As far as longevity and competing systems, I'd add this one to your list: the Catholic church is organized along almost precisely the same lines as the communist party... and it's 17 or 18 centuries old. It's not entirely profit-driven, it's highly authoritarian and centralized, it's highly ideological, etc. So what does that say about which form of government has staying power?!
Of course, we're not particularly capitalist. They say that about 30% of all working Americans work either directly or indirectly for the government or military. I don't know what the figure in Canada, Mexico, or the EU is, but I doubt it's much lower despite their vastly smaller military squanderage.
Strictly speaking, the failure begins with the notion that competition and cooperation are antithetical, that socialism and capitalism are incompatible, that welfare and independence each prevent the other, that sharing and self-interest don't coincide.
For example:
Families are the very epitome of cooperation in Human society -- but you can find hundreds of books and thousands of papers on the subject of intra-familial competition. Siblings compete with each other from the moment they're born, despite simultaneously cooperating. That period where babies wail all night and keep their parents from sleeping? Research has shown that it's quite literally an reflexive behaviour that evolved to allow babies to establish dominance over their parents. Meanwhile, parents begin transferring chores and labour to their children the very moment that they become physically capable of it. And yet no one would question for a moment that parents and their children are cooperative.
Always beware of, and soundly beat the asses of, those who try to create dichotomy where it needn't exist.
Who ever said that Leninism was based on helping others? For that matter, what makes you think that Leninism has anything to do with Marxism?
Leninism is based on the selfishness of the Communist party, and willingness of the people to work very, very hard for the benefit of a party that doesn't need their help. It has zero to do with, say, the welfare state or charity. And you'll note that during the same period, America had welfare, public education, farm subsidies, and a massive military-industrial system that is for all intents and purposes just a massive work-fare program employing over 20% of all working Americans.
Oh, and lets look at the pride of lions again. Notice how all of the female lions work together and share their kills? Or how they leave food for the male lions, who don't even have to hunt? I guess they're engaging in some kind of selfish capitalist behaviour that just LOOKS like a communist society. They probably have a barter system or something that I'm just not seeing. Hey, while you're at it, why not try to claim that ant colonies and bee hives are models of capitalism too!
You get an A for effort, but an F for content. And the professor may suggest that you be placed in the "special" class for retards who fail at basic reasoning.
Consider it this way -- any belief you happen to hold, you presumably hold because you're sure that it's correct. So people who don't hold it are believing something that you believe is incorrect. Doesn't that cast doubt on their intelligence?
It comes down to this: Either
You are correct, in which case those who disagree with you are either stupid, ignorant, or stubborn -- all three of which are reasons to hold someone in contempt and surgically neuter them to prevent the possibility of them breeding.
Or you are NOT correct, in which it doesn't matter what you think because you're a goddam moron. So you might as well be a moron with some gusto and hate those who are smarter than you are for whatever reason you please.
Either way, you can and should despise those who disagree with you. Of course, you can always get around this by changing your views to agree with the other person -- if you have good reason to think that they might be correct. So ultimately, you can always either be correct and despise the incorrect, or be too stupid to held accountable for hating those who are correct. It works out very nicely.
So let me get this straight: you get to save money, AND you don't have waste two hours of your Sunday? It's like a bizarro version of working a part-time time job. Your wealth increases in exchange for not doing unpleasant things and not believing in retarded crap.
Having been raised by religious people, having lived among them for two and a half decades, having spent two decades as one of them, and having studied six millenia of Human history, I know everything I need to know about religion. I've waded knee-deep through the hypocrisy, hatred, violence, bigotry, and general delusional behaviour of theists... and from what I've seen, my personal experiences with religion were far, far more benign than what of the world's population experience (I've never seen anyone beheaded or burned alive, for instance).
No, they ACCEPT natural selection. They would toss that acceptance aside in an instant if they thought it contradicted the bible. They would say the sky was green if someone were to show that the bible claimed it was so.
There's a difference between holding that something is true, and simply not rejecting it. Normal people do the former about scientific truths; YECs do the latter.
Besides, they DO reject natural selection. Natural selection leads as inevitably to the creation of new genuses, orders, and phyla -- new kinds, in their insane biblical terminology -- as it does to new species. So by rejecting the possibility of new "kinds", they're rejecting natural selection, in exactly the same way that someone who rejects the possibility of the Earth moving around the sun is rejecting gravity even though they'll admit the possibility of apples falling towards the ground. Accepting a scientific truth means accepting ALL of the consequences of that scientific truth, not just the ones that don't threaten your faith.
