The Liberal Gun Club Forum

This is a long one.

That looks like something out of Heavy Metal Magazine.

the comedian wrote:

WillCarry wrote:I might be a liberal but I ain't no socialist. I might be a closet socialist but communism is quite out of the question.



The idea is that socialism leads to communism, in which the state withers away due to the fact that it is not needed anymore.
This isn't to say there would be no government. The government is a different entity from the state.
Not really sure where you are going with the clip. That was Monty Python cocking a snook at the myriad independence movements of the 1970s in the former European colonies.

I'm sorry my Life of Brian video didn't meet your high standards. I didn't realize I was dealing with such an intellectual genius. You socialist seem to be all about the workers but at the same time you snub your nose at us because we lack the intellectual flare of a person who his schooled in socialist rhetoric and babble talk. You guys use all of these big words, that you know we don't understand, in trying to convince people of your superior intellect. I'm beginning to understand that all that big talk don't mean diddly squat.

WillCarry wrote:

the comedian wrote:

WillCarry wrote:I might be a liberal but I ain't no socialist. I might be a closet socialist but communism is quite out of the question.



The idea is that socialism leads to communism, in which the state withers away due to the fact that it is not needed anymore.
This isn't to say there would be no government. The government is a different entity from the state.
Not really sure where you are going with the clip. That was Monty Python cocking a snook at the myriad independence movements of the 1970s in the former European colonies.

I'm sorry my Life of Brian video didn't meet your high standards. I didn't realize I was dealing with such an intellectual genius. You socialist seem to be all about the workers but at the same time you snub your nose at us because we lack the intellectual flare of a person who his schooled in socialist rhetoric and babble talk. You guys use all of these big words, that you know we don't understand, in trying to convince people of your superior intellect. I'm beginning to understand that all that big talk don't mean diddly squat.

Well, I am in the working class, yet I took the time and effort to educate myself in the meaning of " big words".
I edited the rest of the post. I think your provocation is intended to start a flame session and get this thread locked. So I will just put you on ignore instead.

Anti-intellectualism is a weird approach to take, for someone with Latin (and a reference to Edgar Allen Poe's "Cask of Amontillado") in his signature.

the comedian wrote: Well, I am in the working class, yet I took the time and effort to educate myself in the meaning of " big words".
I edited the rest of the post. I think your provocation is intended to start a flame session and get this thread locked. So I will just put you on ignore instead.

Well, I am ignoring this thread, so if that happens, tell me, and I will split and lock the flames, leaving this open.

So be civil, use the report post button, and keep on, keeping on. Also remember, this is not the "Socialist Gun Club" so be mindful of that. It's been nice and more or less civil for a few weeks, so let's keep that up as well.

Inquisitor wrote:

the comedian wrote: Well, I am in the working class, yet I took the time and effort to educate myself in the meaning of " big words".
I edited the rest of the post. I think your provocation is intended to start a flame session and get this thread locked. So I will just put you on ignore instead.

Well, I am ignoring this thread, so if that happens, tell me, and I will split and lock the flames, leaving this open.

So be civil, use the report post button, and keep on, keeping on. Also remember, this is not the "Socialist Gun Club" so be mindful of that. It's been nice and more or less civil for a few weeks, so let's keep that up as well.

But aren't all liberals just socialists in disguise...?

</snark>

Inquisitor wrote:

the comedian wrote: Well, I am in the working class, yet I took the time and effort to educate myself in the meaning of " big words".
I edited the rest of the post. I think your provocation is intended to start a flame session and get this thread locked. So I will just put you on ignore instead.

Well, I am ignoring this thread, so if that happens, tell me, and I will split and lock the flames, leaving this open.

So be civil, use the report post button, and keep on, keeping on. Also remember, this is not the "Socialist Gun Club" so be mindful of that. It's been nice and more or less civil for a few weeks, so let's keep that up as well.

Thanks. It is slowly sinking into my brain that it is easier just to use the ignore function.

