Whenever I hear USAmericans denigrating 'socialism', and then offering examples that don't remotely resemble the real-world cases of actually-existing socialism, I can't help laughing. As you say, the meme has been very successfully suckered into the US population by its self-perpetuating ruling gic-class ['gangsters-in-charge'], to the point where everyone uses the word, and apart from a small percentage of serious due-diligence-done thinkers, no-one has the remotest idea what it really means. A bit like 'communism' -- in the popular-American usage --I suppose.

Here in Britain we've had an extremely mild experiment with dilute socialism -- the real thing -- since WW2, and despite massive hostility and a continuous bullshit blizzard of lying propaganda against it from our gics and their servants in media and 'democratic' politics, the bulk of the common people here, who have benefitted mightily from it, and paid for it out of their own taxes, won't part with any of the great strongholds of our version -- particularly the National Health Service -- not at any price, no matter what tosh the privileged minorities try to spin to us.

In the US, as all the world knows, you could have afforded a socialised medicine system at a minute fraction of the cost that commercialised corporate 'medicine' has cost you, and everyone would have been covered, instead of the current 40 million or so USAmericans with no effective cover at all, and many more who are bankrupted by one serious illness, even when they've been paying the corporate health insurance protection racket money all their lives.

Even our lame, ballsless version of socialism is better than that. And the real thing, if we were ever to insist on the real democratic choice, would be even better.

I paid my tax/national-insurance dues for the health service for decades, though virtually never needing it when younger. Now, retired, and with the sort of income which average USAmericans would regard as near-Third-World penury, I do need the service from time to time. Can you imagine the comfort of knowing that it's always there, always -- in my experience -- pretty good, and always free at point of need. The US has a lot of waking up to do in such matters. And the fat days have now gone for ever.

Thanks Jason for this excellent piece. Linked on to other audiences. What would we do without TOD!

“Spoken like a man with a garage full of empty beer cans who dreams of having enough returnables to get a set of mag wheels for the house.”

“I would think a native speaker would immediately stifle a laugh after seeing that one liner.”

Hey, I laughed, not so much at the attempt by the writer of the line to ridicule the great pathetic, uneducated, working class that is now the butt of all jokes (he lives in a trailer! Hee, hee, why wasn’t he and his redneck pathetic family living in a half million dollar home in the suburbs the way real American successes live!), but because it revealed such great accidental reverse ridicule of the elitist Pollyanna types who will change the world with sermons given “ during the Summer Arts and Music Festival at the Benbow Lake State Recreation Area.” (does anyone other than me wonder how long upmarket “preserves” for the well rested and “superior” few will last when their dream of “TSHTF” actually occurs? We had one in central Kentucky called Otter Creek Park that died a fast death when the city of Louisville realized that the beer swilling rednecks who had been subsidizing it out of their tax dollars could no longer do so when they were laid off from places like Ford Motor Co., so it looks like the well rested intellectuals will have to find another patsy to pay for their “green playground”)

So while posters in reply to the article say “The 800-lb gorilla that you don't mention is overpopulation. Maybe you would lose your audience if you were to introduce that downer.But other than that, I liked it..”, and the writer of the article himself says “ and the Growth in human population has been sharply rising for several decades.”, there seems to be no shortage of what Charlie Chaplin once hilariously referred to as “the kinder, ah…the kinder!”, as the happy chortle of so many children pervade the article ““These days, our kids dash home from school eager to get started on planting, or raising seedlings, or canning tomatoes, or drying pears. They hop on their bicycles and ride through the neighborhood, giving away extra lettuce, tomatoes and berries from our garden.” Glory day, it sounds like a Mormon playground!

