Ideologies

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You, apparently, think that most people should live to serve a few special people. In short, you believe in slavery. Shame on you.

I think that people ought to be able to do exactly as they wish so long as they do not initiate fraud or aggression on other people or impose unwarranted risk/hazard upon others. We should be able to live for ourselves and not dedicate our lives to Something Greater than ourselves. Your attitude reeks of an insane and unreasonable collectivism. Screw the collective. Live for your own joy.

I wasn't put on this earth to make space suits for Glorious Cosmonauts.
Neither were you.

Let them buy their space suits from willing producers for an agreed upon price.



ruveyn

How exactly did Stalin's pact with the Nazis benefit anyone? How did the Russian famines benefit anyone? How did lysenkoism benefit farmers?

Stalinism devestated human life, devalued reason and science, and devastated critical thought. The ends do not justify the means.

And how come you are so concerned over starving African children yet fail to hold a brutal dictator accountable for the starvation of his own people?

Stalin signed a pact with the Nazis because he thought it would protect his people from a Nazi invasion. It wasn’t Stalin’s fault that Hitler broke the pact and decided to invade the Soviet Union anyway.

No, thats capitalism. Social democrats in Sweden never did that... except for that Toblerone thing



No, since you say you are against liberal democracy you are against all that you just listed.

Republican rule (a.k.a. your precious "Economic democracy") of the Us has created a wealthy elite that rules over the people and blinds them with stupidity and fake ideas (just listen to the right wing people on the disinformation network called fox news), and that system also allow bank to do whatever they want, which has led to recession after recession because of these banker imbecills all over the world are allowed to play with peoples money without any responsibility.

I suggest you read up on all ideologies, because you seem to have most of them ass-back.

Oh, yes, and there as no aggressive intent or amoral opportunism at all in signing that pact. It's not as if he desired to subjugate the Eastern half of Poland.

Stalin's pact paved the way for the Nazi occupation of Europe. In addition to the responsibility for brutally killing critical thinkers and morally motivated people in the Soviet Union, Stalin can also be held partially responsible for the Holocaust.

"Interesting" in the sense that, in an attempt to get rid of the excesses of neoliberalism and free market fundamentalism, he has thrown out all liberty and individual conscience.

Stalin almost certainly knew Hitler would break the pact eventually- he just wanted to buy time to build up the Red Army because Western Europe was not interested in joining with Stalin to defeat the rise of fascism, and the Soviets couldn't do it alone. Stalin indicated that he would be willing to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia against Nazi aggression, but he couldn't risk it unless Britain and France joined in the fight, and those two countries refused.

It's an opinion I suppose, I should have qualified that. I'm well versed in socialist group-think, having participated myself for a short while, and having a good friend who's been involved for years. The OP demonstrates the terminology used by those who have fallen into this group think. He has good intentions, but I feel he is misled.

This mans form of "socialist group think" (or whatever you desire to call it) is by no means the type of "socialism" I'm familiar with. His cultural and moralistic conservatism is much more strigent, he lacks the typically socially and sexually libertarian attitude that characterizes (co-operative, democratic) socialism, and is much more of a general tolitarian. I would say quite a bit of originality or at least messing together of the least desirable elements from numerous ideologies went into his idiosyncratic system.

Well, I wouldn't call all of these descended from Adam Smith.

I also don't see how these ideologies lack passion, they merely lack "the people's romance" as one economist Daniel Klein called it. But if you hate that, then you can still be passionate, you'd just reject such a narrative.


I hate your ideology with an extreme passion in return.

In any case, I don't think the ideologies you point to have created visions of the world that have done anything but promote the power of a minority over the majority, even worse than capitalism has, despite your accusation. I mean, talk of debt slavery is usually questionable, as is exploitation, at least once one tries to take a lending market and a labor market perspective.


Whose moral values? I think that many social codes generally remain. I also think that obligations are often well-maintained by a contract perspective.

I like hamburgers and I like coke.

I don't see by what metric you would use to promote the idea that our society is lower than islam. We have technological progress, high levels of capital and creation of capital, high levels of wealth and prosperity, high levels of education, etc. The only way I can see promoting the latter group is if you just outright hate freedom, nothing more.


And I distrust those who want to set the values. I will disagree with what you say is good, and what you say is bad, and for you to tell me by the point of a gun is just sickening to me. I mean, you openly advocate torturing and killing people if they disagree with whatever arbitrary code you seek to stick upon them. What prevents this from being abused? What makes this not an abuse in and of itself? After all, you pull your morals likely from the same place most people do, from some mysterious source, and I see little reason to submit to such a fascism.


Anything that happens will be harmful to Aspergians. We are different from the herd, so having to mesh with a herd will always be harmful. This will include your system, and I would bet that an above average percent of aspies will be in the camps.

