Can someone explain to me what's going on in Greece?

[Gx1080]

The USSR isn't a failure because of Communism, because if they had REAL Communism it would be fine.

The USA and the EU aren't a failure because of Capitalism, because if they had REAL Capitalism it would be fine.

Please. Both Capitalism and Communism are outdated ideas from the Industrial Revolution, so they are unfit to deal with this age. When the EU falls (and it will) we will see more of the same apologia.

PS: The US of A version of the Left vs Right debate is pathetic. Reaganites vs. Hippies. Whoever wins, society loses.

[tzor]

The whole Cold War thing happened because they were the second most powerful country on Earth. That was a period that lasted like forty years.

No, they weren't. It was all a facade. It was a facade made by the most powerful country in the world. It was a facade designed to end any real war; any real war waged by anyone with nuclear weapons. And until Reagan managed to poke through the facade it worked exceptionally well.

[tzor]

I still love the notion that everything is an "outdated idea." The human species hasn't evolved one fucking wit in thousands of years. This isn't rocket science, the world is full of fucking bastards and it's been that way for as long as there has been recorded history.

[DSMatticus]

No, they weren't. It was all a facade. It was a facade made by the most powerful country in the world. It was a facade designed to end any real war; any real war waged by anyone with nuclear weapons. And until Reagan managed to poke through the facade it worked exceptionally well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin
Almost as fake as the moon landing, amirite Tzor?

@Gx1080, you're really not following this. You said this, explicitly:

Russia is a rotten carcass, plundered by the excess of the Communists

And that was dumb, because when you credit "communism" with the fall of Soviet Union, you are ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union would not have existed to fall without that very same thing. There was a giant pile of shit in the area where Russia was. Then "communism" happened, and that giant pile of shit turned into a global superpower. Then some other things happened, and it became less than the global superpower it was but still better than it was before "communism". There is no period in Russia's history post-communism that is as bad as it was pre-communism. Even in the middle of the collapse, Russia was still better off than it ever had been before communism. Communism has been a net-win for Russia at all points compared to what they were doing before.

Now, I keep putting "communism" in (finger) quotes, because communism was the narrative, not the actual practice. But that doesn't really matter. We can call it whatever you want. The point is that the same thing they were doing that you blame on their collapse is what gave them something to fall from. And they have not fallen as far as they have risen, so Russia obviously made a great move. Maybe not the best move, but totally a great move.

[tzor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin
Almost as fake as the moon landing, amirite Tzor?

Getting into space doesn't require a superpower. It requires a commitment to ICBM technology. The USSR got a heads up in the space race because the USA wanted to get too fancy for its own good. We changed leaders (in the program) and then did it again with Apollo 1. Finally the great one took his people to the promised land.

[Gx1080]

Feudalism gave hunter-gatherer societies something to fall from and you see nobody defending it.

And stop saying "is not real communism". Is a weak excuse. Communism as an ideology and as an economical and political system fails because it doesn't aknowledge human nature.

[tzor]

The problem with feudalism is that pretty soon you run out of land to give away.

[Gx1080]

"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

[DSMatticus]

Feudalism gave hunter-gatherer societies something to fall from and you see nobody defending it.

Nobody here is defending communism, either. You are missing the point.

If you had said, "The Soviet Union's version of communism was a civil rights nightmare that no one should be forced to live under," you would have got agreement. From everyone here. But you said, "The Soviet Union's version of communism was an economic failure," and that would make you wrong. Because Russia was an economic monster of success; it went from nothing to the #2 something in the world in less years than I have been alive. And now, it's not #2 anymore, but it's seriously not far from being back in the top #10 (thanks to the rest of the world fucking up) if not already there (depending on your metrics).

No one ever had growth under feudalism like Russia had under its communist rule. Now, that said, feudalism (if it even existed as people imagine it, which is a little iffy), was objectively superior to the societies that it emerged from. Which is why it was able to crush those societies and spread more 'feudalism.' And then eventually something came along and crushed feudalism, because it was better, and so forth and so on.

