Is the USA uncivilised?

[colubridae]

Get away from your own emotional and paranoid hang ups and try to see them for what they are. Bullshit.

Awesome.

This even rivals strontium dog’s assertion that he himself was the funniest man on the forum (that was RDF). BG, I never thought I would come across a greater self-delusion than that, I salute you, yours beats StontiumDog's hands down.

[Seth]

Why not try removing that "nasty government"?

Why not let the Cubans determine whether or not they wish to remove that "nasty government"?

I'd be happy to do so. But to give them even the remotest chance of even getting a chance to vote would require massive air-drops of arms and ammunition and other military support equipment to blanket the island so that the Cubans would have the tools with which to suppress the tyranny of the Castro regime long enough to even vote on it.

This is necessary because Castro did what every tyrant in history has done as one of his first acts of power; disarm the populace. Then he set up the military to brutally repress even the smallest dissent or "counterrevolution" mostly by simply murdering objectors. The continuation of his brutality depends entirely on keeping the populace weak, hungry, disarmed and frightened into obedience, as has been the policy of every dictator in human history.

Nothing changes until the people themselves have the tools with which to assert their desires against a well-entrenched military dictatorship.

Cuba is without any doubt the most salient and appropriate demonstration of the wisdom of the Founders in creating a political system that forbids the government from disarming the populace.

[Blind groper]

While I do not consider myself an expert on Cuban politics, I do keep myself reasonably well read, and I cannot recall any demand by Cuban citizens for guns, or for bloody revolution. I suspect they have already had more than enough of that nonsense.

However, a change in the way Cuban politics is carried out can be achieved without people running round shooting each other. Dropping the embargo, so that more influence from democracies will happen, and American tourists who can talk to Cubans, will be more likely to push that progressive evolution. And without bloodshed.

[Seth]

Seth

When you call socialism inherently evil, you are making an emotional judgement.

No, I'm stating an historical fact.

Socialism, or even communism is not inherently evil.

Yes, it is.

It does not work. It causes a lot more harm than good. But these are practical, not moral considerations.

Wrong. The entirety of Socialism flows directly from an irretrievably corrupt, immoral and evil premise, and therefore the entire philosophy is corrupt, immoral and evil in every way.

Carl Marx used the following "logic".
If a state has a communist government, and if the leaders are all saintly, and if the people all cooperate fully, then a kind of paradise on Earth can be achieved. I agree with the conclusion, assuming the premises are correct. However, I doubt I have to point out to the people on this forum where his "logic" goes wrong.

Your mistake is in assuming that his premises are correct. They aren't. They are fatally flawed in large part due to the fact that Marx had no real interest in a classless society as anything achievable. He merely used this unicorn-fart-rainbow propaganda to persuade the credulous proletarian masses that they should violently overthrow the bourgeoisie merchant class and the aristocracy by pretending to give them a utopian ideal to pursue. He did all this with the full knowledge that what he was saying was a complete lie and absolutely impossible to achieve in reality. His goal was to say anything, no matter how big a lie, to cause the proletariat to rise up and smite the people he considered his oppressors because he himself lived in penury and poverty most of his life and was jealous and envious of the ruling class and its perquisites and benefits and wished it to be destroyed no matter what the cost to the rest of society.

The point is that socialism is not evil.

Yes, it is.

Pure socialism, in the Marxist sense, will not work and will cause great harm. But the kind of socialism practised in most of the western world demonstrably does work, and causes great good. For example, the British health system is socialist, and works to the great benefit of the British people.

No, it's not. It just appears that way for now. The problem with socialists such as yourself is that you only see the short game. You only care about that which affects YOU and your comfort today or perhaps for your foreseeable life ahead. Socialists all wear blinders against the inevitable future of socialism because if you look to the future, and apply common sense and economic reality to the philosophy anyone with an iota of brainpower can see that socialism is completely unsustainable and will inevitably result in complete social and economic collapse...which is what all of Europe is on the cusp of right now.

It's the simplest of calculus' really and can be reduced to one simple acronym: TANSTAAFL.

You can't get something from the government that the government has not first taken by force and coercion from someone else without their permission and against their will. It's just exactly that simple. When the OPM runs out, socialism fails catastrophically. E

very single time.

Cuba has a nasty government, that leads to doing harm to the Cuban people. That harm is exacerbated by the American embargo.

No it's not. It's kept in check by the embargo.

Without that embargo, the level of poverty in Cuba would become much less. The embargo is 55 years old, and has clearly not done a damn thing to eliminate the Castro government.