Meh, it's just one thread. I use my built in ignore function. I look in on it every once in a while to see if there's anything amusing. But for the most part it just gets marked read with a few other threads that don't interest me that much. In my experience people who proudly call themselves "socialist" are dreamers who believe in a perfect system run by imperfect people. Can't knock'em for tryin though.

Grimstad wrote:Meh, it's just one thread. I use my built in ignore function. I look in on it every once in a while to see if there's anything amusing. But for the most part it just gets marked read with a few other threads that don't interest me that much. In my experience people who proudly call themselves "socialist" are dreamers who believe in a perfect system run by imperfect people. Can't knock'em for tryin though.

Not quite, if the people in charger were all perfect capitalism would work. What socialists want is checks and balances to balance out those imperfect people, and keep them in check.

More

amrev360 wrote:More

Don't know if the first one is a socialist picture, but definitely an anarchist one. Kropotkin's main point in "The Conquest of Bread" was that government will always be corrupted by the influence of wealth.

This specific thread is fairly straightforward about what it offers. Shameless pro-socialism pictures. If people are going to parachute in and blindly criticize socialism, in a thread which is guaranteed to be inhabited by people who are socialists (and who got to that point through thinking about it and being able to argue in favor of socialism or else we wouldn't be socialists), and then complain when the socialists defend their position, the parachutists deserve whatever mild intellectual discomfort they get from having their preconceptions challenged by words both big and small.

If anybody sufficiently believes in the superiority of capitalism to start a thread about how wonderful awesome it is, with pictures to that effect, go right ahead and I'll ignore that thread and not pee in those cheerios.

We have no right to comfort just the best wishes to be successful in our search for it.

What cracks me up are the folks that confuse Socialism with Totalitarianism. One is economics, the other is politics.

Communism is a pipe dream while Socialism is in practice in the coutries in Europe that have not yet had to get bailed out by the Germans.

ErikO wrote:We have no right to comfort just the best wishes to be successful in our search for it.

What cracks me up are the folks that confuse Socialism with Totalitarianism. One is economics, the other is politics.

Communism is a pipe dream while Socialism is in practice in the coutries in Europe that have not yet had to get bailed out by the Germans.

The Germans have a lot of socialist policies in effect in their own country, to boot.

ErikO wrote:We have no right to comfort just the best wishes to be successful in our search for it.

What cracks me up are the folks that confuse Socialism with Totalitarianism. One is economics, the other is politics.

Communism is a pipe dream while Socialism is in practice in the coutries in Europe that have not yet had to get bailed out by the Germans.

Communism, which is the natural outcome of a government not based on a class system, seems much less a pipe dream than believing that a Jewish carpenter executed 2,000 years ago was divine and can deliever to you a first class ticket to heaven.
The socialism you describe, aka Democratic Socialism, is but one variant of socialism. Its compromise with capitalism achieved noble results, but as we are seeing now the compromise was temporary. The capitalists of Europe are now dismantling the social benefits that the workers of those countries earned with so much sweat and blood in the name of austerity.

aka Democratic Socialism

Don't you mean social democrats?

gendoikari87 wrote:

aka Democratic Socialism

Don't you mean social democrats?

He means the People's Front of Judea, not the Judean People's Front.

well the reason I ask is because the two are wholly different. Democratic socialism being less dependant on a welfare state, and social democracy being basically capitalism with a welfare state to support the masses they put on unemployment. It's a major difference in line of thought. under democratic socialism welfare is something of a saftey net however with social democracy it's more of a holding bucket for those rejected by the capitalist state.

Basically Social democrats are still capitalists and can't really be called socialist, they're more capitalists who understand that capitalism won't work, and try to put on as many bandaids as possible so it doesn't collapse in upon itself. I.E. they're the socialists that gave up.

the comedian wrote:

ErikO wrote: The capitalists oligarchs of Europe are now dismantling the social benefits that the workers of those countries earned with so much sweat and blood in the name of austerity.

