Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Socialism vs. Communism

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Often, when comparing policies of socialist governments, or proposed ideals of the Democratic Party here, which is increasingly influenced by the radical extremist organization, “Democratic Socialists of America,” one will encounter a reactionary, reflexive, overly defensive statement to the effect of, “Socialism is not communism!”

That is glib sloganeering, and also, exceedingly misleading or disingenuous.

A few points…
1. Marxism: They’re branches of the same ideological tree (Marxist theory). In Marxist theory, socialism is the transitional phase to communism. Socialism involves state control of production, nominally for workers (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution”), while full communism is the classless, stateless endgame (“to each according to his needs”) with no private property. Lenin, Marx and others explicitly framed it this way. There is a reason the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had its name.

Socialism isn’t communism the same way adolescence isn’t adulthood — it’s the stepping stone. History shows the “transition” rarely ends…just slows or gets temporarily distracted, without some form of true revolution or outside military intervention.

2. Shared core, regardless of semantic games: Rejection of private property and markets — both nominal systems advocate public/collective ownership of the means of production (factories, land, computing, energy, other resources) over private enterprise. Communism goes further (no private property at all, often via revolution), while socialism allows some private ownership but with heavy state regulation/redistribution. In other words, distinctions that are semantically correct but functionally meaningless!

That’s because socialism and communism differ in degree, not kind. Both subordinate individual liberties to collective control. So-called “Democratic socialists” still push expansive government ownership and planning (look up the latest DSA platform*). This historically concentrates great power and money into centralized bureaucracies. Human nature is to abuse great power and control over unearned treasury largesse.

3. Historical track record: Socialism often leads to or masks authoritarian communism. Regimes like the USSR, China, Cuba, and Venezuela called themselves explicitly socialist, while pursuing communist goals (e.g., “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” as I noted above; Chinese Communist Party’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”). Even the Nazis were socialist; it was firmly amid their name (National Socialist Party), and like many others, including their war opposition in the USSR, their “socialist” experiments involved one-party rule, suppression of dissent, and economic centralization. Two sides of the same tyrannical coin!

Yet logically, failures of “real socialism” are frequently dismissed as “not true socialism,” which is a classical No True Scotsman fallacy, and as such, easily exposed as invalid rhetoric. Every major 20th-century communist state and the German Nazis started as or claimed to be socialist. Body count: tens of millions (famines, purges, gulags, Holocaust). The supposed distinctions didn’t save the victims.

4. Convergent incentives and outcomes: Without market prices and private property, both struggle with calculation problems (Mises/Hayek critique), leading to shortages, inefficiency, and coercion. So-called “Democratic socialism” often slides toward more controls when voluntary cooperation falters. That occurs when citizens realize that: a) they have lost liberty, b) they are poorer, and/or c) their bureaucratic overlords are corrupt and untrustworthy (a feature common to all forms of governance, but rampant in collectivist states).

Nordic models (often cited) pose as pseudo-capitalist welfare states with free markets, strong property rights, and high economic freedom — generally, not socialist ownership of production. However, socialism nominally sells the compassionate halfway house. Reality: it inherits communism’s knowledge and incentive problems, just with slower erosion of freedoms and prosperity.

5. Rhetorical sleight-of-hand: The phrase is often used to distance “nice” policies (welfare, regulation) from authoritarian failures. But classical socialism (e.g., nationalization) goes well beyond that. “Socialism is not communism” is a semantically crafted PR slogan, a parlor trick with words, not reality on the ground. When it expands state control over energy, healthcare, housing, or speech, it follows the same logic: bureaucratic elites deciding “the greater good” over voluntary exchange.

If I’m too wordy for you on this, here’s a bullet list from commentator Michael Smith for shorter attention spans:

    “Democratic socialism” is an oxymoron.
    • Central planning requires centralized power. Someone must decide what gets produced, by whom, and for whom.
    • No planner possesses enough knowledge. Economic information is dispersed among millions of individuals and cannot be effectively centralized.
    • Planning replaces voluntary choices with political decisions. Resource allocation becomes a matter of government judgment rather than market exchange.
    • Democracy struggles to sustain comprehensive planning. Citizens rarely agree on the countless tradeoffs required, leading to political conflict.
    • Conflict drives greater coercion. As voluntary cooperation breaks down, government increasingly relies on regulation, mandates, and enforcement.
    • Economic control becomes political control. A government that directs livelihoods inevitably gains leverage over individual behavior.
    • Liberty erodes incrementally. Each planning failure invites additional intervention, concentrating more power in the state.
    • The destination is authoritarianism, not because it is intended, but because it becomes necessary to preserve the planned system.
    I agree with F.A. Hayek:
    Democracy can elect a socialist government, but a fully socialist economy cannot remain genuinely democratic for long because comprehensive economic planning requires a concentration of power incompatible with individual liberty and limited government.”
    — Michael Smith

There’s your (lower-case) libertarian lesson on socialism and communism for the year. It would be wise to heed!

