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Zousha, your constant dismissals of anything you disagree with with nothing more than a youtube link, combined with your frequently unhinged apocalyptic conspiracy theory (which you can't even defend) and your egregious misunderstandings of basic elements of the political philosophies you oppose makes your honest, concerned seeker persona difficult to credit. I thought briefly that we made some progress, but you seem to have reverted to type.
Why is that?
There's a difference between saying there isn't a dedicated conspiracy of feminists and gay people out to destroy modern society and trying to absolve Marx of the atrocities various Communist and Socialist societies committed under the auspices of bringing his vision forth.
You've convinced me that advocating for LGBT rights is not a bad thing and that it's definitely not aimed at breaking down the biologically stable nuclear family, but I won't be swayed from the basic premise that Marx's philosophies were, if not actively malicious, at least a very bad idea that had very bad results.
I can't support Marxist ideals. Not when they carry baggage to the tune of over 7.5 million Ukrainians starved to death over the course of a single year.
Why is it? Because the Holodomor scared me, that's why.
The Soviet Story I read, has been denounced by leading Russian historians. Leftwing ones? Nationalist ones? I couldn't say.
Regardless, I'm not watching fourteen minutes of Stalin's atrocities to find one line of an article Engels wrote seventy years prior.
In other news: Lenin most certainly was left-wing. Chomsky has been saying he was a right-wing coutnerrevolutionary for years; Chomsky also is not a Marxist and has never been one, or, at least, not since the thirties. Citizen X is correct--he has denounced every Soviet leader from the beginning, that stooge of the plutocracy.
There's a difference between saying there isn't a dedicated conspiracy of feminists and gay people out to destroy modern society and trying to absolve Marx of the atrocities various Communist and Socialist societies committed under the auspices of bringing his vision forth.You've convinced me that advocating for LGBT rights is not a bad thing and that it's definitely not aimed at breaking down the biologically stable nuclear family, but I won't be swayed from the basic premise that Marx's philosophies were, if not actively malicious, at least a very bad idea that had very bad results.
I can't support Marxist ideals. Not when they carry baggage to the tune of over 7.5 million Ukrainians starved to death over the course of a single year.
Why is it? Because the Holodomor scared me, that's why.
Ok, back up. Nobody is asking you to become a Marxist. Here are the ares of dispute:
1) Marxism is not socialism and conflating the two is a basic error. Marx loathed the regular socialists of his time, who are the mixed economy guys who got actual socialist countries working and made them among the best places on Earth to live. If you ever read the Manifesto, or just listened to a quality lecture on its contents, you'd know that. Also if you read Marx, you will discover that Russia and China are about the last places on Earth that were going to go through the kind of revolution he envisioned any time soon. He had France and the UK in mind, where he ended up being wrong.
(Not that his example stopped Hayek from making an even more boneheaded apocalyptic prediction about the UK a century later, of course.)
2) The USSR had about as much to do with Marxism as Hitler had to do with socialism: some co-opting of rhetoric in favor of essentially the opposite aims. Both, once you skin off the verbal gloss, were deeply traditionalist authoritarianisms distinguished from their less murderous antecedents only in that they had the technology to achieve atrocity on a scale that the average Tsar or King in Prussia could only dream of. Inability to see this speaks poorly to the analytical skills and/or the basic honesty of the people you are getting it from.
3) If you're terrified by the Holodomor, that's fine. But when you let your fear lead you to make these kinds of elementary errors it's no longer a sensible reaction to atrocity but instead has become something pathological in itself.
4) No one here, with the possible exception of Doodlebug and he's only asking you to back up the stuff you're saying, is trying to turn you into a Marxist. (In fact, I think Doodlebug is the only Marxist on the boards.) We are pointing out some basic errors in the stuff you're taking in, in the hopes that you will become way more skeptical of it since to date you seem to believe almost anything Mr. Youtube and the rest tell you about anybody and anything. This failure of skepticism serves your stated desire of figuring things out very poorly.
