lord of flies

Nope. South Park has really dumb morals and if you absorb them your political opinions will become garbage.

It is impossible that I even slightly exaggerate my views. Impossible.

lol do you really use ignore? I am giggling IRL.

Oh ho ho, nice try. But I'm not watching another episode of South Park. Please, feel free to inform me that the episode's awful exercise in trying to give an Aesop was not actually centered on mindless centrism. Ah, but you can't, because that is all South Park is: offensive, stupid, dull centrism. It was dumb when the centrism was "atheists are so smug, oh my god!" It was dumb when the centrism was "we need both warmonger imperialists and anti-imperialists." It was dumb when the centrism was "Oh yes, hybrid cars are good... but they make you so smug!!!" And I'm sure whatever dumb mindless middle bull**** the current episode espoused was equally dumb. Having taste is not equivalent to "being pissed off all the time." I enjoy plenty of comedy shows. It's just that South Park is neither funny nor insightful.

Good. South Park is mindless middle garbage and distributes the worst principles of American politics in a ****ty, overly offensive, unfunny format. I'm sure that the end of this episode revolved around some centrist garbage about how "Maybe Muslims are kind of right, and Christians are also kind of right" or some such nonsense.

Liberation newspaper. You can read many articles online at pslweb.org.

From your link: "Moreover, the unit or its members were never accused of any war crimes." Unit 731 got a full pardon from the USA.

See, I have already done that in countless other threads -- he simply repeats himself time and time again, hoping the opposition will go away. Analysing and defeating his rhetoric in detail is a pretty sterile effort, even when there is something to analyse and it's not just tripe along the lines of "democracy is only good when you can only vote for the CPSU". Use the search function, if you don't believe me. You must enjoy fictitious arguments, because I've never argued that "democracy is only good when you can only vote for the CPSU".

Yes, and that is why (I think) the PSL focuses on elections where it can be more competitive, so that it can eventually succeed and show that it is capable of holding power. Yeah. I'm the right side, and he's the wrong side.

And what happens to the workers, who hold no responsibility for ****ing up, and are ready and willing to work?

Except that the fault for the failures resulting in our currently high unemployment rates lie with corporations, while those who have been laid off have done nothing to deserve it. The redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor in this case is a justified action even under your logic, since the poor are the ones who are being punished (laid off) for their "success" (hard work) while the rich are rewarded (with bailouts) for their "failure" (mismanagement of the economy).

I guess I didn't read his post all too well. Let me try that again. In the United States political system, running against the two main parties is political suicide. By running against an unopposed incumbent, you take on all dissent against him and can then mobilize your base of support. Voter turnout in the USA is garbage, so a party like the PSL, which has firm party discipline with respect to voting outlined in its constitution, can do pretty well for itself just off its own members. On the other hand, people who vote in off year elections in the USA aren't completely ignorant about everything, as some people here seem to think. Local press in Long Beach covered the two candidates, and I'm sure that almost everyone who voted was aware that the "PSL" next to Merino's name meant "Socialist."

You're gonna have to explain this one to me. The PSL puts forth candidates in many elections where an incumbent runs unopposed, I believe as part of an overall strategy, for precisely this reason. In our country, this is probably the most effective way for a third party candidate to get elected - to run as a de facto second party. If the PSL can get actually elected, then their chances of continued electoral successes (and thus mass support) wildly increase, since they will have some kind of track record to cite. The Press Telegram believed that Merino would be lucky to get 1% of the vote. The incumbent (Foster) was sufficiently scared of her that he declined a debate. Calling this just a consequence of her being the only rival candidate is, I would say, quite wrong. Other PSL candidates have managed similar vote percentages when there was a third candidate. For example, in the running for the position as 4th District L.A. county supervisor, PSL-backed candidate MaryLou Cabral got 18% of the vote, while the third candidate, Dr. Jay Shah, got 12.5%.

