pvn perhaps I am misunderstanding you.

It is hard to understand people in general. I am sorry. What are you suggesting? I am sure it has been said already so if you got a link handy, I'll read it and get back to you.

I am not disagreeing with you at all.

I am just saying people have been equating Stalin with Hitler and Hitler with the devil.

It's foolish don't you think? People get pigeonholed into focusing on the bad things Hitler or Stalin did. Do you even KNOW of the good? Do you compare?

Or do you, under pressure of being labelled a holocaust denier, simply say OK HITLER IS THE DEVIL. END OF STORY.

I know that's how a lot of people feel but given people are still being placed in jail for speaking their opinion, it's kinda dangerous. I don't even wanna get into this because I don't know of any other topic that can get people banned so quickly.

Holocaust is the magic word for winning any debate because the topic is above Jesus. You can deny Jesus but you can't deny the Holocaust. It's crazy right? I even have to add that I am NOT denying the Holocaust and it's very real. Otherwise once again, I am under threat of being banned for being a denier. The whole Hitler thing got way too much power, lol.

I'm suggesting that you stop bossing other people around and saying that they are bossing YOU around when they object.

Do you want me to apologize twice, just to appease your sensitive nature?

Not many. I consider myself one of them. I know there are some on the "opposite side." Sadly, anarcho-syndicalists have the same penchant for extremism that anarcho-capitalists have. Doesn't make for good relations.

I do think AS has problems of scale, and I think it's best implemented at a community level, and

But fundamentally, AS doesn't suggest that everyone has to follow AS, and AC doesn't suggest that everyone has to follow AC, just that the systems can be viable for some.

The main thrust of anarchism is that people should have the ability to opt out of government systems and try other arrangements if they choose to do so. The problem is that governments generally try to kill people who do this, and governments also lay claim to basically all the land in the world (there are exceptions that are unlivable or occupied by murderous warlords, and some creative solutions). If a bunch of people bought up some land in Wyoming and wanted to try a large scale anarchist experiment, the US federal government would be highly unlikely to let it happen.

Of course, right now I don't know how helpful it would be. It could at least serve as a kind of refuge if successful, as the various tiny communes around the world do. Of course, even then things might get messy, especially with the whole "we don't have to pay taxes to the US government" issue. The more successful such an experiment is, the more the government will want a piece of it. I think a focus on civil rights, anti-corporatism (mainly in the form of fighting subsidies and other privileges granted to corporations by government), responsible fiscal policy (gold standard might be asking too much, especially in this climate, but debt control and some modicum of decency on the part of the Fed wouldn't hurt), and a focus on the well-being of the individual throughout society all move in the right direction IMO, and are all compatible with the extant ideologies.

Then again, I don't think we'll see any of this stuff in my lifetime. Those who foresee some kind of revolution in the near future may think I'm much too moderate and that I give far too many concessions to (insert bogey man here).

I really don't understand what you're trying to get at here, but there is no amount of good Hitler could have ever done to remotely balance out the evil that he did. My wife's grandfather is a Russian Jew, from Ukraine. He had to flee to Uzbekistan in WWII from Hitler. He's lived it, and I'm sure remotely telling him that Hitler did any good would light a fire under him.

He and her parents lived in the Soviet Union. He lived under Stalin. He has barely talked to me about how evil and horrible Stalin was. He only speaks Russian so the language barrier is fairly high right now, but he can still get his point across. You do realize that Stalin IS in the same boat if not worse than Hitler as being the single worst person to cause genocide. He murdered his own people. Millions upon millions. The KGB would gather up the names of people accused of treason, often due to a neighbor having a problem with them. Innocent people. And Stalin would get these massive lists of names, something like 20,000 names at a time, and at the bottom of the last page, he would sign his name. Do you want to know what it meant? It meant that the majority were shot in the back of the head and the rest were sent to prison camps. He didn't even look at the names or ask where the evidence was, he just signed it and pffft off his desk.

