I do believe he was joking.
The problem is that Beck and his ilk have decent sized and very dedicated followers/listeners/believers. Far more than anyone that holds an office outside the presidency itself.
I think socialism is an excellent system to have in places where there’s no crime, poverty, or massive social divisions. For that reason, it works well in places like Finland and other civilized, peaceful nations where everyone has a shared heritage and comes from the same culture. But in the United States, where there are some cities that are simply hell-holes, completely dominated by crime and corruption, where there are public schools where kids kill each other over drug deals and gangs run wild, where there are thousands upon thousands of completely non-functioning people cranking out babies, and many people who have no desire to work and contribute to society and would love nothing more than to suck on the Federal teat and live a taxpayer-subsidised life, we can’t have Scandinavian styles of government. It would be wonderful if we could - if our population acted like your population - but unfortunately it is not so.
So do I, in fact. Apologies if I left that somehow unclear. The post just reminded me of other commenters, on this board and elsewhere that weren’t joking.
Exactly. The man has a sizable amount of listeners who seem to believe everything he says, which makes him a leader (cringe) and therefor unfortunately a political force.
Are you for real ?:dubious:
Why wouldn’t I be? I think that socialism would probably work very well on a small community level in the United States, especially in conjunction with self-sustaining local agriculture and manufacturing. But on a Federal level there are simply too many complications.
No, I mean do you really think Finland, Sweden, Denmark etc… don’t have youth gangs and youth crime, immigration issues, poverty issues and people who have no desire to work ? Hell, nobody on Earthhas a desire to work. We do it because we have to. Anyone says different is a goddamn liar.
Your argument is essentialy American Exceptionalism in the mirror : instead of “America’s better at everything because it’s America, fuck yeah !”, you seem to be saying “It’s too bad America can’t have the nice things. It’s an unliftable curse because we’re not nice people”.
Seriously, do you honest to Og think there’s something magical, some scandinavian atmospheric pixie dust that makes people living there all civilized at birth ?
No but really - compare the amount of social division in the US to that of Sweden or Finland. Really what it boils down to is that we are too HUGE of a country to be effectively governed by a federal government.
Size has nothing to do with it. Social division is the result of a refusal to invest in equality of opportunity. It’s a choice made in Europe and the rest of the developed world.
What makes the US different is a rotten and corrupt politcal class, combined with a media that allows capitalism to define the social framework and even the national identity, rather than it being merely a tool available to encourage wealth creation.
I wonder where we can find a place like that? Somewhere in Marx’s writings maybe. The reality is different however, and every society has all of those to some degree. Which makes it a good thing that we don’t “have socialism” here, whatever it means to a particular speaker.
In fact, we have a freely elected right wing government in power at the moment. One that seems to be in a bit of a hard place at the moment though, since the press is gasp asking hard questions…
Yeah, about that…
Finland’s economy has always heavily depended on ports and trade by sea, which means that we’ve never been that insular in the first place. Personally, my former home town was practically founded by Norwegians, I have English and Swedish ancestry, I work with people from Russia, Estonia and Sweden. When I go to buy groceries, the cashier is from Nigeria or South Korea. The nearest restaurant is run by Turkish people. We seem to even get Irish Travelers from the UK nowadays. 
Every population has people who drop out of the system by their free will or due to outside circumstances. We too do have our “bad parts of the town”, school shootings, violence over drugs etc. The difference is one of scale.
A FOAF sociologist has studied the homeless in Finland and he tells me that the “funny” thing is that most of the people who drop out of the society are the ones with the “American Way” of thinking. The one where you have to do everything by yourself, accept no handouts or you’re a “leech” and if you fail, you’ve deserved that. These people refuse to use the safety nets provided by the society when they hit bad times due outside circumstances, fall to the absolute bottom and blame themselves for it, which makes it almost impossible for them to recover and become productive members of society again.
I think the major difference in thinking that makes the European “welfare state” work, is that while many Americans seem to think of the government as something outside them that tries curtail their freedom and which they have to live with, we think of the government as Us.