This is why I see ALL theists as enemies of progress. The ones who aren't extremists support the ones who are. Supposedly rational christians support that ones that want science to be stricken from schools. Supposedly peaceful christians support the ones who bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors and pregnant women. Supposedly tolerate muslims support the ones who strap explosives to their chests. Supposedly pacifist Hindus support the ones who kill muslims and blow up mosques. Supposedly peaceful buddhists support the ones who riot and form mobs. Supposedly non-violent Jews support the zionists who want to commit genocide. It just goes on and on, until finally people start to accept that there is NO way to be a truly good person when your life is predicated on belief in stories that -- deep down -- you know are purely fantasy.
(This is the part of the argument where the theist traditionally embarasses him or herself by pretending that Hitler and Stalin weren't religious men themselves -- catholic and russian orthodox respectively -- and that Naziism and Maoism aren't just as based on mythology and fantasy as any other religion; it's a nice try, but atheism still takes the prize for most peaceful and non-violent of all categories of belief in the supernatural).
The sad little article in AiG was nothing more than the same bullshit and lies that theists have always engaged in. They draw the completely artificial line between so-called "macroevolution" (or "up-hill" evolution, as they're calling it here) and "microevolution" (or "down-hill" evolution). This distinction has been disproven and discredited a thousand times over, but they keep making it. They've seen the scientific arguments showing that the distinction isn't real, but they persist -- because absolutely nothing matters to them beyond clinging to their fantasy. Biblical inerrancy really is the crux of their entire belief system. They have no interest in real world data or evidence, except in so far as it can be manipulated and distorted to try and get people to believe in their mythology.
The hilarious irony is that they believe that all of the species of finch could have arisen from just two WITHOUT any new alleles (since new alleles would imply "macroevolution"). But naturally, it's impossible for two finches to have more than four distinct alleles for a gene. For two finches on the Ark to give rise to thousands of distinct species would require much more genetic variation than two finches can carry. See how easy it is to discredit their insanity? If they had even the tiniest shred of real interest in science, they'd be forced to abandon their position immediately. Science is incompatible with dogma, with myth, and most especially with faith.
I don't use the term Darwinism as a pejorative. YEC is not a pejorative, just a way of identifying a particular set of beliefs. A Darwinist as it is mostly used refers to someone who not only believes in a change in allele frequencies in a population over time, but also the idea that all living things share a single common ancestor, and usually also the belief that the first life arose spontaneously solely through natural processes not guided by any intelligence.
You're so mired in your faith that you don't even see it anymore. The entire point of using the term "Darwinist" and "Darwinism" is to try and make the scientific belief in evolution appear as some kind of religious, cult-like following of a man, rather than science. You don't go around calling certain scientists Newtonists, Einsteinists, Planckists, Fermiists, or Hawkingists. There is no theory of "Bohrism" or some monstrous anti-god movement called "Lewisism". Zealots refer to the theory of evolution as "Darwinism" as part of a deliberate attempt to create a dichotomy for Christians between following Jesus and following Darwin.
But it is not true that all their beliefs are solely this.
Of course -- they believe in all kinds of different things that are mentioned in the bible, like a Human surviving inside of a whale's gastrointestinal tract, unicorns, dragons, giants that are half-human/half-angel, etc. One way or the other though, they follow a belief system in which evidence is rejected when it disagrees with fantasy.
Just because the Bible doesn't say anything about the milk in their fridge, that doesn't mean they don't have any beliefs about it, or reject to its presence in their fridge.
Keep in mind, we're talking about people who, if the bible claimed their fridge contained milk, would simply ASSUME that the milk was there and refuse to check. Likewise, if the bible claimed that there was no milk in the fridge, they wouldn't bother checking there even if they were about to starve to death. Biblical inerracy is one of the most truly amazing forms of Human stupidity.
Likewise, just because the Bible doesn't say how different kinds spread after their creation doesn't mean that YEC's won't make statements about them, or try to learn more about this world.
