PreteenCommunist - ask me anything ^.^

Because men are natural rapists, at least when they are young. I know I'm going to get a lot of argument on this but I think most men who are honest with themselves will eventually admit it to be true. I quote from the TV show Frazier, "Sex isn't something men use to get what they want, sex IS what they want". I know for a fact that there are LOTS of girls I would have raped if I was dead certain I could get away with it completely and I don't see myself as being that different from most men in that respect.
Mind this doesn't justify or excuse anything, rape or otherwise. Rape. Is. Wrong. but there are some things that routinely override right and wrong in our lives. Survival is one, sex another.
Good answers on the first two paras. You are a persuasive communist.

 

would you feel the same way, if it were socially acceptable for women to simply come up to us and claim, it is our turn to get fornicated into a relationship?

 

I think so, yes. The idea isn't that I even want a relationship, but there have been plenty ot times when I VERY much wanted one particular woman at one time and I am more than certain she did not want me. How do you deal with that without police, assuming that the woman has no family to protect her?

 

Nope; I don't really have time to watch hour-long videos, but you could summarise what went on in the first one?

I don't support the Nordic Model anyway, btw.

 

Where did you get the SJW thing from? I wouldn't want to associate myself with that tumblr radlib crowd.

I can't make heads or tails of the rest of this.

 

Couldn't you briefly respond to the austerity part in particular, then? It'd be better than just making an assertion.

Ok. I have explained this nuance in my position multiple times now. You could lay out the flaws in my clarification or tell me why you found it unclear, but it's disingenuous to act like I never clarified it all.

Right. For the final time:

As you can see, I do not support "big" or "small" government in the abstract, or anything else in the abstract for the matter (I wouldn't have supported communism in Portugal in 1760, for example, and I think early capitalism was wonderful and much-needed but impossible to replicate in current conditions). I recognise, because I have studied capitalist economics - which is how I have basically been able to use Keynesian anti-austerity arguments - that in a market economy, excessive state involvement is counterproductive, and so is insufficient state involvement. But this is utterly unrelated to my opinions on revolution or the mechanics of communist society. I support a transient proletarian dictatorship out of practical necessity, not because of some trite metapolitical belief in the goodness of the state. And this is unrelated to my rather neutral assessment of capitalist fiscal decisions. Additionally, the already vacuous phrases "big" and "small" government have absolutely zero meaning when applied to a transient state whose only purpose is enforcing proletarian interests over what should be a relatively short period of time.

Could I spell it out any clearer than that?

I'm getting rather bored of your assertions.

No, we do not.

It might be a good idea to read posts before replying. Apologies if this whole post sounds agitated, but I'm getting impatient. You're not just failing to do justice to communism and liberalism; you're not actually reading the post to which you are responding.

I wouldn't connect liberal values with religious ones. I mean, the 17th-century thinkers who began the liberal tradition - Locke etc. - were Christian (not in the same sense as someone like Aquinas, though) but the Enlightenment in general simultaneously marked a societal move away from religion and theocracy and the flowering of liberalism. Liberal ideas, although compatible with interpretations of scripture, did not require divine justification and were often outright anti-religion. Just look at how vigorously Voltaire and Rousseau polemicised against religion. But yeah, liberalism is value-driven, I guess. Individual sovereignty, liberty, meritocracy and so on are all values.

Interesting question. The "same issues" thing has literally been answered 10.001 times in this thread, so if you want an answer to the question of why communism never came to be, just go look through the thread because I seriously cannot be asked to answer it for the 10.002nd time. But as for keeping on track ideologically without framing said ideology in terms of values (thanks for not assuming that "equality", whatever the frick that means, is a communist value), I'd say that values in general are something away from which we need to start moving as a society. Axioms are essential for building up a picture of the natural world and metaphysics, but values in essence are the social counterparts of axioms: statements about the importance of certain features in society, like freedom or equality, which are taken for granted. Such quasi-axioms are neither productive or necessary, and end up limiting discourse and causing a sort of "metapolitics" to emerge. This is of great use to the ruling class, for whom obfuscations of social phenomena are useful for perpetuating the current order, but not useful for people who need/want to conceptualise their interests, decision-making and place in society in a concrete manner. So in communism, I could see people making decisions and performing actions based not on "values" but on concrete personal and wider interest. No one will want to make society capitalist once more, if this is what you're getting at, just as no one currently wants to return to feudalism. "Turning back the clocks" never benefits anyone.

 

Didn't know you were a radical feminist!

Now you're going all Freudian on me. I'd agree that sex is something of a basic desire - except for asexual people, of course - but that does not mean that men have a natural tendency to force people into non-consensual sexual acts. Whenever anyone makes a claim about a "natural" element of the human condition, they have an enormous burden of proof, which is extremely difficult if not impossible to fulfil either empirically or theoretically. In fact, the specificity of this tendency to one gender (does it apply to biological women who are men, too?) makes it seem as if it has something to do with men being viewed as "dominant" in all vaguely advanced societies.

