socking it to ya

Yeah Man, it was our bag Man, to say things like, that's my bag Man.  Mostly we liked to say Man, and wow, wow was big too, especially after smoking one of our nickel or dime bags.  Then there were lids, that was supposed to be an ounce.  I don't know how they sell it anymore.  When I bought some in the Colorado dope store it came in grams.  I guess that is one way that we have gone metric.

We also liked to talk about our things.  Not those things, but like 'It's your thing, do what you wanna do.  I can't tell you who to sock it to.'  I hasten to add that, like the 'Tarians! we were not violent, socking it to somebody didn't mean punching them, it meant, well I forget, too many nickle and dime bags maybe.

But you can see right there, with that pithy expression, that also like the 'Tarians! we were a party of principle, two principles really, 1) doing your thing and 2) not telling people who to sock it to.

I think I've gone on before about that idea that being right is more important than winning, citing Henry Clay's assertion that he would rather be right than president, and how stupid I think that is.  We dems have one of those guys, Bernie, right now, although I think he might actually believe he can win, when you travel across the country and see those cheering crowds and everybody around you is telling you that you are great, you get a distorted view of reality. 

For all the screaming about Bernie being a crazy socialist, and now that I mention it I haven't heard that much of it because the reps love him beating up on the big girl and the big girl doesn't want to offend any of his babies, but there has been some, and the fact is that the real socialists think of him as a sellout.  Now there are some guys who would rather be right than president, or dog catcher even.

I wonder about the difference between anarchists and libertarians.  I imagine there are some official anarchists around, but that sounds like a contradiction doesn't it? I think back in the day they mostly felt that gummint was the problem and if people were left on their own they would solve their own problems.  What they believed in were worker communes who would settle their own hashes and I think would be assumed to be fair and balanced because they wouldn't be influenced by that awful gummint.

I believe they even set up some of those communes during the Spanish civil war.  When they went out to fight the Franco forces there were no officers and no insignias.  When the question of whether to take a hill came up it was decided by a workers council.  It wasn't that effective and eventually they were subsumed by the commies who were quite authoritarian and fought better, but were not near so much fun.

I wonder about your saying that the most important role of the gummint is to protect people from violence, theft, and fraud.  The word fraud stuck in my mind, because how do you protect people from fraud?  Doesn't that mean a lot of regulating?  There was some point when Mess O' Potamia was going hot and heavy and your man Rand seemed to be the only guy who was really agin it, and I got to thinking maybe we could put up with his Libertarian nonsense if it got us out of the war.  But then somebody asked him about regulating drug companies and he said well if some pharmaceutical company was making bad drugs their customers would die and others would hear about it and not buy their drugs and the company would go out of business, and see, the marketplace would solve its own problem.  That didn't sound right to me.

I wonder about that libertarian pledge of not advocating force or violence, was that done to distinguish them from the commies who were accused of advocating force and violence?  Of course any group that was into force and violence would pledge right away to be against it so that nobody would know what they were up to until they started socking it to them, and not in the hippie way, whatever that was.