Socialists seem to believe that successful people have a duty to support the less fortunate. Isn't this the same kind of person who would break into homes of the wealthy and rob them?
No. By the basic definitions of words, they are not the same thing.
I personally think that it's in societies best interest to criminalize this philosophy
Why would it ever be in society's best interest to criminalize thought?
If not, aren't you concerned about the fruits of your labor being taken from you?
I am most certainly concerned about the fruits of my labor being taken away from me, and I believe that the government's movement towards, say, socialized medicine with Obamacare, is a huge mistake. However, I also recognize that varying degrees of socialism are necessary to keep society functioning in a healthy manner. This was a lesson the United States learned during the Industrial revolution.
Whoever coined the phrase "marketplace of ideas" was just trolling fools like yourself to see if you were actually servile and/or stupid enough to add it to your 'lexicon'.
First of all, John Stuart Mills, and no, he wasn't.
Second, and how's this for irony, in terms of US politics, the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is famously linked to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case of Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes defends the free speech rights of the defendants who were protesting United States involvement against the Bolsheviks.
The simple truth is that you are wrong on every point. Socialism is a crime in bourgeois society and there has been over 100 years of proof that Marxism is the sharpest weapon the proletariat has in its struggle against capitalist society and the capitalists themselves.
Which is why it's been a failure every single time it's been implemented. Not so sharp, it seems.
...aaand the quote doesn't even make sense. Firstly, it doesn't make sense in its own right: philistines have tons of other weapons of self-defense (I recommend firearms). Secondly, it doesn't make sense in this conversation: you're alleging I'm a cynic to imply I'm a philistine, but he doesn't say "Only philistines use cynicism for self-defense", so logic fail. Thirdly, you may chalk it up as a victory that you made me break out the big guns of elementary logic to defend myself when normally historically-informed sarcasm is more than sufficient to dismiss people like you - but if I'm using logic to defend myself I'm clearly not using cynicism, so take that victory right back down again. And fourthly, you're the one who keeps trying to tell us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket now that communism isn't there to save us, so remind me again how I'm supposed to be the cynic here?
This is beyond embarrassing. The Sophists were enamored of themselves too (obviously),but they did at least pride themselves on being professionals. Here, they wouldn't know whether to laugh, cry, or run in the other direction. Even by internet standards for argument this is so weak that it slides into the bizarre. You say that Gorky's statement is wrong because Philistine's can buy guns? Wha...? And rocks eat popcorn?
But, lets lay it out. You are a loud and proud philistine. You have no intellectual defense for maintaining your comfortable philistine existence (ie status quo) without resorting to denigrating your fellow man (it can't be lost on you that every justification for "the market" ultimately revolves around doing exactly this). ALL claims of human nature (or "the human condition" which is the EXACT SAME THING when considered in the abstract and absent social context) play on this same trumped up cynicism. As in "We can't do better because humans are inherently.."
Yes, Barack Obama thinks that democracy is weakness, black people are subhuman, and racial miscegenation is anathema. That sure sounds like him.
Its not possible to materially support thug excrement mugging for the cameras with their swastika neck tattoos and then claim any moral high ground. And besides its not as though this is the Field Marshal's first tryst with mass murderers and/or ethnic cleansers.
I mean, it'd just be crazy if you actually believed that normal people occasionally thought to themselves, "You know, maybe things would be better if the Berlin Wall were still up." Right?
A majority of East Germans, when polled, looked back on the GDR fondly and wished for its return. This was chronicled in a particularly obtuse article in Der Spiegel not that many years back.
First of all, John Stuart Mills, and no, he wasn't.
Second, and how's this for irony, in terms of US politics, the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is famously linked to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case of Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes defends the free speech rights of the defendants who were protesting United States involvement against the Bolsheviks.
Strange, don't you think? Only a few years ago the modern US liberal would have made quite a production distancing himself from Mill. Today, the repugnant resemblance is too uncanny for anyone to deny. The truth is that the liberals have always professed such profoundly right wing ideas but they are taken as such articles of faith and commonplaces that it scarely necessary to repeat them. To them it is not even a question: of course human ingenuity and knowledge are subject to the same fetters as all other sphere's of human life. Of course it has always been so. Those are bedrock statements of liberalism.
I'm not embarrassed. Are you embarrassed by calling the Soviet Union liberators, martyrs, and heroes? (And how can staunch atheists even be martyrs? Are you embarrassed by how much para-religious rhetoric is in the communist lexicon?)
The Sophists were enamored of themselves too (obviously),but they did at least pride themselves on being professionals. Here, they wouldn't know whether to laugh, cry, or run in the other direction.
Good thing I'm not pretending to be a Sophist. I'd say I'm more in the tradition of the Socratic gadfly here, pointing out embarrassing truths to make your position look ridiculous. Obviously I'm using a different format to do it - I always found something disingenuous about Plato's dialogues since he could write both sides to suit his purpose, and that rather soured me on Socratic questioning proper. But objecting to the form of the argument while ignoring its substance is a very Sophist thing to do - and, if I may point out another embarrassing truth, that's exactly what you're doing here.
You say that Gorky's statement is wrong because Philistine's can buy guns?
Now might be an appropriate time to mention that one of the perennial problems with communism has always been communists. I have yet to find one who has had any sense of humor whatsoever.