To put the last point in a little context: I've got a pretty serious hate-on for religion on various moral, ethical, political, and intellectual grounds. Ask anybody here that knows me and they'll tell you that religions and I are not friends. But if someone comes around saying stuff that's clearly wrong on the facts about it and I see it, I do my best to step in and correct them. It's not because I secretly like religion, but because I care about accuracy and honesty. Same thing with Marxism here.
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Hmm it's been a while for me, but, given Marx's dislike of peasants and his historical determinism, I don't think he would have been down with either Russia's or China's revolutions.
I'm pretty sure he saw capitalism as an important and necessary step, one that brought the great technological and industrial progress required to have the sort of surpluses that a communist state required and the class consciousnesses required.
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It IS stupid, because the modern left and right are so similar in methodology and behavior but for different outcomes and ideals. There's this excellent bit on LearnLiberty.org where Prof. Antony Davies takes a series of political issues and divides them along their "liberal" or "conservative" lines, and notes that it's odd how these labels arbitrarily divide very different issues, and proposes separating them into different categories: "more freedom" and "more regulation."
Who favors more freedom, liberals or conservatives?
I found this video very enlightening. Note that it is NOT that other YouTuber. It's a college lecture by a professor, just in case you assume it's more of the dreck I've been spewing.
Look, I know my logical reasoning and research skills suck. I haven't had to write a college paper in over two years. I'd rather spend my money on Pathfinder books than political and philosophical textbooks. I don't take time to read because I'm working around 12 to 14 hours a week at two jobs. So I rely on YouTube pundits and professors to encapsulate the issues in the likely 1 or 2 hours I've got on the internet a day, time I'd much rather be spending in a PbP or playing Mass Effect. I know it's wrong. I know it's stupid. But the only other option is ignoring the debate entirely, and that's irresponsible. My life is going pretty good, and I know I have no right to complain, but when I hear about stuff like this going on, I feel I HAVE to complain or else I'm a bad person for ignoring an obvious evil. But by complaining when I have no ethical or philosophical leg to stand on I'm also a bad person for stirring up conflict where it's not needed.
I'm a big fat tangle of emotion and insecurity right now. Things are going so well for me that I'm going around looking for something to get me angry and scared because it doesn't feel right otherwise. Like I don't know HOW to be happy or content and that I have to have something to worry about because I can't be a good person. Not with all the flaws I have.
4) No one here, with the possible exception of Doodlebug and he's only asking you to back up the stuff you're saying, is trying to turn you into a Marxist. (In fact, I think Doodlebug is the only Marxist on the boards.)
I have in fact, discovered one other fully-bloomed commie (and a Stalinist, to boot!) on these boards, but he's not a politroll, so I won't divulge his name.
Also, there's Metamorphosis, who only lurks. I'm not sure if s/he's really a Marxist, but s/he sure favorites a lot of my posts, so I'm assuming so.
Vive le Galt!
Hmm it's been a while for me, but, given Marx's dislike of peasants and his historical determinism, I don't think he would have been down with either Russia's or China's revolutions.
First part is true, second part is highly debatable. Russia's was a workers revolution that I tend to think he would have been down with. He wouldn't have been as excited about China in '49, but seeing his support for the Irish Fenians, the Sepoy Revolt, and the cause of the Union in the American Civil War, I tend to think that, again, he would have been down.
I'm pretty sure he saw capitalism as an important and necessary step, one that brought the great technological and industrial progress required to have the sort of surpluses that a communist state required and the class consciousnesses required.
A shout out here for Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development (also known as, the permanent revolution!).
Vive le Galt!
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BTW, Noam Chomsky while leftist is no fan of Obama, he considers him worse than Tony Blair and George Bush combined and believes that all three should be tried for war crimes.
Noam Chomsky thinks everyone should be tried for war crimes.
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It IS stupid, because the modern left and right are so similar in methodology and behavior but for different outcomes and ideals. There's this excellent bit on LearnLiberty.org where Prof. Antony Davies takes a series of political issues and divides them along their "liberal" or "conservative" lines, and notes that it's odd how these labels arbitrarily divide very different issues, and proposes separating them into different categories: "more freedom" and "more regulation."
