Libya: should anything be done?

[JOZeldenrust]

sandinista wrote:

Again...with the "extremist", can't make an argument, can't get your facts right, so you resort to name calling. On all counts you are wrong. How did your "honorable" "peaceful" protests work out for you in Chicago? Fucking head in their clouds hippies.

Ex-hippie, thank you...

As always, you totally ignore the key point, which is that nowhere, in the last 50 years, has a violent insurrection via Marxist principles in a Western democracy even started, let alone been successful.

You remain a tiny, marginalised minority of left-wing puritans, forever sneering at progressives and those of the centre left as sell-outs, even though such political forces are the only ones with a chance of actually counter-balancing the conservative right and big business.

I think someone else has their head in a cloud...

oh yah, because something hasn't happened means it never will. Great logic there. "progressives"

No, there's just no popular support for the kind of change you want. (still not entirely clear what it is you want, actually) The vast majority of the people in western democracies do not want their society to change into a Marxist system, and they will resist, by force if necessary, attempts to impose such a system by a minority such as you and your buddies.

Whether force against you and your buddies is justified is up to you. As long as you limit yourselves to peaceful protest within reasonable limits to accomodate the freedom and safety of others (so you won't be allowed to protest on train tracks, or inside the house of parliament, but you must be allowed to protest in such a way that you're visible to the general public), the use of force against you isn't justified. If it is used regardless, you can go to court.

If your protests manage to convince enough people, you'll achieve changes in society, because it'll change the way people vote. Even if there isn't a party that shares your convictions at the moment, the number of supporters of your cause will mean there's enough support to enter the elections with a new party.

If you don't convince enough people, you won't achieve the changes in society you desire, and that's a good thing, because evidently the vast majority of people don't desire those changes.

Largely, popular support for anything comes from whatever is advocated via the mass media. It's a hard battle to fight, but slowly the people will move past corporate rule. Because there is a majority doesn't necessarily mean their thoughts or beliefs are in any sense correct or just. If that were the case, there actually is a God...praise him.

We aren't under corporate rule. Corporations might wield too much power in the world today. I'm pretty confident they wield too much power in the US at the moment, and the US wields a lot of power in the world. Corporations also wield a lot of power in regions of the world with little or no effective government, especially if those regions are economically interesting. But there's nowhere in the world where corporations wield absolute power.

Corporations derive their influence from the money they control. Governments derive their influence from the people they represent. In both cases, the influence can be reduced to large numbers of individual choices. People can choose to cut off the streams of money from their pocket to a certain corporation, just like they can withdraw their support for the government. They can organize themselves into NGOs or workers unions. They are not powerless victims. They are the individuals that empower corporations and governments, and if hey choose to, they can withdraw that power.

[sandinista]

We aren't under corporate rule. Corporations might wield too much power in the world today. I'm pretty confident they wield too much power in the US at the moment, and the US wields a lot of power in the world. Corporations also wield a lot of power in regions of the world with little or no effective government, especially if those regions are economically interesting. But there's nowhere in the world where corporations wield absolute power.

Corporations derive their influence from the money they control. Governments derive their influence from the people they represent. In both cases, the influence can be reduced to large numbers of individual choices. People can choose to cut off the streams of money from their pocket to a certain corporation, just like they can withdraw their support for the government. They can organize themselves into NGOs or workers unions. They are not powerless victims. They are the individuals that empower corporations and governments, and if hey choose to, they can withdraw that power.

obviously, I disagree.

[JimC]

We aren't under corporate rule. Corporations might wield too much power in the world today. I'm pretty confident they wield too much power in the US at the moment, and the US wields a lot of power in the world. Corporations also wield a lot of power in regions of the world with little or no effective government, especially if those regions are economically interesting. But there's nowhere in the world where corporations wield absolute power.

Corporations derive their influence from the money they control. Governments derive their influence from the people they represent. In both cases, the influence can be reduced to large numbers of individual choices. People can choose to cut off the streams of money from their pocket to a certain corporation, just like they can withdraw their support for the government. They can organize themselves into NGOs or workers unions. They are not powerless victims. They are the individuals that empower corporations and governments, and if hey choose to, they can withdraw that power.

obviously, I disagree.

