Bravery in Hong Kong
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Post subject: Bravery in Hong Kong |  |
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I doubt anyone in Hong Kong reads this, though you never know. Anyway, it's interesting that we get so excited by the actions of a group of homicidal nasties in the MidEast, and the nefarious activities of the US, but we manage to remain silent on the pro-Democracy activists bravely defying our major trading partner. That's right, the major trading partner that has the greatest number of billionaires in its parliament of anywhere else on the planet ; the major trading partner which executes ca 5000 people per annum and sends their family the cheque for the bullet ; the MTP which occupies and oppresses Tibet ; the MTP which is in reality a primitive capitalist system without any kind of credible vote ; the MTP which actively promotes crude nationalism while being the most militarised country and society in the world.
I cannot help but wonder whether, if the US were to do anything like what China is trying to do in Hong Kong, it would have made the pages of this forum...
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Bravery indeed, but why you had to sully that bravery is beyond me. It's great to see people standing up to authoritarian thugs—much like the Chileans and Koreans I know personally who did the same before them, but were instead beaten, killed or simply "disappeared" by gangs of scum deployed by the US puppet dictators at the time.
US elites and their minions lead a dysfunctional, violent, fanatical cult that does that every single day to the nation's impoverished, stressed and insecure citizens, willfully pissing on their humanity by insisting they be given insufficient social services and infrastructure, and then locking them up in privatised prisons to make money off their damaged psychiatries. What they do overseas has been ten times worse for a century now.
China is a giant authoritarian machine, to be sure; but the data—as opposed to your defensive Westernophilia—shows China moving north, and the US moving south.
And if you think you can compare a country coming out of absolute agrarian poverty with a country that inherited a social system which started going through the same process in the eighteenth century, you're either having a lend of us, or being extraordinarily disingenuous.
What wonders of Western civilisation to glory in next, I ask? Chinese children peeing in the streets? The body odour of rural Indians? The corruption of Burmese officials? The ignorance of Bolivian villagers? The brutality of animal treatment in Central Asia? The hardships of women in the Sahel?
Honestly, put your sincerity vest back on and have another go.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| pietillidie wrote: | A potentially good topic undone by your clutching at straws to comfort yourself in the midst of global change.
Yes, bravery indeed, much like the Chileans and Koreans I know personally who did that before them, but were instead beaten down by gangs of thugs deployed by the US puppet dictators at the time.
US elites do that everyday to their nation's impoverished, gun-toting citizens when they willfully piss on their humanity by providing them insufficient social services and infrastructure, and then lock them up in privatised prisons to make money off their damaged psychiatries. What it does overseas has been ten times worse for a century now.
China is a giant thuggish authoritarian machine, to be sure; but the data—as opposed to your defensive Westernophilia—shows China moving north, and the US moving south.
And if you think you can compare a country coming out of absolute agrarian poverty with a country that inherited a social system that had already gone through the same process in the eighteenth century, you're either having a lend of us, or being extraordinarily disingenuous.
What next? Complaints about Chinese children peeing in the streets? The body odour of rural Indians? The corruption of Burmese officials? The ignorance of Bolivian villagers? The brutality of animal treatment in Central Asia? The treatment of women in the Sahel?
Honestly, put your sincerity vest back on and have another go. |
The Koreans ??? You mean the South Koreans for whom 50,000 US soldiers gave their lives under a UN mandate so that they could avoid a fate that is now meted out by the (China-backed and China-created) North Korean system to its people ? I'm aware that there were repressions under the dictatorship in South Korea in 1945-50... But without the Us, South Korea would be governed by Kim Jong-Un, rather than 15th in the world development index.
The US is far from perfect -but your demonology of the accursed US "elites" surely oversimplifies vastly. The same elite that is trying to put in place a long-overdue universal health care system? The same elite that presides over one of the most dynamic, pluralist and inventive economies on earth ? The elite that protected Europe from Soviet Communism ? Far from perfect, mottled like all great democracies, stained with sins like all of us, but i don't get the hate.
Anyway, for once I'd like to see the critics of free societies respond to the illiberalism of a grossly authoritarian regime in their own region with something other than deafening silence.
