Derp, unlike oil, is a resource no country truly lacks. Now I would not dream of going for the crown of the Derpetologist, but I am not above sharing some fine vintage local derp. Now, as in all places, we are spoiled for choice around here, derp wise. But I gave a good long 30 seconds worth of thought about it and decided to go with something representative.
You may not have heard, but Romania had a bit o’ ye olde communism going on a while ago. It may have been in the news over there, not that we got news back then. Anyway the fellar leading us through the multilaterally developed socialist utopia was a quasi-illiterate former cobbler called Nicky Ceausescu. Ol Nick presided over a country where food was a luxury, heating your apartment on a bitterly cold winter day a dream, and leaving the Utopia for the evil western countries a risky endeavor. Because what says Utopia like risking your life trying to get out?
Whenever communism is criticized – and believe you me there is plenty to go around- the death, the torture, the oppression, lack of basic goods and lack of liberty – the great counterargument rears its ugly head. Well, someone will say, at least Ceausescu built something. Apartment buildings and industry!! Apartments in hideous brutalist concrete shells. Tiny, difficult to heat, crowded. Narrow alleys, no parking – the proles didn’t need cars, a capitalist affectation – no parks or green spaces. But build them he did, a great act of urban renewal that lead to entire neighborhoods being flattened after the inhabitants were unceremoniously kicked out of their homes. There might be a mayor or two outside Romania who would give this a try given the chance.
Great Industry was built– randomly, badly placed, horribly inefficient and creating almost nothing of quality. But it was built. And then it rusted. But everyone had a job! Well, yes, people did pretend work for pretend pay. Everyone had a job; food was scarcer, but jobs were to be had by all, for all the good that did.
In Bucharest there is one of the largest buildings in the world. It is officially called Palace of the Parliament now, but most Romanians still call it by the communist moniker of The People’s house, or Casa Poporului in the local language.
Now where the derp got truly amusing was when I heard the argument: without a big government could Romania have built Casa Poporului when it did? The argument was followed, amusingly, by a bit of almost self-awareness. The guy actually told me “I don’t want to hear about the need or efficiency of the building, but the principle stands that you need big government for large project such as that.”
For what was before there, if anyone is interested, you can see more here (not my blog/pictures).
So I ask you, libertarians, without big government could you evict hundreds of families, tear down their homes, and waste a tremendous amount of very scarce resources a poor country could ill afford in order to build a megalomaniac’s wet dream of a pointless slab of concrete full of marble and gilded chandeliers, without bothering to ask questions of its need or efficiency. Well, my humble answer would be no. How the bloody hell is that a bad thing?
Funny enough, as a country gets rich enough, you will have some big pointless stuff being build, by rich people using their own money. But probably not to the scale of the Peoples House and probably not in the stage of development Romania was in.
Also, the Danube to Black Sea canal would definitely not have been built. That is the place where the enemies of the revolution were sent to dig hard soil by using spades and shovels, with evening beatings as the recreation and leisure part of the day, and starvation level diets to avoid obesity and diabetes and such. No one knows how many died at the Canal, and how many lived in fear of being sent to the Canal for no apparent reason. So I ask you this, without Big government, who would send the wreckers to dig the canal, huh? Checkmate, libertarians.
Comments
145 responses to “But without government, who would build the People’s House?”
Had a guy the other day tell me (well tell the internet, but I took it personally) ” It’s ‘all this government’ you keep bitching about that prevents us from becoming North Korea!” He was serious, btw. My response was a mild version of fuck off slaver.
Yes, because North Korea’s problem is clearly not enough government. How the fuck does he remember to breathe?
His argument implied that it is our government that keeps a worse government like NK out. Because government is the only force capable of wielding rifles or something, I’m not sure.
I’d ask him which government kicked the British monarchy out of thirteen measly colonies.
Here we just call that “blight” and hand it over to the most generous campaign donor.
So I ask you this, without Big government, who would send the wreckers to dig the canal, huh? Checkmate, libertarians.
Flawless logic.
PieInTheSKy
PieInTheSKy
Mind your own business you nosy buggers
Sooooo, why not ax the author bios if all the authors hate it?
Hate it? Or use it for a lam,e attempt at humor?
lam,e
I’ve told you! I don’t speak Latin!
Well we have smartphones here in Romania and sometimes type on them
You’re ahead of North Dakota then. The razr was just released
I paid $200 when that phone came out. Ugh. If I had all the money I’ve wasted on technology over the years.
