Just so you know, spammers:
Not only do I moderate my comments, and easily figure out what is spam and what is not, but I immediately submit ALL URLS to Adblock’s filterset.g, AdBlock+’s EasyList, and SpamCop.
I wrote a script to do this, in batch, to a list of URLs, as a Wordpress Plugin. Thus, spamming my site is both fruitless and inherently damaging to your interests.
In short, fucking stop it, you moronic assholes.
On Digg (of course), someone posted a comment about fascism being a form of socialism.
While in practice, full socialism often requires fascism, fascism and socialism do not conceptually include one another. Additionally, the two are not necessarily better or worse on merit than capitalism - and indeed must coexist for an idealized government structure.
Capitalism implies that individuals are solely responsible for their own wealth, based on free markets. Great idea, but there are market failures that cause major sustainability issues.
Socialism implies that the government has the responsibility of maintaining even wealth distribution. Great idea, but corruption and inefficiency tend to bloat the system out terribly.
Fascism implies that the government holds ultimate authority over the individual. Generally a bad idea, but has its merits in corporate regulation as market failure correction.
Ultimately, a capitalist / socialist balance is the ideal, with a minor peppering of fascism - but the overall system must be continuously and diligently revised in order to match modern events, and to prevent abuse of governmental power, bloat of resources, and extreme concentration of wealth. Essentially, they must balance in order to avoid the abuses of each.
It should be noted that we (the USA) have been failing to do this for a while now. You may disagree with me entirely - but you have to be aware that there are numerous and passionately self-righteous political movements happening right now.
I’m sure some of you think that it’s just that “some people just love to complain about shit.” Well, that’s true enough - and if it were just PeTA and other groups with frivolous demands, I’d agree. I can’t agree, however, that the decided unhappiness of Americans over their treatment by the government is just arbitrary whining.
Whatever that balance is, be it 90% capitalism, 10% everything else, or 65c-30s-5f (which is around what I guess the sums to be, but distributed on a per case basis over a wide variety of issues), we’re not there, and we haven’t been there since McCarthy decided unilaterally that anything other than capitalism is devil magic.
And, sadly, I don’t have enough information as to the current state of government to know which direction is the right one. Fortunately, I don’t live in vacuum.
Today, I’m dropping a homework assignment:
Policy Half-Bakery
