Am I correct that this incident occurred on Park Avenue near 38th Street or so? Muggers assume that everyone in that neighborhood who’s not NYPD is walking around unarmed. It’s Manhattan.

These wingnuts are to douchebags what douchebags are to regular people.

Heh.

All I know is what the NY Daily News says, which is that she doesn’t know what happened.

The rest is a bunch of gossip.

Anything new that’s real?

A monarchist or a theocrat could easily inveigh against capitalism in exactly those terms and not be a socialist. Fascism subjects the worker to the state, monarchy subjects her to the throne, and theocracy subjects her to God (and his surprisingly numerous representatives on Earth). None of these are socialism, nor are they capitalism. Socialism and capitalism only define an axis as relative to liberalism.

Which it is not. Monarchy generally featured extensive government control of the economy and was not socialist. Like most political terms, there are quite a few definitions of socialism, but the most general and historically accurate is an economic system where the means of production are in the hands of the workers who operate them, as opposed to capitalism, where they are in the hands of a monied class.

Anarcho-syndicalism is an example of a socialist system which does not feature government control of the economy. A government-run economy is only socialist to the extent that the government is an agent of workers’ interests.

Getting one’s definitions from a dictionary when the terms on the table are terms of art doesn’t, however, tend to incline me favorably toward anyone’s intentions.

That would mean they’re nuts, right?

Jillian, are the only real socialists in your world view the communist ones? Can there be no other face to socialism? And Hitler made a career of trying to centralize power in Europe in his hands regardless of the political nature of his enemies. Those who refused to bow or make peace on his terms were targeted. I don’t know how that is meant to refute anything that I said, nor am I arguing from bad faith.

Frankly, I don’t care where you put him on a political spectrum because I know that Hitler and the NAZIs were nothing like me and nothing like you. With the exception of some fringe lunatics in American politics, there aren’t a whole lot of Hitler clones running around in even marginally rational debates.

Rufus, talk to a goodly number of Libertarians and they will say that, yes, the US is a socialist state. I would personally say that the US is a mixed economy which holds the market in high esteem and yet indulges in some socialist behaviors. I would say it’s an issue of extremes.

Which I don’t think is such a bad thing. And, for the record, the incredibly high tariffs imposed by the NAZIs are one of the things that some people will use as an example of how the German government exerted too much control on the economy.

Lawnguy, yes I am taking him at his word to an extent. Between his words and his movements to control wages and prices, I think there is a good case to be made.

Here’s a dictionary definition of socialism for you:
a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

Jillian, I think this boils down to definitions. You think of socialism (the political theory) as being one and the same as the socialist party. I don’t. I don’t believe that internationalism nor anti-nationalism have to be a part of the mix for a government to be socialist.

I think that it’s curious that you think I am arguing from a point of bad will.

Yeah, because two decades of open threats of physical violence against liberals is NO EVIDENCE AT ALL on which to base a suspicion. Ann Coulter’s admonishment to conservatives to use a baseball bat in talking with liberals is just humor and nothing more. The constant cries over the last ten years of traitor! and un-American! and fifth columnist! and all that mean nothing whatsoever.

So I know zombyboy will be screaming bloody murder the next time the Secret Service “interviews” someone for making threats about the President. Right?

Riiiiiiight.

Moved away from considering himself a socialist? You mean you’re taking him at his word that he believed what he was saying in your quotation? Are you the type of person who believed W considered himself a compassionate conservative in 2000?

That’s it. I’m moving to Pitcairn’s Island.

And there really isn’t any debate over whether Hitler “moved away” from considering himself a Socialist. He never was one. People can call themselves anything they like – Sir William Harcourt thought he was a Socialist. Richard Nixon thought he was a Keynesian. Ann Coulter thinks she’s a Christian.

It’s Hitler’s actions after he came to power, not his words before he came to power, that really determine what his ideology was about. In this, I stand with William Paxton. Nazism is perhaps as close to the polar opposite of Socialism as you can get.