Your Personal Political Heroes (and their quotes)

[AlexDB9]

The only communist I’ve ever liked

 

[hillelslovak87]

Of course he didn't want the Soviet Union invaded. But he never believed Hitler was going to invade in the first place. That's why the Red Army was caught with it's pants down in the early stages of Barbarossa. The pact with Hitler was purely a power grab, nothing more. If Hitler had kept his word, Stalin would have been happy to split Europe between the USSR and the Nazis, and he wouldn't have given a fuck what happened to the Jews or fellow Slavs like the Poles. He eventually would have gone to war with Nazi Germany, but only when he was sure he could win. Barbarossa forced his hand, and he had to join forces with the Allies.

Arguing that Stalin is somehow less evil than Hitler is like saying a Mexican Cartel sicaro is less evil than a serial killer because the former murders purely for money rather than pleasure

I don't see Stalin quite as bad as Hitler. Hitler was a fanatic whose approach would have resulted in gays, colored people, and the disabled being killed wholesale. Stalin held some dangerous, absurd beliefs that fucked the Soviet Union up, like Lysenkoism, but I don't see him as being quite as extreme as Hitler.

 

[Yunes]

Madeleine Albright

I even went and saw her speak when I was in college because I was a politico-nerd

 

[Anung Un Rama]

Leon Trotsky — 'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.'

 

[unimackpass]

Che Guevara was also a rapist:

But it's so hip and edgy to be a fan and wear one of his teeshirts.

 

[Gunny]

I honestly don’t think I have political heros. Richard Wagner and Beethoven are two of my heroes. I can’t think of a single individual in the political sphere who even comes close to stacking up.

 

[mon]

Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men. Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another.

Sayid qutb

Obviously woman and non believers don't count?

 

[deltapapha]

I don't see Stalin quite as bad as Hitler. Hitler was a fanatic whose approach would have resulted in gays, colored people, and the disabled being killed wholesale. Stalin held some dangerous, absurd beliefs that fucked the Soviet Union up, like Lysenkoism, but I don't see him as being quite as extreme as Hitler.

once you get past your first million, the numbers stop mattering. True, Hitler's intent was more insidious than Stalin's. That said, Nazism was like a quick destructive hurricane. Communism has been like an Ice Age. It is always the more "beneficent" dystopias that present the greatest evil.

 

[hillelslovak87]

once you get past your first million, the numbers stop mattering. True, Hitler's intent was more insidious than Stalin's. That said, Nazism was like a quick destructive hurricane. Communism has been like an Ice Age. It is always the more "beneficent" dystopias that present the greatest evil.

You would have thought people would have abandoned communism in the late 40s. The odd cultish state and leader worship that manifested itself had led to way too many schisms, heresy hunts, and absurd dogmas like the mentioned Lysenko Biology, were a pretty damning testament.

 

[KnightTemplar]

I don't see Stalin quite as bad as Hitler. Hitler was a fanatic whose approach would have resulted in gays, colored people, and the disabled being killed wholesale. Stalin held some dangerous, absurd beliefs that fucked the Soviet Union up, like Lysenkoism, but I don't see him as being quite as extreme as Hitler.

It depends on how you define, "bad". As I said before, Hitler was a fanatic who wanted to exterminate all, "inferior" races. Had he won the war, he certainly would have been worse than Stalin. As it stands, Stalin actually has a higher body count. Although an accurate count is almost impossible, given the suppression of data in the USSR, most historians believe Stalin's orders and policies were directly responsible for the deaths of at least 20,000,000. Some historians put the total number of deaths at more than double that.

The difference between Stalin and Hitler was motive, not morality. Hitler actually believed the shit he said in his speeches. Stalin was no more a Communist than I am. He was a gangster on a global scale. His sole purpose was to gain as much power as he could and hold on to it as long as possible, no matter what the cost. If there was a limit to Stalin's ruthlessness, the world never saw it.

The difference between the Nazis and Soviets was the difference between ISIS and the Mexican Cartels. One slaughters innocents for a perverted belief system. The other does it for money and power. But it makes no difference at all to their victims.

 

[Bamboozled]

But it's so hip and edgy to be a fan and wear one of his teeshirts.

I could only watch the first video, that guy was a fucking parrot and it was disgusting how uninformed he was. The USSR guy didn't have an answer for long Capitalism took because it took place naturally and occurred throughout societies for thousands of years. He thinks just because some goon like Marx who doesn't want religion but uses the Matthew Effect (taken literally from the bible) and he says it's strictly used in Capitalist economies when in reality it's used in every economic system.

I can see why socialism is appealing to the uneducated. They don't know what the fuck Marx is talking about and they don't have critical thinking skills to properly critique it.

 

[Rod1]

Not my hero at all but.

This man however

And

Fuck the first guy for forcing the second to commit suicide.

 

[unimackpass]

I could only watch the first video, that guy was a fucking parrot and it was disgusting how uninformed he was. The USSR guy didn't have an answer for long Capitalism took because it took place naturally and occurred throughout societies for thousands of years. He thinks just because some goon like Marx who doesn't want religion but uses the Matthew Effect (taken literally from the bible) and he says it's strictly used in Capitalist economies when in reality it's used in every economic system.

I can see why socialism is appealing to the uneducated. They don't know what the fuck Marx is talking about and they don't have critical thinking skills to properly critique it.