You would spend it on booze and hookers and meth as God intended
It single handedly got ypu laid though.
The meth would have been a more reliable an aphrodisiac .
Inspiration
Good evening and welcome to the Dunny-on-the-Wold bye-election. The first
thing I must tell you is that the turnout has been very good. As a matter
of fact, the voter turned out before breakfast. And I can bring you the
result of our exculsive exit poll, which produced a 100-percent result for
“Mind-Your-Own-Business-You-Nosy-Bastard.”
+1 Adder Party
If you look at the before picture I linked, the buildings may look in need of repair, but bare in mind they got that way after 35 years of communism, without that they would have looked better. Sort of like Havana 50 years ago.
They look as good as some neighborhoods in the US. No need to smash them.
I kinda like the architecture of some of those houses. And the streets had trees which is always good.
Compared to the great achievement of communism
http://www.b365.ro/media/image/201105/w620/Blocuri-Ferentari.jpg
So depressing.
And yet they’re still more tolerable than London brutalist apartments.
Jesus. Love the prison guard tower on the left.
The fun part is that all these instant slums we built in the 50s/60s are “public housing” and therefore are all in various stages of falling apart.
Hey, that’s the building from 28 Days Later!
Reminds me of Boston, which seems to have an excess of Brutalist buildings.
The wiki for that building (Trellick Tower) is even more depressing. Not only is it a shitty appearance, it’s not functional either. Stairs only access to floors above and below each walkway. Electric heat in the apartments because the boilers were decommissioned. Poorly insulated with exterior wood elements that are warping. And the design acts to radiate building heat outward.
I love Boston City Hall for some reason. It’s just so… appropriate?
I’m proud to say I’m engaged in tearing down a brutalist building as we speak. This one is “New Brutalist” (completed in 1968), so it’s sort of a faux-brutalism. The concrete exterior is actually a curtain wall that serves no structural purpose at all. It gives roughly as much to the structure as a glass curtain wall would, except that it’s uglier and less energy-efficient.
What would ZARDOZ have to say about faux-Brutals?
It’s like putting a clip-on mustache on Connery.
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN CURIOUS ONE. “FAUX” BRUTALS WOULD STILL NEED TO BE “REAL” KILLED.
Oh totally. My “blight” joke above was in reference to the American habit of targeting the neighborhoods of the poors for “renewal”. Doing this has basically the same effect because once a neighborhood is claimed to be “blighted” nobody is going to waste money on improving it themselves.
And whatever they put in place of the original “blight” often ends up worse.
Exhibit A: Pruitt-Igoe
In my city they threatened to tear down a bunch of stuff, got stopped by lawsuits and then spent a bundle on stupid “public art”.
I would say 99% of the time it’s worse. The whole fucking movement was (and it is largely over now, at least in the US*) a complete misunderstanding of how cities work. And a perfect reflection of faith in big government. Nowadays you look around NYC and see shitty projects surrounded by gorgeous old neighborhoods that were once also considered “blighted” but are now spruced up and gentrified.
*With the exception that the “blight” excuse when it is used nowadays is more often intended to hand some land over to a connected developer rather than to make life “better” for the poors.
Yeah, I’d say they look fine, certainly nothing that couldn’t have been spruced up. Some of those buildings at the blog were quite lovely and it’s a shame they were torn down. So did that neighborhood turn into concrete apartment blocks, or was the people’s palace built on top of it? I’m unclear on the geography.
I was a little surprised to see the demolition was happening in the early eighties. I would’ve thought it would have been happening in the 70s. Or was it continuous, and it just happened to be that area’s turn in 1983?
The peoplea house was build over part of that neighbourhood. The rest was cleared and became basicaly a big empty lot
a big empty lot
Providing clear fields of fire from the People’s House. For government, that’s a feature, not a bug.
+1 Napoleon widening the streets of Paris.
Not all the land of the torn down neighborhood was occupied bu the peoples house so now they are building a gaudy cathedral next to it
http://i0.1616.ro/media/521/2863/35040/16553186/1/media-146358332772738900.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/u_EaViqSMs8/maxresdefault.jpg
well. That’s … something. I guess, yay, for religious freedom coming back, maybe? but wow, that’s certainly… big.
Not enough gold.
Opportunity cost is difficult to grasp for some people because it describes things that didn’t happen.
*smashed Bob’s window*
STIMULUS!
