Can you summarize? What are the top 3 major changes.
-
Features
Why Socialism?
- Thread starter ksen
- Start date
Can you summarize? What are the top 3 major changes.
You are a very compelling advocate for your beliefs.
If only there were some way to capture your personal charm and good natured advocacy into some sort of pamphlet I'm sure people would be enthusiastic to shitcan the economic system we've been using for the last several hundred years in favor of ksenism, whatever that is.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Because you want some things better doesn't mean you have to explain everything.
It is you that is always proffering the Utopia idea. Granted you always foist the guilt for Utopian or Messianic thinking on others, but it appears it is you who actually believe any idea of governance must be Utopian or else it is not complete...as if the explanation of how people are to live with each other is ever going to be "complete." Your position on almost all issues is that the status quo is just fine and leave things be. When one makes note there is a lot of racism and unfairness in life and singles out a problem, for instance racism or gross inequality and suggest we do something about it, you just go for the old "show me your Utopia" repost and that ought shut them up. This is a common approach the mossbacks to anything that suggests some change, no matter how small, is called for. The problem with your approach is that it is, in its own nature extremely Utopian and comes across as extremely ill informed. We know we don't live in Paradise and there are millions of changes that would make this world a better place.
It is you that is always proffering the Utopia idea. Granted you always foist the guilt for Utopian or Messianic thinking on others, but it appears it is you who actually believe any idea of governance must be Utopian or else it is not complete...as if the explanation of how people are to live with each other is ever going to be "complete." Your position on almost all issues is that the status quo is just fine and leave things be. When one makes note there is a lot of racism and unfairness in life and singles out a problem, for instance racism or gross inequality and suggest we do something about it, you just go for the old "show me your Utopia" repost and that ought shut them up. This is a common approach the mossbacks to anything that suggests some change, no matter how small, is called for. The problem with your approach is that it is, in its own nature extremely Utopian and comes across as extremely ill informed. We know we don't live in Paradise and there are millions of changes that would make this world a better place.
The problem is that you are simply making up your own definition of police state. You don't get to redefine words like that.
Bomb#20
Contributor
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2004
- Messages
- 9,565
- Location
- California
- Gender
- It's a free country.
- Basic Beliefs
- Rationalism
[baseballs, er, crickets]
But the "examples" you've offered are mutually contradictory, so in substance you haven't said. Unsurprising -- it isn't to your rhetorical advantage to be less than 100% vague.
But that's okay. In the event that the people who find ksentopia appealing ever get the power to try to set it up, we know what will happen, so we can provide the answers for you as easily as you can provide them for yourself. And if your answers would have been different it just means those people wouldn't put you in charge of implementing your vision.
What will happen is this: there will be an internal debate among the socialists as to who should get effective control of the means of production in a given industry, the workers in that sector or the society as a whole. The believers in decentralization will argue it out with the people like Einstein who argue for a command economy. One side will win. In the event that the workers-in-sector socialists win the debate and get to implement their approach, it will quickly become apparent that that approach doesn't work. The workers in a baseball bat factory are not going to switch to cricket bats by voting, and then go get the machine they need from the workers who make it, who in turn vote to give them that machine, in return for no money or in return for obsolete money. That's never going to happen, because the workers at the machine factory don't have any reason to want to build a machine for the workers at the cricket bat factory. So once you've abolished production for profit and made money obsolete, the only way cricket bats will ever get made is if the decisions are not made by vote of the concerned workers, but are made by the committee in charge of analyzing the needs of society. The same problem will drive socialists to the same solution in one industry after another. So if the workers-in-sector socialists win the debate and get to implement their approach, that decision will quickly be reversed once everyone sees the results. Then the command-economy socialists will be put in charge. And if you define that outcome as "not ksentopia", what's in a name? That's what you'll have given us.
Which brings us back to the Soviet Union...
Trausti was correct to do so. As we've seen, the workers will not make what they vote to make; they'll make what the committee in charge of analyzing the needs of society tells them to make. Consequently, when a Nobel-level expert on physics writes an argument for why it's a good idea for the economy to be managed by a committee in charge of analyzing the needs of society, the committee will tell the workers at a publishing facility to go ahead and print it; and they'll also tell the workers at a paper factory to supply paper to the book factory so that it can be printed. But when a Nobel-level expert on economics writes an argument for why it's a bad idea for the economy to be managed by a committee in charge of analyzing the needs of society -- for why enslavement is a feature, not a bug, of socialism -- thereby implying that the committee members' jobs shouldn't even exist, the committee will tell the workers at the publishing facility not to print it. And if the workers vote to print it anyway, the committee will tell the workers at the paper factory not to supply paper to that publishing facility. The committee members are not going to decide that having the public listen to an argument for putting the committee out of business is something society needs. If you are ever allowed to set up ksentopia, you will have put socialists in charge of deciding whether criticism of socialism is a deployment of resources that's useful to society, and that will be the end of freedom of the press.
untermensche
Contributor
Answer the questions.
It is childish to think every police state is the same thing.
It's an irrelevant question. The incarceration rate is a measure of how reasonable our laws are, not about whether we are a police state.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Oh, come on, Loren! Let's stop this silly "It doesn't match my defininitions" game you play all the time. The cops are running roughshod over our constitutional rights and they are doing it in spades in the black community. Open up your eyes, Mr.
A police state is one which the police attempt to run. They do it with authority, weapons, imprisonment, and as Eric Garner found out, with outright murder. We have that here and now. Please stop your bellyaching about Untermensche making up definitions.
untermensche
Contributor
Unreasonable laws are a feature of police states.
Nations that spy on the private communications of their citizens are police states.
