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Mar 19th, 2005 12:12 PM
OAO Returns Then no. I felt the need to elaborate.
Mar 19th, 2005 01:13 AM
El Blanco Hey, McGwire, thats a straight forward yes or no question. You're not running for office, just give me an answer.
Mar 19th, 2005 01:00 AM
OAO Returns I posted in here to say that I might address it some other time, which was an apprioriate comment giving that Jeanette mentioned how she was eagerly awaiting my arrival.
Mar 19th, 2005 12:56 AM
El Blanco OK, pretend she asked the question.

Did you postin here to say you aren't going to say anything?
Mar 18th, 2005 11:33 PM
OAO Returns I wasn't banned, I left.

And I was addressing Jeanette, actually.
Mar 18th, 2005 11:09 PM
El Blanco Did you just post in this thread to say you didn't want to say anything?
Mar 18th, 2005 10:51 PM
Immortal Goat Hahaha, that OAO. You sly dog! What did you ever do to get banned, anyway? Was it just because you suck? I bet it was.
Mar 18th, 2005 06:36 PM
OAO Returns Maybe sometime in the future, I'll address this thread. For right now, though... I just don't have much free time anymore, and what I do have I don't feel like devoting to this.

And getting my account back would be nice.
Mar 9th, 2005 09:35 AM
Jeanette X
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zhukov
Unless the Libertarian leaning Vince pops up, or something. Preechr indeed. You wanted Vince to show, didn't you?
I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of The One and Only, myself.
Mar 9th, 2005 12:32 AM
KevinTheOmnivore There's never a time that I wouldn't want Vince here.
Mar 9th, 2005 12:21 AM
Zhukov No offence was ever taken, Kevin. Yes, I dissmissed Libertarianism quite briefly, but I am not worried about it enough to warrant me bothering anymore. :/

Unless the Libertarian leaning Vince pops up, or something. Preechr indeed. You wanted Vince to show, didn't you?
Mar 8th, 2005 09:02 PM
KevinTheOmnivore
Quote:
Originally Posted by Helm
And a lot of you should red Zhukov with a bit less of a bias, because it's insulting you to actually call him names over what he's saying (Jeanette), or resort to ad hominem attacks (so says the communist) like Kevin.
Blow it out your ass you pompous jerk. Is that less of an ad hominem attack for you....?

I haven't dismissed Zhukov's beliefs. I did however dismiss what on his part was a terribly condescending and simplistic dismissal of Libertarianism. Then he went on to criticize the author for doing to Marxism precisely what he in fact did to Libertarianism.

What's amusing is that I thought this article might pull folks like Preechr and one and only out of the wood work, but instead, the socialists of the board have taken issue with the mere comparison. That's fine, but never did I intend to insult Zhukov.


Quote:
Quote:
libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
Tough shit. This is rediculous. This argument goes right back to censorship, and to that I only have to say that real life is the osmosis of all things that exist, permitted or not, and putting your head (or worse, your child's head) in the sand whenever something you deem 'bad' comes along does not help anyone understand real life, and build up the necessary defenses to operate in it. What it does create, is people with an infantile, invented understanding of reality, that are prone to knee-jerk carpet-bomb other countries whenever reality chooses to barge in uninvited.
Thank you for the sermon Sir, but I don't think you got the point. The author (while he undoubtedly probably is the censorship type) doesn't care about what you think about insulating our children from sex, violence, and generally naughty things. He's critiquing the Libertarian argument that freedom would lead to a general condition of overall goodness, that with this absolute freedom, ultimately, everyone would aspire to be sort of Bourgeois and sensible. He doesn't care about censorship, at least not in this article, but he knows that a lot of pseudo-libertarian Republicans in America DO in fact care about those things, but they've been duped by guys like Harry Browne into thinking that Libertarian freedom would result in a morally sound America (the Red-State kind of morality, yes).


Quote:
but I really can't take this article seriously on the grounds that it uses incorrect terminology extensively, seems to have a silly bias ("if I prove it's like Marxism, we all agree that it's wrong!") and generally only superficially touches specific issues.
It was an incredibly brief piece. He had to write in abstracts and such, otherwise he'd probably be saying a whole lot that doesn't really say anything.


