Nobody wants things to work right or work well, if it means upsetting the status quo.
They'd rather things disappear and get bitten in the ass for it in the future, than deal with it now, if it means someone's going to get embarrassed. There's no intellectual honesty anymore..
After the fact assessment of a horrendous shooting incident -> Wish there had been an arrest
Doesn't seem like such a dangerous precedent anymore, does it?
Actually, yes, it does. The value of a free society is higher than the value of a few lives, believe it or not, otherwise our founders would never have gone to war for it.
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
It's reactionist crap like your post that lead to the "Nanny State" as some call it but worse, it is exactly those things that start us down the path of a police state.
It is NOT inappropriate to involve the kid's parents and the school administration. It is EXTREMELY inappropriate to arrest him and charge him with a crime.
All this is going to do is teach the kid that freedom of speech doesn't really exist.
I am well aware of the meaning of the term 'stalking'; that is why I chose it. Its emotional component was part of what I was implying.
We are still relatively free enough that we don't know what it's like to be watched every second of our life, and I doubt seriously you'd feel anything BUT stalked if you knew you were being watched (and *judged* - an important component) everywhere you go.
does the victim of a screwed up system have? a number of avenues, which, if he or she is truly innocent, can result in vindication, clearing of your name, even monetary compensation
what recourse the victim of a criminal have? money? ha! how do you, for example, remunerate a child for screwing them up due to sexual abuse?
in other words, yes, abuse of authority is a threat to your life and liberty, i agree with you. but what i am saying is that criminality is a LARGER threat to your life and liberty, and people need to adjust their priorities to reflect that simple concept
What in the world?
What recourse does a victim of a screwed up SYSTEM have? NONE! What the hell are you talking about? When the system itself is set up to fuck you over, there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
The recourse you have against criminals in a GOOD system is that the system prosecutes them. Who is talking about money?
You seem to be the kind of person that advocates a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to justice, and we can see how well that works. 39 dead and none of them were found guilty. Nice.
but why do you not see the criminal violating those things far more than a bungling cop does?
Because the cop is acting as an official representative of the authoritative body. If a cop is allowed to trample all over your rights, what does that say about the administration that lets him? What does it say about the government that sets up such a system?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" - Thomas Jefferson
This applies both to criminals AND the government. There will always be those seeking to abuse a free society, criminal and government. It requires hard work to prevent them from undermining the society.
Unfortunately, we've instead chosen expediency over wisdom, and we're going to pay for it.
This illustrates exactly why it is dangerous to assume that people with the power of sanctioned violence over regular people will handle that power responsibly. It is imperative that we always remember that they WILL NOT handle that power responsibly all the time, and when they don't, innocent people suffer, sometimes greatly, sometimes as far as having their lives ruined utterly.
I would say they will RARELY handle that power responsibly - the power to do whatever you please is too seductive to control people for long.
Even those of high moral character will lose perspective after awhile, if given free reign with power they shouldn't have.
Grave restrictions and oversight are requirements for police power in a free country. And exactly why the arguement "If you aren't doing anything wrong, X shouldn't bother you" does NOT hold up to scrutiney is illustrated... yet one more time... in this case.
In fact I've never found that argument moving, simply because the counter argument:
If you have nothing to hide, they shouldn't be watching you
Is equally as convincing.
The disturbing part is that anyone EVER buys the first argument, and perhaps more so, that the second never occurs to them - because it tells you just how limited the average citizen's understanding of freedom and liberty really is. They think freedom is the ability to buy whatever iPod you want and have whatever career you want.. they don't understand that liberty is a political feature, not an economic one.
1. Obviously, it's more profitable for the credit agencies to charge you piecemeal for every piece of information they give you, and public interest be damned.
2. It's more profitable for the credit card companies, because for every person that does report fraud, there are others who never do. I wonder how much profit the credit card companies make from fraudulent charges that are never reversed.
No, cameras watching your every move in public places. You have no expectation of privacy in public places.
Also, this smacks of 'guilty before proven innocent.' If I have done nothing wrong, you have no reason to watch me. Defense of that behavior just smacks of a mind obsessed with power.
laws designed to control your behaviour
What other kind of laws are there?
