Or take the Soviet Union itself. The democratically elected Provisional Government was overthrown by force. Even the socialists-only Constituent Assembly election was simply voided and ignored by the Bolsheviks when they overwhelmingly lost.
Your claim is empirically false. Socialism has historically been imposed involuntarily at gunpoint in almost all cases where it has achieved any measure of real power. Moreover, once established, its show elections are a farce, with only pre-selected Party approved candidates allowed to win.
You will no doubt reply that none of this was done by "real" socialists, and that <insert your favorite sub-sub-branch of socialism here> are the only "real" socialists. This is the "No True Scotsman fallacy".
Pretty much ANY political system gains power through bloodshed. The United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, pretty much the entirety of South America, Africa and Asia... With the wide ranges of political systems that span all these places, each and every one of them was put in place by violence.
You point out the horrible regimes that adopted the word "Socialist" or "People's" in their name and point out all the atrocities that they have committed. While adopting those monickers != actual socialism, you've headed off that argument, so I'll give you that. However, don't lay violence as a means of gripping power at the feet of Socialism... That's a human trait.
So were the US backed gorrillas in every violent uprising in South America in the 1980's.
So were Belgian trading companies in the Congo.
So were the French people during the Reign of Terror.
So were the Catholics during the all of the Inquisitions.
So were the Spanish during the expulsion of the Moors.
I could go on. The point being that this is not a Socialist trait. The first two were done with Capitalist intent. The last two were carried out with both political and religous power in mind. It's clear that you don't like Socialism, and that's fine... to each his own. But it's "disingenuous" to ignore history for the sake of proving your point.
No, given the evidence, it's not fair. You could say the exact same thing for Capitalism.
Please. Now you're just being purposefully insulting.
Trying to impute motives to an unreal analytic abstraction is the reification fallacy.[1]
That is an empty refutation...
Colonialism was(is?) as very real practice. I really don't understand how you can claim that it is an "intellectual abstraction"
You went to Wikipeda for the definition of reification, but not for the definition of Colonialism[1]?
They were universally created, armed, trained, and funded by the KGB as part of a massive decades-long social engineering program designed to make people think that there were organic third world socialist movements which had spontaneously emerged from the local population's great love of socialism. In reality they were all -- 100% of them -- created and operated by remote control from Moscow.
They served the interests of the Soviet Union exclusively. They were interested in the needs or betterment of local peoples only insofar as this also served to expand Soviet control and influence in those places.
As the local third world socialists usually naively did not realize this reality, the locals who actually worked and fought in the "indigenous" movements were internally referred to as "useful idiots" within the KGB.
Communism has always been an explicitly internationalist movement with the conversion of all countries worldwide -- and especially highly industrialized countries, above all the United States -- to Communist rule as the open goal. Under these circumstances, the US response of funding counter-operations abroad to counteract these KGB operations was appropriate.
See e.g. the Mitrokhin archive, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2006-0..., etc.
You completely ignored (or didn't understand) my point. I spread the attributions of violence around to show that using abhorrent violence to grip power has nothing to do with political inclination, economic system or religion. It is innately human.
Whether other systems have also been undemocratic is irrelevant (the "tu quoque fallacy").
I simply making the point that gripping power through undemocratic means is not a trait of a particular political belief, but rather a trait of human kind in general. Not agreeing with huac, and not agreeing with you.
You're quoting fallacies while not understanding what's being said around you.
I wish people had the balls to stand behind their politics.
Now taxes, that's a different story.
If you're paying too little, you've got to expect that situation is not sustainable - either that good deal withers, or the vendor's lock on their customers means they can raise prices arbitrarily.
That is indeed the case: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/will-ride-ha...
Quite the business model. I wonder if they really believe they're earning goodwill at the rate of an Andrew Jackson per ride?
They can do that, if they want anti-trust problems. I bet Uber wants Lyft to survive so they can have a substantially similar competitor to point to when the government's lawyers come knocking.
At that point, any (future) new entrant to the market will face a steeper uphill battle than Lyft did. In the process, they may lose some customers to real cars or public transit, but they'll remain the only player in this space.
If Uber succeeds in killing Lyft, they can dictate pricing more effectively and harvest a surplus from the remaining consumers.
Crucially, Uber doesn't own the cars nor the drivers. Anyone willing to throw more cash to drivers and take less cash from riders (with the infusion of VC funding) can instantly steal both the supply and the demand from Uber.
The problem for uber is that I am paying the majority of the cost of owning a car, the parking space, either way, so switching back to driving myself has a low cost. Housing situations I want that don't come with "free" parking are few and far between in my area.
Now if uber would bully the city into letting someone build a parking free tower of studio condos? Yeah o.k. Maybe they could exploit the lack of competition to get me to pay a lot more for transport, but as it is, they need to keep the price below what I would pay to read for twenty minutes rather than drive, and I am not sure that would add up to a market clearing wage without some vc largess.
If Uber gets big, expect this to happen in addition to blocking the construction of effective bike lanes.
The only real benefit to public transit at this point is that it allows you to dodge the cost of parking your vehicle for a day while you are at work. But Uber has figured out other ways to successfully allow people to dodge that cost.
With Uber pool my commute takes roughly the same time as metro, is door to door, and now cheaper and in many ways safer than taking the metro.
Or they are just trying to tread water until they can remove drivers as a cost. If Uber can use VC money to pay current driver and then use more VC money to purchase a self driving fleet, they just have to wait it out until their current prices become profitable.
Later, someone pointed out to me that Lyft and Uber are aggressively competing right now. It seems that Uber might be artificially deflating its prices to try and kill the competition, or discourage new companies from even entering the market. If they do manage to kill Lyft, you can be sure they will raise their prices again.