Non's days of do-goodery may be drawing to a close...

[The Dharma Bum]

[wormwood]

[The Dharma Bum]

[exploited]

Although natural rights philosophy annoys me to no end, like capitalism, I have yet to identify an alternative that forms a better foundation from which to build a society.

Ideally, we can balance individual rights to property and contract with the recognition that we have to curb the excesses of introducing these rights. The idea of one person being compensated more than entire countries, for instance, is patently absurd, and such compensation needs to be prevented, not merely seized and redistributed.

What I'd really like to see is the abandonment of traditional liberal thought and ideological orthodoxy. Obviously the best systems make use of both socialist and capitalist principles; obviously the bootstraps ideologies are garbage; obviously social programs are band aids that don't address the underlying problems that cause such massive inequality (both economically and socially).

Ideas such as maximum ratio, mandatory ownership of at least 50% of businesses by workers (the coop model), using the internet to empower democracy, decentralizing authority where it doesn't concern the basics (why does gun control need to be decided at any level but municipal, for instance - if Chicago wants to ban handguns and Dallas wants to totally deregulate them, why should they be disallowed from doing that?), true cost business accounting... These are the ideas that should define our future, not two hundred year old ideologies that have almost no relevance to how we organize as a society these days.

[exploited]

[exploited]

[John Galt]

the problem is that there are many that say that anthropogenic global warming is fact do so with fervent religious beliefs and refuse to objectively look at it

and you'e right most people don't know jack about it. it's a political issue, but on the science side... i'd hold off for a few hundred more years as more data can be collected before we address the issue. considering the pause in global warming, it would be the responsible thing to do. this isn't teaching children about it that's the issue or something like evolution. to deny evolution is to deny something that has been repeatedly shown to be a fact, supported by the theory of evolution by natural selection. but the worst that happens is some kids have faulty educations. in this case some of the religious fanatics are saying that everyone should be forced to pay indulgences, and that is unacceptable. we don't have enough data that shows that it is caused by humans. the warming of last century was a fact, sure, but so was the warming of the medieval period. we are currently still in an ice age, a relatively novel thing considering the age of the earth, and we dont have enough data to pin the warming of the last century that has not continued into this century on humans. it smacks of hubris to think we actually can cause such a change

none of the models have been correct. none of them. which means even the people that know what they are talking about dont know what they are talking about. until the models can predict within 5% variability (which is chance) what the climate will be in 20 years from today for those 20 years i find it wholly irresponsible to rush to judgement on this

[eynon81]

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Dharma Bum]