jlc

Thank you!

I think you misunderstood my comments, Martimus:

Capitalist societies have no problems co-existing with communes and religious orders, which are socialist societies, as long as it is the Capitalist society that owns the uber rules. Many such individual-choice socialist subsets have existed within the US for all of its existence. (The reverse is not true - Socialist societies do have trouble with Capitalist enclaves because they are destabilized by them.)

My reference to "ample philosophical education" was to indicate that I think that the pro-socialism choice is going to be innate in a large subset of the human population; that it was not a matter of their having been conditioned by our current educational system to believe in socialism. I think that there are genuinely that many people who lack any inclination to excel and who are sufficiently risk-adverse that they would be glad to trade their personal freedom for security.

Jan

Employees stealing pens is what causes national debt? I would like to say that I am in favor of federal employees stealing all of the Orifice Despot (thank you Susanne) priced pens they want...as long as we close the EPA, dissolve Obamacare, turn down the tap on Welfare to only include a handful of handicapped people, watchdog politicians spending and benefits both for themselves and for their endowments, and eliminate the laws that cause wasteful spending in the government.

Then, steal all the pens you want, folks.

Jan

Pretty please - could you post a link to that photo, Herb?

Jan

The article is strong on assertions but short on evidence. There was an experiment in which one group of young children was shown pictures of butterflies and the drew pictures of them; a second group was taught the words 'spot' and 'stripe' before it was shown the pictures. The second group of children drew pictures of butterflies with coherent stripes and spots on them, but the first group tended more toward blotches of color.

This experiment substantiated the theory that having a word for an attribute allows you to perceive it, and this experiment owned the philosophy of psycholinguistics for quite a while. Subsequent experiments were more equivocal in their conclusion, though and the theory that language serves as the structure for thought is more in contention now.

Feral or isolated children do not learn to use language. Language may have a critical period in which it must be learned. Children who have been kept without linguistic input during that period may be unable to acquire any language subsequently.

I have observed that the nature of a language does seem to reveal something about the nature of its speakers, though.

Jan

I doubt that they would secede. "The threat is mightier than the execution." Were I them, I would make it evident that I would be able to secede and use that as a lever to dispense with a lot of the Federal laws that are fettering their economy.

Remaining part of the US, but becoming a huge Free Industrial Zone would attract lots more companies to move there, raising the Texas economy even more.

Jan

May I recommend martial arts to you as a hobby?

Jan

I have been toying with the idea of moving to the area just west of Austin. (I want to get past the more humid climate zone that is around Austin.)

I do not particularly want to move to Texas - I love California, but the more I am around the People's Republic of CA, the more difficult it is for me to deal with that aspect of the local culture here.

Jan

What objectivism has to offer you, Flootus, is the ability to externalize the failure. You do not have to fall prey to the thought that you were 'doing something wrong'.

Many people blame 'others' for their own shortcomings, but you can validly say, "I had a good shot at a terrific enterprise, but my chance to excel was legislated out of existence by sage grouse regs."

Pretty slim, eh? It is all I can offer.

Government intervention may destroy the rest of the healthcare industry at any given moment...which would take Wm's and my company down. We all live on sufferance, at the government's whim.

Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Jan

"Settled science" is an oxymoron. Anytime someone tells you that you cannot present evidence to the contrary, they are running a scam.

Jan

I love your conservative and rational approach. This is exactly what the world will do.

Cash for Hybrids...giggle.

Jan

Do you hear cheers? Is this carried by acclaim?

Hurrah! Allosaur is now the triangle!

Jan

I hereby nominate allosaur to be the official 'triangle of the Gulch'.

Do I hear as second?

Jan

The various Christian sects have managed not to get in a 'god-wagging' contest for the last couple of hundred years, so war is not inevitable amongst a mixture of religions, so long as it is denied governmental power. In context of this post, I would say that the problems we are having with Islam is different from a discussion of religion per se. It is the current permutation of Islam (love these new formatting options) that is itself the problem we have to solve.

I think that the majority of the human race, given ample philosophical education and free choice, would choose a socialist society for themselves: they would be willing to surrender their right of self-determination in exchange for security. And I think that these people should have the right to that choice.

The matrix in which those socialist communes must nest is a capitalistic one, though: we can see through history that a socialist society cannot tolerate free will and self-determination within it; a capitalist society can and has tolerated socialist enclaves within its boundaries.

Similarly, most people will currently choose some extrinsic religion that assures them that they are doing right. It is important that the matrix in which these religions exist makes clear the right of the individual to change religions or to abjure them entirely. The fact that you ask the question, "Where is your life, your property, your betterment of life at in any of that?" just means that you are someone who would not make that choice. Others, most others, I think, would choose differently.

Jan

Later in the article, it said this: "Quoting a fourth century bishop, he called the unfettered pursuit of money “the dung of the devil”,..."

I absolutely do not agree that capitalism is dung of the devil, but I would agree that pursuit of money that_you_have_not_earned would qualify as that sort of excrement. Unfortunately, from other remarks that Frank has made he does seem to think that Capitalism = dung. (There are some statements where he has said that he is not opposed to Capitalism but only to greed...but I am not sure I buy this.)