The Soviet Union didn't fail because it had the worst idea of the time. It failed because it was the second best idea at the time, and it got itself in a direct competition with the best idea. Tzor would call it capitalism, but he would be stupid; the U.S. was socialist and we won the cold war by shovelling government money into projects with the sole purpose of beating those damn commies. We used capitalist as the narrative because we considered it the ideological opposite of communism. In reality, we were both socialist states of different degrees and the primary difference was that Russia took its dissenters out and shot them, and we called our dissenters communists and kicked them out of society until they repented and got back in line with the capitalist doctrine.

It was a scary time to live in either country; it was just much better to live here, and we also did our socialism slightly better. Hence the victory.

[RobbyPants]

This isn't rocket science, the world is full of fucking bastards and it's been that way for as long as there has been recorded history.

Probably earlier, even.

Feudalism gave hunter-gatherer societies something to fall from and you see nobody defending it.

Nobody here is defending communism, either. You are missing the point.

GX likes to do this. He takes a weak argument he's heard some liberal make somewhere and drags it into a thread where no one is making it. You can see him do this any time a liberal/atheist puts the words "Christianity" and "Islam" into the same post.

[Ancient History]

The problem with feudalism is that pretty soon you run out of land to give away.

No, the problem with feudalism is that feudalism as we popularly understand it probably didn't exist, or if it did it wasn't as simple as we like to make it, and even then only existed for a relatively short period of time in a certain geographic area we happened to have semi-decent records for. We describe a lot of very different societies as "feudal" because that's the easiest single word for it in English, even if it is misleading and inaccurate.

[Gx1080]

@Frank

You can call a massive shortage of goods and widespread poverty an economic sucess if you want to. You are still wrong, but you don't seem to mind.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, economic leftism was completely discredited. Poland, Cuba, Hungary, Cambodia, every place when it has been tried ended up being a dirt-poor shithole.

@RobbyPants

Oh fuck you. Every single time that the excess of Muslims are brought, the cadre of atheist cocksuckers bring up "but the christians....". Nobody was talking about the christians and it only shows your anti-christian bias.

PS: If I cared whatever people agreed with me or not, I would be another Obama-apologist sheeple.

[Kaelik]

Oh fuck you. Every single time that the excess of Muslims are brought, the cadre of atheist cocksuckers bring up "but the christians....". Nobody was talking about the christians and it only shows your anti-christian bias.

This is a message board, people can look up what happened, so lying is less effective.

What happened was some people who are not you brought op Christians and Muslims, then you whined about how mean we were for saying Muslims are better, even though we didn't.

You joined a conversation that already included Christians. You don't get to declare that other people aren't allowed to talk about them when you join late.

[Username17]

@Frank

You can call a massive shortage of goods and widespread poverty an economic sucess if you want to. You are still wrong, but you don't seem to mind.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, economic leftism was completely discredited. Poland, Cuba, Hungary, Cambodia, every place when it has been tried ended up being a dirt-poor shithole.

Oh noes! Those Norwegians are dirt poor. Oh wait, no, they are the richest fucking people on the planet. If you limit the set of "economic leftism" to just "countries full of poor people that you don't like", then I guess you get the answer you were looking for. However, if you expand the search to include countries on the upper scale, you find that many of them are economically leftist as well.

Denmark has a lower GINI coefficient than any other country. The Danes are also coincidentally the happiest people on Earth. Norway operates a vast number of explicitly socialist state enterprises, and the Norwegians are the most productive people to have ever existed.

The Khmer Rouge called themselves communists, sometimes. But I think the Vietnamese would disagree, considering that they went to war over economic ideology with the United States taking the Khmer Rouge side. But over and above what people are labeled as, if you check off the things socialists are actually advocating (low income inequality, high taxes, state services, state enterprises), it's basically Scandinavia down the line. And they are happier, richer, and freer than people in the US. Or any other region. That has ever existed on the planet.

-Username17

[Doom]

@Frank

You can call a massive shortage of goods and widespread poverty an economic sucess if you want to. You are still wrong, but you don't seem to mind.

You left off the massive starvation and that Moscow's phone system, installed pre-Revolution, was largely intact (and unchanged) when the USSR finally fell.

