11-03-2011, 10:15 AM | #21 |
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Get rid of capitalism and Democracy. I guess Anarchism would be better?
I know a person who made a good thought about anarchism and he thinks that it would work if everyone can just participate on direct democracy. No one is brought into office just representatives who will execute what everyone has decided upon. Does anyone think it would work? |
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11-03-2011, 10:21 AM | #22 | |
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Loving this discussion!
Actually people in much of South America (and I grew up there) HATE it that people in the US run around referring to ourselves as American. They are American too. I agree that there would be problems, many you mention I had not thought of and do get your point. Some random observations.... Not everyone South of the USA is Brown. Not everyone in the US and Canada is White. I don't see Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela etc as weak countries which need the great White people to the North to save them...I was thinking more of natural resources and having all we need to get us away from depending on China and OPEC. So did not mean to give that impression. The EU mess is making me stop and think though that maybe I am being far too idealistic...especially financially. Had not thought about all the division of church and state ramifications...agree it would likely be problematic to completely unite, but would like to see more Pan American synergy. annnnd Heck ya, blame the French for everything! Quote:
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11-03-2011, 10:25 AM | #23 | |
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I want water and electricity and trash PU and schools and infrastructure and am more than willing to pay takes for these luxuries! Communism and Capitalism both look good on paper. Add people and its a disaster. Straight up Democracy is problematic too due to the time it would take for everyone to vote on every issue.
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11-03-2011, 10:27 AM | #24 | |
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I'm about three hours from finishing up Stephen Pinker's latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The core of the book is that as time has passed humans *have* become more compassionate and less violent. Yes, LESS, violent. Consider the following: 1) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading this knows someone who was burnt at the stake as a witch. I'm not saying someone in your lineage, I mean someone you've met. 2) No one here has ever been to a live bear-baiting. 3) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone here has ever had to fear being stabbed at the dinner table by someone wielding a steak knife. 4) No great power has shot at any other great power since the end of WW II. I'm not saying that there's been no wars, but no *great power* wars. China and Japan fought multiple wars in the past but haven't fought one in 65 years. France and Germany, England and France, Germany and Russia *all* had periodic bouts of warfare through the 17th, 18th, 19th and the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Europe is now experiencing the longest contiguous peace since, get this, the height of the Roman Empire! WW III never happened, sometimes despite all efforts to make it happen. 5) The number of crimes that could earn one the death penalty in western nations has gone from a whole raft of items to a very few (murder, possibly treason, possibly child rape). And in most European nations you simply can't *get* the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime. A century or two ago, you could get the death penalty for insulting the crown! 6) In the west, marital rape has gone from 'just the way things are' to a criminal offense. Spousal abuse has gone from a punchline on 'The Honeymooners' to something no sit-com would *ever* put in because it is socially unacceptable (again, that doesn't mean it never happens just that when it does, the abuser is not going to find a sympathetic ear when he claims that 'she had it coming'). 7) Spanking, in the west, has gone from 'this is how you raise children' to child abuse. If half of what I endured as a child happened to a kid today, that kid would be removed from the home. 8) War has gone from something noble and 'the aspiration of every man and nation' to something repellant to large numbers of people. So yes, I think that human societies can become more compassionate and peaceful, up to a point. I do not think we can nor do I think we should try, to have any kind of utopia. We *know* what happens when people try to create utopias and we should not trust anyone who suggests we should do so. I do think humans are moving to a stage in our cultural development(s) that violence is increasingly being constrained. The circle of moral concern has expanded to include more and more groups of people. As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries. Literacy, is spreading so fast that we notice illiteracy but not literacy. Two hundred years ago we would take illiteracy for granted and notice literacy. Beyond three hundred years, literacy becomes extremely rare outside of the noble classes. Beyond four hundred years, literacy becomes rare even amongst the nobles. Pick a statistic reflective of human well-being and I'll show you something that, graphed out over a few centuries, is moving in the direction we would want to. Health, equality and well-being are on an upward sloping curve, violence and war are on downward sloping curves. I think that's insanely great, as Steve Jobs would've said. Cheers Aj