If you don't recognize the fundamental contradiction between basing one's knowledge on a book of fairy tales and basing it on observation of the real world, I doubt you
The YEC position (and I don't consider myself a YEC) is that natural selection and changes in allele frequencies in a population over time have played a *very* large part in the 6000 year history of the world, and their worldview.
You don't understand YEC at ALL. Their position is solely this: the bible is inerrant truth. They only acknowledge that changes in allele frequencies may have occurred, because it doesn't seem to contradict the bible and because too many of Christians accept some kind of evolution for them to completely deny it.
Most people are blissfully unaware of the objections cited to Darwinism, and so they wonder at how people can reject it. Maybe taking the time to understand the objections might make things a bit clearer.
There ARE no real objections to evolution. Just stupid ones based on ignorance and fear. You'll note that EVERY SINGLE ARGUMENT on AIG is based on disproven or discredited studies, deliberate misinterpretations of science, or is simply bullshit religious dogmaticism. Their ridiculously insane ideas about thermodynamics are enough to completely write them off as deranged, anti-science whackos.
Incidentally, calling it "Darwinism" is deliberate and pejorative, since Darwin only provided our initial form of natural selection. The modern understanding of evolution is vastly more sophisticated and predicated on vastly more evidence. You may as well call classical mechanics "Galileoism", despite the fact that classical mechanics is vastly more advanced than anything Galileo would have understood, and has moved past many of the misconceptions of that age. This leads me to believe that you ARE a young-earth-creationist. Otherwise, you would have no reason to deliberately cast doubt on an establised and well-supported scientific theory.
Of course, it's a very visceral film, that makes a big impact on people.
But one of the things that most people somehow fail to remember is that at the end of the film, the guy had stopped gaining weight and had started to feel a bit better. His liver was no longer turning into pate. His body had begun to adapt to that atrocious diet, to at least some extent. That's not to suggest that an all-Mcdonalds diet is an acceptable lifestyle, but it does show that the body can adapt to handle at least some amount of junk.
I mean, come on! Water doesn't even have any preservatives in it. It can start rotting, transforming into molecules and auto-ionizing and all kinds of terrible, un-Christian behaviours. God wouldn't have invented soda unless he had meant for us to drink it. And if he'd wanted us to drink water, he would have put ascorbic acid and artificial flavours in it.
Well, other supposed health complications aside, aspartame HAS been found to trigger migraines. Lots of things do, but aspartame IS one of them (so is sugar, actually). Caffeine, by contrast, does NOT trigger migraines, although withdrawal from caffeine can.
So... you stopped eating garbage, and now you feel better? Who would have thought!
I kid, I kid... although it's kind of remarkable that this kind of thing is so counterintuitive to most people. It would never occur to most of us that 80g of concentrated sugar, or inbibing a poison designed to kill bacteria, would be a BAD thing. It would occur to even fewer people to approach the problem objectively by actually keeping track of what they consume.
I've been through answers in Genesis. Acknowledgement of what they call "microevolution" is simply their latest fall-back point. They only concede it's truth because to do otherwise would make them look so deliberately ignorant that they would lose all but their core membership -- and religious movements like that one wont settle for anything less than a complete brainwashing of every Human being on the planet.
Nevertheless, if someone were to demonstrate a contradiction between the bible and "microevolution", they would be denying the existence of changes in allele frequencies soon afterwards. That's how delusional behaviour works -- you'll believe and do ANYTHING to maintain the delusion.
You can run an experiment on evolution in a matter of hours, using viruses or bacteria.
This just shows how evil and destructive the theistic movement is -- they've already brainwashed society into thinking that evolution is an untested theory. It HAS been tested -- undergrad students (and even high school students) routinely run experiments in which they allow various traits to evolve in micro-organisms. There are thousands of examples of species that have evolved in the last century, many of them extremely novel. Novel ecosystems have developed. Entirely new metabolic pathways have appeared -- I somehow doubt that titanium-oxidizing bacteria, nylon-oxidizing bacteria, or fungi that subsist on high levels of ionizing radiation, developed before Human were around to provide pure titanium, nylon, or Chernobyl-level nuclear disasters.
I think that's what they once said about the extremist Madrassa in muslim world. And now, I'm sure you've started hearing about muslim groups pressuring schools and governments to kowtow to their idiotic beliefs about depicting Muhammed or acknowledging the holocaust?
Fanatacism never stays confined anywhere -- religion by it's very nature perpetuates itself and attempts to dominate every aspect of Human affairs.