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* Footnote:
The DSA’s new platform is as authoritarian/Communist as can be, while avoiding the C word. Truly batshit crazy, horrifying, dystopian, far-left extremism, including:
1. Forbid bills (payment invoice) for any person
2. Government-run food, transportation, housing, medicine, and nationalization of large corporations and essential industries (Communism!)
3. The drafting of a “new Constitution”
4. Defunding the Department of War/Defense
5. Slavery “reparations”
6. Unlimited free abortion and “gender-affirming care” for all, including minor children with underdeveloped brains;
7. Taxpayers cover all student debt and unlimited “free” higher education for all (payable only through top-down coercion, of course);
8. Taking “steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system”
9. Ending all deportations, providing amnesty for all illegal immigrants, and allowing unlimited migration to America (fully open borders)
10. Abolishing the Presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate (in effect, destroying the Constitution)

I’m not going to give their site clicks by linking here, but the DSA platform is not hard to find for those morbidly interested.

Relearning Lessons in Arguing Rationally with the Irrational

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Recently in a social-media thread, I let myself get sucked into exactly the sort of seemingly unproductive “discourse” that I usually try to avoid, with a representative of the “progressive” left. As usual, it involved a lot of backtracking, goalpost-moving and several ad hominems on his part.

This occurred without my using any name-calling against him, though I did honestly question his reading comprehension after he misstated two positions I clearly had made to the contrary. Yes, I called those out. One was that Trump is my “dear leader,” though I already stated having voted against him (third party) and why. [Truly a ridiculous assertion for anyone who knows me, even superficially.] His other falsehood was to claim I don’t think racism exists, after I clearly and plainly said the opposite. It was as if, in his zeal to apply gotchas and (mis)characterize me, he forgot to actually read the words I wrote, and instead responded from spoonfed progressive talking points and emotion, instead of knowledge, reason and original thought.

To many others outside the left, and me if I must admit, that sort of reaction is no surprise, and follows a very familiar pattern. The whole time I’m laughing at the pathetic nature of his replies one minute, and in the other, asking myself why I stooped down to trying to deal rationally with a person in a patently irrational state (a lesson I learned long ago from a failed relationship with a particular woman, but apparently must relearn on smaller scales sometimes).

Still frustrating him emotionally in what should have been an argument of logic, facts and reason, I deconstructed one house of sand foundation after another. For example, after bringing up the notion I was being “unscientific” somehow, he tried to lecture me that science is about proof. No, it decidedly is not! Then when he found out my name is on over 100 scientific papers (didn’t even mention also being a longtime reviewer and journal editor), the goalpost shifted. “All of your papers have nothing to do with this issue!” So why bring up science to begin with, bud…then try to lecture a longtime scientist about it, using a completely off-base concept of “proof”?

The original comment to which I responded was about supposedly “marginalized groups” in a racial context. This is a concept I did and do dispute; it’s a mass-victimhood excuse, outdated in 2025 with every one being equal under the law, discrimination disallowed based on skin color, and amplifying racial divides accomplishes nothing but needless further division. [It also makes a lot of money for the Democratic Party and affiliated gaggles of professional race hustlers and highly paid industrial “diversity” consultants, but that’s another issue.]

Besides, race is itself an artifice. It has no mathematically analytic, consistently reproducible, biological basis, nor objective, empirically based classification standards. Speaking of positivist science! Yet extremes on right and left love to group people by skin color, equate that with race (never mind that most people are what most would call “mixed race” anyway, and that multiple “races” can have the same skin color, etc.), and completely ignore the fundamental conceptual illegitimacy of race itself.