You have no intellectual defense for maintaining your comfortable philistine existence (ie status quo) without resorting to denigrating your fellow man...
Says the guy calling me a "loud and proud philistine" rather than defending his communist heroes from the numerous charges made in this very thread of mass murder and other human rights violations lesser only by comparison.
ALL claims of human nature (or "the human condition" which is the EXACT SAME THING when considered in the abstract and absent social context) play on this same trumped up cynicism.
Don't try to tell me what I mean by the terms I use. As I said earlier, your mind-reading skills aren't up to the task. "Human nature" is a statistical model of the way humans are inclined to behave before their behavior is modified by culture. "The human condition" is the subjective experience of being human, particularly our reactions to the "big questions" like the purpose of life. The former is scientific, the latter is aesthetic and philosophical. And I'm not just pulling these definitions out of my ass - they've got different Wikipages and everything.
As in "We can't do better because humans are inherently.."
Okay, so somebody somewhere made this argument and now you've got a chip on your shoulder about it. That kind of tells me that you feel threatened by it, which is interesting, but I still haven't said one solitary thing along these lines, nor do I plan to.
A majority of East Germans, when polled, looked back on the GDR fondly and wished for its return. This was chronicled in a particularly obtuse article in Der Spiegel not that many years back.
Ah, well, if it's obtuse, I suppose it's too much to expect you to actually link the thing. I also suppose that the Osties built the Wall for merely decorative purpose, because obviously nobody would want to leave such a wonderful place.
Pssh. Your writer can't even make up his mind whether North Korea's economic condition is a lie, or whether it's the truth but it's all somebody else's fault. He focuses on Pyongyang but ignores the rest of the country, disregarding the fact that Pyongyang is the facade the North Korean government is artificially presenting to the world, the one blob of light on the pitch-black satellite map, and that even there the facade is showing a few cracks, like the embarrassment of the Ryugyong Hotel. Then he turns around and blames American bullying for the economic problems, disregarding the fact that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China both experienced similar problems while not sanctioned by the U.S., and non-communist countries like Iran have been able to grow even under U.S. sanction (I'm not going to pretend a trade embargo is wonderful for a nation, of course, but it's not nearly as powerful as some of our hawks like to think). And he doesn't say a single word about the real reason North Korea is hell on earth, the reason it would be hell on earth even if its economy blazed on the satellite map like the light of a thousand suns: the torture camps. Earlier you complained that "Socialism is a crime in bourgeois society", but you haven't got a clue what the criminalization of dissent actually looks like.
Only a few years ago the modern US liberal would have made quite a production distancing himself from Mill.
Why should they? He was a good thinker, a good liberal, and a good man - an abolitionist, an early defender of women's and gay rights, an advocate of worker's cooperatives, and he managed to get through his entire life without killing anybody or even advocating killing anybody.
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The most obvious problem with trying to criminalize socialism is that it wouldn't actually make it go away. It's similar to how criminalizing tangible objects doesn't make those things go away (and usually just makes the problem worse).
Here's a hint: rarely does a regime find itself on the "Killed more people than Nazi Germany" list. If a country that you're defending is on it, really ask yourself why you're defending them.
What, that you made a snide remark about the person who coined the phrase "marketplace of ideas," without having the historical knowledge to know that John Stuart Mill was was a utilitarian, an advocate for the rights of the individual, a supporter of worker cooperatives, and at times a defender of socialist policies, or that the Supreme Court Justice who was famous for bringing this phrase into the US political dialogue did so during a case in which he was defending a person who was protesting against the US from providing military assistance against the Bolsheviks?
Sadly, no, I don't find that strange at all. The demonstration of a complete lack of historical knowledge in your arguments has proven itself to be well within the parameters of what is normal.
Only a few years ago the modern US liberal would have made quite a production distancing himself from Mill.
I don't know, I think a modern liberal would be happy to be linked to a profoundly influential thinker whose philosophies didn't result in the death of millions.
Wow, I've talked to raving loon College Republicans who were less unhinged than you two. Not everyday you meet two shrill anti-communist pygmy intellectuals of this magnitude. At any rate, I have neither the time or the patience to be drawn further into your pissant BS. Sound your state department ideology (almost verbatim no less) to the rafters.
I will close with a curious historical note:
What, that you made a snide remark about the person who coined the phrase "marketplace of ideas," without having the historical knowledge to know that John Stuart Mill was was a utilitarian, an advocate for the rights of the individual, a supporter of worker cooperatives, and at times a defender of socialist policies, or that the Supreme Court Justice who was famous for bringing this phrase into the US political dialogue did so during a case in which he was defending a person who was protesting against the US from providing military assistance against the Bolsheviks?
Sadly, no, I don't find that strange at all. The demonstration of a complete lack of historical knowledge in your arguments has proven itself to be well within the parameters of what is normal.
If I may offer a suggestion, learning everything you know about a subject from wikipedia during the middle of a discussion is a bad idea. I tried to let you off the hook gently.
1. the odds of anyone knowing off the top of their head the entire notable history of the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is vanishing and zero in your case
2. You didn't even bother to read the article since your claims are explicitly refuted in the article especially since the article addresses the concept and not the phrase.
JS Mill coined the phrase you say?
The marketplace of ideas metaphor was first developed by John Stuart Mill in his book, On Liberty in 1859 (although he never uses the term "marketplace").
