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hpslugga

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Posts posted by hpslugga

  1. 5 hours ago, workswithseed said:

    Doesn't look good then. So are we saying socialism and fascism can be in the same boat? Cause that's what it exactly looks like.

    What I'm saying is that, particularly in the United States, our level of understanding of politics is at a level of superficiality that's very hard to describe. We operate in a way that encourages people to assert inanities like "the reason Adolph Hitler was a socialist was that the Nazi flag was red." 

    I can't believe I'm going to quote this character of all people to prove a point here, but it really sums it up perfectly: "If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don't necessarily make it fucking so!" The same applies to political affairs. Just because some person says that they're a socialist, fascist, anarchist, conservative, liberal, et al don't necessarily make it fucking so. The same is true for when some government says some other government is one or another of those things, in fact even more so because there's a 100% degree of certainty that such proclamations are made with self-interest and only with self-interest.

     

    • Like 1
  2. 15 minutes ago, Asithappens said:

    Not really. 

    Do you realize that what I typed is exactly how Israel justifies defending its existence?

    It's a shit storm over there. Maybe you've got it figured out. If so, good for you. 

    And yeah, fuck 'em all. But at the end of the day, it won't be the Israelis dancing in the streets when the next 9/11 comes....

    I'll hold my nose and be with the Israelis. 

    Posts like these are why I always cringe when I see this thread has new posts in it.

    • Like 3
  3. 29 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    Everyone? Are you sure?

    Again it wouldn’t even matter if he could prove that stupid cartoon was 100% accurate as Venezuela isn’t a socialist state in the first place. Starting with the premise of “given that Venezuela is a socialist state” is like saying “given that the moon is made of green cheese.” I suppose that sentences like those provide a mechanism towards some sort of measure of physical and/or emotional gratification to the person uttering them, but they never end well in terms of actual discourse. 

  4. On 2/8/2019 at 11:52 AM, Iconoclast Texan said:

    So Chávez and Maduro didn’t expropriate the means of production from private hands for the benefit of the masses? 

    This is why I say that people such as yourself haven't the foggiest idea what socialism is: it's because you really do not know what it is.

    The definition you posted is curiously vague, and even with its simplicity, you still failed horribly to comprehend it. It clearly states "the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." From those last five words, you read that as "Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro," two individuals in a state of 31 million people. That's as irresponsible, not to mention rectally derived, as it is when right-wingers in the US say "Donald Trump speaks for all Americans."

    Yeah, so they undertook a few expropriations here and there. That doesn't change the fact that, as an AP article from 2010 pointed out, "the private sector still controls [over] two-thirds of Venezuela's economy— the same as when Chavez was elected in 1998, according to estimates by the Central Bank." The same types of studies conclude that around 87% of the US economy is in the private sector. More on that later.

    Back to the definition(s) of socialism. When looking at any term in search of its meaning, you do what any sensible person does and trace its origins. I'm about 95-99% sure that you're one of those people that associates its foundation with Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, neither of which are even remotely close to true.

    Socialism's foundation was best articulated in 1649 with the publishing of a pamphlet entitled The New Laws of Righteousness by Gerrard Winstanley, one of the founders of The Diggers, which was an anarchist movement in England during its First Civil War. The overarching principle of the Diggers' vision of society in New Laws was that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man." Here's where you need to start paying attention: "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself." 

    That's a call to anarchism.

    Taxonomically, the first published uses of the term "socialism" came with a flurry of literatures in the late 18th-early 19th centuries (Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and a host of others that Marx/Engels decried as "utopians"), but they were all based on the ideas that New Laws put forth. The point being, Engels and Marx are correctly viewed within the socialist community as being a couple of perverted johnny-come-latelys with outlandish ideas. In fact, Mikhail Bakunin once wrote of Marx "the instinct of liberty is lacking in him" and that "he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian." 

    So let's take Winstanley's concept, fuse it with the one you posted, and see if we can detect even the slightest hint of contradiction:

    "There shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man, the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole, there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself."