And with such a detailed, logical and compelling rebuttal, as well...

[Hermit]

you are "free to speak out" as long as you watch what you say.

People who failed to watch what they said:



Go on, trot out the "no true Scotsman" line now. You know you want to.

[Ian]

It think it was Yakof Smirnoff back in the 1980s who had a good quote about freedom of speech. In the US, there's freedom of speech. The USSR also has freedom of speech. But the difference is that in the US, you still have your freedom AFTER you speak.

Some good came out of Tiananmen, btw. Eastern Europeans started referring to the crushing of the revolt as "the China solution", and it helped really keep the ball rolling as they fought back against their Soviet bloc governments. The Berlin Wall came down five months later.

[Hermit]

Eastern Europeans started referring to the crushing of the revolt as "the China solution"

It wasn't a revolt. It was a demonstration, and I brought it up to add a bit of perspective to Sandinista's bleatings about evil capitalist oppression of protesters. It's not the only one. "Let a thousand bloom" wilted very quickly and brutally, and it was not the first time in the eastern block. Tanks and mass arrests were used in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland etc as well, and let's not mention the massive presence of the Stasi, the KGB, the Cheka before it and equivalent political police forces. The FBI certainly was not the only thought police checking on the acceptability of political thinking and campaigns of a nation's citizens, nor was it as pervasive, brutal and powerful as most of the others.

[sandinista]

We aren't under corporate rule. Corporations might wield too much power in the world today. I'm pretty confident they wield too much power in the US at the moment, and the US wields a lot of power in the world. Corporations also wield a lot of power in regions of the world with little or no effective government, especially if those regions are economically interesting. But there's nowhere in the world where corporations wield absolute power.

Corporations derive their influence from the money they control. Governments derive their influence from the people they represent. In both cases, the influence can be reduced to large numbers of individual choices. People can choose to cut off the streams of money from their pocket to a certain corporation, just like they can withdraw their support for the government. They can organize themselves into NGOs or workers unions. They are not powerless victims. They are the individuals that empower corporations and governments, and if hey choose to, they can withdraw that power.

obviously, I disagree.

And with such a detailed, logical and compelling rebuttal, as well...

Just not interested at the moment in 5 more pages of

you are "free to speak out" as long as you watch what you say.

People who failed to watch what they said:



Go on, trot out the "no true Scotsman" line now. You know you want to.

and more

Sandinista's bleatings about evil capitalist oppression of protesters.

again, can't have a discussion without lame personal attacks. Pathetic really.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

again, can't have a discussion without lame personal attacks. Pathetic really.

irony.jpg (6.78 KiB) Viewed 970 times

[Hermit]

Sandinista's bleatings about evil capitalist oppression of protesters.

again, can't have a discussion without lame personal attacks. Pathetic really.

What's pathetic is to confuse a comment on your posts with a personal attack, and then use that as an excuse to evade points at issue. In this instance, one of the points was that you keep bleating about arrests of rioters in capitalist democracies while ignoring the thousands of demonstrators that are actually killed, and the millions that are sent to prison in countries that are not capitalist democracies.

It may be a fair observation that capitalist democracies are neither capitalistic in Adam Smith's sense, nor democratic, and that socialist countries are neither socialist nor communist in Karl Marx's sense, but it is also a moot point to make. Given the choice of living in either the former or latter type of country, I won't have to think long to decide which scenario I prefer.

[sandinista]

again, can't have a discussion without lame personal attacks. Pathetic really.

irony.jpg

coming from someone else that may apply...from you...just a laugh.

Sandinista's bleatings about evil capitalist oppression of protesters.

again, can't have a discussion without lame personal attacks. Pathetic really.

What's pathetic is to confuse a comment on your posts with a personal attack, and then use that as an excuse to evade points at issue. In this instance, one of the points was that you keep bleating about arrests of rioters in capitalist democracies while ignoring the thousands of demonstrators that are actually killed, and the millions that are sent to prison in countries that are not capitalist democracies.

