I kinda got derailed in my C++ webserver project by learning Rust. It’s such a cool language - the ridiculous stability made things like a public 24/7 MMOSG server possible. I’m writing most of my code in Rust of late, but never fear, I haven’t ditched C++; I’m just trying to get very proficient at a new language. It’s fun!
I am, once again, failing to write anything code-related. As you probably guessed by the title, this is yet another political essay.
I used to be a socialist/communist anti-American - mostly because of dumb ideologies I found on the Internet. A lot of people like me exist. Then, I had two realizations in quick succession: one, I am only able to complain about America because of the education and free speech it has given me, and two, capitalism has never failed me but communism has failed me and the rest of the world.
I was embroiled in a savage political argument the other day (as in, a day that wasn’t this one): an American friend of mine has apparently got it into his head that America is a terrible place to be and that we should just leave the rest of the world alone because we absolutely suck. I wonder if people who say things like that have ever been tortured to death for opposing the CCP? Or thrown in a Stalinist gulag for disagreeing with Marxist ideas? Or forced to work in a communist or socialist society at all? (Fun fact: in Stalinist Russia, you could go to a gulag for not working. Makes you wonder if socialism is the right choice after all…)
Now, here’s the thing: socialism has not failed. Socialism has succeeded immensely well here in capitalist Georgia: Georgia Tech, a top college in America, is a socialist institution. Its competitors, UGA and Kennesaw State, are also pretty good colleges (although both cater more to the masses and are less theoretical), and are also socialist. Why am I saying this? It’s simple. Socialism is when capital is public but labor is private, so you can still be paid to work. Wait, what? Capital? This confused me too, until I entered an economics class and learned what capital really is. Capital is not fiat currency like the USD, capital is best described as land. Faculty at Kennesaw State are being paid by the state and working on state land - socialism. All these colleges are prospering. They are not dying and failing like socialism is usually depicted. However, public schools below college here absolutely suck. What’s the difference? What’s going on here?
Capitalism.
The difference is a primary concept of capitalism: competition.
Colleges here are largely in the same market: I can choose to go to Tech or KSU depending on which I prefer. So both of them have to make it as appealing as possible for me. If KSU ends up looking like Chattahoochee Tech (a community college in the area with standards about as exacting as food safety requirements in Mexico, catering to the lowest common denominator of college students here), I’m probably going to pick UGA, or if I get lucky go for Tech. If Tech gets run-down, I’m going to go for KSU or even a private college. However, every public school here is a monopoly: if you live in North Cobb, you go to North Cobb public school. You don’t have a choice unless you are lucky enough to go to a private school, which is very expensive. High schoolers in Fulton County don’t have a choice to go to a Cherokee County school. There’s no competition because every public school controls its own market, and thus they can get as mismanaged as they want and nobody will bat an eye. That is where socialism fails: when there’s no competition. You could probably apply the same concept to most government institutions, like the DMV (a notoriously awful place here in Georgia). What if there were multiple socialist DMVs competing for funding? Perhaps one inside Atlanta, and one on the outskirts? If people know they’re going to get faster service and more help in the suburban DMV, they’re going to go there instead of the Atlanta one, and thus the suburban one will get more funding. The funding distribution system is already in place in public high schools: all we need is more than one public school per market, and they’ll probably dramatically improve, the way places like KSU and Georgia Tech do.
The purely capitalist solution is to just make all schools private, which is a terrible idea. Education here is quite cheap because it’s public. Do you want to stop the flow from all those state Zell Miller dollars giving disadvantaged but brilliant students a chance to succeed in a capitalist society? The purely socialist solution is to minimize competition, which we’ve seen the results of in public high schools. The best answer: our weird-but-effective mixture.
