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  hardie karges 7:38 am on September 8, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: capitalism ( 26 ), communism, Isis ( 8 ), Mideast ( 3 )   

  Isis and Osiris, Flirting with Death… 

  

  Isis wages war in the Mideast

  Why do Westerners join radical organizations like Isis, Isil, the Islamic State, the whatchamacallit gang of hashishins currently overrunning the Mideast from their base in Syria, and apparently with recruits from all over, including those paragons of capitalism UK and US, this at a time of unparalleled economic stability and growth in most of the world? Good question. That’s what a lot of Western politicians would like to know. You can’t just buy these guys off.

  The answer, of course, is as obvious as the nose on anyone’s face. Material well-being is largely an empty vessel, all form and no substance. Once you’ve got your forty acres and a mule, then what’s the next thing you’ll want? Why, another mule of course, a younger one, a larger one, a stronger one with more horsepower. Such is the nature of desire, for acquisitions of more and more, bigger and bigger, to what end, who knows? There is no end. Materialism is an end in itself. But it’s a dead end: entertainment rules, sex and all that jazz. Wait a minute… (More …)

   

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  hardie karges 12:06 pm on July 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), communism, Europe ( 19 )   

  € vs $ 

  The world takes perverse pleasure poking through America’s underwear, digging through the trash, looking for anything incriminating- blood, shit, pee stains, bank statements, whatever it takes to prove what they’ve always known, i.e. ‘it’ll never work’, or maybe ‘they’re stupid’. Forget the fact that America invents the world, regardless of who ends up being the monkey on the production line screwing things up and bolting them down. Forget the fact that, by virtue of her leadership role, America has to take responsibility for nearly everything that happens in the world, whether she had any role in it or not. Forget the fact that things have probably never been better, materially at least, in the world, and that the life we live is virtually identical with what used to be called ‘the American Dream’. Now that Western Europe no longer needs the protection of America against the big bad Russians and the gray spectral cloud of world Communism, they feel free to insult us ad nauseum ad infinitum, disregarding the fact that we ARE them, genetically and culturally, though presumably the black sheep, in their opinion, I guess. Perhaps it’s a feature of human nature to disparage what is close in character but distant in geography. I hope they DO unite and assume world leadership. Let them fuck up again, as they used to do so well.
   
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  hardie karges 12:26 pm on May 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism, ISLAM ( 67 ), religion ( 160 )   

  NEGATIVE SPACE, NEGATIVE RELIGION 

  Indonesia’s being ruined by the jihad. Fundamentalists hate Islam lite almost as much as they hate Western hedonist consumerism. Actually I’m not that crazy about that blind materialistic part of Western culture myself, but religion is everyone’s personal choice, isn’t it? Not in Islamic countries, it’s not. You don’t get to change your mind. In that they’re similar to the previous Communist regimes, lack of freedom and the lack of fun. But Islamic countries stress non-materialistic goals while many of them are rich beyond imagination, yet the communist regimes were totally materialist with barely a pot to piss in. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that the downfall of Communism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism were timed by some cosmic clock. It’s funny how most, if not all, the Communist countries and client states joined the rush to capitalism with hardly a second thought while very few have joined the jihad. That’s too bad for Indonesia, which traditionally shares affinities as much with the South Pacific and Southeast Asia as it does with Islam. They became Muslim to facilitate trade centuries ago, and the rest is history. Philippines made the switch from Islam to Christianity under Western imperialism, except for Mindanao, but Indonesia didn’t. It’s no problem until fundamentalists decide to impose their negativity on the rest of the populace. I was asked to leave a Muslim mosque in Malaysia once, simply because I’m white. I’m a student of religion, a BA in philosophy, but unmistakably white. So are Bosnians, but that’s another story; they ‘surrendered’. I was sitting there minding my own business, soaking in the atmosphere, meditating just like everyone else, but to no avail. I was asked to leave. I decided right then and there that Islam is probably not the religion for me.

   
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  hardie karges 12:52 pm on April 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism, Europe ( 19 ), history ( 42 )   

  MONDAY MORNING COMMUNISTS 

  It’s a good time to be a Communist, now that it’s totally discredited and can be re-discussed without mention of the Soviet Union. The Soviets never had a clue as to what they were doing, but Marx definitely did. He might have even been half right. Societies have come a long way over the last five thousand years in terms of human rights and physical wellbeing. Even Chomsky will admit that. The problem is that there is no guarantee of further improvement. Slavery only became eradicated when it became clear that there were better ways to reduce people into draft animals; i.e. cram them into cities. Communism is great at distributing wealth; it’s not so good at creating it. Europe did better with their social democracies, a multi-level system that allowed for individual initiative while still providing a vast umbrella and safety-net for everyone in society. That kept the Communists at bay, but put Europe at a competitive disadvantage with a resurgent US and UK, and a rising Asia, where labor unions are weak or non-existent. Though paralyzing labor strikes seem to have diminished sharply in the last twenty years simultaneous with the death of Communism, all is not well. Too many people in the US are either filthy rich or filthy poor, falling through the cracks, mitigated only by the vastness of the country and the fact that there are plenty of places to fall. Europe is more egalitarian; it has to be. Europe is probably the next best hope for mankind.

   
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  hardie karges 2:46 pm on April 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: China ( 14 ), communism   

  COMMUNISM DU JOUR DE RIGEUR 

  Communism did for measures what Napoleon did for measurement. Hamburgers are weighed and measured in Romania, to prevent hamburger corruption, I assume. An iron curtain hides nothing. We all know what you were doing back there, getting shit-faced drunk and acting Chinese, pretending you’d wait out the tides of history to catch a wave into the White House. You don’t become Chinese by reading a book. You gotta’ be born there. Communism is a perversion of Nature everywhere but China, where it’s the nature of perversion. Slavs are still Europeans even if they were slaves and serfs and slow to leave the farm. It’s as if the Lord said “Go forth and divide”, and the rest is history, roads leading to nowhere, and reasons to follow them to their logical conclusions. The urge to merge occurs only in sex and religion. To perceive divisions in the world is human; to perceive unity takes a mystic.

