I don't know what to title this.

— X — wrote:

So, I won’t. Billeh just wanted me to expand on something I said in the Foozball side of the site, so I’ll just carry over what he quoted and take it from there.

I said:
Similarly, as long as ‘they’ try to force people into accepting progressive myths and ridiculous social advancements, reactions to this are inevitable. And asking people to “accept that politics belong everywhere” makes no sense when those Progressive myths and ridiculous social advancements have no business in politics to begin with. The Government should provide free health care? The Government should enact laws protecting “genderless” people? The Government should redistribute wealth? The Government is responsible for oppression? Yeah. Sure thing.

I guess you want me to expand on the myths and ridiculous social advancements thing, yeah?

Here’s what I feel is being force-fed to me, and other righties.

1. You don’t need a gender, and you’re intolerant if you suggest people do (need it).
2. Government run health-care is a fantastic idea. Except it’s not.
3. There’s such a thing as ‘white privilege’, and I should not only have it, but feel guilty about it.
4. Income inequality. What about it? Is this my fault too?
5. America is more racist than ever, and I’m partially to blame whether I know it or not.
6. Microaggressions. I’ll never understand them, even though I use them constantly (allegedly).

and so on…

I mean, pick one and we can talk about it, but don’t pick them all.

X,

Thanks. And your title is excellent. Meta, ironic, all of that. It’s not too dissimilar to this painting by Magritte:

Anyway . . .

Will only respond to a coupla.

First one is really easy. It’s not really about being “genderless.” Androgyny goes back in time as far as we can look, and has always been with us. I think the issue you’re referring to is choosing a gender not necessarily in accord with the biology one is born with.

To me, no one should care. If someone wants to pick another gender, and live that way, it’s not going to hurt another soul on this earth. Not a one. Life is soooo damn short, and we have soooo many other issues to deal with, getting worked up over that is, to me, beyond absurd. And because this choice almost always results in an enormous amount of harassment and oppression against that person, the last thing we should be doing is adding to it via public policy.

Live and let live, etc.

4. Income inequality. There are a host of reasons why this is a major problem. One of them is its existential nature. Income inequality actually kills people. It literally causes death. And if not death, then sickness, disease, pain, misery and suffering, and there are no valid, rational reasons for its existence.

It is absolutely “unnatural” to have steep hierarchies within any species. They don’t exist in nature. At most, you’ll usually find two or three tiers, and they’re not that far apart. But under the capitalist system, we have thousands of them, and people are separated via wages, benefits, access, wealth, opportunities and power to a degree we’ve never seen in human history. From top to bottom, we’ve never had such neck-breaking hierarchies/inequality, and, again, it’s not rational, or defensible, or anything but arbitrary.

There is simply not that much difference between humans to warrant such massive gaps between the haves and the have nots. The system creates them. They don’t occur for any merit-based reason. And if we deal with just merit, and put aside for a moment the birth lottery, which is a ginormous factor, there is just not enough difference in intelligence, creativity, “hard work,” hours spent, skill levels, etc. etc. to warrant one person making 20K and another 5 billion. It doesn’t exist. The only way to make that work is if we consider the woman or man making the five billion a human, and the bloke making the 20K a crustacean. Within the human species there are simply not enough differences between us to justify that kind gap.

(more later. Will wait for other responses first.)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Billy_T.

— X — wrote:

Will only address this one of your coupla right now.

Androgyny, from a historical perspective, didn’t mean anything like it does now. So, yeah, I’m talking about choosing your gender at a whim, pansexuals, genderfluid, bigender, trigender, non-binary, Skoliosexual
(someone attracted to non-binary people or those who aren’t cis-gendered), etc. Do I personally care if someone chooses to be one of those? I dunno. Maybe. But what you have to understand is that this Nation was founded on Christian principles and is comprised – now – of millions upon millions of Christians. So this offends them. It also offends them (and me to an extent) that they’re inventing these terms, identifying as such, and then screaming oppression for not being Championed universally.

This will seem Cro-Magnon, but I’m of the opinion that men should be men and women should be women. I feel uneasy when I go into a store and there’s some confused teenager or 20something dude with a man-bun, nail polish and a skirt. I don’t know what to make of it and I don’t want to have to deal with it. Maybe I’m intolerant – I dunno – or maybe I’m just old-school. And I certainly don’t want to be chastised for misgendering. That’s stupid to me. Almost as stupid as children being abused by their parents into being taught that they don’t have to fit the model of gender normality. They can be whatever they want and should demand respect. That’s horseshit to me. But again, might be just me. But I doubt it, because there are millions of people out there who got sick of the Progressive agenda and voted differently.