It has kept the beast contained to Cuba, which is a good thing. It has lead to modification of the Castro communist system since Raul Castro took over (was not voted into power) including limited capitalistic activities and the potential for private ownership of property. All of this is an attempt by the regime to co-opt capitalism in very limited and strictly controlled ways to bring cash into Cuba and to suppress dissent by dangling the carrot of being allowed to make some pitiful amounts of personal money through capitalism while still wielding the stick to keep the proletariat obedient to Castro communism. Only through suppression of free speech and the blocking of outside information by strict control of the media and communications lines (an American is serving a long sentence in Cuba for trying to import HAM radio gear into Cuba so that ordinary Cubans could get unbiased news reporting not controlled by the propaganda machine of Castro) can the regime keep the people ignorant of the truth of capitalism, which would cause them to rebel against communism. But to remove the embargo and allow more luxury goods to enter Cuba while all communications are still strictly controlled would enhance the power and control of the regime, not diminish it, so it cannot be allowed. Short of physical invasion, which I would certainly consider as an appropriate response to depose the regime, the embargo is the best way to contain the infection and hopefully kill it.

Why not try removing the embargo, and allow some good American influence into the country?

Because we don't want Cuba doing what China is doing with our money.

[Seth]

While I do not consider myself an expert on Cuban politics, I do keep myself reasonably well read, and I cannot recall any demand by Cuban citizens for guns, or for bloody revolution. I suspect they have already had more than enough of that nonsense.

Go talk to the Cuban expats in Miami some time.

However, a change in the way Cuban politics is carried out can be achieved without people running round shooting each other. Dropping the embargo, so that more influence from democracies will happen, and American tourists who can talk to Cubans, will be more likely to push that progressive evolution. And without bloodshed.

Nope. That would just result in more bloodshed down the road, as is the case with China. We do not need to be supporting a communist dictator 90 miles south of our border. The last time we blinked Cuba started installing nuclear missiles. Not going to happen again. Once the Castro regime had died off and been deposed and the Cuban people have overthrow communism and shown their resolve to be free and not be a threat to us, then we'll shower them with wealth. But not before then.

In an aside, I saw a program last night on the Kennedy killing that makes a very, very plausible case that the third shot that actually killed Kennedy was fired accidentally by a Secret Service agent in the car behind the President. Oswald fired two shots, one of which missed entirely and the other which wounded the President and Gov. Connoly, and as a Secret Service agent in the following escort car picked up and stood up with an AR-15 (yes, they went into distribution in 1963, I checked) and began looking for the shooter the driver of the escort car slammed down the gas pedal and the agent fell backwards into the seat, discharging the rifle negligently because he had flipped off the safety as he stood and had his finger on the trigger, a violation of at least two of the fundamental rules of firearms safety. The shot hit Kennedy purely by chance and blew his brains out.

It was a very good program that carefully explained, using forensic ballistic evidence and a lot of recorded witness testimony that never made it to the Warren Commission (because it didn't want a scandal to emerge either), that the third shot was tragic misfortune caused by Secret Service error, which explains an awful lot of mysteries about the actions of the Secret Service immediately after the shooting, which were highly unusual, illegal, and which resulted in lots of evidence, including the President's brain itself, disappearing.

Very good show.

[Tero]

[Warren Dew]

Seth

When you call socialism inherently evil, you are making an emotional judgement.

Socialism, or even communism is not inherently evil. It does not work. It causes a lot more harm than good. But these are practical, not moral considerations.

"causes a lot more harm than good" sounds like an reasonable definition of "evil" to me - especially on an atheist site, where we can't resort to God to decide for us what's good and evil.

Cuba has a nasty government, that leads to doing harm to the Cuban people. That harm is exacerbated by the American embargo. Without that embargo, the level of poverty in Cuba would become much less. The embargo is 55 years old, and has clearly not done a damn thing to eliminate the Castro government. Why not try removing the embargo, and allow some good American influence into the country?

Why not try removing that "nasty government"?

Is that a suggestion that the US try its hand at "regime change" again, and demonstrate once more its overweening pride, and contempt for the rest of the world?

I suspect that removing the embargo and increasing contact between Cuba and the rest of the world would be the best way of achieving non-violent change via the will of the Cuban people, rather than the US uber alles approach...

I suspect it's more likely that removing the embargo would benefit only the government and Castro allies in Cuba, since that's what usually happens in trade with totalitarian regimes.

[Blind groper]

Hard to get through to Seth, who makes blanket statements without data to back them, like saying western socialism is doomed. He ignores inconvenient facts which oppose his case, like the fact that the Cuba embargo has been going 55 years, and the Castro brothers still run the place. It looks like what will remove the Cuban government will be simple old age, since the US administration has been so inept.

