The Reason China Will Beat America

Discussion in 'United States' started by Mac-7, Jun 5, 2019.

  1. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Not a Freudian slip, it was Grammarly deciding that's what I wanted to say. But, still sloppy proof-reading.

    Whatever America's sins, real or imagined, she is still the only nation to be based on this simple ideal--the right to live one's own life by one's own effort for one's own happiness. No other nation before, or since, can claim that moral ideal.

    For the communists and socialists, let them answer this charge:

    “Once upon a time, we made a revolution. We said we were tired of hunger, of sweat and of lice. So we cut throats, and broke skulls, and poured blood, our blood, their blood, to wash a clean road for freedom. Now look around you. Look around you, Comrade Taganov, Party member since 1915! Do you see where men live, men, our brothers? Do you see what they eat? Have you ever seen a woman falling on the street, vomiting blood on the cobblestones, dying of hunger? I have. Did you see the limousines speeding at night? Did you see who’s in them? There’s a nice little comrade we have in the Party. A smart young man with a brilliant future. Pavel Syerov’s the name. Have you ever seen him open his wallet to pay for a whore’s champagne? Did you ever wonder where he gets the money? Did you ever go to the European roof garden? Not often, I bet. But if you had, you’d see the respectable Citizen Morozov getting indigestion on caviar. Who is he? Just assistant manager of the Food Trust. The State Food Trust of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. We’re the leaders of the world proletariat and we’ll bring freedom to all suffering humanity!”--https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1711534-we-the-living?page=2

    And what sin did the capitalists commit that required the sacrifice of the best and brightest to the vile and decrepit? They made life on earth an extraordinary wonderous joyous paradise of marvelous achievements. What did Russia accomplish? Gulags and Chernoby. And Red China? Mao's Cultural Revolution. And Pol Pol? The Killing Fields. And Maduro? Empty zoos and starving bellies.
    Before any tribalist, or socialist, or communist, or collectivist, starts wagging their hypocritical finger at America, they better spend an eon on their hands and knees begging for forgivness from the forces of life while they wash the human sacrifical blood off their hands.

    Capitalism starts and ends with a handshake; every other political-economic system starts with a gun and ends in mass slaughter. It's not me saying that, it's reality.

    Whatever her sins, America raised the standard of living of everyone on Earth, and every rational being on the planet should bless her for her benevolence.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  2. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    And yet, despite the lies, and smears, and attacks, and hatred, and belittling, the misrepresentations, her books still sell, her philosophy is growing, and the future of the reasoning mind is brighter than ever. Go figure. Men and women, from all over the world, wanting one simple idea, to live. Not to serve, not to renounce, not to give up, not to surrender, not to rule, not to enslave, not to smear their betters, not to belong, but only to live, and create for themselves all the joy and wonder that "living" brings.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  3. EarthSky

    EarthSky Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2018
    Messages:
    2,148
    Likes Received:
    1,139
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Yeah, I am sure the slaves and aboriginals would agree with you, lol.

    Simply terrible prose. If this is the type of hyperbole you find attractive it is no wonder you have such a distorted view of humanity. you are literally living in a world of blindly self-centered illusion with no value in the real world and are completely oblivious to historical fact

    Really, you seem to have no idea of reality or how capitalism started out as peasantry was forced off the land and into wage slavery in the cities. You should really try to form a more balanced view of history as your willful lack of knowledge is really quite ironic:

    "In our book How the West Came to Rule, we argue that capitalism is a relatively recent, socially constructed and historically specific way of organising society. More specifically, we show that the origins and subsequent history of capitalism is one of violence – a history built on the brutal subjugation and annihilation of non-capitalist ways of life. Some of the key historical turning points in the making of capitalism emerged – to quote Marx – “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

    Blood represents the long durational process of death and exploitation that marked the origins of capitalism: the Black Death that tore apart feudalism in Europe; the colonial genocides of indigenous people spanning the Americas to the Indonesian archipelago; the ravages of the European slave trade and accompanying devastation of the African continent; and the witch-hunts of 16th and 17th century Europe that subjugated women under a new ‘sexual division of labour’. Dirt denotes the appropriation and recomposition of land in accordance with needs of capital accumulation: the enclosures in England which drove peasants off their land; the colonial dispossession of indigenous communities in the Americas; and the imposition of territorial divisions among colonial competitors in Asia.

    But capitalism’s history of violence is far from just history – it is a continuing nightmare from which humanity has yet to awake. The conquest, ecological ruin, slavery, state terrorism, sexism, racism, exploitation and immiseration upon which capitalism was built continue unabated to this day. From the fatal consequences of austerity in the UK to the ravages of sweatshop labour in Bangladesh, from wars in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq to the systematic execution of black people by police in the US, the global and domestic handmaidens of capitalism continue to subordinate and destroy all who dare to resist its suffocating embrace."

    https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/06/18/capitalism-a-history-of-violence/
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbswor...slavery-and-american-capitalism/#124010c17bd3

    "One thing that the historical record makes obviously clear is that Adam Smith and his laissez-faire buddies were a bunch of closet-case statists, who needed brutal government policies to whip the English peasantry into a good capitalistic workforce willing to accept wage slavery.