What is wrong with raising taxes on corporations? The money to help the working people of this country has to come from somewhere, and shouldn't it come from those who are ultimately responsible for current unemployment rates? Who should be held responsible for the fact that 15 percent of the workers in Long Beach are now unemployed?

So if I ran on a platform which was functionally libertarian (or whatever stupid **** you believe), but said I was a socialist, you would be firmly against me? What part of her platform (i.e. not just its name) do you disagree with?

What part of her platform do you disagree with?

Yes, it does suck that she failed to obtain the majority of the votes against the currently reigning mayor.

While voting is obviously a lackluster way to apply political power, you should still vote. Though it's hardly the extent of your political power or duties, it is "better than nothing."

Response predictability rating: 100% What part of her platform do you disagree with?

PSL campaign wins thousands of votes for socialist platform in Long Beach

Blah blah do you have an argument or are you just going to attack my use of the word "bourgeoisie"? Especially since I haven't used it?

History is a long series of events that lead up to other events. The fall of the USSR was no more caused by economic troubles or the war in Afghanistan than it was by the administration's desire to increase its citizens calorie intake, or by the mass slaughter of Russian livestock in the early USSR, or by the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Nonsense. This is an utterly and totally nonsensical, indefensible notion. It requires one to firstly believe that the former constituent republics were functionally democratic, that maintenance is viewed in the same way as recreation, and that the people in a bourgeois democratic country are truly and consistently able to have their desires committed to by the government. None of these things are true. Putting down political parties on the ballot box is dumb bull**** (there were opposition political parties active but they couldn't put "Liberal Democratic Party" or w/e on the ballot). 86% of the people who voted voted for Communists no matter how weirdly the seats were set up, and an absolute majority of eligible voters voted for the Communists (about 66%). There is nothing wrong with state media. Before you try some nonsense about why the Communist party gets preferential treatment, it is because non-Communist parties represent bourgeois democratic interests and Communist parties represent proletarian democratic interests. This means mentioning affiliation with the CPSU allows the voters to understand whose class interests the parties represent (or whether or not someone is anti-communist, if you don't believe in a distinction between proletarian and bourgeois democracy). If people in the USSR hated communism so much, they could have voted for literally anyone else.

Ugh. Look, take a look at this and tell me that the local elites had nothing to do with the collapse of the Union. You say "the Union was going through troubles," and I agree. But was the USA saying "you must balkanize in order to pay your debts"? Were the mujahideen in Afghanistan saying "ha ha ha, now that we have defeated your invasion, sign this peace treaty that agrees to balkanize the country"? No. These troubles merely produced a situation where the nationalist elements (a ****load of them) were given the opportunity to **** everything all to hell and ignore what the people wanted. And please don't insinuate anti-semitism on my part. Not cool. Uh... I'm not sure how difficult this is. The late Soviet Union had a radical left-wing government which was elected in fairly "normal" (bourgeois democratic) parliamentary processes. The modern Russian Federation relies heavily on the more-or-less open suppression of voters and demonstrators, and has throughout its history. There's a reason they aren't letting the OSCE monitor their elections.

The problem with your points is that you basically list some problems the USSR was going through and then say "And that's why it fell." Lots of countries have problems and don't collapse, and the USSR had gone through some really tough times in the past (I mean, having genocide committed on it was probably much worse than getting involved in Afghanistan and trying to produce too much meat). A lot of people claim that it fell because it "stopped suppressing the people," that is, that Gorbachev's reforms directly lead to its downfall by opening up and letting forth some sort of torrent of public dissent by the masses. The problem is that this also doesn't fit with the facts, since the people were never consulted on the matter, and where they were, tended to be in favor of the continuation of the Soviet Union. In the free and fair elections for the Legislature in 1990, the Communist Party picked up 86% of the votes.

Learn to draw. Considering other people as "pretend" or "not real"? Sounds like you're developing sociopathy. You should get that looked at.