>>1980 - 88? Aren't those the Reagan-Thatcher years? That's when the rearmament began. It was about to peter out, but no, the country wanted someone who'd slam a fist on the table. And who could spin anything into a victory.

>I just question the idea that somehow the cold war was about to peter out.

Not the cold war, the nuclear armament race. What good is an expensive weapon if you can't use it? And having a new weapon and never using it is in the same area as partial pregnancy - not quite impossible, but close to it. So both sides seemed to have come to a conclusion that the difference between overkill factor of 3 and 300 is meaningless.

Reagan did two things: dismantled the solar collectors off the White House, and restarted the armament race. The rest followed, sort of logically.

>A dictatorship that disappears political dissidents is a terrible thing. But a state-as-prison-camp that uses family hostages, barbed wire and guard towers to imprison *everyone* , on top of having a police mechanism at least as oppressive is stepping it up a notch. It was a lot easier to get out of Chile or Iran than East Germany, Romania or the USSR.

I've met people who fled from Chile, and have been to Romania under Ceauşescu many times. Neither was nice. I'm often getting the feeling that whenever one of the behind-the-rusty-curtain regimes is mention, there's a willful blanket ignorance of other kinds of regimes.

Besides, we generally may have very little knowledge of what's going on under friendly thugs. Their dissidents mostly seek refuge in the neighboring countries (there's a culture of that all over South America - neighbor's politicians always find sanctuary, because the host never knows when he may need the favor returned). Imagine a leftist from any generic South American country seeking refuge in the US. Equally ridiculous as the definition of political analphabeth went in 1981: a Polish activist seeking political asylum in Afghanistan.

>>My apologies if I'm mixing rants here, but it's the totalitarian==USSR==socialism mantra that mixes them, trying to paint the image of these things being not just properties of each other (yes, USSR was totalitarian in many ways, and yes USSR was a socialist country, but that doesn't mean it was totalitarian because it was socialist, it was actually a contradiction in itself). Actually, I'm announcing Dragan's rule: whoever uses the totalitarian/etatist nature of Stalinism as a representative of socialism, either loses or gives me the equal chance to apply Spanish inquisition as a valid representative of Christianity, and fascism/colonialism as a valid representative of capitalism.
>
>I don't equate socialism and totalitarianism at all.

Maybe not here and not this time and possibly not you - I didn't fall into the trap of anglo-saxon legal system, and I'm not inventing partial rules, where half of the text is in the "applies to" list of cases. The rule is general, you just nudged me at the tipping point - that was the quantity (of nudges over the years) which grew into a quality (I finally formulated the rule).

>>They could have dragged along for a number of years more - the push just made it happen a bit earlier. Stronger pushes didn't do it before.
>
>The important thing is to push at the tipping point.

But as you said, they didn't even know the tipping point was there. They just imagined they would maybe create one over time. Which is one explanation for the lack of gloating; further explanation was that the disassembly of USSR didn't happen at any time, it took years and phases. So there wasn't really any good time when a victory could be announced to the masses awaiting the event - there was no event, just a process, steps over a period. Sort of anticlimax.

>I don't think Zbig deserves all that much credit for arming the mujahadeen. The Soviets only went into Afghanistan because Carter's sytematic bungling of foreign policy led them to believe they could get away with it.

Funny, though, we saw Carter as finally one honest guy in the White house after the last good one was shot. What you see as "bungling", we saw as "finally one guy who doesn't slam fist on the table but actually talks and puts these Soviets to shame so they have to talk too".

>Someone who commits an evil act does not want to be stopped. That is my point. The obviously *want* to do something so from their point of view they do not want interference. When I do something I want to do, I do not want interference. By the golden rule - in its most basic a literalist "bumper sticker" reading, I should not interfere in their actions as I would not want them to interfere in mine.

Again, that implies that you _want_ to do something wrong in the first place, and you aren't so eager to stop somebody else doing a similar thing. If you do, you may set the wrong example and once you get to make your move, the people may just follow your own example.

>You've got some personal issues with what you think 'this country' is all about and I really don't care to debate those. Your perceptions are as they are. I personally reject the generalization of a society of 300 million people as diverse as this one.

Where's the diversity in disclaimers? Every effing thing you buy comes with at least 8K of small print. And they're all the same, "you can't sue us, if it comes to court, we are right and you are wrong because we say so here". From your hotel room to your Windowses. Which means that everybody trying to cheat anyone they can is a widespread tradition, firmly entrenched in the legal system. There's even such a ridiculous thing as title insurance - you better pay that when you buy a house, so if someone comes up with a piece of paper as a proof that he owns your house, you're insured against him. And that's on a HUD repo'd house, so even though I'm buying it from the government, they still cannot guarantee they own it?

