Category: Pondering Infinity

A Taste of my mind. Anything from Sociopolitics to Religion to Philosophy in general goes.

You could have been so much more America

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tatteredYou could have been so much more America. You could have become a land of great culture, where the free exchange of ideas and created a rich culture of new and interesting art. Instead your copyrights and your intellectual properties have created a culture where the thing it is known for is shallow sensationalism only fit for mass consumption.

tatteredYou could have been so much more America ((Note that for the purpose of this post, by “America”, I mean U.S.A)). You could have become a land of great culture, where the free exchange of ideas and created a rich culture of new and interesting art. Instead your copyrights and your intellectual properties have created a culture where the thing it is known for is shallow sensationalism only fit for mass consumption.

You could have been so much more America. You could have become a shining bastion of science and progress where the greatest minds in the world moved in to so that they could have the chance to express and create. Instead you are drowning in the murky pool of fundamentalism and new-age mysticism. A large part of your population is actively opposed to knowledge..

You could have been so much more America. You could have used one of the greatest and more progressive constitutions to become the Democracy everyone wants to imitate and thus change the world by example. Instead you have tried to change the world by using your power to create brutal dictators again and again and again, and then topple them when they don’t turn up to be the willing pawns you expected.

You could have been so much more America. You could have used your extraordinary wealth to extinguish poverty and suffering in your society. Instead you are trying so hard to dismantle and prevent any social security and now your poorer people have to live in fear of a sudden illness that might leave them bankrupt. Instead of taking money from the filthy rich and bettering the lives of the poor, you have taken the money from everyone under the guise of foreign aid and siphoned it to the filthy rich.

You could have been so much more America. Yours could have been the land of the truly free, but instead you are the nation of the deluded. You have exchanged away your freedoms for a false sense of security and thus deserve neither.

You could have been so much more America. You could be loved by the whole world for your status, your example or your culture. Instead practically the whole world despises your blatant imperialism, you disregard for conventions and your gun-ho attitude.

You could have been so much more America. You could have the first culture to break free from taboos  where the human body is not shunned and sexuality or any orientation is not feared. Instead your puritanical culture goes into bugfuck crazy mode at the mere sight of a nipple.

You could have been so much more America. With mere billions of dollars, if not millions, you could have gone totally energy independent and helped retain our planets survivability. Instead you have wasted trillions fighting a needless war that only serves to make your corporations richer and destabilize whole countries. You have fought for the all-mighty black gold with total disregard of the rest of the world.

You could have been so much more America. You could have given the example of a just and honourable civilization acting responsibly to make the world a better place. Instead you are known as the irresponsible bully who tries to play world police, even though nobody wants you to.

You could have been so much more but you blew it America, and now your time has passed. Soon nobody is going to want to play with you anymore.

I only hope you won’t try to take your ball and go home…

Where's the outrage?

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standiing there fascismSeriously US. Americans, what the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you see what is going on around you? Raiding homes of non-criminals for trumpted up charges of “planning to riot”? Arresting and beating up reporters?

Have you learned nothing at all from history?

These are the leading steps to fascism people. This is how totalitarianism comes about. It does not suddently appear one day and gives you a fair chance to fight it off with your 2nd ammendment rights. It creeps insidiously, slowly eroding your freedoms and hoping your will do nothing.

And nothing you did.

Where were you when people’s homes were raided? What were the neighbours doing when police & army were marching and singing military songs in the middle of the neighborhood as if you had a goddamn military law in effect. They did nothing. If all the people in the neighborhood came out of their homes and opposed what your government did to your felow US Americans, perhaps this day would not have been so dark.

But they were cowering at their homes, or having a schadenfreude at the expense of the “hippies”.

  • “In America, they came first for the hippies, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a hippie;
  • And then they came for the immigrants, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an immigrant;
  • And then they came for the Atheists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an Atheist;
  • And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Some of you may think that it’s just the government attempting to silence their critics forcefully. Some of you may think that since this can never be achieved with the distributed way of information, that you are safe.

