cruise ships cunt'd for Mr. Sloman

Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:33 am   

On Feb 1, 5:35 pm, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

Inside Slomans communist Europe a generation of zombies...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/28/europes-lost-generation-young-eu

Ken

Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:33 am   

On Feb 2, 2:14 am, "Ken S. Tucker" <dynam...@vianet.on.ca> wrote:

Why tell me that? Communism has been extinct for some time now, and
only a retarded American would bother telling anybody what his
attitude would be if he ran into one. Do you have an attitude to dodos
as well?

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:52 am   

Bill Sloman wrote:


Why do you ask, are you one yourself? And as far as running into a
communes, we don't need to look to far, do we Bill?

But then again, you can't get your statements in order so how can you
comprehend reality ? If communism was extinct, how could we run into one ?

Jamie

Thu Feb 02, 2012 11:11 am   

On Feb 2, 2:51 am, "Ken S. Tucker" <dynam...@vianet.on.ca> wrote:

Scarcely zombies, and the kids involved are from Spain, Italy and
Greece, where they are coping with the consequences of the sub-prime
mortgage crisis, in countries which are following the IMF's thoroughly
right-wing economic approach to dealing with a recession because
nobody will lend them the money to do Keynesian pump-priming. It's
about as far away from communism as you can get.

Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" would seem to present a more useful
insight into the workings of right-wing pseudo-economics.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Thu Feb 02, 2012 11:25 am   

On Feb 2, 3:52 am, Jamie
<jamie_ka1lpa_not_valid_after_ka1l...@charter.net> wrote:

"Communes"?

You don't think you need to look far, because your brain was
programmed by Senator Joe McCarthy, admittedly indirectly, and you see
communists under every bed. It was a politically convenient - if
destructive - delusion back in 1950, and it has persisted because the
American right-wing is dumb enough to confuse communism - which is
extinct - with socialism, which they don't much like either.


You can think you have run into one because you are terminally
misinformed, and see any political opinion to the left of your far-
right-wing delusions as "communist". These days it's being scared of
ghosts. Few adults are that silly.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Thu Feb 02, 2012 2:25 pm   

On Feb 2, 1:11 am, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

Sloman, does the article lie?
If not it's another generation of wasted Europeans. We in NA have
rescued Europe from itself at high cost during the 20th century , and
most
will vote-against doing it-again.
Europe has an unhealthy predilection for class, and discrimination,
rooted historically.
In NA, we work together to preserve US and Canada, warts and all,
and provide easy access to success to ay one who is disciplined.
By comparison, Europe has a lot of fat lazy dumb fucks on top,
and an uneducated labor mass below decks.
Ken

Thu Feb 02, 2012 2:52 pm   

Bill Sloman wrote:
<snip>

Not without support they didn't. Opening up a second front on
D-Day is obviously a game changer. The Russians paid a staggering
cost in the bit city sieges like Leningrad, but that's with
Stalin as supreme commander. He wasn't exactly interested in
*not* having massive loss of life.

They joke that sergeants are there to shoot those who run away.
In Soviet Russia, this was ... taken more seriously....


So the Americans also engineered Pearl Harbor? Yes, some
strategists were thinking ahead about Yurp, but not that
many.

According to this one bio of Eisenhower*, the main scenario run
in War College circles prior to WWII was conflict
with Britain.

*sorry, lost the title to it...


Again, no. America was able to sell massive amounts of materiel to
Allied participants in the war without putting one military person
at risk ( people in the merchant marine to the side ).

There was a lot of pro-war propaganda in the US, and the US
electorate/populace was not that interested in fighting
without it, but there weren't mercantilist justifications
for being there. If anything, the '30s taught Americans that
commerce with Europe was mighty risky.

SFAIK, the majority in the US held to the the position of
Herbert Hoover - that we should allow Yurp to destroy itself.
I don't know that that is a good opinion, but it's one
made marginal by all the pro-War propaganda.


<snip>

--
Les Cargill

Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:29 pm   

On Feb 2, 1:25 pm, "Ken S. Tucker" <dynam...@vianet.on.ca> wrote:

Probably not - the Guardian is pretty reliable.


