I thought this might be of some interest to fans of Atlas Shrugged of a more academic bent. I stumbled across it in my internet wanderings. It appears to be that a linguist at the University of Birmingham did a study of Atlas Shrugged to try and objectively examine the charges of fascism that we hear so often on the net. It's more than a little dry and very heavy on the linguistic terminology but it makes for an interesting intellectual read. Here's a link to the site it's on:
Corpus Tools and the Linguistic Study of Ideology: Searching for Fascism in Atlas Shrugged
Translator
Showing posts with label consequences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consequences. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Health Care...or Smoke and Mirrors in the Halls of Congress...
I haven't had a lot of time to write or even think about social issues much in recent weeks, so I apologize for the lengthy hiatus. New country, new job, new home, new car...lots of things needed sorting out. Someone brought to my attention their concerns over the current health care debate and I thought I would add my two cents.
It may sound wonderful to imagine a world where everyone has cheap affordable healthcare, but what does that mean, who pays for it, and can such a concept as insurance ever be universal? I think the left and the right both grossly oversimplify all the issues involved and selectively fail to see the viewpoint of one side or the other. It is not a question of class struggle. It is not a question of haves versus have-nots. To adopt such a delineation is to instantly put the debate in a socialist camp from the get-go. The question is, as always, individual liberty. Do you have a right to order a doctor around? Do you have the medical knowledge necessary to second-guess their decisions? Do you have the financial knowledge necessary to adjust a fiduciary table of risk and returns? If you do not, then you cannot be expected to be able to select a representative who could responsibly make such decisions either. And if they cannot make such decisions, then should anyone have the right to supersede the conscience of educated and trained professionals at the point of a gun?
When it comes to government involvement in anything, it must always come down to the governments entitlement to use force to enforce law. By expanding legislation, we expand the government's charter to use force against us. Unless there is a damn good reason for that, I will be opposed to any enlargement of federal authority. We have to assume that our professionals will be professional. If they misrepresent their services, lie, make false promotions, etc. they are already violating the law and no further legislation is necessary. New legislation is necessary to define the terms of homesteading new frontiers of human knowledge and territory and the disputes that inevitably come from them. It is not to regulate and direct our lives. I am 100% inflexible on this concept: Individual human rights are absolute and inviolate. But people do not have the right to someone else's labor, their effort, or their livelihood (even and especially including doctors, bankers, and teachers). If Obama truly wished to make healthcare affordable, then he should consider unwinding the Gordian knot that our government has steadily added to practically everything over the last hundred some odd years, rather then instigating irrational waves of panic to help slide through unwarranted and unnecessary controls on free movement and action (e.g. Pig Flu pandemic scare).
Altruism is what is killing us. I believe this now more than ever. If you could but accept that as a possibility, I think you would be amazed at how much of the human narrative comes into a clear and understandable focus. Also how much easier it is to make moral judgments, when those morals are derived from clearly defined concepts which are derived from perceptions and are adjudicated by the facts of human existence and not on arbitrary exhortations of "humanity" as a concept undefined. I listen to Obama speak and I realize that he classifies businessmen as outside the scope of "we" when he refers to "us" as Americans and "them" as the bankers on wall street. But does he accept responsibility for the fact that business could not collude with government if government was not involved in business? Just as government cannot collude with religion, when religion is properly and strictly separated from government. Just as the end to religious war was precipitated by the separation of church and state, so will the class wars be ended by the separation of government and economics. Politics, is the province of reaching a consensus on how to deal with the classical crimes, the classical criminals, to defending the rights of its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic, and for determining the terms by which new properties, both intellectual and real, will be negotiated between vying parties. Nothing else requires an official mandate. The rest, as they say, is up to us, to the professionals, the educated men and women who decide where to invest their resources. The risk is also ours. As is the responsibility. These are absolutes, unchanging through time. No civilized society can be sustained without them. As much as we may want somebody, anybody to promise us sweet things and remove the burden of that responsibility, all attempts to do so throughout history have ended in disaster. If it will, is no longer a question. The question is, if we will let it happen again.
That is a choice we all must make, but rest assured I hold no illusions about my ability to sway you to my way of thinking. I see things in black and white, because that is how clearly the consequences of a course of actions springs to mind. It is an issue of life and death. I have seen what happens to medicine in highly regulated countries. There are horror stories that you could not conceive of happening here. (Such as women dying in childbirth because the ambulance had to keep driving in circles for hours because no hospital could accept them. Why? Because the mish-mash of regulation on obstetrics had so strangled the industry that most doctor's felt it was safer to go into other specializations and the country found itself with a shortage of nursery units. Funny, huh? That's Japan, where they're supposedly worried about a decreasing population). But there is always a first time for everything I guess. Seen the waiting lines in Canada? THAT's where we'll be going and in short order.
I apologize in advance if I haven't dealt properly with all the possible arguments. But fundamentally, my problem is at the root of the assumption--i.e. that government should have anything to do with the choice in this matter. Thereafter is merely quibbling over details of implementation.
It may sound wonderful to imagine a world where everyone has cheap affordable healthcare, but what does that mean, who pays for it, and can such a concept as insurance ever be universal? I think the left and the right both grossly oversimplify all the issues involved and selectively fail to see the viewpoint of one side or the other. It is not a question of class struggle. It is not a question of haves versus have-nots. To adopt such a delineation is to instantly put the debate in a socialist camp from the get-go. The question is, as always, individual liberty. Do you have a right to order a doctor around? Do you have the medical knowledge necessary to second-guess their decisions? Do you have the financial knowledge necessary to adjust a fiduciary table of risk and returns? If you do not, then you cannot be expected to be able to select a representative who could responsibly make such decisions either. And if they cannot make such decisions, then should anyone have the right to supersede the conscience of educated and trained professionals at the point of a gun?
When it comes to government involvement in anything, it must always come down to the governments entitlement to use force to enforce law. By expanding legislation, we expand the government's charter to use force against us. Unless there is a damn good reason for that, I will be opposed to any enlargement of federal authority. We have to assume that our professionals will be professional. If they misrepresent their services, lie, make false promotions, etc. they are already violating the law and no further legislation is necessary. New legislation is necessary to define the terms of homesteading new frontiers of human knowledge and territory and the disputes that inevitably come from them. It is not to regulate and direct our lives. I am 100% inflexible on this concept: Individual human rights are absolute and inviolate. But people do not have the right to someone else's labor, their effort, or their livelihood (even and especially including doctors, bankers, and teachers). If Obama truly wished to make healthcare affordable, then he should consider unwinding the Gordian knot that our government has steadily added to practically everything over the last hundred some odd years, rather then instigating irrational waves of panic to help slide through unwarranted and unnecessary controls on free movement and action (e.g. Pig Flu pandemic scare).
Altruism is what is killing us. I believe this now more than ever. If you could but accept that as a possibility, I think you would be amazed at how much of the human narrative comes into a clear and understandable focus. Also how much easier it is to make moral judgments, when those morals are derived from clearly defined concepts which are derived from perceptions and are adjudicated by the facts of human existence and not on arbitrary exhortations of "humanity" as a concept undefined. I listen to Obama speak and I realize that he classifies businessmen as outside the scope of "we" when he refers to "us" as Americans and "them" as the bankers on wall street. But does he accept responsibility for the fact that business could not collude with government if government was not involved in business? Just as government cannot collude with religion, when religion is properly and strictly separated from government. Just as the end to religious war was precipitated by the separation of church and state, so will the class wars be ended by the separation of government and economics. Politics, is the province of reaching a consensus on how to deal with the classical crimes, the classical criminals, to defending the rights of its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic, and for determining the terms by which new properties, both intellectual and real, will be negotiated between vying parties. Nothing else requires an official mandate. The rest, as they say, is up to us, to the professionals, the educated men and women who decide where to invest their resources. The risk is also ours. As is the responsibility. These are absolutes, unchanging through time. No civilized society can be sustained without them. As much as we may want somebody, anybody to promise us sweet things and remove the burden of that responsibility, all attempts to do so throughout history have ended in disaster. If it will, is no longer a question. The question is, if we will let it happen again.
That is a choice we all must make, but rest assured I hold no illusions about my ability to sway you to my way of thinking. I see things in black and white, because that is how clearly the consequences of a course of actions springs to mind. It is an issue of life and death. I have seen what happens to medicine in highly regulated countries. There are horror stories that you could not conceive of happening here. (Such as women dying in childbirth because the ambulance had to keep driving in circles for hours because no hospital could accept them. Why? Because the mish-mash of regulation on obstetrics had so strangled the industry that most doctor's felt it was safer to go into other specializations and the country found itself with a shortage of nursery units. Funny, huh? That's Japan, where they're supposedly worried about a decreasing population). But there is always a first time for everything I guess. Seen the waiting lines in Canada? THAT's where we'll be going and in short order.
I apologize in advance if I haven't dealt properly with all the possible arguments. But fundamentally, my problem is at the root of the assumption--i.e. that government should have anything to do with the choice in this matter. Thereafter is merely quibbling over details of implementation.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
It's Your Life
Your life is your property. It's not mine. It's not your neighbor's or your spouse's. It's not your God's, your preacher's or your governor's. It does not belong to Barack Obama any more than it belongs to Kim Jong Il. And if it doesn't belong to Obama, it surely doesn't belong to Sarkozy or Brown or Medvedev or any of the other supposed leaders of this world who keep yapping at our heels to give more and more, to sacrifice ourselves to the lowest common denominator, to abandon our independence and enslave ourselves to a self-proclaimed new world order which seeks only to compound the problems of today by magnifying them tomorrow.
The argument has always gone that we haven't done enough. What if we've already been doing too much? What if the smug certainty of our politicians is actually misplaced? After all, are they economists? Are they historians? Are they philosophers? How deeply have they thought about the current crisis? Or are they simply parroting what their economics advisors, steeped in Keynesnianism have told them? Are they simply parroting what their philosophy teachers steeped in Kant have told them? Are they simply parroting what their law professors steeped in moral relativism have told them?
The root issue, the key, the crux upon which the entire scope of the major problems in the world today hinge is one pivotal issue: Do you have the right to your own life? Ask any proponent of central banking. Ask any advocate of public education. Ask any idealogue who advocates any social program where the fundamental and underlying premise is that your life belongs not to you, but to the state and that the state has the right to your life, that they have the right to do anything they want to you as long as they have the blessed "mandate of governance". Ask these people, "Do you have the right to your own life?" Ask them. And they will evade and dodge, and badger, and become indignant. But if you can actually get them to answer that question straight out, the answer will be "No". I've seen this many times, the desperate scramble to evade answering a simple yes or no question. Also, the horror of that single-syllable answer.
Because what does it mean if you do not have the right to your own life? It means that noone does. It means that anyone can be dealt with by others in any way. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of justice. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of morality.
But there is an objective standard of morality: your own life. What makes it harder to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the evil. What makes it easier to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the good. Life and Death are the simplest moral choices at the base of one's morality. Do you want to live? Or, do you want to die? If you decided to live, then all the things which make that life worth living become values to you. Your children, your family, clean air, and water, working hard to reap the products of that work to gain food and clothes for your family, so that they can live and generate life and so on. Life is an end in itself. Happiness is the consequence of a moral life in that the moral life optimizes one's realization of life. As one philosopher put it, "Happiness is enough to make life desirable and lacking in nothing." But the same philosopher also said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Happiness is not achieved by range of the moment actions, based simply on the arbitrary desires of the moment. Happiness is only attainable by examining the consequences of a plan of action over the span of one's entire life. It does not mean a state of prolonged and constant euphoria. It means self-esteem, self-respect, and the contentment that comes from honest living.
But implicit in the realization of happiness is that you are free to decide how your life shall be lived. Implicit in the realization of morality is that you be free to be moral. If you are not free to decide what ideas to support, to dispose of the fruits of your labor as would best suit your personal self-interests, if, in short, you are not free to work for your own good, then you are not free. If you are not free, you cannot be happy. If you are not free, you cannot be moral or immoral. If you are not free, then you are only a slave. If you do not have a right to your own life, then you are only a slave. If nobody has a right to their own lives, then everybody is a slave to the majority opinion holder of the moment and everyone must live in fear that the next majority wave of opinion will target them as the scapegoat to be sacrificed to the mob.