    I see no contradiction there...at all. In fact, I see repetition. Those two definitions are talking about the same thing, which was actually best articulated by Sylvain Maréchal when he longed for "the communal enjoyment of the fruits of the earth" and the elimination of "the revolting distinction of rich and poor, of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed," and so it goes right through the pre-Leninist period. In fact, even Marx' writings made it clear that the societal order he envisioned was one of statelessness at the very end of the revolution. Yet from that one definition you posted, let alone from the ones with which I've been familiar for quite a long time, you read the exact opposite. What's particularly comical is that you do it because you read into that definition things that it does not say, and then you didn't read what it did say. So you read in between the lines, but didn't bother to read the lines.

    Socialism and statism are like oil and water. That having been said, states have introduced ways to incorporate socialist elements in them, to be sure. But to call that "socialism" or even "pure socialism," as I've seen some right-wingers screaming about, is just partisan masturbation and you're beyond reason if you think it passes as a "coherent world view." 

    Furthermore, the US is one of those nation states that incorporates socialist elements. The USPS, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, Social Security, etc? Who do you think funds those? We do. 

    I'm going to close this with a trump card that I teased earlier: 

    Venezuela's economy is around 70% based on its private sector. You call that "socialism."
    The US economy is around 87% based on its private sector. You call that "capitalism."

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    That is a textbook definition of socialism as witnessed above. 

    Except it's not, you've been absolutely wrong about absolutely everything you've said about this issue in general, and what @hayden_horn said earlier is absolutely correct: what's happening in Venezuela is fascism, and it's getting uglier with each passing day.

    • Like 1
  5. 13 hours ago, David Dennison said:

    Bolivia is the closest thing to democratic socialism in Latin America.

    Not even close. They've made improvements since Morales' election, but even in the present, they're a gnat on Costa Rica's ass w/r/t any meaningful socialism scale.

  6. 1 hour ago, David Dennison said:

    There are plenty of examples of socialism working. 

    Again, I wouldn't bother with this. The person you're quoting hasn't the foggiest idea what socialism is, and we've seen that over and over again from that group for years. Also, what hayden said earlier was correct: the idea that Venezuela is in any way a socialist society is a bad joke, so conceding that assertion in some sort of argument is utterly pointless. It's like starting a debate with "given that the moon is made of green cheese..."

    • Like 1
  7. 5 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    First, thank you for the thoughtful post.

    I do not flatter by nature, but you need to know that posters like you deserve them, like I said, even when we find ourselves in stark opposition on issues like these.

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    The one thing I have a quibble with is "provided however that the United States stays out of it."  We're an American state.  A not-insignificant one.

    Perhaps I should have been a little more clear in that I'm simply re-emphasizing my position on unilateral action by the US. I'm not at all suggesting that it sideline itself in a joint effort by the OAS (or the UN or whoever the fuck it ends up being). Just sideline itself from a solo effort. Mea culpa if that was not clear.

     

    • Like 1
  8. 21 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

    That “unwilling” part is quite problematic for me, though.  

    I don't disagree with that, but let's not pretend that tidbits like that completely nullify the broader scope of her propositions. She's rough around the edges, to be sure, but I wouldn't allow that to obscure the larger picture.

  9. On 2/4/2019 at 2:01 PM, Brisketexan said:

    You don't support anything TANGIBLE. 

    I can't speak for bad_teammate, but as someone who's equally opposed to US interventionism, I'll help you as best I can. Before I start, there's actually another dimension to this that should make us all the more skeptical of the US stance: the Russia factor. Suppose that all this Trump and Putin stuff is actually true. Well then that means he's likely just paying lip service to the Guaido position and it shouldn't be taken seriously in the first place because Putin supports Maduro. This also could be similar to the US position on Nicaragua near the end of the Carter years when they supported the policy known as "Somocismo sin Somoza" or when the US position on Iraq after the Gulf War went from support for Saddam Hussein to preferring "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein." Those kinds of shifts are commonly referred to as "distinctions without differences." Nonetheless, I'll assume in my following remarks that they actually do support Guaido in the manner they say they do:

    1. There is a provision of the Venezuelan Constitution, Article 233, that does allow Guaido (in this case) to assume the role of Interim President for no longer than 30 days prior to holding a new election. The article is worded like this, translated to English:

    "When an elected President [Maduro] becomes permanently unavailable [i.e. his ouster] prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the President of the National Assembly [Guaido] shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic"

    Now of course, Maduro's fanbois would argue that "his inauguration happened so this is inapplicable," but the truth is that it wasn't the traditional (i.e. legal) type of inauguration as the Venezuelan constitution mandates, so the whole thing was a sideshow and he has not been inaugurated. Further, Guaido could run in such an election. But are the same US officials who are insisting that Guaido is the interim President also insisting that he hold elections in 30 days? And if they do really do recognize him only as an interim guy as they've said they do, are they planning on endor$ing potential candidates in these pending elections? The answers to those questions are particularly disturbing when we pretty well know what they are, and they're rather ugly.

