(no subject)

[missroserose]

Four-day weekend for the admin staff.

Two feet of snow over the last two days, including whiteout conditions on a major highway.

Twenty-six messages left on the streets department phone.

One compliment on the efficiency and hard work of the city snow removal crew.

Boo. Yeah.

Comments

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

26 calls and only one "you rock"?

I actually *missed* Juneau's cleanup speed.

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well. Take a look at the Juneau Empire's response boards sometime - that's the quality of folk we generally deal with.

I have no idea what it is with Juneau, but there seems to be a disproportionately high percentage of "whiny jerk" in the population. Sigh.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

Conservatives: whiny jerks
Liberals: whiny jerks with enough entitlement complex to speak up for themselves at every opportunity.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

For all that conservatives like to talk about how much liberals whine, the liberal "whining" is usually complaining about legitimate abuse. Whereas, conservatives tend to whinge more along the lines of "I'm not being waited on hand and foot FAST ENOUGH!"

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Tell it to errant_variable. So far as I'm concerned, whiny jerks are whiny jerks - unless someone's doing you direct harm, there's no call to be less than civil. Ever.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Alright. Yo, errant! You are WRONG!

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

Conservatives and liberals are equally full of shit. As are you.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I was being playfully snarky, not looking for a fight.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

I was just hating equally. :)

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know, it's fashionable these days to say "Both sides are equally wrong, equally corrupt, it's all the same, blah blah blah".

But as the last eight years should have proven quite starkly, this is false. Both sides have their problems, but one political philosophy has led to global economic collapse, war and terror, and all sorts of other threats to civilization. The other one generally promotes peace and prosperity.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

You're confusing conservatives and neocons, which is much the same as confusing Muslim-family religions and fanatic terrorism. Sadly, many conservatives made a similar mistake.

I'm not saying that W and his goonsquad (and the people pulling strings) haven't fucked a lot of shit up over the last eight years.

However, I disagree that liberals as a group are all all about the good shit. A lot of the more radical suggestions that have been made verge on the shitty end of socialism (returns for no effort if you choose to exploit the system) and make no mind to the necessary flip side of the same coin: "From each according to his ability". If you're going to do it, do it right. Take a look at the Russians for what happens when you fuck that one up.

The especially worrying facet of that trend is that it would likely *heighten* the trend toward (for lack of a better term) sheepleness, and make powerplays based on fear of outside or internal forces far more effective than those under the Bush administration - and many of those did or came disturbingly close to going through.

I like Obama. If half of the Home (tm) of his campagin is carried through on, he'll make one of the best presidents in a while. If not, and he lets the special interests behind him move him as effectively as the ones behind Dubya moved their man, I don't want to think of what his second term or the president following him could do.

tl;dr you're less right than you think you are but I think you've got the right idea

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Holy wall of text, Batman!

Anyway, we've not really approached anything akin to socialism in this country, and we're not likely to even if liberals get full control. And I think a lot of people are very afraid of socialism without actually understanding it.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

Hey, I gave you a tl;dr. :)

And I actually like the *idea* of socialism, but doubt that it can be implemented without a massive, universal ethical re-alignment or some very cold-blooded rules.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Well, that depends. Are you talking full communistic dictatorship ala Marx, or modern European Democratic Socialism, such as is found in France, Sweden, Germany, and in fact most of the EU?

Marxist socialism suffers from the same problem as anarchist libertarianism, in my view: they have no solution to the "asshole problem", what to do about people who simply do not want to follow the rules. A Marxist society inevitably gets freeloaders, while an anarchy ends up controlled by warlords.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

I'm referring to socialism as a relatively pure concept. None of the implementations I'm familiar with, especially the mutilated implementations of Marxism present in the USSR and various related countries, are ideal or IMO workable in the long term - they relied too heavily on hero-worship and fear as unifying forces, and failed to be driven by the honest will of the people. Barring the previously mentioned re-alignment I don't believe a primarily socialist system is realistically implementable, however.

I have to admit, however, that I'm not familiar with recent developments in European socialism. Would you care to explain in a basic form?

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

European socialism is more akin to "social democracy". Basically, it's a system in which the state assumes a certain level of responsibility for people's basic welfare, but does not assume ownership of property and the means of production. In countries like France, for instance, they have universal health care, housing assistance, and other welfare programs. However, they still have plenty of private property, private businesses, free enterprise, and all that. So it's sort of a balance of "public assistance" and "private business" handling things.

It's not perfect, but the French do have one of the highest standards of living in the world, higher than ours in the US.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

Paid for with higher-than-average taxes and regulated more tightly than usual, yes?

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Higher than OUR taxes, yes. But the things they are paying more taxes for, are things which are individually much more expensive to pay for out of pocket, so by having the government pay for it, it costs each person a lot less. Also, properly-funded government agencies can do the job of providing health care more efficiently than multiple competing private companies, so it ends up costing less on the whole.

And sure, their economy is more regulated than ours, but we've seen where lack of regulation takes us.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

You know, I had another Wall of Text to put up, but after having LJ eat it twice and the ridiculously narrow column size we're working up to,

fuck it.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Just as well, we were getting dangerously close to someone bringing up libertarianism. I'm allergic.

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

actually I was about to go "fuck socialism" and start devils-advocating for capitalism, inspired by the Spirit of Rockefeller.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, that's alright. You can just say that you did, and I'll back you up if anyone asks.