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how to handle a new caligula?

Caligula Jong-un claims he was watching the loading of an H-bomb on an ICBM, rather than his country has 'readied' a hydrogen bomb.
What matters it what is done, not what is said.

Barak Obama has badly weakened the West and the USA.

What will China do? Are they, in fact, supporting Caligula as a means of distracting the West?

Will the West have the will to sanction China, or is the West addicted to cheap Chinese plastic and cheap labour?

At present, much of the West is claiming to be reducing pollution, while in fact exporting production (and jobs) to China. There, at least 5 to 10 times the pollution is produced per unit of production than is the production had remained in the efficient West. But The West has no pollution from their products being manufactured.

In the end, it is a matter of whether the West still has intestinal fortitude or else it has become decadent.

The notion that Kim Jong-un is making an unanswerable threat does not wash because if he kills a million or three, North Korea will be glass.

The population of North Korea is 25 million on a land area that is less than half that of Britain.

The world may now have to pay the butcher's bill for the likes of Obam and Tony Bliar.
Tthose who do not learn the easy way eventually learn and pay the hard way.

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socialism and sociology zone

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socialism is built on hate - but they do love chelsea!

(A terraces/bleachers chant to Land of hope and glory.)

We hate Nottingham Forest
We hate Tottenham too
We hate West Ham United

but Chelsea we love you.

Raymond Aron analysing Marx (p.166):

"...for there to be a class, there must be a consciousness of unity, a feeling of separation from other classes, and even a feeling of hostility towards other social classes...

"... separate individuals form a class only to the extent that they must carry on a struggle against another class."

Aron goes on to explain that in Marx, unlike the bourgeoisie who gain power by their own merits, the lumpen proletariat (sic) need someone to lead them.

Step forward Obama, 'Liary and ... Chelsea.

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socialism and sociology zone

Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Vol. 1: Montequieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848. by Raymond Aron
	Pelican , pbk, 1968 ASIN: B0049B78JW amazon.com / amazon.co.uk

has socialism ever produced any good for the poor anywhere at any time?

I have been increasingly wondering of late whether socialism has ever done anything useful for populations, anything at all, over the long term.

Or whether the progress of the poor would have been every bit as good and better if the socialist religion had never been invented.

Consider these examples:

• Henry Ford lowered his prices on the theory that if he paid enough, his workers would be able to afford the product.
  And, of course, many industrial magnates concerned themselves greatly with worker conditions, for instance in the UK and USA, and several do to this day.
• There were at least 2,500 private/charity hospitals in the UK before Clement Attlee started interfering and setting up a state centralised, corrupt, alienated 'health' monopoly.

What I am after is whether any action of the left ever, in fact, advanced to condition of the worker, rather than just one powerful self-interested section battening off the real poor as the miners did and several others).

Francis Galton turned around the Victorian assertion that drunkenness caused poverty, and asked if it were not, in fact, that poverty caused drunkenness.
It is in this context that I ask the question.

While every socialist regime indeed does tend to engender poverty and mass murder, is there anything at all to be said for their dogmas in pragmatic terms? Or is it just as Vilfredo Pareto suggests, always one (in this case) mad elite trying to replace another established elite?

And nothing more at all at all?

*

I look at modern examples of Socialist change by revolution in countries across the world. Socialism may not be "always awful", there is probably a minimum/limited case for Cuba, and perhaps similar claims could be made for the French Revolution and even for the Russian Revolution, but the costs were outrageous.

However, my growing sense is that Socialism has never done any real good for the poor.

Working within a revolutionary model for Socialist improvements to society, that model is totally inapplicable to any gains in more advanced/civilised societies.
In more advanced societies, it seems to do only harm.

Considering current socialist 'model' countries, and comparing them to Western or Westernised societies, I look at North Korea compared to South Korea, and to China.
The differences are stark. Without socialism, I do not think it idle to suggest North Korea would have been far better without socialism, and probably China would be also.

It is very likely that Cuba would likely now be far more developed and advanced without socialism and the Castros.

