Pay. Absolutely, I prefer a pay model. Advertising supported media is an ever declining standard. It starts with a little advertising. It increases until people start turning off. Which means they clutch at more advertising to keep the revenues up. The only thing that keeps standards high ultimately, is a customer base that is willing to pay for the content.
Besides, an advertising supported model is incompatible with owning your music, film, whatever. Afterall, no one will make money by selling you a song that eternally has the same ad for Nike's latest running shoes at the beginning of it year after year. The advertising model only works in a setup where you are fed your media content. And of course there are economic pressures against offering you too much choice. We're going to have to fight hard enough against licensing model media purchases (i.e. You've paid for six months of this song) now that the technology for it is available. Part of that fight will be rejecting models like advertising funded media which tie into it.
Well my three very quick answers to your points (if you're interested) would be as follows:
1. Sickness is not a regular demand and is not truly tied to availability of care. People want to be well and once a certain level of care is provided you have reached saturation. Demand wont endlessly expand. Nor will reducing availability of care reduce demand. It will just push the negative effects elsewhere, e.g. sick days, increased demand on the well to look after dependents, etc.
2. There is no critical reason why medical research has to be tied to the same principles as medical provision. I.e. DrugCo can still manufacture and sell products while the government runs the hospitals. This isn't to say that I couldn't also argue that state funded research (i.e. through Universities) can't be more cost effective as well, however.
3. The medical profits you're talking of reducing are not those of doctors and nurses (where mediocrity would matter), but of investors who own the business without actually doing any medical work themselves (and often not management work either). How can Operating Costs + Staff Costs + Profit + Taxes be less than Operating Costs + Staff Costs ? If everyone is pooling together to support the health care industry then surely it makes more sense to do this by a means that wont charge extra for investor profits and wont get taxed by the government.
I work in the NHS currently, in Primary Care. It is a fine institution with a lot of hard working people in it. And yes, I too would far rather be ill here than in the USA. But it is very much under assault at the moment. The current government is doing everything it can get away with to privatise British health care and in some instances, we see the involvement of the same big players in the US market. I could talk at length about the tricks that are being pulled to force us down the privatisation route, but suffice to say that it is a concerted and determined and underhanded policy coming right from the top. If you've benefited from the NHS in the past, then you should do what you can to try and hang on to it. A good start would be to write to your MP to complain about the billions that are being funneled to US companies under the guise of the new "Choose and Book" IT system, which is part of the larger "Connecting for Health" program - code name: Gravy Train. Google is your friend.
Nice charity list, except for Greenpeace.
GMO food isn't exactly corn with teeth. Is saving lives and reducing human impact on the environment.
Hell, plants swap genes all the time. Virally and through cross-breeding.
Well they don't often swap them with catapillars in order to produce their own insecticide. But that's a minor point. Do you really want foodstuffs that are patented and owned by international corporations so that farmers are unable to grow crops without paying for the privelage to do so? Do you also want crops that are engineered not to reproduce naturally so that farmers are unable to save seed from this years crop and must re-purchase new seed each year? Do you also want that situation to magnify economic or infrastructure problems into a situation where food cannot be planted in many areas? Would you also like a situation where genetic diversity is radically reduced by the homogenity of GM crops resulting in the "eggs in one basket" situation that would make the Irish Potato Famine look like skipping lunch? Where one new blight will take down vast swathes of the World's staple crops? Do you also want a situation where genetically modified crops allow unprecendented quantities and strengths of herbicides and pesticides to be deployed on farmland with the corresponding run-off into rivers and lakes and the increasing decimation of wildlife? Do you want the forces pushing this technology to be ridicuously rich and powerful corporations like Monsanto that can bring unbelievable incentives and pressures to bear (including buying government policy) to force this situation on most of the Third World? Do you want these same corporations to take advantage of the ridiculous system of the US government using your tax dollars to subsidise US agriculture to produce food that is then destroyed because it isn't wanted in order to promote GM crops even in North America where there is no need at all?
