213374U

But such nice shoes they are.

@Zoraptor: fair enough. Less rhetoric and more arguments, if you please. Greed is not necessarily bad. From that premise, the rest of the discourse crumbles under its own weight. There's also a lot to be said for and against the "common good", even if we could agree on what that is. And let's not keep recycling the same guilt-inducing trite clich

Always one step behind, aren't you? I'm perfectly aware of your stance on human rights. What I was asking is how modern democracy, an institution grounded on those rights is compatible with a political "philosophy" that necessitates the abolition of said rights. Because, you see, unlike those "other worlds" and alternate historical scenarios you are so fond of, in the real world people don't want socialism. Otherwise, we would have it. Heh, I wish I had some "economic victories" to boast of. But the community has only done those things very indirectly. And so, we have taxes, to pay for things nobody can afford individually, like aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. Another perspective from which socialism is superfluous...

I did explain how the failure of previous attempts at communism is simply the foreseeable result of mistaking a load of utter hogwash for solid political theory - but I did not imply it was proof that communism can't work. Obtaining proof of that is impossible, as "communism can work" is an unfalsifiable statement. A point that seems to have gone right over your head, possibly leaving you slack-jawed with a blank stare, and what feels like a headache. A piece of friendly advice: wipe the drool off the keyboard before you attempt to reply. Anyway, I'd like you to explain how exactly is the systematic abolition of basic individual rights (including, but not limited to those pertaining to property) compatible with democracy, and precisely how you will force those who aren't happy with it to comply... without a tyranny. You are right on something, though. The problems with communism aren't limited to that; but I'd also like to hear more on this idea that "true" communism hasn't been, because it sounds awfully like an ideologue's excuse when presented with the failure of social experiments based on his favorite theory. Yeah, I know that Lenin said Socialism hadn't truly come after they won, but I tend not to trust mass murderers. Call me paranoid. The point isn't about making sacrifices for the collective, but nice try at equivocation. We already have that covered by charity, volunteer groups, NGOs etc that are perfectly legal and don't step on anyone's toes. The point is about forcing everyone to make sacrifices because you (the Party, the People, whatever) say so, when more efficient alternatives exist. As for the bloody revolutions... as has been pointed out earlier, Hitler came to power legally, but his powers were limited by the President and the Constitution. The point I was making is that, for communist parties to attain the power necessary to credibly pursue their stated goals, violence is needed as they need to do away with the checks and balances present in the constitutions of modern democracies. You know, the safeguards intended ultimately to prevent situations where the populace may regard an invocation of the right to rebel as a viable possibility. I tied that to the contrast offered by the results of "Eurocommunism", to better illustrate the point. But unsurprisingly, that one went over your head too. Poor boy, such a hard day you're having!

Hahaha. How cute. Note how even lof has acknowledged and justified precisely that. Yes, just because I've never done a somersault, it doesn't mean I can't do somersaults. Yes, yes. Faulty logic. If I have an irreversible brain paralysis and as a consequence lack basic motor functions, I will never be able to do somersaults, and the fact that I've never done one is simply the foreseeable result of my lack of, and inability to attain, the necessary conditions. No, a communist regime *has* to be tyrannical and murderous, because otherwise, it cannot be communist. It cannot engage in wealth redistribution in the scale it's required for "communism" to be. And without violent revolution it cannot seize the power required to even think of engaging in said wealth redistribution (Marx himself didn't believe a peaceful revolution could take place in Germany - "The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons"). And that just from a theoretical standpoint, we're not even taking into consideration the record of communist regimes. It's not a "broad generalization" any more than "triangles cannot have any diagonals" is a generalization. More like a fundamental implication derived directly from the definition, really. This point is well illustrated by the failure of "Eurocommunism", and the fall into irrelevance of its adherents, or their adoption of other, less militant and radical, political outlooks. Communism cannot be anything but totalitarian. I've never said I consider myself to be particularly smart, by the way. But at least I've grown past the point where fairy tales hold any appeal for me. Sweet dreams.

Won't somebody please think of the children!?

Boo ****ing hoo. Aye, that brought a tear to me eye, it did. I think I'm starting to see a pattern in your posts. You simply cannot deal with the fact that the world is fundamentally harsh and unjust. Maybe that's why you get a boner when you go on about all those mad totalitarian state utopies? Sorry, I'm not buying whatever it is you're selling... your antics are pretty amusing, though. Of course the world is unjust. Does that mean that you should just act like a **** and piss on the poor? Based on this post, I have to assume that it does. Right, I see what you mean. Does that mean we should press for world revolution and the instauration of inefficient, murderous and culturally repressive communist regimes only good for self-perpetuation (and even so...)? Based on your posting history, I have to assume it does.

