Despite my belief in the wisdom behind the original American system of government — the divided powers, local representation and fair courts, a bill of rights and a constitution, and the general understanding that good freedom makes good neighbors — it appears there really is a store of leftist thought wherein the alternatives, such as they may be, might just self-evidence the great wisdom of collective servitude and social conformity.
I presume. I have an inkling of the evil of Americanism on good authority but being something of a ingrained, instinctive rube, it may be because I’ve yet to experience the illumination of the alternative of high leftism.
Perhaps it lies in exposing the American tradition of bringing willful harm and servitude to bear on other peoples in the name of capitalism and democracy — we’ll call it Frozen Chicken Diplomacy. Perhaps it conflicts entirely with Reynolds quoting Goldberg just this morning, “Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.”
Ingratitude? Is that possible? Surely such ingratitude would have cause, merit. No?
Whatever it is
It’s more complex than the tail-wagging and name calling narratives [I'm] used to.
So. Educate me. In a world where something on the order of 250,000,000 have been killed by their own totalitarian leadership — a number that by equivalent ratio should (but has yet to) bring the US’s share to some number of tens of millions piled deep beneath a Nevada test range or something — where are the greatest illuminations of the greatest lights of the leftist experience?
Where are socialism’s and communism’s dead sea scrolls? And what do they state?
And what do they bode for the apparent ignorance that is the American experience in its misled philosophy of freedom, self-reliance, and self-responsibility?
Comment by The Lost Dog on 8/5 @ 10:45 am #
This has confused me for a long time, too.
I think our modern day socialists don’t think that they will have to add a significant amount of bodies to the 250,000,000 that are already on the socialist death rolls. What’s a few more million to a total like that?
Once again, it appears that they think that they are smarter(as did all of their predecessors think the same) than all the other socialists who grabbed power and repeated the experiments in “Mega-Death”.
“Oh! WE will take care of ALL of you!”
Well, the left has been experimenting with socialism on the black community for 60 years, and the results are there for all to see. Devastation. Of the families, communities, and neighborhoods. GOOD-O!
But somehow, the left has made conservatives look like they are responsible. Slippery little pricks, huh?
Unfortunately, with socialism, the “pests” who must be eliminated are usually those with an IQ of over 100. Not an insignificant number in this country, but hey, the individualists must be stamped out before we can create equal misery for all (except the elites).
All I can do is shke my head and mumble.
Great post, by the way.
Comment by Viridian on 8/5 @ 10:58 am #
Not only have we not killed 250,000,000 our capitalist/liberal democracy system has allowed the work of people like Norman Borlaug, who have saved over a billion people all over the world from starving to death. Funny how the left, so quick to assign blame for people killed by America (in whatever capacity) never, ever talks about the number of people we’ve saved.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 8/5 @ 10:59 am #
For someone who claims great intelligence and great education, thor seems to run a lot on pure emotion. He has an affinity for Russia and the Russian people - thus anyone who says something bad about Russia’s history comes under an attack generated by rage. He has an affinity for Sen. Obama - thus anyone who criticizes him comes under an attack generated by pure rage.*
A nice pattern of behavior, I don’t think. Perhaps this is his safety valve where he vents off the rage that builds up in him over the day?
*I seem to recall karl had also said some things about Russia that thor went ape-shit over. This was before thor went berserk over karl’s posts on Sen. Obama’s campaign.
Comment by cranky-d on 8/5 @ 11:07 am #
You know, you summon them by speaking their names.
Comment by BJTexs on 8/5 @ 11:13 am #
Um … Paul Robeson sung purty. Just sayin’…
Comment by JHoward on 8/5 @ 11:14 am #
Good points, Mikey NTH, and I’d taken pains in the other thread to point out the rather profound difference between the Russian people — the real Russian experience — and what’s been put upon them (albeit not without some tacit approval, such as that may have been).
Zoom; right past it goes.
