DarkHelmet wrote:I question if ajax (and anyone else who is shocked by $300 women's salon bills) has ever had a woman in his life. This is the normal cost for women's hair care in this country. I admit I haven't spent a lot of time in ajax's part of the country. I've only seen pictures of female "deplorables" and it appears on average they don't spend much money on hair care. Maybe it's a cultural thing.
He is upper middle class. Given everything else he's said, it's far more likely he just rages when his wife wants to have her hair done. While he lives in a low cost area of the country, he does well enough for himself that he's surely interacting with people who can afford decent hair care.
What's even more likely here is that he's being disingenuous because he thinks that's what the coloreds and their liberal lovers do and he wants to fight fire with fire. Bottomless mendacity justified by ignorant racial stereotyping is much more probable then a married optometrist not being aware of how much a hairdo costs.
The dude explicitly said on a Nazi message board among his Nazi friends that he has to lie about his real opinions to interact with people like you. Ya probably should believe him.
aussieguy55 wrote:Socialism is not the government owning the means of production but making sure everyone has access to good basic healthcare and education so they can become good productive citizens.
Please could we not waste time arguing what socialism is or is not? There is simply no objective way of deciding what 'real' socialism is, any more than there is an objective way of deciding what 'real' christianity is.
Something you might have said without controversy is that the great majority of citizens of advanced countries agree that it is a basic task of a decent and effective government to make sure everyone has access to good basic healthcare and education so they can become good productive citizens. Like national defence, those tasks are not ones that can be adequately fulfilled by letting the market make money out of providing health and education as commodities. Coffee, underwear and entertainment are a different matter altogether - the choice I get from the market suits me fine.
ajax18 wrote: ... even Republicans like Trent Lott have used their elected status to becone the insanely wealthy people Chap is talking about.
Sorry, I only just noticed Ajax18's reference to my screen name.
Can someone help me see how what he says relates to my post? I can't see a connection.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
I think it makes sense to talk about what socialism is. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a socialist, she's trying to tell you something about what her political beliefs are, and I'm inclined to agree with her that she is communicating something meaningful in doing so.
It's true you want to avoid ideological purity tests and strawmaning by pointless debates over the nuances in meaning of the term, but we can broadly agree about it implies support of some kinds of politics and opposition to others. All political labels are underdetermined like this.
The problem with Republican strawmanning of socialist views is that they are strawmen arguments, not that the term socialism is devoid of content.
Just tax the rich, let them all in and put it o n the national debt tab.
Now every citizen of the world is living on $500k per year.[ That's EAllusion's graduate level mathematics/economics.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
EAllusion wrote:I think it makes sense to talk about what socialism is. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls herself a socialist, she's trying to tell you something about what her political beliefs are, and I'm inclined to agree with her that she is communicating something meaningful in doing so.
[....]
The problem with Republican strawmanning of socialist views is that they are strawmen arguments, not that the term socialism is devoid of content.
Please note that I responded to a post saying 'Socialism is not X, it is Y" by saying:
Chap wrote:Please could we not waste time arguing what socialism is or is not? There is simply no objective way of deciding what 'real' socialism is, any more than there is an objective way of deciding what 'real' christianity is.
I have of course no objection whatsoever to discussing what a particular person means or does not mean when they say 'socialism'. That's an entirely different question, capable of being given a meaningful answer.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
ajax18 wrote:Just tax the rich, let them all in and put it o n the national debt tab.
Now every citizen of the world is living on $500k per year.[ That's EAllusion's graduate level mathematics/economics.
Remember in the 2016 election I repeatedly tried to explain to you that Donald Trump was advocating for policies that would massively increase the national debt far beyond anything Clinton was advocating while pretending to be a deficit hawk? Remember how I explained they were so fanciful that they were unlikely to pass, but it indicated a willingness to explode the debt with bills that could pass with Republican support? And you just tut-tutted that while coming off of years pretending to care about deficit spending?
Yeah, Trumpian policy exploded the deficit at exactly the moment it should be shrinking if we just stayed the course, much less actually pursued deficit reduction.
You're fine with this, despite acting as though this was the single most important thing ever for years because you don't actually care about that. You were just taking cues from a right-wing media ecosystem that flattered your stereotypical ideas about Democrats / minorities as wanton, irresponsible spenders.
I don't support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's economic agenda. That's why it is particularly obnoxious to watch morons reduce it into ridiculous strawmen. It makes it easy for supporters to dismiss critics of their proposals as ignorant buffoons.
Chap wrote: Please note that I responded to a post saying 'Socialism is not X, it is Y" by saying:
Chap wrote:Please could we not waste time arguing what socialism is or is not? There is simply no objective way of deciding what 'real' socialism is, any more than there is an objective way of deciding what 'real' christianity is.
I have of course no objection whatsoever to discussing what a particular person means or does not mean when they say 'socialism'. That's an entirely different question, capable of being given a meaningful answer.
If someone says they are a socialist and then proceeds to adopt the policy positions of Paul Ryan, I'm going to say they're not really a socialist. While there is some inherent looseness in terms like "socialism" we can say that there are boundaries, even if they are fuzzy.
aussieguy55 wrote:Socialism is not the government owning the means of production but making sure everyone has access to good basic healthcare and education so they can become good productive citizens.
Please could we not waste time arguing what socialism is or is not?
Maybe it's an exaggeration to say Reason magazine has an article almost weekly that pits socialism against capitalism, pointing out that there is an increasing number of Americans with favorable views towards socialism and negative views against capitalism. And it almost always inserts the argument in the article that capitalism is responsible for raising civilization out of the mire and into the consumer paradise that is western society. My reaction is typically the opposite of what you say above. I think having a discussion about what socialism and capitalism are is a growing need. Otherwise they are prolific but ambiguous phrases whose meaning is so subjective it's more valuable to ignore their use and focus instead on the political views of the person using it as you do above. But that's because they've lost their underlying meaning in favor of polemic bomb throwing that lacks context or tying the terms to the economic systems behind them. It would aid public discourse if there was a more coherent use of the terms with generally shared meaning so they could be useful again rather than dismissed.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
If you spend your time on the Republican / Democrat axis of disagreement, you'll probably miss that hardcore capitalists and socialists diagnose approximately the same problems with the current system. They just have different solutions. It's an overgeneralization, but a lot of the libertarian / socialist disagreements come down to socialists thinking that government needs to be reformed to use its power differently and libertarians thinking that government needs to be reformed by not having that power to misuse.
I guess we need to understand that socialist party leaders are entitled to a royal standard of living worlds ahead of those who are not among the political elites. That's clearly what socialism means to the people commenting on this thread.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.