At one point, I told him that by completely misrepresenting my points to be the opposite, he either failed to comprehend what I wrote, or was misrepresenting it on purpose — either way, a bad look, and embarrassing. “You should stop here before you bury yourself in the dirt you’re throwing straight up from the hole you’re digging ever deeper.” I tried to give this guy a chance to back out, but…on a silver platter, he then handed me the nuke needed to finish the whole thing off.

He told me, of all people, to learn understand what it’s like to be poor, and to go to the inner city and live for a week, like “they” do in “one of these communities.”

Whoa. Go to the inner city…for a whole week! Does two decades count instead?

Anyone who knows me knew this was an invitation to absolutely implode the final argument, which of course I forthrightly did, verbatim:

    That’s a good suggestion. I’ve done it. Base already covered.

    Grew up inner-city poor, amid broken families, drugs, gangbangers, alcohol abuse, violent and property crimes of every kind. I know the streets because I lived the streets. I dare say I’ve seen more poverty than you by factors of hundreds.

    I’ve seen and learned more about what we call poverty or “marginalization” in any given week of my youth than most people will in a lifetime. How long would you last on the corner of Beacon and Columbia in east Dallas during the crack wars in 1985?

    Did you know that these problems are mostly the result of bad decisions by individuals? That everyone who huffs glue, smokes crack or meth, beats up his girlfriend, abuses her child, or deals heroin, *chose* to do that? No big bad racist bogeyman made them. Especially since most poor people are white.

    No “racist system” made one kid I knew beat a teacher bloody. No “racism” caused another to steal radar detectors, or another to sell food stamps for sex, or to wrap a chain around another kid’s throat and swing him around by it, or another to sell herself on the corner of Ross and Haskell to pay for her bennies, or another to lead a street gang into a fight with Mongols bikers off east I-30 (which they won, amazingly), or another to light his pregnant girlfriend’s apartment on fire, or the woman driver on one of my school buses to accidentally shoot herself in the leg with a .22 pistol in her purse, or a dude I knew to rob a 7-11 and still be in prison for it today. Some (not all) of both the criminals and their victims here were not “people of color”. Many of the worst racists I knew against black folks were Asian. Or Mexican. Wow, can you imagine?
    Individual responsibility, bud. That applies to all those crimes, and all racist acts. That’s because they are chosen.

I suspect it was his first exposure to a conservative/libertarian, multiply published physical scientist who grew up poor in the inner city. Hah! To hell with skin color. I am diversity!

Once it became apparent that I knew a whole lot more than this person, from first-hand experience, about science, and poverty, and the inner city, he deleted all his comments. Of course. Take the checked king off that board, bud.

The wildest part of an interaction like that isn’t necessarily the disagreement, it’s watching someone tell you they understand your own lived experience better than you do. Progressives in particular have become contagiously frequent with it. Brings to mind a tweet from a guy I follow who is a multinational author, rapper, speaker and all-around great guy, and whose presentation at OU I attended (Zuby).

Tweet from Zuby

There’s this strange moment where you realize the debate stopped being about reality, and turned into their defensively clinging to a rote, spoon-fed script handed down for recitation by secular, hyper-partisan viewpoint authorities in media and academia. [And yes, it can and sometimes does happen on the right too, but far less, since media (see item 9, page 11 here) and academia as a whole tilt strong left by every polling measure, and the academic left strongly tends authoritarian.]

Independent thought be damned! And honestly, it’s actually hilarious, in a pathetic way, because what else remains but to laugh, when someone insists you try to experience the stories you’ve already experienced immersively, and known better, for longer.

I’ve plied the grounds of my childhood trying to find even a corn kernel of this mythical “privilege,” and there’s no corn there. Were I a deer trying to eat from the feeder of privilege, I’d have starved. Blessings sometimes? Yes, as my friend who made the original post (and agrees with me) rightly differentiated…but not privilege.

What is the “privelege” of poverty? Avoiding being shot by the gunfire heard at night, or only being stabbed once, or seeing a guy’s brains sprayed across a roadway? Actually having a father at home, whichever drafty, roach-infested, rundown duplex was “home” was any given year? Blessing, yes…but not “privilege.” Fatherhood is supposed to be the norm in every home.

But in the end, all else of what may seemed a curse also becomes a blessing, as it imparted valuable perspective. I’m now glad for it. No regrets. And it taught me what MLK tried to teach everyone, but it appears far too few have learned: It’s about the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin.