So you switch gears and ask, genuinely but with some degree of snark, what it is that’s missing in the debate about fundamental values and principles. Where’s the collectivist beef, the socialist virtue, the verifiable taint in the American dream (and one can’t possibly mean frozen chickens and be taken seriously). Without all the intellectual dysfunction and rage, I mean: Where’s the underlying, philosophical, self-evident, repeatable, historically-proven meat on those bones?
Anyone? Maybe Bueller?
Comment by Trimegistus on 8/5 @ 11:34 am #
America gets all the blame because America won. The world has remade itself in our image. Even our enemies have to justify themselves in our terms.
So for alienated narcissists, America is the ultimate enemy because America is, simply, reality.
Comment by thor on 8/5 @ 11:56 am #
I think you should look up Bush Legs, understand the reference, because I can’t tell if you have a clue.
What datadave said, they held out an olive branch and we loaned ‘em a chicken leg (a kick in the teeth).
And what do they bode for the apparent ignorance that is the American experience in its misled philosophy of freedom, self-reliance, and self-responsibility?
Is your implied suggestion that the Russian experience was inverse to the American? If it is, and your textbook might suggest it, I have news for you, the double inverse was/is reality. They’re more self-reliant, more self-responsible, in many ways than we big Americans. Explain that. I can, but I’d like to see you waffle it.
Comment by Minister Jack X Klompus Africa-Muhammad Ali Shabazz on 8/5 @ 11:59 am #
8. Buying into the lefty bag o’ bullshit is still a rite of passage for so many kids today. I was in a bookstore and saw this twenty-something tool wearing an Industrial Workers of the World t-shirt. Eyes roll. Slight mocking laugh. Browse on. The only scary thing is that it seems like more than half of the “adult” population here in Austin hasn’t grown out of it. One of the little affluent college-town playpens for people of such stunted judgment to have the freedom and opportunity to play “dissident” like kids dressing up in big people’s clothes.
Comment by Minister Jack X Klompus Africa-Muhammad Ali Shabazz on 8/5 @ 12:02 pm #
“Explain that. I can…”
Okay we get it. You’re fucking brilliant. We bow before your towering intellect and insight. We know it’s there because you remind everyone of it any and every chance you get. You’re a fucking genius. Reading your oh so clever barbs and turns of phrase gives us all eye-boners. We dare not challenge what a fucking intellectual god you are. We are humbled before your unmatched powers of insight and greatness. We are prostrate before your mighty brilliance. Nobody can ever match the greatness that is thor. God you are such an insufferable, narcissistic prick.
Comment by Mr. Pink on 8/5 @ 12:07 pm #
If he was so brilliant he would not have to remind everyone that he has “lived in Russia” to give his ideas more weight.
Comment by Ardsgaine on 8/5 @ 12:09 pm #
The virtue of socialists, which is the only recognized virtue of our age, is that they care about others more than themselves. It doesn’t matter that their system doesn’t work for anyone, it is the only system based on sacrificing the interests of the individual to the group. Capitalism is based on allowing the individual to pursue his own interests. When self-sacrifice ceases to be considered a virtue, then socialism will have lost its appeal.
Comment by Kresh on 8/5 @ 12:22 pm #
The solution is quite simple. If the socialists could just argree to disagree without building great giant camps for the re-education (or death for the truly un-repentant) of those who merely say “‘ang on a minute” when presented with their tomfoolery, then we’d not have a huge problem with their ilk. Unfortunately, it seems, camp-building runs in their genes. It happens like clockwork, so history says.
Then again, another of their mantras is “This Time It Is Different”, also known as “The Five Most Dangerous Words In Investing, Or Anywhere Else.” Compare the Global Warming hysteria vs. the Global Cooling hysteria for further enlightenment. Or was it the “Population Bomb” hysteria? I forget, there’s so many panics and great hysterias perpetrated by the socalist crowd that I forget which one they’re harping on THIS WEEK.