Boo ****ing hoo. Aye, that brought a tear to me eye, it did. I think I'm starting to see a pattern in your posts. You simply cannot deal with the fact that the world is fundamentally harsh and unjust. Maybe that's why you get a boner when you go on about all those mad totalitarian state utopies? Sorry, I'm not buying whatever it is you're selling... your antics are pretty amusing, though.

No, but it's difficult to quantify the proportion of people that are homeless due exclusively to circumstances outside their control. In many cases the much toted "unfairness of society" isn't to blame, but an inability/unwillingness to live otherwise, compounded by mental and drugs/alcoholism problems. With public education being freely available (and compulsory) and vocational training being easy to access, it's difficult to write off homelessness just as an unavoidable byproduct of society. And, ahem, the Army's always recruiting, I hear. It isn't the 1930's anymore, fortunately.

You're mixing a lot of things there. UHC doesn't share its raison d'

Hahaha. WIN!

Yeah, but you're a fan of Aquinas, so naturally you don't take non-cognitivism seriously. That doesn't mean I do either, but I think non-cognitivism shows (or at least hints) that human beings are emotional as well as rational, and so it follows that approaching the question from a purely rational perspective is bound to fail. The problem of universals is old, and opinions abound, anyway. Personally, I think that Kant's perspective is quite elegant, and avoids operating from direct definitions of good and evil. Conversely, it could be said that he simply sidestepped the issue. Again, opinions abound. Why can't we have mathematical demonstrations for everything?

Um, hello? This is the real world with real people we're talking about. Wake up and smell the coffee.

I see what you did there. You can keep up military spending constantly no matter how ****ty your economy is going. But you cannot do so "more or less indefinitely", which is what both what I posted and your own examples illustrate.

But in all fairness, you can't - your impressions aren't simply pure isolated intellectual constructs, they are strongly affected by the environment. You would be comparing an unreal fantasy you have spent a full five seconds imagining with the real world upon which your moral compass is built. While you're at it, you may as well compare with Bizarro World... for an absolutely pointless waste of time. However you do subscribe the idea of "objective evil", which facilitates statements like this: So by engaging you in this line of debate, I have lost by default...

"Inaccuracies", eh? So, according to you, the inaccuracies present in a model of the solar system are comparable to the "inaccuracies" present in current climate models. Yeah, that's pretty rich. It's funny that you actually accused me of bad reading comprehension, and then immediately you demonstrate how to fail at understanding simple terms like glaciation. I think you actually built your response based on what you wanted me to have said, instead of what I actually did. Further, you focused on the circumstantial part of the argument (XYZ phenomena) and outright ignored the substance - the constant need for readjustment and placeholders in those models, which evidences what I've been attacking from the beginning: their incompleteness. Anyway, do you have proof that glaciers as a collective are losing mass? And how is a large glaciation event different from a global warming scenario in that it needs a different model? This discussion is getting more and more absurd with each subsequent reply. You keep posting (and subsequently redefining) doctrine, but you have yet to produce anything that actually shows that climate models work as you claim they do. Enough with the voodoo act already.

Why, the United States, of course. You know, the same US that finished the USSR off? Hmm, sorry you don't like historical facts. Seems to be a common occurrence among pseudo-intellectual ideologues and charlatans, for some reason, so I'm not completely surprised. However, your "rebuttal" is far more perplexing. I'm starting to believe that you actually, really think that money is a superfluous invention. Well, I suppose it's possible to imagine a 100% drafted army equipped with sticks and stones that walks their way to battles. But that just wasn't the case with the Soviet army. Massive motorized and tank armies are logistical nightmares, and that means $$$. An air force with thousands of aircraft between fighters, attack and support craft? An independent strategic missile arm? The Soviet Navy? The investment in research to try and keep up with the US? In Soviet Russia those things pay for you? Bah. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/wor...a/mo-budget.htm

