LOL... someone read a couple of books and thinks he "gets it"....

tomj,

I believe everything bad you mention in your last post happens more frequent in a socialist country than a capitalistic one.

Your argument that you are better off in the middle ages than a homeless man today is silly. If you could choose to be middle class today in the US or middle class in the middle ages what do you choose? Would you rather be born to a random set of parents today in the US or in the middle ages? These are such stupid questions I hesitate even asking them, but I honestly don't know what you are going to answer.

If socialism is so great why don't we see more socialist countries today? Of the socialist countries today which ones would you say you'd rather be randomly born into than the avg. capitalistic country?

More than a couple. But in fact it is only necessary to read one to "get it", and that is 1984 by Orwell. And what books have influenced you?

I thought you would say that which is why I tried to pre-empt it and mention that I don't believe that so-called socialist states were/are socialist at all. Let's take Cuba for example. Cuba has outstanding (relative to its economy) health care. US citizens, in the world's richest economy, stare in envy at the Cuban's progressive health care system. The US exports bombs. Cuba exports doctors. This leads some to assume that Cuba is a socialist state. But Cuba is not democratic; women are not equal citizens in Cuba; there is inequality; there is exploitation. So to me this isn't socialist, no more socialist than the UK between 1951 and 1979 when most people had jobs, their own stable home, decent health care. The Cuban revolution got rid of the dictator, US puppet Batista, but it didn't get rid of capitalism. I'd rather live in the west in somewhere like Finland where education is good, taxes are high and people seem to want to contribute to society. I was born in 1983 in the UK, I would rather this than the "soviet union" (speech marks because it's a misnomer). Would I rather live in the US or soviet union in the 80s? Tough one. Depends what kind of life I'd have. Job security, housing and social security are more important to me than freedom to make money. If I was a black man, again it's a tough one, black men are treated appallingly in the US - another good book has just sprung to mind, the N***** Factory by the musician Gil Scott Heron about life on student campuses in the 1960s - when state police shot protesters dead for demonstrating about treatment and conditions of black students, and segregation of colleges. So yeah, not sure.

I'd rather be born today than 700 years ago and I'd rather be middle class, but the vast majority of people aren't middle class. My point is that what life does a homeless person have that is any better than the life of someone in the middle ages - at least they would have had a purpose in life, farming or something.

The cat in the hat.

Heh.... You might try another of Orwell's.

Well the author continued to consider himself a socialist despite his critique of Stalinism so I don't know what work you think that is doing Lapidator.

Why do you believe there are no truly socialist states? The get knee deep in socialism and realize how stupid it is and try to un-socialize or is it that they are still on their way paradize/ true socialism?

Why do you think it is that Cuban doctors have been trying to leave the country for so long?

Very few people from the US envy Cuba. Some may think they have a great healthcare system (rightly or wrongly), but almost none of them would trade places with a Cuban.

Hold on. You think black people are treated worse in the US than in Russia today?

The vast majority of people in the US are middle class. The middle class is shrinking, but the majority of people are still in the middle class.

How is a homeless person today better off than a homeless person in the middle ages? Or are you wanting to compare apples and oranges and compare a homeless person today and middle class person in the middle ages?

If it is the later then I would say the opportunities available to the homeless today trump the advantages you would have as a middle class middle ages person. There are ways to get free housing and food today. There are ways to find a job and buy things that weren't available in the middle ages. Diseases that were a death sentence in the middle ages are curable.

Tomj, I'd like to hear your response to my last post, but I am also interested in your backround and how you came to be pro-socialism. Nothing too personal, but stuff like where you were born, where else have you lived, your education, any big events in your life that may have effected your decision to be pro-socialism (father lost his job and you were homeless for a while, your grandpa took you to a socialist speaker when you were young, you went to a OWS protest and that convinced you how evil rich people are), etc.

Yes, because socialists never admit that failure is systematic.

Stalin screwed up, not "the workers", they say.

It's the perpetual refrain. We just need to try harder in the next iteration. Just ask Boxer.

