UNCLE!!!

[3point14]

Meh? This seems a bit off, but I'm not going to nitpick it. Communism is potentially viable in very small communities, where social bonds are strong enough to handle the necessary things. It increasingly falls apart as the community grows and the social bonds become less direct, though, making it non-viable for the success of any large-scale populations.

Anything over Dunbar's number, I would suspect.

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

So, you're finally catching on to what the rest of the world already knew in November 2016... that Americans voted as their supreme leader, an utterly clueless, misogynistic, lying buffoon who has to be the most unqualified person to be a head of state since Henry the Sixth ascended to the throne of England in 1422 at the age of 8 months, and the worst President of the USA since Tricky Dicky.

I think he's been aware of that the entire time.

Personally, I'm more curious about how he managed to hold on to the idea that "fiscally conservative = Republican" for as long as he did.

 

[phiwum]

Are there any communist societies? I know some claim to be, but the big one is China and they have a lot of billionaires for a purportedly communist country.

"Socialism with Chinese characteristics".

 

[BobTheCoward]

Meh? This seems a bit off, but I'm not going to nitpick it. Communism is potentially viable in very small communities, where social bonds are strong enough to handle the necessary things.

I don't think it does in this case. Here is my favorite test for Communism...produce and distribute vacation travel.

 

[Upchurch]

But enough is enough! I’m done.

The turning point (more of a long, gradual curve than an actual point) for my wife was when she came to the realization that the "pro-life" Republicans really didn't give a crap about also helping kids or families in need. In her words, you cannot be one and not the other.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Bye Felicia

Bernie Bro lost his script again?

 

[NoahFence]

Bernie Bro lost his script again?

 

[PhantomWolf]

Communism is generally considered to be on the extreme left. The large majority of leftist policies are very much not communist in nature, though.

Communism as practiced however is anything but left wing. It was taken over by right wing authoritarianism resulting in a system where the party elite have wealth and privilege and the workers are keep poor and under the control of the State. It was a total bastardization if the socialist model.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

The only major problem of communism is resource allocation.
Theoretically, an economy with A.I. monitoring might be capable of balancing supply and demand without the waste that a market-economy produces.
Pretty risky to try though, since the last x times governments tried to shift to communism resulted in famines.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

No. Communism is like all ideologies simply too simple a model of the real world to actually work as described. There is simply no one size fits all ideology that could work. All societies of any size are a mixture of many different ideas.

I think people who say this kind of thing must have read a different Marx . He specifically critiqued this, contrasting "utopian" socialism, with its planned models, with their "scientific" one, based on historical materialism. In fact the better critique would be that Communists use this as an excuse for not having a model at all, a "blueprint" Communists will mockingly call it. "Recipes for the cook-shops of the future" is what Marx dismissed it as. Communism has to emerge based on material conditions. Marx's life work was called Das Kapital, after all, not Das Communism.

 

[MRC_Hans]

The GOP is the worst thing ever. Except for Communism. The Left's implicit support of communism, along with their support of any policy that might advance communism, is the only thing keeping me from switching sides. That and all the leftist douchebags I've met on this board.

Look, communism is dead. There is a level of socialism in modern left side parties, but it has nothing to do with communism, and I doubt even old fashioned socialists could identify with it.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

Do you believe we would be better off in a communist society?

False dilemma.


Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

Meh? This seems a bit off, but I'm not going to nitpick it. Communism is potentially viable in very small communities, where social bonds are strong enough to handle the necessary things. It increasingly falls apart as the community grows and the social bonds become less direct, though, making it non-viable for the success of any large-scale populations.

Any system can work in a small enough community. Provided members want it to.

Hans

 

[TheL8Elvis]

I think both sides are terrible, probably the worst I've ever seen here. I'm still trying to come to grips with the fact that grown adults can think and behave as they do. I've never registered with either party and never will.

Viable third party won't happen. Just my prediction.

This type thinking is the problem.

Both side have problems - but they are not equal.

I can't tell though is this is just reflexive defending of trump or simple gas-lighting.

 

[ponderingturtle]

Look, communism is dead. There is a level of socialism in modern left side parties, but it has nothing to do with communism, and I doubt even old fashioned socialists could identify with it.

Hans

But how else to justify their fascist agenda after all it is 1930 and everyone knows you have to pick fascism or communism.

 

[CORed]

For my entire adult life I’ve been a “Registered Republican”.

Overall I think I’m socially liberal, or even libertarian, but fiscally conservative. In any case I’ve called myself a Republican, and generally voted Republican or abstained in the Presidential election as I did in 2008 and 2016.

But enough is enough! I’m done.

It’s been building for a long time, but this recent budget was the final straw. But I’ve been increasingly disgusted with Republicans at least since the 2016 Presidential Primary. The selection of Trump is a major, but hardly isolated cause of my disgust.

