(02-06-2019 10:42 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(02-06-2019 10:29 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(02-06-2019 07:30 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(02-06-2019 06:19 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  My discussion with a young (25) socialist (Sanders supporter) leads me to believe they actually do want socialism in the US. He said nobody needs more than $200K to live happily, and called for the confiscation of all wealth above that to be redistributed to the poor. So I cut his share of my will to $200K.

No doubt there are socialists in the US. There are also nazis that suppprt Trump...

There are also UFO theorists and Bigfoot hunters, and undoubtedly some of each voted for somebody for President.

The socialists in the US nearly nominated somebody, Sanders, who identified himself as socialist. It took some interference on the part of the DNC to lock Sanders out. But it is safe to say that about 40% perhaps more of the Democratic base supported the socialist.

OTOH, no Republican candidate ran as a nazi, none wanted their support, and any nazi votes in the primaries were neglible in their effect, possibly less important than the votes of the Bigfoot hunters.

Lots more socialists in the US than Nazis. LOTS more.

Not the same, Lad, and surprised you make this silly argument. But you are surprising me less and less daily.

Bernie ran as a democratic socialist and was pretty explicit that he didn't want government to own the means of production and would still rely upon the free market to drive the economy.

http://time.com/4121126/bernie-sanders-d...socialism/

Again, this gets to my comment to George - the rights inability to not call everything that is on the liberal end of the spectrum "socialist" has resulted in the word completely losing its meaning. I mean, Tanq won't even take the dictionary's definition of it...

It wasn’t the right that called Sanders a socialist — it was Sanders who did. I’m not sure how ignorant Sanders is, but I’m quite sure that he counted on appealing to the ignorant — the sort who put up Che Guevara posters, cheer for the Castro regime (because if conservatives oppose it, it must be good!), and insist with straight faces that poor Marx is just misunderstood and that next time, socialism won’t kill anything like the hundreds of millions that it has killed all the other times.

It seems that we agree that (1) today’s leftists claim to embrace socialism and (2) socialism is bad. Lad’s explanation is that leftists don’t really embrace anything bad; they just got confused by bad rightists. My explanation is that they really do embrace something bad, because (in most cases*) they are too ignorant to realize that it’s actually bad.

Between the two, “socialism-embracers are ignorant” seems the far simpler explanation, and consistent with the general prevalence of historical, economic, and other ignorance among the self-declared hip. Cortez seems to be a pretty good Exhibit A.

And speaking of prevailing trends: it cannot escape notice that one theory posits that the leftists in question are victims who are not responsible for their own pronouncements, while the other presumes that they are responsible for their own pronouncements, including their stupid ones.

*I say “in most cases” because some of the leftists embrace the bad thing not ignorantly, but knowingly. Before he became prominent, Barrack Obama was pretty clear that, if left to his own devices, he would be an active redistributionist. To his explicitly stated frustration, but to the world’s great good, republics do not leave presidents to their own devices.