A Shirt About ˈsō-shəli-zəm

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.” (Noam Chomsky)

Thanks for the dose of Noam Chomsky. This quote is a non-issue. You may make and sell as many T-Shirts as you like.

Well aren’t we the clever devil.

Why, yes we are!

Dear Site Manager…this is EXACTLY what we DON’T need…I would hope that your visitors are smarter than you’re giving them credit for. I’m surprised you insult their intelligence in this way.

I’m giving them all the credit in the world and that’s why I wrote such a post without filling in all the blanks. They can understand what this post is about without having to be spoon fed what I’m about to say forth.

ANYONE who visits the page will CLEARLY see that the first line is about how “Capitalism isn’t always evil”.

Yes, that’s great. But it doesn’t make up for what follows on that page.

Second, as YOU acknowledge on your blog there ARE “socialist” programs already in place that we both love and support and yet we use the word “socialist” as some kind of epithet. It’s ridiculous.

THAT is the point of the shirt and we both know that you know that. Your meager attempt at subjective framing is both rudimentary and comical.

That is only PART of the point of the shirt, we both know you know THAT.

So I’ll first deal with that part. I don’t dispute that a few of the tags on the shirt indeed describe socialism well, however socialism is not about relatively small infrastructure programs such as public parks and highways in any major way. The true intention of promoting socialism is to advocate and expand programs such as welfare, government run health care, and other means to redistribute wealth. If socialism were about limited infrastructure programs, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. This may change the day we hear people say “Denmark sure has a lot of socialism, just look at all their parks and highways,” but until then, socialism means something else.

Limited government programs have problems as well, such as cost overruns, inefficiencies, and cronyism. Larger programs exponentially exacerbate those problems. Therefore, biting the bullet and having the government invest some money in building highways and parks to benefit the general public despite those problems, does not translate into a gigantic government mammoth such as universal health care being so great. “Hey, highways are great, let’s do government health care” just does not fly. And this is exactly the type of thinking you promote.

Other words in your tag cloud associate socialism with positive concepts without merit: “Liberty”, “Compassion”, “Unity”, “Wealth”, “Empowerment”, “Equality”, “Freedom”, “Opportunity”, “Justice”, “Cooperation”. And that’s the part that really earned this post a spot in the Humor category. I’m not going to argue with you now why socialism does not promote the concepts described by the aforementioned terms, as this whole site is generally about that.

Your feigned ignorance is exactly why you listed this under the category of “Humor”.

My “feigned ignorance” is aimed at those who already need no explanation as the above.

I do NOT promote an entirely socialist government and neither do many of the other people you’ve probably bad-mouthed throughout your site.

I’m sure you don’t. But so? I’m opposed to an entirely socialist as well as a dominantly socialist government.

What I DO promote is the absence of ignorance.

Ahm! Well, I’m sure I can’t convince you otherwise.

I do appreciate your talking about me and my site though. I’m glad that you took the time out of your day.

And for the record, chances are I wouldn’t even have made it to this page if it didn’t automatically pop up when I went to one of my pages. I may just be sending people your way as well. So (tip of the hat) Good day and God Speed.

Sure, it’s been a blast!