You're kidding, right?
How about the only good laws are the ones that tell government what it is allowed to do, or laws that protect ME from YOU.
You have no expectation of privacy in public places.
Well, in that case I'm perfectly justified in stalking all beautiful women in public. After all, they have no expectation of being *left alone*, right?
Oh, but we're talking about privacy, not stalking. Only the naive think such a distinction exists - the only difference is who is doing the watching.
The civil war started with South Carolina assuming it had the right to nullify federal laws.
No, it started with the federal government assuming they didn't. While states that agree to be part of the Union are bound by those laws (as they agree in the Constitution), if a state decides they no longer wish to be part of that union, they are accordingly not bound by those laws, either.
The Civil War was from a strictly constructionist perspective, unconstitutional. The states were acting well within their rights by seceding.. but the idea of the Union being divided was so anathema to Lincoln that he started a war over it. Not until 1863 did the word 'slavery' appear in any official justification of the war - make no mistake, it was about power.
We usually hero-worship Lincoln into the ground but the fact is, he abused the power of the federal government as much as any politician can. He may have succeeded in securing some positive outcomes, but the end cannot justify the means, because the means determine the ends.. and the ends are the stumbling monster that is the federal government of today.
Just out of curiosity, how is making $0 per user on millions of users more valuable than making $1 per user on a few hundred users? You aren't a venture capitalist from 1999, are you?
They didn't offer merchandise till about 2 years ago, but they've been up for almost 7. And in the couple of years they've offered merchandise, I see it constantly. These guys have GOT to be set for life.
Like I am actually overwhelmed. You just don't realize how in prevelent advertising is until you've shielded youself from it for a while. Mass ad blocking is like a drug.
You just said something else, although you didn't realize it:
That mass advertising itself is also like a drug. I'm constantly amazed when I hear people talk about their experiences when they don't watch TV or go on the internet for awhile.. it's like they see the world completely differently, and in fact, they do: without the constant drum of advertising against their skulls, they start to see a world NOT based entirely on crass consumerism, a world where there IS meaning and simply joy in things like going to a picnic or talking to your family or reading a book on a gentle afternoon.
We've become so conditioned to be the perfect consumers that we're actually surprised when we step out of that mold. I never watch or listen to ads anymore, and advertisers be damned: I'll buy your product when and if I need it, and only then will I go looking for it. You do not need to spend every waking moment of my life telling me I am a worthless piece of shit because I don't have the latest gadget or waving things in my face that you KNOW I'm going to have to use credit to buy.
Fuck you, all of you. I am a human being, not a machine you can control.
Dude, you talk like you think greed is something new. Grow up. It was greed that has driven the US to be the greatest nation in the world. It will one day drive this world to be the greatest in the universe.
Ayn Rand would just love you to pieces. Yes, I've read all of her works; was quite enamored with it for quite a long time, actually.
And then I actually spent some time taking those ideals to their logical conclusion (with some help from our own society, of course) and concluded that what those ideas lead to is not a world in which I want to leave, nor my children.
Greed? No, greed had little to do with the rise of our nation; our sense of Manifest Destiny played a rather more important role. Greed itself was a byproduct of a people who, born from the ideals of laissez-faire Adam Smith capitalism, were lucky enough to find the last unexploited piece of the planet.
As another poster replied in this thread, "Don't let Stars and Stripes inhibit your better judgement." Your statement smacks of nationalism.
Capitalism is the only system that deals with humans as they truly are. Greedy peons who worry for little more than themselves and those closest to them. I don't deny for a second what I am. The ideal of capitalism is that individual greed can be channelled into societal greed.
No, there are in fact dozens of other systems that deal with humans as they are, only in THOSE systems, "dealing with humans as they are" means that the outcome of such "dealing" is what's better for the culture, not what's better for the few at the top.
The problem with holding greed as an ideal is that it doesn't always (and history has shown it VERY RARELY) translates into enlightened self interest (what you term "societal greed"). When everyone is busy trying to take their own piece of a limited pie (and ALL resources are limited) instead of agreeing on how to share it, the end result can only be that some suffer and the few who are strong (or rich), don't. When we consider it acceptable, ney, NECESSARY to only care about our own interests, it may serve us in the short term.. but in the long term, by making our fellow humans suffer, we only limit our own future, be it by outright revolt or complete social collapse.