So you SHOULD give a shit. Sooner or later, they WILL try to force schools to teach this nonsense again, and museums like this make it easier to strengthen public support for their bullshit mythologies. The very existence of this monument to delusion and contempt for science is an abomination.
In "common use", capitalism is also synonymous with the acquisition of wealth using any means, ethical or otherwise. That's where the whole thread got started -- the fact that most people associate the word "capitalism" with the most destructive and evil aspects of market economies. If we're going to start talking about the common usage, then we have to acknowledge things like the usage of capitalism to mean economic exploitation, or communism refering to Soviet-style state-controlled economics rather than Marx's vision of a completely decentralized economy based on the value of labour rather than the value of goods. Or for that matter, socialism referring to welfare states, rather than to whatever it was that Marx called "socialism" (or oddities like "National socialism", and we all know how THAT turned out).
Capitalism, like most terms, has a common usage that is rather different than the technical usage. You referred to Adam Smith and other philosophers, so I assumed that you wanted to use the political science definition.
You really couldn't be bothered to look any further than answers.com? Sad, is what it is. Just sad.
* Noam Chomsky, who equates capitalism with slavery, suggesting that wage slavery and conventional slavery are distinguishable only in the fact that wage slaves MAY have some choice in the form of labour that they must perform.
* Vladimir Lenin, who argued that capitalism inevitably leads to the use of military force in the defence of capitalist interest.
* Marcel van der Linden, whose work notes that capitalism condones slavery and indentured servitude.
I could go on and on.
Clearly, many philosophers DO believe that capitalism is about profit above all else.
You may be CALLING it capitalism, but you're thinking of the free market. Capitalism is right there in the name -- it's a philosophy that values capital over all else, much like socialism values society over all else.
It's strange that people assume that large companies would behave "rationally". I'm sure they do analyze their sales constantly, in much the same way that the Pentagon analyzes its strategy in Iraq constantly. But, like the Pentagon, all that sales information is useless when top-level decisions are made by under-educated sociopaths who make decisions based how much they like the other guy's haircut and how cranky they are about missing their breakfast-martini.
Corporations, like any other organization, are ultimately in the hands of a handful of irrational, stupid, greedy Human beings who only care about their own interests and who make decisions based on instincts whose purpose is to enable survival in a radically different environment where killing small furry animals was the principal means of sustaining oneself and evading baboons and boars was a serious concern.
People running corporations have no idea how valuable good will is beyond the potential for their secretary's good will to result in a blowjob before the day's first martini break. Decisions made by the kind of people that get to the top of the corporate ladder are NOT based on reason -- they're based on instinct. Instinct is great for understanding how to manipulate others (ie: management); but it's absolutely shitty for understanding a marketing study or a sales report. It's even worse for being willing to listen to others. The kind of people that understand data almost never make it into positions of any kind of authority whatsoever, and those who listen to others are perceived as weak and are lucky to even make it into a corporate setting as something other than a technician or a janitor.
You're thinking of free markets. The free market is a system of economic freedom.
Capitalism is the philosophy that we SHOULD adopt ruthless, unethical business practices, because that is what is Good. It's the philosophy that when everyone seeks to maximize profit, the economy will be strong and we'll all be rich -- except for the poor, who are Bad people anyway and are only poor because they are lazy and deserve their lot.
For contrast, free markets disallow government intervention, while capitalism encourages government intervention when it can be used to increase profits -- say, by starting a war, or providing a monopoly on some service. Also, free markets disallow the use of force, while capitalism encourages it when it can be used to increase profits -- say, by murdering/imprisoning union leaders, or suing small competitors into oblivion.
It's not even a good alternative for drunks since service inexplicably ends an hour and a half before last call.
Damn straight. People complain that there's no night life; cities whine that there's no tourism; and everyone gripes about drunk driving. And yet the buses still stop running before the bars close...
I always assumed that it was just my city that did this. I'm glad (in a bitter, mean-spirited way) to hear that other cities operate so insanely as well. Misery insists on company.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, we're not particularly capitalist. They say that about 30% of all working Americans work either directly or indirectly for the government or military. I don't know what the figure in Canada, Mexico, or the EU is, but I doubt it's much lower despite their vastly smaller military squanderage.