Who favors more freedom, liberals or conservatives?
I found this video very enlightening. Note that it is NOT that other YouTuber. It's a college lecture by a professor, just in case you assume it's more of the dreck I've been spewing.
I'll note one thing. First, he's a professor at an independent religious university. A quick glance shows that it is a Catholic University which is generally a good sign. Those Jesuit types are smart fellows. This may or may not be a flag that he's a self publishing whack job, best check to see what he writes.
Can't find him on SSRN. Bad sign.
http://scholar.google.ca/citations?hl=en&user=rDKXPgIAAAAJ&view_op= list_works&pagesize=100
Hmm, not a ton of citations, and not really a lot of pubs in quality journals, and very little or nothing written on the subject he's lecturing about in the video. His most cited paper dates back from 1995 and looks to be a portion of his dissertation.
This isn't to say he's right, or that he's wrong, or that publications and citations are a measure of someones intelligence or worth, but being a 'university professor' doesn't mean a whole lot without some recognition by your peers to back up your status.
Perhaps, as a prof at a catholic school he doesn't face the same pressures to publish as someone at another school would. *shrug*
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Digging a little deeper, he seems to get a lot of funding for his graduate students from the Koch brothers.
It IS stupid, because the modern left and right are so similar in methodology and behavior but for different outcomes and ideals. There's this excellent bit on LearnLiberty.org where Prof. Antony Davies takes a series of political issues and divides them along their "liberal" or "conservative" lines, and notes that it's odd how these labels arbitrarily divide very different issues, and proposes separating them into different categories: "more freedom" and "more regulation."
Who favors more freedom, liberals or conservatives?
I found this video very enlightening. Note that it is NOT that other YouTuber. It's a college lecture by a professor, just in case you assume it's more of the dreck I've been spewing.
I gave up at the first insultingly obvious lie again. Roughly 1:27. If he believes that, he's an idiot. If he doesn't, he clearly thinks his audience is full of idiots.
But here's an elementary error of reasoning right off: There's no necessary dichotomy between regulation and freedom. In fact, regulation can create tremendous amounts of freedom and its absence can quickly extinguish them. In fact, freedom in any substantive, meaningful sense, requires regulation by the state or something that might as well be the state. Otherwise who do you go to to redress things when someone limits your freedom? How would you even know if they had in the absence of any agreed-upon set of freedoms? If you don't have the police and the courts, and the law codes they operate under, you're left with either being or hiring a thug. Inevitably in these situations people who can get more thugs together end up having all the freedom and the rest are only free insofar as the brute squad they've hired (if they can afford one at all) and we have feudalism back.
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Why is it? Because the Holodomor scared me, that's why.
As someone of Ukrainian descent, Holodomor was awful.
And it wasn't about Marxism, it was about Stalin being a horrible human being.
That is like saying Democracy lead to the holocaust.
I am not a Marxist, I think central government of anything the people won't revolt if they don't have is a mistake, as people only act toward motivation, and mass revolt is a good motivator.
Bur Holodomor was genocide, not central planning.
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Who are the Koch brothers?Billionaire "libertarians" whose father was a founder of the John Birch Society. They funded a lot of the astroturf Tea Party efforts and threw an awful lot of money into the Republican party the last two election cycles. Both to Romney and to House, Senate and state races. Koch industries is the second largest privately owned company in the United States.
I use scare quotes around libertarian because they're really the less taxes on me and less regulation of my business end of the libertarians. They seem to care less about any other libertarian ideals. It's all business, though they're happy to use the culture war to prop up politicians who'll back their economic interests.
Or to profit from government spending when they can.
In other words people who are not to be trusted.
In other words people who are not to be trusted.Who are the Koch brothers?Billionaire "libertarians" whose father was a founder of the John Birch Society. They funded a lot of the astroturf Tea Party efforts and threw an awful lot of money into the Republican party the last two election cycles. Both to Romney and to House, Senate and state races. Koch industries is the second largest privately owned company in the United States.