So yeah, not a big fan of the camp-building socialist-religious dogmatic sect of America. Aka, godless commies or the “No Fun Crowd.” /mostly snark
Comment by Jeff G. on 8/5 @ 12:26 pm #
Many Russians are tough and self reliant because they’ve been living in a corrupt society and have learned ways to survive. Americans, on the other hand, are moving more toward the kind of centralized government, nannystatist bullshit that used to be the putative Soviet dream.
So that might kind of explain it.
Of course, in doing so, it reinforces that by embracing — in however oblique or soft a way — much of what the “smart” leftists have forever been peddling and incorporating it into our system of “social justice” by way of increasingly intrusive legislation, we are in fact going in the wrong direction.
But man, can that Calvino turn a phrase — and Steinbeck, well…he could really make you feel the dust and sweat caking in your overworked nostrils.
Comment by JHoward on 8/5 @ 12:27 pm #
Have a clue? Where did I defend contemporary foreign policy, thor, in a question aimed at identifying your superior leftist philosophy of civilization? In fact, as I alluded in the other thread, the same thread you repeatedly ignored said reference, I have near-zero trust for the federal government and only begrudgingly grant it my blessing to occasionally go and break things and kill bad folks elsewhere — yeah, I’d confirm Bush’s defense of the place, sorry as the man’s administration, like all of them, has been and is. And that’s about it. Back to the topic, shall we?
So wtf with your incessant railing against your various wingnut windmills, thor? You have the platform; give with the inherent superiority of alternative and far left philosophies of organizations, the very effing philosophies that surely have both reason and historicity to verify their very humanistic nobility?
Son of a bitch. And I hear Patton wanted to blast em all to kingdom come.
You talking Frozen Chicken Diplomacy?! Say it’s not so, thor. I mean, where do I go to defect, bro?
(No, thor, it is my implied suggestion that you’re as boneheaded as you are intellectually dishonest.) My claim is that if you are so bloody uncomfortable with the function of the American system to the point that you’ll rhetorically hang virtually all the members of whatever political philosophy of it you care to dream up, then a mind of your implied caliber should be able to handily put up with the goods on what works better.
And why. Or how. Where, even.
Yeah, sure, and I’d never once impugned the Russian people, thor, and this is the second or fourth time across two threads I’ve pointed that out.
On the other hand you apparently can’t exercise the American demons in your own mind. And you evidently can’t produce a shred of what works better.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 8/5 @ 12:36 pm #
Likeing Russia and the Russian people isn’t a bad thing thor. But don’t let that affinity blind you to the fact that The Gulag Archipelago is a story about Soviet Russia. It isn’t a story about the United States, and no matter how bad the American government has acted, it hasn’t done that.
The gulag belongs to Soviet Russia and happened there, it didn’t happen here.
And surprisingly, not all of life is about you, and truth isn’t beholden to your personal druthers.
Comment by Squid on 8/5 @ 1:10 pm #
The beauty of socialism is in its perfection. Everybody contributes as much as they can, and in return they receive everything they need. What could be more beautiful?
Capitalism is messy. It’s “every man for himself,” and it encourages competition over cooperation. For every winner in an economic niche, there are a dozen losers who made the wrong decisions or weren’t creative enough to stay ahead. It’s chaotic, and it’s uncontrollable, and it’s just not elegant.
Why would anyone choose chaos over elegance?
Of course, elegant systems must be designed and controlled, lest they spiral into the chaos they were meant to deliver us from. Fortunately, we have Wise Men who can design and control the systems which guide our lives. These men know what we have to offer, even better than we know our own talents; they know what we require to live, and won’t waste precious resources on consumer trinkets and frippery. They have our best interests in mind, and their benevolence and wisdom will see to it that our perfect system provides all of us with a perfect life, where no one (especially not the Wise Men) is elevated above his comrades.
And it’s a good thing, too. Because given that the systems they design and control have influence over our entire lives, and the lives of everyone else in our collective, any mistakes made by the Wise Men would have the gravest of consequences. Any failure of foresight or insight could mean that our talents go unused, or our needs go unfulfilled. And not just one man, or one family — the whole collective would be brought low.