It's not just perception, it's real solid money being spent on, or against, stuff like that. And yet there's no inclination to have a firm, say, set of land ownership books (as exists in Europe for centuries now), but rather everybody's OK with the current system of caveat emptor. Which means that the general will is on the side of "let's leave everybody with some space for cheating, because tomorrow I may need to use that space myself". So yes, they don't want others to get caught, they only want the guy who did damage to them personally.

>>And he was given ammunition by the whites, whereas they proved every point he made (about capitalism never ceding power peacefully, not after elections, not after a coup, so we must have a dictatorship by proletariat). He may have been sidelined too, or made into a propaganda tool without actual power. Imagine if Mahno's ideas were spread more widely instead.
>>
>That was *fuedalism* that didn't want to yield power peacefully. <s>

OK, apart from Scandinavia, find one example of a country where a communist party won the elections and took power without any trouble. For South America, any socialist party would do.

>Lenin never for one moment wanted a dictatorship of the proletariet. He wanted a dictatorship of the intellectual revolutionary cadre that knew what was best for the proletariat. That is exactly where he differed with his more ideological - and idealistic - competitors. He made this very clear in his own writing.

Yet he left them alone, and very much alive. It wasn't until Stalin that the proverb of "revolution eating its children" was coined. Though I agree, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was to be realized (in the European sense of the word: made real) via the "handleading role of The Party", i.e. the most class- and history-aware part of the working class. Which in practice was exactly what you said.

Even in the Yugoslav case, which was a far more liberal and democratic system, The Party didn't really know how to let go of the reins. More and more stuff was liberalized, the system of direct democracy was, well, almost there... but they never let it have substance. They would invent phrases like "the producers should engovern (i.e. gain power over) the whole of income", but that never happened - because they were the main obstacle to that. Someone calculated that the actual part of the profit that the self-managers did self-manage was about 2%, the rest was channeled into this or that by an elaborate system of rules and laws.

>>Which, if it was so, then makes Lenin right - capitalism would never cede power peacefully, not after elections, nor after a coup. It'd rather unleash nazism, hoping that it will spend itself on neutralizing Communism, than letting Communism become just a failed experiment. I think it was actually scared that it may work.
>
>I don't think they were scared it would work but that it would spread.

And if it worked it would set an example, a proof of feasibility, and would then spread. Which is the more reason that I resent Stalinism - they screwed the one chance there was. But then, so does every system; begins with some success, lasts for a while, and then someone in the generation after its fall says "you made mistakes here and here, you screwed the one chance there was".

> The problem with imposing redistribution of wealth on a society where it has already been distributed is that is inevitably involves coercion.

That's no problem at all. Just compare the distribution here 40, 20 years ago with the distribution now - there was A LOT of redistribution, and did you hear a peep?

> Yeah, nobody with anything to lose is going to sign on to that voluntarily. Just isn't going to happen.

It happened already. The rich are far richer, the poor have multiplied, the middle are vanishing.

>I was simply saying that following anything about Hitler with a "Bush is a stupid cowboy" non-sequitur seemed unworthy of the generally interesting thinking you bring to these discussions and is more reminiscent of the sophomoric stuff for which you are notably *not* famous but some contributers and websites are.

1) I didn't mean the parallel to go that far, only in the "taken seriously"; taken out of context, both the Austrian decorator and the fake Texan analphabeth would be funny and negligible figures. However, in both cases the history gave them far more importance than we'd expect from either.

2) I thought the differences in method and goals would be obvious and not necessary to explain. But then, for the spectators with cheaper tickets, anyone can go down this list of 14 points and see for themselves how the comparison simply doesn't apply.

I don't mind anyone telling me that I've fallen below my level; can't be awake all the time. It's the implication that someone put me up to it, that I'm getting my opinions from somewhere that I don't take lightly. Yep, some ego too, develops with age (as does the art of letting go - but that's more in my coding ;).

As for the website of mr Mulitsas, I was visitng it regularly arond 2003-2004-sometimes in 2005, done. Because they aren't, as it turned out, the focal point of dissenters, they are just dems.com.amp - and as much they may dig up stuff that GOP tries to hide, they don't really care about anything else but the placement of their candidates. G'bye.

>I had no intention of offending you with the remark, though I do find it odd that you repeatedly threaten to not speak to me or go to another bar or whatever.

Well, if you insist on your right to intervene in matters of other countries, I better get out of the way. I've seen how that works.