Also, where does the line get drawn? Because it has to.

Can people call themselves goatarsexuals who get off on fucking goats and thereby demand acknowledgement, acceptance and special rights? Extreme example, I know, but where does it stop?

Well, actually, this nation wasn’t founded on “Christian principles” in the slightest. The authors of our founding documents were deists, not Christians, and in their private letters to one another — especially Jefferson and Adams — they mocked Christianity. They also, as students of the Enlightenment, realized how the merger of Church and State in Europe caused centuries and centuries of bloodshed and was always tyrannical. They wanted none of that for the new nation.

The actual foundation for our society came from Pagan Greece, Pagan Rome, the Renaissance, which was a rediscovery of both, and the Enlightenment . . . . which was the first philosophical movement to go after superstition, the supernatural, and the power of organized religion, and to fight against “faith-based” rationales.

And if we look closely at the bible, it’s pretty easy to see that our form of society and governance is the antithesis of iron age, nomadic cultures represented there. There is no “democracy” in the bible. There are no “republics,” other than Pagan Rome. Nothing about the way people behave in the OT or the NT was ever used to form our society. Our society was actually a rebellion against Church doctrine, power and ethos.

PA Ram wrote:

I do believe that the human body and of course the brain, can be a unique and that because I am a certain way, does not mean another human is the same way–even if we share certain parts. But I haven’t really dived deep into the subject.

..

Why is government health care bad? I

Just on those 2 things?

There is hard medical evidence that gender dysphoria is real and probably directly related to brain structure. This runs so deep in human history that many native american groups just normalized it (see the berdache figure). There are also significant differences in suicide rates between kids who go through gender dysphoria with the family accepting it or not accepting it. Guess which group has the higher suicide rate.

And no one in the USA is proposing government health care. I know you know all this PA but it matters how one puts this because there is a big distinction. Socialized medicine is when the medical industry itself is public, like the post office or the fire dept. No one in the USA that I know of is proposing socialized medicine. What is popular in the USA is single payer universal insurance, where the major insurance provider is public but the medical industry itself remains private. There are so many good reasons to do this that eventually it is just going to happen. Doctors themselves are for it because it would reduce time and costs associated with dealing with insurance companies. Every place that has universal insurance has cheaper and better health care and better health care outcomes. And that’s just a thumbnail sized reduced pic of the tip of the iceberg seen from a distance.

One area of David Barton critique might be more to your liking than the others. Because it comes from conservative Christians themselves. There are plenty of atheist, secular humanist angles in this debate, but it’s interesting that several conservative Christian scholars have come out to debunk Barton and his mythology.

Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President Kindle Edition by Warren Throckmorton (Author), Michael Coulter (Author)

The author’s site:

https://gettingjeffersonright.com/

And an overview of the debate:

By Paul Harvey June 4, 2012 The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

An excerpt from the last of these links:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Damned Misleading Lies

As the poster child for tendentiousness, Barton makes easy pickings for dispassionate truth-seekers like Throckmorton and Coulter. One by one, they consider, historicize, and debunk Barton’s claims: that Jefferson used federal funds to promote missions to the Indians, that he sought a theological professorship at the University of Virginia, that in only a very few of his letters did he attack basic Christian theological beliefs, that he believed not in a “wall of separation” of church and state but in a Republic that would actively promote Christianity, that his sexual morality was unimpeachable, that he didn’t really edit out the miraculous stories of the New Testament, that he founded the Virginia Bible Society, and on and on.

They find without fail that the claims fall into one of the following categories: 1) complete falsehoods (there are plenty of those); 2) misleading falsehoods (such as the story about wanting Christian imagery on the national seal—true, but on the other side of the seal, had Jefferson gotten his wish, would have been a pagan story); 3) true, but entirely irrelevant and ultimately misleading statements (such as signing documents with “the Year of our Lord,” which he did because pre-packaged treaty forms had that language, and had about as much meaning as signing “Dear” in our salutations in letters to complete strangers); 4) statements with a “kernel” of truth but blown so far out of proportion as to end up being false (such as Jefferson wanting federal funding for Indian missions, when in fact the titles of the bills simply took on the name of already existing religious societies); 5) baffling assertions that are so far out of the realm of reality as to be neither “true” nor “false,” but simply bizarre (such as Barton’s defense of Jefferson’s views on race, which were disturbingly ugly even by the standards of his era).