Quote:
Go far left enough, and you end up on the right. This is true for communism, but not in that if you push it left enough it will become libertarianism. Rather, it will become a rigid class system with a gigantic state machine more similar to italian fascism than anything else. There is little to no way to go from actual marxism to libertarianism. There is, however, a way to go there through anarcho-communism (I'm thinking Cropotkin and Bakunin here, not the jerk in your school with the mohawk), but I'm pretty sure most people here agree anarchism is silly enough on it's own in most of it's popular incarnations, and could only be discussed as a possibility in it's Bakunin-incarnation only after communism is achieved, so as to not credit this connection very much. It's like someone being in place B on the map, and wanting to go to place A on the map, by wanting to create an interdimensional portal to take him there or something silly like that. Meaning, the faults of libertarianism cannot be connected with communism through anarchocommunism. I understand the article doesn't deal with that directly, but this thread does, so I offer my thoughts on this too.
Lord, speaking of saying a whole lot without really saying a damn thing.....

Communism doesn't have to be the polar opposite of Libertarianism in order for this guy to make his point. Perhaps this unfortunately excludes those living outside the U.S., but this guy is indeed speaking from a very American party system sort of position (the publication is after all called the "American Conservative"). And like I said before, a lot of it is about perception.

I hate to break it to the Greeks, and uh, Tanzanians, or whoever else is on this board, but Communism/Marxism/Socialism is all but dead in this country. I'm not trying to qualify that, I'm simply stating it as a relatively accurate reality. In writing this article, he isn't debating whether ideologically speaking Libertarianism is sort of like the American Right's Communism. The latter has already been dismissed and beaten in this country, but the former has gained a strange degree of appeal. According to the Libertarian Party, they are the fastest growing third party in the country (this is of course what every third party says, but with the recent decline of the Green Party, they may be right).

No third party has more elected officials at the grassroots level, and prominent pundits like Neal Boortz can comfortably call themselves at least "sort of Libertarian" and be accepted in Conservative Republican circles. This guy, obviously being a conservative, wants to point out why that shouldn't necessarily be the case (in fact, if you read the article carefully, a lot of his comparisons have more to do with Libertarian/Conservatism, rather than a comparison between Libertarianism and Marxism).

The center-left in this country has been forced to distance itself from Marxism. Heck, even the label of "liberal" hs become damaging. This guy's point is that Libertarianism hasn't been fully evaluated, and thus sort of gets a pass amongst conservatives (much like the accusations made against the Dems and the unions in the first half of the 20th century). I take it he thinks they deserve equal scrutiny.
Mar 8th, 2005 11:36 AM
davinxtk I was going to mention something about how I was only half-way through the article and was already set to punch massive holes in his argument, but I think I'm going to cut it down to three words:


"What Helm said."
Mar 8th, 2005 09:50 AM
Helm Go far left enough, and you end up on the right. This is true for communism, but not in that if you push it left enough it will become libertarianism. Rather, it will become a rigid class system with a gigantic state machine more similar to italian fascism than anything else. There is little to no way to go from actual marxism to libertarianism. There is, however, a way to go there through anarcho-communism (I'm thinking Cropotkin and Bakunin here, not the jerk in your school with the mohawk), but I'm pretty sure most people here agree anarchism is silly enough on it's own in most of it's popular incarnations, and could only be discussed as a possibility in it's Bakunin-incarnation only after communism is achieved, so as to not credit this connection very much. It's like someone being in place B on the map, and wanting to go to place A on the map, by wanting to create an interdimensional portal to take him there or something silly like that. Meaning, the faults of libertarianism cannot be connected with communism through anarchocommunism. I understand the article doesn't deal with that directly, but this thread does, so I offer my thoughts on this too.

Furthermore, I do not understand why Kevin said that a whole fraction of political thinking is undesirable in a whole country. I agree that a lot of people over there are communists because they hate their country (whereas I was a Marxist for a long while because I loved mine, and what I define myself as today isn't much different anyway), but does this fact completely discount the possibility that communists may indeed be right about a lot of things, and that the US would benefit from the influence of a strong communist party? EDIT: If Kevin ment that the author likens the STATUS of libertarianists to the status of communists in the US, then I misunderstood him. I believe though, that the author likens them with communists in meaning "communism is bad, so if libertarianism is like communism, it must be bad too."' This is further supported by the numerous times the author goes "just like marxism tried to pull that one on us" (paraphrasing), passively suggesting that marxists had some sort of nefarious plan of world domination through smokescreening and trickery.


And a lot of you should red Zhukov with a bit less of a bias, because it's insulting you to actually call him names over what he's saying (Jeanette), or resort to ad hominem attacks (so says the communist) like Kevin.

