Ron Paul & Glenn Beck Promote Right Wing Terrorism

[ilaughatrightwingers]

Run time: 10:17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GR8QOHOa2M   Posted on YouTube: July 19, 2010 By YouTube Member: MaoistRebelNews2 Views on YouTube: 1656   Posted on DU: September 16, 2010 By DU Member: ilaughatrightwingers Views on DU: 1044

 
Ron Paul fanatics and Glenn Beck fanatics were behind several acts of would-be domestic terrorism, yet their influences were ignored by most US media. What gives?

[Scuba]

1. So the tactic is to ....

So the tactic is to

A. Get the message out.

and

B. Discredit the message by having the messenger appear to be on the fringe.

[izquierdista]

2. You got B right....

He would be taken more seriously if he had Krusty the Klown hair and a spinning bow tie.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

4. RE: You got B right....

Whether you agree with his political views or not, you can't deny that right-wing extremism is becoming a major problem due to people's frustrations and their worship of Ron Paul and Glenn Beck.

[izquierdista]

5. Agree?

I think that historians agree that Mao put China through the Great Leap Backwards, and that the Soviet Union fell apart due to its own, internal problems. Drawing on those two images is not very inspiring and makes me think he is stuck in the '60s, siding with the "yes, we can make Communism work" leftists. If he was really serious, he would ditch the props and point out some of their policies that actually worked and build on that.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

6. Capitalism works?

How is capitalism any better? Capitalist systems have caused huge amounts of poverty in the so-called "third world" and is destroying the planet. People's lives are dominated by money and consumerism, not because those particular people are "irresponsible" but because the system they were born into causes it. If the deaths in Mao's China and the USSR show the "failure" of state communism then why don't the millions of workplace related deaths or world hunger show the failure of capitalism?

[izquierdista]

7. Did I say that?

The Soviet Union is a failed (past tense) state. Didn't work. Had to close up shop and have a liquidation sale. Similarly, China has spent 35 years backpedaling from the track Mao put it on. Where you sit in society really determines whether communism or capitalism works better for you.

If you are of a working class background, no family wealth to inherit (which pretty much is the majority of most populations), capitalism offers you all sorts of stuff to buy, and in doing so, there are jobs where you can make money to buy some of that stuff. Communism makes sure you have education, health care, public transportation, electricity, heat, and basic food commodities, and in doing so, they assign you to a job that needs to be done in providing all that. Capitalism fails by only providing the carrot, a limited number of prizes that go to the greediest and leave out the poor, sick, elderly, and other ignored classes of people. Communism fails by only providing the basics, and restricting the innovative, resourceful, and creative from accumulating more and possibly rising above the rest of the classless society.

There is a happy medium, which is found in societies that pick from socialism and capitalism. If you want a society where everyone is educated, then the government needs to provide quality education to all the children. If you want a society where everyone is healthy, then the government needs to have a plan that includes how to provide health care to everyone. If you want a society where people can have the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, then the government needs to either provide it or make sure that fair and free markets exist and people can access them. Planned economies have enough to deal with providing the big things: education, health care, public transport, etc., that they should let the market take care of less important things like how many tomatoes or turnips to plant for this year.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

8. Not buying it (mind the pun)

"If you are of a working class background, no family wealth to inherit (which pretty much is the majority of most populations), capitalism offers you all sorts of stuff to buy, and in doing so, there are jobs where you can make money to buy some of that stuff."

The problem with this argument is that workers' wages under capitalism are far lower than the amount they need to afford their basic needs. Wages haven't gone up since the 1970's while prices have, via capitalists trying to make more money.

"Communism fails by only providing the basics, and restricting the innovative, resourceful, and creative from accumulating more and possibly rising above the rest of the classless society. "

Strawman. Marx emphasized innovation by making products that would make society better as opposed to useless commodities which only exist to make capitalists rich. In the USSR and Mao's China there were great technological advances, only those advances were for human need and not capitalist greed.

"There is a happy medium, which is found in societies that pick from socialism and capitalism."

Just like how there was a "happy medium" in societies that picked from both chattel slavery and wage labor (wage slavery)? Sorry, but your argument does absolutely nothing to prove the morality of capitalism. Chattel slaves had a much better standard of living in 1850 than they had in 1750; does that justify slavery?

[izquierdista]

10. Marxbots gone wild

OK, I'll take up the challenge of trying to get you to actually synthesize a new view instead of trot out the standard Marxist line.

Marx may have emphasized innovation, but you didn't get that from Brezhnev and his cronies. Innovation stopped in the USSR after Khruschev, and it was run as a party oriented kleptocracy, not much different from capitalist kleptocracies. If you travel around the USSR and look for the technological advances, they pretty much stop around 1965.