In each of these categories, as Throckmorton and Coulter gently put it, “we find the reality is often much different than the claim.” That’s their way of saying that the claims are, mostly, “pants on fire,” to use the language of Politifact, the Tampa Bay Times’ fact-checking project. Others rate a “false” or “mostly false” label, while there isn’t a single one (other than minor statements of fact, such as date of birth or dates of his presidency) that rates “true,” or even “mostly true.”

Getting Jefferson Right is an excellent example of the art of historical contextualization, of trying to tell the whole story, not just part of it. For those reasons, the work should become a standard reference.

I have a lot to add about transgender issues as well as a few other points, but I’m at the VA right now so I’ll have to participate later. Just wanted to plant a seed.

— X — wrote:

4. Income inequality. What about it? Is this my fault too?

Yes. It is your fault. So stop it 🙂

I’m less interested in the actual ‘substance’ of an argument For or Against a system that allows or disallows great income disparities — because i know from experience its pointless 🙂 I am not gonna persuade you of anything and you are not gonna persuade me of anything, blah blah blah.

But I ‘am’ interested in the subject of communication between people who are FAR apart politically. How should it be done? Is it possible? Is there a point to trying? Etc. So far i have no answers to any of those questions. Just questions and more questions.

Sometimes i just want to talk to rightwingers about…Islands. Like…if there were two Islands. Each having ten people on them. And one Island had a system where 99 percent of the Island was owned by One Islander. And the other one percent was divided unevenly by the other Nine Islanders. One of the Nine was actually starving and had no land at all.

Ok so thats Island one. Lets call it Capitalist-Isle 🙂

And a second Island also had ten people on it. And they each had roughly, more-or-less the same amount of land. About ten percent each, give or take a percentage point or two. Lets call it Socialist-Isle.

Now which Island would you rather live on and why?

…and dont say it….I KNOW you wanna say “Gilligans Island”.

w
v

— X — wrote:

You left out some details.

Is the 99%er on Island one the only guy working? What if he created the island like one of those fake islands China makes in the South China Sea? Say he made the island, built machines to cultivate the land and dig wells, set up an aqueduct, built infrastructure to get from one side of the island to the other, built luxury huts with premium thatch, and provided clothing & necessities for decades upon decades.

And then 9 people showed up illegally from a nearby shitty island and demanded all his stuff.

Are the 10 people on island 2 all pulling their weight equally? What if they’re all lazy and contribute nothing to the island except for one hard working guy? Say only one of the 10 gets out there and works. He goes out and harvests the coconuts, digs the wells, does all the fishing, manufactures clothing (grass skirts & palm frond vests, I would imagine), and stockpiles it to ensure his longevity.

The other 9 do nothing but steal his shit because they’re too lazy to do it themselves.

Well, I can’t speak for WV, but to me, the problem with your question is — at least I’m reading it this way — assuming that just one person, the “capitalist,” did all of those things her/himself. And that’s never, ever, not ever, how things work under capitalism. Huge numbers of people work for the capitalist and do all those things. They do the actual lifting of the bails, and toting of the barges. They actually “build” it, not the capitalist.

The capitalist basically plays golf or goes to the country club, and delegates work to others, but then gets to claim EVERYTHING made by everyone else in that workforce for themselves. They get to, legally, appropriate — which is a fancy way of saying “steal” — everything generated by that workforce, and they get to decide the value of their workers’ time. Just that one capitalist gets to do that, which I find profoundly immoral.

I think capitalism is evil, radically immoral, and is always already an act of theft. IMO, no sane society should accept it as its form of economics. It creates blatantly unequal power arrangements, automatically creates arbitrary, forced, neck-breaking hierarchies, and disproportionately rewards the few for the work of the many.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the “island” metaphor.

— X — wrote:

Are the 10 people on island 2 all pulling their weight equally? What if they’re all lazy and contribute nothing to the island except for one hard working guy? Say only one of the 10 gets out there and works. He goes out and harvests the coconuts, digs the wells, does all the fishing, manufactures clothing (grass skirts & palm frond vests, I would imagine), and stockpiles it to ensure his longevity.

The other 9 do nothing but steal his shit because they’re too lazy to do it themselves.

====================

Well, i kinda thot you would write somethin like that. I live and breathe in West, by God, Virginia, as you know. And so I am immersed in rightwing ideas, rightwing talk-radio, etc. And so I’m familiar with the notion that there are a bunch of ‘lazy,’ enabled, poor-people out there acting like ‘victims’ and wanting ‘hand-outs’ etc.