[Seth]

Hard to get through to Seth, who makes blanket statements without data to back them, like saying western socialism is doomed. He ignores inconvenient facts which oppose his case, like the fact that the Cuba embargo has been going 55 years, and the Castro brothers still run the place. It looks like what will remove the Cuban government will be simple old age, since the US administration has been so inept.

It's a delicate political balancing act, given the fact that the Castro regime has always been a favorite of the Soviets and now the Russians, and perhaps the Chinese, precisely because having communist control over Cuba gives our enemies a very potent forward operating base from which to launch attacks on the US. Nuclear missiles in Cuba would impact the eastern seaboard too quickly for our forces to respond, thus rendering MAD far less effective as a deterrent. That's why we almost went to war in the 1960s.

But because the vast majority of Cubans are simply oppressed slaves of the Castro regime who mutely endure the despotism because they have no other choice, rather than being the indoctrinated zealots of North Korean communism, the United States does not wish to bomb Cuba into the stone-age. It wishes for Cuba to be free and to be our ally, but until the Castro regime dies out our best political tool is to embargo Cuba to prevent as much as possible the continuation of Castro communism without directly harming the innocent and oppressed Cuban people, who given a realistic choice would pretty obviously dump Castro and communism in a heartbeat. After all, many of them are willing to risk, and lose their lives on rafts, innertubes and overloaded, rotting boats to escape to the US. And those are the desperate but motivated ones. The poor sods who have just given up and are hoping to keep their heads down and their mouths shut so they don't get disappeared into the banana groves would also welcome liberation but know they can't even hint at supporting it because they will be killed if they do.

As I said, go talk to some Cuban expats in Miami before you bloviate further.

[Blind groper]

Seth
Expats in Miami are no longer Cubans, so their opinions, well and truly modified by US government propaganda, are irrelevant. I would prefer to hear from the real Cubans, who live in Cuba.

[Audley Strange]

I can't wait for the embargo to end, imagine the property prices. Waltz into Havana with a couple of hundred thou and you're on the beach in a hacienda with lots of porches and cheap servants. Better be ready to move fast, though, because Marriott, Hilton and Caesar's Palace are sitting on billions waiting for the largest and most unspoiled island in the Caribbean to join the 21st century. I'll bet there will be a few good decades of post-colonial bliss before it's wall to wall high rises and chain restaurants. Get in while the gettings good.

That sounds wonderful but I fear it will all be divided up and shared amongst the plutocrats before the embargo's end is finalised.

[Seabass]

Seth
Expats in Miami are no longer Cubans, so their opinions, well and truly modified by US government propaganda, are irrelevant. I would prefer to hear from the real Cubans, who live in Cuba.

Propaganda!


I don't know any Cuban-Americans, but I've known a shit-ton of Vietnamese-Americans, and every single 50+ yo Vietnamese-American I've known is even more anti-communist than Seth, no "US government propaganda" needed. You see, watching their country get destroyed by communism did the trick just fine. I imagine there are a lot of parallels between Vietnamese and Cuban experiences with communism. But I suppose their opinions are probably "irrelevant" as well, since they are not "real" Vietnamese.

My god man, some of the black & white nonsense you spew is the sort of shit I would expect to hear from a clueless, angsty high school or college kid. "Propaganda."

[laklak]

I can't wait for the embargo to end, imagine the property prices. Waltz into Havana with a couple of hundred thou and you're on the beach in a hacienda with lots of porches and cheap servants. Better be ready to move fast, though, because Marriott, Hilton and Caesar's Palace are sitting on billions waiting for the largest and most unspoiled island in the Caribbean to join the 21st century. I'll bet there will be a few good decades of post-colonial bliss before it's wall to wall high rises and chain restaurants. Get in while the gettings good.

That sounds wonderful but I fear it will all be divided up and shared amongst the plutocrats before the embargo's end is finalised.

The trick is not getting blackballed when you try to join the Plutocrats Club.

[piscator]

Seth
Expats in Miami are no longer Cubans, so their opinions, well and truly modified by US government propaganda, are irrelevant. I would prefer to hear from the real Cubans, who live in Cuba.

I would too, except they don't have internet and would be well and truly modified by Cuban government propaganda if they did, hence irrelevant.

[Ian]

"Propaganda" is a term used by insular or desperate people. Any fool can point to information he doesn't want to hear and call it propaganda. But the US government does not control the media, and propaganda is thus an incorrect term as it cannot apply here.