It has happened before. A society can only carry the weight of its most powerful members for so long until it becomes top heavy. Humans are social creatures because societies work for us; but they only work for us when we all work together.
This is not a communist, socialist, or other "ist" idea - it is a fact of human nature that our civilization has sought to ignore, because it is inconvenient for building civilizations.
"Your labor is a commodity," someone very smart told me 20yrs ago (damn, I'm getting old), "you need to go out and sell it to the highest bidder."
Precisely my point. I am a human being, not a human resource. Accordingly:
These Circuit City employees would quit immediately if they got an offer for a better job, and none of us would blame them.
this total lack of loyalty is appropriate. So long as I am considered a 'thing' that earns you money, so I will treat you as a 'thing' that gives me a paycheck. Treat me as something more valuable and I'm likely to return the favor.
Really I think the beef isn't so much with capitalism as it is with corporatism.
Actually, you're completely correct. The only reason I didn't use the word 'corporatism' is because I long ago rejected that distinction, meaning, I essentially concluded that capitalism will always lead to corporatism.
Whether that's an accurate conclusion, I am not 100% sure. I am certain enough, though, that I think it an acceptable assumption. It IS one I question, though.
I meant to add this, because it alters the tone of my post somewhat, but of course Slashdot doesn't let you edit posts:
There are features of Capitalism which I do actually really like, and that I still think are workable. But since capitalism is a system we invented, we are consequently responsible for how we run it. The choices we make, the values we hold, influence how we build our civilization. We can choose to be responsible in our pursuit of value, or we can choose to cut every corner, cut every throat, in our grasp for wealth.
Currently, we are increasingly choosing the latter. It doesn't have to be that way. But Capitalism isn't an end in itself, and its purpose can ONLY BE to serve us.. but we have to make it do so. It's hard, to choose to give up wealth for values, but that isn't really a sacrifice, when we consider how much our values actually mean to us.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to be making that choice. Or we are, and what we're choosing really is this destructive.
That aside, what offends me most is that this thread is this horrific notion that we've devolved to a point where the meaning of the term "American dream" has mutated from 'boundless opportunity in the marketplace and the ability to move out of the economic class you were born into' to 'lifetime employment at Circuit City'.
Speaking only for myself, if that really were the case then I'd want no part of it.
The American Dream as I understand it is that when you get laid off from a shitty dead-end job you can go out and find or create something better if you have the drive and/or ability for it. And hey, if your lack the skills or the ambition to go out and work to better your situation, you can always reapply -- I'm sure that red shirt will fit just as well in ten weeks as it does now. --
While I appreciate your sentiment and agree that the 'American Dream' is MUCH more than lifelong employment at Circuit City, I'd like to offer an opposing view of what is going on here.
My view is basically this: The American Dream, as you defined (and which I think most Americans would agree with) - is crap. And this action on Circuit City's part only confirms that assertion. It's a lie we tell ourselves to take pride in something that is inherently destructive, something that while it seems good in theory, becomes nearly impossible in practice: Capitalism itself.
I have spent the better part of my life attempting to understand the intricacies of human nature, particularly with regard to how they influence our social systems (and thus, what the requirements of those social systems are) - and the one point that has always stuck with me is Capitalism itself.
It seems like such an ideal solution, doesn't it, the economic embodiment of freedom, the nearly boundless promise of free enterprise..
Except that when you make money the motivating factor for why you do things, the things that SHOULD motivate you as a human being in a human culture - cease to function. The RIAA's recent behavior (suing a 10 year old girl.. come on) eloquently demonstrates this assertion.
Oh certainly, money need not be the ONLY motivating factor, and for a long time it wasn't. But over time it becomes harder to justify taking a hit to the bottom line just because you care about your employees, doesn't it? Especially when your shareholders are harping on you to increase the stock's value. Especially when there are, at any given moment, dozens of lawsuits against companies for NOT fulfilling their obligations to shareholders.
