The Rise of Far Left Extremism

[Metamorph]

OK, let's say everything you've said is true and absolutely none of it is propaganda. Does any of that matter at all? People give up food and housing and doctors and life for more abstract values. In Cuba you can't pursue more abstract values. Enlightenment liberalism came about as the result of many different religions meeting together. If America's statistics look a pretty as a religious martyr being tormented to death, that's to be expected. Show me all the cultural achievements from Cuba. The only one I can think of is the Cuba libré and I'm not sure that counts.

[Muddy]

OK, let's say everything you've said is true and absolutely none of it is propaganda. Does any of that matter at all? People give up food and housing and doctors and life for more abstract values. In Cuba you can't pursue more abstract values. Enlightenment liberalism came about as the result of many different religions meeting together. If America's statistics look a pretty as a religious martyr being tormented to death, that's to be expected. Show me all the cultural achievements from Cuba. The only one I can think of is the Cuba libré and I'm not sure that counts.

I don't know where you get this idea that art and music are somehow exclusive with socialism. Cuba and all socialist today countries exist in very pressured conditions. The economic planners in those countries obviously are not going have people become artist and musicians while things like food and other necessities need to be produced all from within the country. The art and the music will come to Cuba when they no longer struggle under an embargo and and reach a level of wealth where focusing on such things is feasible.

[Grendel]

OK, let's say everything you've said is true and absolutely none of it is propaganda. Does any of that matter at all? People give up food and housing and doctors and life for more abstract values. In Cuba you can't pursue more abstract values. Enlightenment liberalism came about as the result of many different religions meeting together. If America's statistics look a pretty as a religious martyr being tormented to death, that's to be expected. Show me all the cultural achievements from Cuba. The only one I can think of is the Cuba libré and I'm not sure that counts.

The freedom to nail down and fetter one's own thinking to the service of fixed abstractions that concern themselves with only their own good, and not the good of the person serving them, is hardly a freedom we'll miss.

I don't know where you get this idea that art and music are somehow exclusive with socialism. Cuba and all socialist today countries exist in very pressured conditions. The economic planners in those countries obviously are not going have people become artist and musicians while things like food and other necessities need to be produced all from within the country. The art and the music will come to Cuba when they no longer struggle under an embargo and and reach a level of wealth where focusing on such things is feasible.

This is why I'm agnostic on economics. It's always the already desperate crud countries that go communist and never really turn out great one way or another that people pull out to "debunk" socialism.

But I tend to tie death toll to longevity of a regime. The third reich got assblasted to smithereens in an instant, so they only lived to have a lower kill count than the ussr under Lenin and Stalin; which in turn is exceeded by that of the neoliberal order, because that one happened to last the longest.