Norway used to be quite poor just a short while ago in historical terms. Farms were subdivided to the point surviving children had only a tiny plot of land to support themselves and people immigrated to the US, taking advantage of homestead laws to steal Indigenous lands in the Upper Midwest. Once the population pressure eased and people could support themselves, they revamped the system from individualism to one of partnership. It didn’t hurt that oil was discovered in the North Sea.
The main point is that “socialism” isn’t a dirty word in the Scandinavian countries because it’s not the authoritarian form. It’s an We-Us culture, not an I-Mine one. As for happiness, those countries score the highest in the world because they value a person’s self-worth not from how much they earn or possessions, but all children have innate worth from birth on and deserve love and respect. Healthy, happy, well-educated children with a supportive society around them become healthy and happy citizens.
Meanwhile, here in “Murica”, children are brainwashed to think things are the end all and be all of life, and must have the latest gadgets to fit in. I talked with a friend who drives a cab for a living-hard long hours-and her grandchildren are eating her alive with their whining for fancy expensive gifts for birthdays and Christmas. And here I thought it was wonderful when the family got together for a big meal, games and laughter, and a few gifts like books and warm clothing. The television was turned off for the day, ignored.
Great comment. And I wonder how Americans would vote if given the choice between Norway’s governing VS the U.S. mess.
The I versus we type cultures can be summed up as…
I got mine so fuck you!
Versus
I got mine how can we help you get yours?
One of those has people killing one another at a much greater rate and sees claims made that :if it were not for the second amendment and people bearing arms tens of thousands of more would be murdered every year.
It not difficult to conclude that the people living in “The greatest country in the world with themost freedoms and liberty anywhere” are delusional.
We’re #1 in self-deluding. By almost any social measure, the US is NOT #1 IN ANYTHING–except mebbe we’re tops in guns per capita; mebbe military bases in foreign countries; skewed national budget? abuse of our black population? mebbe in not having low-cost high-impact health care for everybody? Remembering Michael Moore’s film about his wanting to “steal” good ideas citizens of other countries enjoy? e.g., school lunches in France; vacation time in Europe; and much much more…
What a horrible reflection of the pathetic corporate prisoners Americans have become just by refusing to learn anything from either history or school.
Obama said his corporate welfare program disguised as "health care reform was made for “our uniquely American health care system”. More succinctly…compound extortion.
Hardly any US students are interested in history and many who are interested get fed revisionist history by their fascist school boards.
GM board of directors prefer their loyal customers buy into the electric car ploy, ie, scheme, tactic, maneuver, plot, subterfuge, contrivance, deception. All car manufacturers and car-related businesses worldwide will say anything to keep us dependent upon driving the longest distances with no choice but to drive. Electric cars alone changes nothing.
They would be propagandized into voting against their own interest.
In other words, nothing would change.
What supports Norway’s economy? By any chance is it oil? Hey Norway, can you still do this while doing solar and wind? Give it a try!
Why is GM making commercials for Tesla. GM only makes 20,000 Bolts a year.
We need to separate-out economic systems - socialism, capitalism - from political systems - democracy, republic, dictatorship, autocracy, etc. - before we can fairly talk about this. China has a capitalist autocracy, really fascist, but they call themselves communist. One can have any kind of economic system under any kind of political system. Americans were brainwashed for nearly 100 years to associate socialism with dictatorship by the rich for their advantage. That is one of the first barriers we need to overcome to get a system with the benefits for most that Norway and the other Scandinavian countries have.
late 18th Century
’An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’ was first published in 1776) as a continuation of the philosophical theme begun in ’The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ .
'Norway has the highest share of electricity produced from renewable sources in Europe, and the lowest emissions from the power sector.’
+https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftproduksjon/
Norway also aims to become the world’s first country to end the sale of fossil fuel-powered cars, setting a 2025 deadline.
+https://www.autoblog.com/2020/11/18/internal-combustion-engine-bans-around-the-world/
Also the profits from Norway’s oil and gas resources have been invested in a ‘sovereign wealth fund’
+https://www.nbim.no/ (which if distributed equally to everyone living in Norway, would be around $220,000 each).