And especially, when companies are so richly rewarded for their abuse of the human cultures in which they participate.
What I am getting at is this: Circuit City doesn't care one whit about the success of our civilization, and accordingly, the value of their employees as ANYTHING OTHER than "human resources" is essentially nil. There is no value in seeing them as people, because well, it makes them just slightly less profitable. Can't have that now.
No, society falls to shit, and the money-making business doesn't care.. because if the society fails, there's no need for money anyway, but so long as it exists, those with wealth hold all the cards.
Seeing people as human beings is a liability in a civilization that values wealth as much as we do.
Quoting Heinlein, "a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot."
Believe it or not I am so jaded that I fully expect Diebold to win this suit.
I have no faith in logic or reason at any level of government or the courts, anymore. I have seen them agree to too many things that simply boggle the mind.
That is arguable. If people are even *aware* that spying is occurring, regardless of whether they themselves are being spied on (or if they know they're being spied on), it can have a chilling effect on the self-correcting behavior of democracies.
More power to you. I'd love to see a coalition come together and tell the RIAA that they can shove it down their throats, and actually have some consumer clout behind it.
These people have lost all sense of reason, decency, and perspective. They've become the worst sharks anyone in our society can become, and they actually think their behavior is *appropriate*! It's time someone kicked them in the nuts to show them otherwise.
I agree completely, and not because I want to. For too long I considered myself a patriot, proud to be an American and proud of the tradition laid down by our founders. I believed we had created the greatest nation on earth, and I do still believe that for awhile, that was true.
And yet.. at some point, I saw too much, and the scales were removed from my eyes and I saw before me a nation of horror, and no matter how hard I try I cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
I know, as does anyone who spends more than 5 minutes thinking about this, where all of this is going..
How all of this will end...
In fire.
There is only one end to what we have built. And brother, it ain't pretty.
You may as well believe - if religion is right then you get a place in the afterlife. If not, by your own argument, what have you lost?
I used to hold to this argument, until I realized its fatal flaw:
There are beliefs that drive us to reject possible avenues of knowledge, for example, the current push by Fundamentalist Christians in the US to ban stem cell research. There is no way to measure the price this behavior costs us, but at the very least, the intellectual price of rejecting whole areas of investigation simply because you have a belief that already fills that void is, to me, astronomical.
It's also inexcusable, for someone who values knowledge, wisdom, and to whatever degree possible, truth. While religion doesn't *require* blind faith, for the vast majority, that is precisely what it amounts to.
Funny.. my experience has been precisely the opposite. Every person of religious belief with whom I have ever "gotten into it" has given up theological ground of some sort, and this is simply because even the most entrenched mind, when faced with the absolute contradiction of their beliefs, is forced to re-evaluate them, at least in part. It's hard to deny pure logic when it's staring you in the face.
I have largely given up such exercises though, partly because I find it boring (it's just too predictable) but mostly because there's no point: always, without exception, very shortly after the confrontation, the person falls right back into their own mental constructs. Changes of vision come only from within, not from external proof, and this is the fundamental point very few people ever understand:
You will never convince anyone they are wrong. If you 'succeed', it is only because you gave them the tools to convince themselves.
I don't know if religion is actually programmed into us, but there does certainly seem to be a lot more religious people in the world than one might a priori expect
On the surface, this seems a perfectly reasonable position, except that it contains an invalid underlying assumption: that the individuals comprising the culture developed the religious belief independently.
Alas this is not the case, and the preponderance of belief, then, is a consequence of the wide reach of our culture and the extreme efforts of many religious to actively convert people to their specific system of belief. This would, of course, only succeed if the converted were already predisposed to belief of some sort (although there have been notable examples of "Convert or die" in our history), but that doesn't mean *religious* or diety-based belief is necessarily itself predisposed.
The specific form of belief (even so far as to imagine a higher power called 'God' or any other name) would seem instead to be a cultural phenomena. It would be just as perfectly reasonable to consider the plants and animals around you to be endowed with sentience, and imagine that you will become one of them when you die (as in fact, many extant cultures did and still do).
