Most excellent, then. That’s not his real hair, is it?

Glad your clear on that.

Don’t look at Donald Trump, it might muddy your waters a bit. Or is he ‘excellent’?

Actually, to some he might be. I heard a very cutting remark recently, I wish I could remember where – ‘He’s very clever – well, no, he’s very rich, which in America is a substitute for clever’.

Charlie, yes, that’s useful – it gets back to the point. The OED is closer than Miriam Webster to the original thrust of socialist theory – “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole” – rather than ‘by the Government’ which has crept in to US definitions..

On a point of logic – we cannot all excel. It is only ever a comparative term. We cannot all have a larger slice of the pie than everybody else, but in the classic ‘It Could Be You’ way it suits for us all to keep trying. To me it’s the difference between a lifeboat drill that says ‘everyone make orderly progress together to the stations, no shoving or trampling’ (received version of socialism, if not all about the means of production) and one that says ‘everyone try to get there first, no rules’ (neo-liberalism). Yes, the fastest and fittest will get there quicker by trampling over others than had they waited, and some of a particular mind set might say that they excelled and demonstrated independence! But fewer get to the boats at all. I know I am a voice in the wilderness, but maybe generations to come will look back on these decades and shake their heads – they might see us as we see a hamster running faster and faster on a wheel, really thinking it’s getting somewhere. Just thought I’d throw that one out there!

It certainly is associated with a socialist orthodoxy, my question was why? If one reads Marx, for example, nowhere does he advocate bureaucracy or even state regulation. I know a few hardcore Socialists, and none of them have ever wanted more state regulation of anything!

So yes, it is popularly associated, but why?

Maybe the terms ‘left’ – or ‘socialist’ – have become meaningless because they have been used so often as a catch-all by a quite narrow but politically dominant school of thought to define the ‘other’ – be it hippies, striking workers, writers, journalists, those who don’t think greed is good, pacifists, atheists, foreigners, gun control advocates, bureaucrats or care workers. In fact, all the people who get rounded up when it hits the fan and real, not imagined, state control is exerted, regardless of the professed political persuasion of those doing the rounding.

All of the above have been recently been called ‘socialists’ in the US. This misapprehension is creeping across the Atlantic. It is making debate of actual issues more difficult, and I am sure that’s fine by some.

Indeed, Alan. A bureaucracy becoming self serving – a feature of any mature state when not curbed by that same state, and one first identified as a malignant syndrome by Marxist social philosophers, Tomahawk.

Good point, Portagee. There might be a simple solution suggesting itself, if an act and not an aircraft are called an ‘item’ and as long as operators are prepared to get together for the purposes of a display and call themselves an ‘item’. Marriages of convenience 🙂

Ooh – Anon, have you any 3D40 bits?? For a very good cause, I promise!

Don’t worry, I had the same response when I asked about any 3D40’s out there. It seems counterweight prop hubs are rarer than hen’s teeth – which is surprising when one thinks how many must have been made.