Why thank you ^.^

 

You misunderstand the concept. Would you feel the same way, if you had to do All of the other ones, before you could "get" her?

 

I am a feminist in that I agree with Ashley Montagu that women are the superior sex. He started his famous book on this subject as a satire but became convinced of it himself by his own research. There is also good biological reason for that being the case. I don't agree with most feminists in the conclusions I reach from this, though.

Yes, it does apply to women too, though women's natural role as the gatekeeper of reproduction generally overrides the "driving" aspects of sex in them. I think the burden of proof has been met here in that the rescue of women (or men) from predatory people is one of the most basic and often used memes that exist in all of literature.

 

I am probably still misunderstanding here but what would anyone not do to have their heart's desire?

 

you wouldn't need to "rape" anyone if you have to get fornicated into a relationship.

 

I think we're getting off the idea here. I only meant to use this as an illustrative example of the fact that not ALL the things we want would be given us by communism and that man would remain as inhumane as he has always been even in the communist utopia.

I have to wonder if Preteen isn't the adolescent version of my 10 year old niece, whose book reports on her elective summer reading last year included "I and Thou" along with "Being and Nothingness"

 

I'm going to discuss with you, since Ted is an annoying pest and you actually seem to have some sort of intellectual honesty. Anyway, I can't say that all things can be gotten in Communism and that some opression will not exist. The mere idea of Communism itself is a political concept, and therefore must be argued through reason and logic. However, I don't think inhumane treatment will be something in Communism? Why would you want to torture someone? Why murder? Why lying, or cheating, or stealing, or fraud? All of these can be tied back to our society, in which the main cause of mental and physical ills can be linked to capitalism. I know, I'm kinda drinking the ideological kool-aid here, but it still is true.

Wait a minute? Satre? Buber? Whomever these summer reading people in your school are, I must applaud them for excellent taste! In my classes, I didn't get (*)(*)(*)(*) in my High School classes. In fact, I just figured our about Satre a few weeks ago! I'm a total Philistine!

 

Considering the previous failures of communism and that any pre-communist country today is significantly less developed than most capitalist states, and the fact that I value the opinion and ideology of adversaries, can you make a pitch as to why and/or how communism can work in the modern age?

My issues with it simply lie with the fact that creating and eliminating social elites destroy the fabric of society. Eliminating an elite class remove desire for social mobility. And creating a Stalinist impossible elite class that only a few can join destroys the will of the people to work at all. You need strong nationalist and autocratic exertion to get anything done. Anyways, enlighten me, and perhaps change my mind.

 

That's just my point with Preteen though, some people find torture and murder to be fun, and I don't think that has much to do with Capitalism/Socialism one way or another. Some people are just plain right bastards, yes? (two recent movies come to mind here, Child 44 and Leviathan), don't we need police here?

My niece read those books on her own, but reported on them additionally to her regular assignments after she found Harry Potter to be "derivative and hackneyed". Her teacher said it was the first time she couldn't understand a child's writing not because it was incoherent but because it was just beyond her

 

that was the idea.

 

I wonder why communists do not like to talk about Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as this has been THE most perfect communist nation ever on Earth? They did away with the class system, they had the best blending of urban and rural living as stated in the tenets of communism. There was free education in the death camps. There was no private property, the government controlled all means of transportation. And the government had full control of labor in the death camps.

Because the Khmer Rouge followed absolutely almost all the policies of communism, they should be the most beloved by true communist today, but I don't see the love. Why not?

 

Take your head off of your ass and listen for once, the Khmer Rouge was far from a socialist movement.

The Khmer Rouge is a very complicated and unsettling concept to many socialists. Because their movement was such a corruption of the term and the ideas behind it. The Khmer Rouge was a Luddite, Nationalist, Agrarian, Feudalist, and Totalitarian state that meant to turn Cambodia into a racially pure agrarian society rather than socialist federation.

You think socialists want to murder anyone with glasses on just because they look like intellectuals? No, that is insane, the whole Khmer Rouge were made out of madmen who were trust into power by US bombings and Chinese support.

Sure Pol Pot could be argued to have wanted to go to socialism. However socialism is supposed to be is supposed to be classless and stateless, there was an active government that controlled all aspects of life and denyed each citizen's individuality. Not only that, but Communism is far from the agrarian/nationalist abomination that was the Khmer Rouge. It is about taking the technology and infrastructure of capitalist society and getting the entire population to be able to use it together. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge were actively for government ownership of production and a There was a very strong presence of Malthusian ideology behind the Khmer Rouge as well, along with mass exploitation of minorities by the statist criminals.