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11-03-2011, 11:06 AM | #25 | |
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Get rid of capitalism and replace it with what? There's a fantastic scene toward the end of the Terry Pratchett novel "Night Watch" which I'm going to share with you to illustrate the point about why getting rid of capitalism is a really bad idea. A revolution is starting, the hero--Sam Vimes--is a sergeant in the City Watch who is protecting the people against the army and the secret police. One person of true revolutionary fervor is having a conversation about how things will be once the revolution is complete with a shoe maker: "Anyway, it says here in article seven on this here list--" Mr. Supple ploughed no. "--People's Declaration of the Glorious 24th of May," said Reg. "Yeah, yeah, right...well, it says we'll seize hold of the means of production, sort of thing, so what I want to know is, how does that work out regarding my shoe shop? I mean, I'm in it anyway, right? It's not like there's room for more'n me and my lad Garbut and maybe one customer." In the dark, Vimes smiled. But Reg could never see stuff coming. "Ah, but after the revolution all property will be held in common by The People...err...that is, it'll belong to you but also to everyone else, you see?" Comrade Supple looked puzzled. "But I'll be the one making the shoes?" "Of course. But everything will belong to The People." "So...who's going to pay for the shoes?" said Mr. Supple. "Everyone will pay a reasonable price for their shoes, and you won't be guilty of living off the sweat of teh common worker," said Reg shortly. "Now, if we--" "You mean the cows?" said Supple. "What?" "Well, there's only the cows, and the lads at the tannery, and, frankly, all they do is stand in a field all day, well, not the tannery boys, obviously, but--" "Look," said Reg. "Everything will belong to The People and everyone will be better off. Do you understand?" The shoemaker's frown grew deeper. He wasn't certain if he was part of The People. Elsewhere in the book, Vimes reflects on 'The People' "People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people." Both passages illustrate what I think is wrong with the idea of throwing out capitalism and democracy. Let's say we did. What would you replace it with? Would you get rid of money as well? At which point how would we do trade? Barter? I can't build a laptop computer--well, I probably could but I can't build the *components*. Where are the components going to come from? If I'm not getting paid, why on Earth would I get up at 4:45 in the morning to be to work at 7:30? Love of my employer? Not hardly. I do it because I get paid to do so, as it turns out I happen to rather enjoy my work but I wouldn't do it for free. So what would you replace capitalism with? Now, back to democracy. Constitutional democracies are not perfect systems but they are the least bad system devised so far. But let's say we did everything through direct democracy. How would you go about protecting minority rights? How would you go about *preventing* people from, say, selling goods or services on the black market? What would happen in an anarchy is that it would last about two weeks. Then the person who could convince the most people with guns to side with him would become Supreme Leader for Life. If you want to know what a nation without either capitalism or democracy looks like, you can do no better than either North Korea or Somalia. At least North Korea has a government. Somalia doesn't even really have that. There's no capitalism or democracy in Somalia, instead he who has the guns is he who makes the rules. Governments are what Thomas Hobbes called a Leviathan. One purpose of having governments is to have an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In an anarchy, no single entity has a monopoly on the use of force and so people will be *hyper-sensitive* to Hobbesian traps. Hobbes said that in the absence of a state (he didn't say what kind of state) things would degenerate into a war of all against all. A Hobbesian trap, then, is when you think I'm going to come over the wall and take your tomatoes and so you put up defenses to prevent me from doing so. Seeing that you are arming up, I start to arm up. A *perfect* example of a Hobbesian trap, and one civilization escaped by the skin of our teeth, was the nuclear build-up of the Cold War. Once the United States detonated a nuke, the other great powers *had* to get one however they could. The Soviets developed their own and missiles to deliver them. So we developed our own missiles. We put missiles in Turkey, they put missiles in Cuba and so on. Cheers Aj
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11-03-2011, 11:25 AM | #26 | |
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In this sort of system, if the majority decides they don't want queer people getting married, well, tough shit, queer people! The majority has spoken! In fact, the majority has just voted that it's totally legal to kill queer people. I hope you're good at hiding! Personally, I'm very much in favor of the checks and balances that are supposed to exist in our current system. As a queer woman, mob rule doesn't go well for me.
