I guess someone started killing people today in a synagogue in Pittsburgh saying "all Jews need to die". Is he not right wing, Wookie?

I wondered how long it was going to take for Reid to use the death of Jews in order to score cheap political points.

I was wondering how long you'd lurk before finding the first opportunity to lash out.

Okay?

I guess what you said and what I said are morally equivalent then?

Reid is just a far-left radical following the Saul Alinsky playbook.

From Rules for Radicals: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Also, what a dumb thing for conservatives to latch onto this Saul Alinsky guy as a boogeyman, seeing that virtually every political polemic (dare I say even moreso on the right) follows his "playbook" without even trying.

Also I am not sure Reid's point here is cheap, so much as anecdotal. But then so are most things.

Yeah kinda. You just tried to use the tragedy to score points against me.

Certainly opportunistic.

You should read some of the research on moral outrage. It's really interesting.

Damn dude, that’s childish. But also par for the course, coming from you.

But no: I’m speaking from a principle based on observation. You’ve repeatedly invoked the memory of the Holocaust in order to score political points against your opponents. I meant it quite literally when I said I wasn’t surprised that you’d use this attack to score cheap political points. You’re interested in Jewish suffering when you can use it to make your political opponents look bad through guilt by association. You’ve made that immensely clear, and so I wasn’t surprised when you did it. You merely gave me an occasion to point it out. I wish deeply that you hadn’t: this *just* happened only moments ago and I’m stunned I’m already engaged in a childish finger-pointing disagreement about it.

I’m sure you think this relates to my last post somehow, but I’m honestly not seeing it. Care to explain?

Of course it is. But it’s not a tax. Don’t pretend you’re keeping up.

No need to be so defensive. We're all friends here.

If you don’t want to respond because you’re too ashamed, then go ahead.

It relates to a few of your posts. In the past you’ve defined Stalinism as something like “state-run” socialism. (Can’t find the post or the precise definition right now, because I’m on my phone.) So I’m asking: does that mean that when the state runs redistributionist programs, those programs are Stalinist?

Oh, sure, I probably shouldn't use a tragedy. I was only pointing out that you're unleashing pent up resentment. You're using the tragedy, too, you just hide your motivations under a warm stuffy feeling of moral superiority. "Moral Outrage Is Self-Serving, Say Psychologists" is an interesting read.

I know you like to pretend everyone is as petty as you are and to drag them down to your level, but it’s not going to work.

It already did work, judging by your reaction.

Perhaps the programs being redistributionist isn’t the key point here. Perhaps what is really key is ownership. If insurance companies and health care providers are owned and run neither by a capitalist ruling class nor by the workers, but by the state, does that make it Stalinist? I’m trying to understand what you’re saying “Stalinism” is at the margins.

Guys, guys, stop fighting. I’m sure we can agree there were fine people on both sides.

No. Along with a bunch of more political things, Stalinism is a non-participatory/non-democratic socialism where the state owns all industry and directs it for the benefit of the state (or those in control of the state).

It is not Stalinism when a state chooses to provide a public good, social program, or chooses to operate a crown corporation. We choose to do that under capitalism. We would certainly choose to do that under socialism as well, at least where the distinction makes sense.

I’m not responding to you any more because it would only amount to feeding the troll.

Let's not forget that Stalinism isn't exactly a coherent set of economic ideas meant to be universally applied. Stalinist economics were centered around rapid industrialization at the cost of the Russian peasantry. I have no idea what Stalin would have done if put at the helm of a fully industrialized nation.

something something mountain of corpses

So going back to the bomber, he apparently had his house foreclosed on him and was working as a pizza delivery man in some of the years prior to sending the bombs. He was an avid Trump supporter and attended rallies and all.

I think, if anything, he's a prime example of defining where sympathy begins and ends for Trump supporters. He's not wrong to have some resentments towards the world. He lost his house and was working one of the worst jobs it's possible to legally have. He probably felt, with some serious legitimacy, that he had been denied access to a normal, healthy adult life.

But, the sympathy ends once his insane conspiracy beliefs begin. Crosshairs on Hillary/Michael Moore on his van? Clearly buying into Qanon conspiracy stuff, attacking Democrat donors like Soros. Nobody knows how to combat this ridiculous propaganda machine that takes these people's real problems and directs their anger at Democrats. And since there is zero reason to suspect their lives will improve, what are we to expect? How do you combat this sort of radicalization?

