Well, insofar as Marxist economics has failed in terms of adequately describing economic behaviour etc., and insofar as you don’t seem to have a terribly good grasp of non-Marxist economics, I’d have to say you don’t have a good grasp of the issues. It is not a matter of having a degree to prove anything, or what you have read. It’s the understanding reflected in the writing.
Eh?
Strikes me as you have some issues with criticism.
In re the follow up:
Assclown? Hmm, my you are senstitive aren’t you? Well in any case, this is the Pit where we can flame either folks or ideas, yes? I wasn’t even flaming actually, just noting for the record there is a huge middle-ground between your position as I understand it so far and Libertarians (same cavaet). No real comment on the validity per se.
Criticism, no. Snide remarks defended as such, yes. Let’s examine.
Criticism? Yes. Your opinion is that Marxism is a flawed theory and I have a flawed understanding of economic principles. All well and good; I disagree with your assessment but have no problem with you making it.
Criticism? No. Blanket assertion that marxists lack any comprehension of economic concepts by definition through contrast. Not a counter to arguments but a dismissal of the people who argue them. A flame, albeit a mild one, nevertheless indefensible as criticism. It’s people like you who pull nasty practical jokes and then accuse the victim of lacking a sense of humor.
Oh, and as for “assclown” - hey, you yourself admitted you weren’t flaming with that statement. Non-flaming behavior in the Pit is flameworthy; if you aren’t gonna flame, take it to GD and take your dumbfuck attempts to mask your snideness as criticism with you.
I’d say you do in fact have a problem with criticism.
Criticism? Yes. Your opinion is that Marxism is a flawed theory and I have a flawed understanding of economic principles. All well and good; I disagree with your assessment but have no problem with you making it.
[/quote]
Well, just to be precise, the entirety of my comments have been directed towards Marxist economics. Isofar as the political theory depends on them, then of course the entire framework becomes rubbish.
Well, in large part I think that’s so. If you’re using Marxism in a modern economic argument, you’re fairly clearly not well-educated in economics, or you prefer to believe in fairy-tales. I of course did not assert or even suggest that “Marxists” “lack any comprehension of economic concepts,” although I do assert clearly that anyone today using these arguments certainly doesn’t have a good understanding.
I rather thought I was dismissing Marxist economics in regards to that particular thread, but whatever.
One sentance my man, one sentance. What do you want? First you want Pit material and then you don’t.
You’ve got issues. Many, many issues.
Mighty strange standards you have here Ollie my boy, mighty strange.
All right, Collounsbury, you scrofulous, monkeybrained, flea-dicked cross between a geriatric Ghanaian whore who sucked the sperm from dead wildebeest for beer money and a syphilitic inbred reject from the island of Dr. Moreau, let’s you and me get one thing straight.
[sub]Man, this one took some work. If I had a pic of you or some knowledge of your personal life, this would have been so much easier.[/sub]
You flamed. The only involvement you had with either this thread or the discussion that spawned it was to come in here and make a snarky comment. If, in the smug, self-absorbed universe formed by the conjuction of the outside of your skull and the inside of your colon, you want to call my responses being “sensitive to criticism”, so be it. There isn’t much that can be done to unravel the logic behind it, as it’s just about as twisted as your spine needs to be in order to get the wonderful from-the-inside view of your navel that you have.
You flamed. You got flamed back. This is the Pit, assclown. These things happen here. Live with it.
So, wait… you really are a socialist? I’ve never met someone who was proud of it.[sup]*[/sup] Why don’t you bring your equally worthles bolsheviks in here (notice, equally heh) and see what we can do.
::rolls up sleeves::
*[sub]Of course, this is just the pit, but I’ve never really interacted here before so I figure we can get a good argument going with some mudslinging instead of the GD supported argument stuff, just for kicks.[/sub]
This is supposed to be insulting? Eh, feh. I am unmoved. No, actually I’m kinda entertained.
I rather thought of it as purely descriptive. Flaming in my mind would have involved some characterization of Marxism. Negative perhaps, but whatever.
Still, moving right along.
Two really. So, comments in passing are not allowed in your centrally planned paradise?
Smug? Self-absorbed? Care to expand on this?
Rather obvious I would say, given your response to my rather bland comment. I leave it to the readers to decide.
This is a little obscure to me. I’m not sure where the “twisted logic” comes into play.
And then this comment really escapes me. As far as I can tell, I’ve simply made some mild corrections to your flaming, which to be frank could be more interesting and entertaining. But perhaps it’s the Marxism, as I have found it does impede critical thinking in general.
There that should give you something to work with. Oh, you could make fun of my nose, I’ve been told it’s the sole thing to detract from otherwise darn good looks. Slightly on the prominant side.
There you go, those only freebies I’m giving away, Ollie old man.
So I can say whatever I want on someone else’s property in Libertaria? Protest? Wave picket signs? That would come as news to me.
It’s been awhile since we’ve debated this, but I’m trying to remember, Lib, if in your utopia, property owners can’t legally shoot and kill willful trespassers. Feel free to refresh my recollection.