Looks good on both countries. Shows the difference between an Economy of Care and Citizen Well being, and one of Casino Capitalism, Big Corporations with more human rights than people, and late comers to the party trying to dominate a scene they don’t fully understand.
The people want to transition, now. In Norway, they have the social security to be all in; in America they have to depend on the Big Auto companies that decades ago…killed EV production and stalled a transition we should have finished by now.
It’s funny yes. But its not funny as well…its free market criminal.
What makes China ‘Fascist’ is the degree of State control of commerce and the national economy while making allowance for private property. Its not quite the ‘corporatism’ of Mussolini’s Italy, but we might imagine if Mussolini could see the China of today, he quite likely would pick it as the closest in the 21st
century to what was trying to achieve.
(see: ‘Corporatism and the Ghost of the Third Way’
+https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.693.939&rep=rep1&type=pdf - especially ‘Mussolin’s Corporatist Epiphany’)
What his reaction would be on discovering that China was run by a ‘communist party’ would be interesting to see.
If not seen before, here’s what Mussolini said ‘Fascism’ was: +https://www.sjsu.edu/people/cynthia.rostankowski/courses/HUM2BS14/s0/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf
(Note, its apparently as turgid in the original Italian as in the English translation.)
To MJR,
(Sorry I can’t directly reply, those features are strangely not on my screen today.)
In 2020, Norway was #16 country in the world producing crude. This year Norway is expecting 3.6% growth in that sector. Doesn’t look like they’re working on reducing crude this year at least.
~https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/article-norway-cuts-oil-production-outlook-for-2021-through-2023/
Thank you, MJR for the fact checking of my comment. I definitely need to improve on my piss poor faculties retaining dates and faces (both seem less important during global pandemic what with requisite masks and quarantine lock-down…) More historical moment when we consider that Adam Smith’s canonized Scripture …Wealth of Nations was actually published in the year of U.S. independence. So much made of Freedom(s) in our founding docs, so little made of responsibilities… Adam Smith’s scripture as I recall and revisit regularly seems more “responsible” and circumspect than any manifest destiny or presumptions about owning newly settled lands and natural resources\wealth…
Warmly and appreciatively yours,
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters and Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List and Looksee
You make good points comparing the nexus between business and absolute rule government in comparing 20th and 21st Century versions of Fascism. Italy and Spain may have joined the Fascist Axis, while Hungary a late outlier tried resisting its neighbor’s outright invasion and occupation, yet all three governments and absolute rulers (although in Hungary’s case the military leader Admiral Miklos Horthy was not quite absolute in his authority and faced internal political opposition) also coerced Uber Nationalism into a nation-state litmus test for survival.
However, what you fail to note is the Force Majeure coercion exercised by the state in compelling such Nationalism Uber Alles. Yet Fascist structure is always associated with a Cult of Personality. That very dynamic tends to prevent a Fascist Axis from holding together any international nation-states led by different Cultic Absolute Rulers.
Not unlike the settling of North America by Anglo, French and Spanish colonial settlers with either a central Church or Ruling State systematically taking indigenous children for compulsory residential education and separation from indigenous tribes and family. With the beating out of them of Mother Tongue. Or the Anglo Monarchy and Imperial policies projecting such Force Majeure towards the wee island across the the Irish Sea and suppression of language and pre-Christian native culture. This just in (not the reports of, but the latest flood of testimony and evidence) from Fascist\State Capitalist China:
~https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
Their goal is to destroy everyone’: Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape
" Women in China’s “re-education” camps for (Muslim) Uighurs have been systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured, according to detailed new accounts obtained by the BBC.
You may find some of the details in this story distressing.
