Florida's GOP gubernatorial nominee says a vote for his black opponent would 'monkey this up'

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Give the Dems an on-camera platform? That would have been even more biased in favor of the Dems if they had done that! I thought CNN was quite restrained in merely reporting what the Dems said without affirming the validity of the Dems position.
Nope, I mean not air the story at all. If the Dems thought the story worthy of spreading they ought to have used their own megaphone. CNN became a willing accomplice in spreading a non-story and thereby affirmed the validity of the Dem position merely by echoing it. They had to side with the Dem position just by viewing it as worthy of giving it airtime.

Lot’s of newsworthy stuff happens all the time. CNN betrays its bias in its selection of the stories it deems worthy of air, thereby, giving those stories life by giving them air.

I would venture that CNN sorta kinda thinks of itself as God in the garden of the news world, breathing its spirit into new stories that it sees as “very good” and thereby worthy of suscitation. You know, “the kiss of life,” kind of thing
 
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LeafByNiggle:
Give the Dems an on-camera platform? That would have been even more biased in favor of the Dems if they had done that! I thought CNN was quite restrained in merely reporting what the Dems said without affirming the validity of the Dems position.
Nope, I mean not air the story at all. If the Dems thought the story worthy of spreading they ought to have used their own megaphone. CNN became a willing accomplice in spreading a non-story and thereby affirmed the validity of the Dem position merely by echoing it. They had to side with the Dem position just by viewing it as worthy of giving it airtime.
A reaction by prominent Democrats to a GOP campaign speech is news, regardless of what you think of the validity of their position.
 
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This is understood and acceptable. There are many childless property owners who support schools through their property taxes, even though they don’t have any kids to send to those schools, while a poor family with 5 kids gets an education for their kids even though they pay very little in property taxes. It has been this way for more than a century. Are you challenging the validity of this system of funding education?
When that system fails to deliver what it is supposed to, then those who are funding it have a right to question how their money is being used. Those who receive for free what others pay for have no real vested interest in the success of the project. They may take advantage of it for their advantage, but are just as likely not to view it as anything more than “no skin off my nose whether it works or not.”

This is the inherent problem with social programs. Some are genuinely benefited and appreciate it while others just take advantage of what is given. For not a few, schooling isn’t anything more than free babysitting for their kids.

The bigger the welfare state becomes, the more of these types have a voice in choosing the people for political office who will provide them free stuff. That is why properly controlled social programs work, but when these become deregulated it produces a welfare mentality that self-propagates and brings down the entire system because more are taking out of it than are putting into it.

There is a tipping point where social programs become socialist state and that always ends badly because the state has to use force and coercion to keep itself functioning. Venezuela went past that tipping point a number of years ago. The Scandanavian countries have or are pulling back, although the immigration crisis has compounded the situation. The next twenty years will be revelatory in terms of their fate. I suspect with some of those countries, the socialist propagandists will be eating crow. Or, if they actually live in those countries, seagulls like they do in Venezuela
 
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LeafByNiggle:
This is understood and acceptable. There are many childless property owners who support schools through their property taxes, even though they don’t have any kids to send to those schools, while a poor family with 5 kids gets an education for their kids even though they pay very little in property taxes. It has been this way for more than a century. Are you challenging the validity of this system of funding education?
When that system fails to deliver what it is supposed to, then those who are funding it have a right to question how their money is being used. Those who receive for free what others pay for have no real vested interest in the success of the project.
I disagree. When I was going to school, I was very interested in the success of my schooling and the quality of the education I was getting even though I was not paying for it. And there is no reason why those who are paying for schools through their taxes would not also be very interested in the quality of education being delivered. Even though they are not in school themselves and may not have children of their own, they do care (or should care) about the quality of the educational system because that quality affects community life for everyone, not just those currently in school.

But you aren’t really challenging the validity of public funding for education are you? Because that would be a much bigger deal than any argument about DeSantis and Gillum.
This is the inherent problem with social programs. Some are genuinely benefited and appreciate it while others just take advantage of what is given. For not a few, schooling isn’t anything more than free babysitting for their kids.
Is that “problem” bad enough to prefer scrapping public education? I think the problems associated with scrapping public education would be much worse than having some people view it as free babysitting for their kids. Those kids can still get an education even if their parents view it that way. (And I think very few parents view school as nothing more than free babysitting.)
The bigger the welfare state becomes, the more of these types have a voice in choosing the people for political office who will provide them free stuff.
That’s the risk you take when you buy into the idea of self-government.
 