Scarcely. These are particular young people who can't get work at the
moment in Greece, Italy and Spain, all of which have been hit
particularly hard by the consequences of the sub-prime mortgage
crisis.

There aren't representative of the whole generation of European youth,
and they are scarcely wasted just because they are having trouble
finding jobs when their local economy is - hopefully briefly - in
recession.


A popular delusion in North America. The Russians won WW2, rescuing
Europe in the process. The Americans provided some support when they
finally realised that their interests were being threatened - the
prospect of a Russian-dominated Europe scared them silly.

It took a serious propaganda campaign to get the American population
to support intervention in Europe, which was primarily directed at
preserving American investments and markets.


So has the US - the historical roots are identical - and the advanced
industrial countries of western Europe currently do more for their
less well-off than the US does. Amongst other things, they've all got
universal health care.


Look at the current campaign for the Republican presidential
candidature and tell me that Europe is the only place that has a
problem with dumb fucks at the top. Unlike you, Angela Merkel did
manage to complete a Ph.D. in Physics before she went into politics,
which makes her less of a dumb fuck than any North American politician
of similar eminence

The advanced industrial countries of western Europe feed and educate
the children of the "labour mass" rather better than the US does, and
it pays off in a rather more productive work force.

America has made a hash of educating the children of its poorest
citizens, and now spends a lot of money keeping a great many of them
locked up in prison. You've certainly managed to preserve a lot of
the warts, but there do seem to have in a few errors of judgement in
selecting the other features of your society that ended up being
retained.

<snip>

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Thu Feb 02, 2012 5:40 pm   

On Feb 2, 2:52 pm, Les Cargill <lcargil...@comcast.com> wrote:

The support helped, but they probably would have won on their own -
they'd reversed the German advance long before D-Day.


It helped the Russians a bit, but mainly by tying up forces that the
Germans would otherwise have used to slow up the Russian advance, but
it wasn't any kind of game changer.


Scarcely. They did have radar and still failed to spot the incoming
Japanese dive-bombers, which some conspiracy theorists treat as
evidence that the American commanders had been told to let the attack
create an impressive number of casualties, but why postulate
conspiracy when stupidity is a perfectly adequate explanation?

The point is that the US didn't have to react to Pearl Harbour by
actively attacking the Germans, but they chose to do so because they
didn't think that they could afford to leave Europe to the Russians.


They would not have been able to sell as much after the war, if Europe
was Russian-occupied and Russian dominated.


ITT for one had large investments in Germany which would have been
lost if the Russians had occupied the whole country. As long as it
looked as if Germany could win the war, or at least do well enough to
negotiate a profitable peace settlement, ITT was pro-German. Once the
Russians had started reversing the German advance, they were more
patriotic.


That's the story I've heard too. Charles Lindbergh was active in the
America First Committee that wanted to keep America out of WW2.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Thu Feb 02, 2012 7:58 pm   

Bill Sloman wrote:

"Joseph Stalin, during the Tehran Conference in 1943, acknowledged
publicly the importance of American efforts during a dinner at the
conference: "Without American production the United Nations could never
have won the war."[18]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

This wasn't exactly original, either. It's pretty clear that Stalin knew
production was off, and just cared less about that than staying in power.

And there's this:
<http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/01/13/lessons-from-americas-intervention-in-russia-1918-1920/>

This is more accessible:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1853678422/
(sorry if it has region code problems)


'... wasn't any kind of game changer...". No historian, you. Aren't
you from *Belgium*? Don't they teach history there? 18 days, baby.

( I do not wish to impugn Belgians or the French for falling
to Blitzkrieg; demographics simply didn't support resisting,
almost full stop ).

Stalin's logic at Yalta was "we had more die than you did",
and it's shocking how both Roosevelt and Churchill fell mute
in response to that...


How about "not at all".


Oh dear... so fallibility is now equivalent to stupidity? Or
in other words, "I have a non-Konspiracy version that makes it
so I can agree with the conclusions of the Konspiracy Kooks."


C'mon... this is clearly something like dissembling...



I have never found one credible shred of evidence of support
this hypothesis in 30 or 40 years of reading on the subject.