Fixed. People who control vast monopolies aren't capitalists by any strict definition. Sorry, but that is something that gets mired in the tons of Marxist propaganda that gets bandied around these days. Adam Smith wrote whole chapters about the need for regulation and the need to dismantle monopolies that act counter to the interests of society that both socialists and what passes for "capitalists" these days just love to ignore.

(For the record, Marx wrote many great ideas and your understanding of the world is severely crippled if you have not studied them with something like an open mind. That said, there is just as much silly FUD and misinformation on that side of the fence as there is on the capitalist side.)

The reason so many economies are mixed economies is that ultra-centrally planned economies do not work. Conversely, laissez-faire economies do not work. Systematic equilibrium is achieved somewhere between these polar ideas. Economies do not work without the concept of a market, which at it's core is simply a system that sends signals from consumers (We need milk to feed the children) to producers (Dairy farms) and vice versa. No matter how carefully you centrally plan, you are going to miss something people want or need.

Conversely, some services or products need central control (think energy/utilities and I would say medical care, for instance) by some objective third party to be distributed fairly, efficiently and without undue damage to shared common resources. Have a look at how private oil companies and international cartels like OPEC have distorted the markets for energy and suppressed the development of alternate resources for decades. Certain strategic resources need a different plan entirely for your society to succeed. The guys at energyfromthorium.com have already started to have conversations about this...

I agree with you that the idea of some guy, high on moldy rye bread in Palestine, claiming to be the son of an invisible sky wizard, that turned into a zombie who could give people eternal life is crazy. It's just as crazy as the idea that people will completely give up the idea of "mine!" and share everything equally and live in peace and harmony despite tens of thousands of years of evolutionary biology that programs them not to.

We can minimize the ill effects of class with proper economic planning and regulation. Hell, this might even put people on a path to evolve different social behaviors that make things like communism possible is some far-off, distant, post-human future. But it ain't in the cards right now.

gendoikari87 wrote:well the reason I ask is because the two are wholly different. Democratic socialism being less dependant on a welfare state, and social democracy being basically capitalism with a welfare state to support the masses they put on unemployment. It's a major difference in line of thought. under democratic socialism welfare is something of a saftey net however with social democracy it's more of a holding bucket for those rejected by the capitalist state.

Basically Social democrats are still capitalists and can't really be called socialist, they're more capitalists who understand that capitalism won't work, and try to put on as many bandaids as possible so it doesn't collapse in upon itself. I.E. they're the socialists that gave up.

This is one of those things that is commonly misunderstood about capitalism. A real capitalist market for labor would seek to optimize employment, thus making the welfare state that supports those on the outs even more efficient. A rigged-up oligarchy on the other hand distorts these signals and suppresses wages by leveraging their media and propaganda resources to turn workers against workers.

no, capitalism seeks to maximize profits which means using as few employees as possible, paying them as little as possible to get the job done. They also require a pool of unemployed to keep the supply of workers up, and thus their price down. Which is easy when you fire people left and right and make others (or robots) pick up the slack, all in the name of lowering costs to maximize profits.

People who control vast monopolies aren't capitalists by any strict definition.

cap·i·tal·ist   [kap-i-tl-ist]
noun
1.a person who has capital, especially extensive capital, invested in business enterprises.

What you are referring to is the idea of crony capitalism and the idea that somehow it is different from capitalism, which by definition is false. What adams and the others were talking about was controlling capitalism's inherently flawed nature, which practically cannot be done with a capitalist mode of production. had socialism existed in the form Marx had introduced at the time of the american revolution, the founding fathers would probably have jumped on it, as it was, they had no clue how to control the beast that was capitalism, and they tried their best, but ultimately their plan has failed.

gendoikari87 wrote:no, capitalism seeks to maximize profits which means using as few employees as possible, paying them as little as possible to get the job done. They also require a pool of unemployed to keep the supply of workers up, and thus their price down. Which is easy when you fire people left and right and make others (or robots) pick up the slack, all in the name of lowering costs to maximize profits.

