The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

? you really don't get that the numbers are against you here do you? the numbers and reason. you're in twice the trouble.

Why don't you include capitalism then? I mean, the dumb false equivalence of firearms and a generic school of ideology aside.

Yeah elodea, count the ones killed because of selfishness or other moral defects as we all know that capitalism is the root of all evil and socialism makes you a better human being. And don't you dare to count the millions capitalism has saved from starving to death! We don't wanna hear it!

*hrrrnnngh!*

FUN! with your favorite of all hosts ! :

Don't forget all the people socialism saved from strarving, too.

... This is a pretty pointless level of discussion, from all perspectives and sides here.
"XYZ killed millions, it is so bad", is so entirely undifferentiated, it's basically an empty statement.
All referenced concepts are waaay too complex to reject or accept them from a sentence or two, even if that sentence references actual history.
Even the gun discussion has more depth to it than that. It all has many positives and negatives.

I wonder if we all can agree that Equifax did wrong...

HAHAHAHAHA. This one always cracks me up. Someone somewhere in the world was just murdered. What did you do about it Gorbles? Because you did nothing, you are responsible for murdering them. It's so boneheaded on so many levels you don't even realise saying this about capitalism essentially makes them an anti-semite.

I can't believe I have to explain this to you. If you think it is faulty logic to relate ideology to homicide in relation to control of ideology, then the relation of guns to homicides in the same fashion is also faulty logic. On the other hand if you believe in gun control because mass gun homicides irregardless of any positive consequence of good intent e.g. self defense, then you must follow your own logic to it's principled end and also accept the banning of socialism and communism irregardless of any positive consequence or good intent.

Socialism saves no-one. It produces nothing. On a systems level, which is the level at which socialism operates, if you really wanted to prevent people from starving as opposed to simply pushing a political ideology, you would be for the system which maximises the incentive for people to produce food in such a way that people can afford to obtain it. There are many solutions to poverty and starvation, yet you choose to advocate an outdated system from a time when people were in the dark about this that has shown to be incredibly cost-ineffective and if taken too far results in mass starvation.

Reality: Socialism directly kills 60-70 million people through starvation. Capitalism brings a billion people out of poverty.
Reality denier: "Socialism saves people from starving! Capitalism kills people!"

It's always refreshing to be reminded how irrational and willfully uninformed people can get in adherence to their particular political religion. Might as well say the earth is flat while you're at it.


How dare those countries adopt private property rights/free markets and shed their socialist central controls in order to starve their own people with capitalism! Wake up people, we're witnessing one of the greatest massacres in human history! We need a socialist revolution to destroy the rich ruling class now more than ever!

The argument of someone who doesn't have an argument and who doesn't understand the topic material. You figure out what communism is yet? Figure out what marx was on about yet? Read what happened under mao, stalin, pol pot etc yet? Oh, and don't give me the typical "that wasn't real socialism" until you do and can articulate why.

I find it amazing you can't even acknowledge that in the last few page both sides of the discussion have been rather weak in their argumentation and instead write another wall of text to defend your ideology and attack me.

"if the logic i disagree with is bad, all logic is bad, HAHAHA GORBLES, PWNED, SOCIALISM SUCKS"

Even funnier that you raise China as an example, @elodea. Aren't they, like, Red Til They're Red kinda style Actual Real Communism with a capital C?

You know, the ideology you gunned for in your previous post. For being useless. But you're attributing the poverty line solely to some form of capitalism? What about the government definition of such (the UK government recently either attempted to or actually redefined what extreme poverty meant, with the net effect of making said number go down)? What about the industrial advances of China in the past few decades, which India is now close to undergoing themselves?

I realise that you religious types can't stand to see any criticism of your benevolent god, Capitalism, but maybe there is valid criticism of it that you can't handwave away as a tangent to get away from discussing that awkward topic of gun control.