Boy, this feels like telling a child that Santa isn't real. That makes no sense. Of course post-war figures are going to be better than the same indicators during wartime, reflecting the natural reconstruction after a period of civil war. How does that prove that communism is good as anything but an excuse for establishing a mass-murdering kleptocracy? No, you do it by suppressing civil liberties and employing genocide and the secret state police liberally to quell any political dissent. And even so, the balance is pretty poor. 70 years? You're kidding, right? The Roman Empire alone lasted for five centuries. The British Empire, four centuries... and so forth. The Soviet Union sucked as a superpower, mate. The August Coup was simply the strand that broke the camel's back. Economic decline, widespread popular disillusion with the regime and the ever-present nationalisms meant that the fall was a matter of time. The coup evidenced the political infighting present in the system, and the weakness of the Soviet leadership. Man, for a supposed expert on the topic, you really know jack about this. Okay, pay attention now. History lesson, free of charge. One-time chance only. The truth is that good ol' USSR was facing economic woes even before the US actively pursued a policy of economic strangulation against it. The two main sources of hard currency for the Soviet Union during the 70's and 80's were weapons and oil sales. Owing to the falling oil prices after the 1973 crisis, Soviet revenues fell sharply - and given that its main customers in the weapons market were other countries with oil-based economies, this meant trouble. So they had to resort to borrowing from the rich capitalist West to get things rolling. Can you imagine it? Commies knee-deep in debt, getting extra-low interest rates for their loans. It's funny because it's true. Pretty picture, don't you think? But it gets better: enter Afghanistan. In 1980, Soviet gold exports amounted to 90 tons. But by 1981, they had increased to a whopping 250 tons... perhaps to counteract the oil debacle? Anyhow, the US were apparently sick of the Cold War, so they wanted it over. And to this end, they enacted economic sanctions of very much needed goods for the commies: first Carter instituted a fertilizer and cereal embargo. And later Reagan delivered the coup de grace by blocking the sale of American made parts and materials for the Europe-Siberia gasoduct, and extending the ban to materials built under American license in Europe. Needless to say, the vaunted Soviet technical expertise was called into action to deal with this emergency. The result was a catastrophic crash and burn. The consequences were that the European gas market was pretty much denied to the Soviets, to which they reacted by flooding the market with oil... which further drove prices down. But the game wasn't over yet. In 1985, Saudi oil production was 2M barrels per day. In 1986, about 10M. Oil prices had plummeted from about 33 dollars a barrel to 8-10 IN A SINGLE YEAR. By 1986, when Bush Sr. finally got his way to stabilize oil prices, Moscow was on its knees. Glasnost, Perestroika, etc. We all know how well that worked. And, in a nutshell, that's how the United States destroyed the Soviet Union. So no, they couldn't "maintain their military spending more or less indefinitely", at all. https://www.policyarchive.org/bitstream/han....pdf?sequence=1 http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issu...w-robinson.html

Yeah, good idea! Let's compare figures from the worst of the Russian civil war and after the disastrous famine of 1921 to the same indicators a decade later. That way, figures might support your theories. Only they are based on unverifiable suppositions of alternate historical scenarios. Way to go, professor. Let's see the Soviet Union project forces or serious influence anywhere that it doesn't have a direct land border to. Oh, um... that's right. It doesn't exist anymore, as it failed both as a cohesive political entity and an economic alternative to the capitalist West. If the Soviet bloc ever held (the illusion of) true force projection, it was by means of a military spending that it could not sustain in the long run. So who lost the arms race? Anyway, don't ask me to do your homework for you. You asked for a comparison between the Russian Federation and the USSR... which is nuts. But there are also GDP per capita figures in the page I linked to (or adjacent), and they all show economic recovery past Soviet era levels. Thanks for the heads up. You never know when a useless piece of trivia might be just what you need.

Hmm, better off, you say? Well, it's strictly true; GDP per capita was ~$1500 in 1914, against ~$1600 (international 1990 dollars) in 1934. Economic genius, indeed. And such pitiful growth was paid for with copious amounts of blood... not that you care. But it still supports what I said: communism stifles progress. www.cefir.ru/download.php?id=2142 Apologies, tovarishch, but that seems to be incorrect. Russia reached its 1989 GDP level in 2006. Your figures seem to have been sabotaged! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP.gif I'd prefer neither, to be frank. But if I had to choose, I'd probably go with Deng since mad policies such as collectivisation and widespread cultural repression were not among his hobbies. The same can't be said for his predecessor, unfortunately. edit: oops

At this point the extrapolation is bordering on the absurd thanks to the effort being made to have model and data agree with the predictions. Again, read what I posted. I'm not against climate models - I'm simply against climate models that don't work, and those models then being used to push whatever agendas. Ah, I see. So glaciations are now "micro" events? Well then, we can conclude that models are useless for the purposes they are being used, as glaciations are in fact on the same scale as the global warming they predict, no? Are you being facetious, or just trying to give the impression that you know more than you actually do? edit: I could point to even more inconsistencies in your discourse by linking that point with the one you made about hurricane warnings (those come from models, too), but it's not really worth it as you keep redefining the terms constantly and then making arbitrary statements about what models can or cannot do, depending on what suits you at a given time... heh.

And by "eliminated", you mean literally. Why not drop the euphemisms altogether? So. What is your preferred method of execution for unrepentant capitalists and their counter-revolutionary lapdogs? Anyway. Entrepreneurialism is arguably the most valuable of human skills. Prosperity is a direct function of commerce, and historically progress has been closely linked to prosperity. So... you want to minimize progress? Shrewd.

In Soviet Russia... etc.

It's not just reasonable. It's advisable, as it simplifies calculations a lot.

IRL I usually lose patience long before I get to the point of going on long, boring rants. It's not exactly fruit that I get coming my way at that point, so I tend to avoid anything that isn't the most trivial of topics. I guess that for me, the stereotype is true.