Most people on steemit are smart enough to understand this simple fact. I've seen some crazy commies and consipiracy fanatics saying that the Earth is flat while also calling them anarcho-capitalist while starting campaigns against individuals with valuable intellectual points, all because they have Jewish blood. Yes there are people on steemit claiming to be anarcho-capitalist while flagging content for the crime of an individual possessing Jewish blood while calling Earth is flat. Those people won't listen to reason and I certainly don't want to save them. But sometimes we see a person who could potentially turn to be a sensible. Some people can be enlightened with facts and at times when you are attacked by the ridiculous ideologies of the acedemic scum, you need to disarm them and mop the floor with their brains by using this wonderful thing called facts. So let's explore a whole bunch of facts against a whole bunch of ignorance present around us.
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language
The 1984 guy who lived and died a socialist opposing Stalinism which totally wasn't socialist wrote this wonderful essay you can read right here: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit I will quote some of the best and most important parts below.
MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
The next part is an illustration of the usage of these kind of writing which Ayn Rand also discussed in her writings. You need to acquire the wisdom to understand the madness. The madness is perpetuated through an act of hiding murder in a morgue. The basic mechanics involve using difficult/high brow words with broad meanings replacing very direct and specific ways giving non-answers and non statements.
People can pickup simpler ones as shown by the comments and the 5K dislikes opposite to 1K likes at the moment. But when things start to have deeper meanings, it happens line this:
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
Look at any Mainstream media publication and you'll see similar elements. These are the kind of statements that stopped the release of Six Days in Fallujah which was a historical third-person shooter video game developed under request and guidance from military veterans who returned after the battle that was the basis for the video game.
Unlike those who accuse everybody for everything and add nothing to make the world a better place, George Orwell actually puts down 6 rules to follow which many of us instinctively tend to follow. It's a simple set of rules and they aren't hard to follow unless you've been corrupted by college or higher education.
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Time for some charts from https://mises.org - Because facts matter
Let's begin by how much of a terrible place the world has become which lead to all sorts of protests, occupy movements and lots and lots of NGO/
Terrible right. You can slap this on people's faces with a grand sense of irony. The world has become a better and more prosperous place. In 23 years, poverty has gone down by more than 3 times. But that's not all. Here is more
Poverty rates aren't the easiest things to think about. Let's go for something much easier to understand in a very tangible way. This is one of the best charts to slap a socialist with.
I'll add some wise words from Ryan McMaken who gracefully use Twatter (https://twitter.com/ryanmcmaken) instead of Zappl or steemit. In case any of you can convince him or the Mises Institute, please convince them to start an account on STEEM.
When the Oxfam report says that certain groups are "worse off," what they really mean is that people in those demographic or socio-economic groups tend to be improving their situation more slowly than people in other groups. "Worse off" most certainly does not mean "worse now compared to 20 years ago."
This, however, is where arguments about inequality almost always end up: the fight against inequality becomes an end in itself because it cannot be shown that inequality is an obstacle to reducing poverty.
If every person in the world had access to clean, safe housing, clean food and water, basic health care, and reading materials for education, wouldn't we consider this a great victory for mankind? After all, a dry room to sleep in and enough food to eat was regarded as something of a utopian fantasy in the 19th century in the West. Since then, the West, of course, has already far surpassed this and the rest of the world is moving in the same direction.
But, Oxfam would have you believe that these victories would mean nothing if there are rich people out there somewhere who own a yacht, or have a home theater system, or own a luxury car. Whether or not the poor are gaining access to basic necessities mean nothing to them so long as other people are buying luxuries.
Their "solution" is simply to redistribute wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest — after governments take their cut, of course.
But this solution assumes that wealth creation would continue at the same pace once massive new redistribution schemes are put in place.
Ending facts to illustrate what a step towards a free market does
- In 1987, there were 660 million poor people in China.
- After they turned faux communist state capitalism resembling old feudal systems, that alone made the number fall to 25 million.
- That's a 96.2121212121% reduction in poverty.
- Each year 140 million people join the middle class.
Finally some wise words of an anonymous person on the internet going by the name "noah" commenting on an article on https://mises.org
The bottom line is this: groups like Oxfam have a grade-school concept of fairness. In a classroom of eleven students, imagine if a student brings in a dozen cookies and shares one with each student, leaving two for himself. Now suppose on the following day he brings in THREE dozen cookies and shares TWO cookies with each student, but splits the extra dozen between himself and his best friend(s).
All students get at least twice as much unearned cookie-wealth as the day before, but the distribution of cookie-wealth now appears far less equal, and therefore unfair. Does unfair mean unjust? It does to some of the students. This feeling is of course reinforced by the teacher, who tells the cookie-provider he must distribute his wealth more fairly, or not at all. The result? He stops bringing in cookies, and everybody is poorer for it. Equality in greater poverty is preferred to inequality in greater wealth.