The risk you run when you put everyone on ignore is that you soon end up talking only to people who always 100% agree with you. And that is to a real conversation what masturbation is to real sex: pleasant, but repetitive and not that interesting.
I can agree with you there for once. Using ignore is just silly. It's very easy to skip over posts without reading them. I do it all the time as I'm sure you can attest to. LOL. It was not intentional with you, it's just that when I step away from a thread and I come back and it's 10 pages later, I tend to just read the last page to see where we are at in the conversation. Don't take it personally Martin. But yeah, we're all adults here. No one should be ignoring anyone. Anyone back to the topic, Martin is there something you wanted to say about communism. Honestly I have no idea what this thread is about except that you seem to be making yourself comfortable down here in P&R lately.
Just a bit bored lately, you know, Maverick... It's summer, my mkt is quiet, so I am enjoying myself here with y'all fine folks. As to communism, like I said, I am interested in the subject. I was trying to get an idea of what people mean exactly when they talk about "communism". For example, the Soviet Union wasn't really communist, in a classical sense; it more a case of state socialism. Interestingly enough, if you're a libertarian, traditional Marxist "communism" to you should be utopia, since it's stateless and there's no government.
I'm the wrong guy to talk to Martin then. I don't believe in ism's. Any of them. Ism's are created in the academic world to be studied and labeled. If I'm talking about our government stateside, I'm more interested in talking to people about what role the government should play in our day to day lives and how much power should we bestow to it. Putting some ism label on it doesn't do anything for me. I don't need to call the Soviet Union communists, they starved millions of their own people. I don't need to call China communists, they have a history of genocide as well. I would not want to emulate either government. Nor would I ever want to give our government the powers that have historically been given to the Soviets or China. And no I don't care where the Yuan is trading or if housing prices are upticking in China. I care more about freedom and safety. But like I said, if you were looking for a long detailed convo about what you think or don't think communism is, I'm probably the wrong guy for that.