Oops..swing and a miss
Oh,it was Oliver Wendell Holmes then
The first reference to the "free trade in ideas" within "the competition of the market" appears in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s dissent in Abrams v. United States.
Huh, 0 for 2..
If you had continued reading..er, skimming, uh..cherry picking you could have also invoked Milton and Jefferson.
At issue was never the origination of the idea (and even JS is a bit late in the game to claim that) but rather the appearance of the phrase as it is bandied about by philistines like yourself in casual conversation. You honestly think whenever some modern sh!t-for-brains throws out the term that he is harking back to Holmes and the irony of dissenting against THE SEDITION ACT? (yeah, you clicked one wiki link too few on that one, old buddy)
Again, before you try to squirm out of this do be sure and tell us how you knew off the top of your head that it was Holmes dissent in Abrams while failing to note that this was the well known Sedition Act.
Not everyday you meet two shrill anti-communist pygmy intellectuals of this magnitude.
Better make that three, pal. I've only been watching from the sidelines while people more competent (and patient) than me somehow manage to engage with your ravings, and I've observed that your response to every question concerning your position has been silence (a silence I find particularly salient when it comes to the matter of the oceans of blood and mountains of corpses that accrue to the practice of the ideology you're defending) or ad hominem attacks on the poster rather than engagement with the issues.
This is a Debate forum. You don't think people here are accustomed to seeing past that sort of bush-league rhetoric to the underlying logic of the position -- which, in your case, is nothing?
At issue was never the origination of the idea (and even JS is a bit late in the game to claim that) but rather the appearance of the phrase as it is bandied about by philistines like yourself in casual conversation. You honestly think whenever some modern sh!t-for-brains throws out the term that he is harking back to Holmes and the irony of dissenting against THE SEDITION ACT?
Yes! That's exactly what is meant in the context of this discussion. We should all dissent from anything like a Sedition Act because, inter alia, we don't need anything like a Sedition Act to deal with Marxists -- they evict themselves from rational discourse voluntarily!
You yourself are a more perfect piece of anti-Marxist propaganda than anything the State Department has ever conceived.
. Your response to every question concerning your position has been silence (a silence I find particularly salient when it comes to the matter of the oceans of blood and mountains of corpses that accrue to the practice of the ideology you're defending)
You have it entirely backwards. You are so sure that all readers are completely ideologically indoctrinated into your philistine belief system that you think throwing around wild claims in colorful language (oceans of blood, mountains of corpses) somehow overwrites the well documented and indisputable genocides of the last century -- by the murderous, barbaric capitalist class.
It seems that you would like me to defend the lies you attribute to be my position and hope that I thereby adopt them as my own. I note that you provide not a shred of evidence regarding your "oceans of blood" nor do your try to fashion a comparison to the prevailing capitalist system.
Or are you pretending to not be aware that capitalists were behind the Holocaust and the concurrent holocaust in India that seems to have been orchestrated merely on the whim of the butcher Churchill? These killing sprees being only a fraction of those immolated in two conjoined world wars with a worldwide Depression sandwiched in between? Do you really think everyone else is an ignorant, credulous Americana like yourself?
You have it entirely backwards. You are so sure that all readers are completely ideologically indoctrinated into your philistine belief system that you think throwing around wild claims in colorful language (oceans of blood, mountains of corpses) somehow overwrites the well documented and indisputable genocides of the last century -- by the murderous, barbaric capitalist class.
You have it entirely backwards. You are so sure that all readers are completely ideologically indoctrinated into your philistine belief system that you think throwing around wild claims in colorful language (oceans of blood, mountains of corpses) somehow overwrites the well documented and indisputable genocides of the last century -- by the murderous, barbaric capitalist class.
Functioning as a mouthpiece for the most vile and reprehensible propaganda does not constitute "raising actual questions about my position". Tu quoque my ass. Yours is more the "tu madre" style of debate.
On EDIT: are you seriously throwing in with High Roller on the point of cribbing from Wikipedia? You realize that what he tried to do (ineptly with quite a bit of haughtiness thrown in) constitutes EXTREME intellectual dishonesty, no? Since you are so concerned with points of order regarding argumentation. Honestly, you guys are borderline solipsists. You think you can throw any old crap out there and it will simply be accepted without scrutiny.
If I may offer a suggestion, learning everything you know about a subject from wikipedia during the middle of a discussion is a bad idea. I tried to let you off the hook gently.
At issue was never the origination of the idea (and even JS is a bit late in the game to claim that) but rather the appearance of the phrase as it is bandied about by philistines like yourself in casual conversation. You honestly think whenever some modern sh!t-for-brains throws out the term that he is harking back to Holmes and the irony of dissenting against THE SEDITION ACT? (yeah, you clicked one wiki link too few on that one, old buddy)
Again, before you try to squirm out of this do be sure and tell us how you knew off the top of your head that it was Holmes dissent in Abrams while failing to note that this was the well known Sedition Act.
Second, no, you yourself demonstrated in this thread that a person can spout off about the "marketplace of ideas" without having a clue that the dialogue about the free exchange of ideas involved an incident in which a Supreme Court Justice defended a man's protesting of the American military involvement against the Bolsheviks, which created for this lovely bit of irony:
Whoever coined the phrase "marketplace of ideas" was just trolling fools like yourself to see if you were actually servile and/or stupid enough to add it to your 'lexicon'.
