You keep saying that, but the only fact you've given about Lenin agreed with my statements. Sheesh, baller. Lenin was a scumbag, okay? Get over it.

Trotsky went on a self-imposed exile. He fled the disaster with his tail between his legs. And he would have been fine, if he had stayed away. But he went back, and Stalin cleaned his clock. Rightfully so. Lenin was a monster, and Trotsky was the moronic pseudointellectual who inspired him with all the "perpetual revolution" crap.

They were jerks. They were donut heads.

And you guys on the left keep wishing it weren't so. Christ, baller. You probably think Fidel Castro is a righteous dude. Get over yourself, dweeb. Learn how to be an American, and get that hammer-and-sickle tattoo removed from your flabby ass. Sheesh.

 

What statements? All you keep doing is talking bullshit as if you personally know these things but not only do you not but they are also NOT EVEN REMOTELY TRUE.

I'm on the left you stupid cunt? I'm IN THE MIDDLE, you dipshit. I ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

 

Leon Trotsky, and Ideological Thinking

On either side of the political spectrum we find the attitude that there is magic in economics. There are not difficult choices; there is a difficult struggle against one's political opponents. Once it is won everything is possible.

On the right there is the belief that if we cut taxes and the size of the government the economy will take off. Anyone who deserves to be affluent will be. There will be plenty of jobs for anyone who wants one and is willing to put some effort into it.

Of course it will first be necessary to defeat the liberals, the leaches, the losers, the parasites, and the Marxists. Once they are pushed out of the way wonderful things will happen.

The belief persists despite contrary evidence because in a democracy no political victories are total or enduring. Ronald Reagan had to contend with a Democratic House of Representatives, George the Greater broke his promise not to raise taxes, George the Lesser strayed from the True Faith by increasing Medicare spending, and so on.

In the United States there are so few Marxists that those who accuse liberal Democrats of being Marxists seldom know what Marxism is, and what Marxists really believe.

When I was young I read quite a lot of Karl Marx, and those in the Marxist tradition. I would almost say that a detailed knowledge of Marxism is evidence of a misspent youth. Nevertheless, I may have some insights into the way may Marxists think. By this I mean real Marxists, and not liberal Democrats, whose thinking may have been influenced by Marx, just as it has been influenced by John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman, and other writers.

(My thinking has been heavily influenced by Edmund Burke, but that is a topic for another comment.)

An appeal of Marxism is that it leads one to believe that a single event - The Revolution - will transform human beings, the way Jews believe the coming of the Messiah will. People will become altruistic. Because of this generosity there will be no more poverty, crime, or war. It will all be like it is described in John Lennon's "Imagine."

[youtube]yRhq-yO1KN8[/youtube]

*not_secure_link*www.elyrics.net/read/j/john-lennon-lyrics/imagine-lyrics.html

The first Marxist revolution happened in Russia in 1917. What resulted was not the world described in "Imagine," but the world's first totalitarian dictatorship.

However, Leon Trotsky was exiled before things got really nasty under Joseph Stalin. Consequently, Trotskyists can believe that if only Trotsky had won the power struggle with Stalin everything would have worked out as envisioned.

Trotsky was an interesting guy. Although he had no military experience, when the Russian Civil War began he studied books on military strategy and lead the Red Army to victory over the Whites. While doing that he wrote a book on poetry and aesthetics.

Nevertheless, I do not think he would have been milder than Stalin. Forced collectivation of the peasants was his idea. When Russian servicemen and workers staged the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 against the Communist government Trotsky put it down harshly.

The best explanation of why Marxist revolutions have failed to achieve the millennium can be found in Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

In this Hoffer wrote: “When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse”.

 

clarise, I know you're having a ball riling up the reactionaries hereabouts, but even you can't define a person solely by what they say - shouldn't one also consider their actions before assigning a label (albeit an almost meaningless one) to them?

 

Nonsense. When will this myth go away in the face of facts? We have not been free of public debt in this country since the 1830s. Clinton submitted two budgets that had tiny surpluses but neither one actually achieved a reduction of the overall debt. At the end of Clinton's presidency our public debt was higher than when he first took office, in both real dollars and as a ratio to GDP. The overall debt increased every fiscal year while he was president.

I've posted this information, sourced from the CBO and the White House budget office, many times before, Master of Facts - why do you continue to ignore them and make false statements like the one highlighted above?

 

This thread reminds me of somebody that has been in prison.

 

This is my recollection as well. Mind you I was too distracted by school to bother voting, but if recollection serves, Clinton succeeded only in halting the acceleration of the increase of the national debt. He never stopped it increasing, let alone erased it entirely. Of course I would have to research it to be sure, and I can't be bothered. No doubt DL can find a chart that shows one or two quarters out of sixteen that actually posted a downtick.

Call me crazy, Old Tool, but count me among the minority who rank Obama's one "accomplishment," the ACA, as wealth distribution, i.e., socialism on a behemothian scale. Some of the related taxation measures begin to go into effect next year. 3.84% excise tax on home sales net profits, for example, which will hit just about everyone. The punitive taxes on medical device innovation, research and development. And that's just the beginning. Congress still has to figure out how to pay for it without breaking the Treasury. It's going to be like Eva Peron pillaging the coffers of Argentina.

And the ACA is the one thing that Obama has done.

If you don't count Frank-Dodd, which happened under his watch and gives the too-big-to-fails a taxpayer funded cushion.

And if you don't count Eric Holder's ongoing extortion of banks.

And if you don't count the EPA's pillaging of the oil and coal industries, to redistribute their profits to losing propositions like the solar and wind industries.

And if you don't count his latest scheme to make it easier for deadbeat college students to walk away from their education loans.

And on, and on, and on.