Oh, come on, Loren! Let's stop this silly "It doesn't match my defininitions" game you play all the time. The cops are running roughshod over our constitutional rights and they are doing it in spades in the black community. Open up your eyes, Mr.
A police state is one which the police attempt to run. They do it with authority, weapons, imprisonment, and as Eric Garner found out, with outright murder. We have that here and now. Please stop your bellyaching about Untermensche making up definitions.
You are the one attempting to redefine "police state".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/police state?s=t
Oh, come on, Loren! Let's stop this silly "It doesn't match my defininitions" game you play all the time. The cops are running roughshod over our constitutional rights and they are doing it in spades in the black community. Open up your eyes, Mr.
A police state is one which the police attempt to run. They do it with authority, weapons, imprisonment, and as Eric Garner found out, with outright murder. We have that here and now. Please stop your bellyaching about Untermensche making up definitions.
You are the one attempting to redefine "police state".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/police state?s=t
Reading the link shows Untermensche to be correct, and Loren wrong.
A nation whose rulers maintain order and obedience by the threat of police or military force; one with a brutal, arbitrary government.
A record of mass incarceration on racial grounds would certainly fit that definition.
One of the examples given is Boston in 2013 during the manhunts. Loren's idea that police state can only be used in a very narrow sense is clearly wrong.
George Orwell's 1984 is often cited as a classic example of a police state, despite not depicting any policeman, in the sense that Loren uses them.
Axulus
Veteran Member
Oh, come on, Loren! Let's stop this silly "It doesn't match my defininitions" game you play all the time. The cops are running roughshod over our constitutional rights and they are doing it in spades in the black community. Open up your eyes, Mr.
A police state is one which the police attempt to run. They do it with authority, weapons, imprisonment, and as Eric Garner found out, with outright murder. We have that here and now. Please stop your bellyaching about Untermensche making up definitions.
You are the one attempting to redefine "police state".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/police state?s=t
Reading the link shows Untermensche to be correct, and Loren wrong.
A nation whose rulers maintain order and obedience by the threat of police or military force; one with a brutal, arbitrary government.
A record of mass incarceration on racial grounds would certainly fit that definition.
One of the examples given is Boston in 2013 during the manhunts. Loren's idea that police state can only be used in a very narrow sense is clearly wrong.
George Orwell's 1984 is often cited as a classic example of a police state, despite not depicting any policeman, in the sense that Loren uses them.
No, it doesn't:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary_arrest_and_detention
Or:
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/arbitrary
Are you saying that the disproportionate incarceration on racial grounds is due to any of the above factors?
I'm not sure what you're doing here? You realise that citing other definitions doesn't invalidate the ones that Loren cited, one of which I quoted above?
Axulus
Veteran Member
You said racial disparities in incarceration and high levels of incarceration fits the definition of "one with a brutal, arbitrary government."
I'm asking you to defend that claim on how that fits.
No, I said that a government with a brutal, arbitrary government fits the definition of a police state.
Whether or not the US government is such a state is a matter of considering whether a state that enslaves a larger proportion of it's population than any other, selected to a great extent along racial lines, is brutal and/or arbitrary. Whether it is or not is not something I've opined on, and may be an interesting political argument, but it's nothing to do with the definition-based position that Loren was pushing, just as untermensche said.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Oh, come on, Loren! Let's stop this silly "It doesn't match my defininitions" game you play all the time. The cops are running roughshod over our constitutional rights and they are doing it in spades in the black community. Open up your eyes, Mr.
A police state is one which the police attempt to run. They do it with authority, weapons, imprisonment, and as Eric Garner found out, with outright murder. We have that here and now. Please stop your bellyaching about Untermensche making up definitions.
You are the one attempting to redefine "police state".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/police state?s=t
Thanks for the exactiudinarian definition...it fits mine to a tee. You are just playing whaley. Why don't you stop picking on me and other progressives here with crap like this. Extend the idea expressed in the dictionary reference and you have both my and Untermenche's definition. Think a little bit.
arkirk
Veteran Member
Lack of empathy seems to be Loren's problem. He doesn't seem to understand what it is like to be born into poverty and to be born black. If you are, then automatically a system that disproportionately imprisons black people is brutal to people like youl In Loren's case nobody has ever roughed him up or made him spread eagle on the pavement. He doesn't seem to have any concept of what that feels like. So to him it is not brutal...just strange.
fromderinside
Mazzie Daius
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2008
- Messages
- 15,945
- Basic Beliefs
- optimist
OK guys. What has all this to do with "Why socialism"?
From Einstein's article in the OP
I suggest ...by a fair interpretation and social contractual execution of what is meant by liberty, equality, and justice.
Oh, come on, Loren! Let's stop this silly "It doesn't match my defininitions" game you play all the time. The cops are running roughshod over our constitutional rights and they are doing it in spades in the black community. Open up your eyes, Mr.
A police state is one which the police attempt to run. They do it with authority, weapons, imprisonment, and as Eric Garner found out, with outright murder. We have that here and now. Please stop your bellyaching about Untermensche making up definitions.
You are the one attempting to redefine "police state".
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/police state?s=t
Reading the link shows Untermensche to be correct, and Loren wrong.
A nation whose rulers maintain order and obedience by the threat of police or military force; one with a brutal, arbitrary government.
A record of mass incarceration on racial grounds would certainly fit that definition.
One of the examples given is Boston in 2013 during the manhunts. Loren's idea that police state can only be used in a very narrow sense is clearly wrong.
George Orwell's 1984 is often cited as a classic example of a police state, despite not depicting any policeman, in the sense that Loren uses them.
Arbitrary?
I've been in real police states--the average man on the street absolutely doesn't want anything to do with the police. They would not call the police other than in the most dire of circumstances. That does not remotely describe the US.