But this is not what they want to achieve.

They want to scare you. They want you to leave in fear that at any point they will be able to barge into your home, manhandle you and take your possetions. They want to show you how none of your copatriots will raise a hand to help you. They want you to bask in fear so that you’re too afraid to speak.

And when the first “accident” happens, you will be.

So keep doing nothing US Americans. Keep doing nothing and see what happens.

Pessimistic but realistic

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The Barefoot Bum has once again posted a really insightful article on socioeconomics. I especially agree on the very basic moral values that most people agree on.

[…] but no one should oppose in principle the idea that no one deserves to starve in his old age. No one should oppose in principle the idea that every child should receive sufficient education to participate fully in a democratic society. No one should oppose in principle the idea that everyone should expect a safe workplace as a matter of course. No one should oppose in principle that everyone should expect that the products they buy, the air they breathe and the water they drink have been made safe to the best of our ability.

He then takes it a step further and explains how laissez-faire has not only shown that it is incapable of achieving these goals but it is actually dragging society to the other direction.

What I hadn’t realised however is how much damage the perverted teachings of the Objectivism cult leader have done, not only to the US society but to the world at large. It is telling when you see the US empire slowly ((Slowly for our lifetime that is. In historical standards, it is disintegrating amazingly rapidly, almost as fast as the Macedonian empire)) disintegrating the more they try to follow “laissez-faire” which basically means that the rich are using it as a way to make the poor vote for them to take their money.

I wasn’t aware that the US had a socialistic reform (Roosevelt) but now that I do, the US rise to the forefront as a the first world nation makes much more sense. That US’ position as a developed nation erodes along with these reforms should not surprise anyone but the deluded Right-Libertarians and Objectivists. That Western Europe, where Ayn Rand never got very popular has ended up much more tolerant, secular and generally has a better way of life that the US, also comes as no surprise.

Anyway, go and read the above post. I mostly posted this because I didn’t want to leave him yet another “well-said” comment.

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Gold medal of…doping

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We interrupt our normal broadcast to bring you these hilarious news

Greece has been awarded the gold medal for doping (article in greek) from the president of the IOC Jacques Rogge. He has apparently named and shamed the Greek team as the most doped up team in the Beijing Olympics with the second and third places being taken by Bulgaria and Russia.

For a country that is so hell bent in maintaining a good image, they have managed to put yet another badge of shame on themselves (following the ban on computer games, suing lesbians and other funny stories)

You know what the sad part it? It’s the government itself that is promoting this kind of behaviour. After the recent shame came up, did anything happen? Was anyone fired or forced to resign? No.

Same as in the past where the doping of two Athletes was ignored and they were eventually not punished at all by the greek national sports comitee, only to have them 1 year later admit to the IAAF that, you know, they did dope themselves.

Pathetic.

But at least it makes this easily amused expartiate laugh at their antics.

Tyrrany of the Olympics

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The Beijing Olympics are growing more and more ridiculous by the day. The International Olympic Committee seems to have a perverse idea of what it means to represent the event. They have the impression that it means total behaviour control of anything having even a remote connection to Olympics.

Witness them contacting the Swedish government to take down a wholly legitimate website by Swedish law, making the Chinese government cover up all brands not sponsoring the Olympics everywhere and promoting the suppresion of behaviour.

It really looks like for the IOC and the Chinese totalitarian government is a match made in Nirvana. It really goes to show how the IOC wants the rest of the world to act and how they would if they could…

Can I ask why people are falling over each other to host the damn things? It is simply an extravagance of corruption, steroids and shallow nationalism. The costs are extreme and the aftermath is a country’s economy in ruins.

You know what the Olympic games are? A parasite. They move into a country and start sucking the life’s blood of the nation, replacing it with cheap nationalist pride. Once bursting red with money, they detach and go hunting for their next victim, leaving their previous host’s economy in ruins and no t angible benefit.
All the while the parasite grows in power and starts pushing other hosts around to accomodate it.

