I’m not sure it’s any better documented than the supposed breakers and provocateurs in the Soviet Union. One thing is for certain, the Communist movement in the US was never anything more than microscopic, and you are attributing outsized influence to it, as well as conveniently blaming it on foreign powers (as if Marxists wouldn’t have existed in the US were it not for the Soviet Union). There may not be equivalence in detail but there is equivalence enough. From there it is not hard to imagine purges of “wrong-thinking” socialists from your ideal society, and maybe a limitation on “wrong-speech”.
Err, the point of what I was saying was that the “base education” isn’t very good, and it’s gradually gotten worse.
First, some base education for everyone is beneficial, whatever you think of the quality. Second, you may have noticed that private education still exists, and thrives, untroubled by the fact that primary and secondary education is free for all. Lastly, since we can only compare to history (as no first world society thinks it is acceptable to not educate it’s populace to some level for free), then it is easy to see that not only are people generally better educated than they were in the 19th century, but the quality of education has steadily improved almost everywhere, declining only where starved for public funds.
You just can’t help yourself can you? I keep telling you we’re on the same side with regard to goals, but you refuse to believe that anyone else can reasonably believe that the means you favour aren’t getting us to the goals. So since I’m suspicious of your means, I must be after a different goal, and you’ll do your damndest to try and winkle out my true intentions as being opposite from yours. Outstanding, my dear heresy hunter, truly outstanding.
This is a weird rant. Do you struggle this much with anyone who disagrees with you? I said nothing about your intentions or goals. I assume you do think your ideology would work (you would be a weird ideologue if you thought otherwise). Similarly I assume Marx thought his ideas would work, etc etc. But these ideologies rarely survive contact with a real human society.
You must be a fan of Michael Moore.
This is not a refutation of anything I or others have said. You will struggle to refute it because the statistics are pretty clear; Americans pay a great deal more for similar outcomes and with less coverage of the population.
Yes, but the state doesn’t take upon itself the burden of universal food provision for children, does it? Yet according to your “reasoning”, it ought to, right?
Fortunately that is not necessary as food is plentiful and cheap. In this matter the state can just “plug gaps” as you say. Plugging gaps though is not practical for education, medical care, infrastructure, law enforcement, justice, common defence, etc etc. Some things work well with minimal (or no) state intervention, some things need to socialized.
The situation is like this: our minds are an ecology of memes (replicable patterns of human action), some of them good, some bad (under any given definition of good/bad). If your aim is (broadly speaking) human flourishing, then the memes we reproduce amongst ourselves fall out as good/bad in relation to that. The proposition is that religious and ideological memes are bad; the good ones, the ones that guard us against religion and ideology, are the cluster of memes around reason, logic, evidence-based argument (also moral courage - e.g. not being afraid to lose friends for saying something that goes against your “tribe”'s views), etc. If you find this description more or less reasonable, then you should understand that there’s no reason for you to make toy false equivalences between me and ideologues, because we’re all in the same boat.
We are all in the same boat with the ideologues, and you sound exactly like an ideologue. What I hear from you is “my way or nothing”, whereas I am saying “whatever way works best”.
but there is a sense of the concept of “free will” as it’s used in ordinary language (without the philosophical baggage) that’s absolutely functional and viable even in a deterministic universe and it’s not necessary to get rid of it (in fact it would be positively detrimental to try and get rid of it).
I didn’t say there wasn’t a sense of free will, just that there is no scientific evidence we actually have free will. it’s not practical to think we don’t though, and further to assume lack of free will or free thought in a discussion of this sort is counterproductive. Any time you accuse someone of being brain washed they can just fling that right back at you and you have no answer.