    2. The Trump Administration is already tipping its hand that it wants US-based multinationals to acquire the ability to sell that oil and claim the majority of the profits, a move which would absolutely devastate Venezuela's economy (and by "economy," I mean for the whole of the country, not a handful of billionaires). They do not care about average Venezuelans, and anyone who says that they do is living in a world of Make Believe as there is precisely and exactly zero evidence to support such an outlandish claim. 

    3. We seriously have no record whatsoever of engaging in military interventionism for humanitarian purposes in our Post-WWII history in Latin America. The US record on the region in general is abominable, atrocious, abysmal, amoral...and those are just some of the A-words. Venezuela is sitting atop very large oil reserves, and that oil belongs to the people of Venezuela. It's been that way formally since 1976, with a heightened emphasis in the early 2000's, and wouldn't you know who won the pony, that's when the US tried to overthrow the regime responsible for making it that way and it was precisely and exactly for that reason. I think this is the biggest problem that you, hayden, etc are grappling with: you guys seem to think that our government has the slightest humanitarian concerns for the people of Venezuela. They do not.

    I actually have those concerns. I've no doubt that at least some of you guys do, too. I have no doubt as to your sincerity. But you're beyond mistaken if you think any US administration has had your level of compassion, let alone this one. You cannot seriously believe that any intervention we take with the current leadership could be anything other than purely predatory in nature. I mean shit, Elliott Abrams and John Bolton? Fucking really??? You know better than that. Those fuckers care about Venezuelan oil, not Venezuelan people.

    And before you say "well at this point, anything is better than Maduro..." no, it's not. Things could be much worse. Things could end up like Guatemala in 1954 or El Salvador in the late 70's/early 80's. If ever there were two post-WWII facsimiles to Nazi-style states that there have ever been, those would be them. And the horror of it all was that we caused it to be that way for our own selfish purposes.

    Venezuela is in pretty bad shape, Maduro and his thugs are beyond responsible for it, but they'd be doing so much worse if they weren't seeing at least some level of benefits from that oil as they do today. They are Major Fucked right now, but without that, they're Totally Fucked. Do not assume for one microsecond that this current administration isn't capable of doing that. They are. Abrams in specific has done this before and he gets off on it. He's a sick and twisted individual who should have been brought forth on war crimes charges decades ago, and it's beyond scandalous that he's even allowed to have contact with ANY persons from the acting US Executive Branch, let alone get a fucking job in same. To make matters worse, the difference between him and Bolton is a mere flea's hop.

    So, what is there to do tangibly?

    Simple: allow international institutions to involve themselves in it diplomatically, and don't let a single state interject itself as the primary mediator. Allow the OAS (preferably) to involve itself in negotiations that will allow Maduro to leave peacefully (one of the major reasons he won't leave right now is that he's beyond terrified of being placed before a firing squad) but also assist in the transition power over to Guaido for the 30-day period that their constitution allows before having new elections. When that happens, those elections need to be as closely monitored as the Gaza elections of 2006 were, and they need to come out with a "free and fair" grade. At that point, the people of Venezuela need to sort it out amongst themselves. Also, the OAS members need to prohibit themselves from funding any of the potential candidates. These need to be Venezuelan candidates funded by Venezuelan money and voted for by Venezuelan people, and it also needs to not be fucked with via a post-election coup by some state *cough* that didn't like the result.

    bernorange posted some BBC article that leads off "A group of Latin American countries and Canada has urged the Venezuelan military to support opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president." I. Have. No. Problem. With. This.

