Jive Turkey
ONE love, blood, life
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2005
- Messages
- 13,645
nevermiiiiiiind
I'm attacking the methods as used per this discussion. If people want to protest the dictatorship in Iran then that is reasonable but I'm sticking with the topic of public sector workers protesting for lavish entitlements that can't be paid for. The same tactics are used all over the world and I've already posted copious examples of government union threats when legitimate cuts and wage freezes are needed. Agitprop becomes a kneejerk reaction. A lot of these same usual suspects also protest global warming and every scapegoat that can generate more tax funds. It's an overused method that should be more judicious in application. Agitprop leaves little room for intelligent debate as we can see in this thread.
My take is, in Europe, it's always the extreme far left, and not the moderate social democratic left, that is angling for the violence.
In my view, it's completely and utterly different from the US, where the extreme right is, frankly, much more of a threat to legitimately constituted authority than the extreme left. I don't know about Canada.
To confront the threat from the extreme left in Europe, and deal with it, we first must analyse it properly.
Maybe it's because I'm studying about these leftists and their tactics (yes the far left pushes the envelope) but I'm getting the sense that this is brewing more and more because of how universities have so many far leftists. I'm worried that they are actually changing the minds of many ignorant people with different forms of agitprop. Some of the less violent measures create this us versus them attitude that eventually can lead to violence (not all of course) and that's why I'm focusing on it. If I was an instructor I would teach all points of view irregardless of my personal views simply because of the position of being a teacher. I can still vote and that's enough for me.
This is the stuff that might incite some to violence. At least if he was joking it would be okay. Unfortunately I don't think he's joking.
YouTube - UCLA Professor Calls for Mexican Revolt in the U.S.
In Canada we more into political correctness. Ann Coulter wasn't allowed to make a speech in the University of Ottawa because of violent threats but that's pretty rare. Most politics here is regional. We're a little like Belgium with our constant divisiveness and claims between English, French, and Aboriginals. Though as I've mentioned in my experiences in University there was definitely left-wing bias. We do have protestors that protest the Oil Sands like Greenpeace that do stunts and want it shut down. So far it's just a bunch of stunts because so many jobs would be lost if Canadians stopped exporting fossil fuels (that everyone is demanding) it doesn't appear tenable. Living in a conservative province I'm not worried about violence from the far left. The most violence I remember was a Canada riot in a strip with lots of pubs and anarchist leftists students (living near by the University) and there were some windows smashed and a hilarious media video of a student stealing a guitar.
I'm worried that brainwashing that could lead to thinking the end justify the means. Of course those who don't fall in with brainwashing (not just me) can slow it down or stop it.
YouTube - Brainwashing of the west by the far left (Part 1 of 2)
YouTube - Brainwashing of the west by the far left (Part 2 of 2)
This stuff reminds me of my history teacher who said he didn't see anything wrong in the Soviet Union when he went there in the 80s. There was a husband of a co-worker that went to Cuba and said the same thing that it was great.
Then you add moronic eco-world government crap that just keeps bubbling in different forms. I don't want constant crisis (caused by Marxists and their ideas who love crisis) because lots of violence often happens afterwards. Anyways I hope I'm just paranoid and these old videos are outdated but events keep happening in that direction. That's why I was so argumentative with cap and trade and this global warming crap. The propaganda and agitation (I also witnessed in University) was so in my face I couldn't ignore it. It looked exactly like this defector describes. A demoralization and hatred for western civilization.
Even when you get a radical leftist professor, there is a built in defense mechanism against college students who are liberals getting taken in by them. College students, by and large, are an affluent group. They at least aspire to the middle/upper middle/lower affluent standards that they grew up in. They are not going to have any use whatsoever for the guy on my campus who questioned people who wanted to have a good job, a nice house, etc. They spend money on college, work hard, and expect to be rewarded. They are liberal people, but that does not mean they will be in any way attracted to communism or radical leftism. There will always be the few hippie types who get taken in by these radicals, but in my experience, they are hypocritical to boot because they are more often than not trust funded and will be going right back to those trust funds as they knock everyone else's "shallow aspirations." Again, even in very liberal Vermont on a very liberal campus, these few kids were not much more than the butt of jokes at best, an object of scorn at worst.