The simple truth is that you are wrong on every point. Socialism is a crime in bourgeois society and there has been over 100 years of proof that Marxism is the sharpest weapon the proletariat has in its struggle against capitalist society and the capitalists themselves. The past century has also revealed which class is truly extremist and has shattered all "logical" refutations of the class struggle.
So clearly it is possible for someone to go off on the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" without recognizing that it is employed to defend the rights of people like himself.
And to be fair, I myself thought the term came out of the Brandenburg v. Ohio case. I didn't realize the idea and its role in US Supreme Court decisions stretched further back than that. I, like you, hadn't done any research prior to this debate on the history of the term.
I posted the link so that people could see for themselves where you tried (and, sadly, failed) to crib your information. Since that is beyond obvious I can only assume you are being disingenuous in an attempted cya. I hope you're not as clumsy at covering for yourself as you are at getting stuff right in first place, although I guess a lifetime of playing the expert has given you plenty of practice being caught with your pants down.
So clearly it is possible for someone to go off on the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" without recognizing that it is employed to defend the rights of people like himself.
The entire history of anti-communism in American disagrees with any whacko notion that "the market of ideas" somehow incorporates protection for socialists. For starters, you could look at the Sedition Act itself (which has reasserted itself rather dramatically of late). Communists and socialists have been (and are) openly persecuted and targeted in the United States any and every time they have ever had a presence in the country. I don't know how oblivious one would have to be to deny that. I would rather not find out but I have a feeling I'm going to.
I posted the link so that people could see for themselves where you tried (and, sadly, failed) to crib your information. Since that is beyond obvious I can only assume you are being disingenuous in an attempted cya. I hope you're not as clumsy at covering for yourself as you are at getting stuff right in first place, although I guess a lifetime of playing the expert has given you plenty of practice being caught with your pants down.
I'm just confused as to why you're attacking me for using Wikipedia as a resource in the middle of a debate. It seems like you're attacking me for the horrible crime of... doing research on a topic before I speak about it. Which is something you haven't been doing this entire debate, and going off on the idea of "the marketplace of ideas" was just one of a serious of hilarious instances of this throughout this thread.
So the answer is you're correct, I didn't know how ridiculous what you said about "The Marketplace of Ideas" was prior to my researching the origins of the term "The Marketplace of Ideas." However, having done the research, I am the better person for it, because I can see the irony of you attacking the idea of a marketplace of ideas while simultaneously claiming about how criminal the idea of socialism is when if you yourself had done the research on the concept of the "Marketplace of Ideas," you would understand the problems of that statement.
You don't understand why I object to someone who can't be bothered or is too much of a klutz to get the facts straight playing the expert? Or is it just a coincidence that every point you got wrong was entirely self-serving?
Perhaps there is more to understanding a subject than spending five seconds on Google? And your readers are left to suppose that your opinions on anything else (say, communism or history or society) are grounded in much deeper thought and research? You already dispensed with that theory (you claim you slogged through -- another of your synonyms for "perused on the toilet" I'm sure -- Marx's Capital at university)
Not to mention you're doing the exact same thing. It's not as though you knew about Abrams v. United States prior to this debate either.
It IS as though I knew it prior to this exchange. Pretty much everybody but you knew about it.
You don't understand why I object to someone who can't be bothered or is too much of a klutz to get the facts straight playing the expert?
After reading what you've posted in this thread? No. No, I genuinely do not understand why you would object to this.
You already dispensed with that theory (you claim you slogged through -- another of your synonyms for "perused on the toilet" I'm sure -- Marx's Capital at university)
That was Blinking Spirit.
Maybe next time you should do some deeper thought and research into identifying who you're responding to? (Hint: his avatar is the one that blinks.)
It IS as though I knew it prior to this exchange. Pretty much everybody but you knew about it.
Is that why you harped about how I didn't reference the Sedition Act when I did? Cuz that kind of sounds like someone who didn't look up why Abrams was on trial.
My apologies. Is that your alter ego or are there actually two of you advancing your garbage?
Is that why you asked why I didn't reference the Sedition Act when I did? Cuz that kind of sounds like someone who didn't look up the actual case.
You only referenced it by its formal name because you were clearly unaware that the case you were talking about WAS the Sedition Act. Which you then somehow tried to claim ended up defending socialists (???) I suppose the Reichstag Decree was friendly to socialists too, on the grounds that surely at least one person must have dissented to it.
Functioning as a mouthpiece for the most vile and reprehensible propaganda does not constitute "raising actual questions about my position". Tu quoque my ass.
The actual question raised about your position was that of justifying historical mass murders that were carried out by the order of Communist regimes acting with the express and stated intent of implementing or enforcing Marxist economic policies. Examples of such events include dekulakization, the resulting famines and the Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward, to name just a few.
This you have not engaged with. Your every reply has been a distraction and divagation, and your statement on the core issue is deafening silence. As an act of charity, I will regard this silence as the silence of a person who has accidentally found himself on an indefensible position and realizes he cannot defend it, but is too proud to retreat from it. A less charitable person might take your silence to be assent and agreement with the actions of these regimes.
The tu quoque fallacy in your argument takes place when you attempt to divagate by constructing a comparison with actions taken by your notion of the "capitalist class". Even if this comparison were valid in every detail, which it is not, it would no more absolve you of your explanatory burden here than a murderer at his trial could expect to sway a jury by pointing out that Charles Manson murdered more people.
