Oh, you mean like in the Soviet model…the birthplace of socialism?
I think you mean Victorian England. History— it’s not just boring stuff that people keep telling you to read.
13 Likes
Why do Millenials think they invented everything?
9 Likes
Was Lenin a Millennial? How about Trotsky… he was kind of a hipster, I guess. But the ice pick business was sort of bad-ass…
11 Likes
Every generation become evangelized by what media puts in front of them.
Look at the sixties anti-war movement.
Some of those people are still around. Who do you think buys organic produce. Whole Foods and Goodness Me are super markets for idiological food choice consumers.
No.
12 Likes
Which the filthy communists fought for the right for us to be able to do (at least in the UK).
11 Likes
Cuba?
No, don’t tell me, i’m keen to guess.
That was an outreach of the Kings land, where and when the only people trespassing on those lands were poachers.
Now not so much.
Politics never bring solutions, just more politics.
Research and development.
Repeat when necessary.
If I’d known that you agreed with me that libertarianism was stupid then we could have avoided this entire conversation.
4 Likes
OK.
I think all of it is daft mind you. Holywood for ugly people.
Well, I’m certainly interested in radical apolitical philosophy. It’s hard to get my head around what it would even mean. Usually when you encounter someone talking the way you do their espoused disgust with politics is just a mask for some breed of libertarianism, neo-conservativism, or randianism. Good to know that you instead ascribe to a baffling philosophy that considers all distribution of power and resources irrelevant…
12 Likes
Nazi Germany, of course.
1 Like
I just said this in another thread, but I’m saying it again: These days the popular wisdom is that governments can’t really do much to improve the economy, but they can do a lot to screw it up. Of course the people who say that are mostly smart enough to admit that public schools are a tremendous boost to the economy (I realize that you have anti-government fundamentalists in the US who are against even that, but outside the US no one would be that dumb), that a country with public schools is going to be expected to economically outperform a country without them massively. So the real popular wisdom isn’t that the government can’t improve the economy, it’s that we’ve already discovered every way in which the government can improve the economy and done it.
Public schools: yes.
Water works: yes.
Highways: yes.
Health care: (again, everywhere but crazytown) yes.
Public transit: yes.
But…
In Canada’s more recent federal election - Daycares: not possible (even though they are doing it in Quebec and it is working)
University/College tuition: no.
Fixing the highways we’ve already built: no.
Building more public transit to accommodate growing populations: no.
Pharmacare (since our national health care doesn’t pay for drugs): no.
Which is all just people picking some date in history and saying: “This is the date we had everything right. This was peak rightness. It’s been downhill since.” Thinking that way is a sign that your usefulness is at an end, and that you should get old and die soon.
10 Likes
Aren’t education, transportation, and healthcare all provincial matters, according to the Constitution? I’m less certain about transportation, but I’m pretty sure that education and hospitals are both mentioned explicitly.
I can see how you read that. The federal election bit only applied to daycares, which were part of the NDP platform. But even if that had been implemented, it would have been provincial business to actually build and staff them. The federal government doesn’t do a lot of things directly.
1 Like
14 Likes
Was looking at
On my way to work this morning I was reading In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land by Thomas Ligotti (from his collection Teatro Grottesco) and in it the narrator says that the unspoken commandment of a northern border town was “Thou shalt not meddle.” It’s a clever way of introducing a sense of horror to the story - in a small town people not meddling in other people’s affairs would be very strange, and immediately the most likely explanation in my mind was that people were generally afraid.
Nature abhors a vacuum, they say. When we have freedom to do and say what we want, inevitably the power of that freedom is going to start consolidating, and power is the power to limit the freedom of others. Meddling in what other people can do and say, creating rules about what is decent and what isn’t, seems like it is an example of how this power consolidation works. If no one is meddling and no one is trying to separate the indecent from the decent then the only reasonable interpretation is that there is no vacuum of power, there isn’t really that much freedom.
So when Serling blames the people who are allowing the censors to do their work, I think that blame seems to fall on what people are rather than the choices that some people make. I’m not surprised I’d come at that through Ligotti since he’s about as misanthropic as one can be.
This all struck me as being like The Market. The market is just another expression of freedom with the ultimate goal of collecting up all the freedom for a small number of players. It’s like small town gossip, assigning value to everything in such a way that it assigns more value to the things that are of interest to the parties collecting power in the market. The sad side effect of freedom is that people use freedom as a weapon against one another, and that is the market at work. Down with Capitalism, comrades.
5 Likes
