nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Zero engagement
the neoliberal vision of the future
- Thread starter Dillinger4
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yep. Who cleans the sewers in the new 'free state' set up in a poor part of Africa? Is it 'citizens'? Or is it cheap labour imported from the local population? Will cleaners, road-sweepers, etc, be paid enough to be able to participate in the completely private health and welfare system? How about the construction workers who build the thing?
All you're talking about is some new form of Dubai-style development. Where's the Utopia in Dubai?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I see you've deployed the "I'll deflect your point by creating a new and parallel one that's completely irrelevant" tactic again.
He asked you to substantiate your slur, not to blow wind from your arse, farting on about a "connection between jews and capitalism".
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
onarchy - the shite - alleged that antisemitism was deeply embedded in the French socialist movement of the 1920s. If it was so deeply embedded in that movement, why was the leader of the SFIO himself Jewish?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
If he'd done that I'd have pulled him up on it myself. Sadly for you, he hasn't, he's merely stated that the SFIO as a party didn't identify capitalism with Jews.
You really must try harder. You look less and less the bold iconoclast and more and more the sort of goalpost-shifting windbag that Onarchy has shown himself to be.
The point is that nobody knows. Not even you or Onarchy.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Which is much the same as being here to show himself up as a twit, when all is said and done.
And he has done so. Spectacularly.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Self-identification and reflexivity. I like it!
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
These people are real fruitcakes. Life extension?
http://www.libertarianinternational.org/apps/blog/categories/show/263033-life-extension
This mayor starts out as a Brazilian but then ends up as a Colombian (note the spelling)
http://www.libertarianinternational.org/apps/blog/categories/show/263033-life-extension
This mayor starts out as a Brazilian but then ends up as a Colombian (note the spelling)
I think it's fair to say that different elements of anti-semetism existed within many tiers of french society. Surely the fact that Blum was Jewish shows how deeply it must have been embedded?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Oddly enough, I was thinking of Dubai as I was typing that. Somehow, I just can't see onar getting his hands dirty cleaning up someone else's shit.
A twit? T'who?
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Just to pick up again from this:
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdm-nixon/nsdm-93.pdf
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
I think 'economic warfare' is a perfectly reasonable term for what Kissinger put forward in the National Security Directive linked above and the other declassified documents linked at GWU's archive. It was very clearly the intent to 'make the economy scream' while actively pursuing subversion.
The instruction wasn't simply to 'not do business' but by acting with the full influence of a global superpower, to freeze trade credit and guarantees and by leaning on local and international partners, to severely inhibit Chile's ability to trade. To try to make any claim on that basis about the economic damage that socialism did to Chile is rather absurd.
Suppose a black man, moves to a 'white' town and the richest man in town. a racist fuck, actively leans on people not to do business with him, so that he can't practice his trade and the racist fuck then gets the bank to foreclose his loans. Pretty soon he's going to be struggling to make ends meet, but this isn't enough for the rich man, so he hires some thugs to kill him and torture his family.
Then someone like you goes on the internet and uses this guy's tragedy as proof of the inherent inferiority of black people.
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdm-nixon/nsdm-93.pdf
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
I think 'economic warfare' is a perfectly reasonable term for what Kissinger put forward in the National Security Directive linked above and the other declassified documents linked at GWU's archive. It was very clearly the intent to 'make the economy scream' while actively pursuing subversion.
The instruction wasn't simply to 'not do business' but by acting with the full influence of a global superpower, to freeze trade credit and guarantees and by leaning on local and international partners, to severely inhibit Chile's ability to trade. To try to make any claim on that basis about the economic damage that socialism did to Chile is rather absurd.
Suppose a black man, moves to a 'white' town and the richest man in town. a racist fuck, actively leans on people not to do business with him, so that he can't practice his trade and the racist fuck then gets the bank to foreclose his loans. Pretty soon he's going to be struggling to make ends meet, but this isn't enough for the rich man, so he hires some thugs to kill him and torture his family.