I mean... just hypothetically. I mean you can talk about it not being corn with teeth if you like, but that is, if you'll pardon me, a strawman argument.
And as to the real need for it in Third World countries, well taking an example like Monsanto's "Golden Rice" which is enriched with Vitamin D, you'll find that historically people in many now malnourished regions actually ate a very balanced and nutritious diet. It was international economic pressure that forced them to swap growing a variety of crops to mass-producing single staples such as rice in the first place and brought about the resulting deficiencies. You know, if you're repeatedly hitting someone on the head with a plank, you don't make things better by taping a pillow to their skull. You stop hitting them. We are capable as a species of feeding ourselves sustainably with existing technology. We don't need the GM crops and the problems they bring make them a very bad move.
Perhaps this is a method that the teenagers can use to bring about a legal redress for the harrasment, rather than breaking the device. Bring in the RSPCA or whatever local society covers animal welfare in that area. Animal cruelty might get more press than teenager-cruelty.
Just passed thirty here, and I can hear it. That's really nasty. I would be sympathetic to any kid that actively broke one of these devices. I would recommend first speaking to the neighbour and then calling it into the police first. But you'd be morally entitled to break it, definitely.
Dyslexia can include not knowing if a word such as offshore is one word (as it is), or two such as 'off shore'. Spell checkers will not correct "off shaw" to "offshore", they will validate it. The parent is correct.
There are people working towards this. You are not alone. The prinicple is not to overthrow the government, but to render it obsolete. People need to be offered a better solution. Modern communications technology makes this more and more plausible for larger groups of people.
The biggest barrier is money, though. I don't mean funding, but rather that money itself is a government monopoly. Ultimately, what you talk about may require acceptance of alternative (non-centralised, community-run) monetary systems. I'd have a look into this if I were you, just so you can keep it in mind. In making the the government redundant, people will have to be able to allocate resources themselves.
George Bush's brain doesn't work, eh? Let's examine this. Who is the US population more likely to vote for? The spoilt Yale graduate son of a millionaire or the heart-in-the-right-place, "one of us." Oh, I'm not saying that he's a genius, but I think his image is carefully chosen and stage-managed. You and I might consider it a positive trait if someone is smarter than us, but "market research" suggests the US public vote for the guy that reminds them of themselves. Be afraid.
Supporting evidence for all this? Well it really doesn't matter if Bush is an idiot as he is surrounded by people who are anything but. We have to consider his actions and policies to be largely the result of influence by his advisors and corporate backers. So we should examine his actions carefully to see if they really are stupid or if we've missed the point. And it looks like it is the latter. Yes, the US is in greater danger than before he took power, and yes, I'd say economically it is also in greater danger. But why do you think his actions are governed by your interests? Defense spending is up, Haliburton has been handed a country for Christmas, and a lot more less publicised profiteering has gone on. If the american public saw him as a calculating and shrewd sort of guy, these activities would recieve more consideration. As a regular guy who cares about them, they are much less likely to think of Bush diverting their taxes into private wars.
Laughing at George Bush might feel good. But he's getting exactly what he wants, isn't he?
I do find it a bit odd that Air Marshalls can't find at least one suspitious-looking person on a flight over the course of a month.
Why? Just how many terrorists do you think are out there? And of them, how many will be trying to take over a plane? If there were even a handful trying this, then it would be all over the news (as it supports the government agenda). And if someone isn't trying to take over the plane then what on Earth makes them suspicious and worth putting on a watch list? Flying while asian? Reading Noam Chomsky? Not only is the government jumping at shadows, it's now got a quota of how many shadows you have to jump at each month?
Don't forget about the guy who got fined £80 for swearing. There was actually an even more offensive case of someone who called the security sensors on the London underground shit where a police officer heard him. He was arrested by six of them and forced to hand over £80. If you don't have it, they march you to a cash point. You can't refuse to pay (without facing being dragged off). Your only legal recourse is to go to court to try and prove your innocence later to get your money back.
