From: Dehede011@aol.com
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 12:43:17 MDT
In a message dated 10/22/2002 12:02:45 PM Central Standard Time,
charleshixsn@earthlink.net writes: If you want to start meaningful
development of your arguments, you must first use well-defined terms.
Charles,
No, no, no. If you look at General Semantics the definition of
Capitalism is a higher level of abstraction than to observe a real living
example of capitalism in action. If you talk me into going to a higher level
of abstraction then I am also further from the thing itself and hence less
accurate.
For instance a friend that is active in General Semantics just
informed me that she found one word in the dictionary that had 26 meanings
attached to it. Now pretend it took 200 words to define capitalism and that
in this instance each word of the definition only had 4 seperate meanings.
Then in that instance my definition could possibly have 800 different
meanings and we would never get anything settled.
And, that is how I view socialism. Scholars, they say they are, have
written volumes defining socialism, telling us how it will work and
explaining how "Heaven on Earth" will have arrived. Then along comes a
socialist state, a thug takes over, sends the scholars off to the Gulag and
suddenly the rest of us had hell on Earth.
As to all those thugs that people object to having called socialist --
they said very clearly that they were and it was under the auspices of
socialism that they came to power.
Now, I can almost anticipate that you will pull out some counter
examples of so called capitalists that were really nothing but common
criminals. Well, we have sent a lot of them to the penitentiary and look
forward to sending more of them to the same place.
As you may know I am a part blood Cherokee. My understanding is that
you killed close to 50 million of us counting all indians between the north
and south poles. The vast majority died of your diseases and often were many
miles removed from the nearest white man. The whites never knew of it and
for the most part are ignorant of the fact today but the same would have
happened had you been peaceful traders and missionaries.
Ron H.
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