Some of this stuff isn't arranging chairs on a sinking ship but one that's already on the bottom of the ocean. The interesting thing is that some "educated" people are telling everyone that their not smart enough to understand Marxism so in their mind they win every argument based on that alone.
Their methods are easily recognized and they fancy themselves sophisticated and above the fray. It's totally delusional and grandiose.
The joke amongst the fishing fleet when the wall came down was that the only communist left were college professors. Scoring high on paper unfortunately was the extent of it for some of them. Interesting that my favorite teacher leaned pretty far left but I grew up in the hard knock world of commercial fishing and saw how things actually worked so realized that you couldn't take any one perspective and run with it.
Would have did more college but fishing opportunities presented themselves in a unique way and it was time to go all in. Even my mom who pushed for education said you can study the rest of your life and you better go for it when you have a opportunity. She knew what real life is about.
One of the challenging things about college was putting up with a bunch of people that thought they knew about something that they knew nothing about. They wanted to make national parks in Alaska the size of California but wouldn't listen to someone who lived there , it's the nature of the "intelligencia" as Sowell would say.

 

[Bamboozled]

Some of this stuff isn't arranging chairs on a sinking ship but one that's already on the bottom of the ocean. The interesting thing is that some "educated" people are telling everyone that their not smart enough to understand Marxism so in their mind they win every argument based on that alone.
Their methods are easily recognized and they fancy themselves sophisticated and above the fray. It's totally delusional and grandiose.
The joke amongst the fishing fleet when the wall came down was that the only communist left were college professors. Scoring high on paper unfortunately was the extent of it for some of them. Interesting that my favorite teacher leaned pretty far left but I grew up in the hard knock world of commercial fishing and saw how things actually worked so realized that you couldn't take any one perspective and run with it.
Would have did more college but fishing opportunities presented themselves in a unique way and it was time to go all in. Even my mom who pushed for education said you can study the rest of your life and you better go for it when you have a opportunity. She knew what real life is about.
One of the challenging things about college was putting up with a bunch of people that thought they knew about something that they knew nothing about. They wanted to make national parks in Alaska the size of California but wouldn't listen to someone who lived there , it's the nature of the "intelligencia" as Sowell would say.

I know there is a greater point to your story but I am jealous as fuck you got to fish on the seas. Mad respect.

 

[unimackpass]

I know there is a greater point to your story but I am jealous as fuck you got to fish on the seas. Mad respect.

It was crazy in a lot of ways, love/hate to the extreme. Swore it off many times as a kid while puking over the side baiting thousands of hooks in nasty weather. It was being bored to death mowing someone's lawn in for way less money in Reno that gave me the drive to push through.
Opportunity and possibility can really challenge and grab someone's imagination like nothing else. People try and deflate you with their own form of nihilism and call it greed but goals and ambition are rewarding in their own right. Some of the most generous people I know are the most ambitious.

It was sad to see able people sitting in the bar on welfare when we came back to port. My dad would have a few drinks and then say something real loud like "who in here is on welfare!" He actually believed in a hand up like most people but he had his moments.

It was life in a nutshell really, like you said capitalism developed out of the nature of life. It's always going to need some tweaking because there will always be some dishonest players and people will need legitimate help but at it's core it reflects the nature of reality.

I know a few people that made big money in high school and partyed like rockstars. They still talk about how much blow they went through and cars they wrecked. I mean six figures in high school/collage age and nothing to show for it. Some wised up and did good and some are still partying.

One of my cousins grew up in a log cabin with a dirt floor and ended up a big wheel in the commercial fishing world. Built several crab boats that fish out of Dutch Harbor. Problem is he can never stop working, he literally used to work 16hrs a day no matter how much he had in the bank.

Know and grew up around the Time Bandit bunch on the Deadliest Catch reality tv show. Our dads knew each other, some serious bar and sea stories.
Remember flying back to Reno and watching people driving luggage from the plane and realizing that I was just in another part of the world making a serious living and in high school. It hardly made sense in the world of academia and theory that I walked back into. They didn't realize their were people like my dad and their way of life outside of their ivory towers nor did they care. It only mattered who published something or what their IQ might be. Such a small world they live in.
It was always interesting going to school and hearing a bunch of theories after that kind of intensity and raw reality. There was a frame of reference to measure things by but most people couldn't relate.

 

[$uperman]

I post some quotes from an economist because economy and politics are intertwined.

Henry Hazlitt

“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”

“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”

 

[Jack V Savage]

I post some quotes from an economist because economy and politics are intertwined.

Hazlitt was a journalist with no education in economics, and he was more into Austrianism than real economics. Calling him an economist is like calling Jeane Dixon an astronomer.

 

[$uperman]

Hazlitt was a journalist with no education in economics, and he was more into Austrianism than real economics. Calling him an economist is like calling Jeane Dixon an astronomer.

He is not trained as an economist but that is not necessary. I call him an economist because he wrote the best economic book ever. His economic book "Economics in One Lesson" sold millions of copies.

"It is a brilliant performance. It says precisely the things which need most saying and says them with a rare courage and integrity. I know of no other modern book from which the intelligent layman can learn so much about the basics truths of economics in so short a time" - F.A Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science.

“Henry Hazlitt’s explanation of how a price system works is a true classic: timeless, correct, painlessly instructive.” — Milton Friedman

 

[Jack V Savage]

He is not trained as an economist but that is not necessary. I call him an economist because he wrote the best economic book ever. His economic book "Economics in One Lesson" sold millions of copies.

But it's not really an economics book at all. Like I said, Austrianism is to economics what astrology is to astronomy.

 

[Higus]

He is not trained as an economist but that is not necessary. I call him an economist because he wrote the best economic book ever. His economic book "Economics in One Lesson" sold millions of copies.

"It is a brilliant performance. It says precisely the things which need most saying and says them with a rare courage and integrity. I know of no other modern book from which the intelligent layman can learn so much about the basics truths of economics in so short a time" - F.A Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science.

“Henry Hazlitt’s explanation of how a price system works is a true classic: timeless, correct, painlessly instructive.” — Milton Friedman

Lol, there's a reason why Business and Economics are taught in different buildings at most Universities.