If you’re blindfolded, you’re likely to be intolerant in some way, to someone.
Not all neo-cons are blindfolded, ditto for liberals or socialists too. I don’t think that “having a left vs right smackdown” is going to do any good to anyone. It just ends up in idiotic comments like that of JV (its nice and short, so I read it 4 times & still couldn’t make head nor tail of it).
To AW, I’d say, “politics isn’t a circle”. Maybe if Mr Betts were around for the Spanish civil war, he would have seen libertarian communists and left-social democrats fighting clerical fascism and drawn a different conclusion. As a Marxist, I dislike being referred to as “a believer”. To me, Karl Marx was an inspirational figure and has left us with a fantastic mechanism through which to evaluate and change the world. I don’t hold all the cognitive content that he left us with as being absolutely true. Socialism is not a belief system in the same sense as Christianity, etc.
As a socialist, I am absolutely opposed to all forms of authoritarianism. Parliamentary democracy – like all forms of representation – is a social gain that was hard fought for, not one that was dished out by any ruling class by a sense of philanthropy. For that reason, it is defended by anyone who does more than just call themselves a socialist. However, us revolutionary socialists see parliamentary democracy as not being nearly representative enough of the vast majority of people. A choice between candidates a/b/c every 3/5/7 years to operate as a parlementarian/president/primeminister within the more powerful, and even less democratic mechanisms of various bourgeois institutions (i.e. courts on a national level, the WorldBank on an international one) is not nearly democratic enough a system for us. On the other hand, a fascist government characteristically snatches the paltry representation offered by national parliaments. Thus, to say “commies and fascists are all the same” is lazy, and wrong. Such a position usually derives from equating the authoritarian actions of degenerated socialist states (i.e. former Soviet Russia) or outright anti-socialist governments (i.e. Albanian SSR) with the fundamental principals of the socialist movement – principals often cited, but rarely used by the privileged elite in centralised, undemocratic CP central committees.
An interesting point is made by PFD when he wonders if anyone in the USA could be classified as being Socialist? I happen to know a couple of very principled US Socialists, but I’d doubt many people in the US are anywhere near the left. Although I am *not* by any means a Maoist (unlike Richard Nixon C:D ), I think that the chairman made a good point when he said that even the working class in an imperialist country benefit from that countries exploitation of others. The US is by no means the only imperialist power today, but it is the by far the most brutal and most powerful, and thus it is only natural that only a small percentage of (exceptional) US citizens are socialists.
I don’t really want to spend another 500 words discussing religion. I’m not a religious person, but I tolerate and respect anyone’s private beliefs. Certain aspects of every organised religion that I’ve encountered have appalled me, but I do know that religion cannot be banned, and cannot be forced out of people. Of course, as a socialist, I think that there should be a public space free of religion, but everyone is entitled to a private space free of religious persecution*.
It’s been a long time since I’ve harked around here and hit on a political one. One thing I remember is that there isn’t much point responding & responding & responding & responding & responding to mud slinging. This post is my tuppence, I’ll be off for another while.
[*I know this, because I need my own private time to kneel at my Enever Hoxha shrine and pray to Karl Marx while refusing to acknowledge anything that doesn’t conform to my narrow socialist *beliefs* which in themselves amount to no more than a political programme somewhere in the cigarette paper that separates Stalins Soviet famine, Churchills Indian famine, and Hitlers early gulag. If only I were smart enough to deal with the complexities of a postmodern politic that really says “its all the same, whatever”. This is my secret, filthy truth – everybody tell me yours!!! ]
Over & Out. 
no amount of ** and transposing letters was letting me post that answer without receiving the following disturbing message
I guess it's potentially dangerous to refer to someone as a cousin fornicating xtian
