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So, your favorite type of jam is semen.

God, shut up.

Boysenberry.

http://real-estate-and-urban.blogspot.com/...unterpoint.html Interesting shit!

Yes! Good, those are exactly the words that I wanted you to use. "In modern society," no "textbook socialist countries," so you'll agree that these definitions change and it's not realistic to say that a socialist government is one that HAS TO TAKE CONTROL OVER EVERY INDUSTRY OR ELSE IT'S CATEGORICALLY NOT SOCIALIST. Like I said before, that's just part of the equation, and we haven't even begin to touch upon social benefits, and what have you. Furthermore, I'm absolutely sure that even the "majority" part of your original sentiment could be broken down further: you'll get different responses to what a socialist country is when you talk to John Adams, Milton Friedman, or John Keynes. You are arguing because X (socialism) is part of Y (any move away from pure capitalsim), then X = Y. Yes, socialism is moving away from pure capitalism, but that does not make ANY move away from pure capitalism the same thing as socialism. Socialism is a very specific thing, and pure capitalism is a very specific thing. But there are many other economic systems which are neither of the two. Here's where your logic gets confused. In the x = y equation, you substitute my definition for your definition. Let's take look at that with my allegory of martyrdom. X is martyrdom, and Y is a religious act. X falls under Y, so X = Y, or that martyrdom is a religious act. Now when you say socialism in that equation above, you're using your construct of socialism. The equation should have read, "X [as an individual act] (anti-trust regulation) is part of Y (any move away from laissez-faire market systems), then X = Y," or that anti-trust regulation is a move away from laissez-faire market systems. Your line of thinking up there isn't coherent and you intermittently switch our definitions, so the whole thing falls apart anyways.

Votes in congress and political capital only go so far until you run into problems with how long things take. Restoring confidence into an economy doesn't take the same amount of time that a vote would take, obviously. We're talking massive, grandiose things happening, and things that take time.

Countries: US, Canada, Mexico, England, Netherlands, Italy, and Japan. States: California, Washington, Hawaii, Utah, Colorado, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Nevada. Vacationwise, I spent the most time in Michigan. Grand Rapids specifically, and it's not very fun. Lots of old people.

So even here, you present two different definitions: where a country is only socialist if the state owns everything, and where the state owns the majority of industries. Excluding that owning industry is only part of the socialist paradigm, of course. I'm not trying to prove you wrong, I'm just defending my own definition and trying to explain why I use it and am not all that excited to go beyond it.

Oh come on, that's entirely based on your definition, and mine just happens to be more free ranging. Not even the European socialist economies are entirely socialist, they still have some free market aspects, but it would be counter-intuitive to say that these countries aren't socialist. If you wanted to remove every single aspect of a free market economy and call it socialism or communism or whatever denomination you choose to attribute to it, that's fine, but you'll run into problems, I guarantee. What about Socialism With Chinese Characteristics? They call themselves socialist and many of us would say that they have a fair share of a command economy, but the SEZs are about as free market as you get. Why in the hell wouldn't an American from the 1850's look at the American economy now and call it socialist? These definitions are constantly changing and are going to differ with every person you ask, that's why I use the broad definition. Concurrently, why or how would a government pension be any less or more "socialistic" than anti-trust legislation or the like? I'm an econ major, dude, I know how the US economy looks. You don't have to tell me what I already know.

Does martyrdom not fall under a "religious practices" umbrella?

No, I'm looking for anything that tells me that my definition is wrong, which no one has been able to do the number of times that I have brought it up, despite the fact that whenever it is brought up, SJ flat out says that it is wrong without giving any sort of thought into it sans copy-and-pasting something. And how does "a political theory advocating state ownership of industry" not fall under the "anything that moves away from a laissez-faire economy" definition?

So instead of presenting me with any evidence that my definition is wrong in anyway, you just give me another definition, and one from the Merriam-Webster dictionary at that.

"Democrats wanna take my gun" My favorite part though is the immediate, knee-jerk white person reaction to rap: gently swaying back and forth and shaking their head as if they really understand the plight of this guy. I was half-expecting him to say "uh," "what," or "yeah" after each line.

The Democrats don't have to own anything. Republicans were in charge of the war when that went bad, so they got blamed. Republicans were in charge of economic policy when the economy went bad, so they got blamed. If things don't get better, the Democrats just need to claim "things are worse than we thought, we need more time to undo all the damage the Republicans did." They don't have to own anything, but the voters have entrusted the Democrats to fix the problems. Like one journalist noted, "Obama voted against the war, but he's inheriting the responsibility to end it." It's not about owning anything, it's about whose responsibility it is to fix it.

Well it depends on how loose your definition of socialism is. The way I learned it, socialism is anything that attempts to detract from a laissez-faire system. So, under that definition, yes, Obama is a socialist, but so were the last 10 presidents.

What actual books did you read? I read Things Fall Apart, two books about chinks, and House of the Spirits. I enjoyed it, but felt as if HotS could have been boiled down to the story of the two brothers and how they fared during the revolution (even though this ended up being a tiny number of chapters, including the cilmax), the rest was just like watching a family slide show. The car decapitation in the first chapter was a nice surprise though. Whether or not Freud is "useless psychology" has absolutely no bearing on whether or not his work is useful for literary analysis. And surprise, surprise, it wasn't. The Freudian look at Hamlet was essentially recanting everything that had already been discussed for the last 200 years, but under the viel of Freud's Electra and Oedipus complexes. "So, maybe Hamlet HAS A SEXY THING WITH THE MOM~! Freud!"

South America is, as far as I know, mostly free of brutal dictators. A bunch of countries now have pussy socialists.

Because it's the Democrats that were put in charge to handle it. Regardless of the fact that this recession could take several months, if not years, to shake out (partly because of a failure to act quickly, and the action we did take was not enough), if the Democrats don't hold their own and can't say "here's the progress to show for the billions we've invested," it seems unlikely that they're going to be able to really persuade voters to keep doing what they're saying. Not to mention that Ds controlled the congress since 2006, so it partially is their responsibility. But hey, the whole fucking congress is responsible because none of them are economists who could look at the problem and see that the industry was so horribly runaway that the structure was bound to collapse sometime.

Murakami - Norwegian Wood Roth - American Pastoral And for poetry, I think some of Feynman's poems should make it in there. Really beautiful poems.

Right, I'm not saying that if we go into the next Great Depression, people will still be all over the Obamandwagon®. But the SF fed has the trough of the cycle ending sometime this year, and we'll begin to see positive numbers near the end of the year or beginning of next.

This is a faulty platform to stand on. Ratings are high up, and it seems like the rest of the country is so vested in Obama's personality, that they'll forego some negatives to keep him in office. He is, after all, very well liked. It's too early to talk about anything.

I can whistle very well. It runs in my family. My girlfriend can't whistle, and my mom is the only member of our family who does the really really loud whistle call.

Yeah too bad EHME would've had to use actual words! Who woulda thunk?

goldengreek EHME

Gavin Newsom should be the French Mitt Romney, because he cheats on his wife and everyone in SF is okay with it.