And this tells you just how wide a reach our culture really has - if 96% of the world has an essentially equivalent view of God, but other equally meaningful views are possible and equally as likely from our predisposition to belief, that seems to suggest how well our culture really has spread its own view of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody wants things to work right or work well, if it means upsetting the status quo.
They'd rather things disappear and get bitten in the ass for it in the future, than deal with it now, if it means someone's going to get embarrassed. There's no intellectual honesty anymore..
Actually, yes, it does. The value of a free society is higher than the value of a few lives, believe it or not, otherwise our founders would never have gone to war for it.
"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." - Thomas Jefferson
It's reactionist crap like your post that lead to the "Nanny State" as some call it but worse, it is exactly those things that start us down the path of a police state.
It is NOT inappropriate to involve the kid's parents and the school administration. It is EXTREMELY inappropriate to arrest him and charge him with a crime.
All this is going to do is teach the kid that freedom of speech doesn't really exist.
I am well aware of the meaning of the term 'stalking'; that is why I chose it. Its emotional component was part of what I was implying.
We are still relatively free enough that we don't know what it's like to be watched every second of our life, and I doubt seriously you'd feel anything BUT stalked if you knew you were being watched (and *judged* - an important component) everywhere you go.
What in the world?
What recourse does a victim of a screwed up SYSTEM have? NONE! What the hell are you talking about? When the system itself is set up to fuck you over, there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
The recourse you have against criminals in a GOOD system is that the system prosecutes them. Who is talking about money?
You seem to be the kind of person that advocates a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to justice, and we can see how well that works. 39 dead and none of them were found guilty. Nice.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" - Thomas Jefferson
This applies both to criminals AND the government. There will always be those seeking to abuse a free society, criminal and government. It requires hard work to prevent them from undermining the society.
Unfortunately, we've instead chosen expediency over wisdom, and we're going to pay for it.
Even those of high moral character will lose perspective after awhile, if given free reign with power they shouldn't have.In fact I've never found that argument moving, simply because the counter argument:
If you have nothing to hide, they shouldn't be watching you
Is equally as convincing.
The disturbing part is that anyone EVER buys the first argument, and perhaps more so, that the second never occurs to them - because it tells you just how limited the average citizen's understanding of freedom and liberty really is. They think freedom is the ability to buy whatever iPod you want and have whatever career you want.. they don't understand that liberty is a political feature, not an economic one.
1. Obviously, it's more profitable for the credit agencies to charge you piecemeal for every piece of information they give you, and public interest be damned.
2. It's more profitable for the credit card companies, because for every person that does report fraud, there are others who never do. I wonder how much profit the credit card companies make from fraudulent charges that are never reversed.
You're kidding, right?
How about the only good laws are the ones that tell government what it is allowed to do, or laws that protect ME from YOU.
'Behavior' is too ambiguous a term.
Oh, but we're talking about privacy, not stalking. Only the naive think such a distinction exists - the only difference is who is doing the watching.
The Civil War was from a strictly constructionist perspective, unconstitutional. The states were acting well within their rights by seceding.. but the idea of the Union being divided was so anathema to Lincoln that he started a war over it. Not until 1863 did the word 'slavery' appear in any official justification of the war - make no mistake, it was about power.
We usually hero-worship Lincoln into the ground but the fact is, he abused the power of the federal government as much as any politician can. He may have succeeded in securing some positive outcomes, but the end cannot justify the means, because the means determine the ends.. and the ends are the stumbling monster that is the federal government of today.
Ask these guys.
They didn't offer merchandise till about 2 years ago, but they've been up for almost 7. And in the couple of years they've offered merchandise, I see it constantly. These guys have GOT to be set for life.
You just said something else, although you didn't realize it:
That mass advertising itself is also like a drug. I'm constantly amazed when I hear people talk about their experiences when they don't watch TV or go on the internet for awhile.. it's like they see the world completely differently, and in fact, they do: without the constant drum of advertising against their skulls, they start to see a world NOT based entirely on crass consumerism, a world where there IS meaning and simply joy in things like going to a picnic or talking to your family or reading a book on a gentle afternoon.
