The End of Nature's Great Ape Experiment.

[georgephillip]

That's because you don't understand the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome.

Being reduced to serfdom is an outcome you favor?

I do not support the kind of slavery obama envisions. Serfs perform services without pay, for the glory of the royal ruler. What ended serfdom was the rise of the skilled craftsman. Anyone could become a skilled craftsman. Some did, some remained serfs or went to work for the skilled. That's equal opportunity. Equal outcome is to decree that all are as skilled as everyone else.

Do you believe you have the same opportunity to succeed as a Rockefeller or Rothschild has? Capitalism wasn't designed to ensure a level playing field from one generation to the next, just the opposite. The last four years should have proven that to anyone who cared to look.

 

[LogikAndReazon]

These poor pitiful socialist peons. Always searching for the magical myths of "equality" and fairness. Poor stupid bastards.

 

[georgephillip]

What purpose do greedy capitalists propose an economy should serve?

"If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable.

"Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance.

"Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."

Social Credit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[LogikAndReazon]

God, I hate you ******* racists

"For Aristotle, then, logic is the instrument (the 'organon') by means of which we come to know anything." Hate is not logical...is it?

Aristotle: Logic

How I express hate here is purely dialectical because I hate any ideology that generalize people of different ethnic groups and those who use pitiful threads like these to justify their hate

lower tax rates = "hate" lol

 

[georgephillip]

Tax cheats hate democracy

"Millions of Americans knowingly lie on their tax forms and the government loses out on roughly $300 billion a year in unpaid taxes. But the IRS has ways of making you pay. Is it worth the risk? CNBC's Becky Quick reports. Original air date, April 14, 2011."

The American Tax Cheat

 

[Meathead]

Being reduced to serfdom is an outcome you favor?

I do not support the kind of slavery obama envisions. Serfs perform services without pay, for the glory of the royal ruler. What ended serfdom was the rise of the skilled craftsman. Anyone could become a skilled craftsman. Some did, some remained serfs or went to work for the skilled. That's equal opportunity. Equal outcome is to decree that all are as skilled as everyone else.

Do you believe you have the same opportunity to succeed as a Rockefeller or Rothschild has? Capitalism wasn't designed to ensure a level playing field from one generation to the next, just the opposite. The last four years should have proven that to anyone who cared to look.

There is no level playing field. There never has been and never will be. Neither nature nor man can ever make it so. You can moan and groan till kingdom come, but at some point you have to get on with your life and make the best of it. It really is that simple.

 

[Katzndogz]

Being reduced to serfdom is an outcome you favor?

I do not support the kind of slavery obama envisions. Serfs perform services without pay, for the glory of the royal ruler. What ended serfdom was the rise of the skilled craftsman. Anyone could become a skilled craftsman. Some did, some remained serfs or went to work for the skilled. That's equal opportunity. Equal outcome is to decree that all are as skilled as everyone else.

Do you believe you have the same opportunity to succeed as a Rockefeller or Rothschild has? Capitalism wasn't designed to ensure a level playing field from one generation to the next, just the opposite. The last four years should have proven that to anyone who cared to look.

Of course! A Rothchild or Rockefeller only need make one bad decision to be divested of all they own. On the other hand, a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs can rise from their parent's garage to be richer than either a Rothchild or a Rockefeller.

Capitalism is not designed to ensure a level playing field It was never supposed to do that. Capitalism is designed to ensure that the most capable succeed. Not equalize the most capable with the least capable. Each generation produces its own successes or failures. They might have the opportunity to build on a parent's success, but that's all it is, an opportunity. Plenty of kids have frittered away parental fortunes.

Paris Hilton, everyone's favorite rich kid air-head actually runs several successful businesses herself. She was actually disinherited from the Hilton fortune some years ago. Her money, today, is all her own.

You are looking for ways to explain your own failures. If you accepted the fact that you are a failure, all on your own, there is a chance that you can overcome the failure syndrome.