How fortunate we are to have, among our brethren, these most wise and kind masters to order our lives! I, for one, believe that we should grant to these Great and Wise Masters names appropriate to their skills and powers. Perhaps they should share the names of the Norse Gods of old, who held the fate of entire populations within their power, subject to their whim.
What say you, comrades?
Comment by Squid on 8/5 @ 1:11 pm #
They’re more self-reliant, more self-responsible, in many ways than we big Americans. Explain that. I can, but I’d like to see you waffle it.
You know, Cuban car mechanics are friggin’ wizards. I’ll be it’s related somehow.
Comment by bergerbilder on 8/5 @ 1:17 pm #
I don’t think narcissism is solely a affliction of the intelligent. But most narcissists crave attention. For the intelligent narcissist, though, the best way to get attention is to be contrarian. This is harmless enough as it is practiced by children and adolescents. But too many adults haven’t shed their adoloescent contrarianism, and in matters of Economics, this is expressed as being a socialist. By this time, it’s probably become part of the psyche and will be embraced very stubbornly.
It’s difficult to be successful in a capitalist economy for a contrarian because you must learn to trust and be a team player to a certain degree. So you usually find the leftist, leftover adolescent contrarians in the academy or some other job that does not produce a measurable good or service.
Of course, the contrarians might end up in the gulags in a different system.
Comment by Thomass on 8/5 @ 1:21 pm #
Comment by Trimegistus on 8/5 @ 11:34 am #
“So for alienated narcissists, America is the ultimate enemy because America is, simply, reality.”
Sort of reminds me of my own thoughts when people attack “capitalismâ€Â. They are; everyone has a market economy. It’s like you’re attacking ‘air’ for causing a social problem. No other system exists.
Comment by Thomass on 8/5 @ 1:26 pm #
Comment by Ardsgaine on 8/5 @ 12:09 pm #
“The virtue of socialists, which is the only recognized virtue of our age, is that they care about others more than themselves.”
More like the conceit of socialists… they claim to speak for the oppressed but become the oppressors as soon as they have power.
Comment by Rob Crawford on 8/5 @ 1:50 pm #
Utterly non-responsive to the question put before him.
And, yeah, MikeyNTH, thor’s all about the rage against anyone who “disses” what he likes. The sad thing is that “diss” means “not worship in precisely the same way” — he admitted that his animus against Karl was based on what he believed were Karl’s motives, not on anything Karl actually wrote. Highly emotional and completely lacking in intellectual honesty, but convinced he’s got it all over everyone else.
Comment by Dan Collins on 8/5 @ 1:51 pm #
You’ll want to read this, JH.
Comment by TheGeezer on 8/5 @ 1:51 pm #
How is it that so many old Russians crave the days of gigamurderer Stalin? Lives controlled, the days were spent in unthinking drift or unutterable fear. That is not humanity, it is less than slavery.
Comment by Salt Lick on 8/5 @ 1:53 pm #
Where are socialism’s and communism’s dead sea scrolls? And what do they state?
I found a few of ‘em in the coat pocket of Lenin’s mummy…
[Religion] is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. Marx.
It is true that liberty is precious - so precious that it must be rationed. Lenin.
It is man’s social being that determines his thinking. Once the correct ideas characteristic of the advanced class are grasped by the masses, these ideas turn into a material force which changes society and changes the world. Mao.
Comment by Rusty on 8/5 @ 3:36 pm #
Someone once said tha socialism is an unobtainable ideal. A beautiful wish.There are no dead sea scrolls, but there are a lot of dead.(the 250,000,000 socialist dead may be conservative. Maos tenure alone calls for nearly that many.)Capitalism ,on the other hand, is simply a way of decribing human behavior. What people do naturally.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 8/5 @ 4:17 pm #
I still want to know what we owed the remains of the defunct Soviet Union after it sued for peace and imploded. Considering the state of post-Soviet governments in the formmer USSR, and the state of its economics, how was the United States to change things without acting like it was post-war Germany or Japan or Italy?