The founders of the United States of America understood this interconnectedness of happiness, freedom, morality, economy, and politics. The one failing was that they compromised on the moral principles and sought to justify the American system on altruistic grounds, on the principle that the justification for such a system is the good of the many. The true justification of the American system is that it rests not on the good of the many, but on the good of the one--you and what is good for you, yourself. Human rights cannot be held by any collective, because any collective is simply a group of individual human beings. If individual human beings do not have rights, then the group also has no rights. Human rights are inalienable, they are independent of the will of the mob, or of individual power holders. Thus, in the American system, political power holders must subordinate their actions within the limits proscribed by the doctrine of human rights. Conversely, American citizens should be free to do whatever they like unless it is expressly prohibited by a doctrine of human rights.
To adhere to a doctrine of human rights is to constrain the politicians and to liberate mankind. To reverse this is to turn politicians into Gods and humanity into slaves.
Your life is your property. If there are no property rights, there is no right to life. If you surrender your right to life, it is the same as committing suicide, a long slow suicide where the killing stroke will come at an arbitrary time and an arbitrary place. If you surrender your right to life, you surrender all the values that come with it. Justice, Freedom, Security....you cannot have one without the others.
Don't surrender your right to life any longer. Demand that the government commit to a doctrine based on the rights of the individual as opposed to the right of mob rule. Instead of forming increasingly expansive world governmental organizations, demand that the governments at home recognize individual rights and act to preserve them. There is too much lip service to rights, and too much sacrifice of them on the altar of a vague and unspecified "good" which we will never see, and our children are expected to slave to pay for. Enough of the political expediency of cake today, and poverty tomorrow. Enough of the sacrifice of the generations to come for some unseen benefit today. Demand your freedom and your rights. Demand the right to hold property, to dispose of it as you will. Demand the right for you to run your own life. Demand that your life is your own and noone else's to arbitrarily dictate to. Demand your right to yourself.
And if you hold that you do not have the right to your own life....kill yourself, and get out of the way of those who want to live.
The argument has always gone that we haven't done enough. What if we've already been doing too much? What if the smug certainty of our politicians is actually misplaced? After all, are they economists? Are they historians? Are they philosophers? How deeply have they thought about the current crisis? Or are they simply parroting what their economics advisors, steeped in Keynesnianism have told them? Are they simply parroting what their philosophy teachers steeped in Kant have told them? Are they simply parroting what their law professors steeped in moral relativism have told them?
The root issue, the key, the crux upon which the entire scope of the major problems in the world today hinge is one pivotal issue: Do you have the right to your own life? Ask any proponent of central banking. Ask any advocate of public education. Ask any idealogue who advocates any social program where the fundamental and underlying premise is that your life belongs not to you, but to the state and that the state has the right to your life, that they have the right to do anything they want to you as long as they have the blessed "mandate of governance". Ask these people, "Do you have the right to your own life?" Ask them. And they will evade and dodge, and badger, and become indignant. But if you can actually get them to answer that question straight out, the answer will be "No". I've seen this many times, the desperate scramble to evade answering a simple yes or no question. Also, the horror of that single-syllable answer.
Because what does it mean if you do not have the right to your own life? It means that noone does. It means that anyone can be dealt with by others in any way. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of justice. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of morality.
But there is an objective standard of morality: your own life. What makes it harder to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the evil. What makes it easier to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the good. Life and Death are the simplest moral choices at the base of one's morality. Do you want to live? Or, do you want to die? If you decided to live, then all the things which make that life worth living become values to you. Your children, your family, clean air, and water, working hard to reap the products of that work to gain food and clothes for your family, so that they can live and generate life and so on. Life is an end in itself. Happiness is the consequence of a moral life in that the moral life optimizes one's realization of life. As one philosopher put it, "Happiness is enough to make life desirable and lacking in nothing." But the same philosopher also said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Happiness is not achieved by range of the moment actions, based simply on the arbitrary desires of the moment. Happiness is only attainable by examining the consequences of a plan of action over the span of one's entire life. It does not mean a state of prolonged and constant euphoria. It means self-esteem, self-respect, and the contentment that comes from honest living.
But implicit in the realization of happiness is that you are free to decide how your life shall be lived. Implicit in the realization of morality is that you be free to be moral. If you are not free to decide what ideas to support, to dispose of the fruits of your labor as would best suit your personal self-interests, if, in short, you are not free to work for your own good, then you are not free. If you are not free, you cannot be happy. If you are not free, you cannot be moral or immoral. If you are not free, then you are only a slave. If you do not have a right to your own life, then you are only a slave. If nobody has a right to their own lives, then everybody is a slave to the majority opinion holder of the moment and everyone must live in fear that the next majority wave of opinion will target them as the scapegoat to be sacrificed to the mob.
The founders of the United States of America understood this interconnectedness of happiness, freedom, morality, economy, and politics. The one failing was that they compromised on the moral principles and sought to justify the American system on altruistic grounds, on the principle that the justification for such a system is the good of the many. The true justification of the American system is that it rests not on the good of the many, but on the good of the one--you and what is good for you, yourself. Human rights cannot be held by any collective, because any collective is simply a group of individual human beings. If individual human beings do not have rights, then the group also has no rights. Human rights are inalienable, they are independent of the will of the mob, or of individual power holders. Thus, in the American system, political power holders must subordinate their actions within the limits proscribed by the doctrine of human rights. Conversely, American citizens should be free to do whatever they like unless it is expressly prohibited by a doctrine of human rights.
To adhere to a doctrine of human rights is to constrain the politicians and to liberate mankind. To reverse this is to turn politicians into Gods and humanity into slaves.
Your life is your property. If there are no property rights, there is no right to life. If you surrender your right to life, it is the same as committing suicide, a long slow suicide where the killing stroke will come at an arbitrary time and an arbitrary place. If you surrender your right to life, you surrender all the values that come with it. Justice, Freedom, Security....you cannot have one without the others.
Don't surrender your right to life any longer. Demand that the government commit to a doctrine based on the rights of the individual as opposed to the right of mob rule. Instead of forming increasingly expansive world governmental organizations, demand that the governments at home recognize individual rights and act to preserve them. There is too much lip service to rights, and too much sacrifice of them on the altar of a vague and unspecified "good" which we will never see, and our children are expected to slave to pay for. Enough of the political expediency of cake today, and poverty tomorrow. Enough of the sacrifice of the generations to come for some unseen benefit today. Demand your freedom and your rights. Demand the right to hold property, to dispose of it as you will. Demand the right for you to run your own life. Demand that your life is your own and noone else's to arbitrarily dictate to. Demand your right to yourself.
And if you hold that you do not have the right to your own life....kill yourself, and get out of the way of those who want to live.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Communists Have Landed
I have to say that I am weary of looking in the news and seeing socialist / communist rhetoric spewing forth from Lord Obama and his cronies. Not only is the government buying out US companies on the cheap (a de facto nationalization strategy as illustrated by act such as this: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aqOyfIA14XQ8&refer=us ) but the very question of the propriety of nationalization is a total non-issue in the current political discourse. All that the so-called defenders of capitalism can do is equivocate on the practicality of doing so. All they can do is equivocate on the potential harm to the people. Nobody at all seems to be concerned with whether such action is morally right. Nobody at all seems to remember a little thing like human rights, rights which our nation was supposed to believe are INALIENABLE. Admittedly, most of Obama's supporters probably don't even recognize what the word inalienable even means, much less what the concept of human rights entails. No, they equate rights with an open-ended hunger. Their concept of rights is an infinite demand on what they percieve as a mystically infinite supply of naturally growing wealth. Shake the tree all you want, there'll still be more fruit on it tomorrow, right? But they don't seem to realize that if you cut down the tree, haul it over into your yard and prop it up against a shed--it will not yield fruit next year.Now, don't get me wrong, I thing Wagoner was a fruitcake. He went crying to the government for help, and sure enough they gave him the help he so desperately deserved--a solid kick in the ass. But the point is that the free market would've sent Wagoner packing anyways and without sacrificing taxpayer money and without setting a dangerous precedent for the arbitrary government nationalization of American industries. Let the idiot CEOs fail, let the brilliant ones prosper, and let us all work to fill the jobs created by the ingenuity and excellence of the very best productive minds around us. The only jobs a government can provide are those which enable it to file, index, sort, encage, punish, and monitor the rest of us. This is because a government's sole function is to maintain and enforce the rule of law. All it can do is threaten, fine, and imprison people. A government doesn't create wealth. It produces nothing of value. It's function is to maintain an environment where people are free to produce freely. By constraining that environment, by bringing it's legislative violence into the private sector, the government in effect becomes a totalitarian force with it's eyes and hands on everybody's life, and the net result is that people are not allowed to be as efficient as they could be were they simply allowed to pursue their own happiness.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness used to be more than just words, they were a dream and an ideal worth fighting for, worth dying for, and more importantly--worth living for. And yet we find ourselves tied down in an age where the last flailing remnants of American idealism are being skinned alive, where the stillborn dream of an American society was sacrificed on the altar of "God and Society" with the self-defiant neurotic cry "For the good of the many!" What is America with no right to one's own life? What is America without the freedom to know your own mind and to act upon the values you decide for yourself? What is America without the moral conviction that one's happiness is an end in and of itself, that one's values have value, that one's dreams mean something? Those dreams mean something, Damn it! They mean something because they are fragile and isolated and occur only fleetingly in the minds of individual men and women all over the Earth. Those dreams that become generators. Those dreams that become companies. Those dreams that become the lifeblood of those who couldn't dream as well or as hard or as thoroughly. Ideas mean something, and the more fragile and fleeting, the more precious those ideas become.
The laughing dreams of children do not have to become the discarded carcasses of compromising adults. For the sake of us all, for your own sake, and for the sake of decency, don't sell out the American dream for a smile and a handshake and the burning coals of "good intentions". Vote libertarian or Vote for Ron Paul in the next election. Protest, speak out, scream out for Obama to stop his systematic, methodical butchering of the human spirit.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Apples, No Apples, Apples: The Sleight of Hand of Obama Inc.'s Elite Economic Corps of Dunderheads
OK. Now I had to read this a couple of times to make sure I got it straight. Now, I thought that I wasn't reading it correctly. I mean, circular logic has some famous adherents. Just look at Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy...or Sam Harris' justification for torture. But this circle is the most striking for how clearly circular it is. You don't have to dig too deep to see the sleight of hand going on in this one. For the whole article, you'll have to check out this link here.
But the part that floored me was this quote:
""I do think the American people in the past have shown an excellent ability to respond to adversity," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told members of the Senate Budget Committee. "And I believe it's going to happen this time and that we're going to see a much stronger economy, not that far in the future."
To hasten that day, the Fed and the Treasury launched their long-awaited program to jump-start the market for consumer loans, including financing for small businesses, students and car buyers.
Under the program, known by the acronym TALF, the Fed will provide loans to investors who buy securities backed by newly issued consumer loans. The idea is to revive the market for asset-backed securities, which provides funding for a large portion of consumer lending.
"In our system, banks are important, but typically 40% of lending comes through the securitization markets. And those markets are not functioning well," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.
"So we're going around banks . . . by doing something only the government can do, which, on appropriate terms to protect the taxpayer, is to try to get those credit markets opening up again," he said." "
OK. TALF. This is the system as it appears to be presented here. The government will now encourage more lending to groups which are high risk in a recession and which the markets recognize as such: students, small businesses, and car buyers. (It may be for that reason that the banks aren't loaning as much to these groups right now..duh....)
But of course, Obama Inc. and his party of looting neanderthals, think that the answer is to give more money to people who probably won't be able to pay it back. (AIG, GM...etc, etc, etc...)