Now, back to topic, let's all hope that the HK protestors do not meet the fate meted out to those in a certain square 25 years ago. Unfortunately, I fear that the Chinese elite (now there's a real elite for you)! have far too much at stake to relax their grip. They know that when they do, long-suppressed dissent often escpaes in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | A potentially good topic undone by your clutching at straws to comfort yourself in the midst of global change.
Yes, bravery indeed, much like the Chileans and Koreans I know personally who did that before them, but were instead beaten down by gangs of thugs deployed by the US puppet dictators at the time.
US elites do that everyday to their nation's impoverished, gun-toting citizens when they willfully piss on their humanity by providing them insufficient social services and infrastructure, and then lock them up in privatised prisons to make money off their damaged psychiatries. What it does overseas has been ten times worse for a century now.
China is a giant thuggish authoritarian machine, to be sure; but the data—as opposed to your defensive Westernophilia—shows China moving north, and the US moving south.
And if you think you can compare a country coming out of absolute agrarian poverty with a country that inherited a social system that had already gone through the same process in the eighteenth century, you're either having a lend of us, or being extraordinarily disingenuous.
What next? Complaints about Chinese children peeing in the streets? The body odour of rural Indians? The corruption of Burmese officials? The ignorance of Bolivian villagers? The brutality of animal treatment in Central Asia? The treatment of women in the Sahel?
Honestly, put your sincerity vest back on and have another go. |
Huh ? The Koreans ??? You mean the South Koreans for whom 50,000 US soldiers gave their lives under a UN mandate so that they could avoid a fate that is now meted out by the (China-backed and China-created) North Korean system to its people ? If you don't mean them, I'm not sure who you mean.
If there is any "defence" on display here, it's surely your coded defence of what you rightly call a "thuggish authoritarian regime" on the grounds of its emergence from "absolute agrarian poverty". As for throwing about the charge of disingenuousness, your approbation for a polity that is actively suppressing democracy in Hong Kong for moving "north" (not hard when you start a long way south?) seems like the very definition of that to me.
The US is far from perfect - but for once I'd like to see the critics of free societies respond to the illiberalism of a grossly authoritarian regime in their own region with something other than deafening silence. |
What, do you still think those young Americans went to die in Korea on a moral cultural mission? Yeah, right. Like George W's Iraq War dead were saving the world from violent tyranny. You're supposed to grow out of that view with Santa Claus for goodness' sake.
Regardless of that aside, please learn something serious about South Korea before entering a discussion on the country and its people, and the literal life experience of friends of mine who still bear the scars today, on the basis of the one solitary event in the country's history you've heard of. (On Chile, someone I know very well saved hundreds of lives when they burned Socialist Party files during the purgings).
Yes, all of that authoritarian, anti-democratic violence was blessed and paid for by the US elite.
On China, we can't rationally expect to see very different in reality, even if we rightly hope and pressure otherwise. We most certainly can't complain about the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty. I mean, how the hell else did you expect hundreds of millions of people on the breadline to synchronize their social system; by facing Wasington D.C. in morning prayer? Massive, decentralised social forces can only be driven by a fraught authoritarianism, with the hope being stabilisation, improvement and reform.
I mean, that's how highly complex societies under conditions of survival deprivation without advanced institutions hold things together without breaking up into smaller states which kill each other until a workable equilibrium is found (a problem which Australia, by sheer fortune, avoided). Have you not pondered thevhuman anthroplogy and sociology of this type of thing before? Did you expect Chinese children to wake up one day and not be rural Confucian?
"Mum, I woke up this morning and decided not to gain my identity in terms of my duty to my superiors. It was a post on the Internet by a champion of Western democracy called Mugwump that did it. Oh, and I've also decided the people at the market treat pigs cruelly, and that the 'gifts' you give my teachers are immoral, and that dad shouldn't have to travel 700 miles during the Harvest Festival to trim the grass around grandad's grave and drink rice wine with his ghost just because he's the oldest male in his family."
"Son, I'm so proud of you! You're becoming a Westerner! Let's call dad and tell him."
