Try Before You’re Forced To Buy

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Think about the increasing number of young Americans demanding socialism, even as the horrific collapse of Venezuela is in the news. Why do they want that to happen here?
It occurs to me that “hot” is a word which has no meaning to a child, until the child touches something hot. Until then, it’s just noise. What if “socialism” is the same? What if the only way to appreciate “capitalism” is to live under “socialism” for a while? Maybe, instead of class credit for protest marches, schools should require students to spend a month living in a place where the water isn’t safe to drink, the electricity isn’t reliable, there is no free wi-fi, food stores are empty, gasoline is only sold in back alleys, medical care is cash only and no antibiotics remain. A place where the police are not your friend, government officials demand bribes and the press reports what they’re told to report.
Would students learn a new appreciation of America? Or would they wave aside their experience saying: “But we’ll do it RIGHT this time.”
Joe Doakes

On the one hand, it’d lead to some of the “haves” among the students bleating “Yeah, but this isn’t socialism done right. “

On the other? It’d put some meat behind Churchill’s dictum “a man who’s not a liberal a 20 has no heart, and a man who isn’t a conservative at 40 has no brain”.

And maybe acclerate the timetable among those that can be saved.

8 thoughts on “Try Before You’re Forced To Buy

  1. Organized along the lines of the Peace Corps Trump should create a Knowledge Corps or Experience Corps where we send bright young XXX Studies graduates to Venezuela, or Cuba, or El Salvador or North Korea for 2 years with a $100.00/month stipend. In exchange the US Govt will forgive 1 year of student loans. If they bail anytime during their 2 year hitch then they’ll still have to repay all their student loans.

  2. Found this online: https://www.ericdigests.org/pre-927/soviet.htm
    It is a teaching guide from 1987 that instructs social studies teachers at public schools what they should teach their students about the USSR.
    –Avoid superficial conclusions, examine exceptions to generalizations, and present a balanced picture of the U.S.S.R. Emphasizing both the positive and negative aspects of daily life in the Soviet Union is important in any study of the U.S.S.R. Remember, the Soviet Union suffered destructive wars during the first forty years of its existence. Lifestyle, goods, and services have improved steadily, albeit slowly, for the average citizen during the span. Many economic and social problems that continue to confront the Soviet people, such as housing shortages, growing urban violence, and alcoholism, are also faced by people in the United States.

    When you read memoirs of Russians who lived to see the end of the USSR, one constant complaint is that the Soviet government treated its people like animals. They were fodder to be used to build a glorious future, and that future never arrived. It never could have arrived, the Marxist-Leninist political cult was wrong about virtually everything. No one, other than 70 year old Stalinists in academia, believes in the “dialectic of history.” The Soviets thought the dialectic of history demanded that kill tens of millions of people.

  3. MacArthur: $100/mo in Cuba would probably place the student in a comfortably middle class lifestyle. They would probably not experience the hardship. $100/mo in Venezuela or NoKo would put them in the upper elite. They definitely would not experience the hardship. It would be more effective to implement some sort of workshare program. We send an able-bodied student to one of those countries where they could be put to work (likely for the first time in their life). The “you stay for 2 years and 1 year of your student loans are forgiven, you leave before 2 years and you owe the entire amount” angle is brilliant.

  4. The idea might work with students who weren’t already indoctrinated. For those who have swallowed the Party line, I’m not so sure. I recall a contemporary of mine returning from Cuba in 1970, where she had gone to help in the sugar cane harvest. Breathless with enthusiasm. Or the American couple who lived on a Chinese cooperative in the pre-cultural revolutionary days, proselytizing to the converted ranks back in America how wonderful it all was. The same couple became sharply critical of the regime when it introduced western-style markets after the mass starvation brought about by Mao’s Great Leap Forward. No cure for stupid.

  5. Just learned your new governor has picked Mary Cathryn Ricker, President of the AFT union to be MN education commissioner.

    You guys are so fucked.

  6. Wait – you thought “education” was about teaching children? No, no – education is a classification of employee union, like machinist or pipefitter. Why shouldn’t they be represented at the highest levels of government in a state run by Democrats For Labor Unions (DFL)?

  7. It’s going to be interesting, Joe, to see exactly what kind of 3 ring circus MN public schools will be in a couple years.

    I’m guessing we’ll see things like tranny councillors…wait, who am I kidding? The schools will probably be issuing vouchers for sex reassignment surgery.

    American flags will be banned from school buildings, as will ROTC. The history of the glorious Cuban revolution will be a mandated course; field trips to Havanna will be organized.
    The boys will be lectured at length about what animals they are, and training in remediating toxic masculinity will be mandatory.

    Graduation rates And test scores will probably get even worse; it will be a miracle if black kids can read a stop sign.

    And, of course, there will be a raging river of cash flowing in to pay for all this.

    It’s the kind of show that can only be enjoyed from a distance.

  8. Did you say Venezuela is in the news? I haven’t seen any stories for some time. And how about those yellow vest protesters in France? Did they take the holidays off along with everyone else?

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