In this case, they will subsidize the extension of credit to high risk groups by sponsoring securities based on packages of volatile debt. They will use the security of the United States Treasury to guarantee that debt and sell shares in it to investors. Not only that, but it will loan money to investors so that they can buy those securities. So, technically, the government will be making it look like it's selling financial instruments when really it's just handing out taxpayer money again.
If the initial loans go into default, the securities become worthless. That means the government can't collect the money from these loans, which means that the investors also don't get anything from the securities either, except that they have to pay back the loans to the government that they used to buy the now worthless securities. Which means that the government will in effect be paying for it's handouts to high-risk lenders by convincing credit-worthy investors to commit to paying for them over the long-term.
Housing fiasco redux.
What Obama and his geniuses are assuming is that the people who will receive these loans will actually pay them back. Now here's the catch. If any financial institution was reasonably confident that the people who are the potential beneficiaries of these loans could actually pay them back, then the financial institutions would loan them the money in the first place.
Why? Because that's how financial institutions make money. By lending to people who pay them back plus interest. Nobody makes money by lending to people who don't pay back. As the housing fiasco and its consequences have effectively demonstrated.
So what will happen to investors who buy large amounts of these securities, if the securities go into default (as they probably will)? Well, their balance sheets will have a sudden gaping hole where their assets used to be, and an equal amount of now unsupported debt. In short, I think that any investor who takes a heavy interest in these derivatives will be staking a lot on the dependability of the federal government to lend responsibly. And if the federal government doesn't, then we will see even more investors taken down in this thing. That will further damage the economy, destroy even more wealth (or "redistribute it" as Obama likes to say), and almost certainly cripple our nation for decades. (That is, decades more than these kind of policies have already crippled us...)
Now, now, I'll be fair. The current crisis isn't Obama's doing. It was caused by Bernanke, Greenspan, and the hypocrites at the Fed and in Congress on both sides of the aisle who have been supporting centrist government-controlled markets. That was the problem with the Republicans. They talked free markets, but they were busy getting their hands deep into the guts of it, so they could grease their own pockets, and the pockets of their buddies. That and they were spending so much time preaching about God that the secular conservatives out there didn't feel very comfortable supporting them either.
The Democrats are idealogues. I seriously believe that they think that they are helping people by sacrificing us all to the hunger of the disenfranchised mob that has been created by generations of irresponsible governance. (Although I think it's telling, how many of Obama's picks have a problem paying their taxes...)
The answer is to stop this madness, not to keep trying more of the same thing.
Cut spending, cut taxes, cut social programs and privatize them.
Privatize education.
Dissolve the Fed.
Introduce a staged retreat from social security so that we can support those who have already paid their way in, but so that we can phase it out as soon as possible. Phase out medicare and government intervention in insurance premiums.
Stop the senseless bailouts of companies that shovel out lifetime-guaranteed retirement policies to workers who retire at 48?! (Like GM....)
Stop the war on poverty. The supposed enemy in that war is the only group that can even remotely provide what is needed to alleviate the problem, by pursuing that war we intensify the poverty.
Stop the war on drugs. 1 in 32 Americans are in jail. 25% of them are there for drugs. Only 5% of homicides were narcotics related. Educate your children to keep them off drugs. I agree, they suck. They are NOT good things to have around children. But neither is tobacco or alcohol, and we have managed to keep them in control without making them into the dangerously uncontrolled illicit multi-billion dollar global industries that illicit drugs are today. In a way, the war on drugs is paying for the war on terror....paying our enemy's wages. Not unlike Prohibition and the mafia...Remove the profit, make them legal and regulate them like any other drug or intoxicant.
And, no, we don't need the self-inflated pompous rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to rally around. What we need is a return to fundamental principles, like those advocated by Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater and the generation of conservatives who really lived up to that name. The crisis we are experiencing day by day in our sweat, our fear, our blood, and our lives...this crisis is a moral crisis. The moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, the objective moral reality of rational self-interest as a life-generating force, the moral supremacy of reason as opposed to the bulwarks of religion or the frantic paranoia of the social relativist---the denial of these truths is what we are experiencing tangibly, and visibly and undeniably this very moment.
This country is headed in the wrong direction, and we're speeding it up! You can't defend freedom by destroying it. You can't defend liberty by enslaving yourselves. You can't increase prosperity by punishing it. You can't inspire innovation by stifling it in bureaucratic red tape. You can't broaden minds through education by stifling teacher creativity. You can't heal bad debt by creating more of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it." --Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
But the part that floored me was this quote:
""I do think the American people in the past have shown an excellent ability to respond to adversity," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told members of the Senate Budget Committee. "And I believe it's going to happen this time and that we're going to see a much stronger economy, not that far in the future."
To hasten that day, the Fed and the Treasury launched their long-awaited program to jump-start the market for consumer loans, including financing for small businesses, students and car buyers.
Under the program, known by the acronym TALF, the Fed will provide loans to investors who buy securities backed by newly issued consumer loans. The idea is to revive the market for asset-backed securities, which provides funding for a large portion of consumer lending.
"In our system, banks are important, but typically 40% of lending comes through the securitization markets. And those markets are not functioning well," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.
"So we're going around banks . . . by doing something only the government can do, which, on appropriate terms to protect the taxpayer, is to try to get those credit markets opening up again," he said." "
OK. TALF. This is the system as it appears to be presented here. The government will now encourage more lending to groups which are high risk in a recession and which the markets recognize as such: students, small businesses, and car buyers. (It may be for that reason that the banks aren't loaning as much to these groups right now..duh....)
But of course, Obama Inc. and his party of looting neanderthals, think that the answer is to give more money to people who probably won't be able to pay it back. (AIG, GM...etc, etc, etc...)
In this case, they will subsidize the extension of credit to high risk groups by sponsoring securities based on packages of volatile debt. They will use the security of the United States Treasury to guarantee that debt and sell shares in it to investors. Not only that, but it will loan money to investors so that they can buy those securities. So, technically, the government will be making it look like it's selling financial instruments when really it's just handing out taxpayer money again.
If the initial loans go into default, the securities become worthless. That means the government can't collect the money from these loans, which means that the investors also don't get anything from the securities either, except that they have to pay back the loans to the government that they used to buy the now worthless securities. Which means that the government will in effect be paying for it's handouts to high-risk lenders by convincing credit-worthy investors to commit to paying for them over the long-term.
Housing fiasco redux.
What Obama and his geniuses are assuming is that the people who will receive these loans will actually pay them back. Now here's the catch. If any financial institution was reasonably confident that the people who are the potential beneficiaries of these loans could actually pay them back, then the financial institutions would loan them the money in the first place.
Why? Because that's how financial institutions make money. By lending to people who pay them back plus interest. Nobody makes money by lending to people who don't pay back. As the housing fiasco and its consequences have effectively demonstrated.
So what will happen to investors who buy large amounts of these securities, if the securities go into default (as they probably will)? Well, their balance sheets will have a sudden gaping hole where their assets used to be, and an equal amount of now unsupported debt. In short, I think that any investor who takes a heavy interest in these derivatives will be staking a lot on the dependability of the federal government to lend responsibly. And if the federal government doesn't, then we will see even more investors taken down in this thing. That will further damage the economy, destroy even more wealth (or "redistribute it" as Obama likes to say), and almost certainly cripple our nation for decades. (That is, decades more than these kind of policies have already crippled us...)
Now, now, I'll be fair. The current crisis isn't Obama's doing. It was caused by Bernanke, Greenspan, and the hypocrites at the Fed and in Congress on both sides of the aisle who have been supporting centrist government-controlled markets. That was the problem with the Republicans. They talked free markets, but they were busy getting their hands deep into the guts of it, so they could grease their own pockets, and the pockets of their buddies. That and they were spending so much time preaching about God that the secular conservatives out there didn't feel very comfortable supporting them either.
The Democrats are idealogues. I seriously believe that they think that they are helping people by sacrificing us all to the hunger of the disenfranchised mob that has been created by generations of irresponsible governance. (Although I think it's telling, how many of Obama's picks have a problem paying their taxes...)
The answer is to stop this madness, not to keep trying more of the same thing.
Cut spending, cut taxes, cut social programs and privatize them.
Privatize education.
Dissolve the Fed.
Introduce a staged retreat from social security so that we can support those who have already paid their way in, but so that we can phase it out as soon as possible. Phase out medicare and government intervention in insurance premiums.
Stop the senseless bailouts of companies that shovel out lifetime-guaranteed retirement policies to workers who retire at 48?! (Like GM....)
Stop the war on poverty. The supposed enemy in that war is the only group that can even remotely provide what is needed to alleviate the problem, by pursuing that war we intensify the poverty.
Stop the war on drugs. 1 in 32 Americans are in jail. 25% of them are there for drugs. Only 5% of homicides were narcotics related. Educate your children to keep them off drugs. I agree, they suck. They are NOT good things to have around children. But neither is tobacco or alcohol, and we have managed to keep them in control without making them into the dangerously uncontrolled illicit multi-billion dollar global industries that illicit drugs are today. In a way, the war on drugs is paying for the war on terror....paying our enemy's wages. Not unlike Prohibition and the mafia...Remove the profit, make them legal and regulate them like any other drug or intoxicant.
And, no, we don't need the self-inflated pompous rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to rally around. What we need is a return to fundamental principles, like those advocated by Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater and the generation of conservatives who really lived up to that name. The crisis we are experiencing day by day in our sweat, our fear, our blood, and our lives...this crisis is a moral crisis. The moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, the objective moral reality of rational self-interest as a life-generating force, the moral supremacy of reason as opposed to the bulwarks of religion or the frantic paranoia of the social relativist---the denial of these truths is what we are experiencing tangibly, and visibly and undeniably this very moment.
This country is headed in the wrong direction, and we're speeding it up! You can't defend freedom by destroying it. You can't defend liberty by enslaving yourselves. You can't increase prosperity by punishing it. You can't inspire innovation by stifling it in bureaucratic red tape. You can't broaden minds through education by stifling teacher creativity. You can't heal bad debt by creating more of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it." --Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Friday, July 18, 2008
Pope John Paul II was an Atheist! -- Breaking News of a Startling Analysis
Yes, here it is. A brilliant piece of deductive reasoning using the deceased Pope's very own words to expose what must have been the ideology driving them. After watching this, there should be no doubt that the Pope, the figurehead of Catholicism was, indeed, an atheist. It's so rare to actually catch out one of the religious figureheads in giving away the game. I highly recommend this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P29YD5Yz6yk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P29YD5Yz6yk
Friday, July 11, 2008
A Decisive Argument Against Religion
This is a video posted by YouTube objectivist Nelapidae. He presents a stunningly clear, precise and cutting argument against faith. Enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQefreiEQOA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQefreiEQOA
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The Weakness of Conservatives...The Hypocrisy of Liberals..
This old footage of Ayn Rand is as relevant today as it was when it was shot in 1961. Here she is addressing the conservatives of the GOP but she might as well be addressing the rival political parties today. Instead of the threat of Soviet Russia, we can think of the threat of religious extremism. And of course there is still communist China, whose relaxed financial rules have created a smokescreen for their continued fascist treatment of its citizens.
China's aggressive suppression of freedom of speech, it's negligent disregard for human life evidenced in its nonchalant attitude to food safety and chemical waste, and it's belligerent self-righteousness when challenged on its premise of citizens as sacrificial fodder to the social animal--these are all situations born of the socialist system, both its mind-numbing effect on its citizens and the cumbersome way in which it adjusts to meet crisis.
How much blood will pave the way to a continued and vibrant communism? How much more blood will we provide as we rush to surrender to an enemy so pitiful and small that it could not survive but by the sanction we grant it? How much blood will they pour on the pyre of the greater good as they rush to convert capitalism in to the socialist quagmire that their ideals fix in the stars as the highest moral system?
Whether that enemy be the religious multitudes swaying to prophetic breeze of idolatry and hate. Or, whether that enemy be the fascist legions of 1st world mercenaries unleashed by the moral abdication of capitalism's defense.
