What does socialism mean to you?

That act of forbidding necessarily includes physical force to prevent anyone from stepping foot on such property.

 

Because if you live near me and you feel the need to walk into my house and use my bathroom or practice your boxing on my kids, there needs to be a rule that says you can't do that.

 

You should think about what the concept of freedom implies. Should you be free to practice target shooting on a school playground?

 

Did you go college? To say that a broad education is strictly recreational ignores the fact that fields such as business rely on the basic understandings of how people think and act through basic courses in things like sociology, anthropology, and so forth.

Without the Arts, a post-secondary education is just vocational in nature.

 

What difference does that make? If you say I can't set foot on a property, what's to stop me from exercising my freedom to do what I want? Whether it's initiation or defensive, force is force and it's the only way to stop me. Therefore, any society is going to use some kind of force to limit my individual freedom.

 

The person I was responding to seemed to take offense to the idea that it would be job training.

 

Alright, so I used some extreme examples, but the basic concept is the same. Imagine you live alone out on some remote Island, you have individuality--the freedom to do as you please when and where you please, never having to worry about getting along with others or have a concern that your actions might be dangerous in some way to anyone else. You can piss where you want, when you want. You can open up your front door and spray everything with your fully automatic assault rifle, and no one will be there to care.

However, if you live a society, say for instance you have an apartment in an urban area, you no longer have the freedom to do those things because your individual freedom might just be deadly to others and violate their freedoms--you surrender to society as a whole. Rules related to sanitation and safety mean you have to give up some of those freedoms you had on the island. Extreme example? Yes, but I'm trying to establish that living in a society means you must surrender certain freedoms.

Again, when we're talking about living in a socialist or a capitalist society, both require us to surrender individual freedoms and follow certain rules and/or laws. That means that all societies are in conflict with individualism. The argument that capitalism means you have freedom and socialism means you don't is an illogical argument. It's part of a simplistic and binary view of the world.

That's all I'm trying to say. This thread is in part about definitions and understanding the concepts as broad concepts instead of simple us vs. them kind of non-thinking. I like to understand how others see things, and one way to do that is to challenge them to explain. You are doing that to me, and I actually appreciate that kind of back and forth because it makes me look closer at my own thoughts.

 

I guess you had different expectations for your education than I did. For me, courses in the Arts were essential to understanding my field. I won't say the fact that I took them got me a job or a better job, but they did help me do my job. At the same time, math was one of those things I had to check off and saw no great benefit from. I've not needed much math, especially since the math could be done electronically.

I would ask you if you think courses in the Arts can benefit someone who works in advertising, or would that just be recreational? Do history, sociology, and anthropology get in the way of a degree in political science or does it benefit?

And why do you want to limit what a post-secondary education is or can be?