Today, I went so far as to call my local voting board to change my affiliation to Independent. Turns out Georgia does not register voters by party affiliation - you declare which primary ballot you want at the time of voting. I was probably thinking of my prior state of residence, Florida.

I’m not thrilled with the current state of the Democratic Party either. But I more and more often find myself on “their side” of issues. If there are more disgruntled Republicans like me out there, the Democrats can only benefit from the overall disillusionment of sensible Republicans at the sordid mess their party has become. Hopefully a viable third party can emerge from this chaos and offer more palatable options than we’ve been presented with recently.

Thanks for listening - I just needed to vent.

I've been unafilliated all my life. I never really agreed enough with the agenda of either party to declare an afilliation. This does mean that I don't vote in primaries or caucuses, and lose some say in which candidates get nominated. I nearly always vote in presidential and congressional elections. I may not care for either candidate, but there is usually one that is significantly less distasteful. I too am very concerned about fiscal responsibility. I fear that if we continue to build a mountain of debt, that we will eventually reach the point where we can't even pay the interest on that debt. At that point, there will be either a federal default, or, more likely hyperinflation as the government desparately tries and fails to print its way out of the crisis. This will make 2008, and probably 1929, look like minor glitches.

Unfortunately, neither party is worth a damn regarding fiscal responsibility. Democrats think every problem can be solved with massive social spending, and Republicans always promise to cut taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget, but they are not remotely serious about balancing the budget, and they always ignore the fact that they can't do the first two and also do the third.

In recent years (where recent means about the last 15-20), I have found myself voting mostly for Democrats. First it was mostly the Republicans catering to the theocrats (or "social conservatives", as they like to call themselves). But as the mania for tax cuts has become increasingly irrational, I have also come to the conclusion that Democrats are the lesser evil in terms of fiscal irresponsibility. Though they almost universally want to spend too much, they at least want to attempt to tax enough to pay for their spending.

I was disgusted with the Republicans before they nominated Trump, but with Trump, they have abandoned the few remaining principals they claimed to have, and have saddled the country with someone who couldn't possibly be less fit for the job. Of course, I also blame the Democrats, especially Hillary, for making Trump appear, to at least some protion of swing voters, like possibly a less bad alternative.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Meh? This seems a bit off, but I'm not going to nitpick it. Communism is potentially viable in very small communities, where social bonds are strong enough to handle the necessary things. It increasingly falls apart as the community grows and the social bonds become less direct, though, making it non-viable for the success of any large-scale populations.

I was going to say that the only instance I'm aware of that communism actually worked for any significant period of time is in monastic orders...but then I realized that a) they were all religious in nature and thus operated with a completely different set of values than society at large and b) the successful monastic communities either lapsed into capitalist corruption as a whole, becoming enormously wealthy landowners as a group, or else they lapsed into capitalist corruption at the top alone, with an enormously wealthy abbot, or they passed all the wealth along to a greater church hierarchy. But by nature of being monastic communities to begin with they were already not accurate models of regular society, so even if they did manage to last and not turn capitalist to some degree or at some level, it wouldn't actually be demonstrating the success of the economic theory.

 

[CORed]

Welcome to the club. Of course, it happened a good deal earlier for me.

My natural inclination was, and still is, what used to be called a "liberal Republican", or maybe "progressive Republican." Social (mostly) liberal, strongly fiscal conservative. Fiscal conservatism went out the window with Reagan. All decrying "tax-and-spend" Democrats, while running up massive deficits to give money back to those who needed it least. And around the same time, they brought the racist southern Democrats over en-masse. No fiscal conservatism, no social progressivism. Screw them.

As for libertarianism, the concept appeals to me. But every actual avowed libertarian I've ever come into contact with has been a loon.

ETA: There's no party registration in this state. We used to have wide-open primaries, in which you could vote for anyone in either party. The party bosses HATED that and filed suit. Then we had a sort of "pick-a-party" system. The voters hated that. Now it's open with candidates running for the two spots on the GE ballot. They are identified as "Prefers Republican Party". That can, and has, cause both GE candidates to be from the same party.

I have to agree with you on libertarians, at least the Libertarian Party. I tend to agree in principle with the idea of social progressivism combined with fiscal responsibility, but most of them want to go way too far with the fiscal part; far beyond anything remotely practical, for the most part.

 

[CORed]

An admitted socialist couldn't even win the Democratic Party Primary And you believe this nonsense?

Wow!

But Obama was a radical socialist/communist/leftist wacko. Well, if you believed all the right wing loons on talk radio. What killed me about all of that was that Obama was actually pretty damned conservative for a Democrat; not entirely a bad thing in my view, but the propaganda had a lot of people convinced that he was some kind of extreme left-wing nut.

 

[ponderingturtle]

I have to agree with you on libertarians, at least the Libertarian Party. I tend to agree in principle with the idea of social progressivism combined with fiscal responsibility, but most of them want to go way too far with the fiscal part; far beyond anything remotely practical, for the most part.

So wait you think we do need a DMV and licenses to drive?