I use scare quotes around libertarian because they're really the less taxes on me and less regulation of my business end of the libertarians. They seem to care less about any other libertarian ideals. It's all business, though they're happy to use the culture war to prop up politicians who'll back their economic interests.
Or to profit from government spending when they can.
Well, you can trust them to side with anything that they think will increase their profits.
First part is true, second part is highly debatable. Russia's was a workers revolution that I tend to think he would have been down with.Noam Chomsky describes the second revolution (the successful one in 1917) as not a true worker's revolution but more in the lines of a coup' detat. He also describes the government set up by Lenin's Bolsheviks and carried on by Stalin and his successors as a right wing dictatorship masking itself in Marxist terms without sharing anything with Marxist doctrine. One of the first things that Lenin did was to abolish the worker councils which are a central tenent of Marxist thought... the control of production by the workers themselves.
Yes, I know he does. But he also isn't a Marxist.
The Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd by gaining a majority in the workers and soldiers councils--the soviets. They had been calling for the soviets to replace the Provisional Government for a while, off and on, both when they were in control and when they were not.
During the Kornilov crisis, when a proto-Francoesque figure tried to march on the capital and crush the revolution, the Bolshevik-led soviets organized the defense of the city and made a mockery of Kerensky's claims to hold power. In the aftermath of the crisis, an All-Russian Supreme Soviet of Worker's, Soldier's and Peasant's Deputies was held, the Bolsheviks, by promising an end to the war, an end to capitalism and land to the peasants was able to convince the majority of delegates to authorize a seizure of power by the pro-Bolshevik regiments and the worker's militias.
So, there's certainly room to argue. I say it was a workers revolution.
I don't have it in me for the Trotskyist explanation of Stalinism, but I wonder if you know any more about the dissolution of the workers' councils. Was that before Kronstadt?
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That's Joseph Stalin, a man who in every way but name was essentially a clone of Adolf Hitler. Stalin's Communism owed it's heritage not to Marx, but to the tyrannical regimes that preceded it. Stalin plagarised Marx and Lenin and used them to disguise that he was nothing more than a typically brutal Russian despot, only armed with modern technology.
In World War 2, the United States knowing who what Stalin was allied with him anyway to oppose Hitler. After Vietnam we allied with Pol Pot a man who brutally killed a million of his own people, emptied the cities of Cambodia and liquidated every form of the intelligentsia and whoever had worked for civil service.
The Soviet Story is a slanted use of history. Right Wing autocracies have perpetuated the same kinds of crimes in places like Nicaragua before the prsent regime and the dictators we backed in Cuba, the Phillipines, and El Salvador. It loses it totally when trying to equate Nazi doctrine with Marxist solely on the common use of the term "Social"
I invite you to listen to Noam Chomsky on the subject of linking Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky with Marxism.
"Lenin was a right wing deviation of the Marxist ideal"
Noam Chomsky.
I've already looked at Noam Chomsky a bit. I'm not convinced by him. And his claim about Lenin being right wing in your linked video rings hollow to me regardless of what that PDF says. Lenin still claimed to be a Marxist, a LEFT WING political philosophy. If he'd been right wing, he'd have advocated for less violent overthrow of Russia, and he wouldn't have advanced the socio-political changes that rocked the country and set the stage for Stalin so quickly. Even Lenin himself had doubts about what had resulted from his attempt to implement Marxism, saying that what Russia had really needed was not one Lenin, but ten Saint Francis of Assisis. I paraphrase, but you get the
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It doesn't look like you have read any Chomsky at all. It looks like you have read a list of hideously out of context quotes being deconstructed by a very obsessed Chomsky critic. Here is some advice: whenever you see these sorts of lists with short quotes and critical responses you might as well use them as toilet paper regardless of who is making the list and what their political agenda is.
