What does Socialism look like to you?

[zeitgeist]

What can you say to this one? 

The starry eyed messenger is way out there in la la land.  Warning: This is a target rich environment of stupid idealism, a two bong dorm room discussion in full bloom.

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/10242689

Starry Messenger (20,947 posts)


What does Socialism look like to you?

We often have conversations on what it is--but I'm interested more in what we imagine when we think of life in a socialist society.
 
For me, I picture life in the US with an expanded and more robust version of the WPA, with public programs to bring up living standards, full unionization with workers running the bulk of decision-making processes.
 
I see the arts and education fully funded, with opportunities that are not dependent on corporations wanting to make a buck on you and your skills. Children from all backgrounds would be able to go on as far with their education as they hope to.
 
The removal of privatized monopolies from our public resources, our living needs should not be dependent on whims of profit. Our news and airwaves would be expanded into more public programming.
 
I have a long list, but my last one for this entry would be the return of public space exploration. I'd rather not see capitalism move out into outer space.
 
Anyone else with a wish list?

Lots and lots of stupid, way too much to bring over.  Grab an air sick bag and take a peek at this one.   

[I_B_Perky]

Starry Messenger (20,947 posts)


What does Socialism look like to you?

We often have conversations on what it is--but I'm interested more in what we imagine when we think of life in a socialist society.
 
For me, I picture life in the US with an expanded and more robust version of the WPA, with public programs to bring up living standards, full unionization with workers running the bulk of decision-making processes.
 
I see the arts and education fully funded, with opportunities that are not dependent on corporations wanting to make a buck on you and your skills. Children from all backgrounds would be able to go on as far with their education as they hope to.
 
The removal of privatized monopolies from our public resources, our living needs should not be dependent on whims of profit. Our news and airwaves would be expanded into more public programming.
 
I have a long list, but my last one for this entry would be the return of public space exploration. I'd rather not see capitalism move out into outer space.
 
Anyone else with a wish list?

Well dummie... all that shit you want got to be paid for. So are you willing to give up 80-90 percent of your welfare check to achieve your socialist nirvanna?

[Dori]

Well dummie... all that shit you want got to be paid for. So are you willing to give up 80-90 percent of your welfare check to achieve your socialist nirvanna?

Where do they think they'll get the money to pay for these socialist wet-dreams?

[Delmar]

What does Socialism look like to you?

http://therealsouthkorea.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/disturbing-south-koreas-version-of-the-killing-fields/

[I_B_Perky]

Where do they think they'll get the money to pay for these socialist wet-dreams?

Taxes on cheetos and pot?   

[Duke Nukum]

Starry Messenger (20,947 posts)


What does Socialism look like to you?

Detroit MI.

You're welcome!

[98ZJUSMC]

Well dummie... all that shit you want got to be paid for.

Of course, wiNgnUtZ!!!!1111!!  We're gonna tax the RICH!!!eLeVeNty!!11!!

Oh wait...no capitalist rich guys..... to steal from .....anymore?

Detroit MI.

You're welcome!

[I_B_Perky]

Starry Messenger (20,947 posts)


What does Socialism look like to you?

Camden, NJ?

Straight from NBC!!!!

[jukin]

Misery for all and death to hundreds of millions. Just like it always has.

The worst genocides of the 20th Century
Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) 49-78,000,000
Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) 23,000,000 (the purges plus Ukraine's famine)
Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) 12,000,000 (concentration camps and civilians WWII)
Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44) 5,000,000 (civilians in WWII)
Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-20) 1,200,000 Armenians (1915) + 350,000 Greek Pontians and 480,000 Anatolian Greeks (1916-22) + 500,000 Assyrians (1915-20)
Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79) 1,700,000
Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94) 1.6 million (purges and concentration camps)
Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78) 1,500,000
Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970) 1,000,000
Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982) 900,000
Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994) 800,000
Suharto (East Timor, West Papua, Communists, 1966-98) 800,000
Saddam Hussein (Iran 1980-1990 and Kurdistan 1987-88) 600,000
Tito (Yugoslavia, 1945-1987) 570,000
Fumimaro Konoe (Japan, 1937-39) 500,000? (Chinese civilians)
Jonas Savimbi (Angola, 1975-2002) 400,000
Mullah Omar - Taliban (Afghanistan, 1986-2001) 400,000
Idi Amin (Uganda, 1969-1979) 300,000
Yahya Khan (Pakistan, 1970-71) 300,000 (Bangladesh)
Benito Mussolini (Ethiopia, 1936; Yugoslavia, WWII) 300,000


Of course this is not the socialism the DUchebag Low IQers think of. It is the socialism of reality.