For example:
Families are the very epitome of cooperation in Human society -- but you can find hundreds of books and thousands of papers on the subject of intra-familial competition. Siblings compete with each other from the moment they're born, despite simultaneously cooperating. That period where babies wail all night and keep their parents from sleeping? Research has shown that it's quite literally an reflexive behaviour that evolved to allow babies to establish dominance over their parents. Meanwhile, parents begin transferring chores and labour to their children the very moment that they become physically capable of it. And yet no one would question for a moment that parents and their children are cooperative.
Always beware of, and soundly beat the asses of, those who try to create dichotomy where it needn't exist.
Leninism is based on the selfishness of the Communist party, and willingness of the people to work very, very hard for the benefit of a party that doesn't need their help. It has zero to do with, say, the welfare state or charity. And you'll note that during the same period, America had welfare, public education, farm subsidies, and a massive military-industrial system that is for all intents and purposes just a massive work-fare program employing over 20% of all working Americans.
Oh, and lets look at the pride of lions again. Notice how all of the female lions work together and share their kills? Or how they leave food for the male lions, who don't even have to hunt? I guess they're engaging in some kind of selfish capitalist behaviour that just LOOKS like a communist society. They probably have a barter system or something that I'm just not seeing. Hey, while you're at it, why not try to claim that ant colonies and bee hives are models of capitalism too!
You get an A for effort, but an F for content. And the professor may suggest that you be placed in the "special" class for retards who fail at basic reasoning.
It comes down to this: Either
- You are correct, in which case those who disagree with you are either stupid, ignorant, or stubborn -- all three of which are reasons to hold someone in contempt and surgically neuter them to prevent the possibility of them breeding.
- Or you are NOT correct, in which it doesn't matter what you think because you're a goddam moron. So you might as well be a moron with some gusto and hate those who are smarter than you are for whatever reason you please.
Either way, you can and should despise those who disagree with you. Of course, you can always get around this by changing your views to agree with the other person -- if you have good reason to think that they might be correct. So ultimately, you can always either be correct and despise the incorrect, or be too stupid to held accountable for hating those who are correct. It works out very nicely.So let me get this straight: you get to save money, AND you don't have waste two hours of your Sunday? It's like a bizarro version of working a part-time time job. Your wealth increases in exchange for not doing unpleasant things and not believing in retarded crap.
Yeah, truth is a bully. It savagely beats on the weak-minded and takes their lunch money. It spanks the stupid mercilessly.
Having been raised by religious people, having lived among them for two and a half decades, having spent two decades as one of them, and having studied six millenia of Human history, I know everything I need to know about religion. I've waded knee-deep through the hypocrisy, hatred, violence, bigotry, and general delusional behaviour of theists... and from what I've seen, my personal experiences with religion were far, far more benign than what of the world's population experience (I've never seen anyone beheaded or burned alive, for instance).
They didn't destroy the work of a person, they destroyed the work of a graduate student. There's a difference.
There's a difference between holding that something is true, and simply not rejecting it. Normal people do the former about scientific truths; YECs do the latter.
Besides, they DO reject natural selection. Natural selection leads as inevitably to the creation of new genuses, orders, and phyla -- new kinds, in their insane biblical terminology -- as it does to new species. So by rejecting the possibility of new "kinds", they're rejecting natural selection, in exactly the same way that someone who rejects the possibility of the Earth moving around the sun is rejecting gravity even though they'll admit the possibility of apples falling towards the ground. Accepting a scientific truth means accepting ALL of the consequences of that scientific truth, not just the ones that don't threaten your faith.
This is why I see ALL theists as enemies of progress. The ones who aren't extremists support the ones who are. Supposedly rational christians support that ones that want science to be stricken from schools. Supposedly peaceful christians support the ones who bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors and pregnant women. Supposedly tolerate muslims support the ones who strap explosives to their chests. Supposedly pacifist Hindus support the ones who kill muslims and blow up mosques. Supposedly peaceful buddhists support the ones who riot and form mobs. Supposedly non-violent Jews support the zionists who want to commit genocide. It just goes on and on, until finally people start to accept that there is NO way to be a truly good person when your life is predicated on belief in stories that -- deep down -- you know are purely fantasy.