Okay, these aren't the ASBO laws, but they've been brought in around the same time by the same people and work on the same lack-of-due-process priniciples. It's mostly a class thing and a establishing authority thing. If the police don't like your attitude or the way you dress or talk, they no longer have to put up with it. They can slap you back into line. Is your clothing offensive or anti-social, e.g. a hoodie or bear an anti-police/government message? That can be anti-social too.
Amen! I've been saying this for years. Look at the amount of variance we've developed in dogs through selective breeding over the years. If we'd had a sustained program of selecting for intelligence, we could have really intelligent dogs by now. They could be very useful. Imagine the blind or the deaf having such dogs. Also it would be cool if you could tell your dog to go to the corner shop and get you a paper, etc. Has that ever been done? Instead of teaching commands like heel, come by, etc. Teach the dog place names!
I think that's very unlikely - it would mean the death of internet banking, shopping, etc. There's no way the banks would accept liability for confidential data being sent unencrypted.
What you'll actually see is encrypted communications either being treated as the lowest of the low priority or entirely banned unless you are paying the prohibitive rate for the encryption service. The public, after all, have no need of encryption amongst themselves! Only businesses will be able to pay the fees to provide these connections.
The first principle is simple - where you have power over someone, such as providing them a needed product, then you squeeze them for every penny they have. The second principle is equally straigtforward - where possible, create barriers to entry to prevent people doing things for themselves.
So if it's that agonising for them, Pull Out! The founders of Google have more than enough money to live and to live well. They'll feel much better and more at peace if they have a clean concience and only several billion dollars instead.
Do they really think that they're accomplishing anything by working within a system that they do not agree with. They should pull out. The Chinese people wont be left without a search engine - there are others, Western and Eastern, that will fill that gap. And have they not considered the positive effects that an ethical stance would have. It would reflect wonderfully on them in the public eye. It would astonish people worldwide and restore a glimmer of faith to all of us to see a company that big and rich voluntarily setting principles above cash. It would be a nice precedent for the business world. And it would show that Google still is different. It might even offer a little support to the people of China because I'm sick of this strange article of faith amongst the/. crowd that the chinese don't care about censorship or living in a totalitarian state. Tianamen Square ring any bells?
This is how it happens. You make a little compromise and tell yourself that you're justified because really, the ends are going to justify the means, and your intentions are good. It's just a temporary thing. But there aren't really any ends, just points on a journey and one day you wake up and realise, 'Hey - you're just like everyone else.'
When you're poor, you're losing your home, you have children to look after - then you worry about your conscience. When you have billions and never need worry about cash - then you stick with your concience and save yourself a lot of sick feeling in your gut. If by some miracle the Google founders are masochistically reading about themselves on/., then I hope they are paying attention. They're supporting a nasty situation in China and they'd feel better about themselves if they stuck to their principles.
Hold on... they're "saying goodbye to their families"? Oh, that can't be good for a marriage. "Yes, darling, I'm just practicing for when there's a national disaster and I abandon you to the collapse of civilisation."
Good God! I must have been about nine-years old and I remember that! I couldn't work out the time serpent riddle either and I had to go forward through the book trying to find something that matched up. I don't even remember what the puzzle was, but I'm sure if someone gave me the answer some deep and buried part of my psyche would resolve its trauma.
I really liked the Lone Wolf series. It was quite sophisticated with you being able to keep track of your characters health and choose different powers. Sometimes you'd find a spell or item that had a number attached and at various points in the books you could add that number to your current number to pull off a hidden course of action.
But I don't think anything compared to Steve Jackson's Sorcery series. Lots of detail, lots of depth and if you didn't beat the seven serpents in book three then the villain in book four knew you were coming! Ah, happiness!
By acting "good" as a means of self-gratification, the base upon which "good" is derived becomes nihilistic and hedonistic.