Nevertheless, AF nicely describes socialism and it logical extension, communism.

erm no communism is not a logical extension of socialism, there isn't anything logically entailing the shift from socialism to communism.

AF was written by a socialist whose rejection of Stalinism was in part motivated by the Stalinist betrayal of the red brigades in Spain.

Dereds is right of course.
If you actually read what Orwell said, he was against totalitarianism in all its forms. The right try have always tried to claim Orwell for their own, in fact Orwell is a traitor to his 'lower upper middle' class upbringing, being an imperial guard in Burma and growing to despise the empire because of the way the people were treated there.

Born in Birkenhead which is near Liverpool and grew up during the Thatcher years which is my earliest political memory, the utter hatred toward this woman for what she did to the miners, steelworkers and so on. Father was quite a bitter man, socialist in many ways but also a bit racist, fond of the Soviet union and devastated when the Berlin Wall came down. Bit of a hippy, mother was as well but she wasn't political. Neither of them worked until I was about 8 or 9. They were educated though - always books in the house, which was a rare sight on our estate, people used to come in and think they were like Professors or something. Nope, just on the dole lol. All kinds of books though, that's where I picked up 1984, I must have looked at the spine since I was 3 and one day picked it up and decided to read it.
Wirral council kept it's grammar schools, offered 11+ which I passed and went to a school which was packed full of middle class kids - what I would say were genuine middle class, posh cars, managers, solicitors. I was the only one from my school on the estate, so I guess I had a unique insight being from a poor are but mixing with posh types and seeing how they lived. Ironically I had a worse standard of living than most of my former mates who went to the comprehensive.
Anyway, all that I guess, coupled with some lefty ideas inherited from my father. It took reading as I said Orwell, and the communist manifesto and other Marxist stuff to decide what I thought was wrong with the world and as Lenin asked, what is to be done. Learned a lot from discussions and activities with other socialists as well as I got older like 20+. Always open to new ideas but fundamentally I am an irreconcilable socialist.

I wonder how these capitalism-haters get their message across without using the benefits of capitalism (computers, internet, etc.)? And don't give me this **** about who invented these things... the products that you're using right now are there because some company decided it was profitable to provide them. And you paid for it. Or more likely, your govt paid for it, along with all the other things you mooch.

lolz

lol

'The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, *against* totalitarianism and *for* democratic socialism, as I understand it.'
-Orwell, 'Why I Write', 1947

Perhaps because of CIA-sponsored promotion of Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Animal Farm in the 1950s (for the CIA's own obvious reasons), Americans tend to imagine that Orwell was a conservative. And they can't conceive that a socialist, which Orwell certainly was, could be opposed to Stalinism. They haven't read Homage to Catalonia (because the CIA didn't puff that one), so they don't know that Orwell served with the socialist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War against Franco's fascists, or that he was wounded in action, or that he narrowly escaped execution when the Moscow-line Stalinists shut down the independent socialist militias.

Indeed. The same could be said of schools in the UK, Animal Farm is studied by many, never Burmese Days or Homage to Catalonia - where Orwell talked about the 'workers being in the saddle' in Barcelona pre-Franco.

Oh dear. Someone doesn't like himself very much.

Actually, Homage to Catalonia was a set text at my school in the 1970s. That is, it was a set text for the old Oxford & Cambridge exam board recognised by the 'public' schools.

Correct.

Usually they pretend that those things exist because of the government, and the collective in some way, hence Obama, "You didn't build that." You didn't build that. You didn't invent that. You didn't do that. And, yada yada. If it's a strawman I'm making, it's a damn good one. Shoe fits imo.

Round here they usually they claim that capitalism exists because of government and lol at ACism.

In any case poster who claims to troll bad takes prob wants to refrain from posting bad takes.

I do think it's a strawman with regards to Obama. I think what he meant was that people don't build things by themselves. They have help. There are often govt loans, etc. There is govt aid in other ways. Roads, police, military, fire stations, USPS, etc. all contribute to helping businesses. These are all provided by the govt.

But i could be wrong about Obama's intentions. It's often hard to tell what he really means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that

You're a very sad man.