Many do think that without communism nothing would have been built in 50 years But the trajectory Romania was on in the interwar period was actually not bad there was a lot of development, a lot more and a lot better than what communism did.
People are quick to point at things communism done in a country or other, but if you look at similar countries with no communism, more was achieved invariably.
I don’t understand how such a thing is even in dispute. We have East Vs. West Germany as an example, or North vs. South Korea or Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic. Those places are literally A/B comparisons of life under Communism vs. not.
I’ve no proof but I’ve been thinking that it’s a form of OCD. It’s hard for some to be okay with the idea of bottom up creation. All those people you don’t know doing things you didn’t think of, leading to unknown outcomes. That can be scary.
Whereas a top-down approach, whilst slow and inefficient is directly visible, you can sometimes vote on it, and there are no obvious profit-takers becoming unequally wealthy.
A guy I used to game with had this idea about technology. He had this idea that we shouldn’t move on to a new technology until we had figured out all the potential uses and side-effects of the old technology.
The fact that this is impossible didn’t faze him in the least.
The fact that this is impossible didn’t faze him in the least.
Also, who cares if we have wrung every last bit of potential out of a particular tech? If some other breakthrough works in the same niche objectively better, then see you later old tech, gtfo.
Also, how does one “know” when all uses have been figured out? Do you get a letter in the mail?
It’s thinking like this that makes me laugh at the modern condescension of “we are way smarter than those barbarians X years ago”.
^ This.
We are no smarter – just more densely populated.
So he proposes we more thoroughly explore coal power before going to solar/wind/wave power?
For that matter, the cotton gin came too soon. We had never figured out all the potential uses for slaves.
Also, I am not so sure that we have sussed out all the potential medical uses for leeches.
Mind you this is a guy that decided it was a good idea to start welding on his oil pan while it was still attached to the engine and having not emptied said engine of combustible fluids.
there are no obvious profit-takers becoming unequally wealthy.
Yea, just everyone becoming equally destitute.
The two arguments used to reject that:
1. Communism is always ruined by kulaks and wreckers. So local counter-revolutionaries or external influences (‘the Jews/Mossad’ and ‘the CIA’ are the go-tos) make the system fail.
2. That’s not real communism, that’s state capitalism (i.e. if I ignore every failure put forth by my ideology, my ideology is perfect).
AFAIK Timisoara was one of the first cities to have electric street lamps – so not really a backwards place at all pre-war.
I had a discussion with a coworker this morning who used the term opportunity cost.
It gave me some hope
But did he/she know what it means?
They thought about learning what it meant, but decided that the time had better uses.
*slow clap*
FM, how do you get your dog to stick to the wall like that?
Sillypuppy.
Cross breeding with geckos
She did! She’s a math major, so we can talk econ pretty well together.
I haven’t been able to say regulatory capture yet, but im working on it.
Bless you for educating/engaging people. I usually just give them books I’m sure they’ll never read.
I have loaned capitalism and freedom out a few times.
I don’t think they read it, either.
Is that an example of marginal futility?
I actually stood up and applauded. Now people are looking at me wierd
That was beautiful
Nice.
Nice!
Second base?
It gave me some hope
I prescribe 5 minutes scrolling through your Facebook feed (or, if you don’t have one, the feed of literally any other living human) and that will clear your hope up in no time.
Thankfully, it’s not usually contagious.
If there is a patriarchy yet it is overthrown via elections that doesn’t mean the people who made up the patriarchy disappear, they’re just out of civil power. And still would be a huge portion of the population.
Sooooo how would a bunch of women who are terrified of much of modern society and their mostly-weakling male allies ever hope to enforce their rule?
Open Carrie?
Wouldn’t that require a King?
Left out a graf:
Along with the numbers comes a lot of firepower and very strong desire not to be under the thumb of some of the most worthless people this planet has produced. Would the patriarchy just sit still and take it? I don’t think so.
Considering the patriarchy doesn’t exist except in these idiot’s minds, I don’t suppose it would do a whole lot of anything.
I’ve thought for some time the best thing Romanians did was to put the Ceausescus in the ground right away, rather than some long drawn out process or worse letting false regrets and fading memories rehabilitate them.
The Ceausescus ought to have been drawn and quartered. They got off easy.
My aunt who is progressive complains about how republicans will not give out free healthcare. She recently lost her job as a teacher, today she is complaining that she discovered her non-work insurance is sky high and she can’t afford it. Along with this complaint she posts a picture of Congressional republicans standing around. Because I guess they took over insurance and caused this mess.
