This seems to have descended into an insoluble partisan debate.
Joel Send a noteboard - 23/08/2011 07:43:07 PM
Which is rather inexplicable since I conceded your primary proposition for the sake of arguing whether it made any difference, then conceded a second based on the first for the same reason. Remember, the only reason I started talking about multinational corporate greed was the reminder you're convinced we have the tech to turn deserts into Clarkian utopias, and I even let the issue of multinational greed slide because it's so incompatible with YOUR world view and because, more importantly, even that's only a symptom of man succumbing to his baser instincts, which was my primary point and is the real problem. Telling me "people are people" does little to refute my having said just that multiple times already. If you're finally willing to grant THAT, then it ought to be a settled issue that human nature will no more usher in a future where quadrillions of humans live in decent comfort without fossil fuels than it's brought a present where even MOST of six billion humans do so with fossil fuels (or did you think Parkinsons Law only applies to the Rwandan part of the Solar system?)
Lest you think I'm ignoring your particular points though, I'll respond to them as well:
I didn't say it was racist, but it did leave a thick aftertaste of smug superiority and/or condescension; not racist, but no source of pride.
Wait, lemme see if I understood that: I'm inserting my pro-socialist worldview instead of realizing that Third World work ethics are destroyed because "Pull in a harvest that's twice as big as everyone else's and they either decide you had good luck or must have cheated someone and thus aren't really entitled to your gains, or they don't care how you did it and simply figure your bounty means you have extra food and an extra son you don't really need, so they take the extra and your kid for the army". Your ENTIRE "alternate" explanation is just a more detailed explanation that their "worldview demands that success can only come at someone else's expense". You managed to make the standard conservative attack on socialism, make it the cause of Third World poverty, disease and oppression AND accuse me of pushing my personal political agenda all at once. Truly impressive, and perhaps a SMALL part of why I responded to the textbook conservative catechism as what it was. Let's just agree to disagree on who's looking at this through partisan blinders; again, whether socialism is good, bad or indifferent is immaterial to the deeper reason human technology won't produce a happy heavily populated future: Human NATURE (which, IIRC, is the most popular reason socialism and communism are dismissed even by people who recognize their goals as desirable but unrealistic).
Sorry, I didn't realize you meant "functionally equal" as wholly literal; I thought you just meant "practically equal" since it goes without saying consumers will always buy a less expensive product that meets their needs in all the same ways as more expensive ones. Even in conspicuous consumption there's the allure of more expensive products intangible "higher status" value; if a Mercedes had the cachet of a Rolls no one would ever buy the latter. In that case I'd rather old ladies got mugged with $5 hammers than $50 ones because muggers won't be as busily cash starved but, once again, neither the hammer nor its price are the problem. The REAL problem is human nature, that while hammers allow constructive people to build more and better homes and spice racks, they also allow destructive people to mug more old ladies. Inventing a self pounding hammer won't create a world where everyone lives in a three story house and muggings are non-existent.
It was an analogy, not an equation: Our own countrys unprecedented and unrepresentative comfort don't demonstrate increasing GLOBAL comfort any more than reduced terrestrial entropy demonstrates reduced universal entropy. Believing either is missing the forest for the trees. I'll skip the part where the last decade putting a cell phone in his pocket gives no more "decent comfort" to an Indian living in Medieval conditions or an American losing his home because he hasn't worked in a year has no more; I don't have hard numbers or actual cases there, and you either dismiss as anecdotal or outright ignore the hard numbers and actual cases I HAVE cited.
This would be an example of dismissing documented cases as anecdotal rather than just ignoring them completely, which is only slightly better. You're telling me that no matter how many examples I give, no matter what kind of pattern I demonstrate, it doesn't matter because they're all exceptional anomalies. I'm not sure what I can say if any evidence I present is irrelevant; that pretty much tells me you've made your decision and won't be confused with facts. The important thing is that no one lets their preferred world views distort their perception.
Meanwhile, when 51% of the world is using cheap and already available technology to live in the decent comfort you predict will one day be the norm for three times as many people who don't have the dubious benefit of fossil fuels, I'll believe human nature doesn't make that as much a pipe dream as a utopian dictatorship of the proletariat where everyone does the most and best work solely because out of civic duty, with no profit motive. Corporate greed is neither here nor there to that, and while it is a longstanding pet peeve of mind (the recent change is that I let Obama sucker me into believing Democrats offered a legitimate alternative) it's only the symptom of the much longer problems inherent in human nature. We have an almost unlimited capacity for good AND evil--yet NONE of us is predestined to accomplish either and ALL of us are fallen, so we'll never be more than a mixed bag, at best. The best way to make it more likely is with Ms. Rands horrible collectives relying on enlightened self interest to make sure each of us denies the others the "freedom" to exploit others, but even that fails when each member of the collective benefits from the exploitation of non-members and lacks the moral fiber to object. Of the many examples of that, multinationals are arguably the most potent and definitely the most visible because very few people have the means to purchase enough shares to hold them accountable through the ballot box, but that's still just one effect of a deeper cause. Fully democratic nations can and do operate the same way when the people exploited are safely out of sight and impotent on the other side of the globe. The real problem, as it has been and will always be for every utopia, is still human nature, not technology or corporations.