For example, the very first "lie" on that list is taken from the middle of a giant paragraph. The point of that paragraph is that in some parts of the world US interference has led to such poor conditions that the people in those parts would view the terrible conditions in some parts of Eastern Europe under Soviet Rule as an improvement over their own. He did not mean that the US was worse that Soviet Russia. One would only believe that if he read that quote alone and wasn't familiar with Chomsky at all. He has written extensively about the horrendous crimes of the Soviet Union.
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And he also claims that Libertarianism is a left-wing, collectivist idea, ignoring John Locke's individualist philosophies that are so important to it. That's historical revisionism, something I've seen lots of leftists accused of.
Patholigcal may be a good way to describe it, Samnell. To put it at it's simplest, I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of religious fanatics taking power and rewriting the Constitution as they see fit. I'm scared of dating a woman only for her to accuse me of rape simply because she wasn't satisfied with the sex. I'm scared that no matter what I do the country's going to collapse and I'm going to go down with it because I didn't buy a gun and a cabin and stock up on food and water. I'm constantly scared of losing my jobs. I'm scared of socialists, capitalists, Christians, atheists, libertarians, conservatives, liberals, feminists, mens' rights advocates, LGBT advocates and advocates for straight-marriage only. There's so much stuff going on in the world and it seems like the only thing that's consistent about them is that things are only going to get worse and worse. It may be a Marxist Revolution in America. It may be that conservative Christians create a Gilead-like state, making The Handmaid's Tale a reality.
I read Harrison Bergeron and A Wrinkle in Time in Middle School and Animal Farm and Brave New World in High School. I did my Senior Capstone on Perdido Street Station. There's potential dystopias around every freakin' corner!
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And he also claims that Libertarianism is a left-wing, collectivist idea, ignoring John Locke's individualist philosophies that are so important to it. That's historical revisionism, something I've seen lots of leftists accused of.
I don't know who you are talking about but...
Outside the United States libertarianism is associated with anarchist philosophies. Inside the United Sates, since the 70's, it has been associated with right-wing proprietarians. The first people to describe themselves as libertarian were 19th century anarchists. The first person to coin it in an academic journal was the French communist-anarchist Joseph Déjacque who published it in the 1860s.
In the US libertarians from the vein of the original libertarians refer to themselves as libertarian-socialists, libertarian-communists, or sometimes left-libertarians.
John Lock was the father of classical liberalism. Conservatives hijacked the word "libertarian" because they didn't want the word "liberalism" to mislabel them as liberals.
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And he also claims that Libertarianism is a left-wing, collectivist idea, ignoring John Locke's individualist philosophies that are so important to it. That's historical revisionism, something I've seen lots of leftists accused of.
I don't know who you are talking about but...
Outside the United States libertarianism is associated with anarchist philosophies. Inside the United Sates, since the 70's, it has been associated with right-wing proprietarians. The first people to describe themselves as libertarian were 19th century anarchists. The first person to coin it in an academic journal was the French communist-anarchist Joseph Déjacque who published it in the 1860s.
In the US libertarians from the vein of the original libertarians refer to themselves as libertarian-socialists, libertarian-communists, or sometimes left-libertarians.
John Lock was the father of classical liberalism. Conservatives hijacked the word "libertarian" because they didn't want the word "liberalism" to mislabel them as liberals.
Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.
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I'm scared of dating a woman only for her to accuse me of rape simply because she wasn't satisfied with the sex...
Do women do that? Before marriage I kept myself extremely busy with not satisfying women in bed and this has never happened to me.
It's incredibly easy to make false rape accusations in the current political climate. While not a direct example of a man being accused of rape after dissatisfaction with sex, the Duke lacrosse case of 2006 is a good example of how easy it is to make such an accusation, how readily people are willing to believe it, and the harm such irresponsible actions causes.
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I know that. I wrote the capstone back in 2010, before I started reading into this philosophical stuff (I only started watching these videos back in September of this year) because I thought Perdido Street Station was an interesting counterpoint to the majority of dystopian literature out there, which largely seemed to me to focus on Marxist-based dystopias, PSS flipping it around and showing what a capitalist-based dystopia might look like. I tried to look at it from a purely literary standpoint, without making judgments on political affiliations, and given that I got an A and the university president himself attended and liked it, I'd be willing to guess I succeeded in some fashion.
