(Untitled)

[lacommunarde]

God fucking damn anyone who thinks that the only alternative to selfish, unblunted capitalism is Eastern Bloc "socialism," who thinks that any amelioration to the market will automatically lead to Big Brother

Comments

[xen0glossy]

People are so ridiculously stupid about the whole "socialism!!!" thing that it's not even funny. If it were just that they were uninformed, that would be one thing, but when you try to inform them, they don't listen. I mean, I don't have the political knowledge to back it up that you do, but one would think that the distinction between Eastern Bloc "socialism" and socialized medicine would be simple enough to grasp without going into political theory.

[lacommunarde]

My point exactly. One doesn't have to go into political theory but merely onto the country comparison sites which compare on a wide variety of factors. Most of Western Europe has socialized medicine with the countries with better socialized medicine having a higher percent of maternal survival rates (a basic measure of how a country's progressing) and better rates of survival until adulthood and longer life expectancy (true that is because some of these countries just have a population with an unusually high age of mortality). Plus, they have a high correlation with having much higher literacy rates.

But my aunt tried to say that she'd been to Eastern Germany before the wall fell so she knew. When I tried to point out to her that that's not socialism but an f-ed up version of Communism (as opposed to communism with a lowercase c). She yelled, "That's not socialism? That's not socialism? I was there!" On that headdesk note, I left the room.