(This is the part of the argument where the theist traditionally embarasses him or herself by pretending that Hitler and Stalin weren't religious men themselves -- catholic and russian orthodox respectively -- and that Naziism and Maoism aren't just as based on mythology and fantasy as any other religion; it's a nice try, but atheism still takes the prize for most peaceful and non-violent of all categories of belief in the supernatural).
The hilarious irony is that they believe that all of the species of finch could have arisen from just two WITHOUT any new alleles (since new alleles would imply "macroevolution"). But naturally, it's impossible for two finches to have more than four distinct alleles for a gene. For two finches on the Ark to give rise to thousands of distinct species would require much more genetic variation than two finches can carry. See how easy it is to discredit their insanity? If they had even the tiniest shred of real interest in science, they'd be forced to abandon their position immediately. Science is incompatible with dogma, with myth, and most especially with faith.
You're so mired in your faith that you don't even see it anymore. The entire point of using the term "Darwinist" and "Darwinism" is to try and make the scientific belief in evolution appear as some kind of religious, cult-like following of a man, rather than science. You don't go around calling certain scientists Newtonists, Einsteinists, Planckists, Fermiists, or Hawkingists. There is no theory of "Bohrism" or some monstrous anti-god movement called "Lewisism". Zealots refer to the theory of evolution as "Darwinism" as part of a deliberate attempt to create a dichotomy for Christians between following Jesus and following Darwin.
Of course -- they believe in all kinds of different things that are mentioned in the bible, like a Human surviving inside of a whale's gastrointestinal tract, unicorns, dragons, giants that are half-human/half-angel, etc. One way or the other though, they follow a belief system in which evidence is rejected when it disagrees with fantasy.
Keep in mind, we're talking about people who, if the bible claimed their fridge contained milk, would simply ASSUME that the milk was there and refuse to check. Likewise, if the bible claimed that there was no milk in the fridge, they wouldn't bother checking there even if they were about to starve to death. Biblical inerracy is one of the most truly amazing forms of Human stupidity.
If you don't recognize the fundamental contradiction between basing one's knowledge on a book of fairy tales and basing it on observation of the real world, I doubt you
Incidentally, calling it "Darwinism" is deliberate and pejorative, since Darwin only provided our initial form of natural selection. The modern understanding of evolution is vastly more sophisticated and predicated on vastly more evidence. You may as well call classical mechanics "Galileoism", despite the fact that classical mechanics is vastly more advanced than anything Galileo would have understood, and has moved past many of the misconceptions of that age. This leads me to believe that you ARE a young-earth-creationist. Otherwise, you would have no reason to deliberately cast doubt on an establised and well-supported scientific theory.
Of course, it's a very visceral film, that makes a big impact on people.
But one of the things that most people somehow fail to remember is that at the end of the film, the guy had stopped gaining weight and had started to feel a bit better. His liver was no longer turning into pate. His body had begun to adapt to that atrocious diet, to at least some extent. That's not to suggest that an all-Mcdonalds diet is an acceptable lifestyle, but it does show that the body can adapt to handle at least some amount of junk.
I mean, come on! Water doesn't even have any preservatives in it. It can start rotting, transforming into molecules and auto-ionizing and all kinds of terrible, un-Christian behaviours. God wouldn't have invented soda unless he had meant for us to drink it. And if he'd wanted us to drink water, he would have put ascorbic acid and artificial flavours in it.
Well, other supposed health complications aside, aspartame HAS been found to trigger migraines. Lots of things do, but aspartame IS one of them (so is sugar, actually). Caffeine, by contrast, does NOT trigger migraines, although withdrawal from caffeine can.
I kid, I kid... although it's kind of remarkable that this kind of thing is so counterintuitive to most people. It would never occur to most of us that 80g of concentrated sugar, or inbibing a poison designed to kill bacteria, would be a BAD thing. It would occur to even fewer people to approach the problem objectively by actually keeping track of what they consume.
I've been through answers in Genesis. Acknowledgement of what they call "microevolution" is simply their latest fall-back point. They only concede it's truth because to do otherwise would make them look so deliberately ignorant that they would lose all but their core membership -- and religious movements like that one wont settle for anything less than a complete brainwashing of every Human being on the planet.
Nevertheless, if someone were to demonstrate a contradiction between the bible and "microevolution", they would be denying the existence of changes in allele frequencies soon afterwards. That's how delusional behaviour works -- you'll believe and do ANYTHING to maintain the delusion.