So I assess and respect the former, and treat the latter as irrelevant. Why? Because Jesus himself did. Nowhere did He say, “Pity and favor thine dark skinned people,” nor, “I love all, but I love some skin colors more than others,” nor, “Go and sin no more, except if you’re the head of a BLM organization committing embezzlement and money laundering, or looting a store in Ferguson, or wearing a white hooded sheet burning crosses, or in a Mexican gang beating up blacks or vice versa, or being a white supremacist, or a black supremacist, or sending millions of dollars overseas illegally from Minneapolis.”

No, Jesus’ ideals apply the same to everyone. I approach race as impertinent, because He made no big deal about it either.

Charlie Kirk’s Murder, Response and Legacy

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As somebody who was born four floors above and four years after JFK’s murdered body was rushed into the ER in futility, who was immersed in knowledge of his assassination throughout childhood, and who has studied it extensively, along with the killings of RFK and MLK, I know a bit about political violence. We seem to be back into that sort of terrible era again with two attempts on Trump, a couple of state-legislator killings by a sicko in Minnesota, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month. [This occurred on my flight to Hawaii for Kilauea Episode 33…more on that later.]

Charlie leaves behind a lovely young widow, Erika, and their two little kids, all because some deranged radical didn’t like his ideals. Must it be this way?

Political violence is evil, absolutely intolerable, and has no place in civil society. Disagreements and grievances should be aired through rational debate and discussion, with logic, reason, facts, and the humility that comes with not having all the answers. That is a nonpartisan statement.

So far, I’ve seen posts from men, women, people of different faiths, nationalities, backgrounds and appearances, mourning the loss of Charlie Kirk. Let their voices ring truest—none I’ve read yet more well-written under intense personal grief than Dennis Prager’s (below), who knew Charlie as a brilliant mind, faithful servant of God, and also, husband and father to a young family.

As an American, as a Jew, and as Dennis, I am devastated at the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The truth is, as I write these words, I can’t believe I am writing them. I am in the denial stage of mourning. As an American, we have lost the most articulate spokesman for America and its unique value system—a country founded to be free, based on Jerusalem and Athens, the Judeo-Christian value system and the Greek emphasis on logic and reason. Charlie was a uniquely gifted individual who, in his teens, created the largest movement of young Americans committed to preserving and growing America and its ideals. He tirelessly went from campus to campus, from Oxford to Utah, dialoging with any student who wished to debate him. Using his vast reservoir of facts and his exceptionally speedy and articulate mind, he gave them what seemed to be unlimited amounts of time, and then calmly eviscerated all their anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Judeo-Christian positions. I watched an inordinate number of these exchanges and thanked God that Charlie Kirk was there to do this work. America’s youth in particular have lost a moral and intellectual leader, one who would, perhaps, have one day become their president. As a committed Jew, I thank God regularly that a non-Jew, a committed Christian, became one of the few great public spokesmen on behalf of Israel and the Jewish communities outside of Israel. Few Jews could match Charlie’s knowledge and eloquent arguments on behalf of those two entities.

As Dennis, I have lost a very close friend. Charlie repeatedly visited me in the various hospitals that I have been in since November 12 of last year, when I suffered a catastrophic fall which has left me paralyzed. When members of the nursing staff heard that Charlie Kirk was visiting me, my room became the most popular one in the hospital. Charlie brought me the manuscript of his forthcoming book arguing that everyone—Christians as well as Jews—should observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, just as he and his family had begun to do from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. It is a measure of our close relationship that he dedicated the book to me. His brilliant exposition of these arguments provide clear evidence for the non-necessity of a college education for most young Americans.

My heart breaks for his young widow, Erika, and for his two children, who have lost as great a man and a father as children can have. And for Charlie, who did not live to see them grow up. For one of the first times in my 20 years with my wife, Sue, I have seen her sob uncontrollably. The Prager home is in deep mourning, as are the homes of countless Americans. The loss to us personally and to the country generally is immeasurable.

Commentator Ivyonna Corrine had a brilliant post too, which I’ll also reproduce below, corrected for punctuation and grammar:

It’s wild to me how quick people are to slap labels on Charlie Kirk without actually knowing what he stands for. He’s been called racist…but where is the evidence? Go back through his years of speaking at college campuses, podcasts, interviews, debates, you won’t find him using racial slurs, degrading a race, or promoting hate. Not once. What you will find is him debating issues like immigration, education, the economy… and culture. Those are policy discussions, NOT racism.

