: : : If all you Socialist/Communists hate competition so much why are you all competing with me and Gort et al. to get us to see the errors of our ways? : : Because we think you're wrong. We are not oppressing you, or going against our principles when we disagree with you, in fact we are in fundamental agreement with our principles in doing so, debate is the stuff society is made of. You're free to say what you will, we're free to disagree with you.
: *Concur, in the main. I see ourselves as Copernicus and Bruno going against the reactionary tide of their day, in 'competition' with those whose personal lives were based upon a false doctrine which placed themselves at the center of the universe. And so the dialectic goes...
Caution, Krasny; remember what happened to Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus; remember the time it took the Church to admit that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe.
The opposition are clinging doggedly to their faith, after all, and have no compunction about spilling blood to preserve it. Remember what Martin Luther said about Copernicus' heliocentric model;
``that fool [who would] reverse the entire art of astronomy. . . Joshua bade the Sun and not the Earth to stand still.''
- or the person who wrote to Tycho Brahe declaring ``No attack on Christianity is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the
heavens.''
Remember that the Church banned De Revolutionibus until it was edited to be taught as "a possible theory" rather than "an observed fact" (just like the Midwestern US and Darwinian evolution!); and that Galileo was troubled by the Catholic Inquisition just as Kepler was banned from his local Lutheran communion.
Eventually, the more enlightened believers realised that they couldn't deny the evidence in front of them and changed their beliefs; as they will also eventually accept evolution. Maybe, 300 years down the line, the orthodoxy will finally admit that socialism is a sustainable and egalitarian system; as some of the more enlightened believers are already doing.
Until then, the capitalists are going to fight it tooth and nail; as Lt. Col. Ralph Peters* puts it;
"...the de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault - to those ends we will do a fair amount of killing".
We can merely resist them and hope they don't completely wreck the planet in the meanwhile.
It is interesting to note the number of ardent pro-capitalists on this board who are also Creationist born-again Christians; one is tempted to wonder if their common motivator is their complete inability to deal with any thought newer than 300 years old...
They'll come around. Eventually.
After all, Copernicus was the first proper 'revolutionary' - and his daring to challenge orthodoxy was the 'revolution' from which we derive the word.
Farinata.
(who chose a famous heretic for his pseudonym.)
*Office of the US Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence.