   
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  hardie karges 1:54 pm on April 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism, MATERIALISM ( 2 )   

  GRAY MATTER 

  Communism stops the clock if nothing else. Once the curtain was lifted and the wall came down, it was like opening a time capsule. I missed East Europe in the early days, but Vietnam and Laos were revealing, with their Bolshevik architecture, Minsk motorcycles, and Russian cultural centers. Gray is the color of communism, unfinished concrete and cellblock apartments. All the joy is gone from life in a world devoted to dialectical materialism. Time stands still in a world without profit nor prophecy. Alcohol takes on new importance and sex is more than just going through the motions. You take what pleasure you can find in as much family as you can afford and hope for things to get better.

   
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  hardie karges 1:07 pm on April 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism, COOPERATIVES   

  COMMUNITY-ISM 

  In a nod to Communism, maybe the government should sponsor model villages just in case somebody isn’t sure if they’re ready for the dog-eat-dog world or not yet. The villages would have to be at least self-sufficient, but totally top-sponsored so that the really lame don’t have to make big decisions or otherwise take an active interest in their own lives. I think this idea could really fly. If it’s truly self-sufficient, then the government could stay out of it totally. It could operate under the principles of free enterprise, producing a product for sale to the “outsiders”, while members worked and lived in close proximity to themselves and their work. It would be like a company town with a company store, except with a conscience. Members would be like employees, except motivated. It would be like a commune, except competent, and successful. It would be like communism, except voluntary. The problems are the problems of human nature itself- greed, envy, selfishness, and especially, boredom.

   
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  hardie karges 6:48 am on April 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: capitalism ( 26 ), communism, OIL ( 6 )   

  CAPITALISM 

  Capitalism’s moment of glory barely lasted ten years. Without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is. The rip-roaring leveraged-buyout corporate-raiding inside-trading era of 1980’s American capitalism only subsided when the more creative Internet era of computing rose to dominance. But by then it was too late. The capitalists had shown their colors too often and made too many deals with too many devils. The colors were the black of oil and the green of money and the devils were too many corrupt leaders of too many corrupt regimes, increasingly those in control of major oil-producing countries. As with yin, so with yang, the seed of one is in the other, the universal law of retribution. The West’s refusal to embrace energy technologies other than oil has funneled money into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists with oil-derived wealth. Islamic fundamentalism is not likely to subside until their oil-derived wealth subsides. If they move us all back into the 14^th century in the process, well so be it. That was a golden age for Islam.

   
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  hardie karges 7:04 am on April 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism, Russia ( 4 ), USSR ( 4 )   

  RUSSIAN TO NOWHERE 

  Things are too crazy now. After two or three generations of institutionalized repression in Eastern Europe with pretensions to world domination, Communism has fallen flat on its ass with hardly a moment to spare. Though the reasons for the sudden collapse are complex and varied, I suspect more than a little thanks should go to Japan, who flooded the world with cheap VCR’s and other communication devices that made Berlin Walls seem not only outmoded and irrelevant, but incapable of hiding anything. More than that, they also showed that the for-members-only club of industrialized nations was not only not exclusive, but was not limited to European countries and their immigrant offspring. Leave it to capitalism to overcome racism, doing what religion not only had never accomplished, but which had frequently instigated. This mitigated the USSR’s attraction as the model of development for third-world countries. Of course the USSR was largely European itself, so its lag behind the West’s, and now Asia’s, leaders was particularly ironic. Forged in the pan-Slavism of the 19^th century, the USSR is perhaps best seen as a noble experiment at that, despite its ineptitude as a world leader.

   
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  hardie karges 10:57 am on April 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), communism, Europe ( 19 ), history ( 42 ), jihad ( 8 )   

  The Death of America, the Re-Birth of Europe 

  It’s Europe’s turn to lead the world again, not as English or French or Greeks or Romans, but at the head of a united Europe that returns something to Russia that it took away from the Soviets, and respects its status as a major player in the community of nations.  America is not fit to rule the world any more.  They’ve made too many deals with too many devils, mostly previously under the guise of Soviet containment and anti-Communism, now mostly under the guise of increased oil flow.  When American tanks rolled over the Arabian Desert and into Iraq for the second time, they crossed the line.  The Afghan War was justified, slimly, to remove a Taliban regime that sustained al-Qaeda.  The Iraq War was not.  At that point al-Qaeda won in its quest to remove America as world leader.  If I were a Conspiracy Nut, I might think they planned it that way, themselves having no great love for Saddam Hussein.  Not that it’ll make any difference with respect to Israel; it won’t.  Israel is a fait accompli, and no more than a pretext for the current jihad worldwide.  But if Europe can unite, they’ll have accomplished something that’s never been done in history, which means they’ll have the moral upper hand to lead the world and set an example.  America did that once, until wars of independence became a rite of passage for a developing country.  Europe is now fighting a war of inter-dependence.  If they succeed, then look for a united South America, United Turkistan, etc.  FTA’s are a major step in that direction already.  America has gone too far in its excesses and its negligence.  European corporate executives don’t make a billion dollars a year.  Europe doesn’t leave half of its population without health insurance.  When Americans voted for George W. Bush in 2004, they voted for ignorance, greed, and selfishness.  Now the bill is due.

  Stiv is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Stiv 7:28 pm on April 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Yes, but you’ll be “leading the world” as Eurabia not really Europe any longer. The weakness of Europe has allowed that to happen. Have fun with that.