But you aren’t really challenging the validity of public funding for education are you? Because that would be a much bigger deal than any argument about DeSantis and Gillum.
Nope. I am challenging the idea that moving towards an extreme is a virtue. Aristotle made the point quite cogently that virtue is a balance or middle between two vices or extremes.

Socialism pushes us towards an extreme which I think will ultimately be vicious.

I suspect a good way to see this is by moving outside the realm of politics into an area like permaculture.

This discussion – although taking quite a while to move into addressing the point specifically – does show that the balance in nature doesn’t work by cooperation, but rather by a kind of healthy competition. The species that best provides “value” to the whole system, rather than merely drawing value out, is the species that benefits the entire system and thereby benefits itself, insuring both its survival and the survival of the system by, in a sense, balancing it’s well-being with the well being of the entire system.


Socialism tries to monkey up the balance by forcing when and how everyone contributes or benefits. The problem is that the individual components in the system are better able to respond creatively relative to their own requirements from and contributions to the system, than one central authority can possibly be.

That is why socialism and communism (both espousing central control rather than decentralized subsidiarity) are doomed to fail miserably at some point. Central control in an ever evolving and complex system cannot long be maintained.
 
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LeafByNiggle:
But you aren’t really challenging the validity of public funding for education are you? Because that would be a much bigger deal than any argument about DeSantis and Gillum.
Nope. I am challenging the idea that moving towards an extreme is a virtue. Aristotle made the point quite cogently that…
You can stop right there because I am not arguing for moving to the extreme in socialism, and neither is Gillum or Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez.
 
It’s not, but they are both still socialist. Fascism tends toward the model of strict government control while Marxism government ownership of the means of production.
Naziism (i.e., fascism as practiced by the Nazi Party in the thirties and forties) was hardly socialist. It exercised control over industry mostly by issuing huge government contracts. As you yourself point out, a central feature of Socialism was state ownership of industry.

Here’s a case study for you.

Look at the Quandt family. The patriarch, Gunther Quandt, founded the industrial conglomerate that included BMW, its best-known company. The family got rich during the First World War, richer during the Second World War, and still owns a controlling interest.

And they’re still around, and still rich, and still own the company, or at least a controlling interest in it.

And the companies into which IG Farben was broken up are still around, too.

Now, let’s look at an equivalent industrialist in Russia before the October Revolution. Or actually a large landowner, perhaps one of the nobility who owned huge amounts of land and farmed that land (until 1860 or thereabouts) with serf labor, and subsequently with impoverished labor who might as well have been serfs.

Where are those nobles and their families today? Dead, mostly, or reduced to nothing. Their land was collectivized.

Nazi-style fascism and Socialism (upper-case “S” Socialism, the real thing, not Bernie’s proposals to do things in this country that are pretty liberal, often things we’ve done before, like more progressive taxes and heavily subsidized higher education) are fundamentally different. There’s some overlap, of course – they both had significant totalitarian elements – but they are diametrically opposed.
 
You can stop right there because I am not arguing for moving to the extreme in socialism, and neither is Gillum or Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez.
Yeah, they are. They do have their finger to the wind to gauge how far towards the extreme they can legitimately talk others into, but they definitely are pushing hard in that direction.
 
Here’s a case study for you.

Look at the Quandt family. The patriarch, Gunther Quandt, founded the industrial conglomerate that included BMW, its best-known company. The family got rich during the First World War, richer during the Second World War, and still owns a controlling interest.

And they’re still around, and still rich, and still own the company, or at least a controlling interest in it.

And the companies into which IG Farben was broken up are still around, too.
Did they do exactly what the Reich said? The answer has to be yes, or they would not be around today. Strict government control, as was the case with many companies in Nazi Germany, is still socialism. They claimed the name and the practice.
 
