gslack
Senior Member
- Mar 26, 2010
- 4,527
- 356
- 48
westfall, you claim to be a geologist, yet you're silent on destructive mountaintop mining and the dumping rock and debris in waterways. You claim you are an environmentalist, yet you refuse to read a speech given by an environmentalist to an esteemed environmental group and you are unaware of the League of Conservation Voters.
Here is a true axiom that applies to all leaders and forms of government:
'While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives.'
Robert Altmeyer
I know your parochial indoctrination makes this fact beyond your comprehension.
And you exhibit the typical right wing malady of being 'word bound'
Misnomers are quite common in the history of political labels. Examples include the German Democratic Republic (which was neither) and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's "Liberal Democrat" party (which was also neither).
Socialism has never been tried at the national level anywhere in the world. This may surprise some people -- after all, wasn't the Soviet Union socialist? The answer is no. Many nations and political parties have called themselves "socialist," but none have actually tried socialism. To understand why, we should revisit a few basic political terms.
Perhaps the primary concern of any political ideology is who gets to own and control the means the production. This includes factories, farmlands, machinery, etc. Generally there have been three approaches to this question. The first was aristocracy, in which a ruling elite owned the land and productive wealth, and peasants and serfs had to obey their orders in return for their livelihood. The second is capitalism, which has disbanded the ruling elite and allows a much broader range of private individuals to own the means of production. However, this ownership is limited to those who can afford to buy productive wealth; nearly all workers are excluded. The third (and untried) approach is socialism, where everyone owns and controls the means of production, by means of the vote. As you can see, there is a spectrum here, ranging from a few people owning productive wealth at one end, to everyone owning it at the other.
Socialism has been proposed in many forms. The most common is social democracy, where workers vote for their supervisors, as well as their industry representatives to regional or national congresses. Another proposed form is anarcho-socialism, where workers own companies that would operate on a free market, without any central government at all. As you can see, a central planning committee is hardly a necessary feature of socialism. The primary feature is worker ownership of production.
The Soviet Union failed to qualify as socialist because it was a dictatorship over workers -- that is, a type of aristocracy, with a ruling elite in Moscow calling all the shots. Workers cannot own or control anything under a totalitarian government. In variants of socialism that call for a central government, that government is always a strong or even direct democracy never a dictatorship. It doesn't matter if the dictator claims to be carrying out the will of the people, or calls himself a "socialist" or a "democrat." If the people themselves are not in control, then the system is, by definition, non-democratic and non-socialist.
I am well aquainted with Kennedy's speech..just as I am well aware of all of the other things you site.....ever been to the Peabody mine in northern AZ? I didn't think so...I have on four different occasions through the years and helped them craft a system to restore the open-cast damage they have done. What have you done?
You talk big but have done absolutely nothing to rectify the situation....you're just as bad as old fraud and konrad and spidey toober, you guys factual posture (I love that term) but DO NOTHING! You twerps try and denigrate what I say and old fraud goes so far as to say that everything I say is a lie...OK buster proove it.
Everything you people post is propaganda. I have had enough propaganda forced on me to last a lifetime. I don't need, or want, or desire any more of yours or old frauds BS. If you wish to discuss the science involved and use legitimate sources I am happy to talk to you.
But if all you are going to do is fall back on the same old ad hom attacks and circular arguments then I can happily say piss off, you're as useless as old fraud. Like I told him, if you have good information that is not tainted or manufactured out of whole cloth I am happy to read it. If you can't produce that then you have no business talking with the adults here.
Well good for YOU... But YOU talking about YOU is simply a diversion, while you continue to ignore the REAL issues. I don't need to be a geologist to understand the dangers of dumping rock and debris in waterways, or the dangers of heavy metals in our bodies and our children's bodies. Do YOU westfall?
You make all these claims and boasts about YOU, but if you are a thinking man and a father, then you need to add a HUGE dose of human capital into your thinking. Poison is not propaganda, it is measurable.
Good stewardship of our environment is not socialism or communism. It is sound economic policy. It is not something that can be protected solely by the invisible hand of the market. It requires government regulation and consumer protection measures.
It should be a bedrock tenet of conservatism.
But....But.... But, you know everything.... You were a psychology major and all that.....
So according to your posts here and your claims against others, you would need to be a geologist to understand that.. According to you we are all too dumb and uneducated to know anything....