“We the people”, states your constitution, but rarely in your history I’ve seen people really think like that. The government is us, all of us, deciding how we should treat eachother and conduct our shared affairs for the maximum benefit of all of us. This might sound naive, or wishful thinking to you, but in reality it is the foundation of working social contract and the way to maintain a working democratic society.
Can’t speak for Sweden or Finland, but there’s quite a bit of social division here in France. I think it’s smaller than Texas, though. We also have our share of racial & gender inequalities, poverty and crime hellholes, kids killing each other over pairs of fucking Nikes, a huge rich vs. poor gap, the same right wing rethoric about poor & lazy people taking advantage of welfare etc…
And yet we’re still a somewhat “socialist” country (by a US rightwing definition of socialism, anyway), with kickass UHC, low work hours, powerful unions (there’s always at least one strike going on somewhere), one of the biggest militaries in Europe, public transportations, public utilities, public housing and so on and so forth. Also, porn on non-cable TV :p. And contrary to our dear National Party, I don’t think it’s all due to some aethereal French “cultural & racial exception” or some such tripe.
Of course, it also comes as a price - namely high taxes on everything and government regulations on how businesses can be run. Seems to work, or at least hobble along all right.
You ask me, the whole “the US population make up is just too different, and anyhow we’re too big” is naught but a cop out. But I may well be wrong, and that’s fine. Why don’t you guys try it out at State level, see how it goes ? From what I understand (and remember from my American Civ. classes) the federal government doesn’t have that much actual power or impact over what goes down in Peoria anyway.
But on a more immediate basis, you want to dampen down social division across the board ? You get scumsuckers like Glenn Beck, whose entire business is dividing society, to shut. the. fuck. up. Possibly with a C4 ballgag.
So anyway, this girl that he hasn’t denied raping and killing. Was the rape before or after the killing?
Oily Taint…<shudder>
I look forward to the day when radio stations play songs by Rush and Beck, rather than air bullshit from Rush and Beck.
In that vein, when Beck finally goes nuts, will he sing “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
Damn. Just… damn. “What is white culture?” YOU’RE THE ONE WHO FREAKING USED THE TERM AND YOU CAN’T ANSWER WHAT IT IS? Will you know it when you see it?
“SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE BUT…WHITE CULTURE IS WHITE PEOPLE! AHHHH!!!”
He’s close to imploding just in that interview, and it’s Katie Couric (or as Eve of Blessed Memory called her, “America’s attack muppet”). Can you imagine what Colbert would do to him? Or any unscreened intelligent caller?
That will be his implosion: get him to where a decent and capable journalist (not a Couric or a Larry King- ideally Jon Stewart when he’s in “Kill Cramer” or “Kill Tucker Carlson” mode rather than “Let Santorum ramble unchecked mode”) tear into him. Beck will shit and fling his own feces on air and scream that the “Jew monkeys are trying to tear out my eyes!”, causing him to lose 4 or maybe even more of his followers.
Which girl? There are MANY girls he may or may not have killed and raped in some order. Is this the one who he may have dumped in the Everglades or the one he might have incinerated up in Banff?
Sometimes you say really dumb things, dude.
Goddamn. Someone tell me you’re joking. Lie if you have to.
Very good sir! Excellent in fact!
Thank you very much for point out that the left has no counterpart to the vile, shit-slinging lies of Beck et.al.
It’s probably hard for you to realize that the left does not like lying, foaminig at the mouth, crazed hate-mongers. A bit of projection perhaps? You think that everyone should be hate-filled, just like you?
Even worse - it’s a viewer on Twitter writing in txtspk who asked the question. If that question were any more softball it would be Nerf, and yet he sputters for five minutes.
Boy, working in television sure looks like hard work.
I’m not joking. I’m not afraid of socialism. I don’t think it’s a dirty word. I think the America of George Washington and the Founding Fathers probably could have benefited from socialism, though the issue of slavery would have to be dealt with eventually. There’s even evidence that the early Christians believed in a socialist style of government.
But it can’t work in the United States. (And I’m not one of those people who thinks that Obama is a socialist.) It may be able to work on a very small community level. But not on a large scale.