Absurdly Dangerous Militarization of America's Police

G > Is she a socialist? BS > She was when she was younger. BS > Now she's no more doctrinaire than I am. Do you think you're convincing someone that you're into socialism LIGHT? Maybe you should try to explain how socialism LIGHT is different from socialism. You were once Marxists but now you believe all of the same things, just try very hard to distance yourself from the words of Marx, hence you claim to be less doctrinaire, right? Isn't that a bit like painting a smiley face on the nosecone of an atom bomb? You thought the absurdity would pass? You've never run a small business. You live off your wife. It's easy for you to be a socialist since you are a non-producer, Slowman. That's why you are all in favor of the power of the state.

You seem to share the typical American delusion that socialism and communis m are indistinguishable.

In fact communism branched off from socialism around 1870, and a number of different strands of socialist though have evolved since then.

ialism.

I don't talk about "socialism LIGHT". From time to time I talk about the so cialism that is practiced in Scandinavia and Germany, which is different fr om the socialism practiced in the UK immediately after WW2 and in Sweden ra ther more recently.

ry very hard to distance yourself.

You've got it the wrong way around. Marx and Engels more or less invented s ocialism - in the 1848 Communist Manifesto

The socialist movement threw out Marx in 1870 for his undemocratic attitude to "the leading role of the party", correctly predicting that it would lea d to worse tyrannies than the capitalists societies of the time.

Marx wrote a very large number of words. Quite a few of them were remarkabl y informative. Others were plain wrong. Linus Pauling got two Nobel prizes for being almost right in different areas. Being almost right can be remark ably helpful.

atom bomb?

Far from it.

The absurdity is all yours.

Many people don't.

I'm retired, and my wife's income is higher than mine. That's not exactly " living off".

I'm retired. I was productive as long as anybody was prepared to hire me, w hich lasted a bit over thirty years. I was just as socialist when I was emp loyed.

I'm all in favour of the state intervening in the free market to correct it s imperfections. Health, education, welfare, defense, law and order (includ ing anti-monopoly activity) aren't well handled by the free market, as the Victorians had worked out before 1900 (with a little guidance from Marx and Engels, amongst others).

You seem to be incapable of realising that there are range of possible int erventions, with the centrally planned economy being well to the left of an ything that can be expected to work well, and the current US system being n early as impractical in the opposite direction.