By Matthew Hill, David Campanale and Joel Gunter
BBC News
Published
2 February 2021
Any serious study of Fascism will have to grapple with the element of Genocide or FINAL SOLUTIONS to the OTHERING of those declared Non-nationals or privileging of those declared genetically pure. A close study of Mussolini’s movement shows real tension between Il Duce’s early adoption of Uber Nationalist techniques not unlike those internal contradictions and tensions in Trump & Company’s Uber Nationalist Movement (MAGA). Both Mussolini and Trump were mentored by highly nationalistic members of a group that across the border was being OTHERED by the Nazi movement. Indeed there were often intimate ties to these OTHERED non-nationals, with Mussolini only consenting to the de-nationalization of Italy’s Fascist financial backers among a tiny Judeo-Italian elite of Fascism’s underwriters in Italy’s lumbering process towards national consolidation from its early 20th Century Feudal roots to the Nationalistic cohesion, consolidation and influence of Italian Fascism’s 20th Century Jewish Mother, Mussolini’s mentor and lover Margherita Sarfatti along with the leading Jewish underwriters of the Mussolini Cult of Personality who retained a Jewish Identity while cultivating over generations of familial sacrifice an Italian Patriotic identity, such as financier Ettore Ovazza one of many who met tragic ends with the uneasy alliance among Euro-Fascism’s Axis Cult Leaders Between World Wars and the Uber Nationalistic disciples of the Absolute Authority projected by these differing Cults of Personality:
~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Ovazza
~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism
~https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/mussolinis-lover-who-crafted-fascism-1.5333787
Hungary’s case during WW II is among the most poignant and unresolved after the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that attempted to draw maps on the never completely defined borders of Eastern Europe across Western Asia and the Near East or North Africa. Where after all does the ‘continent’ of Europe begin or where in time and space does the ‘racial Caucasian’ remain confined to the Caucasus gene pool?
For Racial Fascists: What separates Africa from Asia at the salt-water\freshwater sliver known as the Suez Canal on the Sinai peninsula is barely visible on a map and more arbitrary than any Continental Divide. Same for the Straits of Bosphorous separating today’s post Ottoman Empire Turkey whose Turkic peoples extend eastwards from that tiny sliver of Eastern Mediterranean and Levantine shorelines across the Caucasus gorges and canyons rolling across the Central Asian steppes).
~https://hungarytoday.hu/dr-eliezer-m-rabinovich-anti-semite-miklos-horthy-saved-jews-budapest-part-71369/
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters and Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List and Looksee
The American Advertising Agency that made up the commercial starring Will Ferrell raging over Norway’s leading the world in electric vehicles and free higher education and maternity leave opened a door more radical than any Big Labor union has formed into a cogent grass-roots driven D-E-M-A-N-D.
Looking at Norway’s good-humored responsa would cut Q-Anon off as the distracted cult of Fetishization of Selfishness with NO RESPONSIBILITY TO ACCOMPANY THE FETISHIZED VERSION OF FREEDOM that Cults Worshiping the Gospel of Prosperity represent:
Here, have a knowing laugh to share. Norway’s side of the Will Ferrell Superbowl Commercial in all its subversive open-door glory: HasanAbi, teach U.S. the Nordic accents for English and the way of thinking and acting responsibly to each other rather than serving and creating more Feudal Lords that U.S. now illustrates leads to underachievement and FETISHIZING ALL THAT THE WORLD’s MOST PROFOUND SCRIPTURES CAUTIONS AGAINST- GREED IS GOOD is where we in the U.S. went wrong. WALL STREET USED THAT COLD WAR MEME NOT AGAINST THE RUSSIANS AND MAOISTS BUT AGAINST GAINS MADE BY THE BRIEF HISTORICAL MOMENT WHEN THE U.S. WAS GROWING A WORKING MIDDLE CLASS WITH ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION AND ADVANCEMENT:
Will Ferrell in the Super Bowl ad taking on Nordic Social Democracy policies and policy outcomes:
~https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10DHsPuPHhw
~https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCSt2B7qR1g
~https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi3JQa1ynDw
University in Norway responds to Will Ferrell and GMs Super Bowl ad - Sorry (not sorry)
EDUCATION IN NORWAY IS FREE…Even for U.S. Americans!
Universitetet i Agder
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters and Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List and Looksee