Gary Kasparov on Facebook:
I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.
For anyone that has been to Miami to look at a latin America story of smuggling white power this is stunning. Smugging powdered milk in a socialist utopia.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-29/how-bad-its-got-latin-americas-socialist-utopia
I had the privilege of hearing Gary Kasparov speak as the commencement speaker at my graduation from grad school. He discussed his childhood in the Soviet Union, his success with chess, and how those experiences have helped in his activism for freer government and markets in Russia. He’s a very inspiring individual!
I keep thinking that a posting this important should have more comments. But then, Mr. Kasparov really said it all. In my mind’s eye, I keep thinking of socialist/communist societies as dreary places at best, and places filled with suspicious misery as the norm after a few years.
B. Long, I wish I had had him as my grad school graduation speaker, too.
Not exactly off-topic: a little while back, Sean L raised a question about homosexuality in sci-fi settings. I’ve just been re-reading The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and while Robert Heinlein does not say very much about homosexuality in a direct way, the lunar society he describes has a very skewed sex ratio (about 2 men per 1 woman), and has developed some rather unusual customs in response to this. Most notably, there are several different forms of “polyandry” — i.e., one woman having several husbands — an arrangement that’s almost unprecedented in Earth societies.
From this, the reader can infer that moon citizens have zero incentive to stigmatize consensual male bisexuality (less competition for wimmenz), and yet — contrary to Ben Carson — very few men see homosexuality as anything other than a makeshift kludge, and would much rather have a wife even if it means sharing her affections with the husbands. (So Heinlein pretty much rejects “orientation fluidity” and “non-binary genders,” in other words: even in the sci-fi conditions of 2075, most men want to be men, most women want to be women, and almost everybody prefers to be hetero.)
P.S. In a more general sense, this is absolutely on-topic for a thread about socialism — because the novel deals with a laissez-faire revolution, and the unofficial motto of the lunar nation is “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”