I genuinely cannot tell if KBH is some teenage marxist railing at the world, or possible some ex-KGB idealist. Maybe it's vladimir putin.
KBH, when you say "most east germans want communism back" I assume you mean 10 to 15%?
"However, only 10 to 15 percent of the former East Germany's 16 million people would want the old communist regime back, according to several German opinion polls. The vast majority are happy to live in a freer and wealthier unified Germany. But still - there is something odd going on here."
(While we're on the subject of corrections: Highroller, it is probably inaccurate or at least complex to confirm that communist russia killed more people than the nazis; even excluding war casualties the figures are fairly similar and hard to confirm for either. Certainly the Nazis killed more per year of their reign of terror. A better comparison is to the Chinese communists; they killed a LARGE number of people more, althought TBF probably less as a percentage of population controlled).
Socialism has its upsides, no doubt. Communism has far lesser upsides, as it is essentially a stalinist dicatorship dressed in the clothing of equality. While I think the initial thread suggestion (that socialism should be criminalised, an incoherent statement at best) is laughable, the notion that communism - and socialism - are perfect societal models and that the Russian and Chinese experiments were amazing successes we should emulate - is also pretty absurd.
No doubt, capitalism is also pretty badly flawed and I think the American model is a pretty messed up example of how it can all go horribly wrong for the people of the country involved. But during the last century the Americans did not commit mass genocide against their own people, so I think they probably have the moral high ground there.
No doubt, capitalism is also pretty badly flawed and I think the American model is a pretty messed up example of how it can all go horribly wrong for the people of the country involved. But during the last century the Americans did not commit mass genocide against their own people, so I think they probably have the moral high ground there.
The funny thing (not ha-ha funny) is that throughout the Cold War the Kremlin kept expecting an American genocide to happen. It just blew their minds every year that the United States didn't erupt into a race war. They were looking at the world through the filter of their own ideology and national experience, and could not imagine any other conflict resolution method than violent class struggle. The peaceful power of free speech was completely alien to them.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
You only referenced it by its formal name because you were clearly unaware that the case you were talking about WAS the Sedition Act.
Except for the part where Abrams and others were arrested because of the Sedition Act because they were protesting the American involvement against the Bolsheviks. Which I've said repeatedly. It helps to actually read up on the case.
Which you then somehow tried to claim ended up defending socialists (???)
Holmes defended Abrams' right to protest the American involvement against the Bolsheviks by going against the Sedition Act, yes. Thus, Holme's employment of the concept of a free market of ideas was used in this case in his case against the Sedition Act in favor of a person who was protesting America's involvement against the Bolsheviks.
While we're on the subject of corrections: Highroller, it is probably inaccurate or at least complex to confirm that communist russia killed more people than the nazis; even excluding war casualties the figures are fairly similar and hard to confirm for either. Certainly the Nazis killed more per year of their reign of terror. A better comparison is to the Chinese communists; they killed a LARGE number of people more, althought TBF probably less as a percentage of population controlled).
Fair enough, but I think the fact that we acknowledge that the USSR is a contender for most atrocities committed when Nazi Germany is in the running means my point stands: if anyone finds himself defending the USSR, especially while decrying fascism so much, he should really ask why on earth he's defending the USSR.
Illegal one: They earn little but still is MUCH more what they gain in their respective countries and I'm not sure if you're familiar with third world countries but we actually don't constantly die or live a horrible life. I earn 1/3 of USA's minimal wage (purchase power adjusted) and I live a fine material life, in the sense I shouldn't be demanding public intervention in my favor.
Aren't you Brazilian? Cost of living there is 1/3rd of that in the US, so I'm not really sure how the comparison is accurate.
This thread caught my attention and to your comment I had to respond. There are plenty of people here in the US that insist on having a fancy cell phone, maybe cable and fast Internet connection, also maybe expensive clothing, that may be part of this group that is living paycheck to paycheck. I think it is our responsibility to make sure we are not robbing ourselves of living simply because we think we need to have some of these things. It won't solve the issue completely in terms of being able to live, but some people need to examine their expenses and determine what they need versus what they want.
Personally, I do not feel that restaurants or retail jobs should be considered a career and people expect to live by working there.
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Why would it ever be in society's best interest to criminalize thought?
I am most certainly concerned about the fruits of my labor being taken away from me, and I believe that the government's movement towards, say, socialized medicine with Obamacare, is a huge mistake. However, I also recognize that varying degrees of socialism are necessary to keep society functioning in a healthy manner. This was a lesson the United States learned during the Industrial revolution.
First of all, John Stuart Mills, and no, he wasn't.
Second, and how's this for irony, in terms of US politics, the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is famously linked to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the case of Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes defends the free speech rights of the defendants who were protesting United States involvement against the Bolsheviks.
Which is why it's been a failure every single time it's been implemented. Not so sharp, it seems.
Yeah? What role did the USSR play in that?
Because totalitarianism doesn't run rampant under Communism? Really? That's your argument?
Liberators, martrys, and heroes for all time
This is beyond embarrassing. The Sophists were enamored of themselves too (obviously),but they did at least pride themselves on being professionals. Here, they wouldn't know whether to laugh, cry, or run in the other direction. Even by internet standards for argument this is so weak that it slides into the bizarre. You say that Gorky's statement is wrong because Philistine's can buy guns? Wha...? And rocks eat popcorn?