Some people really cannot learn.
Maybe the inability to learn was why she lost her job as a teacher?
Isn’t this sky-high insurance an example of Obamacare working exactly as its supposed to?
it polls so well! as long as 90% of the people being polled don’t actually pay ACA rates, why, it means everyone loves it.
Yes, obviously. She seems to have an infantile mentality of “I voted for cheap stuff, now this stuff is not cheap therefore someone must have superseded the will of the democratic people.”
It appears she believes that throughout history the only obstacle to free and cheap everything is a failure to vote for it.
If only medieval kings had known they could have simply issued decrees to launch their societies into prosperity. Modern voting electorates certainly subscribe to such magical thinking though.
I’ve noticed how suddenly lots of Team Blue people are screaming about how much their healthcare/insurance sucks now. They honestly don’t seem to realize that the Republicans haven’t actually done anything yet and that they’re actually complaining about ObamaCare.
Doesn’t mattter – they’ll bleat about it incessantly and it’ll be their platform in 2018. If the Elephants do anything, Dems”ll campaign on how whatever they do sucks, and if they don’t do anything, obviiously they need to be replaced so the Dems can fix it/move us to single payer/whatever. The fact that Obamacare was their turkey will be ignored.
The left doesn’t care about results, only power. So that’s why they’ll say, do, or ignore whatever they have to to get it.
When I talk to people about this, I always be sure to remind them of two things :
1) The government hates the self employed because they’re more difficult to extract wealth from, in part because they are writing checks to the government instead of the whole “witholding” scam.
2) Work based insurance is an artifact of wage controls in the post-WWII era. It exists only because of government action. Many proggy people I tell this to are unaware that the US ever had price controls, or how employer-based insurance became the default.
I love watching the film of Ceausecu’s final speech, when he is visibly shaken as the crowd starts booing him.
YouTube being what it is, the comments include such gems as
and
I try to never ascribe to malevolence what can more plausibly be attributed to abject stupidity or incompetence. But I also believe that a person can be so stupid and/or deluded that they are effectively indistinguishable from evil. Evil stupidity showed up in that comments section.
I don’t need a personal incontinence consultant. I can inappropriately piss and shit all on my own.
Especially if you take your wife’s magnesium advice.
I’m going to take Bob’s advice and just keep sneaking hits of the Flonase.
If I remember correctly, the woman that designed the People’s House felt she had to flee Romania for a few years after the dictator’s downfall so the widespread disdain towards her could die down.
Friday afternoon opinion poll:
Which former Soviet Bloc country was the worst, and why?
San Francisco, because they’ve yet to give up on the ideology.
I was going to go with Belarus for the same reason.
The ‘stans are all totalitarian shitholes now too, I believe.
We counting the little sub-states of the USSR? Probably the Ukrainian SSR, because Holodomor.
What does the Game of Thrones guy have to do with anything?
*narrows gaze*
Oh, is that what it is? I thought he meant that plot enabling device on TNG.
I really liked the episode where Fry got the robot devil’s hands and became an expert at playing the Holodomor.
I want to say Albania.
Youre just jealous on their per capita bunker numbers, more than american survivalists dream of
I’m going to have to say Romania. I’m not usually one to give into the feels, but after seeing documentaries and studies of the children abandoned in the communist orphanages of the period, even thinking about it makes me tear up and want to hug my children. Seeing the inhuman, hell-on-earth torture of babies, infants and toddlers kept in cages like animals at the zoo, never knowing of their families, kindness or love …it’s just too much to take. Just typing up this post I’m getting all teary eyed thinking about it.
Oh, I wasn’t sure if the question was about the SSRs either. Hm… yeah Romania seems like a good choice. I can only speak personally about East Germany, which wasn’t so bad in comparison. Depressing and bleak, but not a horror show.
*Unless you wanted out. And kept your mouth shut.
Argh… “didn’t” keep your mouth shut.
Back in the late 60’s my aunt feel asleep on a train, missed her stop and somehow ended up in East Germany by the time she woke up. The Stasi arrested her and held her for two weeks for interrogation in awful conditions before finally dumping her in west Berlin. Yet to this day, that aunt remains an avowed socialist. It boggles the mind.
Holy shit. I looked it up.
Pure. Fucking. Evil.
Thus my vehement unbridled hatred towards communists and their fellow travelers on the left. The destruction, economic and human, wrought by those monsters should be enough to dissuade everyone everywhere from advocating in communism, but it hasn’t. The New York Times is still writing love letters to communism, for example.