I understand what you're saying. I was observing that good behaviour (e.g. helping others, sharing and being honest) being a means of self-gratfication says something very positive about human nature. What you are saying and what I am saying are, if I do understand you, not exclusive. My point is simply a consequence of your point. It's an absurdity really. The way you have framed things, the only way to be good would be to do good whilst wishing you weren't. Which, I suppose would imply coercian of some sort and therefore negate the fact that you were good anyway.
Now the above depends on someone's means of self-gratification deriving from good behaviour. That's also fine because my point was not that this is universal, but simply that it is the common case, which I believe to be the case. Where it all breaks down is arbitrary boundaries about who we extend our "goodness" too. In your example of the soldiers in the regime, I actually consider the reverse to be the case. It is the "feeling" moralist that would be inclined to doubt the state because he would feel empathy for the oppressed. Essentially, his definition of good encompasses extending that behaviour to others than his state. In contrast, the "thinking moralist" is much more able to justify mistreatment of others on the orders of the state because "good" behaviour is normally defined as "beneficial to the community" and he has a fixed definition of his community, i.e. the totalitarian state. As we see time and again, once you define someone as 'not one of us,' then it's hard to find reasons for good behaviour towards them on purely rational grounds (the only one being to avoid reprisal which isn't motivated by "good"). I'd challenge you to come up with one actually. We see this exploited again and again in order to justify horrors against others. But those who listen to the feeling that tells them this 'other' is just like them, quickly extends good behaviour to those outside his community / ethnic group / whatever.
So really, you could define "good" as extending your self-gratification outwards to others. This in fact shows how we can escape your trap of it being impossible to do good, because good means, not self-gratification, but group-gratification. Really good people, like Ghandi are after people-gratification and Jesuses are really humanity-gratifying. The 'self' has been disolved. Try the definition out for a little while and you'll see that it fits our instinct of what is good very well so I'd offer this up as a clearer explanation of what "good" is. Once we understand this, then we suddenly find the issue has resolved itself and "good" can be logically derived.
Up to you, but this thread's a day old and dissapearing into history as we speak. I can't see the harm in tangents now and I'd be interested in what you see as the difference between 'religion' and 'cult.' I have popularity and how long its been around. I see no qualitative difference between the two. A religion perhaps being less likely to have a single authority controlling it, but that's just a variation of the size issue and even Catholicism has the pope.
In the end, you might find that you're actually an egocentric immoralist who commits to moral actions as a means of self-gratification,
In other words, mankind is inherantly good. I'm fine with that. In your model, I'd consider the "religiously" moral akin to nightschool web-monkeys who churn out websites with MS Frontpage and lack any understanding of XHTML. Those capable of ethical calculus (nice phrase) understand the XHTML and CSS. Anyone who uses Firefox should therefore understand the importance of deriving a moral code from first principles.
Slashdot Mirror
Pay. Absolutely, I prefer a pay model. Advertising supported media is an ever declining standard. It starts with a little advertising. It increases until people start turning off. Which means they clutch at more advertising to keep the revenues up. The only thing that keeps standards high ultimately, is a customer base that is willing to pay for the content.
Besides, an advertising supported model is incompatible with owning your music, film, whatever. Afterall, no one will make money by selling you a song that eternally has the same ad for Nike's latest running shoes at the beginning of it year after year. The advertising model only works in a setup where you are fed your media content. And of course there are economic pressures against offering you too much choice. We're going to have to fight hard enough against licensing model media purchases (i.e. You've paid for six months of this song) now that the technology for it is available. Part of that fight will be rejecting models like advertising funded media which tie into it.
Well my three very quick answers to your points (if you're interested) would be as follows:
1. Sickness is not a regular demand and is not truly tied to availability of care. People want to be well and once a certain level of care is provided you have reached saturation. Demand wont endlessly expand. Nor will reducing availability of care reduce demand. It will just push the negative effects elsewhere, e.g. sick days, increased demand on the well to look after dependents, etc.
2. There is no critical reason why medical research has to be tied to the same principles as medical provision. I.e. DrugCo can still manufacture and sell products while the government runs the hospitals. This isn't to say that I couldn't also argue that state funded research (i.e. through Universities) can't be more cost effective as well, however.