In the end, I reject your ideology for the following reasons:

1) There is not good evidence of significant progress by such a system, and perhaps even evidence of reductions in progress due to your system.

2) There is not good evidence for increased welfare caused by your system, and perhaps even evidence of welfare reduction caused by your system

3) As for statements of moral values, I do not see much reason why your moral values should be given weight over the moral values held by other individuals, or even that the imposition of moral values is itself moral.

So, because of 1-3, I am not sure much commends this kind of ideology.

You seem to be under the false impression that all these people are free thinkers who need to be subdued. I doubt that most people even have original thoughts so why are you so afraid of this so called liberal free thinking ideology? They are the product of social engineering that was put into place by elitists with the same mentality that you have.

As Churchill once noted, democracy is a particularly lousy form of government but every other form is lousier. The old philosophers were horrified at the "rule of the mob" which they viewed as the dominance of ignorance and prejudice. But through history even absolute rulers with the most beneficent attitude and a good dollop of intelligence ended up committing frightful social horrors. The laxative of democratic elections moves the bowels of social order to the extent of overturning all but the worst governments without murderous turmoil. The worst governments are the ones that defeat this system of peaceful revolution and any absolute totalitarian government inevitably ends up benefiting those in power to the detriment of the nation as a whole. The proper medicine for a good functioning government is a well informed populace which retains the power to kick out poorly performing leaders.

To a disappointing extent the spread of government incompetence in countries like the USA is due to an extremely poorly informed populace through the manipulation of general information sources controlled by the wealthy elite that controls much of the media. The internet has countered this to a large extent but the rapid development of government censorship techniques throughout the world is beginning to defeat this too. Without this counterforce proper democracy cannot take place and the move towards a false democracy which is basically a form of totalitarianism the only way to displace a bad government is through bloody revolution. Things look rather dim as invasive electronics is definitely pushing government towards a "1984" distopia.

I have obviously gained a reputation in this site as a vociferous anti-religionist and I am not unhappy over that since my faith in the inherent capabilities of humans to properly control themselves and deal properly with the environment is strongly dependent upon the basic human ability to think logically and with clarity and good information about solving problems. Religion is rife with formulaic nonsense based on primitive and unfounded beliefs with strong coercion not to question them, a basically totalitarian system as well exemplified in the Catholic hierarchy. This is relevant in a discussion of government since religion is frequently permitted to exist with criticism of its rigidity and illogic considered out of bounds and I find this exceedingly dangerous to functioning democracy and it frequently leads to mindless unnecessary violence as exemplified by both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and which is extremely detrimental to sane civil society.

I'm not sure if this system was "rationally constructed" by a panel of social engineers so much as some ideas were favoured, over the course of history, by some very powerful people. Those ideas, be they established by inequality, domineering, public apathy, or even approval by the public, set the stage for latter issues or reforms.

Specific ideologies have affected the world we see today. But none is wholly the product of one person: the ideolgists who wrote up narratives in the nineteenth century offering economic capitalism and political liberalism as an alternative to feudalism would be horrified by certain features of todays world. Nowhere is society governed by perfect ideology: there is always a slight disconect between the articulated system and the actualized on. A lot more meshing goes on than anyone would like and many factors can skew such a complex system as a society.

Sometimes ideas themselves have a power of escaping people, slipping from their consciousness, and affecting society in ways nobody notices. A lot of society has developed due to rather random memetic evolution.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 03 May 2009, 9:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

I wouldn't disagree with you. I am not trying to say all socialists fall into this pattern, merely that is a trap that many socialists do fall into. Talking to me as if I am a machine made to absorb rhetoric. Talk to me like a person and maybe we can agree on something, you know?

It's surprisingly easy to brain wash people. Check out Edward Bernays and some of the Nazi experiments in psychology. They refined propaganda to an art form. Advertisements use subtle forms of persuasion and even that is pretty effective. Social engineering was put into place on purpose and it's not as sinister as many conspiracy theorists claim. It's the safest way to control the populace. They are not implanting thoughts in our heads, but rather they use our instincts as a herding device.

No system is perfect. I don't think anything in nature is perfect. That seems to be the thing that really bothers zyborg. But hey that's life. Deal with it.

I think the problem is structural - we have very limited short-term memory, limited acuity, usually the greatest limit on our mental strength is our neurological endurance as we can't store ATP or borrow it from other places; pretty much you have so much juice to fight a problem with before your out and pretty much at the mercy of what's around you. Stockholm Syndrome comes to mind when I think of someone's survival mechanisms kicking in to compensate the difference. Other times, people's senses of reality just aren't locked in enough or are too largely habit-driven rather than having any kind of core coherence (and often enough, intelligence can limit people's ability to have much in the way of anything better).