We've become so conditioned to be the perfect consumers that we're actually surprised when we step out of that mold. I never watch or listen to ads anymore, and advertisers be damned: I'll buy your product when and if I need it, and only then will I go looking for it. You do not need to spend every waking moment of my life telling me I am a worthless piece of shit because I don't have the latest gadget or waving things in my face that you KNOW I'm going to have to use credit to buy.
Fuck you, all of you. I am a human being, not a machine you can control.
Good point. Rather than repeat myself, I point you to a similar reply, here
And then I actually spent some time taking those ideals to their logical conclusion (with some help from our own society, of course) and concluded that what those ideas lead to is not a world in which I want to leave, nor my children.
Greed? No, greed had little to do with the rise of our nation; our sense of Manifest Destiny played a rather more important role. Greed itself was a byproduct of a people who, born from the ideals of laissez-faire Adam Smith capitalism, were lucky enough to find the last unexploited piece of the planet.
As another poster replied in this thread, "Don't let Stars and Stripes inhibit your better judgement." Your statement smacks of nationalism.
No, there are in fact dozens of other systems that deal with humans as they are, only in THOSE systems, "dealing with humans as they are" means that the outcome of such "dealing" is what's better for the culture, not what's better for the few at the top.
The problem with holding greed as an ideal is that it doesn't always (and history has shown it VERY RARELY) translates into enlightened self interest (what you term "societal greed"). When everyone is busy trying to take their own piece of a limited pie (and ALL resources are limited) instead of agreeing on how to share it, the end result can only be that some suffer and the few who are strong (or rich), don't. When we consider it acceptable, ney, NECESSARY to only care about our own interests, it may serve us in the short term.. but in the long term, by making our fellow humans suffer, we only limit our own future, be it by outright revolt or complete social collapse.
It has happened before. A society can only carry the weight of its most powerful members for so long until it becomes top heavy. Humans are social creatures because societies work for us; but they only work for us when we all work together.
This is not a communist, socialist, or other "ist" idea - it is a fact of human nature that our civilization has sought to ignore, because it is inconvenient for building civilizations.
Precisely my point. I am a human being, not a human resource. Accordingly:this total lack of loyalty is appropriate. So long as I am considered a 'thing' that earns you money, so I will treat you as a 'thing' that gives me a paycheck. Treat me as something more valuable and I'm likely to return the favor.
You merely made my point for me.
Whether that's an accurate conclusion, I am not 100% sure. I am certain enough, though, that I think it an acceptable assumption. It IS one I question, though.
I meant to add this, because it alters the tone of my post somewhat, but of course Slashdot doesn't let you edit posts:
There are features of Capitalism which I do actually really like, and that I still think are workable. But since capitalism is a system we invented, we are consequently responsible for how we run it. The choices we make, the values we hold, influence how we build our civilization. We can choose to be responsible in our pursuit of value, or we can choose to cut every corner, cut every throat, in our grasp for wealth.
Currently, we are increasingly choosing the latter. It doesn't have to be that way. But Capitalism isn't an end in itself, and its purpose can ONLY BE to serve us.. but we have to make it do so. It's hard, to choose to give up wealth for values, but that isn't really a sacrifice, when we consider how much our values actually mean to us.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to be making that choice. Or we are, and what we're choosing really is this destructive.
While I appreciate your sentiment and agree that the 'American Dream' is MUCH more than lifelong employment at Circuit City, I'd like to offer an opposing view of what is going on here.
My view is basically this: The American Dream, as you defined (and which I think most Americans would agree with) - is crap. And this action on Circuit City's part only confirms that assertion. It's a lie we tell ourselves to take pride in something that is inherently destructive, something that while it seems good in theory, becomes nearly impossible in practice: Capitalism itself.
I have spent the better part of my life attempting to understand the intricacies of human nature, particularly with regard to how they influence our social systems (and thus, what the requirements of those social systems are) - and the one point that has always stuck with me is Capitalism itself.
It seems like such an ideal solution, doesn't it, the economic embodiment of freedom, the nearly boundless promise of free enterprise..
Except that when you make money the motivating factor for why you do things, the things that SHOULD motivate you as a human being in a human culture - cease to function. The RIAA's recent behavior (suing a 10 year old girl.. come on) eloquently demonstrates this assertion.