Most of the "the USSR has a strong economy" propaganda US children were taught was just fear-mongering, with what little progress there was simply a result of the concentration of capital taken from the many millions that died. Russia was already a powerful country pre-Revolution, and its destiny to become a superpower was already considered likely in the 19th century (cf, Tocqueville, for those that actually believe the 19th century happened).

To give an idea of just how bad things were, when the very first McDonald's tried to open up in Moscow, they first had to build an entire infrastructure--roads, bakeries, cattle farms, stockyards, because the entire region did not have the capability to support even ONE Mcdonald's restaurant in the way such restaurants are supported here.

When one considers just how many McDonalds' there were in the US, it really puts in perspective just how little the USSR had built up, explaining why there was so little after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[RobbyPants]

Oh fuck you. Every single time that the excess of Muslims are brought, the cadre of atheist cocksuckers bring up "but the christians....". Nobody was talking about the christians and it only shows your anti-christian bias.

PS: If I cared whatever people agreed with me or not, I would be another Obama-apologist sheeple.

Actually, I was bringing up your tendency to selectively remember what was actually said in posts. The fact that it involves Christians and Muslims is beside the point. And you're the one who brought up any sort of Christian/atheist bias.

Basically, you're doing it again right now.

[DSMatticus]

When the Soviet Union collapsed, economic leftism was completely discredited. Poland, Cuba, Hungary, Cambodia, every place when it has been tried ended up being a dirt-poor shithole.

Define economic leftism. Because if you mean "socialism" as Americans define it where socialism means "the government does anything at all," the entire first world already fucking does this and it turns out it's not a dirt-poor shithole. It turns out the parts of the world that actually are dirt-poor shitholes are the ones with ineffective governments that don't or can't do anything, or places where the government is relatively successful but doesn't actually give anything back to its citizens. The Soviet Union had widespread poverty for the same reason China has widespread poverty. Not because they aren't economically successful; if you tried to tell us China wasn't economically successful we would laugh in your face. They have widespread poverty because the government doesn't give a shit about their citizens and dedicates its resources to itself.

For fuck's sake, you realize that China is now the global economic superpower and it is exactly as ostensibly communist as the Soviet Union was?

Now, if we move away from terribad socialism like China and the Soviet Union where the government actually just runs everything and forces you to do things at gunpoint and propaganda in the name of economic growth (see China), you get into those dirty leftist - fuck it, Frank beat me there. The most successful countries in the world and the happiest countries in the world are the same group of countries, and they are economic lefties, as you're calling them.

[tzor]

No, the problem with feudalism is that feudalism as we popularly understand it probably didn't exist, or if it did it wasn't as simple as we like to make it, and even then only existed for a relatively short period of time in a certain geographic area we happened to have semi-decent records for.

That's another point. Feudalism existed only because capitalism was effectively outlawed. (The best way to get start up capitol is to borrow it; usery laws prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans and thus no one loaned anyone anything.) One Christian Crusaders started demanding middle eastern imports of material and spices, the merchant class boot strapped the capitol to make a capitalist economy. From that point most of europe had a mixed economic system.

[Ancient History]

No, the problem with feudalism is that feudalism as we popularly understand it probably didn't exist, or if it did it wasn't as simple as we like to make it, and even then only existed for a relatively short period of time in a certain geographic area we happened to have semi-decent records for.

That's another point. Feudalism existed only because capitalism was effectively outlawed. (The best way to get start up capitol is to borrow it; usery laws prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans and thus no one loaned anyone anything.) One Christian Crusaders started demanding middle eastern imports of material and spices, the merchant class boot strapped the capitol to make a capitalist economy. From that point most of europe had a mixed economic system.

That is also not entirely correct. Capitalism as we know it just didn't exist as a fucking concept yet. Christian-influenced laws against usury had been in effect since the Christianization of the Roman Empire, yes, but there were always ways around them - pagans, Jews, contractum trinius, Lombard banking, etc. The major restrictions to economic development in Europe was the general breakdown in long-distance travel and communication, lack of fungible coinage (which is why Europe eventually switched from the gold standard to the silver standard, and then with the Crusades and the Templars made the big transition to actual banking), and legal limits on prices of goods and the right to buy and sell goods and land.