If anyone thinks that a lot of thought and time wasn’t spent thinking about, writing about, and trying as best as possible to bring about a soft landing wasn’t done, then those persons need to get back to the libraries and archives and re-read that time.
Look, anecdotal evidence is great, first hand accounts from someone who has been to a place and talked to its people and experienced how that place runs is excellent. But in the end it is very limited. I have been to Canada many times, I have relatives in Canada and I see them quite regularly, at least twice a year. I do not think my observations (and there is almost a common language!) mean that I am an expert on everything and every place Canadian. It is a continent-spanning nation, and Vancouver is not Edmonton is not Regina is not London. No more than working with the Camp America counselors from the British Isles, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, Germany, and Austria meant that I had a good handle on their countries.
It merely gives a little window, mayhap opened wider, on something very, very big. My sister-in-law is Colombian and I have met friends of hers and members of her family, but that doesn’t mean I have great insight beyond generalities about Colombia. My S-i-L has lived here for many years, but she doesn’t necessarily understand Americans or the United States.
A little window, opened a bit wider; but still a little window.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 8/5 @ 4:36 pm #
#24 The Geezer:
How is it that so many old Russians crave the days of gigamurderer Stalin? Lives controlled, the days were spent in unthinking drift or unutterable fear. That is not humanity, it is less than slavery.
A lot of Russia had just gotten out of feudalism about fifty years before the communists took control. The mindset of looking to a lord or a czar for direction probably had not left. Stalin enacted tighter control than any czar or czarina had done since Peter the Great or Catherine the Great.
That may have something to do with all of this - just speculation, I am not an expert.
Comment by Big Bang Hunter (pumping you up) on 8/5 @ 7:15 pm #
- You know Mikey, I tried to point out in another thread a few days ago that the vast majority of Russians are rural agrarian in nature, and have next to zero interest in anything political. Like Americans, they deal with it when it effects their lives, as it did with the 15,000 dead Russian young men during the ill-fated Afghanistan campaign.
- Generally the populace, busy to the point of daily exhaustion simply trying to scratch out a meager living from the permafrost, simply go about living their lives and making the best of a tough life. But in that instance it was Russian mothers who traveled to Moscow and literally cowed the politburo into stopping that insanity by threatening to decend enmasse.
- When I see someone like thor claim that a period of time spent in a single area of the Rodina as “experience” to the point where he feels comfortable arguing and explaining the heart and ways of Russia, I just shake my head.
- Its as if a Russian national from Murmansk spent a year in say, Atwater Ohio, or Juno Alaska, and then returned home and waxed on the American spirit and ways. Inane to the point of distraction. But what can you say.
- In addition to considerable world travel in my career, and my Russian family and heritage, I’ve spent almost my entire 69 years in America, visiting and living all over the country, including Hawaii and the Caribbean territories, and even I wouldn’t make such claims.
- Your contentions are, however, for the most part correct. The majority of Russians only know government from a feudal system standpoint, while the majority of the Stalinist era passed them by. If they knew of ir at all, it was from family memebres murdered or totured to feed the raw blood lust need for victims to affirm the “paranoia of the damned” as my Babushka on my mothers side used to say, or the incessant taxation and quotas demanded by the collectives.
- If silly spoiled Americans like thor had to live under that system for 1 week they’d be cured for life.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 8/5 @ 7:35 pm #
BBH - one thing that I am grateful for the years I have lived (not the receding hairline and expanding waistline) is the realization that I do not know everything about a subject I am interested in.
I am a ship geek, I love naval history, but I do not claim that I know everything about, say, the USN in WWII. I still learn more each year, and now know to preface things with “From what I know” to immuenize myself from when someone brings up a topic.