Except in rare cases of massive upheaval, cultures and societies evolve through a complex of arbitrary forces over a long period of time. There is no Culture Committee that meets every Tuesday to discuss how to implement the latest cultural innovations, as much as you and the Chinese Communist Party seem to think that's how it works. It's amazing enough that hundreds of millions of people can coordinate at all, let alone us inventing new fantastic aetiologies as to how these things happen. Of course authority, and plenty of it, is going to be the initial glue.
Knowing that and then using our inherited fortune, which we did nothing morally or otherwise to create, to hector developing nations for being morally inferior to "our kind" is rather pathetic in my view.
Haven't you got plenty of work to do in your own culture? Have you noticed the disturbing size of the UK underclass yet? Now that is surely a moral outrage closer to home that warrants your considerable cognitive effort.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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regan is true fullback
Joined: 27 Dec 2002
Location: Granville. nsw
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I think he means the people of South Korea who stood up to an authoritarian government, similar to the people of Hong Kong.
let us hope that the Beijing regime, who worship the same god as Rupert Murdoch, will see it is not in their financial interests to harm the people of Hong Kong.
Fascism did not end with Hitler, it survived and thrived in such places as Spain (Jack Spain hah!) Portugal and Chile, largely assisted and condoned by American regimes and the Vatican. |
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regan is true fullback
Joined: 27 Dec 2002
Location: Granville. nsw
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in the mean time my old mate Jose "Sissy Boy" Sisson is up to his old tricks in the Philippines.
Jose, the head of an extreme right wing organisation that luuuves the unborn but hates people wants to overthrow the current president, Ninoy Aquino, a sort of Obama lite, because he hasn't done enough about corruption.
| Quote: | | We have been on this “experiment” of an independent republic anchored on a US-style democracy for nearly three (3) generations since 1946. True, we were under an authoritarian regime for a brief 14 years, but we have been back on a democratic track for 28 years or twice as long as the Marcos dictatorship and yet the level of economic prosperity, quality of life and happiness index remains much to be desired… |
Aquino's real crime in the eyes of Sisson is to introduce a bill guaranteeing limited reproductive rights to Filipinos. And as we all know, contraception is abortion.
Last edited by regan is true fullback on Wed Oct 01, 2014 8:57 am; edited 1 time in total |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| regan is true fullback wrote: | I think he means the people of South Korea who stood up to an authoritarian government, similar to the people of Hong Kong.
let us hope that the Beijing regime, who worship the same god as Rupert Murdoch, will see it is not in their financial interests to harm the people of Hong Kong.
Fascism did not end with Hitler, it survived and thrived in such places as Spain (Jack Spain hah!) Portugal and Chile, largely assisted and condoned by American regimes and the Vatican. |
That part was after the Korean War in the 1980s and 1990s. The Korean War was a vastly complex and chaotic affair from the POV of South Koreans, a very traditional Confucian people who were historically mostly Chinese vassals internationally and feudal peasants locally, but whom were under brutal Japanese Colonial rule from about 1910 until Hiroshima, and the next minute in an arbitrarily divided country, often separated from relatives and with absolutely no ideological interest other than getting enough food to survive. (I can hear the Wikipedia clicks now as people who know nothing about Korea try to arm themselves with enough information to feign expertise lol).
But the parallel I think you have noticed is spot on, as with other Asian Tigers. My point to Mugwump was that we can't accept what happened in the Asian Tigers' development experience as necessary, including having sponsored their brutal dictators, and then criticise China's efforts to achieve the same with hundreds of millions of people on the breadline.
Watching countries develop is an uncomfortable moral dilemma involving hopes and disappointments, not an opportunity for cultural hectoring.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| regan is true fullback wrote: | in the mean time my old mate Jose "Sissy Boy" Sisson is up to his old tricks in the Philippines.
Jose, the head of an extreme right wing organisation that luuuves the unborn but hates people wants to overthrow the current president, Ninoy Aquino, a sort of Obama lite, because he hasn't done enough about corruption.
| Quote: | | We have been on this “experiment” of an independent republic anchored on a US-style democracy for nearly three (3) generations since 1946. True, we were under an authoritarian regime for a brief 14 years, but we have been back on a democratic track for 28 years or twice as long as the Marcos dictatorship and yet the level of economic prosperity, quality of life and happiness index remains much to be desired… |
Aquino's real crime in the eyes of Sisson is to introduce a bill guaranteeing limited reproductive rights to Filipinos. And as we all know, contraception is abortion. |
Interesting; you will have to post more on this to bring us up to speed and then keep us up to date!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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On the other hand, mugwump's observations about Hong Kong are entirely correct. Might have been better without the red rag in the last paragraph, since that seems to have enabled or encouraged some broad-ranging and irrelevant diatribes.