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Change the voices in your head Make them like you instead Last edited by SecretAgentMa'am; 11-03-2011 at 11:27 AM. Reason: That's not the button I meant to push! |
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11-03-2011, 11:28 AM | #27 | |||
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But anyway, no. I have no interest in EVER merging with any country in North America. I'm not even okay with the US and Canada becoming one country. Not even a little bit okay. We're fine, thanks. We do not need to join forces with you. We're very likely better off -not- joining forces with you. The whole EU thing, I get. A little. I do think that, for example, Belgium and France have more in common than not and so certainly have a better shot at making it work than the US and Mexico do. Maybe Canada and the US have as much in common and Belgium and France do - maybe. But I just don't see it working for us. For starters the US is, to my understanding, pretty stoked about being independent from England. And we LIKE that the Queen is our (mostly symbolic) "head of state". We're good with it. It's part of our heritage. How do you reconcile that between two countries? Then add on top of that the very different ways our governments are run, certain laws we have in Canada that would never fly in the US, certain lacks of laws we don't have in Canada that would make heads spin in the US, health care and equal marriage in Canada, all that free speech right to carry a gun stuff in the US. It'd just NEVER work. Our countries are far too different. Maybe Canada should join the EU. ETA - I do not want to join the EU either. I do want Canada to buy a warm island somewhere that I can move to legally so I never have to see snow again, however.
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11-03-2011, 11:38 AM | #28 |
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We call ourselves Americans because the name of our country is the United States *Of America*. What the hell else are we supposed to call ourselves? USians? United Staters? And why would anyone call a person from Brazil an American? People from Brazil are Brazilians. If I'm referring to the continent as a whole I'll say "North Americans" or "South Americans" but if I'm referring to a specific country, I'm an American, Bete is a Canadian, one of my professors is a Chilean. What other words am I supposed to use?
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11-03-2011, 11:40 AM | #29 | ||
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[qutoe] For starters the US is, to my understanding, pretty stoked about being independent from England. And we LIKE that the Queen is our (mostly symbolic) "head of state". We're good with it. It's part of our heritage. How do you reconcile that between two countries? [/quote] You don't. I mean, I think that for the most part Americans are pretty neutral about the whole monarchy thing but I don't see us adopting Her Majesty as our head of state (and, quite honestly, I do rather like that our head of state and our head of government are embodied in the same person). Cheers Aj
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11-03-2011, 11:42 AM | #30 |
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The funny thing about anarchy is this:
For you to honestly believe it would work you'd have to have a pretty altruistic view of human nature. You know, the doctor will be very happy to care for your sick mother because she is very excited that you tend the chickens. The dude next door would never rape you because he is a good person and knows you are a good person who would never steal his car. Blah blah social contract blah blah. That's pretty stupid and naive, for starters. But on TOP of that. Right on top of that - you have the fact that most "anarchist" groups are populated by dickheaded 25 year old white boys who break windows and do more harm than good when they show up at a protest. The behaviour of the average self-described anarchist ALONE is evidence enough that anarchy would never work.
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11-03-2011, 11:48 AM | #31 | |
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11-03-2011, 11:55 AM | #32 | |
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The whole thing is just such a bad nightmare, really. Anarchist - [an-er-kist] - noun: A jerkwad who likes to break stuff and has conveniently found a self-righteous explanation for their crappy behaviour.
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11-03-2011, 12:03 PM | #33 |
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"Now that my brain is functioning again, I can address the things above.