3. The medical profits you're talking of reducing are not those of doctors and nurses (where mediocrity would matter), but of investors who own the business without actually doing any medical work themselves (and often not management work either). How can Operating Costs + Staff Costs + Profit + Taxes be less than Operating Costs + Staff Costs ? If everyone is pooling together to support the health care industry then surely it makes more sense to do this by a means that wont charge extra for investor profits and wont get taxed by the government.
Just some off the cuff thoughts.
I work in the NHS currently, in Primary Care. It is a fine institution with a lot of hard working people in it. And yes, I too would far rather be ill here than in the USA. But it is very much under assault at the moment. The current government is doing everything it can get away with to privatise British health care and in some instances, we see the involvement of the same big players in the US market. I could talk at length about the tricks that are being pulled to force us down the privatisation route, but suffice to say that it is a concerted and determined and underhanded policy coming right from the top. If you've benefited from the NHS in the past, then you should do what you can to try and hang on to it. A good start would be to write to your MP to complain about the billions that are being funneled to US companies under the guise of the new "Choose and Book" IT system, which is part of the larger "Connecting for Health" program - code name: Gravy Train. Google is your friend.
I mean... just hypothetically. I mean you can talk about it not being corn with teeth if you like, but that is, if you'll pardon me, a strawman argument.
And as to the real need for it in Third World countries, well taking an example like Monsanto's "Golden Rice" which is enriched with Vitamin D, you'll find that historically people in many now malnourished regions actually ate a very balanced and nutritious diet. It was international economic pressure that forced them to swap growing a variety of crops to mass-producing single staples such as rice in the first place and brought about the resulting deficiencies. You know, if you're repeatedly hitting someone on the head with a plank, you don't make things better by taping a pillow to their skull. You stop hitting them. We are capable as a species of feeding ourselves sustainably with existing technology. We don't need the GM crops and the problems they bring make them a very bad move.
Ah, read the grandparent. We were talking about how the device distresses animals.
Brilliant - utterly brilliant! And with even a little planning, getting in and out of the house unnoticed ought to be possible.
Perhaps this is a method that the teenagers can use to bring about a legal redress for the harrasment, rather than breaking the device. Bring in the RSPCA or whatever local society covers animal welfare in that area. Animal cruelty might get more press than teenager-cruelty.
Just passed thirty here, and I can hear it. That's really nasty. I would be sympathetic to any kid that actively broke one of these devices. I would recommend first speaking to the neighbour and then calling it into the police first. But you'd be morally entitled to break it, definitely.
Dyslexia can include not knowing if a word such as offshore is one word (as it is), or two such as 'off shore'. Spell checkers will not correct "off shaw" to "offshore", they will validate it. The parent is correct.
There are people working towards this. You are not alone. The prinicple is not to overthrow the government, but to render it obsolete. People need to be offered a better solution. Modern communications technology makes this more and more plausible for larger groups of people.
The biggest barrier is money, though. I don't mean funding, but rather that money itself is a government monopoly. Ultimately, what you talk about may require acceptance of alternative (non-centralised, community-run) monetary systems. I'd have a look into this if I were you, just so you can keep it in mind. In making the the government redundant, people will have to be able to allocate resources themselves.
George Bush's brain doesn't work, eh? Let's examine this. Who is the US population more likely to vote for? The spoilt Yale graduate son of a millionaire or the heart-in-the-right-place, "one of us." Oh, I'm not saying that he's a genius, but I think his image is carefully chosen and stage-managed. You and I might consider it a positive trait if someone is smarter than us, but "market research" suggests the US public vote for the guy that reminds them of themselves. Be afraid.
