Denialists' Deck of Cards: The Ace of Diamonds, "Communism!"

i-f2651a74d72ce871f34af234ab218963-ad.jpeg Suricou Raven guessed it--after calling your opponent "Unamerican," you call them "Communist." Here, use loaded phrases, such as "the proposal smacks of the paternalistic 'command and control' of Communism."

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You are running out of cards, and I haven't seen "If we do that, the terrorists will have won" yet. ;)

From xander's comment, I went back and looked at the whole deck (the link by your photo). I can't see the four of hearts, or any of the fives except the hearts. Am I missing something?

From xander's comment, I went back and looked at the whole deck (the link by your photo). I can't see the four of hearts, or any of the fives except the hearts. Am I missing something?

It's a conspiracy! I knew something was fishy!

I think this calls for some high quality PDFs and a visit to the nearest print shop for some Denialist Top Trumps! :)

@coturnix, you're right...I'll fix Saturday. C

Caught redhanded playing with a short deck. For shame. In the olden days, there'd be a necktie party.

For the world, I'm not sure that being called a "communist" or "socialist" is an insult these days. Although old guard communism has withered, their educated children -- social democracies have flourished. I didn't really care for the ultra-wide boulevards anyway.

Saw the republican debates a few days ago and they characterized the democrat positions on health care as "socialist". Oooh! No..., anything but that.

Fact is the mainstream US democrats are nowhere close to what "liberal" goes for in many places in the world.

@Ted, the deck is actually a card short...that's one of the jokes. But I've unintentionally shortened it by a couple of cards. Will fix.

This is not as illegitimate as you make out. Communism is/was the unrestrained implementation of a command economy. The evidence is in: it doesn't work.
Besides, the evidence is in that any time you implement a fully socialist social structure, it rapidly morphs into a dictatorship.
There are empirically valid ways to run a good economy. High levels of regulation, as per socialism and communism, is not one of them.
What sort of science blog is this?

By David Dufty (not verified) on 09 Jun 2007 #permalink

And unrestrained capitalism solidifies social stratification and leads to abusive oligopolies and monopolies as those that have raise the barriers to entry ever higher for those that have not. As a general rule that leads to corporate dictatorship. So laissez-faire capitalism obviously doesn't work too well either.

So the question is: what next? Social democracy seems a good place to start -- what can we do about the tax issues there while maintaining the social safety net? (That's the problem of most Westernized countries. The left is trying to get a rudimentary safety net in place, but the right would rather squabble over prayer in classrooms, the right to own an entire gun shop's worth of weapons, and whether or not the fossil record actually says what it looks like it says.)

And unrestrained capitalism solidifies social stratification

You give capitalism too much credit! Social strata are everywhere, whether you're talking democracies, monarchies, or communist dictatorships.
This is one reason why "Animal Farm" is such a clever book, because it illustrated this truth.

But seriously, yes, I agree with you. Implementing a social safety net or wanting to keep an eye on corporations isn't "socialism", much less communism.

By Daddy Dave (not verified) on 09 Jun 2007 #permalink

Mark, I was checking out your deck of cards, and many of the cards are standard conservative tenets - market forces, rights, technological innovation, job creation, small government, etc.
Your deck of cards looks more like a criticism of conservatives than a criticism of anti-science crusaders.
And most of your rhetoric is about dealing with leaders of industry. Guess I should have dug deeper before getting excited about the mission of this blog. It's not what it seems.
I guess that explains why you don't give a toss about vaccination deniers, fluoride deniers, or other public health policy deniers that jeopardise people's lives every day: these are boring to you because they don't fit into your political mission. Climate change, on the other hand, fits right in because it's a big stick for you and your realclimate buddies to beat evil capitalists with.
Should have left here two days ago. Cya round.

By Daddy Dave (not verified) on 09 Jun 2007 #permalink