Nothing he did was ever good enough to take just a fraction of his bad he did. Its amazing how naive your thoughts and opinions are. Its like you just have these thoughts of an idealistic perfect world, and then say it like its fact.

We're waaaay off topic here, but...

As you know from our exchange in the censorship thread, I'll defend your right to say whatever you want in whatever fashion. I also know, unless your whole persona is one giant level, that you are a much more thoughtful person than some of your posts would indicate.

I think anybody on these forums should be allowed to say anything. I have received infractions myself. I think that's actually a rite of passage. Plus, I'm a raging *******.

But we are in a privately owned forum and have to hew to the rules that are put down by the owners. Yeah, I think they go too far, and often display iron fisted tendencies. But this is a forum primarily dedicated to poker and poker strategy. The fact that these non-poker boards exist for us poker enthusiasts to take our minds off STT strategy and the intricacies of implied odds in a short-handed game is something I genuinely appreciate. I read that the Politics board was almost shut down once rather than deal with issues like you mention.

So whether I think it is right or not is irrelevant. It is not my board. But I like posting here, and I like reading here, so I have to play by the rules. To paraphrase you, if I don't like it, I can go live in a cave.

Remember, they are also a business. If anything suggesting intolerance is on the boards, it can imply a tacit endorsement, even in the face of what would seem to be common sense. First and foremost, they have to think about their business. This website is commercial, don't forget. It is not just for funzies.

Respectfully, I am suggesting that it's not so much what you post as how you post it. Be careful.

Frankly, I though you were holding your own pretty well there for awhile. So keep your thoughts focused, and don't worry 'bout all that other crap.

Oh, and pvn doesn't accept conciliatory gestures well. He's a bit of Spartan, that one...

Ideal outcomes aren't a hard thing to agree on in most political discussions. Subverted utopias like the one in "Brave New World" show that there is some disagreement, but if we ignore the nit-picking and semantics, "everyone happy" can usually be accepted as a wonderful goal. I don't believe in any set of moral principles that absolutely prohibit any action, so I think an absolute authority would be fine if it could be wise enough, smart enough, and stable enough to make it work. You can check the political positions thread in SMP to see what I think would be the ideal solution.

But it's typically recognized that ideal solutions are unrealistic. There is no way to make everyone happy. And implementation is very important. So I'll respond to your view the way I respond to all utopianism, it'd be nice if it worked, but it wouldn't.

My view of Stalin isn't as black-and-white as it could be (neither is my view of Vlad the Impaler, for that matter). In a sense, Stalin did more than anyone to stop Hitler, and the sacrifices of the Russians in securing a WW2 victory are largely what he's criticized for.

But this is going a bit far. Even as part of Lenin's political circle, Stalin was a power-monger and a very deceptive guy. And even in personal terms, well, go ask Yezhov.

Well, we have us a winner. This may be the most common sense post in this thread. Mad has avoided all the flashpoint wordage (Statist. Coercion. Utopian.) and presented a pretty clear-headed idea of where he thinks the concept can go. I have no faith in the concept, of course, being a black hearted cynic. You've no convert here, sir. But there is common ground there.

As I've stated, I see a conceptual destination framework. I've also stated the necessity of a more evolved humanity on several levels. Which is why I refer to it as Utopian, I guess. Idealistic does not necessarily mean unreachable. And I still maintain the importance of human nature in easing society's problems, far, far more than systemic implementation.

The concept of AS actually seems more reasonable to me on several levels than AC, but that may be my naturally left-leaning pinko nature coming to the forefront.

kudzudemon,

Thank you for the kind words Right back at ya, hehe. I respect that it's a privately owned forum and everything else. I was just pointing out the irrational one-sidedness that's so typical among anyone who is a "saint" or anyone who is a "villain."

People seem to forget that saints are humans and make mistakes. Villains are humans and also make mistakes. In the end we're all human and I personally haven't met a single villain in my life, have you?

