Asita said:
And efforts to curtail an investigation, fire the prosecutor and then attempting to cover up that attempted firing, trying to influence testimony, trying to influence a jury...these go well beyond "disliking being investigated". You are trying to handwave some very serious attempts to interfere with several criminal proceedings.
I'm not handwaving attempts, because something would have to be attempted. Curtailing an investigation with no real purpose is neither illegal nor immoral. Once again, the only actions the investigation even arguably found guilty of was trying to interfere with the investigation itself and failing. Maybe, just maybe, he wanted the investigation over, because as someone who didn't conspire with foreign agents, he knew personally the whole thing was a waste of time. Remember, not only did he not conspire with the Russians, he also didn't prevent the Mueller investigation from running its due course. He wanted to, but you're drawing a line from "wanting to end the investigation" to "trying to obstruct the investigation" and that line isn't there. I don't think highly of Donald Trump, and I could buy the "he intended to obstruct justice but was too incompetent to do it" angle if he hadn't said over and over and over "I can fire Mueller whenever I want, but I'm not doing that." He wasn't secretly plotting against the investigation and failing because people wouldn't do his dirty work the way they're spinning it, he was publicly railing against the investigation, expressing on television his power to end it whenever he wants, and cooperating anyway. Like, is there anything in this report about Trump you didn't know before that you do now? A single piece of information? It was all public the whole time! Where are these attempts to obstruct the investigation?
Agema said:
Which communists?
The old Soviet/Maoist style regimes certainly weren't liberal. According to Marxist theory, communism ends with the withering away of the state and so also centralised law and control - socialist libertarianism. The old Eastern bloc, by Marxist theory, was actually in a transitional phase between capitalism and communism. Whilst there still are Maoists / Leninists etc., the failure of those states has led a lot of modern communists to pursue communism by other means, and they tend to be liberal / libertarian.
I would argue all communists aren't liberal, but I guess that is me making assertions beyond the definitions. The way I see it, liberal theories are largely based on the supposition that an uncorrupted person will use their power and influence in accord with reason and morality, where I don't think communist frameworks really allow for the possibility of someone having power or influence and not being inherently corrupt. Liberals can desire a shared prosperity, but wouldn't tear down the mechanisms that provided it. It's cynicism that demands the absolute equality where the state ceases to exist, where no human being can be trusted to lead. There's a tragic irony that the failure of every communist state by dictatorship is itself sort of evidence of the premise of communism. Really tragic.
Saelune said:
Now don't get me wrong, I am well aware that many political labels have long been twisted into meaning different things. You yourself are trying to make people think communism is inherently hedonistic, which it is not.
But socialism gets its name from society, the idea being that society should look after the people that is part of it, that we should take care of each other to better our society.
So yeah, it is socialism, because it is society. I will give you the benefit of the doubt here, if you think people helping each other is good, then you need to stop being mistaken into thinking 'socialism' is this evil thing that Fox News and Trump wants you to think it is. Socialism is people helping people.
I am not saying all communists are hedonists. Me saying "hedonistic communists" was not meant to suggests all communists are hedonists anymore than the phrase "vanilla ice cream" suggests all ice cream is vanilla. And while I understand the misunderstanding the first time, I've said already that I'm sure there are non-hedonistic communists. Like, I said that.
My problem with communism is the motivation, it's not "people helping people". Communism is a philosophy on societal behavior I won't agree with.
My problem with socialism isn't always the motivation. I wouldn't always call it "people helping people", and if I did, I'd call it "people trying to help people" because sometimes they fail, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt that most advocates of socialism are trying to help (except most of the people in Congress advocating socialism because, ironically, the market has demanded that of them). My problem with socialism is that it's an answer to a problem we don't have. Socialism answers the problem of distribution rather than scarcity, and its success relies on a post-scarcity economy. To take all the wealth and put it in a pot and divvy it up evenly is to not understand the level of effort people put into creating that wealth. People work very, very hard to overcome the scarcity of resources so that everyone can have food and water and shelter (and modern things like electricity and transportation and communication and entertainment). There is no way everyone works as hard as they do without receiving any benefit from it beyond the equal share they're promised to begin with.
You can demonstrate the post-scarcity outlook in the things that are socialized. Take roads, for example. Everyone gets to use roads equally, but there's a cost to this. Free market devotees are almost certainly right to say roads would be less expensive and higher quality if provided by the free market, but leave out that some roads would never be built and the ones that are would likely not be equally available to everyone. To have that equal scenario, we accept the gross expense and throw money at infrastructure until demand is filled and scarcity effectively disappears from the equation. We act as if roads are functionally limitless, and if we need more manpower or resources to make that happen, we aim more money at it to draw those resources from other parts of the economy.
You can't do that with everything, you run out of resources to use and people to use them eventually. We just don't have the collective wealth to fulfill everyone's desires equally. So if you try to ensure economic equality, you end up having to put limits on industries beneath the demand for them. And when you artificially limit something, you decrease productivity or efficiency from the level there would be without that limit. And then for the sake of solving the problem of wealth distribution, you've aggravated the fundamental problem of scarcity, from which we have yet to escape, assuming we ever do.
If we lived in a world where we could meet all of our needs without people working themselves to the bone, I think socialism would work fine as a method of distribution of goods and services. I'd be all for ensuring a high level of healthcare for everyone if it didn't require the doctors and nurses to drive themselves ragged to provide that. But we don't have that. If we want more better healthcare, someone has to provide that, probably someone working very hard, and someone who's (likely greater) productivity has been pulled from whatever else they would be doing.