    Francis Hutcheson, from whom Adam Smith learned all about the virtue of natural liberty, wrote: ”it is the one great design of civil laws to strengthen by political sanctions the several laws of nature. … The populace needs to be taught, and engaged by laws, into the best methods of managing their own affairs and exercising mechanic art.”

    Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?

    But in order for capitalism to work, capitalists needed a pool of cheap, surplus labor. So what to do? Call in the National Guard!

    Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support."

    https://www.filmsforaction.org/news...-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/


    Raised the standard of everyone on Earth, huh? Any proof of this statement or just more self- serving Randy inspired nonsense from the world of terrible science fiction? America and capitalism itself is dripping in blood, exploitation of indigenous lands and the forced slavery of millions of people around the world. But you can never admit a shred of this or your Randy inspired fallacies begin to fall apart and you have to begin to address the truth.

    So lost in a world of illusion. America's benevolence, huh? lol. Yeah, ask the rest of the world about that.[/QUOTE]
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  4. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    [/QUOTE]
    If the choice is between a primitive way of life and a modern way of life...I don't know, riding half-naked bareback using a bow and arrow to hunt game, or driving an air-conditioned BMW to Whole Foods for Champagne, sheathed corn, baking potatoes, and a filet mignon, to take back to a penthouse and have dinner with an intelligent beautiful woman dressed a blue satin gown, wearing rubies, diamonds, and sapphires...hell, I don't know, but thank goodness no one gets to decide that but me for me.

    As to proof of America's benevolence, look at reality--other than idiots, who would want to go back to caves, teepees, waterholes, outhouses, log cabins soothsayers, and witch doctors?

    Keeping pissing on America and praising the stagnant primitives, roaming nomads, Gulags, Killing Fields, Cultural Revolutions, and empty bellies--it's your mirror to look in, not mine.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  5. EarthSky

    EarthSky Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2018
    Messages:
    2,148
    Likes Received:
    1,139
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I didn't remember his name but I know exactly who you mean from the art in FALILV. Hunter did some great work in the beginning before becoming a bit of a caricature. Hell's Angels was brilliant, original journalism.

    I'm not sure why I used that quote. Sounded cool, I guess. MY favorite quote of Hunter's is:

    "There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

    And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

    So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
     
    James Evans likes this.
  6. EarthSky

    EarthSky Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2018
    Messages:
    2,148
    Likes Received:
    1,139
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I am not pissing on America. That is just you making things up so you don't have to read anything or address anything outside your bubble. I'm trying to give you information so you can see the world and it's history as it really is. I try to document everything I say with multiple sources so you can see I'm not making things up.

    I am not praising any of those things. That is you pulling red herrings and strawmen out of your hat so you don't have to address the reality of capitalism or America's bloody and brutal past.

    It is not an argument between primitives and moderns. The societies you conquered would have found their way to modernity if you had not conquered them. That is the way of the world. Perhaps they would have been as brutal as you were perhaps not. This is not a moral judgement. It is an attempt to explore the truth of the past in a factual way in order to move forward into the future.

    People in the Iroquois confederacy had a far better standard of living and a more sophisticated political system than poor peasants living in brutal squalor in Renaissance Europe did.

    I know it is impossible for you to look outside the Randian veil of faux-righteousness and pompous superiority over other people but you should try.

    I wish I could show you how ugly the illusion you are living in actually is and how the simplistic, misinformed, hateful sloganeering expressed in Rand's fiction, only serves to blind you to the real world and it's people.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  7. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    18 minutes of video? Geez, do you ever read a book?

    How about summarizing the video?
     
  8. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    The world's people in polls say they would rather have the U.S. be the biggest fella on the block rather than China. Maybe people around the world know something you don't.
     
  9. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I doubt it ... and so do you.
     
  10. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    This is how you appear to me.

    upload_2019-6-19_14-6-51.gif
     
    ronv and dairyair like this.
  11. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Don't care. Don't care about any of it. I give credence to only two cultures, Greek and Roman, all others are ignorant massholes. Damn. Western Civilization is conquering space, and primitives are still trying to grasp the wheel. If you were even 1 millionth of the human loving moral saint you delude yourself into believing you are, you'd kiss the first businessman you'd see and say: "Thank you and Bless you", instead of looking for the deepest hellhole you can send him to. No human soul can claim the mantle of moral superiority without recognizing that capitalism is the only moral system for the human soul because it is the only system that states: Your life belongs to you, live it, love it, and never surrender it, to anyone, for any reason, at any time--to do so is the greatest betrayal a human soul can make.

    No one says you can't live like a primitive, but the "rights of man' state it is immoral to demand other's live likewise--and I'd rather fly to Waikiki Beach, and not camp out on the prairie. But you go ahead, build your campfire, honor the Great Spirit, smoke some peyote, commune with the wolf, and enjoy your life...as I will mine.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  12. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    [​IMG]

    How long will Joe and Jane American put up with not getting their share of the pie? Would you like to see them dump the capitalist system?
     