You know how I know you haven't read Wealth of Nations?

Capitalism seeks to use resources efficiently. People sitting around doing nothing isn't efficient.

You are talking about oligarchy.

bumDharma wrote:

gendoikari87 wrote:no, capitalism seeks to maximize profits which means using as few employees as possible, paying them as little as possible to get the job done. They also require a pool of unemployed to keep the supply of workers up, and thus their price down. Which is easy when you fire people left and right and make others (or robots) pick up the slack, all in the name of lowering costs to maximize profits.

You know how I know you haven't read Wealth of Nations?

Capitalism seeks to use resources efficiently. People sitting around doing nothing isn't efficient.

You are talking about oligarchy.

That's the theory on how markets work, that the invisible hand of the market corrects all. The idea that a resource when being overused will increase in price and thus be harder to obtain and thus use will drop. The Reality, is something much different however, and while efficiency is what the original intent was, the system itself is bad at it. not horrible, we're all still here in a capitalist system, but it is sub-optimal at best at the management of resources. Now you may say that people sitting around isn't being efficient, but they are people who are not being used, meaning the system is working with fewer people than it was before, which is the definition of efficiency. Meanwhile our other resources are being used up at an alarming rate. The reason is simple. You sell lumber, you buy labor.

And like it or not, capitalism's nature is to become oligarchical. That's just what it does. People have started to recognize this, so they try to regulate it, but those regulations are anti-free market, and thus anti-pure capitalism, and forms the basis for the various hybrid systems around the world.

gendoikari87 wrote:

bumDharma wrote:

gendoikari87 wrote:no, capitalism seeks to maximize profits which means using as few employees as possible, paying them as little as possible to get the job done. They also require a pool of unemployed to keep the supply of workers up, and thus their price down. Which is easy when you fire people left and right and make others (or robots) pick up the slack, all in the name of lowering costs to maximize profits.

You know how I know you haven't read Wealth of Nations?

Capitalism seeks to use resources efficiently. People sitting around doing nothing isn't efficient.

You are talking about oligarchy.

That's the theory on how markets work, that the invisible hand of the market corrects all. The idea that a resource when being overused will increase in price and thus be harder to obtain and thus use will drop. The Reality, is something much different however, and while efficiency is what the original intent was, the system itself is bad at it. not horrible, we're all still here in a capitalist system, but it is sub-optimal at best at the management of resources. Now you may say that people sitting around isn't being efficient, but they are people who are not being used, meaning the system is working with fewer people than it was before, which is the definition of efficiency. Meanwhile our other resources are being used up at an alarming rate. The reason is simple. You sell lumber, you buy labor.

And like it or not, capitalism's nature is to become oligarchical. That's just what it does. People have started to recognize this, so they try to regulate it, but those regulations are anti-free market, and thus anti-pure capitalism, and forms the basis for the various hybrid systems around the world.

It's way easier to attack a strawman than the truth, isn't it?

Did you bother to read my earlier post about mixed economies at all? A lot of times you guys are just as bad as the wingers when it comes time to have an honest conversation. You're long on indignation and short on the ideas to actually do anything about it. Pure capitalism isn't any kind of a mythical beast with powers. It's just a system of ideas which corrupt people bent to their whim. Sort of like Christianity, which looks awesome in the Bible and is an absolute pile of shit in practice, right?

You should spend a little time reading this:

http://i-ahrens.de/schule/bvw/Wealth-Nations.pdf

and this:

http://www.panarchy.org/keynes/laissezfaire.1926.html

and a little less time on Adbusters. Then maybe we can discuss the merits of these ideas instead of what you've been told they really are. Whenever anyone points out the colossal failures of certain socialist systems (and Leninism was a colossal failure by any measure, but the Euro socialist countries, not so much) you get all uppity and point out that isn't a real socialist system, even if it was.