Well this certainly gives me hope. When the Al Gore types stop with their world bureaucracy to save the planet I'll feel better. It seems to be possible to have social democracies without going too far. Of course both of us are extrapolating within narrow spans of time spanning our own lives and there could be new threats unforeseen by our generations and future generations will have to deal with. Then there's the cultural aspect of what people will tolerate.
When the Al Gore types .
Maybe it's because I'm studying about these leftists and their tactics (yes the far left pushes the envelope) but I'm getting the sense that this is brewing more and more because of how universities have so many far leftists.
I certainly get the point of the rest of your post, but Al Gore is not the guy I would hold up as an example of the radical left.
He was a moderate/conservative Democratic senator from Tennessee and then was the Vice President for the very moderate Clinton.
It would be interesting to have others here who went to Canadian schools comment on purpleoscar's observations. I have no idea what university he attended, perhaps it's a local problem.
This latest wave of arson attacks in Greece dates back to late 2007, though; this was something like the thirtieth one, I think. We just don't hear about most of them because they don't generally harm anyone (nor are they intended to, and it's doubtful this one was either--it was unusual for employees to be in a bank during such a time). Firebombings of banks, politicians' offices, empty metro trains and (especially) police installations are pretty regular occurrences in Athens and Thessaloniki unfortunately. In fact, if you've been to Athens, you've probably seen some of the ilk these groups generally draw from--all those young squatters and vagrants who hang out around the Exarchia district, they're really quite a visible presence. Most of them don't identify as αναρχικός (anarchists), let alone Marxists, but rather as Αντιεξουσιαστική, "anti-establishment" I guess I'd translate it, and their public statements tend towards inscrutable rants about arson as 'artistic statement,' the transgressive glories of violent resistance against the instruments of state justice, etc. rather than ideological propaganda about class struggle and so forth.The far left in Europe is a dangerous animal with a long history of exploiting times of economic difficulty in a violent manner (and I've been predicting something like this would happen for some time now, and unfortunately have been proven right) but conflating legitimate protest with what is basically terrorism is complete tripe.
lol. Athens is full of great canine characters like that--often nominally owned by some taverna or shop employee, but given free rein to make the rounds of the area throughout the day as they see fit. No one bats an eye as they wander freely in and out of the Acropolis, meander through demonstrations, poke around the tourist shopping and dining districts, etc. By our standards (i.e. pampered, infantilized American dogs, with all their neuroses and dependencies) Greek dogs can seem eerily independent and self-contained. They all tend towards that same general type physically, too--wonderfully archaic-looking hounds from what are probably flock-guardian lineages. In fact, I remember seeing one of their country kin at work while hiking in the mountains in central Greece--over the course of about half an hour, as I ate my own packed lunch, I watched one of them emerge, along with a shepherd's wife, from their house, where she handed him a package, which he then proceeded to carry unmolested all the way up the mountain to the pasture where his master and sheep presently were. He handed it over to the shepherd, who immediately sat down with its contents--lunch--then went straight to work checking out what the sheep were up to.
2000: The IRSP passes a new ideological motion at its convention, which affirms:
That the IRSP is a revolutionary Marxist organisation, and that by this we mean that the IRSP believes:
Class conflict is the motive force in human history;
The IRSP stands unreservedly and exclusively for the interests of the working class against all others;
Only the creation of a 32-county Irish socialist republic can provide the means by which Irish national liberation can be realised;
That there can be no socialism without national liberation in Ireland, nor can there be national liberation without socialism;
That there is no parliamentary road to socialism, because socialism cannot be forged by seizing the bourgeois state apparatus; nor is there a guerilla road to socialism, because a social revolution requires the active participation of the masses; and therefore a socialist republic can only be established through the mass revolutionary action of the working class in the political, economic, and social spheres;
That socialism means the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange collectively by the entire working class, with an end to wage labour, an end to production for profit and its replacement by a system of production based on human need; and
That socialism must be administered democratically by the working class itself, recognising the class dictatorship of the workers, because the vast majority of society is formed by that class. This does not suggest the need for a political dictatorship of a single party. Rather it calls out for a class dictatorship, administered through new working class institutions created to permit the greatest degree of political freedom for all working people.
I'll be happy with my life and confident I can make a difference in the world, and these kids will still be angry and bitter, chasing phantoms and expending their energy on some perceived enemy that by and large does not exist."