Comment by Bender Bending Rodriguez on 8/5 @ 7:45 pm #
When I see someone like thor claim that a period of time spent in a single area of the Rodina as “experience†to the point where he feels comfortable arguing and explaining the heart and ways of Russia, I just shake my head.
Elvis Costello: “They say that travel broadens the mind/’Til you can’t get your head out the door.”
Comment by Mikey NTH on 8/5 @ 7:49 pm #
BBH - thor had said that he helped people arrange airplane rides in trainer versions of Soviet fighters, and that his fiancee’s father managed a factory. That does not compute with an experience that takes in the guys and gals in the hangar who make sure the aircraft is ready, or the guys and gals on the factory floor actually making what the factory produces.
There is a greater dividing line between those who are on the factory floor and those who manage than I think he realizes. BTW, I am from southeastern Michigan and I know what that line looks like here, and as I said in another thread, I have dug out ditches, replaced sewer grates, and worked a garbage truck.
And my mom’s father was head of the federal reserve bank in Detroit. That fact won’t even get me a cup of coffee.
Comment by thor on 8/5 @ 8:07 pm #
I lived in Moscow for almost three years. A weekend a Bernie’s dacha it wasn’t. To bang as many dyevs as I banged, to plant my American seed in enemy territory as i did, well, I had read Tolstoy so I knew that when a man labors and toils the fertile ground he can, only then, think his clearest thoughts.
Therefore I f$#@$%ed and whored day and night to work my semen in just right, like a good kurkuhli. I drank with Chekhov’s peasants, ate their daughters and pleasured their wives. My duty was my calling. Tears filled Tverskaya the day I left, or ran for it, depending on who you ask.
Comment by thor on 8/5 @ 8:22 pm #
You are correct, Comrad. We are victims of our own success to some degree. Those Russians, building their own TVs out of tin cans and their houses out of discarded pop bottles, they are quite the tinkering bunch. They didn’t have a choice, they had no way to make money, so if they wanted it they had to build it themselves, or steal it out the door of the factory. Many a Russian male knows how to sew his own clothes, and I mean the whole garment and not a button.
I don’t think the Leftists theorized that a nation built on Marxism would result in a huge population of clever thieves, strong-armed connivers, state system gamers and home electronics tinkers as it did. It’s really funnily bizarre over there, except for the cruelty.
Comment by Rob Crawford on 8/6 @ 4:23 am #
Good for you, thor. Now fuck off.
Comment by alppuccino on 8/6 @ 4:32 am #
Those Russians, building their own TVs out of tin cans and their houses out of discarded pop bottles, they are quite the tinkering bunch.
Caught you thor.
Everyone knows that if a Russian could get his hands on all those items that he would first build a still and then try to make a rocket with the leftovers. Busted.
Comment by jdm on 8/6 @ 5:46 am #
Sure was a great trade… thor for Karl.
Comment by thor on 8/6 @ 7:26 am #
I see a lot of upside.
Comment by BJTexs on 8/6 @ 7:28 am #
I see a lot of upchuck.
Comment by BuddyPC on 8/6 @ 8:09 am #
Today’s pick for our netflix queues:
Billy Wilder’s reversive subversive One, Two, Three.
Peripetchikoff: [trying to trade for Ingeborg] Would you take new automobile?
1961 Moskvich hardtop convertible, two-tone.
C.R. MacNamara: You mean that Russian hot rod parked outside?
Peripetchikoff: Is wonderful car. Is exact copy of 1937 Nash.
Comment by Ardsgaine on 8/6 @ 10:21 am #
Thomas wrote: “More like the conceit of socialists… they claim to speak for the oppressed but become the oppressors as soon as they have power.”
The conceit of the masses who put them into power is thinking that the socialists’ calls for self-sacrifice will apply only to a hated minority for the benefit of the masses, and not to the masses themselves. A system based on sacrificing the individual for the good of the collective, though, must have a constant supply of victims. It never stops at the kulaks.
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