But none of it is his fault, and he is not a communist. Because he isn't responsible for any of it. Because he is useless, and because he is inept, because the buck stops with you. Just like Truman said.

 

*not_secure_link*3.bp.blogspot.com/-Q5F3EAkorjU/TV2l0oGtzsI/AAAAAAAAAt0/K1xTPO1ghVs/s550/rushmore4.jpg
Baller, I don't know how to tell you this, but you just can't play.
Basketball is for girls.​

 

Fair enough - but even the ACA is a far cry from communism. Since it depends on the full participation of for-profit corporations as the main fuel for its continuation, even its reputation as a socialist mechanism is suspect.

I'm fairly surprised how it has rankled the dyed-in-the-wool right-wing capitalists out there when it is likely to spur a growth spurt across the entire healthcare industry. Oh, the income will be distributed a little differently, but make no mistake, record profits will follow. I'm also surprised about how proud the leftist nutballs are about its passing since it is not likely to improve the overall health of the people who will pay for it. I guess all the complaining about political posturing is valid.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

 

I have trouble understanding how she is mixing up owning something, and achieving success as a manger, with being a construction worker.


Is there some super smart connection that I am missing? cause that seems like a pretty big misconception.

If I bought a house and paid people to repair it over the years, I would not say that I BUILT the house.

as an artist, if someone claimed to have BUILT something that I CREATED I would fucking castrate them.

They can OWN it though.

if they use it a a marketing campaign and are successful, they created that marketing campaign. If they told me the design they wanted (a female pirated with two purple eye patches and blonde hair) but I still drew it, it would be a COLLABORATION.

 

Clarise,

You are quite frankly one of least intelligent Republican talking point spewing retards I have seen here in quite some time. I suggest you do some fact checking before you post. OH I forgot facts have a liberal bias and we cannot have that. Socializms OH MY. Muzlin infiltrators. etc. etc. lunacy.

But this one on the oil industry being pillaged is the icing on the cake so to speak. Now I know for a fact that you are a raging lunatic with an IQ quite a bit under 90. Big oil has had record profits for damn near each quarter in each of the last 10 years. Pillaged? How so? Prove to us that the most profitable companies in the US are being pillaged. They pay next to nothing in taxes on their profits. And they are getting government subsidies ie they are welfare queens.

Go DIAF moron.


spjames

 

clarise is just being provocative for the lulz (just a guess on my part), but there is quite a debate about who is responsible for anything that is produced in this world - and it's been going on in earnest for a couple of centuries now.

Sometimes the sloppiness inherent in our vocabulary (what does it really mean to "build" something) sets off the tripwires in overly sensitive folks.

In most cases, almost every thing that gets "built" in this modern world is the product of collaboration, of course - but ideologues like to climb up high and shout their predispositions for all to hear. It's a very interesting pathology.

 

FactCheck.org: The Budget and Deficit Under Clinton

Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased?

A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not...

The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers...

Some readers wrote to us saying we should have made clear the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. A deficit occurs when the government takes in less money than it spends in a given year. The debt is the total amount the government owes at any given time. So the debt goes up in any given year by the amount of the deficit, or it decreases by the amount of any surplus. The debt the government owes to the public decreased for a while under Clinton, but the debt was by no means erased...

under accrual accounting, the annual reports showed surpluses of $69.2 billion in fiscal 1998, $76.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and $46 billion for fiscal year 2000. So even if the government had been using that form of accounting the deficit would have been erased for those three years.

- Brooks Jackson

Sources
Congressional Budget Office, "Historical Budget Data," undated, accessed 6 Sep 2010.
*not_secure_link*www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/

 

Actually clarise is one of the most intelligent Republican talking point spewing retards I have seen here in quite some time. That is a small distinction, however.

 

One of Ayn Rand's attitudes there is the idea that every significant achievement owes its existence to one person. In the strictest sense, this is only true for artistic achievements. Without Michelangelo there would not be The Last Supper. Even Ayn Rand's turgid novels required people to print the books. Without those people Ayn Rand's manuscripts would have languished in the obscurity they deserved. They would have been subjected to what Karl Marx called, "the biting criticism of mice."

Without Henry Ford there would have not been the Model T Ford, and the company that built subsequent Fords. Without Bill Gates there would not be Microsoft Windows. Nevertheless, Ford and Gates needed colleagues and employees. They needed the government to educate these, and to provide the infrastructure they needed.

 

she rick trolled us.

 

how do we know she wasn't using satire to point out the ridiculousness of some of the anti Obama arguments?

 

She's not doing anything except preaching nonsense that she genuinely believes in.

I feel sorry for anybody who has been fooled into thinking otherwise.

 

I do believe this is the nicest thing you have ever said about me.

I have work to do (in the dreaded private sector), and I will deal with the dweeb, spjames, later.

But I just wanted to pop in with the observation that we now know, unequivocally, that:

1. OWS has nothing to stand on;
2. and Phil Angiledes conducted his investigation like the connected, biased moron that he is;
3. and the lefty moonbats no longer have a foundation on which to blame the banks for all their ills;
4. The Frank-Dodd legislation is utterly ineffective and simply fuels the fire that is burning down America,
5. because the private sector's major architect of the dissolution of Glass-Steagall has publicly recanted and admitted that it was a huge, ruinous mistake.
​

(I am referring, of course to Weil's statements and the Citigroup story.)

More later. Thank you and have a nice day.

 

*not_secure_link*3.bp.blogspot.com/-H0Tyo8rh2Ds/TV2l08yMYUI/AAAAAAAAAt8/6ryYUk6EsMs/s550/rushmore5.jpg
Look, Baller. The cunt, clarise, is right. Basketball is for girls.
Try growing a pair. Then you can go out for a real sport. Like lacrosse.​