Re: a dumb query? pls humor me

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 11:02:26AM +0100, Mitja Podreka wrote:
The terms socialism and communism were vandalised by the authoritarian
governments and individuals, in order to legitimate their authorities.

The terms socialism and communism where not vandalized, they are and
always have been synonmymous with authoritarianism.

In fact this governments had no more in common with socialism and
communism than GNU/Linux has with Microsoft.

Huh?

Following the widely accepted "democratic" rationale of socialism and
communism we could, for example, say that Debian GNU/Linux is a bad
thing. The most common OS (socialism/communism) is Windows
(authoritarian state/government). Knowing that Windows is not of very
good moral and technical standards we can then "democratically" conclude
that OS is a bad thing. Because Debian GNU/Linux is an OS it must then
also be a bad thing.
And to finish the discourse properly. We should also recognise democracy
put into practice as different than democracy by theory.

Right, because very few places actually have pure and true democracy.
It is likely just as doomed to failure as pure communism or pure
socialism. A friend once explained it like this:

Him: "Do you know what the definition of Democracy is?"
Me: "What?"
Him: "Two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch."

There is a lot of truth to that. Take a look at Hillary Clinton's
rhetoric about wanting to "take" oil company profits and tax revenues
lost by tax cuts and wanting to redistribute them more fairly. That is
Democracy in action. The mob being whipped up to support taking other
people's private property for themselves.

Regards,

-Roberto

--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

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