I'm about three hours from finishing up Stephen Pinker's latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The core of the book is that as time has passed humans *have* become more compassionate and less violent. Yes, LESS, violent. Consider the following: AJ, I think you may have to be my go-to person for injections of optimism. I've added the book to my wish list, and I'll wait for the soft cover. Thank you for the reference. 1) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading this knows someone who was burnt at the stake as a witch. I'm not saying someone in your lineage, I mean someone you've met. But you have heard of "water boarding" and you may well know one of the 400K in the United States who have been victims of political torture, which, it turns out, is still sanctioned in 100 countries. https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/r...e/welcome.html 2) No one here has ever been to a live bear-baiting. I have seen a toothless, chained bear in Russia used for panhandling. Certainly we know other acts of animal cruelty exist everywhere, such as the release and termination of an exotic animal zoo in Ohio last month. 3) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone here has ever had to fear being stabbed at the dinner table by someone wielding a steak knife. :-) 4) No great power has shot at any other great power since the end of WW II. I'm not saying that there's been no wars, but no *great power* wars. China and Japan fought multiple wars in the past but haven't fought one in 65 years. France and Germany, England and France, Germany and Russia *all* had periodic bouts of warfare through the 17th, 18th, 19th and the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Europe is now experiencing the longest contiguous peace since, get this, the height of the Roman Empire! WW III never happened, sometimes despite all efforts to make it happen. Greece is at a tipping point, and much of the EU could follow if the economic situation grows worse. Just because an active volcano has a long period of dormancy does not mean it can't or in fact won't erupt. 5) The number of crimes that could earn one the death penalty in western nations has gone from a whole raft of items to a very few (murder, possibly treason, possibly child rape). And in most European nations you simply can't *get* the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime. A century or two ago, you could get the death penalty for insulting the crown! True. But we are still in fact using the death penalty as the final act of insult and injury in a series of injustices. 6) In the west, marital rape has gone from 'just the way things are' to a criminal offense. Spousal abuse has gone from a punchline on 'The Honeymooners' to something no sit-com would *ever* put in because it is socially unacceptable (again, that doesn't mean it never happens just that when it does, the abuser is not going to find a sympathetic ear when he claims that 'she had it coming'). You do know that marital rape and spousal abuse continue in large numbers and most likely affect/have affected someone you know, including yours truly. "One in four women (25%) has experienced domestic violence in her lifetime." "Between 600,000 and 6 million women are victims of domestic violence each year, and between 100,000 and 6 million men, depending on the type of survey used to obtain the data." http://www.dvrc-or.org/domestic/violence/resources/C61/ 7) Spanking, in the west, has gone from 'this is how you raise children' to child abuse. If half of what I endured as a child happened to a kid today, that kid would be removed from the home. Funny, one of my students is writing about this (others have). It's clear she's struggling with whether or not to continue this with her own children. 8) War has gone from something noble and 'the aspiration of every man and nation' to something repellant to large numbers of people. As much as I really want to believe this, how can I when main stream films now resemble a hybrid of video games and porn films - thread bare, derivative and scant dialogue and character development for the sole purpose of taking the viewer to each new orgy of violence (war-driven or otherwise). For example, I just saw the trailer for Immortals last night at the gym. It seemed to me like one extended battle scene that picked up where 300 left off. Please tell me how many top grossing straight-dramas (adult and not a comedy) you can find that don't have at least one act of glorified violence in it: http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2011&p=.htm If the military branches have started to capitalize on gaming technology and the gaming mindset. The ads now make it seem as though the transfer from basement Xbox or Wii to live military engagement is seamless or perhaps the video game done one better. So yes, I think that human societies can become more compassionate and peaceful, up to a point. I do not think we can nor do I think we should try, to have any kind of utopia. We *know* what happens when people try to create utopias and we should not trust anyone who suggests we should do so. I do think humans are moving to a stage in our cultural development(s) that violence is increasingly being constrained. The circle of moral concern has expanded to include more and more groups of people. Has it expanded, or have alternate realities allowed us to detach from violence and its consequences even more? Whether or not we want to claim an absolute state of paradise, if we don't pursue Utopia, is dystopia always the default? And does dystopia, or the idea of it, scare us less? Does it feel more comfortable and more in sync with our natures? As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries. Actually, that trend is reversing and will no doubt continue to reverse, "particularly among women." http://www.americanscientist.org/iss...sal-of-fortune http://articles.baltimoresun.com/201...h-inequalities Literacy, is spreading so fast that we notice illiteracy but not literacy. Two hundred years ago we would take illiteracy for granted and notice literacy. Well, we know literacy is tied to crime, and we know we are filling prison beds with amazing numbers here in the U.S. "One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study....Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending." I've been teaching since 1985 (another frightening statistic in itself), and those is purely non-scientific and empirical, I am seeing problems with vocabulary, reading levels, understanding grammatical concepts like fragments and run ons and other issues that I have not seen to this degree of seriousness. Whether it's in offering the correct pronunciation of the word "library" (not lie-berry), or the introduction of a word like "gist" or simply explaining to my students that cutting and pasting from an encyclopedia is not researched writing, I am amazed at the education my adult students didn't get and what the implications are for this going forward. I'm really most curious about this question of designing ourselves out of our natures. I'm curious about the purpose and power of visions and alternative presentations of "reality." Can we redesign ourselves? Should we? And are our visions like Rawls' intrinsically important to growth evolution, or are they just another alternate reality, another distraction? And on that note, I'm more than ready for lunch. Now where did I leave that steak knife? ;-) |
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11-03-2011, 12:10 PM | #34 | |
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I have no interest in every single person in my country thinking exactly like I do. I do, however, want mutual respect of ideas and an ability to work together to promote liberty and justice "for all." Which takes accepting that everything will not be exactly as I would like it. But, that we all find common ground in ideas that do promote equal opportunity for the entire population. I know, I have a streak of idealism- the fact is, I do find what is good in all and try to figure out how that can best be utilized for the whole. Bet's take on the 25 year old white boys... usually pretty spoiled white boys as anarchists fits with what I have seen as part of and looking from the outside of social movements since the mid-1960's. In fact, you can count on them to want to run everything! |
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11-03-2011, 12:16 PM | #35 | |
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People from Brazil do live in America. South America. Other people who live in the Americas hate it that we act like we are the only Americans. Smart, intelligent, educated people in other countries in the Americas, other than Canada apparently, call themselves American and they are. It is very US centric to say they are not, in my opinion. They do not agree that what to call ourselves is their problem.
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11-03-2011, 01:19 PM | #36 |
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For me I am willing to say that people in Latin America are responsible for their choices when they are actually allowed to make them without covert or overt interference from the right wing agenda pushing United States of America. However, that is not likely to happen anytime soon. One only needs to look at what happened recently in Honduras to understand that. No matter all the fancy footwork it was clear to other Latin American governments that the political strategy of the U.S. was to blunt and delay any efforts to restore the elected president, while pretending that a return to democracy was actually the goal. Haiti had the U.S. extensively involved in overthrowing the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide not once but twice. The U.S. has lost some ground over recent years but that just means they are in there fighting all the harder to to get it back one country at a time. And as always the smaller, poorer countries that are closer to the U.S. are the most at risk.
Personally I think a united Latin America would be a better idea. All abortion is legal in Canada but current provincial policy forbids abortions from being performed in PEI. There is also free medical care in Canada but in PEI the government will only cover the cost of the abortion in a hospital in a different province under the recommendation of two doctors. So if you live in PEI even though you are supposed to be entitled to free medical care and abortion is legal in Canada you would not be able to get an abortion that was free just because you wanted one. So I suppose if P.E.I. can do it then I imagine very catholic latin american countries could also get around abortion laws. I imagine it is disturbing and it might even piss some people off that the U.S. hogs the term American for itself. And not in the way that people are European or Asian but as their nationality. It might not annoy Canadians as much as Latin Americans because, although I know some that don't like it but think it is just part of the typical thoughtless arrogant behavior one expects from Americans, Canada hasn't been subjected to the same kind of imperialistic behavior as Latin America.
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11-03-2011, 01:43 PM | #37 | |
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Really glad to you do! and really get and care how it might feel to a non-US citizen. I don't know that it would benefit to have a united Latin America, it might divide the US even more on issues like language, immigration and geopolitical borders. Would Brazil be considered Latin? I mean yes, linguistically it should be, but in the US we seem to use Latin and Latino/a for people who speak Spanish and do not live in Spain, not people who speak languages bases on Latin.....which BTW I find confusing a bit. What of other (yes small) countries who don't speak Spanish in South America?