I myself have no children, (from my parent’s four children there have so far been produced two children, which is why I have a free pass on the carbon and consumption issue…I could not possibly burn in a lifetime what the combination of the children I never produced, (and the children they never produced, and the children the unproduced grandchildren never produced, on into INFINITY) would have consumed…

And yet we stand judged by people who have comfy houses for the kinder, and operate “small farms”:

“Now some people look at my family and Mary’s family and think, “That is fine for them. They have made a nice lifestyle choice. My choice is to keep on doing tomorrow what I did yesterday.”Well, that is not going to cut it. While I like my lifestyle choice I want to make another key point.”

First let me make a key point: Who the hell gave you the right to tell anyone what is and is not going to “cut it”? In exchange, will you give the childless poor the right to tell you and your green friends and then their clatter of shiny well bred kinder what is and is not going to “cut it”? Is that an exchange you will make willingly? If so, I beg that you keep in mind the fate of the educated elite who have fallen prey to the masses of disenfranchised poor from the French Revolution to the Maoist “everybody should produce what they eat” movements, the whole “ send them to the farms” mentality… It ain’t been pretty…

But the author defends…
“A few, or perhaps many, of you might be thinking: “This guy is taking joy in the loss of the American Way of Life and the good jobs that hard working people have held for many years. Is he a heartless jerk?” Well, I don’t think so.”

Nor do I. I think the author has good intentions…and we all know where the road paved with those has often led…, but of course, “Plenty of job opportunities should exist in order for us to pay back that loan Mother Nature approved”.

Yes they should, and I would gladly take up bicycle vending or citizen farming, especially if I could confront the glorious problem of, “Underemployment could mean more free time. What are you going do with it?”

Of course I can answer that question easily. I speak for myself here, if underemployed deprived of health insurance and needed medication, I am going to die, unless said “underemployment” can provide the medication to keep my blood pressure down, which stays up and continues to rise to astronomical levels without it (I am a 129 pound male at 5 foot 5 inches…just thought I would mention it before the folks who now believe that obesity is the only illness in America chime in…my condition, like so many conditions in the U.S. is inherited, suffered also by my father, uncles, an aunt and other assorted descendents on my father’s side, only one factor in my avoiding the path of procreation).

But all of the above are mere quibbles to the happy yeoman gardener with his herd of kinder and earth mother wife tilling the soil on quarter million dollar an acre land on the edge of the happy suburbs…(one wonder what is used to haul around the collection of antique farm implements once they are found, and whether they all rode one bicycle to the “Summer Arts and Music Festival at the Benbow Lake State Recreation Area.”)

Ah, it brings back fond memories of the first and last peak oil meeting I attended in person some 3 years ago, in which a collection of aging boomers all agreed that “people have got to stop consuming oil” and then went to the parking lot and drove away in a glorious collection of Japanese and German sports sedans and SUV’s while I drew sad frowns limping away in my ancient 1982 Diesel 240D Mercedes with a quarter million miles on it (still runs, my uncle has it now).

I am the kind of guy my rural friends love to hate, a bit too much the “Frasier” type…I like wine and craft shows and museums and literary events, and am a believer in the “green” and “sustainable” idea…and having no kids, I have nothing to speak to about with either my down to earth country friends nor my elitist green ones, who all have the pretty shiny offspring and all preach their brand of “family values”, that great unifier of Americans whether your taste is beer or wine, granola and Kashi cereal or KFC and ribs, Bach (Johann Sebastian, not Barbara) or Faith Hill (with her adorable Anglo Saxon face and beautiful permanently pregnant tummy, a Madonna image for the trailer park masses) or Barack with his adorable princesses, the image of the progressive and green universal nation to come, all play to the various fantasy utopias for “the “kinder, ahhh, the kinder”.

I who can be a bit of an elitist snob myself sometimes….but my respect for the down to earth real people of America who have wheels on their houses increases more each and every day.

And SacredCowTipper, never worry about one of your snide pissy elitist jokes getting over my head…oops, have I committed a "campfire faux pas"? Stifle a laugh, it's all in good fun! :-)

RC

My apologies, I thought you were replying directly to me and saying that was my view.

Double-plus correct!