So please, don't try to throw a strawman and argue how these concepts actually cannot work.

- - - Updated - - -

Take your head off of your ass and listen for once, the Khmer Rouge was far from a socialist movement.

The Khmer Rouge is a very complicated and unsettling concept to many socialists. Because their movement was such a corruption of the term and the ideas behind it. The Khmer Rouge was a Luddite, Nationalist, Agrarian, Feudalist, and Totalitarian state that meant to turn Cambodia into a racially pure agrarian society rather than socialist federation.

You think socialists want to murder anyone with glasses on just because they look like intellectuals? No, that is insane, the whole Khmer Rouge were made out of madmen who were trust into power by US bombings and Chinese support.

Sure Pol Pot could be argued to have wanted to go to socialism. However socialism is supposed to be is supposed to be classless and stateless, there was an active government that controlled all aspects of life and denyed each citizen's individuality. Not only that, but Communism is far from the agrarian/nationalist abomination that was the Khmer Rouge. It is about taking the technology and infrastructure of capitalist society and getting the entire population to be able to use it together. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge were actively for government ownership of production and a There was a very strong presence of Malthusian ideology behind the Khmer Rouge as well, along with mass exploitation of minorities by the statist criminals.

So please, don't try to throw a strawman and argue how these concepts actually cannot work.

 

I think mass murderers are evil, not "mad." They may be mad too, of course, but Nazis who systematically and efficiently committed genocide per a pre-arranged plan were not "mad," just bad.

I don't think hard core Marxist socialists (I don't mean left wing progressives who just want to nationalize the oil companies and the health care system and raise taxes on the rich) ever have mass murder in mind. The problem arises (over and over again) when the people resist the "levelling" impulse of socialist leaders. For some reason, and I don't know what it is exactly, socialist leaders again and again resort to mass murder to maintain their revolutions.

And there are plenty of young marxists on the internet at least that aren't shy about verbalizing their homicidal urges as against "the capitalists." Check our Revleft.

 

I wouldn't. But plenty of communists have wanted to do exactly that. Why? You tell us, but I think it's simply to maintain power.

 

There is no concivable reason to shoot someone just because they 'look' like an intellectual. Seriously, anyone who had glasses during the Khmer Rouge was shot!

Personally, I don't want to see any genocide, be it based on class divisions, racial tensions, etc. Even capitalists, I see them more as fellow victims of the capitalist system.
Precisly, statism in a centralized form always leads to mass violence in order to maintain the power structure. This is actually where I agree with a anarchists, they make good points about this issue.

[/QUOTE]And there are plenty of young Marxists on the internet at least that aren't shy about verbalizing their homicidal urges as against "the capitalists." Check our Revleft.[/QUOTE]

I've actually been on Revleft, I haven't seen any 'KILL ALL CAPITALIST SCUM!'-like comments in there (or as I recall). Most Communists would be perfectly content if capitalists were able to surrender and help in rebuilding a new society, and most who are like the people you describe are zealous newcomers who have no idea what they're talking about.

 

Yes, people are strange things, and sometimes they will harm others and exploit just because they were born that way. However, if that were to happen in a society, I could see the local community or elected council deciding what to do with them.

Incredible, that is one sharp kid you have. Hell, when I was seven I still liked to play with Pokemon and Minecraft and listen to the Amazing Atheist!

 

What do you think about the Left-Communist movement in general? Many people see them either as dead or ultraorthodox and dogmatic, I for one being politically aligned with them see it more as their movement was subverted by more popular movements at the time. Those being Marxism-Leninism and Anarchism.

 

I think it's really hard for Communism to argue with Capitalism's success any more. The death knell of that type of thing appeared to be Marcuse, who seemed to argue that the proletariat were "bought off" by giving them everything they ever wanted. Well, duh, to quote a rather famous Capitalist, that's called "Winning" isn't it? If you're going to argue revolution for revolution's sake to people who are fat and happy you shouldn't expect to get too far, IMO.

I dunno my real objection to communism remains the question of what drives it. When Mikhail Kalishnikov, the Hero of the Soviet Union and inventor of probably the most successful infantry weapon ever devised wanted to come to America for one or another anniversary of the AKI-47 he was flown here on the private jet of George Stoner, inventor of the M-16. Are people really going to put forth the prodigious efforts progress often requires when your only reward is a medal and a small pension?

 

What do you mean by "superior"? I'm generally sceptical of such blanket quantification. Surely what is "superior" depends on the circumstances?

Additionally, adequately measuring superiority is predicated upon the notion that the objects which are to be labelled "superior" or "inferior" have sufficiently simple, defined and constant characteristics to be categorised effectively. Human beings, with their complexities and idiosyncrasies, are not such objects.

Literature is an art form, and art is totally socially mediated.