I’m in a hospital waiting room, banging away on my laptop, today. Sorry for the dearth of posting. I only had time to grab a quick update of my web server cache and copy it to my laptop before leaving. At least I’ve got something to read. Among the things I’ve found I find this of greatest interest….
Beck makes reference today to a report in the British paper, The Economist. He also notes that Scott, over at eViscera who is a fellow Blogspotter, quoting the same article, which says in part:
“Some economic numbers are as resonant as they are significant. One such figure was announced on Wednesday February 2nd by Germany’s Federal Labour Agency. More than 5m Germans were unemployed last month, the agency revealed, the most since 1932, when the economic devastation of the Great Depression brought the Weimar Republic to an unhappy end.”
Billy then rants about Scott Erb. His point about Erb is quite valid; he and and that blithering idiot Churchill who got canned in Colorado the other day for claiming the 9/11 victims deserved what they got…. he and Erb would have gotten on rather well indeed. (As you will see when you follow the link I’ve put up for Erb, here… it’s to his usenet postings.)
But to answer Billy’s unanswered question, Erb’s not been heard from since the re-election of George W. Bush. Eagle Eye makes the point that
The only way one can begin to understand Scott Erb is to toss out
any assumption that he actually means anything he writes or that
he is anything like the person he purports to be. He earned the
name “Disingenuous Fraud” years ago for a damned good reason.
Erb only gets brought up because he is one of the idiots, as Billy puts it,
“parading your enthusiasms for social necrosis, to include rhapsodies for Gerhard Schröder “
but of course, he’s hardly alone. And of course, this nutcase, like Churchill until recently, actually has a government-fed job teaching his leanings to young minds of mush.
Which is a roundabout way to lead me to the point in all of this;
Germany’s troubles are not unique, nor are they a one-off in the trends socialism has revealed to us over the century and a half the idea’s been around.
What does the continued failure of socialism world-wide tell us? What lessons, if any, should we as individuals and as a society, and as a culture, be taking from those failures? And what do our institutions of higher learning produce when they harbor such as Erb and Chruchill, who teach socialism as a great good, in the face of these failures?
The claim usually put forward by such individuals about the utter rejection of the underliers to socialism, is that to do so is closed-minded, and that we as a society don’t need closed minded people. To that I will only ask; How closed-minded does one need to be to ignore hundreds of years of utter failure for socialist ideas and ideals?
On what basis, I ask do we continue to provide a government-paid soapbox for such as Erb and Churchill? We have seen repeatedly the outcome of putting into practice what such people preach. So, why are we allowing it to continue, then?
Oops. Gotta change the battery. Perhaps we’ll discuss this more when I have time.
Tags: BitsBlog