Agreed
I hate quite the same reaction reading about the events in Cambodia.
Thanks for doing that. I’ve had enough nut-punches for the month? year? lifetime? after reading about automobile accidents in China.
Sort of on-topic:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-britain-hospitals-cyberattack-20170512-story.html
Without a big government, could people create a massive network with questionable security practices to store patient record for an entire fucking country? I say not, and I don’t want to hear any of you libertarianazi “logic” stating the contrary!
Take down the NHS and only demand $300? What kind of amateur hour is this?
Unlike most of TSTSNBN’s TDS predictions, looks like this one might be coming true…
Thoughts?
He’s a nasty little goblin. Don’t know why Trump put him in this position, but it’s not going to turn out good.
That’s the weakness of making up laws by fiat. It’s great if they arbitrarily leave you alone, but when the wind shifts, back to being meat for the grinder.
The ‘law and order’ President was bound to do some sort of ‘tough on crime’ idiocy, and Sessions as Attorney General made it inevitable.
This is a perfectly legitimate thing to complain about in regards to the Trump administration, and criticism is warranted.
…Now if only Certain Other Sites kept to actual valid complaints like this, rather than constantly insinuating that Trump is an authoritarian strongman.
So close to awareness, yet so far. This is pretty much what I expected. Trump sold himself partially as a strong rule of law kind of president. I’m not happy about it, but it isn’t surprising. I’ll try to take comfort in the words of Ulysses S. Grant:
I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
If the laws were applied consistently, including politicians/celebrities/wealthy, then I’d agree. As long as it’s the poor taking the brunt of the punishment, I can’t agree.
Yep. It’s not high class coke dealers in LA that is going to feel the sting of this, but some Louisiana trailer park meth dealer.
That’s why I said that I would try to find comfort. I know full well that the rule of law is a polite fiction.
That quote jumped the hell out at me too. He doesn’t even realize what he’s saying.
don’t have time to read it, but does it comment on any of the states that have recently legalized weed? No CO or WA, but more recent ones.
curious if they’re trying to stem the tide
Not specifically, other than the normal “People in states where it is legal are worried about these implications”
This last bit though might apply to growers in those states:
Youtube’s ad revenue policy going after interesting targets, like say, channels that produce news highly critical of China.
Getting Google to define what ‘extremists’ are seems such a great idea.
I think by extremist they meant to say “extremely bad for our user growth in China”
Man, wtg China, by virtue of your 1.3 Billion person market, you can get idiotic capitalist companies to bow to your oppressive policies and force them onto citizens of (ostensibly) free nations.
The kicker is that how do you combat this problem? The only thing I can think of would be to start a new competing video site that tells advertisers “We don’t censor, and if you don’t want an ad on a video you will have to police your own shit.” Compared to the ass kissing that google does I don’t see how that is a viable business strategy.
YT;DW but I would expect more of this sort of thing as China continues to throw its weight around.
He also covers how 6 major corporations control 90% of the American media, and all of them have major and growing business and financial connections in China. It’s not just China throwing its weight around, it’s self-censorship to suck up to them.
Yeah. I was counting that as part of China throwing its weight around.
It also reminded me of the endumbening of Hollywood.
Something hilarious just happened on Facederp. I was othered. By a social justice warrior. For using a phase that is “a priviliged class term”. He’s white-knighting the widowed wife of a deceased relative of mine. He literally policed my language and then mansplained why I was wrong after she appeared to agree with me on something (she’s a flaming SJW and she was actually trying to disagree while appearing to agree for stupid tactical reasons).
They literally are what they claim to hate. And they are so crippled in the self-awareness department that they’ll likely never get it.
What was the egregious term you used?
“I don’t agree”
“off-putting”. Basically I was suggesting to the foot soldiers of the glorious anti-Trump resistance that when they heroically confronted the dangerous and threatening bodyguards of craven yet aggressive republican elected officials they should leave their kids at home or with a babysitter instead of bringing them along. 😀
No, please bring them. We need to snuff out the entire genetic line.
“Nits make lice!”
I suspect I’m going to be sorry I asked, but how is “off-putting” a “privileged class term?”
Remember, they use “privileged” in conversation the way racists use “nigger”. Basically, he felt that I talked like a nigger and was expressing the critical idea that niggers need to shut up and know their place.
That analogy is surprisingly fitting.