The Chinese leadership's record of horror and oppression is unacceptable and long-standing. It is no good special pleading for them or proffering the American jus tertii defence. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| pietillidie wrote: | [quote="regan is true fullback"]in the mean time my old mate Jose "Sissy Boy" Sisson is up to his old tricks in the Philippines.
Jose, the head of an extreme right wing organisation that luuuves the unborn but hates people wants to overthrow the current president, Ninoy Aquino, a sort of Obama lite, because he hasn't done enough about corruption.
[quote]We have been on this “experiment” of an independent republic anchored on a US-style democracy for nearly three (3) generations since 1946. True, we were under an authoritarian regime for a brief 14 years, but we have been back on a democratic track for 28 years or twice as long as the Marcos dictatorship and yet the level of economic prosperity, quality of life and happiness index remains much to be desired…[/quote]
Aquino's real crime in the eyes of Sisson is to introduce a bill guaranteeing limited reproductive rights to Filipinos. And as we all know, contraception is abortion.[/quote]
Interesting; you will have to post more on this to bring us up to speed and then keep us up to date! |
What if I wanted to overthrow the current president Ninoy Aquino a Obama lite because he hasn't done enough about corruption |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| pietillidie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | A potentially good topic undone by your clutching at straws to comfort yourself in the midst of global change.
Yes, bravery indeed, much like the Chileans and Koreans I know personally who did that before them, but were instead beaten down by gangs of thugs deployed by the US puppet dictators at the time.
US elites do that everyday to their nation's impoverished, gun-toting citizens when they willfully piss on their humanity by providing them insufficient social services and infrastructure, and then lock them up in privatised prisons to make money off their damaged psychiatries. What it does overseas has been ten times worse for a century now.
China is a giant thuggish authoritarian machine, to be sure; but the data—as opposed to your defensive Westernophilia—shows China moving north, and the US moving south.
And if you think you can compare a country coming out of absolute agrarian poverty with a country that inherited a social system that had already gone through the same process in the eighteenth century, you're either having a lend of us, or being extraordinarily disingenuous.
What next? Complaints about Chinese children peeing in the streets? The body odour of rural Indians? The corruption of Burmese officials? The ignorance of Bolivian villagers? The brutality of animal treatment in Central Asia? The treatment of women in the Sahel?
Honestly, put your sincerity vest back on and have another go. |
Huh ? The Koreans ??? You mean the South Koreans for whom 50,000 US soldiers gave their lives under a UN mandate so that they could avoid a fate that is now meted out by the (China-backed and China-created) North Korean system to its people ? If you don't mean them, I'm not sure who you mean.
If there is any "defence" on display here, it's surely your coded defence of what you rightly call a "thuggish authoritarian regime" on the grounds of its emergence from "absolute agrarian poverty". As for throwing about the charge of disingenuousness, your approbation for a polity that is actively suppressing democracy in Hong Kong for moving "north" (not hard when you start a long way south?) seems like the very definition of that to me.
The US is far from perfect - but for once I'd like to see the critics of free societies respond to the illiberalism of a grossly authoritarian regime in their own region with something other than deafening silence. |
What, do you still think those young Americans went to die in Korea on a moral cultural mission? Yeah, right. Like George W's Iraq War dead were saving the world from violent tyranny. You're supposed to grow out of that view with Santa Claus for goodness' sake.
Regardless of that aside, please learn something serious about South Korea before entering a discussion on the country and its people, and the literal life experience of friends of mine who still bear the scars today, on the basis of the one solitary event in the country's history you've heard of. (On Chile, someone I know very well saved hundreds of lives when they burned Socialist Party files during the purgings).
Yes, all of that authoritarian, anti-democratic violence was blessed and paid for by the US elite.