Lest you think I'm ignoring your particular points though, I'll respond to them as well:
I can't say as I'm surprised but you not only seem to have missed the core of everything I was saying but actually flipped it on it's head, let's review.
Work Ethic: People who are used to the powers that be taking their stuff every time they try to be just a little bit better off than those around them don't have a good work ethic, because it's hard to tell your kids things like "You can achieve anything with hard work and determination" when it's not particularly true where you live. You chose to interpret that as racism I guess.
Work Ethic: People who are used to the powers that be taking their stuff every time they try to be just a little bit better off than those around them don't have a good work ethic, because it's hard to tell your kids things like "You can achieve anything with hard work and determination" when it's not particularly true where you live. You chose to interpret that as racism I guess.
I didn't say it was racist, but it did leave a thick aftertaste of smug superiority and/or condescension; not racist, but no source of pride.
You point out that you ran with it more than it should because it smacked of the classic "only people too good to work want welfare" argument which really only means you blinded yourself to the point I was making because it set off your personal anti-socialism alarms. When your worldview demands that success can only come at someone else's expense I suppose that's necessary, but it doesn't change my point that people are people and that when you observe widespread tendencies to good or bad work ethics there's usually a reason for it. For much of history, and for much of the world, people often have no incentive to try to improve their lot because improvement is not allowed, it is punished by the people on the top and by your own 'equals'. Pull in a harvest that's twice as big as everyone else's and they either decide you had good luck or must have cheated someone and thus aren't really entitled to your gains, or they don't care how you did it and simply figure your bounty means you have extra food and an extra son you don't really need, so they take the extra and your kid for the army. Much of the third world's problem is not exploitation by the west it's because "Why try when you'll just fail?" is endemic to many of those places. I guess that hits a little too close to home philosophically so it's easier for you cast my remarks as some sort of racial or cultural bigotry.
Wait, lemme see if I understood that: I'm inserting my pro-socialist worldview instead of realizing that Third World work ethics are destroyed because "Pull in a harvest that's twice as big as everyone else's and they either decide you had good luck or must have cheated someone and thus aren't really entitled to your gains, or they don't care how you did it and simply figure your bounty means you have extra food and an extra son you don't really need, so they take the extra and your kid for the army". Your ENTIRE "alternate" explanation is just a more detailed explanation that their "worldview demands that success can only come at someone else's expense". You managed to make the standard conservative attack on socialism, make it the cause of Third World poverty, disease and oppression AND accuse me of pushing my personal political agenda all at once. Truly impressive, and perhaps a SMALL part of why I responded to the textbook conservative catechism as what it was. Let's just agree to disagree on who's looking at this through partisan blinders; again, whether socialism is good, bad or indifferent is immaterial to the deeper reason human technology won't produce a happy heavily populated future: Human NATURE (which, IIRC, is the most popular reason socialism and communism are dismissed even by people who recognize their goals as desirable but unrealistic).
The hammer: The whole repeated point of the $50 and $5 hammers was that they were roughly equal in quality so it's hard for me to see how you aren't cherry-picking my comments when you choose to use them in an analogy about how you'd rather old ladies get hit with the less effective $5 one. The purposes of the hammers is to indicate an imposed falsehood about technology where commerce is concerned. Two people constructing hammers with different available resources and equipment could both construct equally effective hammers and sell them for the same percentage of profit but for $5 and $50 each. Consumerism, through competition, eliminates the sale of equally useful but more expensive equipment, so that people assume higher price equals higher quality when all it really means is that for an object to fetch a higher price it must be perceived as being of higher quality. This does not however mean that a more expensive product is superior, or is even being falsely touted as superior, it just means modern consumers never see products that are effectively identical for large price differences because the more expensive one is not commercially viable. Through out this discussion you've been using the lack of those $50 hammers at Walmart to claim they can not exist, while I have been trying to point out that hammers are useful enough that if material that allows $5 ones is exhausted, the $50 one becomes commercially viable. Economics and industry both tend to follow the Law of the Minimum, but just because a steel screwdriver is cheaper to make and superior to one of bronze does not mean a sudden absence of steel would cause the screwdriver industry to cease to exist.