Then someone like you goes on the internet and uses this guy's tragedy as proof of the inherent inferiority of black people.
It may not be easy, but Bernie is correct to say that you have to... otherwise you can't use Pinochet's regime as an example of anything except how the people who made a mess helped clear it up a bit.
This is a fair question. Let's start by comparing the alternatives. What is the difference between Dubai and the proposed Free State? Also, what is the difference between the Free State and most European welfare states for immigrants?
Dubai vs the Free State
------------------------
1) Immigrtion to Dubai requires a work permit, and it is only temporary (3 years) and needs to be renewed. The Free State offers permanent residence to peaceful immigrants.
2) In Dubai in order to get a work permit you need to have a job offer from an employer. In the Free State you need a *voucher* which ensures the payment of legal fees in case you are a criminal and the cost of flying you back to your home country in case you are expelled due to criminal activity. The voucher does NOT have to be your employer. It can be anyone, even yourself. You then put a certain amount of money in a locked bank account to be able to pay for the mentioned expenses. If you leave the Free State you are of course allowed to take that money with you. Typical vouchers will be employers, airlines and insurance companies.
3) In Dubai there are only certain economic free zones. All of the Free State will be one gigantic free trade zone, with close to zero taxes. Thus, the scale of economic activity can be much greater in the Free State.
4) In Dubai governance is not that good. Property rights are not secure due to severe influence by the monarchs, and corruption is significant. Therefore workers' ability to enforce a contract is not so good. In the Free State this will be a major improvement since the whole point of the Free State is to have good governance and proper enforcement of contracts.
5) in Dubai a foreign worker cannot own property. He is essentially a serf. In the Free State an immigrant worker can own property. This land can be bought, and even homesteaded.
That sums up the main differences from an immigrant's perspective. Now let's do the same comparison for, say, UK vs the Free State.
UK vs the Free State
-----------------------
1) The UK in general has a ban on immigration. No foreigners allowed. Poor people have to stay in the hellholes they were born. The Free State though has close to free immigration. Poor people are given a chance.
2) UK citizens exploit the work of virtual slave labor every single day from people working in sweat shops in poor countries. The gap between the rich UK and the poor people in bad regimes that they exploit is enormous. In this sense the UK is very close to a feudal society with great walls to protect the nobles. UK citizens including socialists are perfectly ok with this because they don't see the poor people that they exploit. In the Free State there are no walls. The rich who live there live side by side with the poor immigrants. As such the inequality is made visible for all to see, but at the same time there is social mobility. Since there are no immigration walls it is perfectly possible for poor people to level up and to gain a middle class life.
We liberals don't believe that social inequality in itself is inherently bad or unjust. What is bad is when there are legal barriers that prevent people from leveling up. The UK and all other welfare states have tons of such legal barriers, making the modern feudal states. The Free State will have no such legal barriers, and poor immigrants will recognize this. When poor people come and work in bad jobs (that are still much better than the jobs and salaries at home) they will be able to see and talk to other people who live better lives and that came as poor immigrants a few years earlier. They have worked their way up. There is social mobility for everyone who wants a better life. It is an inspiration to meet people like themselves who have succeeded and climbed out of poverty. Rather than being experienced is unfair the great inequality gather in the Free State is experienced as a path to prosperity. What makes this possible is the social mobility that is impossible in welfare states such as the UK.
Fortunately thanks to communism we have something very close to a social experiment in what socialism does to a society vs something akin to capitalism, namely East-Berlin vs West-Berlin, Hong Kong vs Mao's China, South Korea vs North Korea, Eastern Europe vs Western Europe, the communist states vs the Western states. So we do know what the effects of socialism are, and they are devastating.
No, laissez-faire literally translates as "let be" and it is an idiom which parallels the English idiom "let it be" or "leave us be." I.e. the MEANING of the term is "leave people alone" which is the same as "leave people in peace." Translating idioms is always tricky and if you ask any dual French and English speaker you will learn that I have most certainly been faithful to the meaning of the idiom.
