Joe,

I don't think I ever thought I was involved in a struggle for a perfect society; though maybe when I was a total idealist earlier on in high school. I'm surprised by your references to that. I thought and still think that everything constantly changes, and that once one set of contradictions are resolved, a new set will emerge. Which I guess is another way of saying: 'Life's a bitch but I wouldn't want it any other way'. And it certainly is the opposite of seeking perfection, final resolution, or 'Sustainability'.

You can find my email address with my bio note on this thread, so please email if you'd like to catch up in person one day for a beer/wine/latte/coke - or all the above.

Jesus, Joe and JKJ, we have a couple of True Believers here in Byork and David McMullen.

It just goes to show the power of Faith when it comes to people suffering from Obsessive/Compulsive disorders. No amount of reasoned argument can ever put a dent in their deep psychological need to believe in a perfect ideal. Such people make for great Vegans, Nazis, Socialists, Creationists, Inquisitors, Anarchists, extreme Greens, Jihadis, and advocates of any other cause where absolute commitment to an unobtainable ideal is the only choice a true person of virtue can make.

Take Jihadis and Creationists for example, and compare them to our two socialist friends. Both are obsessed with a religious ideal, and Jihadis in particular are confronted by the same conundrum that Barry and David face. The more Islamic a society is, the more of an economic and social failure it is. Exactly the same can be said of Socialism. No matter what the socialists tried, and try they most certainly did, it always failed. But the boys in ISIL or the socialists are never going to see what everybody else can see. All they see is the ideal.

And an avalanche of fossils is never going to convince a Creationist that the world is more than 6,000 years old. They just come up with the perfectly "logical" excuse that dinosaurs were just the animals God killed off at the time of the Flood.

Barry and David's excuse for socialist failure is as silly as the excuse of the Creationists. Socialism never failed, it was just never properly implemented. David claims that socialism can only work if it springs from an already successful free market economy. Only True Believer's could swallow that.

But once those potty ideas are accepted and internalised, everything becomes clear for Barry and David. Socialist repression, censorship and mass murder was never the fault of socialism, because the Chinese, Russians, Cubans, Khmer Rouge, the East European regimes, and North Koreans were not socialists. So there.

And 18C is not the fault of Socialists because the Labor Party is not a socialist party

Loudmouth

Re your comment at

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16816#296049

I think we can say in hindsight that capitalism risked nothing in allowing the pseudo left to "march through the institutions".