Sorry, I didn't realize you meant "functionally equal" as wholly literal; I thought you just meant "practically equal" since it goes without saying consumers will always buy a less expensive product that meets their needs in all the same ways as more expensive ones. Even in conspicuous consumption there's the allure of more expensive products intangible "higher status" value; if a Mercedes had the cachet of a Rolls no one would ever buy the latter. In that case I'd rather old ladies got mugged with $5 hammers than $50 ones because muggers won't be as busily cash starved but, once again, neither the hammer nor its price are the problem. The REAL problem is human nature, that while hammers allow constructive people to build more and better homes and spice racks, they also allow destructive people to mug more old ladies. Inventing a self pounding hammer won't create a world where everyone lives in a three story house and muggings are non-existent.
Entropy and Poverty: Please don't equate a fundamental aspect of the Universe to tricky and relative concepts of wealth amongst humanity. When you say there is less entropy in the west, if you are trying to use that as some sociological or political term, please define it and do not use physical entropy of the Universe in the next sentence as though it were identical. Entropy has a few different meanings just inside science where careless use can cause gross misunderstandings, I have no idea how you are using it context to the 1st vs 3rd world but I'm not familiar with entropy as an economic or political term and I can't think of any scientific versions that would be true in that context.
It was an analogy, not an equation: Our own countrys unprecedented and unrepresentative comfort don't demonstrate increasing GLOBAL comfort any more than reduced terrestrial entropy demonstrates reduced universal entropy. Believing either is missing the forest for the trees. I'll skip the part where the last decade putting a cell phone in his pocket gives no more "decent comfort" to an Indian living in Medieval conditions or an American losing his home because he hasn't worked in a year has no more; I don't have hard numbers or actual cases there, and you either dismiss as anecdotal or outright ignore the hard numbers and actual cases I HAVE cited.
Scale: One of the most profound remarks I ever heard is "The Sun is much, much bigger than even an Elephant." wrapped up with it was the concept that the human mind does not deal with scale comparisons well, and why math is so important to understanding scientific concepts, why the layman's understanding is always incomplete without it. The Speed of Sound compared to the Speed of Light, planetary models depicting the Earth as a small foam ball a foot away from a grapefruit Sun when it should be a pea a mile away from a beachball, etc. When you cite cases of corporate abuse in the third world, you'll never have problems coming up with real ones, because 6 billion people produce a lot of interaction, same as people can always find cases of police brutality. You remember a year or two back when someone opened up another police abuse case and someone talked about how we had these every few months and something needed to be done? And I pointed out that with hundreds of thousands of cops working for 30 or so years each, that even if there were a hundred times as many incidents as got reported and that if they were evenly spread as opposed to repeat incidents by a bad egg it would still mean less than 1 in 100 cops ever in 30 years had a single incident? This is the same... oh, corps are anything but white knights but even if you filled up a ten volume book series of real incidents of bad behavior, each a page long, the scale of corporate involvement in the third world is so massive that for practical purposes those ten books would get stacked in a corner shelf of an entire library composed mostly of minor bads, neutrals, minor goods, and great successes of mutual benefits. This same concept applies to a lot of human outrage, let's hypothesize a major religion who have about 10,000 incidents of strapping bombs to their chest or child molestation, sounds truly awful, an indictment of that religion with two incidents on the news every week for a decade, but if they've got a billion followers those 10,000 incidents, even if they could be considered 1:1 acts of mainstream members, would indict only 1/10th of 1% of 1% of their membership, the equivalent of claiming a murder spree occurred in a city of Two Hundred Thousand because two murders took place there in a decade. A dozen sweatshops employing a hundred kids each to make sneakers does not in of itself mean much in a country of 100 million, even if one chooses to ignore that those not working for a western corporation or before they even started arriving generally worked just as hard if not harder for the same or less compensation. Scale can not be ignored.
This would be an example of dismissing documented cases as anecdotal rather than just ignoring them completely, which is only slightly better. You're telling me that no matter how many examples I give, no matter what kind of pattern I demonstrate, it doesn't matter because they're all exceptional anomalies. I'm not sure what I can say if any evidence I present is irrelevant; that pretty much tells me you've made your decision and won't be confused with facts. The important thing is that no one lets their preferred world views distort their perception.