None of the responses to my question that I have received so far, including those vaunting Cuban medical and school services, make a very convincing argument against my original question:
"Has socialism ever produced any good for the poor anywhere at any time?"
That is quite amazing to me in the context of all the myths that have built up around the Socialist cult.

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socialist religions
the labour party did not start the nhs
poor in london, 1909 - you never had it so good

socialism and daesh

"Or is it the opposite? Is it precisely the pitilessness, the purity, the inhumanity, that attracts them? In every age and nation, some people – often young men – are drawn to ideologies that promise a completely new way of life, ideologies that make no concession to human frailties, nor to past practice. In this regard, at any rate, the appeal of Communism is not so different from the appeal of Daesh."

Of course? Daniel Hannan has not quite got the freedom to call communism, socialism and fascism one and the same after 50 years of Kremlin propaganda

a psychiatrist will tell you that a person raised by parents without much sense will learn to project a hatred of all authority. Some of those never grow out of it.

And then there is the simple mind who seeks a perfect world with 'answers' that are simple, clear and wrong.

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socialism, a religion that hopes for the end of times

Of course, idiots like then USSR President Khrushchev supported loons like Fidel Castro, as did and does the Socialist cult in general.

"In January 1992 Robert S. McNamara, who served as US Defence Secretary during the Cuban Missile crisis, attended a meeting chaired by Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba. It was only at this meeting, 30 years after the event, that McNamara learned 162 nuclear warheads, including 90 tactical warheads, had already been deployed on the island at the time of the missile crisis.

McNamara was dumfounded. He asked for the translation to be repeated. He then gathered his thoughts and said: "Mr President, I have three questions for you: number one, did you know the nuclear warheads were there? Number two, if you did, would you have recommended to [Nikita] Khruschev in the face of a US attack that he use them? Number three, if he had used them, what do you think would have happened?".

Castro, seemingly irritated by the naivety of McNamara's questioning, triumphantly replied: "Number one, I knew they were there. Number two, I would not have recommended to Khruschev, I did recommend to Khruschev that they be used. Number three, what would have happened to Cuba? It would have been totally destroyed."

McNamara was astonished. He was sat before a man who was prepared to foment nuclear war between the world's superpowers, and in doing so sacrifice the lives, not just of his own citizens, but those of untold millions elsewhere. And all in the name of what? The preservation of a misguided ideology that time and again history has shown to only deliver economic misery and hardship to those living within its clutches."
—
"But the left's blind adoration extends beyond Fidel Castro to other left-wing luminaries. In 2008, while appearing on the BBC's This Week, Dianne Abbott argued Chairman Mao "on balance did more good than harm". No, you're not mistaken – she's talking about the same Chairman Mao whose 'Great Leap Forward' resulted in the deaths of some 45 million people. Abbott's remarks were jokingly dismissed by Andrew Neill and Michael Portillo."
[Quoted from commentcentral.co.uk]

When will lightweights like Andrew Neill and Michael Portillo grow up? When will the British State Broadcaster stop giving them airtime?

I believe you know the 'answer'.

Why do socialists believe they are any more sane than Islamists hoping for the end of times?

"The Shiite clerics of Iran believe that Mahdi is the child of Muhammad, the "hidden Imam" and the twelfth Imam. They argue that Muhammad al Mahdi was born thousands of years ago and disappeared to reapear later when certain signs emerge. On the other hand, the apocalyptic Muslim leaders of the Islamic State believe that Mahdi has not yet been born but this is the time that he will appear in the world."

"Their hatred toward Jews and Christians, and anyone else that doesn't share their Islamic philosophy, drives them to fund global terrorism and build up their military to extreme levels—including the development of nuclear weapons. Iran's stated vision is to bring about the end of days by destroying Israel and conquering the world"
[Quoted from endtimestruth.com/]

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Socialism and appeasement - so few stood firm against the socialist dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler
Papal encyclicals and Marx - some extracts: on socialism and liberalism
Humans killing humans
Ends and means and the individual

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