To another point. People complain about how much America interferes with foreign politics, how many human rights violations we commit, etc. Have they considered that perhaps we’re largely better than other countries, but more transparent? Here, if the press wants to report on Guantanamo Base (thanks for nothing, George Bush, you fat ****), they can report on Guantanamo Base without fearing for their lives. In China and Russia reporters are killed for mention of things like that. Since 2000, Russia’s regime has had an estimated 20 journalists killed in just the 2000s - about 1 a year since 2012. Meanwhile, only 4 journalists have died under suspicious circumstances in America since 2000, although many more were killed by private actors. Our many news agencies report on bad things we have done (say, Guantanamo base, thanks once again Bush, you sack of ****), but Russian media (TASS, a truly beautiful example of disinformation) reports only on all the evil “Nazist” things the Jewish-led and self-defending Ukrainians have done, and how successful the Russians have been in their “harmless military operation”, which is doing orders of magnitude worse a job in familiar cold, Russian-speaking territory than, say, they did in Afghanistan. To be fair, countries like Switzerland and Finland are probably doing a better job than us, but they’re tiny. Switzerland is a pathetic 15,000 square miles - my home state alone can hold 4 Switzerlands. It’s much easier to stay clean when you’re a tiny, neutral country than when you’re a major technological and economic force concerned with human rights across the globe. The CIA black sites are really bad (thanks a third time, Bush, you little ****), but the total number of detainees inside CIA black sites (not just the most famous one) is probably under 1,000 and may be as low as 100. Is that really comparable to the millions (not an exaggeration. Estimates are around 1.8 million but the number may be as high as 3 million) of Uyghurs put through the brutal Chinese re-education camps? (Warning: incredibly graphic article. If you think reading this won’t be that bad, but don’t really know what goes on in Guantanamo Base, you are wrong and need to keep your mouse far away from that link. It’s orders of magnitude worse than what America does.) Let’s look at this objectively: these people are being starved in terrible living conditions. They are also being brutally tortured. They are imprisoned for “crimes”. Is China trying to upstage Joseph Stalin?
These are just the big fish. Smaller countries, especially in Asia and Africa, can be just as bad. In Malaysia, you can be hospitalized for homosexuality; North Korea’s internment camps rival China’s. Syria. Most of the Islamic fundamentalist states. Per the world population review, America is near the top of the chart in freedom, and most everybody above is far smaller - it’s easier to have good human rights with a tiny population and little world stage involvement (Canada, of course, beats us into a cocked hat, but who thought they wouldn’t?).
My friends take from this kind of writing (I have extemporized on this many times, although never ratified it in essay form) that humans in general are bad and should be hated. I protest this kind of thinking, because it goes against pack instinct and allows traitorous species self-hatred. Who was Adolf Hitler, but a man who could look at a group of Jews (or, more accurately, non-Aryans) and say “I hate these humans. They should die.”
Instead, take one from Humanism: the idea that all human beings have the fundamental ability for good. Some human beings don’t use it. After all, what can morals come from but pack instinct? How can we say that any members of our species are truly “bad”, without ignoring pack instinct? The Uyghurs have been through enough, they don’t deserve God’s smiting blow reworking the world without humans. The Malaysian populace is in general kind and compassionate (as per the same Malaysian who informed me about the human rights violations), but their leaders are not. In a world where corrupt and evil people can decide on a whim to ban homosexuality or torture Muslims, should we work towards a solution, or just decide that all humans deserve to die?
We live in a world of people who have gained power and who can hate on a whim. What opposes this? The belief that humans should not be hated because all humans have a universal ability for good that they should exercise. Humanism.
This ideological set needs a name. I brand myself a libertarian socialist because 8values said so, and because it seems to fit, but I find it hard to defend such a contradiction in terms. Thus I imagine a new, incredibly confusing, and only kinda accurate word to sound fancy: “Socio-Humanistic Libertarianism”. Hopefully everybody will be too confused to protest the fact that, given my stance on drugs and guns, I am clearly not a libertarian.
Anyways, once I’m done with my Rust project I’ll probably do a write-up (cough cough, re-write) here, like PFS. See y’all soon!
My friend's blogs: Wizardwatch's overall site, Sawyer's blog (the .org part bemuses me), Luke's site. If ryleu decides to actually put something on his site, I'll link it here.