On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Jul 2022 09:33:22 -0400) it happened Phil Hobbs snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net wrote in snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:
Peaple like McCarthy did see commies everywhere in the US, googgle wikipedia mccarthysism
ByeThen wants a common enemy to destract from his total failure You puppet, you dance,
Simple Simon says: clap your hands ... sort of song comes to mind.
Living under a more direct threat certainly makes you more open-eyed about the world's vulnerabilities, of course.
Today there are really no "commies", those who identify as such are just hypocrites. The real danger comes from the KGB mafia, which has spread its tentacles worldwide. The Chinese are following closely.
I can sympathize with your lost feeling of having all (well, most) the truly criminal statesmen abroad but for me that time meant I had to live under them... (back then I "defected" because of this).
Yeah, we Americans figured McCarthy was excessive, long before Jan did. He has been an historic example for us to avoid. So was Stalin, even for his native Russia.
But there were commies everywhere.
On a sunny day (Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:34:17 -0700) it happened snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Well, "beauty is in the beholders eye" (is the expression), so is evil I think. Are not all commies united in the Demoncrates party these days? Oh wait ... probably a bit more complicatiantiated than that There was an science topic in sci.daily.com about the making an enemy and that making people more happy or something (header all the way down that page) I personally believe more in cooperation, make peace with Russia, China, Iran, better for business, kills less people, sentence war criminals / mass murderers like Dr Faulty and ByeThen to: well what have you these days... Is the last chance for the US, drop the support for that Military Industrial Complex and it political salesmen. Putin is just selling gas US tries to destroy the competition by selling stuff they got using fracking a system that poisons their own people, Bit of a big bully US is... it keeps asking for something, was reading Iran now enriched enough plutonium to make a bomb... US people will have to rise up against that US weapon industry, you are outnumbered many times. US mafia
Not on the present scale.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Oh. Good point.
John Larkin has some very silly ideas. This is just one them.
The US Communist Party membership peaked at 75,000 people in 1940-41. That's not a lot in a population of about 130 million. McCarthy had a famous list of 205 communists who he imagined to be working in the State Department. It never got tested against reality.
People like Phil Hobbs and John Larkin seem to think that everybody more left wing than they are is a communist.
They probably think that Noam Chomsky is a communist - when he is actually an anarcho-syndicalist, which is the group that threw Karl Marx out of the international socialist movement back in 1871 because they (correctly) saw his enthusiasm for the leading role of the (what became the communist) party as undemocratic and likely to lead to tyranny.
It's one of those convenient simplifications that makes life a lot easier, but does tend to lead you into destructive errors.
Perhaps some people feel Chomsky says things better left unsaid? Out of sight, out of mind???
Welcome to a Science-Fiction Planet How George Orwell's Doublethink Became the Way of the World: David Barsamian interviews Noam Chomsky
Barsamian: I've got a little puzzle for you. It's in two parts. Russia's military is inept and incompetent. Its soldiers have very low morale and are poorly led. Its economy ranks with Italy's and Spain's. That's one part. The other part is Russia is a military colossus that threatens to overwhelm us. So, we need more weapons. Let's expand NATO. How do you reconcile those two contradictory thoughts? Chomsky: Those two thoughts are standard in the entire West. I just had a long interview in Sweden about their plans to join NATO. I pointed out that Swedish leaders have two contradictory ideas, the two you mentioned. One, gloating over the fact that Russia has proven itself to be a paper tiger that can't conquer cities a couple of miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens' army. So, they're completely militarily incompetent. The other thought is: they're poised to conquer the West and destroy us. George Orwell had a name for that. He called it doublethink, the capacity to have two contradictory ideas in your mind and believe both of them. Orwell mistakenly thought that was something you could only have in the ultra-totalitarian state he was satirizing in 1984. He was wrong. You can have it in free democratic societies. We're seeing a dramatic example of it right now. Incidentally, this is not the first time. Danke,
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