PS_RalphW wrote:Plenty of scientific progress. Very little of it had filtered down from the elite to the working class in the UK. The at really started with compulsory free education and other socialist ideas, like votes for women
Universal education paid for through taxes was the norm in the USA before 1917. You can't credit socialism with that. Surely the working class in the UK benefited from improvements in public infrastructure and sanitation. Just having a working rail system would have improved the lives and prosperity of everyone using it.
In medicine just the fact that they stopped bleeding people to treat them and actually started looking at disease scientifically must have improved the lot of all those they used to lance.
The benefits of bloodletting only began to be seriously questioned in the second half of the 1800s, as the development of evidence-based medicine led to new statistical methods for evaluating treatment effectiveness.[14] While many physicians in England at the time had lost faith in the general value of bloodletting, some still considered it beneficial in some circumstances, for instance to "clear out" infected or weakened blood or its ability to "cause hæmorrhages to cease"—as evidenced in a call for a "fair trial for blood-letting as a remedy" in 1871.[15] Bloodletting persisted into the 20th century and was even recommended by Sir William Osler in the 1923 edition of his textbook The Principles and Practice of Medicine.[16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting
The industrial revolution is what released the workers from the fields owned by lords and advanced the status of women to the right to vote.
NO progress in a century where America became a great nation and the British empire stretched around the globe? Absurd!
The industrial revolution reduced and impoverished the lives of workers who were displaced from the fields. It was only with subsequent growth of unions and the demands for better conditions they made, coupled with hundreds of thousands of men who had been trained to be killers and had endured terrible suffering on the fields of France, that the elites began to throw a few more crumbs from the top table. Even then, a young Winston Churchill was implicated in driving men who had shed blood for this country, back down the mines at gunpoint because they had the temerity to demand more than a few coppers a week for their subterranean toil. Major change finally came after the second world war because, by that point, our elites knew full well that if significant concessions were not made, there would be systemic political upheavals and possibly even revolutionary unrest as there had been following the end of the first world war (though your average British citizen might be forgiven for not knowing that, so complete has been the erasure of the record of it from our school book texts).
It's only surprising it's taken the bastards nearly 80 years to begin to claw it all back.
The debate about the value of socialism and socialist programs goes on endlessly. My point is only that the assertion that one hundred years past without any progress in the human condition is false on it's face and any argument you rest on this falsehood is fatally flawed.
Even the premise that the period 1817 to 1917 was free of socialist experimentation and development is false so the comparison of one century to the one that precedes it sheds little light on the supposed value of socialism.
vtsnowedin wrote:
The debate about the value of socialism and socialist programs goes on endlessly. My point is only that the assertion that one hundred years past without any progress in the human condition is false on it's face and any argument you rest on this falsehood is fatally flawed.
Even the premise that the period 1817 to 1917 was free of socialist experimentation and development is false so the comparison of one century to the one that precedes it sheds little light on the supposed value of socialism.
You are deliberately re-framing the terms of the debate now. No-one will argue (at least on the level of analysis pertinent to this particular debate) that improvements in living conditions did not occur eventually. However, such improvements in living conditions that did occur were as a consequence of socialist victories and not as a consequence of some kind of implicit facet of the capitalist system. You have no evidence of that whatsoever. The evidence to the contrary, however, is voluminous.
I didn't say or mean to imply there was no technological improvements in that century. I'm fully aware there were , more that how the average working man lived wasn't hugely different. If it were possible to take a person from 1917 back to 1817 it would be much less of a shock than it would to take someone from today back to 1917 . As I said only a theory and like most it does have holes but I'm still of the belief that altruism is thin on the ground for the "elites" , for want of a better term , and the working man has had to fight for nearly everything. Communism acted as an external factor that prompted change as an alternative to bodies hanging from lampposts .
Perhaps the question should be why is America so scared of socialism ?
vtsnowedin wrote:
The debate about the value of socialism and socialist programs goes on endlessly. My point is only that the assertion that one hundred years past without any progress in the human condition is false on it's face and any argument you rest on this falsehood is fatally flawed.