    But my position on that is a qualified one: I do not oppose this, provided however that the United States stays out of it. In all those interventions/coups that I've mentioned over and over, it followed a similar pattern: the CIA would basically take over the country's military so that it could take over. Subsequently, we would provide arms and other aid whenever it was requested.

    THAT is what we're opposed to, and we're also opposed to that concept that Parliament just described: "we need to know they won't just strip resources and expatriate all the profits." Given the history of private oil companies in general, I wouldn't trust them not to engage in such endeavors even if their tongues were notarized.

    But you seem to have this very black-and-white view that if we don't support direct US interventionism, we are supporting Maduro. Either that or you seem to think that direct US interventionism can be benevolent and relatively disinterested (basically the William F Buckley argument about Vietnam in the 60's). Either way, that's just sheer nonsense. You're one of the posters with which I disagree on a number of topics, but I respect you and will be the first to say that you're smart enough to know better than that. I just went on a massive binge of adding posters to my Ignored Users list because while it's one thing to disagree with someone, it's possible for one to learn something from the other in doing so, and I added to my list everyone from which I can learn nothing helpful and they'd refuse to learn anything from me. You do not match such a description in the slightest.

    Anyways, getting the US involved in military interventionism (or corporate interventionism like the kind Guaido is outlining, which is curious since he's only an interim figure that's laying out long-term policy solutions) is like asking Bill Cosby to run a woman's shelter, Keith Richards to run a drug rehab facility, Bobby Knight to lead an anger management course, Charles Manson to be a prison warden, or whatever analogy that fits this absolutely perverse and disgraceful concept.

     

    • Like 3
  10. 6 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

    This idea that somehow America is destroying Venezuela's economy is fucking laughable. Chavez's and Maduro's lasting legacy as fascists will be both a destroyed economy and a diaspora. Anyone supporting these shitbirds supports fascism. 

    It’s a variety of factors, but we’ve definitely been one of them for the past 17 years.

    But to add to DD’s more relevant point, the issue isn’t whether or not we’ve played a role in their plight. The issue now is who should be entrusted to transition them away from Maduro and into whatever becomes of Venezuela, and the idea that we’re to be trusted to oversee such a transition in a way that benefits the general population is an abject failure at humanity. That’s just putting the coyote in the chicken coop.

  11. 4 hours ago, Rimbo said:

    Wow, I only responded to your first paragraph, but you've filled this post so full of inaccuracies and flat-out lies

    Oh this should be fun.

    Quote

    that I'm going to have to do a little more correction, lest other laymen such as yourself come across the post and feel themselves to have learned something when all they've learned is bullshit.

    You're not a professional at this. You claim you took a semester course. I fucking minored in history but only an epic moron would even think to consider me a "historian."

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    Henry Kissinger had a bit of an ego and may have thought he was more influenctial than he really was.

    I wasn't referring to his speeches and I wasn't referring to him bragging on himself. I was referring to his explanations of what, in his disgusting mind, the US needed to do in order to assist Pinochet in toppling Allende and to insure that he'd be in charge for a while. That has nothing to do with his ego, that's a matter of the declassified records, which I doubt you've read as much as a cover page. I gave a sampling of the material and can cite literally dozens of others. You, on the other hand, are posturing and it's not convincing in the least.

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    Suffice it to say, the historical record -- which I've researched in detail and you have not

    I've spent more time researching Chile, as well as the rest of the similar ventures that I mentioned, than you've spent remembering that one puny semester course that you seem to think gives you a level of unquestionable knowledge on the topic. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on the topic, but I know bullshit when I see it, and you're laying it on pretty thick. 

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    "You use the big C "Communist" tag as if to infer some sort of alliance" -- I call Allende a Communist because he was a member of the Chilean Communist party

    Allende was the leader of the Unidad Popular, which was a compendium of various parties, the Communist Party included. But Allende was never a member of the Communist Party exclusively. He founded, as a matter of actual fact, the Partido Socialista de Chile and was a member of same for 40 years before his death. You say that you've reviewed the historic record, but I haven't seen any evidence of this. All I see in this tidbit of bewildering inanities is just flat-out posturing, and you think you can hide behind that with all of this bluster. 