  13. Mac-7

    Mac-7 Banned

    Joined:
    Apr 21, 2011
    Messages:
    86,664
    Likes Received:
    17,636
    Trophy Points:
    113
    He is a video blogger

    Its too bad you didnt bother to listen
     
  14. EarthSky

    EarthSky Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2018
    Messages:
    2,148
    Likes Received:
    1,139
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Lol, so if I dangle a trip to Hawaii in front of you, you will believe anything -even something as loony as Ayn Rand and discount all other historical evidence or fact for a pina colada?

    How moral is that?
     
  15. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Here's what history teaches me: From the humanoids first steps, to their discovery of fire, to hunting, to the gathering, to herding and planting, to the civilizations of today, there have been those individuals who possessed ideas, and courage, and honor, and love, and integrity; and there were those individuals who didn't. And of all of those cultures, of all of those primitive tribal systems, of all of those theologies, and ideologies, only one protects the individuals with good souls, defends their rights, and salutes their lives, and that is the system of capitalism.

    If you truly love the best in the human spirit--and it isn't soulless schmoo that sacrifices for the sake of all others; it is the reasoning mind doing its best to achieve its highest--then truth and integrity demand you defend capitalism; for the purpose of morality is not to teach you to suffer but to live, happily, now, on Earth. And that is what Capitalism offers.

    How do I know? My iPhone tells me so, and my car, and computer, and long life, and Caribbean cruises, and Hawaiian vacations, and on, and on, and on, and on, until my capitalist blessings are too many to enumerate.

    Ayn Rand: "But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."--http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/happiness.html

    It is astonishing that a human soul that defends the right of the rational mind to flourish and live happily is hated by those who preach brotherly love. Perhaps that is because they have mistaken "brotherly love" for "smothering love", to the point of snuffing out the lives of millions. You have tolerance for every primitive idiocy and callousness, but none for the minds that took the human being from the cave to the stars, the creative souls.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  16. EarthSky

    EarthSky Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2018
    Messages:
    2,148
    Likes Received:
    1,139
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Like you have a monopoly on the definition of "good souls" or "morality" or even "freedom" There is nothing moral about anything you or Ayn are on about. It is all self-serving your own interests and greed while trampling the rights of others.

    The greatest societies are those that are the most egalitarian and the most unstable those with the highest levels of inequality.
     
  17. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Not I said me--reason and reality, and the actions of each individual determine the goodness of their souls. And each knows what kind of life they lived better than anyone else.

    And what determines a good soul? The extent of their rationality.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  18. Starjet

    Starjet Well-Known Member Past Donor

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2009
    Messages:
    5,805
    Likes Received:
    1,678
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Well then, I guess that makes Venezuela the greatest nation on earth, for truly they are all equal in their poverty, malnutrition, and misery...well, unless you are one of Maduro's goons.

    However, as this is way off the thread, I again invite you to this thread,

    http://www.politicalforum.com/index...-liberty-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness.556951/where you can rant away at the evil Ayn Rand. How dare she write:

    "Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them."--http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/happiness.html

    And for this, you defile, deny and desecrate her. Think about it. Is that really good for you?
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  19. Ethereal

    Ethereal Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Jul 4, 2010
    Messages:
    40,617
    Likes Received:
    5,790
    Trophy Points:
    113
    What do you mean when you say they will "beat" America?
     
  20. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I learned soon enough that political deals and business deals are different. Trump, apparently, hasn't figured that out. The guy is a loser who can't get anything done.
     
    Mandelus likes this.
  21. Concord

    Concord Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Sep 20, 2013
    Messages:
    3,856
    Likes Received:
    876
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    I bet the thumbnail summarizes it. It's faintly fascist concerns about the "degeneracy" of America vs the virtue of Chinese patriots.

    Gonna go ahead and let it play in the background to see if I was correct.
     
  22. Concord

    Concord Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Sep 20, 2013
    Messages:
    3,856
    Likes Received:
    876
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Alright, here it is: The Chinese (and Vietnamese) have an advantage over Americans in that they don't criticize their own country as strongly or as often.

    They, of course, have it completely backwards. The Western/American traditions of free-thought and criticism of those in power have been some of the greatest assets of our civilization. There's something much stronger in a willingness to accept hard truths and attempt to rectify them, than in ignoring the faults of your own country.
     
  23. zer0lis

    zer0lis Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Jul 13, 2015
    Messages:
    677
    Likes Received:
    274
    Trophy Points:
    63
    Gender:
    Male
    deleted, sorry
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2019
  24. Concord

    Concord Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Sep 20, 2013
    Messages:
    3,856
    Likes Received:
    876
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Pfft.

    Might as well have just posted: "Hereby, I defeat my own argument."
     
    EarthSky likes this.
  25. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Nov 14, 2017
    Messages:
    44,677
    Likes Received:
    12,448
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Male
    Sure, let's bring $2/hour manufacturing jobs back, pay Americans $20/hour to do them behind a protectionist wall, when those same people were making $17/hour doing service sector jobs. Do you have any other ways to lower our real GDP? Are you going to send them off to the Orange Oaf?
     

Share This Page