23 hours ago: Blade: You raise a lot of interesting points. Just like everyone else, I also dislike giving people an unnecessary "free ride", but I don't include crippled people . Even animals show this instinct. That raises the whole question of just what is creativity and productivity anyway, and how do you recognize it? Tesla was incredibly productive, but he died in obscure poverty., just one of many. The Wall St. inventors of "Derivatives" have created billions (on paper), but would you defend such "Creativity", just because the perpetrators have bribed enough people to evade jail? And their success depended , among other things, on the taxpayers saving them from bankruptcy. Good for them, I say, Ayn Rand-wise, but seriously damaging to everyone else. Did they not create the whole Real Estate Bubble by this means, which seriously damaged the US middle class? And by the way, the same process of "Creativity" is leading to M.C. extinction. I can perfectly understand your fear that the future involves lots of murder; we peasants seem to have little other option, although we are all keeping up the pretense, for the time being, as long as the taxpayers have anything left. (If you notice, the "taxpayers" are mostly middle class, since the "Productive" class has all kinds of ways of evading them)
1 day ago: Blade: The key point is that Wall St. believes that society does not need any "equality", no matter if the Competitiveness become lethal for the whole group, including themselves. Ayn Rand style. I fail to see much difference between them and the Ancien Regime in France. What is really decadent is that so many of them, depairing of coming up with anything "creative", seem satisfied with mere law breaking , or just close enough to it to stay out of jail. It i simply not sustainable, as they themselves frequently know.
2 days ago: Arun: I wouldn't dispute the Collective Consciousness of Society. The "Wisdom of Crowds" research seems to validate it , as welll as general scientific thinking. But, just as a lot of other civilized activities, it takes a certain amount of social organization to express this, and the larger the "Group" gets, the more complex this process becomes. Now we're looking at a group of about 8 billion people, right? And we are all conditioned to think about our small group, mainly. Psychologists have said the about a hundred people to "know personally" is about all the average person can handle. For the rest , we need some sort of "politics".
2 days ago: Blade: But the smarter animals, like lions, cooperate in their "competition"
for food, rather than impoverishing each other.
I was well aware of Orwell's work, and admire him. But his perceptions about the corruptibility of some people does not stop with "Socialism". It applies to Walll St. as well as Communist"Leaders".
2 days ago: Christians do not really believe they are immortal. Their World view is completely different from that. And I'm not talking about "being" anything in particular , except interested in an accurate , scientifically oriented Word View.
2 days ago: I would have thought that Outsourcing , Offshoring, etc. would have put an end to the idea that Land values are a big factor in "Production" of anything, except vacation resorts.
2 days ago: David: as a sort of Historian, I find your idea that we "can easily determine the Will of the People" to be rather self-contradictory. What leader or Dictator did NOT believe he was" determining" the W.o.P?(Pun intended or not?) Hitler? Stalin? Obama? Churchill ? Even Jesus? This is actually what politics has always been about.
2 days ago: We live in a Utopia now, compared to many former societies. What has made this possible , really, besides a lot of luck , is the Industrial Revolution, along with cheap coal and oil power for the last hundred years, which is now running out. So my Utopian vision is that we , somehow, take advantage of the recently invented cheap source of power, i.e. Thorium LFTR nuclear fission, which is Green, pretty safe compared to Uranium plants, and has limitless fuel, cheaper than coal. With that, we could rather easily keep on with the "progress" of the past, and not be forced to leave anyone behind, as we are doing now. (Because we "can't afford not to"). With enough civilized, educated people in the world, it would probably occur to them, just for self-preservation, that it would be wise to establish Legal structures to avoid being forced to resort to war to "solve" the simplest political problems, as we do now.
We need to do all this , so that we can afford to be able to go on with the real adventure, which is to colonize Space, while we still have a chance to do so. This idea of having everyone "just get along" on Earth is just too Utopian to work..
2 days ago: The whole discussion about Equality is muddied up by the assumption that "Groups" , whether families, ethnicities or whatever have no real existence, or importance in the world . The facts are that groups are cooperative, social and people like it that way, where individual differences can be not only entertaining, but have "Survival Value " for the group, as long as their actions do not damage the group seriously. But that is just where we are right now: the "Smartest People in the Room" have trashed the world economy for their own benefit, clever as they are, without apparently noticiing that their activities are cutting out the ground beneath their feet.. (I mean , if too many people are impoverished, where are the customers going to come from?! "Overseas" is not an unlimited resource ).
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A comment on Conversation: Is equality feasible and is it worth achieving? Subquestion: By your definitions, is equality synonymous with fairness?
A comment on Conversation: Is equality feasible and is it worth achieving? Subquestion: By your definitions, is equality synonymous with fairness?
A comment on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?
A comment on Conversation: Is equality feasible and is it worth achieving? Subquestion: By your definitions, is equality synonymous with fairness?
for food, rather than impoverishing each other.
I was well aware of Orwell's work, and admire him. But his perceptions about the corruptibility of some people does not stop with "Socialism". It applies to Walll St. as well as Communist"Leaders".
A comment on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?
A reply on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?
A reply on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?
A reply on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?
A comment on Conversation: What does your utopian future look like?
We need to do all this , so that we can afford to be able to go on with the real adventure, which is to colonize Space, while we still have a chance to do so. This idea of having everyone "just get along" on Earth is just too Utopian to work..
A reply on Conversation: Is equality feasible and is it worth achieving? Subquestion: By your definitions, is equality synonymous with fairness?