But, lets lay it out. You are a loud and proud philistine. You have no intellectual defense for maintaining your comfortable philistine existence (ie status quo) without resorting to denigrating your fellow man (it can't be lost on you that every justification for "the market" ultimately revolves around doing exactly this). ALL claims of human nature (or "the human condition" which is the EXACT SAME THING when considered in the abstract and absent social context) play on this same trumped up cynicism. As in "We can't do better because humans are inherently.."
Its not possible to materially support thug excrement mugging for the cameras with their swastika neck tattoos and then claim any moral high ground. And besides its not as though this is the Field Marshal's first tryst with mass murderers and/or ethnic cleansers.
A majority of East Germans, when polled, looked back on the GDR fondly and wished for its return. This was chronicled in a particularly obtuse article in Der Spiegel not that many years back.
As for North Korea being hell on Earth..
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/how-and-why-the-western-news-media-get-north-koreas-economy-wrong/
Strange, don't you think? Only a few years ago the modern US liberal would have made quite a production distancing himself from Mill. Today, the repugnant resemblance is too uncanny for anyone to deny. The truth is that the liberals have always professed such profoundly right wing ideas but they are taken as such articles of faith and commonplaces that it scarely necessary to repeat them. To them it is not even a question: of course human ingenuity and knowledge are subject to the same fetters as all other sphere's of human life. Of course it has always been so. Those are bedrock statements of liberalism.
Good thing I'm not pretending to be a Sophist. I'd say I'm more in the tradition of the Socratic gadfly here, pointing out embarrassing truths to make your position look ridiculous. Obviously I'm using a different format to do it - I always found something disingenuous about Plato's dialogues since he could write both sides to suit his purpose, and that rather soured me on Socratic questioning proper. But objecting to the form of the argument while ignoring its substance is a very Sophist thing to do - and, if I may point out another embarrassing truth, that's exactly what you're doing here.
Now might be an appropriate time to mention that one of the perennial problems with communism has always been communists. I have yet to find one who has had any sense of humor whatsoever.
Says the guy calling me a "loud and proud philistine" rather than defending his communist heroes from the numerous charges made in this very thread of mass murder and other human rights violations lesser only by comparison.
After all we've been through so far, somehow you still believe that I secretly share your ideology? Talk about your false consciousness.
Don't try to tell me what I mean by the terms I use. As I said earlier, your mind-reading skills aren't up to the task. "Human nature" is a statistical model of the way humans are inclined to behave before their behavior is modified by culture. "The human condition" is the subjective experience of being human, particularly our reactions to the "big questions" like the purpose of life. The former is scientific, the latter is aesthetic and philosophical. And I'm not just pulling these definitions out of my ass - they've got different Wiki pages and everything.
PS: "Exactly the same."
Okay, so somebody somewhere made this argument and now you've got a chip on your shoulder about it. That kind of tells me that you feel threatened by it, which is interesting, but I still haven't said one solitary thing along these lines, nor do I plan to.
Au contraire, but let's not get sidetracked - you are, after all, simply moving your goalposts when called on an indefensible claim.
Ah, well, if it's obtuse, I suppose it's too much to expect you to actually link the thing. I also suppose that the Osties built the Wall for merely decorative purpose, because obviously nobody would want to leave such a wonderful place.
Pssh. Your writer can't even make up his mind whether North Korea's economic condition is a lie, or whether it's the truth but it's all somebody else's fault. He focuses on Pyongyang but ignores the rest of the country, disregarding the fact that Pyongyang is the facade the North Korean government is artificially presenting to the world, the one blob of light on the pitch-black satellite map, and that even there the facade is showing a few cracks, like the embarrassment of the Ryugyong Hotel. Then he turns around and blames American bullying for the economic problems, disregarding the fact that Stalinist Russia and Maoist China both experienced similar problems while not sanctioned by the U.S., and non-communist countries like Iran have been able to grow even under U.S. sanction (I'm not going to pretend a trade embargo is wonderful for a nation, of course, but it's not nearly as powerful as some of our hawks like to think). And he doesn't say a single word about the real reason North Korea is hell on earth, the reason it would be hell on earth even if its economy blazed on the satellite map like the light of a thousand suns: the torture camps. Earlier you complained that "Socialism is a crime in bourgeois society", but you haven't got a clue what the criminalization of dissent actually looks like.
Why should they? He was a good thinker, a good liberal, and a good man - an abolitionist, an early defender of women's and gay rights, an advocate of worker's cooperatives, and he managed to get through his entire life without killing anybody or even advocating killing anybody.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Here's a hint: rarely does a regime find itself on the "Killed more people than Nazi Germany" list. If a country that you're defending is on it, really ask yourself why you're defending them.
What, that you made a snide remark about the person who coined the phrase "marketplace of ideas," without having the historical knowledge to know that John Stuart Mill was was a utilitarian, an advocate for the rights of the individual, a supporter of worker cooperatives, and at times a defender of socialist policies, or that the Supreme Court Justice who was famous for bringing this phrase into the US political dialogue did so during a case in which he was defending a person who was protesting against the US from providing military assistance against the Bolsheviks?
Sadly, no, I don't find that strange at all. The demonstration of a complete lack of historical knowledge in your arguments has proven itself to be well within the parameters of what is normal.