Thing is i have spent a quarter of a century now, working with poverty-sticken people and i rarely if ever actually meet any ‘lazy’ poor people. I meet single moms working at McDonalds who make barely enough to live on, and they work a lot harder than the rich folks — they just dont win the capitalist-games. But the work a lot HARDER. But they stay poor. The system looks rigged to me. I dont think the problem is a ‘good system’ full of ‘lazy’ poor-people.

The poor work harder. Thats been my experience anyway. They just dont make money.

I would choose the socialist-island because it seems more ‘fair’ to me. You would choose the capitalist island because it seems more ‘fair’ to you.
There’s no persuading either of us on some of these core, buried, deep ideas.
I think. I dunno.

Go Rams.
w
v

X,

Thanks for telling part of your story. I’ve seen my own times of poverty, and experienced actual homelessness when I went back to get another degree.

Again, just speaking for me, I don’t want to try to change your mind about your own beliefs. Most of the time, in these debates, I’m really fleshing out my own view of things, kind of on the fly, so to speak. If others find something that interests them, that’s cool, too. Even better, if they spark something that expands my own intellectual journey into places I haven’t thought of going. Actually, that’s a really great thing. But I also realize that that last part seldom if ever happens when people feel under attack. If that’s how you feel here, then I fully “get” that you want out.

That said, another aspect that’s important to me, and I think it’s likely a residual effect from having teachers as parents . . . I just have this (bad) habit of wanting to “correct the record.” So when someone says that socialism has always failed, I have to say, no. It hasn’t. Cuz it’s never been tried. And that’s factually the case. No modern nation has ever, not once, not ever, implemented socialist theory. No truly socialist nation has ever existed on this planet, because that would mean the entire economy was democratized, that the people, not “the state,” literally owned the means of production, and that society was working toward an elimination of all class divisions.

The next step from there — and I don’t see any of these steps as historically inevitable, btw — the next step is doing away with the state apparatus itself, because we’re ready to roll without any training wheels. We’re ready to truly self-govern, and there’s no need for the state any longer. At this point, we have theoretical communism in place, with no ruling class, and no other classes, period. Pure D democracy and self-rule, and an egalitarian society to boot.

The issue of same exact pay even when people work at different speeds, skill levels, effort levels? I find that concern interesting, but I think it’s a point of grave misunderstanding, politically. IMO, the issue isn’t trying to keep compensation exactly the same. The issue is preventing it from being wildly out of whack, relative to the actual differences between human beings. Capitalism can’t. It’s not built that way. It’s built to invent and then wildly exaggerate our differences, and via zero sum logic, concentrate the vast majority of wealth and power in the hands of the few.

There are vastly better ways to organize economies and societies. We really don’t have to have a top and a bottom so grotesquely separate that it’s as if we’re dealing with different species, humans and crustaceans, say. There really just isn’t any way to logically, rationally or morally justify the divisions between the Haves and the Have nots on the merits. The gap is too great.

Hope all is well, X.

Billy_T wrote:

So when someone says that socialism has always failed, I have to say, no. It hasn’t. Cuz it’s never been tried.

And there are lots of different views on THAT too.

For example democratic socialism, as opposed to theoretical pure socialism, has not only been tried and is successful, in some parts of the world it is dominant.

I count the success of democratic socialism heavily in looking at real economic policies.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

So when someone says that socialism has always failed, I have to say, no. It hasn’t. Cuz it’s never been tried.

And there are lots of different views on THAT too.

For example democratic socialism, as opposed to theoretical pure socialism, has not only been tried and is successful, in some parts of the world it is dominant.

I count the success of democratic socialism heavily in looking at real economic policies.

To clarify: I’m not talking about “pure socialism.” I’m talking about the absence of any attempt with anything remotely like socialism(s) on a fundamental level. As in, the total absence of the key pillars of the theory. The most essential aspects to the theory. Aspects, without which, it simply makes no sense to call it “socialism(s).”

Straining for a good analogy here: But perhaps something like the basic tenets for Jazz composition are missing. And you need those established first before you can go off in a thousand different, beautiful directions, and call it “jazz.”

As for “democratic socialism.” Just my take, but I don’t think that term really fits anywhere, either. Primarily because democratic socialists also are anticapitalists, and want social ownership of the means of production, instead of private ownership.

In Scandinavia, there are mixes with aspects of democratic socialism included. But it’s really not the kind of thing that can be done in part. Another rough stab at a relevant analogy:

There’s this agro-theory that requires the drying out of an entire piece of land, and a buffer zone surrounding it, before planting, in order to ensure radically higher crop yields. It’s called the Dry Land Theory, or DLT.

The plot of land is 250 acres. The buffer zone adds another 10. But because of competing theories, the DLT folks have never been able to dry out more than 25 acres at any one time. They never achieve the higher crop yields.