I deliberately mentioned Perdido Street Station among the other dystopian works I'd read to illustrate the point I was trying to make: totalitarianism frightens me no matter the ideological dressing, and I fear we're heading towards one form of it or another, whether it's Christian fundamentalism or Marxist revolution.
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Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.
Facts are facts. Joseph Dejacque and fellow anarchists were the first to call themselves libertarians way back in the 1850s. Right-wing proprietarians co-opted the word for themselves way afterwards. Outside the US, anarchists still refer to themselves as libertarians.
Don't believe me or them - look it up with google. It takes 15 seconds.
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It's incredibly easy to make false rape accusations in the current political climate. While not a direct example of a man being accused of rape after dissatisfaction with sex, the Duke lacrosse case of 2006 is a good example of how easy it is to make such an accusation, how readily people are willing to believe it, and the harm such irresponsible actions causes.I'm scared of dating a woman only for her to accuse me of rape simply because she wasn't satisfied with the sex...
Do women do that? Before marriage I kept myself extremely busy with not satisfying women in bed and this has never happened to me.
But is it incredibly common? No. Is it worth fear mongering over? No.
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Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.Facts are facts. Joseph Dejacque and fellow anarchists were the first to call themselves libertarians way back in the 1850s. Right-wing proprietarians co-opted the word for themselves way afterwards. Outside the US, anarchists still refer to themselves as libertarians.
Don't believe me or them - look it up with google. It takes 15 seconds.
Google and Wikipedia both say you're right. Thank you for clearing that up. I'll give Chomsky a second look too, while I'm at it.
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But is it incredibly common? No. Is it worth fear mongering over? No.It's incredibly easy to make false rape accusations in the current political climate. While not a direct example of a man being accused of rape after dissatisfaction with sex, the Duke lacrosse case of 2006 is a good example of how easy it is to make such an accusation, how readily people are willing to believe it, and the harm such irresponsible actions causes.I'm scared of dating a woman only for her to accuse me of rape simply because she wasn't satisfied with the sex...
Do women do that? Before marriage I kept myself extremely busy with not satisfying women in bed and this has never happened to me.
Its commonality isn't the problem. That it happens at all is the problem.
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Google and RationalWiki both say you're right. Thank you for clearing that up. I'll give Chomsky a second look too, while I'm at it.Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.Facts are facts. Joseph Dejacque and fellow anarchists were the first to call themselves libertarians way back in the 1850s. Right-wing proprietarians co-opted the word for themselves way afterwards. Outside the US, anarchists still refer to themselves as libertarians.
Don't believe me or them - look it up with google. It takes 15 seconds.
I am always right. As soon as my wife realizes this our household will run much smoother.
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I am always right. As soon as my wife realizes this our household will run much smoother.Google and RationalWiki both say you're right. Thank you for clearing that up. I'll give Chomsky a second look too, while I'm at it.Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.Facts are facts. Joseph Dejacque and fellow anarchists were the first to call themselves libertarians way back in the 1850s. Right-wing proprietarians co-opted the word for themselves way afterwards. Outside the US, anarchists still refer to themselves as libertarians.
Don't believe me or them - look it up with google. It takes 15 seconds.
I can't tell whether you're joking here or not...
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I can't tell whether you're joking here or not...I am always right. As soon as my wife realizes this our household will run much smoother.Google and RationalWiki both say you're right. Thank you for clearing that up. I'll give Chomsky a second look too, while I'm at it.Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.Facts are facts. Joseph Dejacque and fellow anarchists were the first to call themselves libertarians way back in the 1850s. Right-wing proprietarians co-opted the word for themselves way afterwards. Outside the US, anarchists still refer to themselves as libertarians.
Don't believe me or them - look it up with google. It takes 15 seconds.
I never joke. I am a very serious person.
Or do I always joke and I am not a very serious person?
Maybe there is two of me and one of us always tells the truth and the other always lies. You may ask me one question and then make your decision on which door to choose.