Supporting evidence for all this? Well it really doesn't matter if Bush is an idiot as he is surrounded by people who are anything but. We have to consider his actions and policies to be largely the result of influence by his advisors and corporate backers. So we should examine his actions carefully to see if they really are stupid or if we've missed the point. And it looks like it is the latter. Yes, the US is in greater danger than before he took power, and yes, I'd say economically it is also in greater danger. But why do you think his actions are governed by your interests? Defense spending is up, Haliburton has been handed a country for Christmas, and a lot more less publicised profiteering has gone on. If the american public saw him as a calculating and shrewd sort of guy, these activities would recieve more consideration. As a regular guy who cares about them, they are much less likely to think of Bush diverting their taxes into private wars.
Laughing at George Bush might feel good. But he's getting exactly what he wants, isn't he?
I do find it a bit odd that Air Marshalls can't find at least one suspitious-looking person on a flight over the course of a month.
Why? Just how many terrorists do you think are out there? And of them, how many will be trying to take over a plane? If there were even a handful trying this, then it would be all over the news (as it supports the government agenda). And if someone isn't trying to take over the plane then what on Earth makes them suspicious and worth putting on a watch list? Flying while asian? Reading Noam Chomsky? Not only is the government jumping at shadows, it's now got a quota of how many shadows you have to jump at each month?
Don't forget about the guy who got fined £80 for swearing. There was actually an even more offensive case of someone who called the security sensors on the London underground shit where a police officer heard him. He was arrested by six of them and forced to hand over £80. If you don't have it, they march you to a cash point. You can't refuse to pay (without facing being dragged off). Your only legal recourse is to go to court to try and prove your innocence later to get your money back.
Okay, these aren't the ASBO laws, but they've been brought in around the same time by the same people and work on the same lack-of-due-process priniciples. It's mostly a class thing and a establishing authority thing. If the police don't like your attitude or the way you dress or talk, they no longer have to put up with it. They can slap you back into line. Is your clothing offensive or anti-social, e.g. a hoodie or bear an anti-police/government message? That can be anti-social too.
Amen! I've been saying this for years. Look at the amount of variance we've developed in dogs through selective breeding over the years. If we'd had a sustained program of selecting for intelligence, we could have really intelligent dogs by now. They could be very useful. Imagine the blind or the deaf having such dogs. Also it would be cool if you could tell your dog to go to the corner shop and get you a paper, etc. Has that ever been done? Instead of teaching commands like heel, come by, etc. Teach the dog place names!
The first principle is simple - where you have power over someone, such as providing them a needed product, then you squeeze them for every penny they have. The second principle is equally straigtforward - where possible, create barriers to entry to prevent people doing things for themselves.
So if it's that agonising for them, Pull Out! The founders of Google have more than enough money to live and to live well. They'll feel much better and more at peace if they have a clean concience and only several billion dollars instead.
Do they really think that they're accomplishing anything by working within a system that they do not agree with. They should pull out. The Chinese people wont be left without a search engine - there are others, Western and Eastern, that will fill that gap. And have they not considered the positive effects that an ethical stance would have. It would reflect wonderfully on them in the public eye. It would astonish people worldwide and restore a glimmer of faith to all of us to see a company that big and rich voluntarily setting principles above cash. It would be a nice precedent for the business world. And it would show that Google still is different. It might even offer a little support to the people of China because I'm sick of this strange article of faith amongst the
This is how it happens. You make a little compromise and tell yourself that you're justified because really, the ends are going to justify the means, and your intentions are good. It's just a temporary thing. But there aren't really any ends, just points on a journey and one day you wake up and realise, 'Hey - you're just like everyone else.'
When you're poor, you're losing your home, you have children to look after - then you worry about your conscience. When you have billions and never need worry about cash - then you stick with your concience and save yourself a lot of sick feeling in your gut. If by some miracle the Google founders are masochistically reading about themselves on
The title of the parchement was XL. So you turned to page 40 (XL in roman numerals.)
Oh God! I feel so... released! Like an annoying background noise that you'd forgotten was there had just stopped.
Thank you AC. Thank you soooo much!