But the discussion technique you are using is one I am very familiar with and I call it focusing on the fly on the wall while ignoring the elephant in the room. That is, you divert the discussion to some irrelevant detail and if you can find even the slightest fault or even something that can be construed to be an error, even if it isn't, you will cease the opportunity greedily so as to avoid dealing with the elephant in the room, the main point to which you have no answer.
This is simply not true. Laissez-faire is the direct cause of eliminating poverty in the world.
Shithead
invisibleplanet
porter des cornes
It's something you've got from an anti-Catholic conspiraloon site. If this is the sole measure of your political ''insight'', then your political insight isn't worth the pixels it's written in.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
So you're backing off from using Chile as an example then?
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
It's a reasonable interpretation of what I said. As for how it is that we dispute the origins and meaning of that cartoon, the point is that we dispute onarchy's confident labelling of that cartoon as the work of 'FRENCH SOCIALISTS'. He labels it thus so that he can spin a tale in which the democratic socialism of the SFIO and similar parties shared an ideological overlap with the NSDAP and its ideological cognates. This insinuation is inconsistent with the evolution of French socialism from the Dreyfus affair onwards, and is inconsistent with key facts concerning the leadership of the SFIO in the 1920s and 1930s. As for your sentence here:
What on earth are you trying to say? Do you mean that the fact that Leon Blum was Jewish demonstrates the deep embeddedness of antisemitism in French socialism? How on earth does the latter follow from the former?
invisibleplanet
porter des cornes
Wrong. "Feud'' comes from ''faide'', ''faida'', a germanic word refering to the ''vengeance'' taken by kin.
''Feu'' refers to land held in feudal tenure - notably this is where the word 'fee' comes from: http://www.word-origins.com/definition/fee.html
etymology said:
The ''connections'' you've made between ''feu'' and ''feud'' are nought but babble. As are the ''connections'' you've been making between socialism and fascism. Google is definitely not your friend
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Actually, Elvis here is, for a change, bang on target.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Actually to tie the two strands of the thread together, this reminds me that a few years back Salvador Allende was the subject of claims that he had been, in the 1930s, an advocate of various obnoxious ideas, including antisemitism, forced sterilisation und so weiter. This is what the wiki page on criticisms of Salvador Allende has to say:
Recent controversy has surrounded Allende's 1933 doctoral dissertation "Mental Hygiene and Delinquency", the subject of a recent book Salvador Allende: Anti-Semitism and Euthanasia by Victor Farías, a Chilean-born teacher at the Latin America Institute of the Free University of Berlin. In his book, Farías claims that Allende held racist, homophobic and anti-semitic views, as well as believing at that time that mental illnesses, criminal behaviour, and alcoholism were hereditary.