I don't know, I think a modern liberal would be happy to be linked to a profoundly influential thinker whose philosophies didn't result in the death of millions.
I will close with a curious historical note:
If I may offer a suggestion, learning everything you know about a subject from wikipedia during the middle of a discussion is a bad idea. I tried to let you off the hook gently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas
Two things are obvious.
1. the odds of anyone knowing off the top of their head the entire notable history of the phrase "marketplace of ideas" is vanishing and zero in your case
2. You didn't even bother to read the article since your claims are explicitly refuted in the article especially since the article addresses the concept and not the phrase.
JS Mill coined the phrase you say?
Oops..swing and a miss
Oh,it was Oliver Wendell Holmes then
Huh, 0 for 2..
If you had continued reading..er, skimming, uh..cherry picking you could have also invoked Milton and Jefferson.
At issue was never the origination of the idea (and even JS is a bit late in the game to claim that) but rather the appearance of the phrase as it is bandied about by philistines like yourself in casual conversation. You honestly think whenever some modern sh!t-for-brains throws out the term that he is harking back to Holmes and the irony of dissenting against THE SEDITION ACT? (yeah, you clicked one wiki link too few on that one, old buddy)
Again, before you try to squirm out of this do be sure and tell us how you knew off the top of your head that it was Holmes dissent in Abrams while failing to note that this was the well known Sedition Act.
I wrote regarding Obama:
And the intrepid Blinking Spirit responded au contraire
I suspected he was a passive fascist enabler but this seems a bit much..
Better make that three, pal. I've only been watching from the sidelines while people more competent (and patient) than me somehow manage to engage with your ravings, and I've observed that your response to every question concerning your position has been silence (a silence I find particularly salient when it comes to the matter of the oceans of blood and mountains of corpses that accrue to the practice of the ideology you're defending) or ad hominem attacks on the poster rather than engagement with the issues.
This is a Debate forum. You don't think people here are accustomed to seeing past that sort of bush-league rhetoric to the underlying logic of the position -- which, in your case, is nothing?
Yes! That's exactly what is meant in the context of this discussion. We should all dissent from anything like a Sedition Act because, inter alia, we don't need anything like a Sedition Act to deal with Marxists -- they evict themselves from rational discourse voluntarily!
You yourself are a more perfect piece of anti-Marxist propaganda than anything the State Department has ever conceived.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
You have it entirely backwards. You are so sure that all readers are completely ideologically indoctrinated into your philistine belief system that you think throwing around wild claims in colorful language (oceans of blood, mountains of corpses) somehow overwrites the well documented and indisputable genocides of the last century -- by the murderous, barbaric capitalist class.
It seems that you would like me to defend the lies you attribute to be my position and hope that I thereby adopt them as my own. I note that you provide not a shred of evidence regarding your "oceans of blood" nor do your try to fashion a comparison to the prevailing capitalist system.
Or are you pretending to not be aware that capitalists were behind the Holocaust and the concurrent holocaust in India that seems to have been orchestrated merely on the whim of the butcher Churchill? These killing sprees being only a fraction of those immolated in two conjoined world wars with a worldwide Depression sandwiched in between? Do you really think everyone else is an ignorant, credulous Americana like yourself?
Do you know what a tu quoque fallacy is? No, I thought not. Well, this is the part where you go learn everything you know about a subject from wikipedia during the middle of a discussion. Don't worry, though, I'll wait. But meanwhile, I will observe that the silence on the actual question raised about your position continues.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Functioning as a mouthpiece for the most vile and reprehensible propaganda does not constitute "raising actual questions about my position". Tu quoque my ass. Yours is more the "tu madre" style of debate.
On EDIT: are you seriously throwing in with High Roller on the point of cribbing from Wikipedia? You realize that what he tried to do (ineptly with quite a bit of haughtiness thrown in) constitutes EXTREME intellectual dishonesty, no? Since you are so concerned with points of order regarding argumentation. Honestly, you guys are borderline solipsists. You think you can throw any old crap out there and it will simply be accepted without scrutiny.
First of all, how did I fail to note the Sedition Act? I specifically said Abrams was on trial for protesting American military involvement against the Bolsheviks. (Here's the part where you learn everything you know about a subject from Wikipedia in the middle of debate)
Second, no, you yourself demonstrated in this thread that a person can spout off about the "marketplace of ideas" without having a clue that the dialogue about the free exchange of ideas involved an incident in which a Supreme Court Justice defended a man's protesting of the American military involvement against the Bolsheviks, which created for this lovely bit of irony:
So clearly it is possible for someone to go off on the idea of the "marketplace of ideas" without recognizing that it is employed to defend the rights of people like himself.
And to be fair, I myself thought the term came out of the Brandenburg v. Ohio case. I didn't realize the idea and its role in US Supreme Court decisions stretched further back than that. I, like you, hadn't done any research prior to this debate on the history of the term.
If, by extreme intellectual dishonesty, you mean "does research on a topic before speaking about it," then that explains a great deal about you.
I posted the link so that people could see for themselves where you tried (and, sadly, failed) to crib your information. Since that is beyond obvious I can only assume you are being disingenuous in an attempted cya. I hope you're not as clumsy at covering for yourself as you are at getting stuff right in first place, although I guess a lifetime of playing the expert has given you plenty of practice being caught with your pants down.