Quote:
claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.
Whereas one might dissagree with this line of thinking, it is not inherently falacious. In fact, the writer of this piece has a very warped understanding of 'good', and chooses, misleadingly enough, to use it in both an ethically descriptive, and perscriptive manner, going from the simple truth that "if you want to continue living, then food is good for you" to the totally moralistically imperative (and strangely neoplatonist) "There are things that are ethically good inherently" which anyone that has even the basic understanding of ethics, understands it as what it is: a fallacy of ethical universabilty. Food is "good", where "good" means "needed", within the institution where continued existence is an end in itself, whereas 'things are inherently ethically good' really means "I believe there are things which everyone should always do, in any context" which is an ethical prescriptive statement. Either the writer doesn't understand ethics, or he chooses not to use his knowledge of them to paint his warped point.

Quote:
libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.
Tough shit. This is rediculous. This argument goes right back to censorship, and to that I only have to say that real life is the osmosis of all things that exist, permitted or not, and putting your head (or worse, your child's head) in the sand whenever something you deem 'bad' comes along does not help anyone understand real life, and build up the necessary defenses to operate in it. What it does create, is people with an infantile, invented understanding of reality, that are prone to knee-jerk carpet-bomb other countries whenever reality chooses to barge in uninvited.


I could go on point by point on much he's saying (like the 'paradoxically enough, people exercise their freedom to not be libertarianists! OMG SELF-REFERENITAL FALLACY I ARES SMART!!11) but I really can't take this article seriously on the grounds that it uses incorrect terminology extensively, seems to have a silly bias ("if I prove it's like Marxism, we all agree that it's wrong!") and generally only superficially touches specific issues. Also, it's generally ment as a debunking of libertarianism, and it doesn't really interest me to play the devil's advocate extensively. Just wanted to point out that the writer either isn't very well-read on the subjects, or that he maliciously lies about them. I am not a libertarianist, and I do realize various holes in most libertarianist systems of belief, but that doesn't mean I have to agree to the series of rediculous claims anf faulty arguments the person that wrote this piece presents as if it's great knowledge, from his invented political and moral highground.
Mar 7th, 2005 11:46 PM
Zhukov Well I don't believe in the common "political spectrum". Like I said to Kevin, I'm not saying that they are different, which they obiously are, I'm saying that they are complete different kinds of [/i]things[/i]. :/

You can't just say that something is on the oppisite side of 'the spectrum' sometimes. It's not as easy as that, it's not just about views or ideas.

and we're talking about Marxism, not communism.

"Maxism is the philosophical idea that the development of the means of production is ultimately the key to understanding the development of society. Specificaly that the process is dialectical, and not automatic, involving a contradiction between the demands of economic development and the inevitable lag in human consciousness, ideas, theories, institutions, morality, etc. "

wheras Libertarianism is capitalism with it's chains off (I'm sure someone can explain it better.

It's like saying that a chair and swimming are on oppiste ends of a spectrum. Kevin stated what the author was meaning and I submitted to that, ok? :/
Mar 7th, 2005 11:34 PM
Jeanette X Zhukuv, I used to think that you were reasonably intelligent, now I think you are a bonehead. Even I can grasp the analogy. Of course Communism and Libertarianism come from entirely different premises! That's NOT THE FUCKING POINT!

The "Army of Gd" that blows up gay bars and abortion clinics comes from an entirely different premise than Al-Queda does. Does that mean that they cannot be compared? That the Army of Gd cannot be called the Al-Queda of Christianity, and vice versa? Both come from extreme views of two different religions. Communism and libertarianism come from extreme views of two different sides of the political spectrum, hence, they can be compared.

Can you wrap your brain around that?
Mar 7th, 2005 11:33 PM
Zhukov [quote="KevinTheOmnivore"]
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zhukov
Libertarians don't accept the class nature of development, hence "They move away from an economic base and end up with "individualism".
The author wasn't debating how libertarianism is ideologically similar to communism. A lot of what he's talking about is perception and viability-- Both have become sort of the fringe skeleton in each wing's closet (communism being so for the Left for quite some years now). I think his motive has to do with the seemingly recent, "sexy" appeal to call yourself a "libertarian" on the Right and wrap yourself in the Constitution. I believe it was this authors intent to expose those people, expose their flaws, thus likening them to the status of Communists here in America (i.e. undesirable....sorry).

Yes that's a good explanation. 'Perception' that's fair enough, his perception of course. Which was what I was disagreeing to. Communists may can be compared to Libertarians in this way inside the US, but not worldwide.

No, I didn't think he was comparing ideolgy, I did read the article.
Quote:

I don't think he said that.
They were just examples of a simplified view. on the left we have commies and the commies on the right are libertarians. Marxism being the kind of philosiphy it is cannot be the 'left' of something like libertarianism. Like saying the opposite of an apple is an orange. It's just a silly way for the author to discredit Libertarianism by mentioing it next to marxism, which is obviously hated by his right-wing audience.