On China, we can't rationally expect to see very different in reality, even if we rightly hope and pressure otherwise. We most certainly can't complain about the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty. I mean, how the hell else did you expect hundreds of millions of people on the breadline to synchronize their social system; by facing Wasington D.C. in morning prayer? Massive, decentralised social forces can only be driven by a fraught authoritarianism, with the hope being stabilisation, improvement and reform.
I mean, that's how highly complex societies under conditions of survival deprivation without advanced institutions hold things together without breaking up into smaller states which kill each other until a workable equilibrium is found (a problem which Australia, by sheer fortune, avoided). Have you not pondered thevhuman anthroplogy and sociology of this type of thing before? Did you expect Chinese children to wake up one day and not be rural Confucian?
"Mum, I woke up this morning and decided not to gain my identity in terms of my duty to my superiors. It was a post on the Internet by a champion of Western democracy called Mugwump that did it. Oh, and I've also decided the people at the market treat pigs cruelly, and that the 'gifts' you give my teachers are immoral, and that dad shouldn't have to travel 700 miles during the Harvest Festival to trim the grass around grandad's grave and drink rice wine with his ghost just because he's the oldest male in his family."
"Son, I'm so proud of you! You're becoming a Westerner! Let's call dad and tell him."
Except in rare cases of massive upheaval, cultures and societies evolve through a complex of arbitrary forces over a long period of time. There is no Culture Committee that meets every Tuesday to discuss how to implement the latest cultural innovations, as much as you and the Chinese Communist Party seem to think that's how it works. It's amazing enough that hundreds of millions of people can coordinate at all, let alone us inventing new fantastic aetiologies as to how these things happen. Of course authority, and plenty of it, is going to be the initial glue.
Knowing that and then using our inherited fortune, which we did nothing morally or otherwise to create, to hector developing nations for being morally inferior to "our kind" is rather pathetic in my view.
Haven't you got plenty of work to do in your own culture? Have you noticed the disturbing size of the UK underclass yet? Now that is surely a moral outrage closer to home that warrants your considerable cognitive effort. |
Actually, China is rather closer to home for we Australians - and certainly far more entwined with our economy, than the US. So spending perhaps 25% of the vitriol you expend on the US on scrutinising our MTP might be warranted.
On Korea, i know you lived there and understand it well. I also know that both sides of the 49th parallel did terrible things prior to and doubtless after the War. That does nothing to invalidate the fact that the Us (like Australia) fought for its interests, and those interests - as they usually are - were broadly on the side of liberty and democracy, and allowed the development of a South Korea rather than a North Korea, while China and North Korea descended into an autocratic hell of famine and persecution.
If the US, for all its faults, had not acted as the underwriter of democratic regimes in the twentieth century, most of the world as we know it would have spent the 20th century under totalitarian regimes of a Fascist or Sovietist nature. I'm sure that can be disputed, because almost anything can in the humanities. But i'm glad it didn't have to be lived.
As regards the Uk underclass, no, i'd missed that - thanks for pointing it out. If you've got any ideas on how to fix it, drop David Cameron and Ed Miliband a line, coz they're dying to find an answer. Even better, write to Nick Clegg, because noone else does and someone has to. All I can tell you is that more government - as tried by Labour from around 1964-1980 and 1997-2010 - seemed to make it worse, and Thatcherism certainly didn't help either.
On the subject of states and cultures and their relevant development, i'll make my position clear, as your post completely (and I presume unintentionally) misrepresents it. Different nations, with different traditions and histories, have different preferences and pathways and near-term capacities. Most things are positive expressions of that difference, bcause people -including us - love their culture as they love their families, despite many imperfections. It may be that some peoples, because of their traditions, are happier with authoritarian forms of government.
Nevertheless, i think there are a few transcendent values, which most people will choose if they can. Without limitation, these include the right to criticise those in power, the right to vote out those who hold the monopoly of force we call government, to life, liberty and law and order under an independent judicial system, and the right to personal property. All of these are fundamental to a good society, amd I don't think that any state's history in this modern, connected world, can be used to argue that it should be immune from international presure to provide these to its citizens.
I'm not sure if you are arguing that history can validate or excuse deviations from these transcendent values by governing elites, but it sounds like it ; and if you are, I struggle to reconcile that with the sincere humanitarian ideals I believe you hold. The final part, then, of my belief system is that this type of pressure is only likely to come from the many liberal democracies, including the one liberal superpower.