Let's be honest, for a large part of the Middle Ages being a farmer sucked. Crop yields were generally low, fields under-utilized on an ancient field-rotation system and rarely fertilized, improper crops were sown for the climate because Christian monasteries made a conscious effort to obtain the staples of a Mediterranean diet (bread, wine, olive oil) in Northern Europe), and even when you did reap more than you sowed, you had limited places you could market the excess and generally fixed prices you could charge for it - if you could charge money at all, because chances are nobody had a lot of hard coin and you'd be reduced to bartering your wheat or barley. Also, depending on where you were living, you might be a farmer by default because you dad was a farmer and law said you had to farm too.

That isn't to say that the import of foreign goods or international trade ever actually stopped during the fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages - the diffusion of goods from the relatively accessible northern and southern European kingdoms to the more central states was generally much smaller and slower, but you still had plenty of products making their way from Byzantium, Egypt, and farther east throughout the period (as evidenced by surviving goods and coins in European hordes) - and plenty of European slaves went the other way to help pay for it.

The "merchant class" wasn't even a single thing you could really point at until relatively late in the period. You had lots of tradespeople (some locked into their trade), and some really successful farmers that became landowners and negotiatores, and a shitload of Jews barred from other professions, but a lot of the functions we would consider as mercantile weren't brought together in a single person in most of Europe for a while - and even then, the former Roman city-states that retained some long-distance trade also maintained mercantile traditions that put them ahead of a lot of the rest of Europe in that regard. What really caused a spurt in the growth of mercantile power was the increase in the availability of money - from private mints, goldsmith notes, credit systems, futures markets, etc. - because with more money, the merchants could buy, sell, and invest on a wider scale, and the money they pumped into the economy meant other people had more money to spend too. (And even that would have been useless except for slow technological advancement improving the quantity and quality of crops and other basic goods.)

[Gx1080]

And here we go to the classical Communist failure:

"If only the all-powerful and mighty Goverment were ruled by Angelic functionaries, everybody would hold hands and be happy".

Fuck that noise. The Goverment isn't a holy agent on society is just another institution created and directed by human beings, that, by definition, are flawed.

It has a place? Yes. I don't want neither private roads or electric grids (hello monopoly) or public supermarkets (hello bread lines). I believe that Goverment should serve society, not the other way around.

But seriously, stop trying to weasel out by slapping the "Communist" bumper sticker on the stuff that works and denying that the stuff that doesn't is not "real" Communism. Ideologies are judged by real world results, and the real-world results of Communism are massed poverty. As an economic policy, it died with the USSR. Get over it.

BTW, cut the crap about the China boogeyman. If the US stops buying their cheap crap, due to a colapse or something, their money flow stops.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Well, since Gx is too scared to address the point about Denmark and Norway, he has lost the argument. He will no doubt continue to post, but I declare him as lost the debate.

[DSMatticus]

Well, since Gx is too scared to address the point about Denmark and Norway, he has lost the argument. He will no doubt continue to post, but I declare him as lost the debate.

For the part where Gx sweepingly declares socialist states as failures because "GOVERMENT BAD", I'll just point at this.

BTW, cut the crap about the China boogeyman. If the US stops buying their cheap crap, due to a colapse or something, their money flow stops.

For this part, I would like to point out that China losing customers because the first-world has collapsed is kind of a win for China and a major loss for us. And it's probably a win for the Chinese people, too, because they'll take their massive production, create a middle in-class, and turn their sales inward. And the raw goods they import to make their shit will become super cheap because the rest of the world will be begging for scraps. Really, that's not a doomsday scenario for them. That is probably the long-term plan, being held off because having a significant middle class puts the ruling class in slightly more political danger.

[Gx1080]

Christ, can't forget anything on this shit:

Norway is a mixed system, meanwhile Denmark:

http://www.transform-network.net/en/jou ... nmark.html

http://socialismdoesntwork.com/denmark- ... m-is-good/

EDIT:

@DSMatticus

>Losing Customers
>Good

Damn, you sure are retarded. The videos don't lie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJ ... r_embedded

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Sorry, too late. You lost.

[Gx1080]

Getting told that I "lost" by the ponyfag is rich.