This just shows how evil and destructive the theistic movement is -- they've already brainwashed society into thinking that evolution is an untested theory. It HAS been tested -- undergrad students (and even high school students) routinely run experiments in which they allow various traits to evolve in micro-organisms. There are thousands of examples of species that have evolved in the last century, many of them extremely novel. Novel ecosystems have developed. Entirely new metabolic pathways have appeared -- I somehow doubt that titanium-oxidizing bacteria, nylon-oxidizing bacteria, or fungi that subsist on high levels of ionizing radiation, developed before Human were around to provide pure titanium, nylon, or Chernobyl-level nuclear disasters.
I think that's what they once said about the extremist Madrassa in muslim world. And now, I'm sure you've started hearing about muslim groups pressuring schools and governments to kowtow to their idiotic beliefs about depicting Muhammed or acknowledging the holocaust? Fanatacism never stays confined anywhere -- religion by it's very nature perpetuates itself and attempts to dominate every aspect of Human affairs. So you SHOULD give a shit. Sooner or later, they WILL try to force schools to teach this nonsense again, and museums like this make it easier to strengthen public support for their bullshit mythologies. The very existence of this monument to delusion and contempt for science is an abomination.
Go read your bible some more. Actual science is probably a little too scary for you.
In "common use", capitalism is also synonymous with the acquisition of wealth using any means, ethical or otherwise. That's where the whole thread got started -- the fact that most people associate the word "capitalism" with the most destructive and evil aspects of market economies. If we're going to start talking about the common usage, then we have to acknowledge things like the usage of capitalism to mean economic exploitation, or communism refering to Soviet-style state-controlled economics rather than Marx's vision of a completely decentralized economy based on the value of labour rather than the value of goods. Or for that matter, socialism referring to welfare states, rather than to whatever it was that Marx called "socialism" (or oddities like "National socialism", and we all know how THAT turned out). Capitalism, like most terms, has a common usage that is rather different than the technical usage. You referred to Adam Smith and other philosophers, so I assumed that you wanted to use the political science definition.
* Noam Chomsky, who equates capitalism with slavery, suggesting that wage slavery and conventional slavery are distinguishable only in the fact that wage slaves MAY have some choice in the form of labour that they must perform.
* Vladimir Lenin, who argued that capitalism inevitably leads to the use of military force in the defence of capitalist interest.
* Marcel van der Linden, whose work notes that capitalism condones slavery and indentured servitude.
I could go on and on.
Clearly, many philosophers DO believe that capitalism is about profit above all else.
You may be CALLING it capitalism, but you're thinking of the free market. Capitalism is right there in the name -- it's a philosophy that values capital over all else, much like socialism values society over all else.
Corporations, like any other organization, are ultimately in the hands of a handful of irrational, stupid, greedy Human beings who only care about their own interests and who make decisions based on instincts whose purpose is to enable survival in a radically different environment where killing small furry animals was the principal means of sustaining oneself and evading baboons and boars was a serious concern.
People running corporations have no idea how valuable good will is beyond the potential for their secretary's good will to result in a blowjob before the day's first martini break. Decisions made by the kind of people that get to the top of the corporate ladder are NOT based on reason -- they're based on instinct. Instinct is great for understanding how to manipulate others (ie: management); but it's absolutely shitty for understanding a marketing study or a sales report. It's even worse for being willing to listen to others. The kind of people that understand data almost never make it into positions of any kind of authority whatsoever, and those who listen to others are perceived as weak and are lucky to even make it into a corporate setting as something other than a technician or a janitor.
Capitalism is the philosophy that we SHOULD adopt ruthless, unethical business practices, because that is what is Good. It's the philosophy that when everyone seeks to maximize profit, the economy will be strong and we'll all be rich -- except for the poor, who are Bad people anyway and are only poor because they are lazy and deserve their lot.
For contrast, free markets disallow government intervention, while capitalism encourages government intervention when it can be used to increase profits -- say, by starting a war, or providing a monopoly on some service. Also, free markets disallow the use of force, while capitalism encourages it when it can be used to increase profits -- say, by murdering/imprisoning union leaders, or suing small competitors into oblivion.
I always assumed that it was just my city that did this. I'm glad (in a bitter, mean-spirited way) to hear that other cities operate so insanely as well. Misery insists on company.