Watch this video and ask yourself, how much blood has been spilled in defense of socialism? How many lives sacrificed? How many dreams crushed? Ask yourself how much of that blood has flowed in the scant 47 years since this video was created. And ask yourself how much more must be sacrificed before we finally fix what must be fixed? Before we embrace capitalism as both effective and a moral ideal.
I'm sure it would be fascinating were Obama and McCain able to respond to this lucid challenge from another age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTf6NK0wsiA
China's aggressive suppression of freedom of speech, it's negligent disregard for human life evidenced in its nonchalant attitude to food safety and chemical waste, and it's belligerent self-righteousness when challenged on its premise of citizens as sacrificial fodder to the social animal--these are all situations born of the socialist system, both its mind-numbing effect on its citizens and the cumbersome way in which it adjusts to meet crisis.
How much blood will pave the way to a continued and vibrant communism? How much more blood will we provide as we rush to surrender to an enemy so pitiful and small that it could not survive but by the sanction we grant it? How much blood will they pour on the pyre of the greater good as they rush to convert capitalism in to the socialist quagmire that their ideals fix in the stars as the highest moral system?
Whether that enemy be the religious multitudes swaying to prophetic breeze of idolatry and hate. Or, whether that enemy be the fascist legions of 1st world mercenaries unleashed by the moral abdication of capitalism's defense.
Watch this video and ask yourself, how much blood has been spilled in defense of socialism? How many lives sacrificed? How many dreams crushed? Ask yourself how much of that blood has flowed in the scant 47 years since this video was created. And ask yourself how much more must be sacrificed before we finally fix what must be fixed? Before we embrace capitalism as both effective and a moral ideal.
I'm sure it would be fascinating were Obama and McCain able to respond to this lucid challenge from another age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTf6NK0wsiA
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Is the Koran compatible with science? Is it consistent?
Lately I've noticed an increase in claims, specifically on YouTube, but amongst Islamic advocates in general that the Koran is not only internally consistent, but that it also foreshadows modern scientific discoveries. Zealots will use carefully cultivated quotations to support these wild claims. Well, I tend to think that the psychology going on here is not unlike that which surrounds proponents of Nostradamus, astrology, palm reading, or any other of a litany of quacky half-baked pseudo-scientific spiritualist dogmas. To prove that these neo-scientific religious bigots are in fact spouting nothing but hot air, I decided to do some cursory research on contradictions in the Koran.
Here's what I came up with:
1) This site lists at least 10 issues which show that the Koran is either not internally consistent and that Mohammed had no more knowledge of astronomy than a gibbering cave-man.
http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/SKM/contradictions.htm
2) This site raises an interesting point. The Koran states that Allah can answer any question. It also states that he can do anything. So, can Allah ask a question that Allah cannot answer?
http://the-qurans-fatal-flaw.myblogvoice.com/?contradictions-inconsistencies-and-fallacies-in-the-koran-quran-120336
3) And here's a link to a list of a further 87 inconsistencies put together by one dedicated poster:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?s=d981da0ad3d6d5a72b63ef7628a00c80&t=71501
4) Here, perhaps most damning of all, is a group of Muslims who concede that the Koran has inconsistencies and promotes violence, but that it must somehow be "reformed" to remove such features. My suggestion..."Become an atheist."
http://www.reformislam.org/
and here is their list of Suras that they recommend should be deleted from the Koran because they "promote divisiveness and religious hatred, bigotry and discrimination."
http://www.reformislam.org/verses.php
I wonder how much of the Koran would be left...And this raises another interesting point. If the Koran, is not the unalterable, indefatigable, perfect, and complete word of God, why then bother with it at all?
And before you say, well the Koran is consistent, unalterable and 100% true, please consider these words from a religion of peace:
O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
If you would like to verify the veracity of the quotes attributed to the Koran, I recommend reading it. Nothing clears up controversy like looking at the facts. For your convenience I've also included a link to an online searchable Koran here.
Here's what I came up with:
1) This site lists at least 10 issues which show that the Koran is either not internally consistent and that Mohammed had no more knowledge of astronomy than a gibbering cave-man.
http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/SKM/contradictions.htm
2) This site raises an interesting point. The Koran states that Allah can answer any question. It also states that he can do anything. So, can Allah ask a question that Allah cannot answer?
http://the-qurans-fatal-flaw.myblogvoice.com/?contradictions-inconsistencies-and-fallacies-in-the-koran-quran-120336
3) And here's a link to a list of a further 87 inconsistencies put together by one dedicated poster:
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?s=d981da0ad3d6d5a72b63ef7628a00c80&t=71501
4) Here, perhaps most damning of all, is a group of Muslims who concede that the Koran has inconsistencies and promotes violence, but that it must somehow be "reformed" to remove such features. My suggestion..."Become an atheist."
http://www.reformislam.org/
and here is their list of Suras that they recommend should be deleted from the Koran because they "promote divisiveness and religious hatred, bigotry and discrimination."
http://www.reformislam.org/verses.php
I wonder how much of the Koran would be left...And this raises another interesting point. If the Koran, is not the unalterable, indefatigable, perfect, and complete word of God, why then bother with it at all?
And before you say, well the Koran is consistent, unalterable and 100% true, please consider these words from a religion of peace:
O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
If you would like to verify the veracity of the quotes attributed to the Koran, I recommend reading it. Nothing clears up controversy like looking at the facts. For your convenience I've also included a link to an online searchable Koran here.
Monday, June 16, 2008
A Religion of Peace?
And here I get to complain again...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25106145/
So....how long are people going to be "tolerant" of religion? What we have here are schools which are training children to destroy the country in which they are growing up. So what should we do about this, objectively?
Well, first of all, I don't believe that government should be involved in education in any way whatsoever. And that means that I think all public schools should be privatized, but that's off topic. The government can't shut down schools just because they teach unpopular ideas. But if religious schools teach "criminal" ideas, then the government has every right to shut them down. The only legitimate use of government action is in the prohibition of the initiation of physical force in human interaction. By teaching children to break the laws of their country and teaching them that this is a moral "ideal", these fanatics are in effect inciting a generation of children to violent lawlessness. They are undermining the authority and rule of law which are the proper domain of government. But, even worse, they are committing an egregious act of psychological abuse on the minds of children. The purpose of schools is to provide students with information and skills that they can use to exist within their culture. All they are doing is setting them up to be murderers. Who could honestly say that telling a child to go kill is anything but abuse?
Anyways, I'm glad they shut this one down. But I wonder how many right-wing Christian faith camps abuse children in just the same way...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25106145/
So....how long are people going to be "tolerant" of religion? What we have here are schools which are training children to destroy the country in which they are growing up. So what should we do about this, objectively?
Well, first of all, I don't believe that government should be involved in education in any way whatsoever. And that means that I think all public schools should be privatized, but that's off topic. The government can't shut down schools just because they teach unpopular ideas. But if religious schools teach "criminal" ideas, then the government has every right to shut them down. The only legitimate use of government action is in the prohibition of the initiation of physical force in human interaction. By teaching children to break the laws of their country and teaching them that this is a moral "ideal", these fanatics are in effect inciting a generation of children to violent lawlessness. They are undermining the authority and rule of law which are the proper domain of government. But, even worse, they are committing an egregious act of psychological abuse on the minds of children. The purpose of schools is to provide students with information and skills that they can use to exist within their culture. All they are doing is setting them up to be murderers. Who could honestly say that telling a child to go kill is anything but abuse?
Anyways, I'm glad they shut this one down. But I wonder how many right-wing Christian faith camps abuse children in just the same way...
Thursday, June 12, 2008
A Discussion of American Culture
The following is the reproduction of an e-mail discussion I had with a friend recently. I thought that the subject matter would be both appropriate to this site and interesting in that the two participants hold almost diametrically opposed viewpoints on morality, religion, and politics. I've edited the e-mails so as to remove any personal references, but I've left the greater part intact so that both viewpoints can be presented as accurately and fairly as possible. How fairer than to place them in the original wording? I hope you find the discussion as interesting as I, and I would welcome any comments you may have on the topics involved. American Anti-theist will be green and T will be blue.
First of all, here's the e-mail that got the discussion started:
Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good,politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up,it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
If you agree, pass it on.
If you can read this - Thank a teacher!
And now the discussion:
T: Thanks for the Bill Gates thingie-majig, though, as I'm sure you might have assumed, I disagree with the man on principle. Some of the things he said were good, and things that people, especially in our cry-me-a-river-and-you-get-a-cookie society, need to hear (such as "it's not your parent's fault" and "be nice to nerds"). I felt, though, that those eleven things really exemplified the failings of our society. The American culture, at least as it is rather apparent on the east coast, is very dog-eat-dog, do it yourself or else you'll lose, and shut up and take it. In Japan everyone was pretty hyper-society and many Japanese think of others, and not just their family, when making decisions. You'll probably have more input here, since you're living closer to the culture than any of us did, though it seemed that, in general, Japanese thought more about the society around them than Americans do. It was an interesting thing to see for me, because it was a system that wasn't American individualism and it worked. Not perfectly, but, then again, how can a human system be perfect.
Anyway, I wanted to see what your argument is on one of the arguments I had for the first things Gates said on the list (or, at least, the first thing listed): Life isn't fair. First of all, saying 'life" is generally saying "American culture." I personally think he's also saying "the way things are going to be for everyone," but that's a different story. The thing about this argument that I never understood is how does anyone know about fairness if there isn't anything that set that fairness. I'm sure you've heard the argument, as it's a rather standard one for the religious-minded, that if there wasn't a God to set down what things are fair, or good, for that matter, then we wouldn't have this overwhelming sense that things really should be fair. As much as people are told that life isn't fair, no matter how many times that line is spoken, people don't stop feeling like things ought to be.
So, I thought I'd ask your opinion and jump off from there, if you wouldn't mind starting another discussion.
American Antitheist: Aside from the "Life isn't fair" one, I would have to say that they're just statements of reality. There doesn't seem to be a moral imperative in the other rules. They're basically facts of life that we have to learn eventually. No matter what society we would live in, we would have to adjust to the reality of the human situation. Let's take them one by one. I'll leave "Life isn't fair" till the end, cause it's the weird one, and you have some good points on that.
#2 "The world expects you to accomplish something before you feel good about it. " That's the simple cause and effect of self-esteem. If you feel like you should be treated like the most important person in the world, yet you haven't done anything significant to justify that, then it's not self-esteem it's self-deception. I think that's where a lot of people mistake pride for arrogance. What people normally think of as arrogance is unjustified self-esteem. Pride is justified self-esteem.
#3 "You will not make $60,000 a year out of high school. You won't be a VP w/ a car phone til you earn both." Another statement of fact. Of course, if you don't want $60,000 and a car phone, then I don't see anything wrong with that. But if you do, you have to earn it that's all.
#4 "If you think your teacher is tough wait until you get a boss." Well, it depends on the teacher, but there are less second chances in the workplace then there are in the classroom. Another fact.
#5 "Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity." Been there done that. While it's not the best thing on an academic resume, it helped me survive and get me to a point where I could actually start to think about going to college. I've never relied on the dole, had to make my way from scratch. And I feel the accomplishment of that effort every time I cash a paycheck, every time I look around at the life I've constructed. I know that it's mine, because I earned it and nobody will ever be able to take that feeling away. It's something worth fighting for.
#6 "Parents being boring.." Well, I don't think that necessarily has to be true, but parents should be more level-headed than a child. I think it's really just common sense. And when we're younger we do tend to chafe at the bit to slip the leash so to speak and be able to challenge our parents thereby proving that we're adults. Of course how much is a question of degree and a question of how different parent and child are ideologically.But all this is saying is not to be too quick to judge our parents before we think through the choices they perhaps have had to make in their lives.
#7 "If you mess up, face it and learn from your mistakes." Just a fact of reality. We are all ultimately responsible for our own lives, for the content of our minds, and for the actions we perform. At the end of the day, we only have ourselves to look at in the mirror to be the final judge of who we are and what we have done. There is no one to listen to excuses within the walls of our own mind. Our only option is to try and not make the same mistake twice and try to become better people every day.