Calling him racist because you don’t like his politics is lazy. It waters down the meaning of the word and takes away from the fight against actual racism. If someone truly believed he was racist they would be able to show proof. But they can’t, because it doesn’t exist. All they have is name calling.

He’s had thousands of open conversations on college campuses with people of every background, and guess what? The majority of those exchanges end with respect, even if they disagree. He’s been called sexist, but why? Because he’s pro life? Because he believes men and women are different? Having a conviction about protecting unborn children or recognizing biological differences doesn’t make you sexist. It means you are willing to stand for life and truth even when it’s unpopular.

He’s been called homophobic/transphobic, but again, where’s the proof? Saying “men can’t become women” is not hate on his part. It’s biology. Protecting kids from being pushed into irreversible decisions isn’t hate. It’s compassion. He has debated LGBTQ+ issues face to face without name calling, without hate, with facts.

He’s been called a fascist/Nazi, which is honestly laughable. Fascism silences speech. Charlie has spent his entire career defending free speech. Nazis took away rights, and Charlie advocates every day for the protection of rights in the Constitution. The comparison doesn’t even make sense.

He’s been called a bigot or accused of spreading hate, but what is hateful about encouraging young people to think critically, question government, and protect their freedoms? If you actually listen, he debates respectfully, and even when people scream at him he holds himself fully. That’s not hate, that’s self control.

And he’s been accused of spreading misinformation, but here’s the thing: every time people try to “fact check” him, the debates usually end with the person walking away because they can’t answer his questions. He brings data, statistics and constitutional backing. That’s not misinformation, that’s inconvenient truth.

At the end of the day, Charlie Kirk was not racist. He was not sexist. He was not hateful. He was bold. He was outspoken. And he was unafraid to say the things that needed to be said in a world where people get canceled for speaking how WE FEEL and the truth. He’s allowed his thoughts, just as in America you are too. So if you’re going to label him at least label him correctly: unapologetically American.

Let voices like these drown out those demonic cackles of celebration sprinkled over social media. The overtly diabolical celebrators are obvious. Block and move on if it helps, but do pray for the expulsion of their demons.

Perhaps more insidious are the passive-aggressive folks—some even labeling themselves as fellow Christians—who assigned Charlie such wholly unfounded labels as Ivyonna covered, based on weak and out-of-context interpretations and assumptions, but not actual hard evidence, who haven’t read his literature nor seen multiples of his videos, who talk often about tolerance, love, kindness and empathy without showing those qualities toward Christian conservatives, and who are showing two faces.

When people reveal themselves from behind the mask of virtue signaling and faux tolerance and “empathy”, pay attention. Observe, be watchful, and pray for them. A mask of kindness and empathy, hiding a mindset of the very opposite, reveals itself in such times as these. Charlie wasn’t perfect. None of us are free of sin. That includes me. I certainly recognize sin when I see it, and I see a lot of stones being cast Charlie’s way from behind those “kindness and empathy” facades.

To all fellow conservatives/libertarians who are infuriated, feeling helpless in the face of this and other recent violence, tempted to lash out: I get it. This enrages me as well. But remember who Charlie followed: Jesus. And remember how Charlie both followed and set a great example in taking obvious risk to go into hostile atmospheres to engage through dialog and ideas. Never resort to true hate (not the same as the false equivalency of hate and disapproval continually posited by the left), destruction or retaliation in kind. Be better than those psychopathic ghouls and mouth-foaming zealots of the left who readily could be found celebrating or rationalizing evil, across social media in the days following the killing. They need urgent psychological treatment, and most of all, they need to find the Lord, who ultimately will be the final judge of all events and people.

Finally, for 50 years, I’ve read and watched great speeches by political figures from antiquity through the men on Mount Rushmore, to Churchill, Reagan and beyond. This, from Utah Governor Spencer Cox, has come out of nowhere to take its place among the very best, not only for the transcribable text, but for the raw and unvarnished sincerity plainly apparent behind the wise words. For context in posterity, I linked not just to the video, but a local news story containing it.

We all could do well to heed. As I’ve stated in some recent comment: Freedom of speech under threat of violence is not freedom at all.

Rest in Heaven, Charlie. We can honor his legacy, and that of other nonviolent agents of change like MLK and Jesus, by fighting bad ideas not with violence and destruction, but with better ideas.