How did you infer that I said chattel slaves had a better standard of living in 1850? They didn't. Any advances from 1750 to 1850, no matter what the source, are going to accrue to the upper classes first, and then only when something becomes too cheap to give away will the slaves be given the throw-aways. You see this in the modern world with shipments of used clothes to poor countries. If you go to a very poor country (say Mali or Niger), people are wearing cast-offs from the west instead of their traditional garb. It is a hook that capitalism uses to hook them into the global marketplace, part of that "all sorts of stuff to buy, and in doing so, there are jobs where you can make money to buy some of that stuff" I referred to earlier.

I think you misunderestimate me if you think I am trying to prove the "morality of capitalism". I will be the first to point out that capitalism as practiced by its most amoral invention, the corporation, is only about money. Since it is only about the money, my argument is that it should be tightly controlled, maybe even supplanted by a socialist, planned distribution for basic needs. However, I would allow it to operate freely in the area of luxuries, consumer goods, entertainment, fashion, and other things that aren't basic needs.

If you are game to consider another example of the failure of Communist central planning, consider the agricultural planning that goes on in North Korea. However you might view them as representative of Communism in total, their agricultural planning has followed a classic Communist approach with collectivization, mechanization, and chemicalization (I don't think that was a word until Kim Il Sung coined it). It's led to them being food insecure where agronomists who have studied their situation have maintained that they could still be food self-sufficient. (http://38north.org/2010/05/why-north-korea-could-feed-itself/) It's a pretty big screw up when you cause a famine in a country where the national dish is pickled cabbage.

I'm not going to advocate or try to "prove the morality of capitalism". Neither am I going to give classic Communism or Marxism as it was practiced a pass either. I am going to look at both critically, see what works in a Utilitarian manner (the greatest good for the greatest number) and advocate for that. I think Cuba has been a good model of what works. When their inputs from the Soviet Union were cut off, similar to the North Korean situation, they responded by a wholesale change in agriculture, implementing community farming in urban areas and actually improving food availability; and that did use some free market capitalist elements.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

11. Capitalism is still worse

All you've done is rant about the low living standards in once-socialist countries. N. Korea is in poverty due to decades of embargos and sanctions. Same with Cuba.

I brought up the slavery argument to show that a rise in living standards doesn't mean the system which caused those standards to go up is moral. Under capitalism, I am a slave to my boss. Unless I'm lucky I have almost no autonomy. Even if I'm able to quit my job and become my own boss it still doesn't justify the oppression (if I told you the fundamentalist government in Iran was okay because any Iranian can get up and leave you would say I was out of it).

Maybe marxist-leninist style communism isn't the complete answer, but capitalism in its entirety has to be done away with.

[izquierdista]

12. OK, now we agree

Capitalism would be better done away with. Unfortunately, it seems to be the default setting for getting goods from one place to another absent a planned economy. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the only way goods got to the masses was by people traveling and trading, creating markets as has been done since ancient times. Now central planning takes a lot of effort (at least to do it right), and that planning is better used on the big things in life, education, medical care, transportation, etc., and get those right, than trying to plan every aspect of the economy down to shoelaces and nail clippers.

I'd also justify my outlook ("rant" as you call it) by pointing out that if central planning results in uniformly low living standards, it's not very good planning. The Chinese since Mao have been doing quite a bit of good planning, as the average Chinese has seen his living standards go up. Too bad they won't tax the riches that go into high rise buildings a little more to take care of the environmental horrors that seem to be cropping up.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

13. There are other ways

For example, Spanish labor unions created a free anti-capitalist stateless society from 1936-39. No totalitarianism involved.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

14. Example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUig0lFHDDw

Proof that socialism/workers' control CAN work.

[Crowman1979]

3. His argument fell flat once I saw the soviet flag and the word Maoist.

There's a certain Beatles lyric that comes to mind when I saw this video.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

9. Regardless

People need to be aware of right-wing extremism.

If this guy were against cancer, would you be for cancer because he is a maoist?

[redixdoragon]

15. More to the point

Would you ignore the important comments on cancer simply because a Marxist delivered them?

I think the better song to think about in this matter is not the beetles one, but John Lennon's "Imagine."

Remember, seperate your ideas of political and economic styles. A democratic communistic state could exist as easily as a oligarchical capitalist system. Or A Gerintocric Mercantilist system

[ilaughatrightwingers]

16. Truth

I'm not a fan of authoritarian communism, but I think it would be much better than capitalism of any form.

[ilaughatrightwingers]

17. Wow

Only 499 views on DU? When that Delaware chick gets thousands???