_________________
Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Wed Oct 01, 2014 9:27 am; edited 1 time in total |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | On the other hand, mugwump's observations about Hong Kong are entirely correct. Might have been better without the red rag in the last paragraph, since that seems to have enabled or encouraged some broad-ranging and irrelevant diatribes.
The Chinese leadership's record of horror and oppression is unacceptable and long-standing. It is no good special pleading for them or proffering the American jus tertii defence. |
Correct, but meaningless.
The reference to the US was primarily an imperialist delusion counterpoint. The scientific explanation offered is sociocultural; or did you not read or understand that part? An anthropological explanation, being an attempt to be scientific even if constrained by the nebulous and macro nature of the entities concerned, is the precise opposite of special pleading.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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regan is true fullback
Joined: 27 Dec 2002
Location: Granville. nsw
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| Quote: | Fake democracy
A LAW EACH DAY (KEEPS TROUBLE AWAY) By Jose C. Sison (The Philippine Star) | Updated September 29, 2014 - 12:00am |
I am not making this up. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | On the other hand, mugwump's observations about Hong Kong are entirely correct. Might have been better without the red rag in the last paragraph, since that seems to have enabled or encouraged some broad-ranging and irrelevant diatribes.
The Chinese leadership's record of horror and oppression is unacceptable and long-standing. It is no good special pleading for them or proffering the American jus tertii defence. |
Yes, that's the truth. My last sentence was genuinely relfective of my frustration that China's actions - as the world's other real superpower - get so little scrutiny compared to the US. But I should have realised it'd start a melee, and left ot out, rather than leave it in and then, what's worse, get sucked into the melee i'd started !
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Mugwump wrote: | | I'm not sure if you are arguing that history can validate or excuse deviations from these transcendent values by governing elites, but it sounds like it ; and if you are, I struggle to reconcile that with the sincere humanitarian ideals I believe you hold. The final part, then, of my belief system is that this type of pressure is only likely to come from the many liberal democracies, including the one liberal superpower. |
It's not hard to reconcile at all. Human psychiatry, in its individual and social aspects is extremely malleable (hence its many forms), and subject to so many forces that it's hard to even grant ourselves free will. But even if for the sake of sanity and convenience we grant ourselves free will, which we have no other choice but to do, to turn around and grant agency to some arbitrary macro epiphenomenon such as a culture or a nation is just absurd. Leave well enough alone.
That is, these are metaphors we use to feel as if we have a grip on the world in order to stay sane, much as religion is doing. To then take those metaphors we have humorously granted agency to and bestow them with moral insight is beyond madness. There is no moral Other at that already silly level of analysis; by that scale we're just playing mental chess with abstract tokens in our heads that have no meaningful earthly referent. As such, we are left to deal with the science of the problem, which as far as I can tell means to discuss the matter in terms of social physics.
The rest is religio-nonsense, including whenever I grant moral agency to "elites". In fact, my actual view is that I am simply talking about a powerful social node which for whatever complex of reasons tends to pull in a direction that, if not countered, drags society toward socio-economic control and some sort of feudal structure. I actually don't think that this social node is either moral or immoral (even if I play those games); the node just happens to constitute a destructive force that often needs to be countered, not actually "punished" (something that node is good at avoiding anyhow lol).
My understanding of what constitutes a "right" or "good" direction for society is purely based on a whim and a prayer: The assumption there is some shared inherent concept that ultimately makes sense to Homo sapiens and aligns roughly with some relatively stable "reality" by virtue of a primitive selection ultimately based on some common underlying physics, and which is oprates optimally when we have full faculties by virtue of good health and low stress (favourable conditions). But even then, our individual and contextual variation is great enough to warrant enormous patience with the "morality" of Others, which will ultimately be similar to our own under similar conditions. (The Hitlers, Stalins, George W's, Ivan Milats and lynch mobs of the world fall under the mentally ill category in my view; sometimes caused by traditional psychopathies, and sometimes by a confluence of social forces which instigate an "effective" psychopathy).
That's the best I can do at this stage, I'm afraid. Not pretty, but most of everything else looks a heck of a lot like immature or defensive self delusion in my view.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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