Subject:
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Re: socialism etc. (was: Re: Blue Hopper Car Mania...)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 19 Nov 1999 00:49:16 GMT
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Viewed:
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1137 times
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On Thu, 18 Nov 1999 19:04:34 GMT, Christopher Weeks
<clweeks@eclipse.net> wrote:
> Jasper Janssen wrote:
> >
> > If you come home, find someone there, and shoot him, you have shot
> > down an innocent man and therefore deserve to be punished. That is
> > what "innocent until proven guilty" means.
>
> Well....I disagree. But he was proven guilty. He proved it to me by
> raping my wife. Under your world view, what would be the appropriate
He was proven guilty to you because you saw him. When was it that you
said "I don't want to play judge, jury, and executioner"? Oh, right,
four messages up.
> response to finding yourself in that situation? Calling the police?
I'd probably start off by grabbing a poker and trying to beat him
senseless. Should I happen to have a gun, and know how to use it
(which both are highly hypothetical, but that aside), I'd probably
start off trying to threaten him into leaving, and only shoot at last
resort. Certainly not as first solution.
Or I'd go blind-bull-seeing-red mad and clobber the guy to death. But
I don't _think_ I'd think I should be able to get away with it.
> It is my opinion that the courts aren't really in the business of
> _proving_ guilt anyway. Not in any rigorous sense. It's more like
> suggesting guilt and playing probabilities against one another. All you
> have to (usually) do is convince a jury that person x is guilty. When I
> have been on juries I have been impressed by two things: the genuine
> concern that the members gave to the issue, and their simple mindedness.
> I certainly wouldn't want my fate resting in their hands with some
> tricky prosecutor guiding them to whatever conclusion he wanted.
So you want your fate resting in the hands of $RANDOM_CITIZEN who
thinks you were trying to hold him up because you "looked funny",
instead. If you don't trust the courts, the solution is to make the
courts and the law more rliable. Not to allow vigilante justice.
> A socialist system (from my understanding of the vernacular) is one in
> which social programs exist to equalize or take care of some members of
> society who through whatever mechanism don't make as much money as the
> norm. My dictionary says that socialism is "a social system in which
> the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and
> political power is exercised by the whole community." I think we have
> to accept that socialism as defined is a fictional extreme opposite
> hard-line anarchocapitalism, another fiction. So most systems are
> closer to one extreme than the other.
Agreed. Full-out-socialist is Bad. Providing a baseline
standard-of-living is, IMHO, Good, but let's keep that issue for
another thread, huh?
> The US seems socialist from the inside to those of us who want it to be
> less so and particularly to those who've never lived anywhere else. (My
> first two years, spent in Europe, don't count.)
>
> And I think that technically I could argue that the US fits that
> definition perfectly but you would have to buy into (or at least accept
> for the argument) my attitude toward property rights.
From what I've heard, there are no country-regulated unemployment
benefits, zero-to-none regulated pension plans, and welfare only if
you have underage kids.
Doesn't fit that definition in my opinion. Certainly not in comparison
to even the more right-of-centre parties here (which would probably be
called "the bloody loony utter left" in the US, or so I hear).
> > Because there may not be a way to correct the deficits.
>
> How so? I suppose if the system really FUBARred and destroyed humanity,
> that would be uncorrectable. But short of that, the system could be
> scrapped and the process of governance started over.
If it merely destroyed the US economy (not just a slump, but truly
destroyed), it is debatable what would happen - but one possible
outcome would be that with US _and_ the USSR essentially
anarchocapitalistic (once you lose the governments..), the
technological world we have now would cease to exist. And once that
happens, there is arguably not really any way for it to start up
again.
The current technology-based, Western-European society (for that is
today the origgin of all the dominant societies), started out in
Sumeria, Egypt, Greece. Around that region, for one example petroleum
simply bubbled to the surface. No digging required. Same for coal,
which made the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age possible
(you can't smelt iron ore with wood or charcoal fires - they don't
burn hjot enough). All those surface deposits have long since been
mined away, just like the near-surface deposits of everything from oil
to copper and tin ores, and even flint.
>
> Or do you mean that there's no solution? If that's what you mean, I
> might agree. I fear that basically, someone has to eat $h!t so that
> others can live better. I don't like that though.
This is _currently_ the case.
With continuing automation, pretty soon the unskilled labour demand
will continue to decline, and without some sort of social security, or
whatever you want to call it, those people are going to turn into
mobs. And nothing resists a mob... See the French Revolution, Russian
Revolution, heck, see the American revolution.
Jasper
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