Racists and socialists
To quote my own PR,
My first question is why are we even talking about socialism?For the exact same reason you were talking about racism. Those are the two cries de guerre in this political struggle, I took your use of it to mean you intend to limit yourself to discourse in that paradigm.
That's pretty much the simple truth of the matter. Nobody being called a racist actually is anything in particular. They're just as likely to be a spic or a fag. The word doesn't denote anything definite, it is completely devoid of any direct meaning. You couldn't make any verifiable predictions based on the information provided by knowing someone is or was at some point labeled "racist".
In fact, the very first question popping in your head the moment you try to see how exactly you'd go about making a prediction based on that label - namely, "he was called racist by whom ?" - clearly resolves the problem : the epithet simply connotes that the speaker has identified someone as an enemy of the holy tenets of imbecilitarianism, and is warning his fellow imbecilitarians of this important discovery, as well as trying to enlist their help in... guess ?
He's trying to enlist their help in creating the reality of the other party's enmity. Because that's how it works in Imbecilitania, agreement creates reality, and so if he can get enough of his own side to agree that's that. Consensus (aka fecal matter)i is just one easy step away.
Socialism is equally meaningless. The particular stupidities indigent to the various flavours of socialism known to man are exactly that, particular, and the core stupidity at work in all socialism - namely, that the salvation of individual people comes from the agencies of the group as a whole - isn't all that stupid to begin with. It's repugnant as all hell, sure, but there's plenty of situations in which the survival of each individual neatly depends on the performance of the group, and they're not limited to some sort of hell or fringe. If you've read Anabasisii you have a ready example there. If you're more of a visual type of thinker any group of superhero-spies in any installment of pulp fiction you've digested recently enough to rememberiii works just as well to illustrate.
In short, both terms mean simply "enemy", and inform us as to the political leanings of the person emitting them. I have no qualms calling people socialist specifically becasue I have no qualms identifying the enemies of my party. I also have no qualms with being called racist, either intentionally by people who mean what they say (to wit, that they've correctly identified the one guy that, absent anyone else doing it first, will take their beloved system out of reality entirely) or unintentionally by people who haven't quite fully digested the signs and meanings of the current world and as a result simply blurt out whatever approximately arranged flotsam happens to strike them in their deriveiv.
The good news, of course, is that the need for socialists waxes and wanes with the vagaries of history - in most times and places there being need of none whatsoever - whereas the need for racists is pretty much fixed and eternal. In fact for most of human history everyone was a racist, and for all we know socialists are as much an accident, a rounding error, a spec in time as for instance global warming is. Or are they not calling it global warming anymore ?
———- The fecal reference is important, because monkeys mostly fight by flinging their own excrement. [↩]
- And no, "in English" does not count. [↩]
- Doesn't matter if it calls itself a cartoon, an "action movie" or whatever else - they're all the same junk. [↩]
- Look ma, I am use French words. I can not be racist nao. [↩]
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Socialism is not really an accident, families and small communities/tribes are inherently communist. The problem is that it doesn't scale.
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Rasismul e vesnic prezent, atat tip cat exista diferente atat de mari, tot vesnice...
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
@gheorghe This is like saying that children are inherently dirty. Sure they are. Cleaning them up and teaching them to keep clean is called civilisation.
Thursday, 17 January 2013
But then the same could be argued about racism.
Thursday, 17 January 2013
Sure.