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    "you seem to think that this was some sort of popular revolution" -- I can't imagine how you gained that opinion from the word "coup," 

    You said he was deposed because of his political leanings and that Pinochet didn't need our help. In order for a coup in Chile to succeed without US assistance, it'd need to be a popular revolution. That didn't happen, and the Pinochet regime relied on crucial US support to both assume and maintain power in those years, which is why we gave it to them.

    And I also stand by what I said: the Chile escapade was a relatively minor one in terms of just Henry Kissinger, let alone post-WWII US foreign policy. What that bastard did in the Far East was far worse.

     

  12. 2 minutes ago, tazhorn said:

    You think legalizing very addictive hard drugs and selling them here at higher prices than the average junky could afford  over time so we could tax them is going to stop Cartels in Mexico and elsewhere from growing and selling them cheaper here? 

    Their could be better ways to handle the legal concerns...Our jails are probably overloaded with people that didnt really  harm anyone but themselves and people close to them with their own personal drug use...

    It depends on how steeply it’s taxed. People who use drugs know that lifestyle is fucking dangerous as hell and they’d much rather get their junk from some sort of legal dispensary than from some shady black market people, and that’s especially true of the crack/heroin/PCP crowd. Why else do you think the black market for alcohol is a relative non-entity here?

  13. El Chapo and his ilk couldn’t exist if drugs were legal. I don’t think you understand what horrible effects that hideous drug war has had over the years, but it’s not inconsiderable. To assume that criminalizing them has had any positive effect whatsoever is an exercise in Make Believe. As has been said many times before, drugs are a health concern and not a legal one. 

  14. 5 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

    This is a hilariously dumb take to have. Even before the raft of declassified intelligence in the Clinton years that show our constant destabilization of Allende's government.

    But we don't even need that, the Church Committee report is enough.

    Holy mother of god

    Well far beyond those reports, there are practically (if not literally) zero reports that support what we were just treated to. All of our own evidence points one way, yet we still have people proudly pounding their chest that it was the opposite. It's been almost a quarter century since Nixon died, and we still have people defending Pinochet. That's just shockingly awful.

  15. 58 minutes ago, Rimbo said:

    That we cause all the problems is also a fairy tale.

    For example, conspiracy theorists love to point out the CIA's involvement in the Chilean coup that ousted Allende and installed Pinochet. The CIA did get involved, but only very minimally.

    The documentary and historic record says otherwise. You'd do well to do a little research on the Chilean topic rather than just lazily using the label "conspiracy theorists" as if it was some instant argument winner.

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    The coup would've happened if the USA had never been involved.

    It would have failed without our involvement in it. Henry Kissinger was very forthright about that in internal discussions in which he declared that our first objective was to "make the economy scream." Again, there's other ample evidence to indicate this and you're engaging in purely baseless conjecture with this silly-assed comment. If you don't give me a reason to believe you, I have no reason to believe you.

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    The coup in Chile happened because Allende was a far-left Communist

    He was an orthodox Marxist who also despised Fidel Castro. You use the big C "Communist" tag as if to infer some sort of alliance with either Cuba, Russia or both, neither of which are even remotely true. Furthermore, he was in a close race where he captured a plurality of the vote. One of the candidates was a progressivist that just didn't veer as far to the left as Allende. The other was a right winger.

    So, here's what you had: In 1970, 2/3rds of the country turned out to vote for one or another shade of liberalism/progressivism/socialism/whatever the fuck label we're putting on it, 1/3rd voted for the incumbent right-wing President.

    As of 2013, "According to the poll, 55% of Chileans regarded the 17 years of the dictatorship as either bad or very bad, while 9% said they were good or very good."

    The record pretty much speaks for itself, but you seem to think that this was some sort of popular revolution. It wasn't. It was a coup that was dictated by Washington and executed by a handful of thugs in Santiago.

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    candidate who was elected through a very temporary coalition of constantly arguing left-wing parties that dissolved soon after his election, while he made sweeping changes (in terms of nationalizing various industries) that had a very profound negative impact on Chilean elites. This story ends badly no matter how involved or uninvolved the USA gets.

    Again, that's a nice fairy tale.

    https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm

    And I'm not sure why you thought this would help you even if half of what you said was true because we've done far worse since 1947 literally dozens of times over. The Chile escapade was a relatively minor one, even just for Henry Kissinger.

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