[Freeper]

jody (26,624 posts)
1. I like China's approach to socialism of limiting women to one baby and eventually using genetic
 
prenatal testing to select babies with superior intellectual potential.

Don't know whether to add the sarcasm thingy or not.

At DU you better use the sarcasm thingy, because views like this are not uncommon at DU.

patrice (46,273 posts)
4. China is Communist, which is more authoritarin than many varieties of Socialism are. nt

They both lead to the same exact path, no liberty and death to those who dare stand up to them.


The problem with socialism is eventually you will run out of other people's money. Hell it's happening here we have lived under a hybrid of capitalism and socialism for many years and now we are broke. We ignored the founders and the Constitution and now we have nothing but debt and more and more people in poverty to show for all that debt.

[miskie]

EOM.

[Freeper]

EOM.

Yeah looks great don't it?

[Vagabond]

What does socialism look like to me, Starry Messanger?

It looks like a jack boot heel smashing down on a human face over and over again for generations until, having exhausted it's host (the face), the boot collapses.  

In it's wake it leaves a broken and defeated people who don't have the pride of their nation's past nor the strength of their own will nor the knowledge from past entrepreneurial efforts to fight off the new vultures that will quickly come to feed upon them.

I see a people told lies and never, ever allowed to hear anything that contradicts the lies.  A people who after almost sixty years of glorious feudal communism are inches shorter and pounds lighter than their brothers to the south.  A people who place entire families into prison death camps because one among the family's number failed to cry hard enough.

I see people who chopped arms off of kids for conspiring with the imperialist capitalists, because the imperialist capitalists had given them childhood immunizations at no charge.  I see men who starved entire populations mainly because those people could not abide having their property stolen.  I see men that spread depredation and torture around the world in their effort to subject everyone to their version of paradise.  I see DUmmies that complain bitterly when other, better, men stopped the aspirations of this collection of villians.

Mostly, I see a jack boot heel smashing down on a human face.

[txradioguy]

Starry Messenger (20,947 posts)


What does Socialism look like to you?

That's easy:

[JohnnyReb]

What does Socialism look like to you? .....a dead end street.

[AprilRazz]

jody (26,624 posts)
1. I like China's approach to socialism of limiting women to one baby and eventually using genetic
 
prenatal testing to select babies with superior intellectual potential.

Don't know whether to add the sarcasm thingy or not.

Actually they are using prenatal testing right now so they can abort the girls.

[zeitgeist]

In a way I feel sorry for the folks at the DUmp.  There are a few who actually get it but they are throttled in any attempt to speak out.  It is the nature of the collective.  There are also some committed (or who should be committed), Marxists, (both Grocho and Karl) and loose cannon anarchists who posted verbose boring screeds.  The rank and file, however, are just as mother described them to me years ago, useful idiots who believe the pablum they have been fed by the public education system.

It becomes apparent that the majority of them think that under a socialist system they would be free to sit in a tree and learn to play the flute while sombody else cleans the bathroom.  There will be a classless society.  For the most part they swim in the shallow end of the pool imagining life will be as they dream it, not as it has been proven to be over and over again.  Human nature always wins.  Why I feel sorry for them is that they have no way of having an open discussion about the issue over at the DUmp.   I do believe they are capable of change if they could discuss the truth but that is not the way DU or any socialist enterprise is set up.  Any one not Starry's caution against 'red baiting' on her thread?  Der Skinner has allowed his board to wallow in the swill filled trough of socialism for sometime now.  I wonder how it will effect the brand "DemocraticUnderground" ?  