 

[georgephillip]

You're defining "failure" in strictly monetary terms, right?
Maybe you spend too much time around rich parasites like Paris Hilton.
Capitalism rewards the corrupt at least as much as the capable.
Or perhaps you think those who get rich from war and debt earn their "success?"

 

[georgephillip]

I do not support the kind of slavery obama envisions. Serfs perform services without pay, for the glory of the royal ruler. What ended serfdom was the rise of the skilled craftsman. Anyone could become a skilled craftsman. Some did, some remained serfs or went to work for the skilled. That's equal opportunity. Equal outcome is to decree that all are as skilled as everyone else.

Do you believe you have the same opportunity to succeed as a Rockefeller or Rothschild has? Capitalism wasn't designed to ensure a level playing field from one generation to the next, just the opposite. The last four years should have proven that to anyone who cared to look.

There is no level playing field. There never has been and never will be. Neither nature nor man can ever make it so. You can moan and groan till kingdom come, but at some point you have to get on with your life and make the best of it. It really is that simple.

Simple begins with deciding on the purpose of an economy.
Here are three alternatives offered by CH Douglas:

"1. The first of these is that it is a disguised Government, of which the primary, though admittedly not the only, object is to impose upon the world a system of thought and action.

"2. The second alternative has a certain similarity to the first, but is simpler. It assumes that the primary objective of the industrial system is the provision of employment.

"3. And the third, which is essentially simpler still, in fact, so simple that it appears entirely unintelligible to the majority, is that the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services."

Simple?

Social Credit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Oldguy]

Yeah, bringing telegraphs, telephone systems, radio, railroads, santization standards, medicine that almost completely wiped out historical diseases that were a constant blight, and moderen government was all so ******* exploitative. Get the **** out of here, you ******* communist. lol

Would YOU consider those things a fair trade off for liberty, freedom and self government?

I suspect the honest answer would be no. If so, what makes you think the Indian's wouldn't answer the same way?

If the answer is yes, then you're a prime target for charlatan's and demagogues. Who cares about what Mussolini is doing, so long as the trains run on time, right?

 

[Oldguy]

That's because you don't understand the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome.

Being reduced to serfdom is an outcome you favor?

I do not support the kind of slavery obama envisions. Serfs perform services without pay, for the glory of the royal ruler. What ended serfdom was the rise of the skilled craftsman. Anyone could become a skilled craftsman. Some did, some remained serfs or went to work for the skilled. That's equal opportunity. Equal outcome is to decree that all are as skilled as everyone else.

Skilled craftsmen almost universally organized themselves into guild's or trade unions. Unions...let me say that again...unions.

How does that fit into the Republican's vision for America?

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

"'If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea...'"

For the last 500 years white European and Euro-American ape-descendants have plundered, polluted, pillaged, and exploited planet Earth to the brink of extinction.

In his most recent post, Chris Hedges argues this particular Great Game is nearly at its end:

"But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence."

Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

*Yawn* Another dingbat climate-changer.

 

[Dante]

"'If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea...'"

For the last 500 years white European and Euro-American ape-descendants have plundered, polluted, pillaged, and exploited planet Earth to the brink of extinction....[/url]

We share an ancestor with apes...we do not descend from apes.

 

[georgephillip]

Would you elaborate or provide a link?

 

[georgephillip]

"'If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea...'"

For the last 500 years white European and Euro-American ape-descendants have plundered, polluted, pillaged, and exploited planet Earth to the brink of extinction.

In his most recent post, Chris Hedges argues this particular Great Game is nearly at its end:

"But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence."

Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

*Yawn* Another dingbat climate-changer.

"Clive Hamilton in his 'Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change' describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that 'catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.'

"This obliteration of 'false hopes,' he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge.

"The first is attainable.

"The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire.

"To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.

"The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us."

Is the denial of your mortality making it hard to hear the Requiem?

Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

 

[Dante]

Would you elaborate or provide a link?

We share an ancestor with apes...we do not descend from apes.

*sigh

HowStuffWorks "Are humans really descended from apes?"