None. The information-transfer efficiency of government is
*notoriously* poor. That's not "stupid" per se; it's a
Public Choice Theory problem. It extends to the present day...


So it was 100% about mercantilist access to markets on
our part, huh? Wrong. Remember, exports had already
collapsed because of tariffs early in the Depression.
Until Lend Lease, very little was even shipped to Yurp.

Besides, nobody in the US was actively Mercantilist past
about 1920. Protectionist, yes. Isolationist, yes.


And so it goes...



There was Vast confusion about what was really going on over
there for a very long time. If ITT had ended up on the wrong
side of history, then good riddance.

The US has very, very rarely intervened for "corporate"/imperialist
reasons. We've generally done things on a very different basis. for
one, we did not wish to behave like Britain. There were of course
egregious cases ( many of Progressive justification, especialyl
under Teddy Roosevelt ) but the *dominant* mode is something harder
to describe - it's more like about a perception of "honor".

That's one reason bush was poorly understood...


*That* part of America First was 1) widely popular and 2) made
a lot of sense. Sure there was racism - racism was all but universal
at the time.


--
Les Cargill

Sat Feb 04, 2012 5:31 pm   

On Wed, 1 Feb 2012 17:51:37 -0800 (PST), "Ken S. Tucker"
<dynamics_at_vianet.on.ca> wrote:


Does anybody notice that none of these people were trained in anything
needing math. No engineers, scientists, nurses, MDs, or anything else
that requires any kind of working knowledge of hard physical reality. No
lawyers either.

If they selected an education in skills that do not lead to reasonable
employment that is their choice, but they better not come crying to me
that there are no jobs. There are always jobs for the persons that are
willing to do useful work, they will not always pay well, sometimes only
enough to keep body and soul together but not pay rent. They want the
pay, but are not quite ready to do the work required for it.

?-(

Sat Feb 04, 2012 9:38 pm   

On Feb 4, 8:31 am, josephkk <joseph_barr...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Yes, there may be a lack of versatility in the Euro labor force.
In the early 70's the aerospace and nuclear industries were winding
down, and employment increasing, math-physics was marginialized,
but electronics was in the upswing.
So getting a technician diploma was a means to good employment,
useful and in demand. Degrees coming out of the wazoo might lead
to a career being a school lifer in teaching.
I find Euro posters to lack versatility, it's ingrained culturally I
guess,
along with the class system, like in India.
Ken

Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:49 am   

On Feb 4, 5:31 pm, josephkk <joseph_barr...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

They probably selected an education in a subject they were good at.
Not everybody has a talent for mathematics.


Really? People can get into a situation where they are over-qualified
for the kinds of jobs that are hard to fill - employers won't take
them on, because they figure that the over-qualified will leave a soon
as job shows up for which they are qualified, and it takes a while
before employees have built up enough experience in any specific job
to be properly productive.


That happens too, but getting new graduates to work as ditch-diggers
does waste their training.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:59 am   

On Feb 4, 8:38 pm, "Ken S. Tucker" <dynam...@vianet.on.ca> wrote:

Probably not. One of the points made in Will Hutton's "The State We're
In"

http://www.amazon.com/World-Were-Will-Hutton/dp/0316860816

was that good social security and the availability of government-
funded retraining schemes made European labour more re-deployable that
its US counterpart.


It's steady work, if not that well-paid, and decidedly useful to
society.


I'm sure all of us Euro posters will be devastated by this observation
- Ken S Tucker is widely renowned for his insight and wisdom. Mainly
because he hasn't got any of either.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Mon Feb 06, 2012 1:23 am   

On Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:58:34 -0600, Les Cargill <lcargill99_at_comcast.com>
wrote:


To which the unused retort is "And how many of those did you kill
yourselves?"

Scarcely is British/'strine not at all.

to each other and thus, to attack one was the same as going after both.

Much of that was a reaction to the 1890s interventions at the behest of
American commercial interests in Central America and South America where
the US habitually set up "banana republics".

Hmmm. Pure prejudice methinks. They were not particularly worse than any
other multinational corporation.

Oops on you. What about all the banana republics we set up or supported?
For that matter, how about our continuing meddling in the middle east?


You don't know your history very well. Nation and Honor are almost
antithetical.