The parallel I can draw from this, is that government officials are oftentimes seen as villains as well. They really are not. They're just people who are caught up in a system that's self destructing and nobody is willing to spark a revolution as it stands.

It's easier to let it be than to try and change something that's been growing wrong for so long. This is seen everywhere in life. How many % in USA suffer from obesity? It's not because they're stupid... They are simply focused on very strange things in life. Namely - money.

That's what I keep saying over and over again - there's no single person or single concept that we can vilify. It takes great wisdom to make a big society work. It took a lot of little mistakes for a person to become obese. It took a lot of small mistakes for a government to become corrupt. It is not going to get fixed with a WEIGHT-LOSS pill or a new government idea like AC.

But I guess it's easier to argue how one weight-loss pill is better than another. It is a lot harder to look at what causes obesity in USA and consider all the factors, consider the possible LONG-TERM solutions. So it goes, we arguing AC vs some other random word, getting nowhere

I believe men are animals, and there are plenty of animals that have desires we consider strange. But my point was entirely theoretical. The idea that equilibrium is impossible because people never stop wanting (even if we grant that, and some people do stop wanting so I won't grant it) is simply unjustified. I'm not talking about schools of fish (neat as they are), I'm talking about ecosystems - everyone wants a piece of everyone else, and given total control it would be a disaster. However, because the various players are balanced, there's something resembling a harmony. Three people can be an equilibrium in that if one person ever tries to take control, the other two must band together and stop him. The logistical problem lies in preventing those two people from banding together and killing the first, splitting his stuff, and then fighting to the death. However, this dilemma always exists, and the reason democracy works better than dictatorship is because some solutions are more effective than others.

You seem to think a representative democracy is the best possible solution, and that's just silly.

Merriam Webster needs to get its political philosophy straight. My definitions are from the Oxford English dictionary, that's not fancy enough for you?

Of course the word anarchy applies to Zimbabwe, but none of the presented definitions are accepted by anarchists. If I say "I put my foot in my mouth" and you claim I shoved the muscular part of a mollusk into the opening of a canyon, then you're being deliberately obtuse.

You're saying that Zimbabwe is the closest thing to the system I'm describing, and I'm telling you that the system I'm describing has laws and is predicated on nonviolence. Trying to use a different definition of "anarchy" than the one I'm using is disingenuous. Anarchists don't support political disorder - anarchists support a political order that is voluntary and nonviolent. No anarchist above the age of 17 suggests simply getting rid of the government, as you seem to be implying. Anarchism suggests slowly phasing government out in favor of a different political process.

And while I didn't think you were too confused about the definition of anarchy, I am now. It sounds like you've never even read an anarchist political philosopher (or that you don't even know that anarchist thinkers play a role in political theory). Either that or you're trying to keep the debate out of political philosophy, which is strange because it's a debate of political philosophy in the first place.

Are you that naive? I'm really just kind of like "Are you for real?"

I don't know if "common sense" is the way to describe me; I think the ideal solution is a great big artificial intelligence controlling everything. But I take a pretty light-hearted view, because I think my ideal solution is a few millennia in the distance. If this were 5278, I'd be as rabid as anyone.

Well, I fundamentally think that the fact intelligent people tend to disagree about politics is a good sign nobody is likely to be right on the subject. There are probably many things about human society we still don't understand, and we're all forced to speculate based on limited information. For that reason, I think making a drastic choice to implement any personal pet scheme is unwise. I never liked the status quo, but at least it works. I believe change has to be very gradual - in the dark, it's important to watch one's step.

Bump for anyone.

To use the latest analogy put forward in this thread, please explain why the fact that a few people are fat implies that everyone in the country needs to be on the same restrictive diet.

I really likey this


Hollywoodmatt - is naive, a nice way of saying you believe your opinion to be good, while mine - childish and uninformed?

If so, it could very well be. Or it could not be. Either way what do you wanna say if anything?