#8 "Life has winners and losers" Another fact. But the standards for success of course ultimately rest with yourself. Do you consider yourself a success? Or a failure? Some people fail at their life goals. But I often think that this is because either they're not willing to put in the effort to actually accomplish their dreams, or they set their goals way beyond the realm of what they can expect realistically given their skills and qualities. I think most people have constant opportunities to be a success. Sometimes it means changing your goals, reassessing your motives, and setting new objectives. When I realized that I was not going to be a famous guitarist, or even have a successful music career, my confidence was shattered, yes. But I reassessed my skills, my dreams, and my nature. I set new, more realistic goals, and I now consider myself on the road to a successful and rewarding career. Life has winners and losers, yes, but only in a specific frame of time. As time moves along, those people may find themselves switching places. But it doesn't happen naturally. It of course requires constant effort on the part of losers to become winners and for winners to stay winners.
#9 "No summer breaks, and find yourself on your own time." Just another fact. It's not the business of your employer to nurture your spirit. That's each and every individual person's responsibility. Or your pastor's. Or your family's and loved one's responsibility. Time doesn't stop. We just have to accept it.
#10 "TV is not real life. We have to leave the coffee shop and work sometime" Just a fact of reality. I suppose people who marry rich don't have to. And if by chance they met their benefactor in the coffee shop, then they really might never have to leave, but that would be an exception I think. For the most part, we all have to do something to pull our own weight. Except perhaps in socialist systems where people can actually get away with getting paid for doing nothing.
#11 "Be nice to nerds" I think we agree on that one.
Anyways I don't see what's wrong with any of these sentiments. I fail to see how they "exemplified the failings of our society."
Now, as for the dog-eat-dog mentality in the states, I tend to agree that it's not what I would call an ideal state of humanity. But I don't think that rational selfishness = dog eat dog. I think desperation and panic leads to dog-eat-dog. The desperation is seeded in the conditioning of people to accept only two alternatives to existence. They are told that they are either 1. a sacrificial animal to be consumed by the stronger, or 2. they are a cannibal whose destiny is to consume their fellow humans in order to survive. This is completely false, and the dichotomy is one of misdirection. The third option is that we can of course, work together freely through self-organizing cooperative groups in order to pursue various common goals. In short, working together to mutual advantage. This, not dog-eat-dog, is the very essence and heart of capitalism. People who have choice, are not forced into a violent and desperate struggle over limited resources. People who have choice realize that all values are developed, all resources created by humans. And that only by allowing humans to generate the resources that keep people alive and distribute them to those who desire them will people be free to minimize their suffering and to reap the benefits of that collective and voluntary distribution of labor.
You may have been impressed with Japan's government, which is thoroughly dedicated to socialist protocols, but you also witnessed first-hand the real life consequences of socialist methodology on the education system, the complete lack of local flexibility, the waste of children's creative potential and the mindless drilling of subjects that have been decided to be important for the students rather than allowing them the freedom of personal development and choice. Yes, Japanese social groups are very cohesive. But what happens when people slip through the cracks? "The nail that sticks out gets hammered in." That's an attitude which would be morally incompatible with a society built on respect of individual life. Only in a society where social cohesion is valued above human life, where people are considered expendable, could such a tenet adhere as a social norm. Perhaps, they don't have as much dog-eat-dog, but it make me seriously question which culture is actually more brutal at its heart. Perhaps in free capitalism there are no guarantees, but that also means that there are no guaranteed sacrifices either. People remain free to find the path which is most suitable to them, regardless if it is in the mainstream or not. And as they must reap the consequences of their failures so they may enjoy the full reward of their successes in whatever way and in pursuit of whatever goals they see fit. Especially if that means helping people charitably and ensuring that the community around you is one that will continue to be one that is civil and respectful of human life. But if that is not what one wishes to do with their resources, then none should have the right to force them.
Perfection, is a matter of definition. If the goals that you set for society are unrealistic ones doomed to failure, then yes, such a society will never be possible, and society will never be perfect. But it is only doomed to be so by definition. If your definition of perfection is something realistically attainable, then a perfect society is possible. I would argue that any definition of an ideal society which is impossible, is not worthy of being set as an ideal mainly due to the fact that it makes no sense to strive for something which is impossible to attain. I think the key involves looking at acceptable bounds of the oscillation of variables rather then at predetermined fixed values. Once again, free capitalism allows people to oscillate according to their personal beliefs with the only bounds on that variability being other people's freedom to do the same. The fact that it does not fix the values of the society to be constructed allows it to optimize itself in accordance with the cumulative effect of millions of individual dreams. Like any self-forming autonomous chaotic system, life and society should be chaotic systems allowed to breath, expand and contract naturally. The more rules and barriers and commandments affixed to society, the more and more people who are caught under the blade. I will always be an advocate of freedom as the best policy.
I'm sorry I've rambled on so long, lol, but finally I think I can talk about the "Life isn't fair" one. I agree that the sentiment there is pretty cynical. But it is a cynicism bound to reality. No matter how attainable or unattainable our ideal worlds may be, the fact is that none of us live in that ideal system. Because of the incongruence between our ideals and the present state of the world, we have to accept that things will happen which will rankle our nerves and frustrate our concept of proper behavior. Things which seem to be unjust from our relative points of view will happen in a world that does not prescribe to a person's sense of justice. No matter what world we live in, there will be acts of injustice which will stoke our indignation. For instance, if the world was completely in line with a socialist methodology, I'm sure socialists would see much less injustice, and I would see more. Whereas if we were living in a truly capitalist society, I would see less injustice but they would invariably see more. Life isn't fair in that the life in our world is not bound to our expectations of it. One person may have to work harder to get to the same place as another. One may have to be smarter to survive at the same level as another. These are unfortunate if unavoidable facts of our existence. The reward is not something guaranteed, because the rewards of effort and devotion to a goal are not things which are dispersed by a conscious agent. The reward is the use of what has been created. The reward is continued sustenance and the enjoyment of life's pursuits. But it is in our chemistry, I suppose, to think of life as having a conscious agent, a God, a corporation, the big cheese, whatever you like. Somebody who dispenses the rewards of life's effort. And I think this is where we get the idea of life not being fair. Because we think that it should be obvious to the Great Dispenser in the Sky that two people should get equal rewards for equal effort. But this isn't always how it works out. More often than not, our rewards equal the best deal we can get for our effort. And the dispenser is not a mysterious agent in the sky, or a vague concept of the Big Boss, the dispenser is the shopkeeper down the street, or the HR director of your company for whom you agree to work and with whom you reach an agreement for a certain wage.
I hope that I've adequately addressed your concerns. I didn't really expect to see any objections with the e-mail. But I'd be interested in hearing the rest of your ideas on the matter.
T: Reading through the list again, taking away the first (I haven't read all your mail yet, so we'll save that one for later here too), you're right, they are basic facts of life, and the youth in high school today (saying nothing about when we were that age) needs to hear that things aren't all happy with flowers and roses when they have to get a job. The key word in that sentence, though, was ALL. Not EVERYTHING is happy and good, but there are a lot of amazing things in the world. Gates wasn't saying that life is tough as nails and that we should suck it up, but I wondered when I read his list how much 'tough talk' perpetuates bad opinions on life. Don't get me wrong, like I said, tough talk is needed, but even headed tough talk is important. Telling a kid "you're going to have to get a job" and not explaining that finding one the kid likes is not only a good idea, but possible, is a damaging thing. Multiply that by the number of teenagers we have in our culture and you get an apathetic generation. I don't think we disagree here, though I'll throw in an example because we're both linguists here, and you might find it interesting. Have you noticed that words have been losing meaning? Not changing meaning, but actually losing it? I saw a commercial the other day for a woman's shaver called Venus that asked the viewer "What type of goddess are you?" Really? Does the word goddess no longer refer to the extensive (and vastly important) meaning it bore half a century ago? Words are used in advertising for affect, not for their actual sense, and I'm rather disturbed. And these aren't simple words like tree or green, but culturally and historically necessary words. Redeem is now something you do when you've won a contest and you want to give your ticket it for a prize. A lot of these examples that I have are religious, and you may have a different take there, but I'm sure there are some other examples there too.
Alright, sorry about that rant, back to your email: I agree on your take of dog-eat-dog, and I agree on your opinion of what capitalism should be. But the American culture is not purely capitalism. I'm not up on political philosophy, so please forgive me bumbling around the definition, but it seems that the commercialism in American has grown to such a height that it has become the culture's source of morality. Where do we get our views of right and wrong? Religion is either seen as the work of the violent or the stupid in our country (thanks Bush for helping Christians out there). Hyper-individualism focuses oneself on oneself alone, and a blatant disregard for the past (or, rather, looking upon the new as good and past as bad) casts out any lessons learned from those who have lived before us. Capitalism, in my opinion, has a few things to tweak out, but it requires a rather firm morality system to really get off the ground. American capitalism has Dancing with the Stars and Sport stars with Steroids.
Forcing opinions, I will whole-heartedly agree, is wrong, but human beings need guidance. Whether that comes in the form of an old man who went through two world wars or an organization that tries to instruct those in the way of goods found in almost all cultures, people need something. Most people, when it comes down to it, can't get to a place where, left to themselves, they'll develop well and healthily. Kids need good parents or at least a good role model. Forming (and formed) governments need this too. Interestingly enough, this is mirrored in nature as well: plants need nurture from a stronger source (i.e. the sun) just as us humans do.
You wrote: "I think the key involves looking at acceptable bounds of the oscillation of variables rather then at predetermined fixed values." and I can't agree more. When making tall buildings above fault lines, allow for that building to sway and shift; rigid structures will fall down. Those bounds being set still calls for something though: what sets them? And who teaches them to the younger generations? Left up to general people who toil their lives away doing something OTHER than teaching and thinking about teaching morals, very few of the ideas will get through. Thus the reason for religion, or at least schooling. Unfortunately both have a rather bad track record of actually coming through, but still the essence of religion and education is what I'm talking about, not the practice (which can always be worked upon).
Fairness, to me, is the interesting point in all of this. Fairness, and connected with it an image of what is good and what is not, is the key. We feel a requirement of the world to be fair, and yet it isn't. Why? Why should we expect something we all know well and good to be something horribly unfair to be completely against its nature? I think my opinion is because, really, it is fair, but that we're not looking at the big picture. Humans are biological beings regardless of what anyone says about us, and I think we confuse our sense of fairness in spiritual affairs for fairness in biological affairs. Really I think that's one of the main problems with things. Doing good things are innately good and we understand this not because of some...well, what? A want to feel safe? Why should we want to feel safe? Maybe we think we should be dealt with fairly because we want to have enough to be self-sufficient. But why do we need to be self-sufficient? To survive? Why, in the end, is survival important? It's an instinct and we listen to it, but instinct is a suggestion, not a demand. We don't have to listen to it, but everyone, save for those who are seriously ill, listens to the will to live. To get back on track, I think we want things to be fair in the biological world because things are innately fair in the spiritual. You know the Christian story, as well as most other religions I can think of for that matter, and in 99% of them humans are treated fairly. If you leave the path, you left the path, and it's the abyss for you. If you screw up being a human, you're a bug. And even if all these are simply stories, still, where does this sense of fairness come from?
Well, gotta get my head warmed up for future debates, but it's always good hearing an opinion other than mine. I've been reading a bit of CS Lewis lately (I'm sure you're a rather big fan of him), and every page I stop and think "What would [you] say to this one?" This email, though, I've mainly agreed with you.
American Antitheist: I have to agree that telling a kid to just "get a job" as in any job could be misinterpreted. Of course a kid should aim for a job that they like, and I agree they should be encouraged to work towards that goal. I think that the point was more that they can't expect to walk into a job they like at first. Most of the time, we have to work our way up to the job we actually want. And that means starting in the fast food restaurant sometimes. Hell, I'll never go back to fast food again if I can help it. But if I found that there was nothing open to me in a field I desired, then I would be back in a second. The reason being that I will do whatever it takes to support my life and the life of those I love. And the reality of the necessities of life often outweigh our desires. As much as I think that I deserve a position of privilege, if such an opportunity doesn't exist, then I must use what opportunities are available to do the best I can.