The pope has made a personal choice to live in a communal, socialist Jesuit organization. This cannot help but influence how he thinks a 'good' economic system is constructed. He should be able to do better than that!

Jan

The role of religion in our society was made clearer by my encounters with two people in the course of my life:

Example #1: A mature gentleman, affable and helpful, became one of my friends. He and I were playing Risk (I do not normally game, but he talked me into it) and he betrayed an alliance. I was upset at this. He told me something that, he said, only his wife otherwise knew: He was a psychopath. He had chosen to handle this condition by carefully selecting his (a) wife, (b) subculture and (c) job to be ones that provided him with behavioral definitions that he consciously approved of.

Example #2. A young man who was a Mormon related to me that he had ceased being a Mormon during his HS years, but had returned to the faith of his childhood when he realized that he did not like the way his life was going. He did not feel he could live a life he liked without extrinsic guidelines.

Religion is a tool. This may be difficult for many of us on this list to realize because we are a list of 'black sheep' (and one dinosaur). We have all been people who kicked over our cultural 'traces' and gone off to define our own lives.

Many of the religions people on this list see god as a 'prime creator' but consider Physics to be the operational rules of the universe; others have picked a reasonable and compassionate path amongst the conflicting advice offered by the bible. Neither of these choices diminishes their ability to make rational decisions in the real world, or alters their ability to be good neighbors.

We are not the rule in the Gulch, we are the exceptions. Many people seem to need the existence of extrinsic rules that tell them 'how' to live a life of the sort they like, 'when' they have done something wrong, and 'what' to do about it when then have erred. Established religions have responded by evolving their own philosophies to fill these needs - and the ones who did not (such as militant versions of Catholicism) have fallen by the wayside. Religions compete for proponents by addressing these concerns.

Islam. Islam is stuck in a terrible and violent loop, and has taken extreme steps to not allow competition by other religions. How many people would remain Islamic if they had the ability to convert and be Episcopalian? How many would adhere to a radical form of Islam if a 10th century version of Islam were available to them instead?

I think that the question of religions has a lot to do with the biblical injunction to judge a tree by the fruit it bears.

Jan, an agnostic quoting scripture

There are many kinds of strength.

I am 5'7"...and I look like the archetypal, invisible, 'little brown woman'. You would not look twice at me if you passed me in the street - I could be anybody.

I have also done martial arts for >50 years. I would have been in that fight in an instant. I would have done my best to tear the knifeman's arm off, stick his own knife in his own eye, break his head, or perform some other type of socially-needed remediation for his personality.

I have pointed up a lot of responses on this thread. Bravo to the folks who would have acted! For those of you who said that you would have regarded it as philosophically correct not to have acted in defense of the victim, please be aware that if that is the type of society you laud and would construct from your philosophy: I will not be any part of it. That is not a world in which I would live.

My (late) mother, at 80 years of age and in ill health, would have tottered up to that fight and beat the attacker to death with a loaf of French bread. My father would have crawled off his death bed to tackle the knifeman around the ankles.

There are many kinds of strength.

Jan

The purpose of credit cards is to smooth out cash flow. I have spent many years on the ragged edge of making ends meet. If there is an unexpected expense, then a credit card lets me meet that need and pay it off in increments over time.

This is an essential philosophical underpinning for the use of credit cards. Too many people use them for electively purchasing things they do not need; on the other side of the spectrum are people who are so afraid to use them that they won't use a credit card to buy necessary food when they run out of money. Neither of these operational policies is functional: use credit cards for essentials to allow you to process debt as part of an ongoing cash flow.

Jan

Thank you for the great discussion points.

Jan

Have a fun vacation. Do all the bad stuff. Get into trouble.

Jan
(and get back out again)

He is not ethnically Hispanic...looks more Celtic.

Linguistically, you are correct. It is possible that his cross-gendering is a linguistic and social convention only - I have not inquired.

Jan

I am a bit more positive on this topic. I know a young man who asks to be addressed using masculine pronouns. He is short and...eh...quite feminine looking. As a matter of fact, if I did not know to use the masculine pronoun, I would unhesitatingly assign this person to the female gender.

He is a very nice person, and I cross paths with him every month or so. I admire the way, with one superficial life decision, 'he' has totally eradicated all of the social expectations surrounding him: No one tried to make him buy a dress to go to the prom, go on dates. His relatives do not pester him to get married and have 2.7 children.

It is rather elegant, actually. I am not sure if he is really cross-gender or if he has simply found a neat and somewhat amusing way of escaping from the pigeonholing of his life by society in general.

Bravo.

Jan

Yes! I am a proponent of 'what is permitted' - if someone wants to create a gender of their own, more power to them. But it is not my gender nor is it my problem - and it certainly should not be my bill to pay.

Jan

You may be onto something there. I am not a canny observer of politics, but it seems to me that if Trump forces the hand of the other competitors to respond to topics that he brashly brings up, that he is serving a good purpose.

Jan

And, yes, it was well done. It looked like a first book, or at least an early book, in an author's career. The first part of the book had a certain stilted sense to the characters, but I liked the people and I became engaged with them. I wanted them to do well and to make things better.

I want to read more of the series.

Jan