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11-03-2011, 02:04 PM | #38 | |||||||||||
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Please, please, please understand that violence or other social unpleasantness isn't a binary switch. The logic you appear to be using above is that if there is ANY violence or torture then violence and torture have not been reduced. But that doesn't work. Let's say that there were 15K homicides in the US last year and 10,000 this year. Would that not be an improvement? Or should we say that 10,000 murders is the same as 15,000 and so nothing has improved? I would argue that the fact that witch burning is *unknown* in the West and hasn't happened either in Western Europe or North American in about 200 years! This can be true even IF water boarding is still going on. What's more, look at the difference of reaction--in the West--to water boarding now and witch burning (or lynching) in the past. I'll take lynching first. Within the lifetime of my parents (born in 1922) lynching went from a Saturday or Sunday afternoon diversion for the whole family (presuming the family was white) to a *crime*. People used to send *postcards* of lynchings and now anyone even suggesting doing so would regret it immediately. Consider that the men who killed James Byrd in Texas were convicted of murder while their grandfathers would have walked for the same crime (probably their fathers as well). That is vast improvement. Isn't one lynching in 1997 an *improvement* over 10 lynchings in 1907? I would say that is a fantastic improvement. Quote:
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Consider that no President could survive an American casualty total like WW II (407K), the Civil War (650K) and Vietnam (58K). An American president who sent kids into combat and broke the 10K casualty mark would probably be in for a very tough election cycle unless the US had been attacked. Also consider that nothing like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo could happen again. Yes, I know, lots of people were killed in both the Second Gulf and Afghanistan wars but no Iraqi or Afghani city was bombed anywhere *near* what Dresden or Tokyo endured in WW II. Nothing even close. Dresden was reduced to rubble. Then there's this number--zero. That is the number of times a nuclear weapon has been used in anger since the August of 1945. We *could* have used them in Korea but we didn't. We *could* have used them in Vietnam--and even considered it--but we didn't. We *could* have used it in Afghanistan-and yet again we didn't. Neither has anyone else. Israel could solve its Iranian problem with a nuclear bomb but it has restrained from doing so. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in just over 60 years and have managed not to go nuclear. Then there's the war that *didn't* happen--the Soviet Union never crossed into West Germany which almost *certainly* would have resulted in a nuclear exchange. Have there been wars between 1945 and 2011? yes. None of them have involved nuclear weapons even though the United States has lots of them. Quote:
Alexander Solzhentisyn, who knew a thing or two about what happens when nations become gripped by ideological fanatics said it best: To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. This is not a dystopia, not even by half. How do I know? George Bush was a warmonger who approved the torture of people in contravention of international law. Barack Obama, for all his virtues, is a little too conciliatory to deal with the madness that is the Republican Congressional majority. John Boehner is a little tin-post oompa-loompa. Eric Cantor is a smarmy little twit. Now, one of two things is going to happen. Either I'm going to be arrested and put in prison for those statements or I'm not. In a dystopia, I would NEVER write those things about the national leadership because I know what would happen to me. People in North Korea, if they *had* Internet access, would never dare to say something like that about either Kim the Elder or Kim the Younger. America is far from a perfect society but I'll take the US over North Korea, Iran or Saudi Arabia. [quote] As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries. Quote:
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Cheers Aj
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11-03-2011, 02:11 PM | #39 | |
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ETA: If it is because of our empire, shouldn't the same apply to the Japanese, the Chinese, the French, the British, the Turks, the Germans, the Russians and the Persians? ALL of them had empires at one point or another. Some much more recently than others and every last one of them was somewhere on the line of brutal. Shouldn't they *also* be stripped of their national names? Now, this is based *solely* on the idea that Americans--uniquely amongst nations--has been so overwhelmingly horrible to other nations that it is an *insult* to others for us to have a short-name for ourselves as a people because they are also Americans in as much as they occupy the Western Hemisphere. If it is not because of our imperial actions, then what *is* it based on because this seems to me to be a case of "America must pay for her crimes" and stripping the citizens of their national name is a good place to start. Cheers Aj
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Proud member of the reality-based community. "People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett) |
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11-03-2011, 02:12 PM | #40 | |
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Cheers Aj
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Proud member of the reality-based community. "People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett) |
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