It's incredibly easy to make false rape accusations in the current political climate. While not a direct example of a man being accused of rape after dissatisfaction with sex, the Duke lacrosse case of 2006 is a good example of how easy it is to make such an accusation, how readily people are willing to believe it, and the harm such irresponsible actions causes.I'm scared of dating a woman only for her to accuse me of rape simply because she wasn't satisfied with the sex...
Do women do that? Before marriage I kept myself extremely busy with not satisfying women in bed and this has never happened to me.
Your example is actually an example of how it isn't easy to be falsely convicted of rape. Yes it sucks that it happened, but in the end the court system was useful in rooting out most of the truth of what happened, or at least enough evidence to dismiss the charges. The prosecutor lost his job, was disbarred and even convicted of criminal contempt for bringing false charges before the court.
False rape accusations are much rarer than actual rapes. In fact, even as a man, you are more likely to be raped than suffer legal consequences of a false rape accusation.
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I can't tell whether you're joking here or not...I am always right. As soon as my wife realizes this our household will run much smoother.Google and RationalWiki both say you're right. Thank you for clearing that up. I'll give Chomsky a second look too, while I'm at it.Chomsky. It's weird. Some people I'm reading say the leftists like Chomsky are co-opting Libertarianism, while others are saying the conservatives co-opted it . Who's co-opting who, here? I was under the impression that the core part of Libertarianism WAS classical liberalism.Facts are facts. Joseph Dejacque and fellow anarchists were the first to call themselves libertarians way back in the 1850s. Right-wing proprietarians co-opted the word for themselves way afterwards. Outside the US, anarchists still refer to themselves as libertarians.
Don't believe me or them - look it up with google. It takes 15 seconds.
I never joke. I am a very serious person.
Or do I always joke and I am not a very serious person?
Maybe there is two of me and one of us always tells the truth and the other always lies. You may ask me one question and then make your decision on which door to choose.
Would you tell me that THIS door leads to the castle?
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It's incredibly easy to make false rape accusations in the current political climate. While not a direct example of a man being accused of rape after dissatisfaction with sex, the Duke lacrosse case of 2006 is a good example of how easy it is to make such an accusation, how readily people are willing to believe it, and the harm such irresponsible actions causes.I'm scared of dating a woman only for her to accuse me of rape simply because she wasn't satisfied with the sex...
Do women do that? Before marriage I kept myself extremely busy with not satisfying women in bed and this has never happened to me.
Your example is actually an example of how it isn't easy to be falsely convicted of rape. Yes it sucks that it happened, but in the end the court system was useful in rooting out most of the truth of what happened, or at least enough evidence to dismiss the charges. The prosecutor lost his job, was disbarred and even convicted of criminal contempt for bringing false charges before the court.
False rape accusations are much rarer than actual rapes. In fact, even as a man, you are more likely to be raped than suffer legal consequences of a false rape accusation.
I didn't think of it that way...but still, peoples' lives were ruined even if the accusation was proven false. It tarnished the reputation of not just those boys, but the entire college.
Yup, but there also thousands and thousands of young women and girls whose lives are ruined by rape.
One estimate is that 74% of all girls who have been "sexually active" by the age of fourteen have been victims of rape.
Roughly 40% of black women have been the victims of a sexual crime by the age of 18.
On average, American women have roughly a 25% chance of being victims of rape in their life time.
I agree, it's bad that those young men had to go through a difficult time. I think part of the problem was an issue of class though. You had a group of well off white boys accused of raping a black woman. For the poor black community, that's pretty much a clarion call to arms, it's a rallying point which creates pressure in various forms.
If we lived in a society where men didn't treat women like sexual objects (the boys had hired her as a stripper at their party), it wouldn't have happened. I feel bad for them, but I feel even worse for the little girls around the country, that statistically speaking, will be raped tomorrow.
Patholigcal may be a good way to describe it, Samnell. To put it at it's simplest, I'm scared of everything.
