Imagine

Moulingalette: it was a joke. Read both my posts--if you took that seriously, you really need to wake up.

And so you're saying that everyone should be like JL? An egotistical, drug-addicted, lazy/uncreative (he didn't write a single original song for Sgt.Pepper) ex-hippie?

Zamzara:

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Have you done any actual research?

Surprisingly, many people DID wat to waste their lives slaving away for the common good of humanity. People can be like that--during the Early Middle Ages, people tried to spend their entire lives slaving away for the common good of Christianity--and if that means slaughtering a few heathens here and there, so be it :p

People want to do what they are trained to want to do. You see, there is NO reason why Communism could not work theoretically. If a country has an equal amount of wealth, and the wealth is evenly distributed, on the whole everyone should be happier but the top 5%. In practice, although nobody technically "owns" anything, that doesn't stop people from actually owning things. PROPERTY is what one cannot own. Property should be evenly distributed.

No, Communism failed because Communism never existed. True Communism is enlightened anarchy--a perfect system, if it could be put in place. The world of Imagine.

What we ACTUALLY had was Totalitarian Socialism--the entire country and every aspect of it in the hands of the government, and the government entirely in the hands of a few. In paper, this is needed to condition the people to live together without class rivalry (yes, people, class rivalry does exist today--90% of all crimes committed by blacks are against whites. It's not racism, it's true.). However, in practice, the admirable goal of decreasing rivalry instead merely gets warped into a full-blown tyranny. Shows of power are the only way such a government can support itself, and it doesn't help that you are invariably threatened by a very unhappy Western Hemisphere. So you militarize, while still keeping the economy stagnant as a byproduct of opression. Uh-oh! You can't afford that! Better just keep building and let the standard of living plummet--can't show the world weakness or you'll get invaded, right?

We didn't win the Cold War through ideology or through flaws in communism. We outspent them. Gov't spending tripled during the Reagan years, the Soviets tried to match us--after Kennedy, they were pretty much doomed, but Reagan managed to expediate the process.

Have you been to China? I spent 9 months there last year--and amazingly, they're just as happy as we are here...some more, some less. As long as you're above the poverty line and as long as people around you have comparable wealth, income has very little impact on happiness.

Dui le, Dui le, wo hui jiang hanyu. Bu hui shuo Zhongguo hua, Zenme ke yi qu Zhongguo?

Now, see, people WERE unhappy during the Great Leap Forward. Indirectly, Mao ended up killing more people than Hitler did (discounting WWII). But that wasn't communism, that was the result of a foolish attempt to westernize a nation overnight. And that wasn't an ideology giving the orders, that was a power-mad dictator.

Finally...most of the reason people like this song is because of its innocence. The world has never been changed by people who say it can't be, and on some level we all inherantly know that. Innocence and purity are beautiful, and as such this song is beautiful. Very few people would like the following song:

"The world is miserable Nobody likes me at all Nobody ever will We'll all go to hell

Pain and suffering forever All that will ever come And I know this song doesn't rhyme Because I'm a failure at this too"

...oh, right. Sorry. I forgot about much of rap, heavy metal, popular music...never mind.

I'm going to go cry :)