Oh certainly, money need not be the ONLY motivating factor, and for a long time it wasn't. But over time it becomes harder to justify taking a hit to the bottom line just because you care about your employees, doesn't it? Especially when your shareholders are harping on you to increase the stock's value. Especially when there are, at any given moment, dozens of lawsuits against companies for NOT fulfilling their obligations to shareholders.
And especially, when companies are so richly rewarded for their abuse of the human cultures in which they participate.
What I am getting at is this: Circuit City doesn't care one whit about the success of our civilization, and accordingly, the value of their employees as ANYTHING OTHER than "human resources" is essentially nil. There is no value in seeing them as people, because well, it makes them just slightly less profitable. Can't have that now.
No, society falls to shit, and the money-making business doesn't care.. because if the society fails, there's no need for money anyway, but so long as it exists, those with wealth hold all the cards.
Seeing people as human beings is a liability in a civilization that values wealth as much as we do.
Quoting Heinlein, "a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than a riot."
Believe it or not I am so jaded that I fully expect Diebold to win this suit.
I have no faith in logic or reason at any level of government or the courts, anymore. I have seen them agree to too many things that simply boggle the mind.
More power to you. I'd love to see a coalition come together and tell the RIAA that they can shove it down their throats, and actually have some consumer clout behind it.
These people have lost all sense of reason, decency, and perspective. They've become the worst sharks anyone in our society can become, and they actually think their behavior is *appropriate*! It's time someone kicked them in the nuts to show them otherwise.
I agree completely, and not because I want to. For too long I considered myself a patriot, proud to be an American and proud of the tradition laid down by our founders. I believed we had created the greatest nation on earth, and I do still believe that for awhile, that was true.
And yet.. at some point, I saw too much, and the scales were removed from my eyes and I saw before me a nation of horror, and no matter how hard I try I cannot put that genie back in the bottle.
I know, as does anyone who spends more than 5 minutes thinking about this, where all of this is going..
How all of this will end...
In fire.
There is only one end to what we have built. And brother, it ain't pretty.
There are beliefs that drive us to reject possible avenues of knowledge, for example, the current push by Fundamentalist Christians in the US to ban stem cell research. There is no way to measure the price this behavior costs us, but at the very least, the intellectual price of rejecting whole areas of investigation simply because you have a belief that already fills that void is, to me, astronomical.
It's also inexcusable, for someone who values knowledge, wisdom, and to whatever degree possible, truth. While religion doesn't *require* blind faith, for the vast majority, that is precisely what it amounts to.
Funny.. my experience has been precisely the opposite. Every person of religious belief with whom I have ever "gotten into it" has given up theological ground of some sort, and this is simply because even the most entrenched mind, when faced with the absolute contradiction of their beliefs, is forced to re-evaluate them, at least in part. It's hard to deny pure logic when it's staring you in the face.
I have largely given up such exercises though, partly because I find it boring (it's just too predictable) but mostly because there's no point: always, without exception, very shortly after the confrontation, the person falls right back into their own mental constructs. Changes of vision come only from within, not from external proof, and this is the fundamental point very few people ever understand:
You will never convince anyone they are wrong. If you 'succeed', it is only because you gave them the tools to convince themselves.
Alas this is not the case, and the preponderance of belief, then, is a consequence of the wide reach of our culture and the extreme efforts of many religious to actively convert people to their specific system of belief. This would, of course, only succeed if the converted were already predisposed to belief of some sort (although there have been notable examples of "Convert or die" in our history), but that doesn't mean *religious* or diety-based belief is necessarily itself predisposed.
The specific form of belief (even so far as to imagine a higher power called 'God' or any other name) would seem instead to be a cultural phenomena. It would be just as perfectly reasonable to consider the plants and animals around you to be endowed with sentience, and imagine that you will become one of them when you die (as in fact, many extant cultures did and still do).
And this tells you just how wide a reach our culture really has - if 96% of the world has an essentially equivalent view of God, but other equally meaningful views are possible and equally as likely from our predisposition to belief, that seems to suggest how well our culture really has spread its own view of the world.