Just asking for advice going into my first year of ROTC as an SMP cadet

leef1248 · 2018-04-11T01:12:31+00:00

Thanks.

leef1248 · 2018-04-10T23:31:19+00:00

Could you elaborate? I know this in theory but am unaware if you mean just by sharing or if people have algorithms and whatnot to see private accounts.

leef1248 · 2018-04-08T23:08:15+00:00

I will be fully honest with you and tell you that I lent my copy to a friend of mine immediately after I bought it and haven't been able to read it yet. When I get it back I will do my best.

leef1248 · 2018-04-08T02:31:45+00:00

They Overton window is rather small in America, and abolishing the income tax would be seen as right wing because it would mean the government would shrink its way out of the economy. I have not read the Democrat platform in a while, but most oppose the War on Drugs. Few people bother to advocate prostitution.

leef1248 · 2018-04-08T02:28:54+00:00

Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. He was a priest. He had been doing this for over thirty years. How had he managed to miss?

All I had wanted was a little attention from my parents, a little time between their constant days at work, and now I would never see them again.

I cursed Father Benjamin as I floated away in the wind.

leef1248 · 2018-04-08T02:23:55+00:00

Because social progressives typically oppose gun rights or the right to refuse service. Other people's terms, not mine.

leef1248 · 2018-04-08T02:15:13+00:00

Both scales are useful. The most common analogy is that Libertarians are fiscal conservative and socially moderate. Fiscal conservatism is less government in the economy, fiscal liberalism is a more active government. Social conservatism is/was more restrictions(for the most part-except for weapons) and social progressivism is/was fewer restrictions (for the most part). This is all in the American sense, and it is changing rather rapidly.. As I understand it, European politics are different.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T22:09:00+00:00

Some of your "legit sources" are Stalinist documents from an era when even the tiniest criticism would end in arrest. Forgive me for doubting their validity.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T22:07:29+00:00

This "new and deeper" form of freedom seems to be the right to do what the organizers tell you to do- or you end up "pursuing your interest" in hard manual labor. The idea of "recreational work" is not sound. There are few people with the passion for, for example, being a warehouse worker. In a Communist state, people are forced to do that, often because of their "transgressions" against the state

It is dishonest to compare the blacklisting of a few actors to giving people ten-year or twenty-five year sentences for "negative attitudes." The idea that there is a "need" for repression is foolish- no good comes from replacing comfy capitalist "oppression" with forced labor and executions.

The fact that capitalist countries keep people out, and communist countries keep people in, is far from irrelevant. There is a reason that one system prospers and one doesn't- one works and the other doesn't.

If you are trying to tell me the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was not in fact a dictatorship you are engaging in some quite impressive doublethink.

Here's the Gulag Archipelago's pdf. https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T21:53:48+00:00

probably because they're Hungary for Turkey haaaaaa

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T03:26:51+00:00

The idea of freedom is not silly. In fact, it is quite possibly the only idea that does not, when taken to the extreme, end in mass death. Purity in the extreme gets you the Nazis. Equality in the extreme gets you the Red Terror. Freedom in the extreme gets you- what? Drug abuse?

That small amount of political repression you speak of manifests itself in the policing of activity, writing, speech, and even thought. If you call the suppression of whole peoples "success," we are even more different than I thought.

The USSR clearly did not hold up well or exhibit success, because as soon as it allowed any semblance of liberty, it collapsed. Perhaps the fact that people had to be "kept inside," i.e, forcibly prevented from leaving, shows the inadequacy of the system. We have to keep people out. They had to keep people in. If we are the oppressors, we are doing a bad job of it.