Ok. I don't know how to help you with that except to say that the thing you seem least afraid of is that the people talking to you might be misleading you when they're telling you to be afraid of this and that. Do you prefer to be afraid?
There are things out there that reasonable people should fear, of course. As it's an imperfect world full of imperfect people, that'll probably always be true. And there may be some things that you just have an irrational fear that you can't help. I have one about snakes, but seeing as I'm not working at a snake farm or whatever, it's pretty easy to manage and does not dominate my life.
The kind of fear you're talking about does not sound like that. You don't seem to have any sense of proportionality or appreciation for just how unlikely some things are. Do you worry about being struck by lightning every time you leave the house? I don't know, but I doubt it. Being struck by lightning just is not that common. It's not impossible, but then again neither is winning the lottery. Do you go out every day assuming you've won or are about to win the lottery?
If you don't worry about those things, which are relatively simple events that don't take any coordination or involve many conscious acts, etc, why do you worry so much more about far more improbable events like a politically-engineered social collapse? People are not supervillains.
The Magyar Struggle by Frederick Engels, January 1849.
See, it wasn't that hard. (All of Marx and Engels' article in the Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung)
Also, I only gave it the once-over, but I couldn't help but notice that "racial trash" (which the admitedly pro-Marxist translator rendered as "residual fragments of people") is an allusion to Hegel.
There is some language that looks pretty icky to the modern eye, which is, of course, why these articles have been controversial for a long time before Glenn Beck picked up on them.
But the entire history of the Second International during Engels's lifetime, with its parties in the Balkans (Bulgarian Social-Democratic Worker's Party, Rumanian Social Democratic Workers Party, etc., etc.) and Russia (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks) indicate that the urge for genociding up the southern Slavic peoples, if it ever existed at all, was a passing fancy.
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Patholigcal may be a good way to describe it, Samnell. To put it at it's simplest, I'm scared of everything.Ok. I don't know how to help you with that except to say that the thing you seem least afraid of is that the people talking to you might be misleading you when they're telling you to be afraid of this and that. Do you prefer to be afraid?
There are things out there that reasonable people should fear, of course. As it's an imperfect world full of imperfect people, that'll probably always be true. And there may be some things that you just have an irrational fear that you can't help. I have one about snakes, but seeing as I'm not working at a snake farm or whatever, it's pretty easy to manage and does not dominate my life.
The kind of fear you're talking about does not sound like that. You don't seem to have any sense of proportionality or appreciation for just how unlikely some things are. Do you worry about being struck by lightning every time you leave the house? I don't know, but I doubt it. Being struck by lightning just is not that common. It's not impossible, but then again neither is winning the lottery. Do you go out every day assuming you've won or are about to win the lottery?
If you don't worry about those things, which are relatively simple events that don't take any coordination or involve many conscious acts, etc, why do you worry so much more about far more improbable events like a politically-engineered social collapse? People are not supervillains.
Lightning strikes are completely random, not influenced by people. And I know I'll never win the lottery. But I do worry about getting into a traffic accident every time I'm behind the wheel of a car, because I'm prone to panic if other cars get too close or want to pass me.
The fear I have isn't of death or something like that. It's dystopia, something that people have to engineer. Orwell himself said the world of 1984 was just around the corner.
I'd speculate that Orwell would find some of your sources very similar to the Two-Minute Hate, Citizen Zousha.
But I agree with you--there's very good reason to be afraid. The American working class's living standards have been on the decline for four decades now, and for all the talk of Obama being a socialist, he's presided over a network of policies and programs that--despite all the heated rhetoric on both sides--have helped the corporate elite (the capitalists) entrench their positions of wealth and power against the rest of the world.
The destruction of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites has left the US pretty much free reign to ride roughshod all over the globe in an orgy of bourgeois triumphalism, ripping down welfare states over here, bombing uppity Third World dictators over there and, all the while, subjecting us here in the US to plunging living standards and increasing domestic repression.
Despite the happy wins of gay marriage and marijuana decriminalization, I'd say you've got every reason to be afraid.