talkpolitics | Political systems from a cowboy's perspective

Hi all ~~popcorn munching armchair procrastinators~~ possessors of the ultimate political insight! Here's a small parable, which could shed some light on our recently quickly deteriorating understanding of such basic political terms as socialism, communism, fascism, etc. (It's a known fact that once a term gets over-used, it starts losing some of its weight and value). So here's my summary.

Assume you're a farmer and you've got two cows.

Feudalism: You have two cows. Your landlord takes part of the milk that you're producing.

Pure socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and puts them together with other people's cows in a common cowshed. You have to look after all the cows in there. The government gives you exactly the amount of milk that you need to avoid starvation.

Bureaucratic socialism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and puts them together with other people's cows in a common cowshed. Some guys who used to have chickens are now looking after these cows. You have to look after the chickens which were taken from those who used to have chickens. The government gives you exactly the amount of eggs and milk that you need to avoid starvation.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes them both, then hires you to look after them because it wants to look after you, then sells you your own milk.

Pure communism: You have two cows. Your neighbors are helping you to look after them and you divide the milk between yourselves.

Russian communism: You have two cows. You have to look after them, but the government takes all your milk.

Dictatorship: You have two cows. The government takes them both and then kills you or imprisons you if you protest.

Singapore democracy: You have two cows. The government fines you for illegal possession and keeping of livestock in your apartment.

Military junta: You have two cows. The government takes them both and drafts you into the food military unit.

Pure democracy: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who takes the milk.

Representative democracy: You have two cows. Your neighbors appoint someone to decide who takes the milk.

American democracy: The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for them. After the elections, the President is undergoing an impeachment procedure for having speculated with futures livestock stocks. The press names the scandal "Cowgate".

British democracy: You have two cows. You feed them with sheep brain. They go mad. The government does nothing.

Bureaucracy: You have two cows. Initially, the government tells you when and how you can feed them and when you should milk them. Then it pays you a subsidy not to milk them. Subsequently, it takes them both, kills one of them, milks the other and then throws the milk into the gutter. Eventually it forces you to fill several forms to declare the missing cows.

Anarchy: You have two cows. You try to sell them for a good price, before your neighbors have managed to kill you to take them both.

Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one of them and you buy a bull.

Hong Kong capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three cows to an investment association, using credit letters registered at the bank by your brother in law. Then you initiate a swap debit deal with a certain public fund, and you manage to take the four cows by signing a single license document for keeping five cows. The rights for the milk of these six cows are then transferred via an intermediary branch to a new company stationed in the Cayman Islands, owned by a guy with good connections who buys your SPA center, plus the above mentioned rights for milking the seven cows. The annual balance confirms this company owns the eight cows with an option for buying a ninth cow. Meanwhile you kill your two cows because the milk is not very good anyway.

Ambientalism: You have two cows. The government forbids you to either milk them or kill them.

Feminism: You have two cows. They marry each other and then adopt a little calf.

Totalitarianism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and denies they ever existed. It sells the milk on the black market.

Political correctness: You are in certain relations (the term "ownership" is a symbol of a past failed epoch of intolerance) with two consenting individuals of a livestock persuasion (who are very valuable for your farm), and of unspecified gender.

Slang: Yo, boss... check this out man, we got two babes over here. Gee, you jus' gotta pull 'dat milk, yo!

Surrealism: You have two giraffes. The government makes you take accordion lessons.

Windows 95/98: You are in need of some milk. You try to milk a cow. You receive a message: "Major error in the horn defense type FFFFF; if the problem persists please contact your cow deliverer"; then both cows disappear. You hectically browse through the Internet search engines, and you find out that it's possible that you update your cow drivers by downloading a file called "Cow_OK.dll" (18 Mb). After several hours of efforts with your crappy modem, you've successfully downloaded the file, and you try to Install. You re-start the ~~cow~~... I mean the O.S., but it doesn't recognize the udder any more. Now you have to re-install everything from scratch, format the cows, install WIN95, then try to milk. After all is done, all you get is lots of rancid milk that you can't eat. You press Ctrl+Alt+Del and you go to play WoW at the local PC club. A thing I'm going to do too, right now.