I agree that some words are losing meaning. Although it's hard to say whether that is a good or bad thing. In general, the evolution of meaning in language would seem to be a natural process, not unlike biological evolution. Words and meanings acquire significance or lose it based on the values of the period and the social and intellectual pressures of language use. The trivialization of words like "goddess" is an example of how the once intensely significant concept of polytheistic religions with female deities or monotheistic matriarchal religions have faded from relevance in the mainstream culture. The words linger in our vocabulary, but the significance is something which has eroded. I would argue that the erosion is due to a lack of relevance in modern society. Almost noone believes in goddesses anymore. And, although I would need to do a corpus study to verify this, I would think that the modern usage of the term is more in line with a label characterizing an ideal state of womanhood, more than a theological distinction. If that is indeed the case, then the ad's usage is perhaps more in line with the actual modern intent of the word than as a reference to spiritual phenomenon.
Redeem would be another candidate for an interesting corpus study. How do we actually use the word nowadays? Is it really more common in references to prizes, or the process of atonement for moral transgressions? I don't honestly know. But it is an interesting question nonetheless.
I also agree with your observation that capitalism needs a moral basis to get it off the ground, so to speak. Actually, Ayn Rand argued that the reason the American system has steadily been collapsing into socialism has been because although the founding fathers created a revolutionary new governmental system with an inherent political philosophy, there was no explicit moral system which was consistent with the philosophy implicit in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and consequently with Capitalism in general. The ethics of her philosophy of objectivism form a pretty strong argument for the shape of a capitalist ethics. If you haven't had a chance to read her arguments, I highly recommend them. Even if you don't agree, I would be interested to see where you object. Of course, I'll warn you, she's an atheist like me and she unilaterally rejects altruism as a moral ideal.
On the issue of people needing moral guidance, I will also agree. People need a framework, a rationally coherent model of not only what is right and wrong, but why something is right or why something is wrong. We need something more than a threat of punishment to choose the moral course. We need rational arguments to provide an explanation of why something is wrong, objectively. Objectivism would hold that "every is implies an ought." And I'm inclined to agree.
The problem with religion and education both, is that neither has tried to help people understand the why of morality, only the what. Both hold fast to the notion that indoctrination = moral behavior. Whereas this is simply just not true. If the only reason someone has to be moral is that it is a mandate from God or society, then there will inevitably be situations where that person feels that it is acceptable to act in an immoral way to achieve some short term objective. If somebody knows why something is wrong, then they will rebel against the very notion of breaching the moral precept in question and furthermore they will actively work to anticipate such situations so that they can avoid placing themselves in moral jeopardy. That is why rational ethics will always be stronger than ones which work primarily from a punishment motive.
I agree that the perception of life not being fair is due to a misconception of what fairness entails. I agree that most people have a skewed expectation of fairness which usually works out to saying "things should be good for me because I'm me and not because of anything I've done in particular." I will take exception though to the notion that Bible stories, or the religious texts of any religion have any bearing on modern ethics at all. We can, of course, select the nice bits from those texts. However, that means that we are using a morality outside of the literal depiction of religion to select those stories which conform to our independent sense of morality. If we are using a system independent of the literal teachings of religion to find moral justifications of our belief system, then we cannot be truly said to be basing our morality on religion. We are instead using our religion, selectively, to justify our morality. Where that morality then comes from is a matter of debate. I don't think that it comes innately, but I do think it is a function of values encoded in our society. Of course that is a recursive process, for who encodes values into our society if not for ourselves, and the institutions we erect. Ultimately that comes down to the ideas that were accepted in the generations before and the philosophers that the founders of those institutions adhered to.
A very pressing question that a friend recently brought up and to which I cannot find a satisfactory answer is, "Since all religious texts of the big 3 monotheistic religions are generally xenophobic, resistant to change and promote the use of violence against non-believers, why is it that the Christian religion evolved to be more permissive of dissent and to be more "selective" while Islam has instead retained it's non-selective literal interpretation?"
I used to more a fan of C.S. Lewis than I can currently find myself capable. After being exposed to Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and listening to Youtube interviews with the author, I've come to have a slightly different perspective of Lewis's work. If anything, I find myself more on the side of Milton than ever. "Better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven." And as I think more and more about religion in general and moral issues specifically, I could honestly say that even were I to face some God after death, I think I would disown him for the insanity of his demands on the beings he created.
First of all, here's the e-mail that got the discussion started:
Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good,politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up,it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
If you agree, pass it on.
If you can read this - Thank a teacher!
And now the discussion:
T: Thanks for the Bill Gates thingie-majig, though, as I'm sure you might have assumed, I disagree with the man on principle. Some of the things he said were good, and things that people, especially in our cry-me-a-river-and-you-get-a-cookie society, need to hear (such as "it's not your parent's fault" and "be nice to nerds"). I felt, though, that those eleven things really exemplified the failings of our society. The American culture, at least as it is rather apparent on the east coast, is very dog-eat-dog, do it yourself or else you'll lose, and shut up and take it. In Japan everyone was pretty hyper-society and many Japanese think of others, and not just their family, when making decisions. You'll probably have more input here, since you're living closer to the culture than any of us did, though it seemed that, in general, Japanese thought more about the society around them than Americans do. It was an interesting thing to see for me, because it was a system that wasn't American individualism and it worked. Not perfectly, but, then again, how can a human system be perfect.
Anyway, I wanted to see what your argument is on one of the arguments I had for the first things Gates said on the list (or, at least, the first thing listed): Life isn't fair. First of all, saying 'life" is generally saying "American culture." I personally think he's also saying "the way things are going to be for everyone," but that's a different story. The thing about this argument that I never understood is how does anyone know about fairness if there isn't anything that set that fairness. I'm sure you've heard the argument, as it's a rather standard one for the religious-minded, that if there wasn't a God to set down what things are fair, or good, for that matter, then we wouldn't have this overwhelming sense that things really should be fair. As much as people are told that life isn't fair, no matter how many times that line is spoken, people don't stop feeling like things ought to be.
So, I thought I'd ask your opinion and jump off from there, if you wouldn't mind starting another discussion.
American Antitheist: Aside from the "Life isn't fair" one, I would have to say that they're just statements of reality. There doesn't seem to be a moral imperative in the other rules. They're basically facts of life that we have to learn eventually. No matter what society we would live in, we would have to adjust to the reality of the human situation. Let's take them one by one. I'll leave "Life isn't fair" till the end, cause it's the weird one, and you have some good points on that.
#2 "The world expects you to accomplish something before you feel good about it. " That's the simple cause and effect of self-esteem. If you feel like you should be treated like the most important person in the world, yet you haven't done anything significant to justify that, then it's not self-esteem it's self-deception. I think that's where a lot of people mistake pride for arrogance. What people normally think of as arrogance is unjustified self-esteem. Pride is justified self-esteem.
#3 "You will not make $60,000 a year out of high school. You won't be a VP w/ a car phone til you earn both." Another statement of fact. Of course, if you don't want $60,000 and a car phone, then I don't see anything wrong with that. But if you do, you have to earn it that's all.
#4 "If you think your teacher is tough wait until you get a boss." Well, it depends on the teacher, but there are less second chances in the workplace then there are in the classroom. Another fact.
#5 "Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity." Been there done that. While it's not the best thing on an academic resume, it helped me survive and get me to a point where I could actually start to think about going to college. I've never relied on the dole, had to make my way from scratch. And I feel the accomplishment of that effort every time I cash a paycheck, every time I look around at the life I've constructed. I know that it's mine, because I earned it and nobody will ever be able to take that feeling away. It's something worth fighting for.
#6 "Parents being boring.." Well, I don't think that necessarily has to be true, but parents should be more level-headed than a child. I think it's really just common sense. And when we're younger we do tend to chafe at the bit to slip the leash so to speak and be able to challenge our parents thereby proving that we're adults. Of course how much is a question of degree and a question of how different parent and child are ideologically.But all this is saying is not to be too quick to judge our parents before we think through the choices they perhaps have had to make in their lives.
#7 "If you mess up, face it and learn from your mistakes." Just a fact of reality. We are all ultimately responsible for our own lives, for the content of our minds, and for the actions we perform. At the end of the day, we only have ourselves to look at in the mirror to be the final judge of who we are and what we have done. There is no one to listen to excuses within the walls of our own mind. Our only option is to try and not make the same mistake twice and try to become better people every day.
#8 "Life has winners and losers" Another fact. But the standards for success of course ultimately rest with yourself. Do you consider yourself a success? Or a failure? Some people fail at their life goals. But I often think that this is because either they're not willing to put in the effort to actually accomplish their dreams, or they set their goals way beyond the realm of what they can expect realistically given their skills and qualities. I think most people have constant opportunities to be a success. Sometimes it means changing your goals, reassessing your motives, and setting new objectives. When I realized that I was not going to be a famous guitarist, or even have a successful music career, my confidence was shattered, yes. But I reassessed my skills, my dreams, and my nature. I set new, more realistic goals, and I now consider myself on the road to a successful and rewarding career. Life has winners and losers, yes, but only in a specific frame of time. As time moves along, those people may find themselves switching places. But it doesn't happen naturally. It of course requires constant effort on the part of losers to become winners and for winners to stay winners.
#9 "No summer breaks, and find yourself on your own time." Just another fact. It's not the business of your employer to nurture your spirit. That's each and every individual person's responsibility. Or your pastor's. Or your family's and loved one's responsibility. Time doesn't stop. We just have to accept it.
#10 "TV is not real life. We have to leave the coffee shop and work sometime" Just a fact of reality. I suppose people who marry rich don't have to. And if by chance they met their benefactor in the coffee shop, then they really might never have to leave, but that would be an exception I think. For the most part, we all have to do something to pull our own weight. Except perhaps in socialist systems where people can actually get away with getting paid for doing nothing.
#11 "Be nice to nerds" I think we agree on that one.
Anyways I don't see what's wrong with any of these sentiments. I fail to see how they "exemplified the failings of our society."
Now, as for the dog-eat-dog mentality in the states, I tend to agree that it's not what I would call an ideal state of humanity. But I don't think that rational selfishness = dog eat dog. I think desperation and panic leads to dog-eat-dog. The desperation is seeded in the conditioning of people to accept only two alternatives to existence. They are told that they are either 1. a sacrificial animal to be consumed by the stronger, or 2. they are a cannibal whose destiny is to consume their fellow humans in order to survive. This is completely false, and the dichotomy is one of misdirection. The third option is that we can of course, work together freely through self-organizing cooperative groups in order to pursue various common goals. In short, working together to mutual advantage. This, not dog-eat-dog, is the very essence and heart of capitalism. People who have choice, are not forced into a violent and desperate struggle over limited resources. People who have choice realize that all values are developed, all resources created by humans. And that only by allowing humans to generate the resources that keep people alive and distribute them to those who desire them will people be free to minimize their suffering and to reap the benefits of that collective and voluntary distribution of labor.
You may have been impressed with Japan's government, which is thoroughly dedicated to socialist protocols, but you also witnessed first-hand the real life consequences of socialist methodology on the education system, the complete lack of local flexibility, the waste of children's creative potential and the mindless drilling of subjects that have been decided to be important for the students rather than allowing them the freedom of personal development and choice. Yes, Japanese social groups are very cohesive. But what happens when people slip through the cracks? "The nail that sticks out gets hammered in." That's an attitude which would be morally incompatible with a society built on respect of individual life. Only in a society where social cohesion is valued above human life, where people are considered expendable, could such a tenet adhere as a social norm. Perhaps, they don't have as much dog-eat-dog, but it make me seriously question which culture is actually more brutal at its heart. Perhaps in free capitalism there are no guarantees, but that also means that there are no guaranteed sacrifices either. People remain free to find the path which is most suitable to them, regardless if it is in the mainstream or not. And as they must reap the consequences of their failures so they may enjoy the full reward of their successes in whatever way and in pursuit of whatever goals they see fit. Especially if that means helping people charitably and ensuring that the community around you is one that will continue to be one that is civil and respectful of human life. But if that is not what one wishes to do with their resources, then none should have the right to force them.
