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Quote of the Day: Socialism
“Socialism is the Axe Body Spray of political ideologies: It never does what it claims to do, but people too young to know better keep buying it anyway.” – Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)
Yes, I am hitting socialism again. It needs to be hit after that odious meme about the difference between fascism (one flavor of socialism) and communism (another flavor of socialism – and indeed what socialism was called before the communists demonstrated by example socialism’s shortcomings, and communism had to be renamed socialism) hit the interwebs recently.
(This one. It stinks. Follow the link for a better take-down than I could do.)
And, yeah, I am doing another “get off my lawn” swipe at youth. It is not really fair, because young people are not really responsible for their ignorance. That is the fault of their elders who fail to educate them properly or stuff youngsters heads with folly (such as socialism) for the elders’ own purposes.
That is the reason so many young people turn conservative by middle age — they finally have enough experience to realize they have been lied to. It is the very lack of experience and judgment that leads youth to enthusiastically embrace socialism. It sounds good and it matches their experiences because a family really is run along the lines of “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs.”
Published in General
Enormous like.
Yes!
And never forget that Communist USSR has a non-aggression pact with National Socialist Germany. The Communists were, apparently, fine with the holocaust. It wasn’t until National Socialist Germany attacked the USSR that the USSR bestirred itself. Stalin had just eradicated a coupl’a million Ukrainians, so who was he to cast aspersions on mass murderers.
The age of “maturity” has increased since 1940. Back then, 18 year-olds were fighting wars, with many becoming married and even having children. For us boomers, it was about 25 years old. Now it is approaching 35 years old. Unfortunately, voting age was reduced from 21 to 18, so almost 1/2 of the voting age population potentially has the mindset of a youth.
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Jan and I were retro. We married when she was 19 and I was 21. This was in the 1970s. Never regretted it.
Good one. Instapundit has been the home page on every phone with Internet access that I’ve ever owned.
Wait, I thought the difference was one started the Holocaust while the other started the Holodomor?
What a difference a suffix makes.
Except the Holodomor was before the Holocaust. One of the many Soviet firsts.
Just read another article on Venezuela somewhere that mentioned falling oil prices as the cause of people starving. They fail to mention that Venezuela oil production has dropped by 80%. Why be cause it was nationalized and Socialist can’t run a damm thing. Besides there are many countries that have zero oil production that do just fine feeding themselves.
Yep, even Venezuelans who’ve escaped the disastrous regime believe the problem is Maduro, not socialism. It just needs the right people…
Very well put. Personal experience tends to eventually kick in. The experience of history would work well if we better educated people without personal experience.
You say that the young people are not really responsible for their ignorance as their elders have failed to educate them. We are all responsible for ourselves even when it isn’t our fault. Maybe it isn’t fair, but we are still responsible.
Hear, hear.
I wish there was a cult of personal responsibility to go up against the cult of self-esteem.