Farías' allegations have been challenged by the Spanish President Allende Foundation, which published various relevant materials on the internet, including the dissertation itself[3] and a letter of protest sent by the Chilean Congress (and signed among others by Allende) to Adolf Hitler after Kristallnacht.[4] The Foundation claims[5] that in his thesis Allende was merely quoting Italian-Jewish scientist Cesare Lombroso, whereas he himself was critical of these theories. Farías maintains the affirmations that appear in his book. The President Allende Foundation replied publishing the entire original text of Lombroso[6] and in April 2006 filed an anti-libel claim against Farías and his publisher in the Court of Justice of Madrid (Spain).[7]
Farías paraphrases of Lombroso have been much quoted; for example The Daily Telegraph (UK) reported 12 May 2005 that "Allende… wrote: 'The Hebrews are characterised by certain types of crime: fraud, deceit, slander and above all usury. These facts permits the supposition that race plays a role in crime.' Among the Arabs, he wrote, were some industrious tribes but 'most are adventurers, thoughtless and lazy with a tendency to theft'[8]
The Telegraph's quotation about the Jews appears to be a combination of two sentences that are not adjacent in the dissertation. Both are part of Allende's summary of Cesare Lombroso's views on different "tribes", "races" and "nations" being prone to different types of crime; the latter is misquoted. Allende's passage about the Jews reads "The Hebrews are characterized by certain types of crime: fraud, deceit, defamation and, above all, usury. On the other hand, murders and crimes of passion are the exception." After recounting Lombroso's views, Allende writes, "These data lead one to suspect that race influences crime. Nonetheless, we lack precise data to demonstrate this influence in the civilized world." The passage about Arabs is "Among the Arabs there are some honored and hardworking tribes, and others who are adventurers, thoughtless and lazy with a tendency to theft." There is no statement that the latter applies to "most" Arabs.[3]
Farías further claims to have found evidence that Allende had tried to implement his ideas about heredity during his period as Health Minister 1939-1941, and that he received help from German Nazis E. Brücher and Hans Betzhold in drafting of an unsuccessful bill mandating forced sterilisation of alcoholics. The President Allende Foundation has challenged Farias in the Court of Justice of Madrid (Spain)to prove that any bill on this issue has been proposed by Minister Allende to the Chilean Government or Parliament, and to prove as well Farías' allegation that Allende was bribed by the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop without providing any evidence of it.[7]
Surviving personal friends of Allende have completely rejected the validity of Victor Farías accusations of "racism" and "anti-semitism" for two major reasons: Allende's mother, Laura Gossens Uribe, was of Jewish descent and Allende considered himself a Marxist and socialist internationalist for most of his adult life.
Allende’s supposed “anti-semitism” is left unfounded not only because of Allende’s own Jewish ancestry, which was well known in Chile, but by the fact that it was often used by his political detractors against him. The renowned neo-Nazi intellectual and former Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano (who was the mentor to many in the fascist “Patria y Libertad” movement, which was instrumental in overseeing the CIA’s backed programme of destabilization in Chile) often spoke about Allende’s “Jewishness” or his “Judeo-Bolshevik” agenda.
During his term in office, Allende - who was himself an atheist - supported a more ecumenical approach to national festivities and encouraged participation from the small Chilean Jewish community in celebrating Chile’s Independence Day, which had always been sanctified by the Roman Catholic Church. During his term in office, the Great Rabbi of Santiago, spiritual leader of the Jewish Community, had a principal role in the preparation of an ecumenical service for this event.
Further countering accusations of anti-semitism is the fact that Allende entrusted two of the most important tasks of his government to Chilean Jews: Jacques Chonchol to direct and implemented the successful agrarian reform which completely transformed the country’s agricultural structure, and David Silberman Gurovich, who was in charge of consolidating the nationalization of the most important industry in the country, Codelco-Chuquicamata (the largest open-pit copper mine in the World).
In 1972, Salvador Allende suggested the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal ask the Chilean Supreme Court to extradite former SS Colonel Walter Rauff to Germany. The letters exchanged between Wiesental and President Allende are published in CLARIN.[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Salvador_Allende
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
What drivel. However people want to characterise the former Communist-ruled states-and you'll never get everybody on here to agree on the matter-they did eliminate the direst effects of poverty, eliminate illiteracy and guarantee a basic standard of living and health care. All these things were absent for the vast majority in most of these states beforehand, and remained absent in much of the capitalist world. In my experience, those who grew up in those places, even when highly critical of the system, will tell you that poverty was not an issue for them (poor consumer choice is not poverty), while they are appalled at the bad educational standards and general ignorance among the majority in the UK and elsewhere in the West. There's also no point in trying to conflate the madness of the Stalin and Mao eras with what existed most of the time in most of those other states, which was in no way comparable.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
I for one find Onarchy's arguments 100% convincing and see where I was going wrong by being a murderous socialist who wants to put guns to peoples' heads or something. Thanks for showing me the light Onarchy, you truly are a giant among men.
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