Perfection, is a matter of definition. If the goals that you set for society are unrealistic ones doomed to failure, then yes, such a society will never be possible, and society will never be perfect. But it is only doomed to be so by definition. If your definition of perfection is something realistically attainable, then a perfect society is possible. I would argue that any definition of an ideal society which is impossible, is not worthy of being set as an ideal mainly due to the fact that it makes no sense to strive for something which is impossible to attain. I think the key involves looking at acceptable bounds of the oscillation of variables rather then at predetermined fixed values. Once again, free capitalism allows people to oscillate according to their personal beliefs with the only bounds on that variability being other people's freedom to do the same. The fact that it does not fix the values of the society to be constructed allows it to optimize itself in accordance with the cumulative effect of millions of individual dreams. Like any self-forming autonomous chaotic system, life and society should be chaotic systems allowed to breath, expand and contract naturally. The more rules and barriers and commandments affixed to society, the more and more people who are caught under the blade. I will always be an advocate of freedom as the best policy.
I'm sorry I've rambled on so long, lol, but finally I think I can talk about the "Life isn't fair" one. I agree that the sentiment there is pretty cynical. But it is a cynicism bound to reality. No matter how attainable or unattainable our ideal worlds may be, the fact is that none of us live in that ideal system. Because of the incongruence between our ideals and the present state of the world, we have to accept that things will happen which will rankle our nerves and frustrate our concept of proper behavior. Things which seem to be unjust from our relative points of view will happen in a world that does not prescribe to a person's sense of justice. No matter what world we live in, there will be acts of injustice which will stoke our indignation. For instance, if the world was completely in line with a socialist methodology, I'm sure socialists would see much less injustice, and I would see more. Whereas if we were living in a truly capitalist society, I would see less injustice but they would invariably see more. Life isn't fair in that the life in our world is not bound to our expectations of it. One person may have to work harder to get to the same place as another. One may have to be smarter to survive at the same level as another. These are unfortunate if unavoidable facts of our existence. The reward is not something guaranteed, because the rewards of effort and devotion to a goal are not things which are dispersed by a conscious agent. The reward is the use of what has been created. The reward is continued sustenance and the enjoyment of life's pursuits. But it is in our chemistry, I suppose, to think of life as having a conscious agent, a God, a corporation, the big cheese, whatever you like. Somebody who dispenses the rewards of life's effort. And I think this is where we get the idea of life not being fair. Because we think that it should be obvious to the Great Dispenser in the Sky that two people should get equal rewards for equal effort. But this isn't always how it works out. More often than not, our rewards equal the best deal we can get for our effort. And the dispenser is not a mysterious agent in the sky, or a vague concept of the Big Boss, the dispenser is the shopkeeper down the street, or the HR director of your company for whom you agree to work and with whom you reach an agreement for a certain wage.
I hope that I've adequately addressed your concerns. I didn't really expect to see any objections with the e-mail. But I'd be interested in hearing the rest of your ideas on the matter.
T: Reading through the list again, taking away the first (I haven't read all your mail yet, so we'll save that one for later here too), you're right, they are basic facts of life, and the youth in high school today (saying nothing about when we were that age) needs to hear that things aren't all happy with flowers and roses when they have to get a job. The key word in that sentence, though, was ALL. Not EVERYTHING is happy and good, but there are a lot of amazing things in the world. Gates wasn't saying that life is tough as nails and that we should suck it up, but I wondered when I read his list how much 'tough talk' perpetuates bad opinions on life. Don't get me wrong, like I said, tough talk is needed, but even headed tough talk is important. Telling a kid "you're going to have to get a job" and not explaining that finding one the kid likes is not only a good idea, but possible, is a damaging thing. Multiply that by the number of teenagers we have in our culture and you get an apathetic generation. I don't think we disagree here, though I'll throw in an example because we're both linguists here, and you might find it interesting. Have you noticed that words have been losing meaning? Not changing meaning, but actually losing it? I saw a commercial the other day for a woman's shaver called Venus that asked the viewer "What type of goddess are you?" Really? Does the word goddess no longer refer to the extensive (and vastly important) meaning it bore half a century ago? Words are used in advertising for affect, not for their actual sense, and I'm rather disturbed. And these aren't simple words like tree or green, but culturally and historically necessary words. Redeem is now something you do when you've won a contest and you want to give your ticket it for a prize. A lot of these examples that I have are religious, and you may have a different take there, but I'm sure there are some other examples there too.
Alright, sorry about that rant, back to your email: I agree on your take of dog-eat-dog, and I agree on your opinion of what capitalism should be. But the American culture is not purely capitalism. I'm not up on political philosophy, so please forgive me bumbling around the definition, but it seems that the commercialism in American has grown to such a height that it has become the culture's source of morality. Where do we get our views of right and wrong? Religion is either seen as the work of the violent or the stupid in our country (thanks Bush for helping Christians out there). Hyper-individualism focuses oneself on oneself alone, and a blatant disregard for the past (or, rather, looking upon the new as good and past as bad) casts out any lessons learned from those who have lived before us. Capitalism, in my opinion, has a few things to tweak out, but it requires a rather firm morality system to really get off the ground. American capitalism has Dancing with the Stars and Sport stars with Steroids.
Forcing opinions, I will whole-heartedly agree, is wrong, but human beings need guidance. Whether that comes in the form of an old man who went through two world wars or an organization that tries to instruct those in the way of goods found in almost all cultures, people need something. Most people, when it comes down to it, can't get to a place where, left to themselves, they'll develop well and healthily. Kids need good parents or at least a good role model. Forming (and formed) governments need this too. Interestingly enough, this is mirrored in nature as well: plants need nurture from a stronger source (i.e. the sun) just as us humans do.
You wrote: "I think the key involves looking at acceptable bounds of the oscillation of variables rather then at predetermined fixed values." and I can't agree more. When making tall buildings above fault lines, allow for that building to sway and shift; rigid structures will fall down. Those bounds being set still calls for something though: what sets them? And who teaches them to the younger generations? Left up to general people who toil their lives away doing something OTHER than teaching and thinking about teaching morals, very few of the ideas will get through. Thus the reason for religion, or at least schooling. Unfortunately both have a rather bad track record of actually coming through, but still the essence of religion and education is what I'm talking about, not the practice (which can always be worked upon).
Fairness, to me, is the interesting point in all of this. Fairness, and connected with it an image of what is good and what is not, is the key. We feel a requirement of the world to be fair, and yet it isn't. Why? Why should we expect something we all know well and good to be something horribly unfair to be completely against its nature? I think my opinion is because, really, it is fair, but that we're not looking at the big picture. Humans are biological beings regardless of what anyone says about us, and I think we confuse our sense of fairness in spiritual affairs for fairness in biological affairs. Really I think that's one of the main problems with things. Doing good things are innately good and we understand this not because of some...well, what? A want to feel safe? Why should we want to feel safe? Maybe we think we should be dealt with fairly because we want to have enough to be self-sufficient. But why do we need to be self-sufficient? To survive? Why, in the end, is survival important? It's an instinct and we listen to it, but instinct is a suggestion, not a demand. We don't have to listen to it, but everyone, save for those who are seriously ill, listens to the will to live. To get back on track, I think we want things to be fair in the biological world because things are innately fair in the spiritual. You know the Christian story, as well as most other religions I can think of for that matter, and in 99% of them humans are treated fairly. If you leave the path, you left the path, and it's the abyss for you. If you screw up being a human, you're a bug. And even if all these are simply stories, still, where does this sense of fairness come from?
Well, gotta get my head warmed up for future debates, but it's always good hearing an opinion other than mine. I've been reading a bit of CS Lewis lately (I'm sure you're a rather big fan of him), and every page I stop and think "What would [you] say to this one?" This email, though, I've mainly agreed with you.
American Antitheist: I have to agree that telling a kid to just "get a job" as in any job could be misinterpreted. Of course a kid should aim for a job that they like, and I agree they should be encouraged to work towards that goal. I think that the point was more that they can't expect to walk into a job they like at first. Most of the time, we have to work our way up to the job we actually want. And that means starting in the fast food restaurant sometimes. Hell, I'll never go back to fast food again if I can help it. But if I found that there was nothing open to me in a field I desired, then I would be back in a second. The reason being that I will do whatever it takes to support my life and the life of those I love. And the reality of the necessities of life often outweigh our desires. As much as I think that I deserve a position of privilege, if such an opportunity doesn't exist, then I must use what opportunities are available to do the best I can.
I agree that some words are losing meaning. Although it's hard to say whether that is a good or bad thing. In general, the evolution of meaning in language would seem to be a natural process, not unlike biological evolution. Words and meanings acquire significance or lose it based on the values of the period and the social and intellectual pressures of language use. The trivialization of words like "goddess" is an example of how the once intensely significant concept of polytheistic religions with female deities or monotheistic matriarchal religions have faded from relevance in the mainstream culture. The words linger in our vocabulary, but the significance is something which has eroded. I would argue that the erosion is due to a lack of relevance in modern society. Almost noone believes in goddesses anymore. And, although I would need to do a corpus study to verify this, I would think that the modern usage of the term is more in line with a label characterizing an ideal state of womanhood, more than a theological distinction. If that is indeed the case, then the ad's usage is perhaps more in line with the actual modern intent of the word than as a reference to spiritual phenomenon.
Redeem would be another candidate for an interesting corpus study. How do we actually use the word nowadays? Is it really more common in references to prizes, or the process of atonement for moral transgressions? I don't honestly know. But it is an interesting question nonetheless.
I also agree with your observation that capitalism needs a moral basis to get it off the ground, so to speak. Actually, Ayn Rand argued that the reason the American system has steadily been collapsing into socialism has been because although the founding fathers created a revolutionary new governmental system with an inherent political philosophy, there was no explicit moral system which was consistent with the philosophy implicit in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and consequently with Capitalism in general. The ethics of her philosophy of objectivism form a pretty strong argument for the shape of a capitalist ethics. If you haven't had a chance to read her arguments, I highly recommend them. Even if you don't agree, I would be interested to see where you object. Of course, I'll warn you, she's an atheist like me and she unilaterally rejects altruism as a moral ideal.
On the issue of people needing moral guidance, I will also agree. People need a framework, a rationally coherent model of not only what is right and wrong, but why something is right or why something is wrong. We need something more than a threat of punishment to choose the moral course. We need rational arguments to provide an explanation of why something is wrong, objectively. Objectivism would hold that "every is implies an ought." And I'm inclined to agree.
The problem with religion and education both, is that neither has tried to help people understand the why of morality, only the what. Both hold fast to the notion that indoctrination = moral behavior. Whereas this is simply just not true. If the only reason someone has to be moral is that it is a mandate from God or society, then there will inevitably be situations where that person feels that it is acceptable to act in an immoral way to achieve some short term objective. If somebody knows why something is wrong, then they will rebel against the very notion of breaching the moral precept in question and furthermore they will actively work to anticipate such situations so that they can avoid placing themselves in moral jeopardy. That is why rational ethics will always be stronger than ones which work primarily from a punishment motive.
I agree that the perception of life not being fair is due to a misconception of what fairness entails. I agree that most people have a skewed expectation of fairness which usually works out to saying "things should be good for me because I'm me and not because of anything I've done in particular." I will take exception though to the notion that Bible stories, or the religious texts of any religion have any bearing on modern ethics at all. We can, of course, select the nice bits from those texts. However, that means that we are using a morality outside of the literal depiction of religion to select those stories which conform to our independent sense of morality. If we are using a system independent of the literal teachings of religion to find moral justifications of our belief system, then we cannot be truly said to be basing our morality on religion. We are instead using our religion, selectively, to justify our morality. Where that morality then comes from is a matter of debate. I don't think that it comes innately, but I do think it is a function of values encoded in our society. Of course that is a recursive process, for who encodes values into our society if not for ourselves, and the institutions we erect. Ultimately that comes down to the ideas that were accepted in the generations before and the philosophers that the founders of those institutions adhered to.
