So now universal healthcare will not only turn the Americans into socialists and then Nazis, it will turn them into grandma-killing socialist Nazis? Well, you’re gonna have to catch up to us Europeans when it comes to wanton grandma killing someday. There’s too many of them cluttering our crosswalks already.
P.S.: I shot a grandma just to watch her die.
Mr. Svinlesha Liberal irrationalia is more sophisticated but it’s still pretty irrational. The Right Wingers are no more villains than the left is the villains they try to portray them as. Mostly they are a bunch of curmudgeonly Hobbitses.
mswas:
Sorry I haven’t responded to your previous post; I’ll get back to the discussion shortly.
But you know, when you think about it, we’re being accused of being worse than fascists; fascists sought to kill political opponents or members of alien culture groups. We, on the other hand, are the sort of people who would kill their own grandmother’s for the sake of expediency, apparently.
Yeah, that’s a whole bunch of nonsense certainly.
It’s worse than nonsense. It’s an outright vile fabrication.
Simple logic answers this notion.
We all, presumably, hope to live to a ripe old age. A vote to kill grandma and grandpa is a vote to kill yourself once you (general “you”) reach a nice ripe old age.
Sign me up! :rolleyes:
mswas:
I’m not going to beat this debate to death, but just a couple quick responses to your previous posting:
Well, it’s used that way today, in America, because the far right has more or less redefined socialism to mean, in essence, government provision of basic services. But that is not socialism, really; as you’ve pointed out yourself, socialism is a politcal/economic system in which the State owns most, or all, of the “means of production.” (Although it is true that provision of basic services by the State would be a part of a socialist system, simply by virtue of the fact that the State owns and runs the “means of production.”)
If you redefine socialism in terms “government provided services” only, then you would have to claim the US is a socialist country because the state builds and maintains roads, employs police and firemen, regulates industrial pollution, and so forth. I submit this to be obviously absurd on it’s face. I know that a lot people in US think these services are expressions of socialism, but that’s only because they’re politically ignorant, and don’t really know what socialism is.
Nuance? Between Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s fascism, and Obama’s fascism? If that’s what you mean, then I’m afraid you’re wrong; I haven’t done a very good job at all. Hitler, Stalin, and Obama are all light years from each other, politically speaking.
Actually, if you were to take some time out to study Marxist economic/social theory, you’d probably find a lot of it to be compelling rational. But that’s a bit off topic, so I don’t know if we should go into it or not.
OK, and I’m afraid I don’t see anyplace where Obama said he was going to kill anyone’s grandma, either. Pretty much what I figured. Thanks.
Did you hear a lonesome whistle and hang your head and cry?
Yes, and sometimes I wish that lonesome whistle could blow my blues away.
There is nothing rational about Marxism except in the cynical sense that it achieves power for the commissars who inflict it. Any belief that the Marxists act out of goodwill should have gone straight out the window by any thinking person when the Marxists threw the anarchists out of the First International for not endorsing tyranny as a means of achieving freedom.
To quote Mikhail Bakunin, “[The Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship – their dictatorship, of course – can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.”
Ahh, so that’s what the kids are calling it these days! 
StS:
What I meant was that Marxist class-analysis is a rational method of studying and understanding social history. Even an anarcho-syndicalist can agree with that; it’s pretty much the starting point for all left-wing critique of liberal capitalism, even Bakunin, is it not?
As to the age-old dispute between Marxism in practice and the various flavors of syndicalism, anarchism, and so on…well, my personal sympathies lie with the anarchists, but I wouldn’t accuse them of being any more rational that the Marxists. For what it’s worth, I used to be a member of SAC, the Swedish Anarcho-Syndicalist Labor Union, but I’ve kind mellowed out in my old age: now I’m a union rep for SKTF instead.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I can’t wait for grandma season. Permits are only $10 down here.
Of course, since Obama is taking all our guns away, we’ll have to club them all to death, baby seal-style.
It’s a lot better exercise.
I hope this entire kerfuffle puts paid to the idea that “Republicans think Democrats have bad ideas; Democrats think Republicans are bad people.”
Fascism did sort of grow out of socialism, though Mussolini(in his youth) was a much more serious socialist than hitler, who simply used it to his advantage in the very early days of the nazi party. Regardless, both movements had abandoned even giving lip service to the left long before they even got into power. Limbaugh should look into the past of some of his heroes and examine how neoconservatism grew out of anti-soviet socialism in america before he talks about this subject again.
Well, yes, you can hope.
Oh, I get it now.
I thought Rush meant that stuff about how we’re like Hitler as a compliment.
To me, that’s the problem in a nutshell. Its so rational, its insane, it is rational to the point where reason becomes impossible. Like Objectivism, in its headlong determination to eliminate anything not strictly rational, it fails to recognize that humans are not adding machines. All philosophical systems depend, at bottom, on at least one fundamental assumption, and assumptions cannot be strictly rational.
For instance, a lot of modern economics depends on analyzing the behavior of the rational actor. Myself, I’m not sure I know any. I know people who behave rationally in pursuit of irrational goals, like the accumulation of loud, shiny crap. I know people who behave rationally in reference to fundamental assumptions, be they economic, religious, political or pathological.
Hyper-rational systems are inhuman, in the basic sense of the word, they attempt to order the behavior of semi-rational beings, that is to say, us. And, of course, Marxism’s elevation of History to the position previously occupied by God is quite, quite insane.
Socialism, like American democracy, is best left undefined, it is an ongoing experiment we bequeath to our children and grandchildren, to be tinkered with, to be amended, to be altered to fit circumstances as they arise. It is the highest form of improvisation. We may dream of unalterable and immutable principles, like an agnostic who craves faith but has only his doubts, and is not comforted by the notion that doubt is as holy as faith, and far easier to sustain.
People who allege that elucidator offers nothing but partisan drivebys and feeble witticisms aren’t paying attention. At all. Excellent post, friend.