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You have a habit of referring to writers of the past without quoting or even paraphrasing anything they wrote. Then you chide me for not having read them. If that is not pure and simple pedanticism, I don’t know what is. If they wrote something relevant to the current discussion, why don’t you give us a clue what it was.

I am an aerospace engineer, and I don’t have time to waste reading Marx. If that makes me inferior to you in your little mind, then so be it. I don’t really care. I deal in the realm of reality, where you can’t just make stuff up and pretend it’s true. You can claim that the Nazis were not socialists, but if I claimed with a straight face that the moon missions were staged, I would be laughed at.

You seem to be some sort of liberal (modern sense) academic. Liberal academics are notorious for believing the most asinine things. Many if not most of them believed, for example, that Soviet communism was superior to Western capitalism and free enterprise. In fact, many of them still believe that communism will prevail, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that you believe that too.

Well, there I go again, wasting yet more time with you.

Have you ever heard of the "great books"? i.e. the base knowledge every educated westerner should know. Before you have an apoplectic fit about "liberal academics" etc... you should realize that the great books are a fundamentally *conservative* phenomenon.

If you're going to pontificate about socialism it helps to know the basics of its intellectual tradition. The fact that you didn't have the common courtesy to at least google what you didn't know about shows just how willfully ignorant you are.

Also addressing your laughable claim that you "deal in reality". As someone who studied physics you should be well aware how laughable that claim is. Is Quantum mechanics more "real" than Newtonian mechanics? Not that I expect you to understand the analogy, but this should prove that you don't even know the implications of *your own field*.

Do you really think I'm "liberal" in your dingbat mind? Or is "liberal" anything you don't understand and don't like?

There you go again, telling me that I should read more books, without a clue about what in those books might pertain to this thread.

And you persist in denying that the National Socialist Nazis were socialists in the face of irrefutable proof to the contrary, apparently because only special people like you really understand the nuances of the word “socialist.”

Actually, I find it hard to believe that anyone could really be as dense as you appear to be, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and conclude it’s just an act.

I’ve been a fool to go along this far, but I’m not going to take the bait any more. I have far more important things to do. You are free to continue wasting your own time — which I’m sure is worth far less than mine.