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JonNC:
It’s not, but they are both still socialist. Fascism tends toward the model of strict government control while Marxism government ownership of the means of production.
Naziism (i.e., fascism as practiced by the Nazi Party in the thirties and forties) was hardly socialist. It exercised control over industry mostly by issuing huge government contracts. As you yourself point out, a central feature of Socialism was state ownership of industry.
No, actually, a central feature of Socialism is state control of the economy. And Nazi Germany was National Socialist, which comes from the German Nationalsozialismus that attempted to refocus socialism away from the international socialism of Marxism. Merely because the same principles were reduced in scope from international to national does not mean the ideas changed. Nazism and Italian fascism worked to have the people of the respective countries subordinate their personal interests to the common good, as defined by the State.

The Nazi Party’s forerunner, the German Workers’ Party, was renamed to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the 1920s – to attract workers away from the other left-wing parties: the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD).

You aren’t arguing that German socialists underwent a “big switch” from socialism to something else entirely, all the while retaining the underlying principles of socialism, are you?
Here’s a case study for you.
Yeah, no. Some of the wealthiest individuals in the world are Chinese Communists. Alibaba is one of the world’s largest corporations founded and run by Jack Ma and 17 other Chinese billionaires. Ma has a personal worth of about $30 billion.

You aren’t trying to argue that the existence of wealthy companies, wealthy families or wealthy individuals within a communist or socialist state makes that state NOT communist or NOT socialist, are you? In which case, China is not communist.

The reality is those wealthy companies and individuals operate at the behest of the state and can very quickly be deprived of all their assets should the state choose. That could have happened to German companies and could happen to Chinese.
 
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LeafByNiggle:
You can stop right there because I am not arguing for moving to the extreme in socialism, and neither is Gillum or Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez.
Yeah, they are. They do have their finger to the wind to gauge how far towards the extreme they can legitimately talk others into, but they definitely are pushing hard in that direction.
Evidence? Or just your speculation?
 
Did they do exactly what the Reich said? The answer has to be yes, or they would not be around today.
Well, yes, in that they accepted a huge government contract that made them rich and survived the war to enjoy their ill-gotten riches.

Something that doesn’t happen often under Socialist regimes.
 
Cooperating with the regime is hardly going to hurt your chances of getting rich.
 
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HarryStotle:
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LeafByNiggle:
You can stop right there because I am not arguing for moving to the extreme in socialism, and neither is Gillum or Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez.
Yeah, they are. They do have their finger to the wind to gauge how far towards the extreme they can legitimately talk others into, but they definitely are pushing hard in that direction.
Evidence? Or just your speculation?
Trajectory.
 
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LeafByNiggle:
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HarryStotle:
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LeafByNiggle:
You can stop right there because I am not arguing for moving to the extreme in socialism, and neither is Gillum or Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez.
Yeah, they are. They do have their finger to the wind to gauge how far towards the extreme they can legitimately talk others into, but they definitely are pushing hard in that direction.
Evidence? Or just your speculation?
Trajectory.
So,…speculation then.
 
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JonNC:
Did they do exactly what the Reich said? The answer has to be yes, or they would not be around today.
Well, yes, in that they accepted a huge government contract that made them rich and survived the war to enjoy their ill-gotten riches.

Something that doesn’t happen often under Socialist regimes.
Compared to socialist regimes that never suffered major overthrow in a world war, you mean? It is difficult to compare the two since the two national socialist regimes both ended their runs prematurely. Thus, apples to oranges.

Here is a paper by Peter Temin at MIT who argued that the Nazis and Soviet Communists had essentially the same four and five year plans, and that the Nazis more or less followed the lead of the communists in Russia.


Time Magazine didn’t miss the similarity, either.
Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany’s bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism." - Time Magazine; Jaunuary 2, 1938
This page contains quotes from a number of well-known economists who also noticed that the Nazis were socialist to the core.

https://dictators.blogspot.com/2004/07/nazi-germany-and-socialism.html
 
If there is inaccuracy, it is not inaccuracy by CNN. As I said before, your complaint is not with CNN, but with the people whose words they were reporting about (the Democrats). CNN took no position on those words.
Well…Except for their dishonest, fake-need HEADLINE!!!
We were talking about Gillum, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez. Strict control of the economy by government is not in the platform of any of these people.
Well…except for healthcare!
 
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