One of the most persistent myths, however, concerns the relationship of humans to great apes, a group of primates that includes the gorilla, orangutan and chimpanzee. Someone who believes the myth will say, "If evolution exists, then humans must be descended directly from apes. Apes must have changed, step by step, into humans." This same person will often follow up with this observation: "If apes 'turned into' humans, then apes should no longer exist." Although there are several ways to attack this assertion, the bottom-line rebuttal is simple -- humans didn't descend from apes. That's not to say humans and apes aren't related, but the relationship can't be traced backward along a direct line of descent, one form morphing into another. It must be traced along two independent lines, far back into time until the two lines merge.

 

[Cassandro]

Two billion people live in dire poverty today, which is more people than existed on this planet 100 years ago. How's that for objectivity? Indians "flocked to Spanish missions" because they were exterminated or enslaved if they did not. Capitalism doesn't exist without the virtues of total war and endless debt.

Never took a statistics class, eh? Even if your two billion estimate was correct, that would mean that only 40% live in poverty, a much lower percentage than in previous times. Or do you just deal in gross numbers? In that case, poverty could only be reduced by mass extinction. Brilliant.

You're right about that Statistics course; I'm starting my first this month. (https://www.edx.org/courses/BerkeleyX/Stat2.1x/2013_Spring/about)

Can you explain your claim of a much lower percentage of humans living in poverty today compared with past times? People may have had much less money hundreds of years ago, but that doesn't necessarily mean their deprivation of basic human needs was any greater.

Until the 20th Century, lack of food was the principal factor limiting human population.

 

[Dante]

Never took a statistics class, eh? Even if your two billion estimate was correct, that would mean that only 40% live in poverty, a much lower percentage than in previous times. Or do you just deal in gross numbers? In that case, poverty could only be reduced by mass extinction. Brilliant.

You're right about that Statistics course; I'm starting my first this month. (https://www.edx.org/courses/BerkeleyX/Stat2.1x/2013_Spring/about)

Can you explain your claim of a much lower percentage of humans living in poverty today compared with past times? People may have had much less money hundreds of years ago, but that doesn't necessarily mean their deprivation of basic human needs was any greater.

Until the 20th Century, lack of food was the principal factor limiting human population.

not wars and inbreeding?

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

"'If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea...'"

For the last 500 years white European and Euro-American ape-descendants have plundered, polluted, pillaged, and exploited planet Earth to the brink of extinction.

In his most recent post, Chris Hedges argues this particular Great Game is nearly at its end:

"But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence."

Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

*Yawn* Another dingbat climate-changer.

"Clive Hamilton in his 'Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change' describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that 'catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.'

"This obliteration of 'false hopes,' he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge.

"The first is attainable.

"The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire.

"To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality.

"The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us."

Is the denial of your mortality making it hard to hear the Requiem?

Chris Hedges: The Myth of Human Progress - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

It's a bunch of statist crap. The only real threat to civilization is government. The only thing breaking the backs of the great civilizations is government. The force behind the climate change hysteria is government. Hedges is wallowing in a load of crap, going on about a lot of crap that no one in his right mind gives a crap about. He’s a pseudo-scientific dingbat, a braying ass, a moralizing little twit, a limp-wristed, Pollyannaish creep.

Prufrock's Lair: Bogeymen

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

Would you elaborate or provide a link?

We share an ancestor with apes...we do not descend from apes.

*sigh

HowStuffWorks "Are humans really descended from apes?"

One of the most persistent myths, however, concerns the relationship of humans to great apes, a group of primates that includes the gorilla, orangutan and chimpanzee. Someone who believes the myth will say, "If evolution exists, then humans must be descended directly from apes. Apes must have changed, step by step, into humans." This same person will often follow up with this observation: "If apes 'turned into' humans, then apes should no longer exist." Although there are several ways to attack this assertion, the bottom-line rebuttal is simple -- humans didn't descend from apes. That's not to say humans and apes aren't related, but the relationship can't be traced backward along a direct line of descent, one form morphing into another. It must be traced along two independent lines, far back into time until the two lines merge.

According to the theory anyway. . . .