Pah!

Why "our way of life" is not deserved

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Mendicant outside the Kizhaperumpallam templeRecently, after my last argument on immigration, I ended up having a similar discussion with my girlfriend. While she is much more resonable in these debates, nevertheless she too had taken a protectionist stance on the whole issue of immigration. Most of the arguments were similar to the ones I mentioned before but there was one more thrown to the table that I think deserves refutation.

Mendicant outside the Kizhaperumpallam temple
CC License - credit: calamur

Recently, after my last argument on immigration, I ended up having a similar discussion with my girlfriend. While she is much more resonable in these debates, nevertheless she too had taken a protectionist stance on the whole issue of immigration. Most of the arguments were similar to the ones I mentioned before but there was one more thrown to the table that I think deserves refutation. It went as thus:

These immigrants, they know that in their own countries and under their own laws, the crimes they do here would be severely punished and this is why they come to our Germany and Europe. They know that here they will just get a “slap on the wrist” compared to where they come from.
If they commit crimes then it is only fair that we send them to the backward country they came from for we (Germans) have worked hard to have the kind of society we do and it’s not fair that they enjoy all the benefits we have achieved and ruin our system.[1. This is not an exact quote but rather the main gist of the argument as I understood it.]

On first take, one would be inclined to agree. Why should we tolerate immigrants who come to our developed countries in order to avoid the horrible societies they live in but yet they cannot respect our laws?

The answer is that this is begging the question. When one asks this, it is presupposed that the 3rd world society people live in is deserved and of their own fault and that when we, as Europeans or North Americans, have a good society, it’s because we are such great and hard-working people and we deserve our way of life.

This is false.

One has to have a very short memory or an ignorance of recent history to believe that the western or developed nations achieved this status by simply being more hardworking than the rest. The nasty truth is that the first world nations have achieved this through imperialism and shameless exploitation of other countries.

Similar to an Objectivist who deludes himself that his status in life is completely self achieved, without taking into account all the societal benefits and luck that allowed him to be who he is, so do the people who express such views completely fail to see that their nation’s status is intertwined irrevocably with the rest of the world and their history.

Great Britain would not have been so great if it didn’t have an India, Australia and Ireland to exploit. US America would not have been so united if the Indigenous population had not been systematically exterminated etc. and this of course does not stop just with history.
Even now wars are being waged by the first world nations, devastating whole societies just because the natural resources are too valuable. Brutal Dictators are being put into power just because they are friendly with the policies of the people in charge and agree to screw over their own countrymen so that first world nations can get the goods. Megacorporations are outsourcing their labour to 3rd world nations so that production, and thus costs, will be cheaper for us. I could go on…

When people from these nations flee their countries in search of a better life, we have to realise that their situation is not their own fault and our countries are partly to blame. Nobody lives in a vacuum and nobody deserves a bad life just because he has been born into it.

The only thing one can say is that they are partly responsible for their own status in life. I say “partly” because this is 90% luck as the where, how and when you were born plays the biggest role and you have no choice in this matter. Still, we have a modicum of control over our own life choices so one can feel at least a bit proud and deserving on what themselves have achieved.

But to extrapolate that and consider that one is deserving of the society one lives in is simply absurd. To further request that people who were not lucky enough to be indigenous in a western nation deserve to be treated worse (i.e. ostracized) is outright wrong.

Quote of the day: Economics

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Quoth the Barefoot Bum

I am no more impressed by the assertion that “The vast majority of economists agree that capitalism is the most sound system there is for producing wealth and responding to demand,” than I’m impressed by the equally true assertion that the vast majority of theolgians agree that religious belief is the most sound system of creating and maintaining social, moral and ethical socialization.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is exactly the same way I feel every time someone brings in the “vast majority of economists that support capitalism” or whatever.