Tag: Marx

Rootin' tootin' yee haw

Last Week in Weird

by Darien Sumner

It’ll be a cold day in a hot place

I’m sure you’ve heard about the weather. Throughout most of the continental United States, the last week has been unusually cold and snowy (which is because of global warming and don’t you forget it, you horrible science denier). Texas certainly had the worst of it, though; not only were temperatures in the single- or low-double-digits for most of the week, but the infrastructure was unable to withstand the sudden cold — due to years of crony deals, about a quarter of Texas’s electricity is generated by wind and solar, none of which was designed to operate in the cold and buried under snow, and millions of Texans were left without power for days on end, leading to no end of misery and a fair few deaths.

So naturally, deranged rodeo clown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the problem was that Texas didn’t green energy hard enough:

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Against Socialism

by Darien Sumner

Libertarians do a terrible job fighting against socialism, but the tragedy of it is that we think we’re winning. In the end, though, it’s impossible for us to win as long as we fail to understand our opponents, which is the key problem; libertarians devote so much time to fighting against Bernie Sanders and Kshama Sawant and their idiotic promises of free this and free that that we come to identify the "free stuff" mentality itself as the heart of the socialist ideology. Don’t get me wrong, now; Bernie is wrong, as any fule kno, and it’s important that we keep pointing that out, but smashing dopey politicians is playing the short game. The long battle is fought by the philosophers, and no serious Marxist philosopher bases his philosophy on a foundation of "rich people will pay back your student loans."

We libertarians are often fooled into believing that we can smash the socialists forever by pointing out that socialist economies are notoriously unproductive, and that a hundred million people starved to death under their reign in the last century. While that does pretty effectively blow up the bumper-sticker socialism of a Sanders or a Sawant, it should be noted that, as a philosopher, Bernie Sanders makes a great long-distance runner, while "Kshama Sawant" is a Hindi phrase meaning "intellectual lightweight." Just because those two goobers have literally no comeback at all when faced with the obvious failures of real-world socialism doesn’t mean that the serious thinkers haven’t considered the problem. They have — and the answer they’ve come to is so far afield of what libertarians are used to dealing with that we basically don’t even realize it’s there.

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