Both.
Bfl
I’ll say stupid, because the individuals supporting Socialism/Communism apparently only look at the potential of the theory ignoring (or ignorant of) the facts of history.
The ignorance isn’t just about history. Every time I go to a supermarket I am blown away by the bounty and diversity of the products available to all of us. When you’re in one, ponder the effort, industry and most of all the risks endured by those who give us the choices we have. It’s only possible when people are free.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me
Capitalists build walls to STOP people from breaking in... (think of how wonderful a place would be that YOU would risk death to break into)
Commies change the minute they take power - when THEY take power the first thing they do is outlaw ‘protests’. If you don't like how they treat you they'll kill you. The days of public pity parties will end the first week. If YOU object to ‘THE STATE’ you'll be put in prison or put to death..
Commies play on the greed and childishness of the young in capitalist counties... The difference is the adults in society have NOT protected this generation...
There’s a Museum in DC called the newseum. It’s a self aggrandizement museum dedicated to all the brave journalists.
In typical leftist fashion, it’s the most expensive museum in Washington and chronically short on money.
Anyway, the place is pretty marginal but they do have an excellent Berlin Wall exhibit with about 20 panels of the wall.
I suspect they were not happy with me as I loudly led my kids around and asked them which side was the free country and which was the socialistic command economy with no freedom.
The free side was messy and loaded with multiple layers of graffiti while the dictatorial communist side was pristine clean concrete.
John K Fairbank is the greatest textbook case of how leftist academicians engaged in a symbiotic relationship with communist tyrants to both advance their careers and push a carefully modulated propaganda line designed for the American intellectual market. For several decades Fairbanks ‘The United States and China’ was probably the one book on China (other than Snow's ‘Red Star Over China’) that most US undergrads were exposed to in either a poly sci or foreign area studies class. It is a very well written conspectus of US-China relations that subtly makes the case for Mao and the CCP as the best alternative for China to deal with its massive problems and that the US by being a consistent supporter of the Nationalist produced a real ‘tragedy’ as the true interests of the US were i supporting the robust and sometimes necessarily brutal but progressive CCP. Many Americans absorbed the short lesson that ‘Well the Chicoms were dictatorial but the Nationalists were just awful, like Nazi's” This was the JKF was supposed to push quietly and sedulously. In return he was allowed to have certain access to and do research in Chinese state archives denied to other scholars who were not covert agents of intellectual subversion. Fairbank was a highly intelligent man and a fine writer and he just about dominated China studies in the US for nearly a half century. He conducted a kind of quiet campaign within his academic specialty to marginalize scholars such as Karl Wittfogel, who was more than Fairbank’s intellectual equal, who held ‘incorrect’ views. Fairbanks located himself in the center of the American intellectual universe teaching and writing his many books at Harvard. Blessed with an engaging politician like personality rather like an academic Dean Jagger he could seem reasonable in his views to even ardent anticommunists. As a agent of influence he was unparalleled and he genuinely empathized with Chinese thought processes and melded them to produce his own highly deceptive multilayer persona and in incorporating propaganda in his works on Chinese history from about the Opium War to the present in such a way as to seem moderate and convincing. His books such as East Asia the Great Tradition and The Modern Transformation, written with Edwin O. Reischauer , who wrote the sections on Japan, are excellent and still worth reading but one has to always be on the alert for any pro-communist interpretations. Fairbank became quite rich offering advice to bankers and big business after the Nixon opening of China as well as reaping large rewards from the many editions and revisions of his books and famous as well not just in academia. Unfortunately there are to many institutional barricades for his true record to be ever much known.
Marx sat a London library pouring over Adam Smith to learn all he could in order to stab at the heart of this very needed and natural human function.
The miseducated and the stupid have no idea how life would be without American capitalism.
Shopping in a Soviet grocery store (about 4 minutes)
Explanation of what happened during the fall of communism (about 5 minutes)
“Are Americans Who Admire Socialism and Communism Miseducated or Stupid?”
How about evil?
Stupid people are easily indoctrinated, and we have put education into the hands of trade union thugs. Saving future generations from the hell of communism would seem like a worthwhile goal of education, but “curriculum development specialists” (example: Brenda Snipes) don’t see that as a priority.
Pervasive, nefarious conformism selects and self-selects who is “successful”. Both stupid and intelligent people pursue rewards and avoid punishment. The media culture and cult of celebrity defines what is “cool”. Only radical leftists need apply. Many jobs require spewing the PC claptrap. Those who do get ahead, those who don’t get dropped. Academia, the FBI, CIA, and most of the gov’t became a leftist lake gradually because leftists hire and promote their compadres, and blackball non-leftists.
I think both.
It is a mixture of both, but rather than say “stupid” I would say ignorant. “Stupidity” implies low intelligence, while extreme ignorance means extremely lacking in knowledge.
There two main ways knowledge is acquired; formally as through formal education and life experience, which includes not just what we do but in what ways we become “informed” beyond our own experience, and that includes what we call “the media”.
So there are also two kinds of “miseducation” - one is from academia directly and the other comes from all the forms of the media.
Very intelligent persons can be very ignorant. It is not a result of mental defect such as very low intelligence - capability for logic and reasoning, so they are not stupid. Though that is not to say SOME of the Liberal/Progressive/Left are just plain stupid. My only point is I would not lump all who are Liberal/Progressive/Left into the “stupid” category.
In some sense with many Liberals/Progressives/Leftists it is a self-imposed ignorance - as if either sometime during formal schooling, or once they Left formal schooling the impetus for self-education ended, and “knowledge” became only what was delivered to them as predetermined “expert knowledge”. Even in many intelligent Liberals/Progressives/Leftists the ability for critical thinking hit a mute button, and was replaced by a “record” button convinced to just absord and memorize what they were told. Let me call it atrophied intelligence. David Horowitz is a former Leftists who realized he had once hit the mute button, until his intellectual honesty rose up and he began again to critically look at where his own ideas had come from, and had taken him.
You can see it in “well spoken” persons who are of the Liberal/Progressive/Left. The language craft of good intelligence is still there but the material is a constant recycling of Liberal/Left shiboliths.
One of the basic principles of communism was that it would first start in the world’s most advanced country.
It didn’t.
That is a fact.
If one of the most basic principles of communism was proven wrong, AT THE START, why would anyone believe anything else about it?
Boomers and “Greatest Generation” larded their Millennial children and grandchildren with mountains of debt and now scratch their heads in puzzlement over why they’re embracing socialism.
For Americans, it’s a cover.
Take a look at our Democrat/Socialists.
Diane Feinstein....rich or poor?
Nancy Pelosi.....rich or poor?
Hillary Clinton.....rich or poor?
Elizabeth Warren.....rich or poor?
Bernie Sanders.....rich or poor?
They are all rich, yet they talk about redistributing wealth.
Why don’t they redistribute their wealth if they think that is such a good idea?
It’s because they are liars and they are talking but not doing.
They’re arrogant. They think they’ll be part of the elite group that tells the masses how to lead their lives.