Stalin was a thug, and it’s hard to see what the label of the political system in his country had to do with that. If you define Hitler as a communist or socialist, you can eventually prove that black is white. And the best way to evaluate Mao is to compare him with the other governments - or occasionally lack thereof - in recent Chinese history before Mao.
First, you have to unscrew your brain from the notion that someone else’s property belongs to you. Just because you have a mouth doesn’t mean that you can suck my toes.
I wouldn’t presume to refresh whatever your recollection might be of whatever arbitrary inference you might have taken from whatever it was that you skimmed over. You might be recalling the discussion where it was explained with excruciating detail and patience that you cannot measure out more force than is necessary to defend yourself from whatever coercion you encounter since that makes the force you use coercive. Then again you might be recalling a discussion about your vacuously childish reference to my “utopia” as opposed to the distopia that you defend. Who can say?
Notice I snipped your red herring. Now your statement is silly.
Or that the totalitarian ruler and creator of the National Socialist Workers Party was not a socialist.
Uh huh. I suppose things could have been worse. Mao could have massacred as many people as Ching Chun Wang and his band of barbaric thugs.
Lib, I love it…toe sucking! In a discussion about economic systems, it is perfect.
Olen, I do not feel that being free to work for the state or the good of the state is being free. You may consider yourself a champion of justice, a promoter of fairness, or what-have-you, but in the end you’re telling me that the idiots who can’t even drive on the highways have some fundamental claim on my labor, and my life.
Sorry, but maybe if they learned how to drive first. Then we’ll talk about getting a job. For themselves, of course. Nothing like self-sufficiency to build character.
collounsbury Heh. Biotech, eh? (not that I didn’t get that from the african/medicine debate) Care to purchase a titrator for pKa or solubility determination? How about permeability using f-IAM technique? I don’t sell them, however, only design and fix them. You are welcome to come to Mass, USA for a demonstration of a politically moderate, socially liberal and economically conservative company designing intruments to fit the needs of biotech.
Well, it wasn’t stricto sensu. Lib my dear fellow, pulling back from a mere label, its pretty clear that the National Socialist Party was not socialist in a significant sense of the term. Populist to a degree, yes. And a faction, which was purged, did take the socialist part somewhat seriously, but in the final analysis, the party had no substantive problems with private property nor capitialism per se. A nationalist, eschatalogical movement built around racialist ideas. It’s statist aspects fit well with right wing European statist traditions, so even this is not a true grounds for lumping Nazis in the Communists.
In short, doing so is both abusive and inaccurate.
(ARL: do you ship to Cairo? Anyway, Geneve controls most of these decisions, not me.)
If this contribution were toilet paper, there wouldn’t be enough to wipe an ant’s ass with. But there would be more than enough to outweigh that tiny grain of fat you call a brain, although according to strict medical definitions it would be called a ‘wart’. Thanks for playing, though.
No, on second thought strike that. Just fuck off.
Well then, what do you feel is “being free”?
Libertarian: try reading some of Trotsky’s works on the rise of fascism in Germany. Very good analysis of why Nazism is not socialism. I recommend Fascism, Stalinism, and the United Front as a good place to start. I mean, why not? Surely you shouldn’t be afraid of having your ideas challenged, if you’re so sure they’re right. I’d also like to see where “Chucklehead” Morse got his ‘quotes’ from Lenin. Does he cite any works?
If your point is that quasi-religious desires to perfect the human species are dangerous, then you have a point and your cite is on point.
It has no relation, of course, to the question of whether Hitler’s political and economic policies can accurately be ascribed to socialist economic theories.
I go with RT and Collounsbury on this one.
Frankly, I am always bemused when someone feels the need to drag in Adolf in order to critique solcialism. It is like pointing to Henry Morris to critique the scientific method.
Olen
Free to work for myself, free to work for the state, free to work for someone else. You know, options. I appreciate the good of the many, a strong economy, etc etc. Why do you feel you gotta bust my balls to get there?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Libertarian *
Collounsbury:
Ehh. Not particularly convincing analysis at all. I don’t really see that Communism truly shared a “quasi-religious” desire to perfect humans in a way comprable to Nazi racialism. Some CPUSSR folks certainly seem to have gone in that direction at certain times, but in general doesn’t seem to really fit.
Sorry, I’ll put Charles Morse down in the fuzzy thinkers or ideologically driven analysis category.
I really don’t know why you’re so wedded to this, it’s not a terribly defensible point, nor even truly necessary or relevant to attacking Communism per se.
Thanks for making my point so eloquently: no real estate, no rights. I think the term for this is ‘own goal’.
And why not, little fuckwad? One can measure out however much force one wants. And as I understand it, if a landowner has opted to be his own government, rather than contracting out that service, he may do anything he wants on his own property. Killing trespassers isn’t illegal - it’s his law.
The ‘noncoercion principle’ is well and good - but who’s gonna enforce it? There ain’t no overriding gummint to appeal to in Libertaria. Are other countries gonna invade, anytime a murder has been quite legally committed in another country? Nah: he’s dead, and it’s legal as church on Sunday. End of story.