Hold on... they're "saying goodbye to their families"? Oh, that can't be good for a marriage. "Yes, darling, I'm just practicing for when there's a national disaster and I abandon you to the collapse of civilisation."
My advice - stay in the bunker!
Good God! I must have been about nine-years old and I remember that! I couldn't work out the time serpent riddle either and I had to go forward through the book trying to find something that matched up. I don't even remember what the puzzle was, but I'm sure if someone gave me the answer some deep and buried part of my psyche would resolve its trauma.
You think that's crazy? Try Hamlet the Text Adventure. You may laugh, but can you beat it?
North.
North.
Commit Incest.
I really liked the Lone Wolf series. It was quite sophisticated with you being able to keep track of your characters health and choose different powers. Sometimes you'd find a spell or item that had a number attached and at various points in the books you could add that number to your current number to pull off a hidden course of action.
But I don't think anything compared to Steve Jackson's Sorcery series. Lots of detail, lots of depth and if you didn't beat the seven serpents in book three then the villain in book four knew you were coming! Ah, happiness!
By acting "good" as a means of self-gratification, the base upon which "good" is derived becomes nihilistic and hedonistic.
I understand what you're saying. I was observing that good behaviour (e.g. helping others, sharing and being honest) being a means of self-gratfication says something very positive about human nature. What you are saying and what I am saying are, if I do understand you, not exclusive. My point is simply a consequence of your point. It's an absurdity really. The way you have framed things, the only way to be good would be to do good whilst wishing you weren't. Which, I suppose would imply coercian of some sort and therefore negate the fact that you were good anyway.
Now the above depends on someone's means of self-gratification deriving from good behaviour. That's also fine because my point was not that this is universal, but simply that it is the common case, which I believe to be the case. Where it all breaks down is arbitrary boundaries about who we extend our "goodness" too. In your example of the soldiers in the regime, I actually consider the reverse to be the case. It is the "feeling" moralist that would be inclined to doubt the state because he would feel empathy for the oppressed. Essentially, his definition of good encompasses extending that behaviour to others than his state. In contrast, the "thinking moralist" is much more able to justify mistreatment of others on the orders of the state because "good" behaviour is normally defined as "beneficial to the community" and he has a fixed definition of his community, i.e. the totalitarian state. As we see time and again, once you define someone as 'not one of us,' then it's hard to find reasons for good behaviour towards them on purely rational grounds (the only one being to avoid reprisal which isn't motivated by "good"). I'd challenge you to come up with one actually. We see this exploited again and again in order to justify horrors against others. But those who listen to the feeling that tells them this 'other' is just like them, quickly extends good behaviour to those outside his community / ethnic group / whatever.
So really, you could define "good" as extending your self-gratification outwards to others. This in fact shows how we can escape your trap of it being impossible to do good, because good means, not self-gratification, but group-gratification. Really good people, like Ghandi are after people-gratification and Jesuses are really humanity-gratifying. The 'self' has been disolved. Try the definition out for a little while and you'll see that it fits our instinct of what is good very well so I'd offer this up as a clearer explanation of what "good" is. Once we understand this, then we suddenly find the issue has resolved itself and "good" can be logically derived.
Up to you, but this thread's a day old and dissapearing into history as we speak. I can't see the harm in tangents now and I'd be interested in what you see as the difference between 'religion' and 'cult.' I have popularity and how long its been around. I see no qualitative difference between the two. A religion perhaps being less likely to have a single authority controlling it, but that's just a variation of the size issue and even Catholicism has the pope.
In the end, you might find that you're actually an egocentric immoralist who commits to moral actions as a means of self-gratification,
In other words, mankind is inherantly good. I'm fine with that. In your model, I'd consider the "religiously" moral akin to nightschool web-monkeys who churn out websites with MS Frontpage and lack any understanding of XHTML. Those capable of ethical calculus (nice phrase) understand the XHTML and CSS. Anyone who uses Firefox should therefore understand the importance of deriving a moral code from first principles.
It's not a religion? Other than popularity what is the difference between a religion and a cult?