Trump keeps saying the economy is great, when many people are working crap jobs for nothing. What else do they have to believe in, other than that somehow the Democrats are still holding them back? It's madness and I can't see how it's going to get better.

This is a problem I have with using the word Stalinism as Jon does. I’m not convinced the term works very well if it describes a formalized idea abstracted from its historical context and applied to multiple regimes spanning different places and different historical periods, in the same way that terms like “democracy” are. Used in that way, it often seems to be applied inconsistently and arbitrarily. It seems best used as a historical term to describe the particularities of the regime that Stalin ran.

Yes, I tacitly use it to slur non-democratic and non-participatory socialism. In my experience it’s a lot more helpful than you suggest it is, because western people generally aren’t aware that there is a non-Stalinist socialism.

Out of curiosity do you think it’s more apt and less misleading than “soviet style” socialism?

Re: seizing the means of production, this doesn’t necessarily have to mean literally seizing them (sending tanks to the factories). There are a lot of ways to do this peacefully. Much like we use a gentle hand on fiscal policy to encourage certain behaviours, we could do the same thing to award businesses that give control to the workers.

The US constitution protects business owners from having their property seized. The constitution does not, for example, guarantee a limitation of liability for those business owners. That is a special measure that has been granted relatively recently. There is nothing that legally prevents the US from limiting liability protections to cooperatives, for example.

As a rhetorical technique or as a scientific term? Soviet-style is soft. Stalinist is hard, and it has a lot of imagery loaded into it - gulags and famine. Chances are, people who are confused about socialism are more concerned about the latter than about the day to day operation of a socialist government. Or they’ve been pushed so hard that they think Stalinism is what we should do instead of capitalism. In either case I find it a helpful contrast.

If we were just debating central planning vs markets, for example, I would use more technical language.

I’m sure there elements of the man’s life that one can sympathize with — or at least that one can pity. (Although it should also be noted that this individual seemed to be quite off kilter, long before he fell on hard times.) I’m less inclined to think, however, that there’s such a strong correlation between economic hardship and political radicalization (and of course I’m even more doubtful that there’s a causal relationship). If you look at the composition of al-Qaida at around the time of the 9/11 attacks, for example, most of the organization’s members were middle-class and European educated. The thing that they had in common was that they struggled to integrate into the European countries in which they lived and became asocial. The sort of asocial, pathological and, frankly, psychopathic outlook that one needs to have in order to become a terrorist often aren’t caused by economic factors as much as they are by social factors: as the al-Qaida example indicates, Individuals can become radicalized (and often do become radicalized) even when they don’t face economic hardship or anxiety. so I don’t think the answer is redistributionist policies. It’s a social problem and a security problem (specifically a counter-terrorism problem, to which the same CT methods used to combat Islamic terrorism ought to be applied).

Assuming Arab culture places the same social value on employment that we do.

Reading profiles of Cesar Sayoc, it seems entirely feasible that he wasn’t emotionally distraught because his life was in disarray, but that he couldn’t keep his life in order and hold a steady job because he was emotionally troubled.

Mental health issues disturb work and life, which in turn exacerbates mental health issues.

Mhmmm.

So I skipped by the past several posts but I knew something was happening in Pittsburgh because I have this scanner app on my phone that alerts me when many people are tuning into a specific frequency. I thought the left in America hated the Jews.

Anyway, I want to get back to the socialism thing at some point but I might forget.

Well now, what a lovely person you are.

Well, gosh, I don't know what to say.

If there's one thing we learned in the 20th century, it's not to politicize Antisemitism.

You know how the left is so fond of throwing around charges of racism for political points? But then one day, we all woke up to find that a large number of Americans have thrown up their hands and said, "well shucks, if they're going to call me racist no matter what, what difference does it make if I actually decide to be racist?".

And there you have it: openly racist candidates running for an winning public office, all the way up to the White House.

At any rate, if you think that Antisemitism is a left-wing phenomenon alone, then I really don't know what to say, except to look at the news I guess. Or simply continue as you are, thereby serving as an argument to Reid for not starting the discussion the way he did.