A very pressing question that a friend recently brought up and to which I cannot find a satisfactory answer is, "Since all religious texts of the big 3 monotheistic religions are generally xenophobic, resistant to change and promote the use of violence against non-believers, why is it that the Christian religion evolved to be more permissive of dissent and to be more "selective" while Islam has instead retained it's non-selective literal interpretation?"
I used to more a fan of C.S. Lewis than I can currently find myself capable. After being exposed to Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and listening to Youtube interviews with the author, I've come to have a slightly different perspective of Lewis's work. If anything, I find myself more on the side of Milton than ever. "Better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven." And as I think more and more about religion in general and moral issues specifically, I could honestly say that even were I to face some God after death, I think I would disown him for the insanity of his demands on the beings he created.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
A Brief History of Life on Earth
This is a fascinating video I found. The narration is by Carl Sagan from his old series "Cosmos". The video was re-edited by Cyraside. It's a short synopsis of the entire history of life, from the first molecules to the quest for space. I hope you enjoy it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kOLIHi9pTY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kOLIHi9pTY
Friday, June 6, 2008
Will You Spill the Blood of those You Love?
I was really moved when I saw this. Any religion, any culture, which casts a blind eye on this behavior or even worse condones it cannot be considered a peaceful one by any stretch of the imagination. You would seriously need to completely turn on end what it is you consider right and wrong. You would have to be worshiping death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KASoTdii9c
For more information on this issue, I'd like to refer you to an informative article over at National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KASoTdii9c
For more information on this issue, I'd like to refer you to an informative article over at National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Scientology: The Devil Next Door
Here's an interesting and informative video on the new-age fanatical religion founded by American SF writer L. Ron Hubbard. I also highly recommend Thunderfoot's entire, Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? series.
Here's the link to the Scientology video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuHF_br-DBs
And here is Thunderfoot's proposed battle plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eNyBrQUKs
And here is a justification of Thunderfoot's Scientology = Nazi analogy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYG5ayrd040
Here's the link to the Scientology video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuHF_br-DBs
And here is Thunderfoot's proposed battle plan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6eNyBrQUKs
And here is a justification of Thunderfoot's Scientology = Nazi analogy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYG5ayrd040
Will You Let Your School Murder Your Child's Mind?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24761899/
This is truly terrifying. What are these teachers thinking? What are the parents thinking? Why are these teachers still working? They should be fired for child abuse. School is not to indoctrinate our children with religious propaganda. Even worse, if they come away from these classes believing in creationism, believing that the world is less than 10,000 years old...then they are basically being handicapped from any career in the sciences.
Scientists cannot afford to accept arbitrary judgments at face value. And by saying that there is even a shred of respectability to the ideas of creationists, then those teachers are gutting their students' ability to make valid scientific judgments. There is no proof of ID. There is no proof of creationism. Teaching it as part of a science course flies in the face of everything that science is about.
Teachers have a responsibility to teach children how to reason critically. It is a skill which is essential to negotiating one's way through life. Without it, children are malleable, controllable, programmable creatures with no notion of what ideas are worth accepting and which are worth rejecting. Well...I guess that makes it pretty easy to see what the creationists want. They don't want truth, religious or otherwise. They want a world of slaves.
Fight this! If you are aware of this going on at your children's schools, fight it or face the reality that your child is being set up for a blue collar job in a propaganda state. Go to the school board! Go to the newspaper! Scream bloody murder until these irresponsible and vicious abusers of children's minds are kicked out of academia and back into the pulpits where they belong. After all it's your child's future. Are you willing to throw it away for the sake of whim and superstition?
This is truly terrifying. What are these teachers thinking? What are the parents thinking? Why are these teachers still working? They should be fired for child abuse. School is not to indoctrinate our children with religious propaganda. Even worse, if they come away from these classes believing in creationism, believing that the world is less than 10,000 years old...then they are basically being handicapped from any career in the sciences.
Scientists cannot afford to accept arbitrary judgments at face value. And by saying that there is even a shred of respectability to the ideas of creationists, then those teachers are gutting their students' ability to make valid scientific judgments. There is no proof of ID. There is no proof of creationism. Teaching it as part of a science course flies in the face of everything that science is about.
Teachers have a responsibility to teach children how to reason critically. It is a skill which is essential to negotiating one's way through life. Without it, children are malleable, controllable, programmable creatures with no notion of what ideas are worth accepting and which are worth rejecting. Well...I guess that makes it pretty easy to see what the creationists want. They don't want truth, religious or otherwise. They want a world of slaves.
Fight this! If you are aware of this going on at your children's schools, fight it or face the reality that your child is being set up for a blue collar job in a propaganda state. Go to the school board! Go to the newspaper! Scream bloody murder until these irresponsible and vicious abusers of children's minds are kicked out of academia and back into the pulpits where they belong. After all it's your child's future. Are you willing to throw it away for the sake of whim and superstition?
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Ascension's Gate: Parts I and II
I've been playing around with video editing lately and decided to try my hand at making a video based on a prose-poem I wrote some time ago. This is my first Youtube video so check it out and let me know what you think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI6sFJ2qrMc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI6sFJ2qrMc
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
This is John Galt Speaking...
This is a 13-parter, so I can't embed all the clips here. But I seriously recommend that you at least look at part 1 and if you like, go check out the others.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
An Illustration of a Problem and the Answer
It's fascinating how many Christians cannot defend the issue when their faith is assaulted. Perhaps, recognizing that they haven't got a leg to stand in, they instantly revert to ad hominem attacks. Childish really. But not amusing, because this is exactly the kind of behavior which is tolerated far too much world-wide.
What follows is a comment that I left on the MSN forums in response to this question: "Do you believe in spiritual apparitions?" It was a forum topic associated with this news item:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24454559/
My initial comment and Mr. Lawrence's "rebuttal" and my response are presented for your entertainment. I feel this is the appropriate way to respond to anyone of this character. Enjoy...
I have absolutely no problem with Christian demagogues spouting their laughable madness from every rooftop. But they should be prepared to be laughed at for the ridiculously ignorant louts they are. My suggestion is not that you be "shut up" so to speak. I think that the proper response to such a blatant and willfull ignorance as yours and your like is ridicule. Something which I will be glad to heap on anyone so moronic as to propose that the vast litany of simply preposterous claims held in the Bible is the ultimate truth.
And the reason I care is because all the believers of this farce of a creed are making claims to truth, claims that they seek to force on the rest of us with political power. And the standard of their belief is not evidence but the mouldy scribbles of some bronze age tribal leaders. The bible couldn't even get pi right. How could it have anything revealing to say about the universe? And yet these proponents of mindless devotion to an anachronistic faith would seek to influence the lives and decisions of every living man and woman on this earth.
Whether they be Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Protestants, or even Scientologists, the main principle of faith is to believe without thinking. And the result when that is married to political power is evident whenever we look at news from the Middle East or listen to the rantings of psychopaths like Falwell or Graham or Robertson.
Sure, say what you like. Believe what you like. Just be prepared to be laughed at. There is nothing which makes religion more respectable than any other form of discourse. If you say something ridiculous, be prepared to be ridiculed. And there is no religious claim which is not laughable when compared to the vast body of scientific knowledge which we have at our disposal. Religion is as plausible as alchemy or astrology and should be rendered as impotent in the influence of our beliefs as carnival fortune tellers and the horoscopes are today.
My interest is not in changing your mind. I think you would need some serious therapy to do that. My interest is in working away the veneer of impenetrability that religion has built up over the years. It deserves to be as accountable for its propositions as any scientist is accountable for his claims. If a scientist proposes a new idea, he must battle with the entire scientific community, most of whom want to see him fail, in order to win acceptance.
And yet all someone has to do is have the letters "Rev." in front of their name and they can spout racism and fascism with impunity. If they are challenged they cry, "oh, you can't oppress me...it's a matter of faith." Well, faith be damned. If you can't support what you claim to be true then be prepared to be laughed out of the room. It's what you deserve.
What follows is a comment that I left on the MSN forums in response to this question: "Do you believe in spiritual apparitions?" It was a forum topic associated with this news item:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24454559/
My initial comment and Mr. Lawrence's "rebuttal" and my response are presented for your entertainment. I feel this is the appropriate way to respond to anyone of this character. Enjoy...
Message #260
No, I most definitely don't. And it's amazing that people can still be taken in for that kind of madness in this day and age. I mean, what kind of judicial process was undertaken by these so-called "experts" to validate this thing? Did they solemnly meditate until they had some vague amorphous "feeling" that the girl saw the virgin Mary? Or more likely were they lobbied by the local clergy who would love to see a bit more tourism in the area (as in Lourdes) and hope that it may bring a bit more business their way too? Unbelievable. If I went around saying that I had seen Napoleon walking around I would at best be considered a nutcase and at worst locked up. Why? Because it's bonkers. And there is something seriously wrong with anyone who would believe such nonsense. Do us all a favor and get out of the church and get into therapy.
Message #261
wow, AmericanAntitheist, if you have such a problem with people of faith practicing their rights, using their freedom of speech and so on than you should shut up also, you are getting angry with a group of people who DONT CARE what you say about them or let alone what YOU think they should do, If you choose not to believe fine, but seriously we live in a world of diversity, of multiple different races, and faiths, who cares...who cares...move on with your life just as the billions of believer will also without your petty misinterpretations of what you think they believe..you dont understand and by your post you dont care to, so whats the point. your peeing in the wind.
Message #345
In response to Mr. Lawrence:
I have absolutely no problem with Christian demagogues spouting their laughable madness from every rooftop. But they should be prepared to be laughed at for the ridiculously ignorant louts they are. My suggestion is not that you be "shut up" so to speak. I think that the proper response to such a blatant and willfull ignorance as yours and your like is ridicule. Something which I will be glad to heap on anyone so moronic as to propose that the vast litany of simply preposterous claims held in the Bible is the ultimate truth.
And the reason I care is because all the believers of this farce of a creed are making claims to truth, claims that they seek to force on the rest of us with political power. And the standard of their belief is not evidence but the mouldy scribbles of some bronze age tribal leaders. The bible couldn't even get pi right. How could it have anything revealing to say about the universe? And yet these proponents of mindless devotion to an anachronistic faith would seek to influence the lives and decisions of every living man and woman on this earth.
Whether they be Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, Jews, Protestants, or even Scientologists, the main principle of faith is to believe without thinking. And the result when that is married to political power is evident whenever we look at news from the Middle East or listen to the rantings of psychopaths like Falwell or Graham or Robertson.
Sure, say what you like. Believe what you like. Just be prepared to be laughed at. There is nothing which makes religion more respectable than any other form of discourse. If you say something ridiculous, be prepared to be ridiculed. And there is no religious claim which is not laughable when compared to the vast body of scientific knowledge which we have at our disposal. Religion is as plausible as alchemy or astrology and should be rendered as impotent in the influence of our beliefs as carnival fortune tellers and the horoscopes are today.
My interest is not in changing your mind. I think you would need some serious therapy to do that. My interest is in working away the veneer of impenetrability that religion has built up over the years. It deserves to be as accountable for its propositions as any scientist is accountable for his claims. If a scientist proposes a new idea, he must battle with the entire scientific community, most of whom want to see him fail, in order to win acceptance.
And yet all someone has to do is have the letters "Rev." in front of their name and they can spout racism and fascism with impunity. If they are challenged they cry, "oh, you can't oppress me...it's a matter of faith." Well, faith be damned. If you can't support what you claim to be true then be prepared to be laughed out of the room. It's what you deserve.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Yaron Brook Speaking About The Future of Objectivism
This is an interesting video of the President and Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute talking about his view of the future of the philosophy of objectivism.
And here is an interesting interview where he talks about capitalism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIoP7V6U-aQ
And here is an interesting interview where he talks about capitalism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIoP7V6U-aQ
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