what have you). It might surprise you to learn that the main Communist party of the Russian Federation has renounced atheism as a basic tenet and reconciled with the Eastern Orthodox church. My own grandfather was a full-on Marxist-Leninist to his dying days, and a church-going one at that.
A non-insignificant number of Communists I have known over the years have thought so as well. Some argued that, while Communism is the ultimate goal, anything but popular elections is anti-democratic, and hence anti-Communistic. Others believed that elections were the only way to guarantee that the ruling Communist Party remained maintained its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
You and a billion other Communists. Even I must concede that I started out as an old-school Marxist-Leninist, but have been won over by Chinese Communism. As long as it is thoroughly regulated by a socialist government, the free market can and should play a major role in any nation’s economy. No arguments there.
I know a lifelong Russian Communist that, in the last two elections, has voted United Russia (Putin’s party) rather than the national Communist Party. His reasoning is that the prior can best guarantee national stability, which he believes is currently of paramount importance to the Russian people.
Hence, no, I could not authoritatively claim that a person that honestly held all of those beliefs could not be a Communist. It would be unlikely, sure, but not at all impossible.
Actually, I’ll grant you that I could have reduced farther. I also don’t approve of the idea of class warfare, have little time for Marx, think that economics shouldn’t be considered the most important factor in explaining political structures or history, dislike China’s current political regime, and think that the only decent political leader to call himself Communis so far was Gorbachev.
But hey everyone, I’m really a Communist, Commissar says so too!
That thread could be a brilliant exchange of insight and wisdom, but “the 9/11 perps were safely based in Montreal” (or however it was precisely phrased) is a sufficiently absurd and baldfaced lie in and of itself that it deserves to called into question, which I have, and your response has always been consistent effort not to give evidence in support of the claim, but to attack the questioner.
Heh, “stalking”. I make about one reference to this every six months, if that. It has nothing to do with you personally, it’s just an example that comes to mind when someone makes a ridiculous claim and takes challenges of that claim as personal attacks. Commissar does that. So do other users. So do you.
Ya big crybaby…
Elvis, anyone with a slight familiarity with your posting history is aware of how much of a nut bag you are. Stalking Shodan’s posts to link the same 3 year old post repeatedly in a thread with nothing to do with him in particular and thinking you are making a point is pretty much the definition of an obsession.
I’m a hypocrite, but needling is needling; and Elvis is Elvis.
Psshaw, that’s nothing. I got him to say I’m a citizen of Trebizond even though it ceased to exist 500 years ago.
Not quite… And absurdly enough, you’re misrepresenting *your own post * after actually linking to it. That’s bizarre on so many levels…
In that post, you facetiously claim to consider yourself “a Trebizond because that is where my loyalties lie.” I maintained and continue to maintain that it is, first and foremost, a person’t subjective self-identification that determines his social and political identity. Hence, an individual claiming in good faith to belong to a specified philosophical movement/ideology/political theory/national identity/etc. ought to be viewed as a member of that group. I see no reasonable alternative to this, as the only other option is to have third parties play guessing games concerning the individual and his identity or allegiances.
So, in other words, if you were honest about viewing yourself as a Trebizond, then you would indeed be a Trebizond.
And if he’s boldly fabricating, he’s the daring young man on the lying trabeze.
There are already enough threads laughing at Shodan. For purposes of this one, pointing out the risibility of his claim to virtue by comparison to Commmisar’s (remember him? This is a thread about him, even though you haven’t said a word about him here yet) is enough.
IOW, no, you haven’t ever actually read or understood what you’re complaining about. OK, you can continue to act as lame as you like, I’ll just keep laughing at you too. Putz.
Then you ought to be able to find an actual factual example or two, then, shouldn’t you? Simple repetition of invective is not as convincing in the real world as you seem to think, but nice try.
Some facts you have apparently not grasped:
- I never even responded to him before on that point (not necessary - half the active members of the board seemed to have done so already)
- Repeatedly - only in response to YOUR OWN unsupported complaints. A one-liner would have been enough, but then you had to dive in with your own silly whines.
- **Shodan **made the observation in this thread (about his fellow self-proclaimed trolls, including Commissar); I was responding to that observation. That’s how threads work, in case that’s another thing you haven’t grasped yet.
Speaking of irony 
How many posts have I made here now about Shodan, and how many have you now made about me? :D:rolleyes:
Now how about you all go form a thread complaining to each other about me pointing out your childishness? I could use a little more entertainment. Putz.
Elvis: shut the fuck up, retard.
Dissonance: well played. While I still believe that Commissar is truly just awful at trolling, it must also be said that he’s truly awful at thinking. Sometimes he plays dumb, sometimes he is dumb, and sometimes it’s really just too close to call.
Now, though, I’m wondering if people can be citizens of places and subscribe to ideologies which never actually existed. Can I, for instance, be an authentic Atlantean as well as a devotee of the Lemurian Arcana? Truly a fascinating ontological conundrum.
Hasn’t this troll been banned yet? I thought the mods just got a new, more powerful banhammer. 
When it comes to personal identity, the risk that people are lying to you is one that you must learn to live with. There is no alternative, unless you are willing to take the question of identity out of the people’s hands and entrust it to a third party, which would not necessarily be any more reliable or effective that the original method.
An example. You meet a white person born and raised in the US. This person informs you that he is a Muslim. Upon further discourse, it emerges that he has no Muslim family members or friends. It further emerges that he has never before set foot in a mosque. Finally, he admits that he has never read the Koran, and has no plans to ever do so. Nevertheless, he maintains that he is Muslim, and you have no other grounds for challenging this assertion.
Question: do you look him in the face and call him a liar? It appears that some of the people in this thread would like to at least imagine that they would (of course, internet anonymity does tend to imbue humans with a false sense of bravado, but that’s a discussion for another time).
Personally, I would not, for the reliability of such a conclusion is not guaranteed by the facts presented. While unlikely, it is possible that this person is in fact a Muslim by choice, despite his seeming lack of adherence to what many would consider core aspects of the faith. The main issue is whether or not he actually subjectively and honestly self-identifies as a Muslim. This is also one of the hardest issues for a third party to pontificate on, for it involves essentially reading another’s mind. Since this is not currently possible, I advocate deferring to the individuals themselves and allowing them to freely choose their own identity, where such identity is not contradicted by a necessary extrinsic factor.
Hold it: what do I mean by that last part? Quite simple: on some issues, the claim made is fully verifiable by referring to sources outside of the human mind. For instance, imagine that the person also claims to be a Saudi citizen. Upon looking up the Saudi citizenship records, you discover that he has never had nor does he currently have Saudi citizenship. At this point, you are justified in calling him a liar for making this claim, for you have proven the claim to be a lie by referencing binding authority on the issue (i.e. the Saudi government).
Something you seem not to have grasped:
The number 3. It comes after 2 and before 4.