Is it fair to say DLT failed?

To elaborate a bit further on why no nation can be truly said to be “democratic socialist.” There’s never been a nation — including the Scandinavian countries — that allowed democratic socialist platforms to take hold, without also being countered by capitalist, conservative, center-right, or even further right programs and societal structures too. None was able to socialize the means of production.

And like the DLT metaphor, it doesn’t really work unless the entire set up can be “socialism(s).” If the whole basis for improving quality of life is based on the social ownership of the means of production, instead of private ownership, but you only have that in some sectors, and even in those sectors, there is always hamstringing going on by the private sector, it’s just not going to work as planned. Far too much working at “cross purposes.”

Perhaps it makes more sense to call it “social democracy” than “democratic socialism.” The former is compatible with existing capitalism as THE economic engine. It tacks on a welfare state and seeks some kind of redistributionary offset from that point. But “socialisms” aren’t compatible with capitalism. They want to go beyond “liberal” welfare states and solve the problems of inequality upfront, so there’s just no need for governments to do their offsets after the fact.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

As for “democratic socialism.” Just my take, but I don’t think that term really fits anywhere, either. Primarily because democratic socialists also are anticapitalists, and want social ownership of the means of production, instead of private ownership.

See we’re fighting over semantics. That will eternally bore me.

If I say the Nordic democratic socialist model works fine, 2 things happen.

I get chided by right-wingers.

I get chided by left purists. That’s an emphasis on “purist” there since I am left.

Well actually 3 things happen. Some people agree with me.

Calling the Nordic model democratic socialism is fine with me, as is the Nordic model itself.

I dont’ engage much beyond that because I found out a long time ago that arguing about these things never accomplishes anything of value.

Fair enough?

I’m fine with you not wanting to talk about terms. But it puzzles me a bit, because you brought up the term, “democratic socialism” in response to my earlier comment. Didn’t you do so as a way of saying I was incorrect in claiming there have never been any “socialisms” in place, on the national level?

Also, I think these conversations are more productive when we don’t add labels like “purist.” If you think I’m wrong about the terms, please explain why. There’s just no need for the “purist” shot. I take that — whenever I hear it — as a shortcut attempt to dismiss a point of view. The accusation of “purist” and various scoldings like “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” are the frequent go to silencers used by centrist Dems, when it comes to leftist critiques leveled against their platforms, as I’m sure you know. I imagine you’ve been on the receiving end of that for a long, long time, coming from folks to your right.

Anyway . . . personally, I think political terms are really important. If two “sides” are using them in completely different ways, it’s nearly impossible to forge any understanding at all. And when it comes to “socialisms” this is rampant, in my experience. I’m a thousand and one times opposed to the state capitalist forms of the USSR, China, NK, to their dictatorships, to their authoritarianism, etc. etc. . . . which is why I advocate for actual socialisms. But most Americans hear “socialist” and immediately and erroneously jump to “You’re a Stalinist!!”

No. The vast, vast majority of socialist theory (for well over two centuries) is and was in direct opposition to everything he stood for, and socialist theory(s) calls for the opposite of what he did.

How can we have even slightly fruitful discussions if we mean totally different things by these terms? Boiled down, most right of center Americans view advocates of “socialisms” as supporters of the worst kind of tyranny and oppression, while we socialists view it as among the very best antidotes to tyranny and oppression. We see it as a solution to those problems, while they see it as the cause.

If we could at least agree about political terms . . . .

Anyway, hope all is well, ZN.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.

Billy_T wrote:

I’m fine with you not wanting to talk about terms. But it puzzles me a bit, because you brought up the term, “democratic socialism” in response to my earlier comment. Didn’t you do so as a way of saying I was incorrect in claiming there have never been any “socialisms” in place, on the national level

To be honest it had nothing to do with “incorrect.” It;s that something is disputed and/or is seen differently. Some of us count the democratic socialism associated with the Nordic model. This usage comes from Sanders and just identifies with that tradition because if nothing else it has a viable living energy at the moment. Like all things these terms have their practical, lived, changing histories. Emphasizing that just comes from my own tendency to embrace that kind of fluidity and the sense of disparate practical options. So I was more intervening in a discussion about socialism to open it up to more disparate visions. The goal being as I said to emphasize divergent and different views. Some of which admittedly flat reject one another, which is just part of it and certainly not dishonorable.

All I did, really, was invite more concepts to the party.

As a rule I am not very good about wondering if there is a “definitive” one. I just say, the history on that is messy, and…yay messiness.

…