Now Even Being an Active Anti-American Terrorist Doesn’t Make You Off-Limits for The Obama Administ

[Hauldren Collider]

Commies caused you to land on the moon. Islamists caused you to get groped when boarding a plane.
Also, would you rather live in a socialist state or an Islamic state?

Commies scared us into accomplishing great things, but that doesn't mean I'm unhappy to see the back of the most evil system of government known to man. I'm sure you're aware of the countless atrocities perpetrated by Stalin, et al? These aren't isolated things. The abuses of Mao, Castro, Kim Il Sung, Stalin and all the other commie kings of the hill are inevitable results of the system.

[Hauldren Collider]

Hey, wake up. It's not Serb you're talking to. Confrontation with socialism led to no major wars, improved working conditions, lent support to feminist and civil rights movements, and led to breakthroughs in science. It also triggered atrocious witchhunts by McCarthy, but that is also the only result of the War on Terror so far.
Every country needs competition, and the only way to use it for your improvement is to pick a competitor whose values are at least in some ways superior to yours.

The witchhunts of McCarthyism are remarkably petty when you compare to millions tortured/murdered, millions more starved, environments destroyed, and wealth and freedom eliminated. The worst of McCarthyism was that a few people in hollywood had some trouble finding work. The worst of Communism was that if you said you didn't like Brezhnev you'd get sent to Siberia.

[giblets]

The Taliban would be a worse government. At least the Communists don't want to live in the middle ages.

[onodera]

Commies scared us into accomplishing great things, but that doesn't mean I'm unhappy to see the back of the most evil system of government known to man. I'm sure you're aware of the countless atrocities perpetrated by Stalin, et al? These aren't isolated things. The abuses of Mao, Castro, Kim Il Sung, Stalin and all the other commie kings of the hill are inevitable results of the system.

If you want me to take you seriously, you should stop mindlessly regurgitating stuff you've learned in high school history classes. Is socialism a form of government? All dictators commit atrocities, it doesn't really matter what economic system they try to build while doing that.
Socialism in the Soviet Union had its shortcomings (it's hard to tell how many were the result of the poor design, how many were caused by dictatorial mismanagement and how many were from the cold war overexertion), enough to collapse, but its coexistence with capitalism had an enormous positive influence on the latter. Without this moderating influence people in Europe and the US would be much worse off.

[kentonio]

I think that may be a very good point. When the two sides were facing off, capitalism couldn't swing too hard to the extreme because then communism would have started to appear a much more attractive alternative.

[Elok]

The Taliban would be a worse government. At least the Communists don't want to live in the middle ages.

Depends which Communists you're talking about. Stalin made a game try of it by trying to kill all the engineers. Religious persecution? Fundamentalist Muslims look pretty nice on that score when you compare them to some of the regimes in Eastern Europe. And then there's the Khmer Rouge...

[Hauldren Collider]

None of this **** was stuff I learned in history class. My teachers were pinkos. If you want me to take you seriously, you have to sound like someone who isn't trying to protect his national pride. Capitalism may have benefitted from us being afraid of the communists, but I'd rather live in a world where millions of people didn't have to suffer under the thumb of economic and political dictatorship.

You can have dictatorship without the abuses of communism, onodera. There have been plenty of capitalist dictatorships and they've been almost universally better than their socialist and communist counterparts.

Additionally, the idea of communism without dictatorship is pure fantasy. Economic control inevitably leads to social and political control. So let's not trot the "communism wasn't implemented properly" dead horse out of the stable.

[MRT144]

Evidence or GTFO, Mike.
The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him. - Peter Bergen
http://articles.cnn.com/2006-08-15/w...ey?_s=PM:WORLD

Sorry, he meant Saddam, but with the way the Bush Admin presented their case for war, they didn't know the difference either.

[giblets]

Depends which Communists you're talking about. Stalin made a game try of it by trying to kill all the engineers. Religious persecution? Fundamentalist Muslims look pretty nice on that score when you compare them to some of the regimes in Eastern Europe. And then there's the Khmer Rouge...

I'm going to ask for a citation for your claim that Stalin wanted to have all of the engineers killed.

[Elok]

That was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but some of the first show trials of the USSR were of engineers accused of "wrecking."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakhty_Trial

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Party_Trial

It wasn't a real purge, no, but what an idiotic way to run a country...

EDIT: Really, all I'm trying to say here is: I'd rather live under the worst Islamists in history than the worst Communists. I'd be an Undesirable Element under either one, but at least the Muslims would wait for me to actually do something before killing me.

[Aeson]

The worst of either would have killed you for no other reason than what you are Elok. (Nationality or religion, sometimes both.) It's a nonsensical distinction to make between genocidal fanatics.

[Elok]

No, not really. The worst of the worst, for Muslims, are pagans, who can be converted by force and killed if they refuse. Sounds pretty bad, until you realize that the worst of the worst under certain Red regimes were members of the wrong social class, or sometimes even chosen, effectively, at random. And then given a show trial where they were forced to confess to invented crimes before being executed. Assuming they were important enough to merit that treatment--sometimes they simply "vanished."

Also, the Muslims generally only tortured you if you really pissed them off. Communists, not so much. More later, gotta go do stuff with the wife.

[Aeson]

You're insane if you think the worst that any Islamic nation ever did was kill someone who wouldn't convert.

[Elok]

Well, that and all the wars of aggression, cruel laws, oppression of women, etc. Compared to the Yezhov Terror, though, they were still pretty sane and rational. You don't seem to appreciate just how bat**** insane Communism could be. Also, where did "genocidal" come from?

[notyoueither]

Hey, wake up. It's not Serb you're talking to. Confrontation with socialism led to no major wars,

How many tens of millions of people in the developing world died in proxy wars? I'm sure they died happy knowing that at least it was not a major conflict.

improved working conditions, lent support to feminist and civil rights movements,

It might be argued that the presence of the Soviet Union impeded the progress on these files in many countries. It was easier to marginalise socialist thinkers and thought.

and led to breakthroughs in science.

Score one for your view. The Space Race.

It also triggered atrocious witchhunts by McCarthy, but that is also the only result of the War on Terror so far.
Every country needs competition, and the only way to use it for your improvement is to pick a competitor whose values are at least in some ways superior to yours.

We have that in the way of European vs Anglo vs Japanese vs Chinese ways of doing things. Oops. Looks like the Chinese picked the system that is superior. Now they're just a dictatorship rather than a socialist paradise.

What I responded to, BTW, was your counter to the claim that the Commies were worse than Islamists (as threats not only to us, but to every person on the face of this planet, IMO). They were.