In a worker's paradise it seems the emphasis is always on WORK, not workers, and certainly not paradise.  And just a heads up for the lurking DUmmies, they send the teachers to the farms (re-education camps) first.

I met many of the first wave who left Cuba.  I still remembr their stories.

[BlueStateSaint]

What does socialism look like?







Any questions?

[I_B_Perky]

jody (26,624 posts)
1. I like China's approach to socialism of limiting women to one baby and eventually using genetic
 
prenatal testing to select babies with superior intellectual potential.

Don't know whether to add the sarcasm thingy or not.

Well dummie... if that ever happened here the dem/liberal base would dry up within a generation.

[chitownchica]

I like the way StarryMessenger asks people to discuss their views of socialism, and then throws the 'protected forum' card when the view doesn't match his. Not surprising, but definitely hilarious. 

[Vagabond]

I met many of the first wave who left Cuba.  I still remembr their stories.

My Spanish Teacher told me once about her family coming to America.  She was proud to tell us that she had been among the top math students in her country.  Castro had taken over and they realized that everything was not going to be alright.  The purges were starting.  They bought tickets to Mexico intending to fly to Miami after getting to Mexico.  As her mother, father, older brother and two sisters were boarding the plane, a couple of soldiers pulled her brother out of line and told him that he could not leave because he was of age for military service.  Her mother told her father to go a with the girls and they would have everything cleared up and be on the next flight.  It was the last she ever saw or heard of her mother and brother.

I met a real estate agent that had left near the same time, but a little later a seven year old girl at the time.  She told of her mother and her hiding in a field near her house as Castro's thugs arrived with their lists.  Her father was on the list as having been a stooge of the old regime.  His great crime was serving as the postmaster of his town.  She remembers parts of that day of terror and of towns people shuttling her and her mother to the docks and onto a boat to escape.  As she was loaded onto the boat she saw her father hanging from a nearby street lamp.  It's her last memory of her father and Cuba.

One of my girlfriend's mother told me of escaping Cuba in a raft in the mid 1970s.  Her friends told her they were going and she had heard stories about the freedom in America.  Her parents wanted her to leave and gave her everything they could.  They were discovered by a charter fishing boat captained by one of the original Cubans that fled and brought to America.  It was the last time she saw her parents.

[Karin]

Someone made a suicide run.  I liked the name.

Response to Oakenshield (Reply #95)
Indoctrinated idiots    Message auto-removed

Response to Starry Messenger (Original post)
Sun Nov 25, 2012, 04:50 PM
 Jackpine Radical (36,284 posts)
3. Worker-owned industries

with various stakeholders (consumers, environmentalists, etc.) on the boards.

Production geared to real needs rather than trying to create needs to justify production. Zero economic growth combined with zero population growth.

Shorter work weeks at the same pay as an alternative to unemployment as productivity increases.

Higher pay for shittier jobs, and attention paid to making those jobs less shitty.

Everybody's dirt poor until the day they die.  Better have killed all your kids except one before you go, too. 

[Gina]

Say you get your wish and everything is paid for, do you think those low information voters will start acting right?  or are they always going to be lowlifes?  are they going to try to get an education and make themselves better and their children? 

[thundley4]

I see the arts and education fully funded,

I want to sit around with finger paints and paper and the government should provided my every need and want.

[Maxiest]

As I have posted on here before.  I spent many of my younger years in a socialist country.  Although they are still socialist on social issues they have moved their markets to more of a capitalist type market and have seen some of the largest growth in the world because of it.

Anyway, these DUmmies have no idea...  There was almost was no middle class there.  The rich and powerful ran everything and there was more corruption than you could shake a stick at.  You think they gave a **** about some kid born in a rice field?  You think that kid in a rice field will ever be the rich or powerful?  **** no.

Well, your own Obama is proof that you can come from nothing to becoming the rich, powerful, and the freaking President of the US.  Although he was used, it's possible.  It's not in any socialist country.

You think being born into some wealth and privilege here is bad?  You have no clue...