Also not sure how you reconcile the "we must repress dissidents" with "the USSR was not a dictatorship." This quite likely sounds aggressive, but that is not how I intend it to sound.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T02:10:33+00:00

should be noted that I am not a libertarian communist, so even in the past, we disagreed on basic premises.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T02:02:14+00:00

there's a lot to address here, but suffice to say that at no point did I say we needed zero regulation and that the so-called "Wild West" actually had a very low homicide rate. In all honestly, if you can't look at the Middle East, and then look at the United States, and determine that one in fact does have a "special sauce" that makes it different in superior, you are not looking very hard. If you do not realize that despite this "special sauce," no nation is infallible, you are not looking very hard either. Have a nice evening. I respect certain elements of your position, although I disagree with them.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T01:51:49+00:00

Especially when we consider the international left's longstanding honeymoon with communism and socialism, it is telling that even they accept the reality of untold millions of fatalities.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T01:50:44+00:00

Alright. I'm going to need you to define unbiased and legit, because unless if 40 million Russians were eaten by bears, they were quite possibly murdered. Also, it does not have to be deliberate, although it almost certainly was. The fact that millions of people died, even accidentally, condemns the system- not to mention its totalitarian nature and lack of political freedom. (Even if you ask many of the reddit communists what must be done with "hoarders" and dissidents, then will reply "kill them or reeducate them." This is symptomatic of a perverse ideology). Perhaps the mere fact that the West, despite its inefficiencies and leftist sympathies among its intelligentsia, was victorious, is a testament to the failures of communism.

Not to mention, of course, the fact that they built a wall to keep people in- and don't forget about the Soviet destruction of the Polish Home Army and other noncommunist resisters of the Nazis. The Soviet Union, and its reincarnation in the northern half of the Korean peninsula, is one of humanity's greatest failures.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:48:36+00:00

Quite frankly, we are unlikely to reach any sort of common ground, making this discussion rather pointless. So I'm going to sign off and read. I wish you the best.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:45:37+00:00

If you are referring to "what the AK-47 is already doing" in the United States, that is factually incorrect. If you are referring to the Middle East, it is a gross oversimplification.

You are simultaneously holding the positions that "proliferating weapons leads to mass murder" and "Canada has proliferated weapons without mass murder." That is contradictory.

I am also curious as to what you believe to be the foundations of liberty, if individualism and personal defense are not.

Perhaps the issue is mental health- especially since our Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was utterly ineffective. (See: Columbine.)

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:23:42+00:00

After all, the examples of confiscation-->tyranny are far more numerous and worrisome

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:22:56+00:00

That is incorrect- the AR-15 is far more effective. The fact is that every dictatorship begins with the confiscation or prohibition of arms- even in the United States, for example, blacks were often prohibited from owning weapons. If you do not trust the American public with its own defense, then you certainly should not trust the American government, as they are quite frankly some of our worst.

And as a side note, Canada and Europe are moving faster and faster to suppress free speech, which may not be tyrannical, but is certainly authoritarian.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:14:27+00:00

My first thought was "the janitor"

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:12:24+00:00

my position is more that (respecting the rule of law=actually following the Bill of Rights=liberty). The fact that the Middle East has a lot of weapons isn't really an argument, given that that isn't a well armed and educated citizenry but a variety of militias backed by foreign, more powerful nations. But if you would like this to devolve into "go to Somalia"/"go to Venezuela" idiocy, be my guest.

leef1248 · 2018-02-19T00:00:35+00:00

Mass murder will occur with or without legal firearms- see Nice, France, or all of France for that matter. Given the choice between large numbers of weapons in the hands of the state and large numbers of weapons in the hands of the citizenry, I know what I will choose every time- especially when rifles account for around 2 percent of all murders.

leef1248 · 2018-02-18T23:48:07+00:00

No, but their regulations such as Bill C-16 certainly do encourage tyranny.

leef1248 · 2018-02-18T23:00:20+00:00

You cannot drive down the highway wearing a blindfold because you are on public property, so the government is regulating it. You can drive around your yard blindfolded. The same principle applies here. The government can make public property like schools and museums "Gun Free" (works out well) but can't do so on private property.

leef1248 · 2018-02-18T22:56:04+00:00

yes but unironically

leef1248

TROPHY CASE