Meanwhile, when 51% of the world is using cheap and already available technology to live in the decent comfort you predict will one day be the norm for three times as many people who don't have the dubious benefit of fossil fuels, I'll believe human nature doesn't make that as much a pipe dream as a utopian dictatorship of the proletariat where everyone does the most and best work solely because out of civic duty, with no profit motive. Corporate greed is neither here nor there to that, and while it is a longstanding pet peeve of mind (the recent change is that I let Obama sucker me into believing Democrats offered a legitimate alternative) it's only the symptom of the much longer problems inherent in human nature. We have an almost unlimited capacity for good AND evil--yet NONE of us is predestined to accomplish either and ALL of us are fallen, so we'll never be more than a mixed bag, at best. The best way to make it more likely is with Ms. Rands horrible collectives relying on enlightened self interest to make sure each of us denies the others the "freedom" to exploit others, but even that fails when each member of the collective benefits from the exploitation of non-members and lacks the moral fiber to object. Of the many examples of that, multinationals are arguably the most potent and definitely the most visible because very few people have the means to purchase enough shares to hold them accountable through the ballot box, but that's still just one effect of a deeper cause. Fully democratic nations can and do operate the same way when the people exploited are safely out of sight and impotent on the other side of the globe. The real problem, as it has been and will always be for every utopia, is still human nature, not technology or corporations.
Honorbound and honored to be Bonded to Mahtaliel Sedai
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
This message last edited by Joel on 23/08/2011 at 07:52:43 PM
If ever there was a reason to cut greenhouse gas emissions
19/08/2011 10:14:00 AM
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I've seen Start Trek, I know the real threat is you killing whales.
19/08/2011 10:34:08 AM
- 520 Views
I know
19/08/2011 10:36:22 AM
- 470 Views
You make a fair point
19/08/2011 11:22:53 AM
- 445 Views
There's so much wrong with that
19/08/2011 01:08:57 PM
- 500 Views
"They don't recycle; kill them all. "
19/08/2011 07:11:15 PM
- 496 Views
Very Space Hippy
19/08/2011 10:39:10 PM
- 513 Views
It's still debatable whether we've abandoned the evolutionary ladder.
19/08/2011 11:16:58 PM
- 589 Views
You'll welcome to debate that with a biologist, it's not my specialty or interest
20/08/2011 04:46:43 AM
- 545 Views
I've seen a lot of mainstream biologists suggest human evolution may be mostly mental now.
21/08/2011 11:32:48 AM
- 562 Views
Neither of us are biologists though and it's not really relveant anyway
21/08/2011 01:21:06 PM
- 504 Views
I'm not ignoring it, just wondering why over half the planet ignores it and lives in misery.
21/08/2011 01:55:53 PM
- 519 Views
If you have occassion to spend time in those places you'll know why
21/08/2011 02:38:44 PM
- 450 Views
How does literal mud huts as the norm respresent living standards rising "a lot".
22/08/2011 12:29:35 AM
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You seem to have cherry-picked what you wanted to hear out of my comments
22/08/2011 01:07:10 AM
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"It's a stability thing, not a Western greed thing" seemed to encapsulate your comments.
22/08/2011 03:10:17 PM
- 479 Views
Only if you really cherry pick them
23/08/2011 02:48:08 AM
- 492 Views
This seems to have descended into an insoluble partisan debate.
23/08/2011 07:43:07 PM
- 554 Views
*rudely butts in*
23/08/2011 04:38:33 AM
- 534 Views
American companies don't go to China SOLELY to screw the working class, no;that's largely incidental
25/08/2011 08:03:05 PM
- 583 Views
we should abdon the myth of the evolutionary ladder
20/08/2011 11:49:35 PM
- 383 Views
Probably; as discussed in Brams thread it should never be seen as predictive, let alone prophetic.
21/08/2011 11:55:09 AM
- 492 Views
Well, for this context I think the use is okay
21/08/2011 11:59:19 AM
- 463 Views
That's an interesting point about the NEED for fossil fuels as a stepping stone to advanced culture.
21/08/2011 12:33:59 PM
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Not a need, just an edge
21/08/2011 02:06:23 PM
- 377 Views
There's industrialization and then there's industrialization.
22/08/2011 12:53:35 AM
- 739 Views
If you were more familiar with engineering you'd not say something like that
22/08/2011 01:53:33 AM
- 735 Views
I dispute that industrialization is primarily about non-agricultural production.
22/08/2011 03:10:19 PM
- 641 Views
Well you can argue that with a dictionary I suppose
23/08/2011 03:50:52 AM
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I'm not above that, but the dictionary definitions I've found are disappointingly self-referential.
24/08/2011 02:25:21 AM
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That tends to be the case, it is a kinda vague term outside of specific context
24/08/2011 09:12:19 AM
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Tends to moot that part of the debate though.
26/08/2011 12:31:21 AM
- 600 Views
and we wonder why so many people ignore "scientist"
19/08/2011 01:17:38 PM
- 518 Views
Think it's better to ignore "reporters on a slow news day," to be honest *NM*
19/08/2011 02:38:23 PM
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Hypothetical aliens are perfectly wise
19/08/2011 06:24:13 PM
- 432 Views
You may be confusing aliens with God.
19/08/2011 07:08:01 PM
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