The entire history of anti-communism in American disagrees with any whacko notion that "the market of ideas" somehow incorporates protection for socialists. For starters, you could look at the Sedition Act itself (which has reasserted itself rather dramatically of late). Communists and socialists have been (and are) openly persecuted and targeted in the United States any and every time they have ever had a presence in the country. I don't know how oblivious one would have to be to deny that. I would rather not find out but I have a feeling I'm going to.
So the answer is you're correct, I didn't know how ridiculous what you said about "The Marketplace of Ideas" was prior to my researching the origins of the term "The Marketplace of Ideas." However, having done the research, I am the better person for it, because I can see the irony of you attacking the idea of a marketplace of ideas while simultaneously claiming about how criminal the idea of socialism is when if you yourself had done the research on the concept of the "Marketplace of Ideas," you would understand the problems of that statement.
And really, not sure the basis of you criticizing someone who has done a limited amount of research when it's evident you've done none at all. Except, of course, when you've looked something up on Wikipedia in the middle of a debate while criticizing someone for doing exactly that.
Perhaps there is more to understanding a subject than spending five seconds on Google? And your readers are left to suppose that your opinions on anything else (say, communism or history or society) are grounded in much deeper thought and research? You already dispensed with that theory (you claim you slogged through -- another of your synonyms for "perused on the toilet" I'm sure -- Marx's Capital at university)
It IS as though I knew it prior to this exchange. Pretty much everybody but you knew about it.
That was Blinking Spirit.
Maybe next time you should do some deeper thought and research into identifying who you're responding to? (Hint: his avatar is the one that blinks.)
Is that why you harped about how I didn't reference the Sedition Act when I did? Cuz that kind of sounds like someone who didn't look up why Abrams was on trial.
My apologies. Is that your alter ego or are there actually two of you advancing your garbage?
You only referenced it by its formal name because you were clearly unaware that the case you were talking about WAS the Sedition Act. Which you then somehow tried to claim ended up defending socialists (???) I suppose the Reichstag Decree was friendly to socialists too, on the grounds that surely at least one person must have dissented to it.
The actual question raised about your position was that of justifying historical mass murders that were carried out by the order of Communist regimes acting with the express and stated intent of implementing or enforcing Marxist economic policies. Examples of such events include dekulakization, the resulting famines and the Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward, to name just a few.
This you have not engaged with. Your every reply has been a distraction and divagation, and your statement on the core issue is deafening silence. As an act of charity, I will regard this silence as the silence of a person who has accidentally found himself on an indefensible position and realizes he cannot defend it, but is too proud to retreat from it. A less charitable person might take your silence to be assent and agreement with the actions of these regimes.
The tu quoque fallacy in your argument takes place when you attempt to divagate by constructing a comparison with actions taken by your notion of the "capitalist class". Even if this comparison were valid in every detail, which it is not, it would no more absolve you of your explanatory burden here than a murderer at his trial could expect to sway a jury by pointing out that Charles Manson murdered more people.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
KBH, when you say "most east germans want communism back" I assume you mean 10 to 15%?
"However, only 10 to 15 percent of the former East Germany's 16 million people would want the old communist regime back, according to several German opinion polls. The vast majority are happy to live in a freer and wealthier unified Germany. But still - there is something odd going on here."
(http://www.dw.de/ostalgia-romanticizing-the-gdr/a-17959366)
(While we're on the subject of corrections: Highroller, it is probably inaccurate or at least complex to confirm that communist russia killed more people than the nazis; even excluding war casualties the figures are fairly similar and hard to confirm for either. Certainly the Nazis killed more per year of their reign of terror. A better comparison is to the Chinese communists; they killed a LARGE number of people more, althought TBF probably less as a percentage of population controlled).
Socialism has its upsides, no doubt. Communism has far lesser upsides, as it is essentially a stalinist dicatorship dressed in the clothing of equality. While I think the initial thread suggestion (that socialism should be criminalised, an incoherent statement at best) is laughable, the notion that communism - and socialism - are perfect societal models and that the Russian and Chinese experiments were amazing successes we should emulate - is also pretty absurd.
No doubt, capitalism is also pretty badly flawed and I think the American model is a pretty messed up example of how it can all go horribly wrong for the people of the country involved. But during the last century the Americans did not commit mass genocide against their own people, so I think they probably have the moral high ground there.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Holmes defended Abrams' right to protest the American involvement against the Bolsheviks by going against the Sedition Act, yes. Thus, Holme's employment of the concept of a free market of ideas was used in this case in his case against the Sedition Act in favor of a person who was protesting America's involvement against the Bolsheviks.
Fair enough, but I think the fact that we acknowledge that the USSR is a contender for most atrocities committed when Nazi Germany is in the running means my point stands: if anyone finds himself defending the USSR, especially while decrying fascism so much, he should really ask why on earth he's defending the USSR.
This thread caught my attention and to your comment I had to respond. There are plenty of people here in the US that insist on having a fancy cell phone, maybe cable and fast Internet connection, also maybe expensive clothing, that may be part of this group that is living paycheck to paycheck. I think it is our responsibility to make sure we are not robbing ourselves of living simply because we think we need to have some of these things. It won't solve the issue completely in terms of being able to live, but some people need to examine their expenses and determine what they need versus what they want.
Personally, I do not feel that restaurants or retail jobs should be considered a career and people expect to live by working there.