Even the premise that the period 1817 to 1917 was free of socialist experimentation and development is false so the comparison of one century to the one that precedes it sheds little light on the supposed value of socialism.
You are deliberately re-framing the terms of the debate now. No-one will argue (at least on the level of analysis pertinent to this particular debate) that improvements in living conditions did not occur eventually. However, such improvements in living conditions that did occur were as a consequence of socialist victories and not as a consequence of some kind of implicit facet of the capitalist system. You have no evidence of that whatsoever. The evidence to the contrary, however, is voluminous.
No I am not re framing the debate. Back on Dec. 6 Lurkalot posted this.
Were living standards for the average person much different in 1817 than they were in 1917
Implying that the advent of communism in 1917 started real progress in human living standards.
In fact the UK life expectancy in 1817 was 36.8 yrs at birth and rose to 52.7 by 1917. So things were improving across the board over that century and if you look for cause and effect one need look no further then the progress in steam engine design fallowed by IC engines.
No social movement , philosophy or mode of government had anywhere near the impact that the age of steam had.
Lurkalot wrote:I didn't say or mean to imply there was no technological improvements in that century. I'm fully aware there were , more that how the average working man lived wasn't hugely different. If it were possible to take a person from 1917 back to 1817 it would be much less of a shock than it would to take someone from today back to 1917 . As I said only a theory and like most it does have holes but I'm still of the belief that altruism is thin on the ground for the "elites" , for want of a better term , and the working man has had to fight for nearly everything. Communism acted as an external factor that prompted change as an alternative to bodies hanging from lampposts .
Perhaps the question should be why is America so scared of socialism ?
Well the rate of change is accelerating but the 19th century was no slouch.
Take your farmer from 1917 (My father was one when he was drafted into WW1,) and transport him back to 1817 and see what is missing or different. First take away his machine woven clothing and replace it with home spun and leather. then take his Winchester 30-30 and replace it with a flintlock , most likely a smooth-bore. His home becomes a rough log cabin instead of the clapboarded post and beam farmhouse he grew up in. There are no rail lines ten miles away to ship or receive goods from Boston or New York. And no model T automobile to take him down the also missing gravel road to the train station. His eighth grade one room school house education would be reduced to someone hopefully having taught him top read from the bible if the family had one. The nearest doctor is in WRJ(Hartford Vermont) a two day walk away and what he knows is not worth the walk. There is no chance of one or those new fangled areoplanes flying over. just hawks and eagles. His horse drawn cast iron moving machine is gone and the men mow the fields with hand scythes one swing at a time. The fields are small and surrounded by huge trees yet to be cut or burned as a big tree takes a long time with a single bitted ax. The hay is raked with a hand rake five feet wide with eighteen inch wooden teeth. What happened to the ten foot cast iron dump rake?
If the crops don't come in good and he runs out of food mid winter he and his family may well starve as there are no roads open in winter and he has little if any cash to buy more with.
I'd say that is quite a schock but I think he would have taken it better then a kid today if you smash his X- box and cell phone.
A senior Democratic senator said on Wednesday that Washington was mulling lifting its decades-long commercial and travel restrictions on the island nation under communist rule for more than five decades.
US President Barack Obama is scheduled make a statement at 1700 GMT on Cuba, the White House said. Obama is expected to announce a shift in Washington's Cuban policy. Cuban President Raul Castro, in turn, is scheduled to address his nation at the same time regarding his country's relationship with the United States.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
It will be interesting to see what kind of traitor to the revolution and to the Cuban people Raul will turn out to be when the details of whatever deal he has done with the US becomes clearer.
stevecook172001 wrote:It will be interesting to see what kind of traitor to the revolution and to the Cuban people Raul will turn out to be when the details of whatever deal he has done with the US becomes clearer.
I could be wrong, of course. I hope I am.
It's been clear for a while that Cuba will eventually fall for the economic joke that is our way of life - or at least, try to.
I imagine America will colonise Cuba by its modern means: we give you a few worthless dollars in exchange for your working lives.
It seems very sad that this is possibly (seen as) one of Obama's few achievements. So much hope, so much bullshit.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
It will be interesting to see how fast the Cubans can catch up with the Chinese on economic issues.
Your on to something.