Nice attempt at a diversion though, I almost let you go without pointing it out

It's depressing when irony hits so close to the truth

That's rich. Gorbles and yourself were the ones who tried to worm around my original statement on gun control by randomly making an irrelevant case for socialism. Don't start weaseling away with that high and mighty act now that you can't stand to look at empirical evidence.

What's funny is you were the only one actually defending an ideology - all i care about is the freedom of individuals to determine their own values unmolested. I have no utopian policy structure I want to impose on everyone. Negative rights, not positive rights - learn the difference. You want to know how to help the starving and make the world a better place? Start with yourself, not the world.

The point was simple - get the leftists in this thread to come face to face with their own logical inconsistencies by validly looping their own simpleton arguments back on things they value.

a. things that kill a lot of people should be regulated
b. guns kill people
Therefore strictly regulate guns

a. things that kill a lot of people should be regulated
b. socialism kills people
Therefore strictly regulate socialism

I also find it amazing you would think "socialism saves people" somehow exempts it from the consequences of this retarded gun control logic. You don't think guns save people too? Where's your intellectual consistency?

@Gorbles

It was an error to follow you into this capitalism vs socialism derailment. Lesson learned. Don't follow the pace set by people who haven't sorted out their own ideas in any reasonable degree - like trying to run your computer on an unstable overclock. If you think "capitalism" kills people go ahead and advocate that it be banned. Just make sure you face your Mr Hyde in the mirror and do the same for socialism.

a. things that kill a lot of people should be regulated
b. capitalism kills people
Therefore strictly regulate capitalism


?

I guess I agree on regulating socialism. I mean we do have a lot of laws that regulate how to combine socialistic concepts with free markets and capitalism. We call it social democracy.
It's a great success. Maybe you should put down your books on Stalin and Mao and read up on more modern implementations of "socialism".

So the lesson is, crazy dictators kill lots of people? Because it seems to me that the lesson is that crazy dictators kill a lot of people.

I don't think Elodea is seeing the irony. Besides, isn't china a socialist market economy (or state capitalism, if you will)?

@elodea claims I made a case for socialism, when all I asked was to hold capitalism to the same standards. I made no case for socialism at all.

elodea then tells me I haven't sorted out my ideas.

The Rational Thinking Superman™ wins again!

If you want to know what is not happening in Spain watch this. The girl says that 90% of 'us' wants secession. She doesn't say that 'us' is the people who voted, less than 50% of the people living in Cataluña.
So basically, 40% of the population want to force the rest to leave their country.

Oh and that 40% of the people hate Spain but love EU because EU is cool though they don't really know who rules it. While Spain is bad even though the have much more political power than the rest of the Spanish regions.

Also they have more money and don't want to share with the people with lower income from other regions... many of the secessionist are socialist.

So are you posting this as a random attack on evil socialists are as a pointer at another topic?

I don't know what kind of political ideology the catalonian separatists follow, but I sure would agree they're not doing anybody a favor with all this separatism stuff.

No, not attacking socialism this time, I thought the topic about socialism was over but wanted to point out the hypocrisy of this particular group of socialists "share with the neighbour until I have more, then I'll say your not my neighbour anymore".

They don't have a specific political ideology. In fact, it's very beautifu, socialists, capitalists, anarchists holding hands in harmony.
I just saw the video and wanted to share it. I have seen videos like this one before from other countries, a girl almost crying asking for help. Just that this time I know the full story and how bullshity this is.

We tried this argument with Brexit. Apparently it doesn't matter because the referendum results mattered regardless.

So, you oppose Catalonian independence. What's your thought on UK independence from the EU? I'm betting you are somehow in favour of it, given your loaded statements about the EU there.

What argument? That not even half of the population voted?

*hhhhrrrrrrnng*

https://www.google.com/search?safe=...1j0i22i30k1j0i22i10i30k1j0i19k1.0.SNPfWfOw1-A

Read again, till you find the word "less"