It may be a fair observation that capitalist democracies are neither capitalistic in Adam Smith's sense, nor democratic, and that socialist countries are neither socialist nor communist in Karl Marx's sense, but it is also a moot point to make. Given the choice of living in either the former or latter type of country, I won't have to think long to decide which scenario I prefer.

That's not a simple "comment on my posts", don't embarrass yourself further. I haven't evaded anything, you bleat on and on about "ohhhh you're not talking about killed protesters in other countries"...what does that have to do with anything? I was stating that "speaking out" against power in a liberal democratic country like canaduh isn't legal. That's it...what is being evaded? Nothing. It's a "moot" point that protesting in supposedly democratic countries is becoming illegal. Yah...moot.

[Hermit]

I haven't evaded anything, you bleat on and on about "ohhhh you're not talking about killed protesters in other countries"

Fair point, actually. Well, it would be if this thread was about the fate of protesters in alleged democracies, but it appears to be about Libya and what - if anything - should be done about it.

Meanwhile I'll just reiterate that life in so-called capitalist democracies is somewhat less oppressive than in so-called communist countries, especially for those of us who have participated in mass protests. Our chances of being rolled over by tanks, machine gunned or spending many years in prisons as a result of such participation are only a tiny fraction in the former when compared to the latter.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I haven't evaded anything, you bleat on and on about "ohhhh you're not talking about killed protesters in other countries"

Fair point, actually. Well, it would be if this thread was about the fate of protesters in alleged democracies, but it appears to be about Libya and what - if anything - should be done about it.

Meanwhile I'll just reiterate that life in so-called capitalist democracies is somewhat less oppressive than in so-called communist countries, especially for those of us who have participated in mass protests. Our chances of being rolled over by tanks, machine gunned or spending many years in prisons as a result of such participation are only a tiny fraction in the former when compared to the latter.

[sandinista]

I haven't evaded anything, you bleat on and on about "ohhhh you're not talking about killed protesters in other countries"

Fair point, actually. Well, it would be if this thread was about the fate of protesters in alleged democracies, but it appears to be about Libya and what - if anything - should be done about it.

Meanwhile I'll just reiterate that life in so-called capitalist democracies is somewhat less oppressive than in so-called communist countries, especially for those of us who have participated in mass protests. Our chances of being rolled over by tanks, machine gunned or spending many years in prisons as a result of such participation are only a tiny fraction in the former when compared to the latter.

I have tried to ditch this topic in this thread. Off topic. I'll just reiterate, because oppression exists in other countries doesn't make it any less relevant that it also exists in the so called "free" west.

[Hermit]

Use the "imgfit" tag, Gawdzilla.

Returning to comparing the protests in democracies with ones that took place in socialist/communist countries, here's a parallel:

• Janos Kadar, Radio Kossuth (24th October, 1956)
  
  Workers, comrades! The demonstration of university youth, which began with the formulation of, on the whole, acceptable demands, has swiftly degenerated into a demonstration against our democratic order...

Sounds familiar, hey?

Now looking at the difference: 3000 people were killed in Hungary and many more thousands imprisoned for many years as a result of those demonstrations. How many dead or gaoled in Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia, Italy, Germany, France, Japan...?

[Warren Dew]

On the other hand, reasonable and peaceful protests in the west against economic policies (eg. the G20 and G8 summits) have been consistently taken over by a small minority of destructive hooligans who are in it for the thrills. They have set back their putative cause immeasurably, because the public now permanently associates dissent against aspects of globalisation with a violent but vocal minority of destructive fools.

The antiwar and civil rights protests of the 1960s also had a minority of destructive hooligans "taking them over" from the perspective of those who disagreed. The difference wasn't in how the protests were done; it was in the fact that those 1960s protesters actually had valid points, while the globalization protesters are simply mistaken about how economics works.

Of course, in a free country one could protest without fear of retribution even whether or not one's position were mistaken.