El blanco, "the individual serving the group" is just a bad cliche. If you dissagree with my breaking down of Libertarianism, that's ok. I'll wait till one brings up the issue with me.
Mar 7th, 2005 11:17 PM
El Blanco
Quote:
Libertarians don't accept the class nature of development, hence "They move away from an economic base and end up with "individualism".
Hastily thrown together explanation what?
Mar 7th, 2005 11:15 PM
KevinTheOmnivore
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zhukov
Libertarians don't accept the class nature of development, hence "They move away from an economic base and end up with "individualism".
The author wasn't debating how libertarianism is ideologically similar to communism. A lot of what he's talking about is perception and viability-- Both have become sort of the fringe skeleton in each wing's closet (communism being so for the Left for quite some years now). I think his motive has to do with the seemingly recent, "sexy" appeal to call yourself a "libertarian" on the Right and wrap yourself in the Constitution. I believe it was this authors intent to expose those people, expose their flaws, thus likening them to the status of Communists here in America (i.e. undesirable....sorry).

Quote:
If you want to be simple and say that nazism is the marxism of the right, or capitalism is the opposite of communism, then go aead. I thought that this author was at least trying to be more accurate than that.
I don't think he said that.
Mar 7th, 2005 11:02 PM
Zhukov Yes I know Unions can be corrupt, thanks.

Marxism does not say "the individual should serve the group", that's just a hastily thrown together expanation of the communist ideoligy. Maxism is the philosophical idea that the development of the means of production is ultimately the key to understanding the development of society. Specificaly that the process is dialectical, and not automatic, involving a contradiction between the demands of economic development and the inevitable lag in human consciousness, ideas, theories, institutions, morality, etc.

Libertarians don't accept the class nature of development, hence "They move away from an economic base and end up with "individualism".

If you want to be simple and say that nazism is the marxism of the right, or capitalism is the opposite of communism, then go aead. I thought that this author was at least trying to be more accurate than that.
Mar 7th, 2005 10:53 PM
KevinTheOmnivore
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zhukov
Have you turned into a Libertarian?

You don't think that the communist linked unions in the early twentieth century achieved anything? Like wage increases, workers rights....?

You don't think that what is happening in Venezuela or Nepal right now is even a little bit important?
What I think is that you didn't read the article.

And no, I'm not a libertarian. Nor am I a communist.
Mar 7th, 2005 10:45 PM
El Blanco Did you read it? You should.

It states that libretarianism is like Marxism in that its the polar extreme of capitalism. It says that the group is meant to serve the individual. Marxism says the individual serves the group.

" If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. "

Did you get that?

Yes, the unions made great strides. But, they had to find the balance of protecting the rights of the whole, and satisfying the desires of the individuals. Actually join a union and you will see this in action.

Better yet, join the teamsters local like I did and you'll see how a union can be as awful and corrupt as the corporation they were supposed to be protecting me and my coworkers from.[/semi-rant]

Yes, what is happening in Venezuala and Nepal is improtant. Hopefully, those people will find a happy medium of socialism and capitalism that will satisfy their specific needs.
Mar 7th, 2005 10:31 PM
Zhukov Have you turned into a Libertarian?

You don't think that the communist linked unions in the early twentieth century achieved anything? Like wage increases, workers rights....?

You don't think that what is happening in Venezuela or Nepal right now is even a little bit important?


I post here as a hobby, but I don't find politics to be a hobby, and I'm not a rich academic who lives in a big house and doesn't eer have to worry about employment or money.

I always thought that if I could understand Marxism, it must be pretty easy. :/
Mar 7th, 2005 10:20 PM
KevinTheOmnivore
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zhukov
they spend their lives aimlessly indulging themselves in politics as a hobby, while never actually making an impact on, let alone experiencing, societies realities. Few people understand what they write. Fewer still even care!
Said the Communist.....
Mar 7th, 2005 09:46 PM
Zhukov Libertarianism proceeds from an entirely different premise and therefore cannot be made comparable with Marxism.

To dismiss it as the "marxism of the right" is shamefull. Libertarianism is utterly worthless and is simply a desperate grasp by some bourgeois thinkers to wipe away the decay of capitalism. They move away from an economic base and end up with "individualism". they spend their lives aimlessly indulging themselves in politics as a hobby, while never actually making an impact on, let alone experiencing, societies realities. Few people understand what they write. Fewer still even care!
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