Text 13791, 217 rader
Skriven 2007-04-22 08:40:13 av Carl (154.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: OT: Finesse contest finalists - thanks to all!
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"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:76nl23h27d4jgf39df1nb18n1b0042j1il@4ax.com...
> On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 19:50:46 -0500, "Carl" <cengman7@hotmail.com>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>"AaronJB" <aaronjb@gmail.com> wrote in message
>>>>news:1177193001.479865.152860@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>>>>> On Apr 21, 6:48 pm, "Carl" <cengm...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> The most disturbing part of that is that people like to get vile and
>>>>>> demeaning at all.
>>>>>
>>>>> Perhaps I'm just jaded and cynical beyond my years, but to me that
>>>>> just sums up most of human nature - and certainly a large section of
>>>>> the population as a whole.
>>>>>
>>>>> We are, after all, little but violent aggressive apes who've learned
>>>>> how to use tools - and just look at the multitude of weapons we've
>>>>> invented to use with our opposable thumbs.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Hmmm.
>>>>
>>>>Technological advances are often mistaken as a measure of how our 
>>>>species
>>>>has advanced.
>>>>
>>>>Is there any reason to believ that people have gotten better over time?
>>>>Are
>>>>people better now than they were ... 100 years ago? 1000 years ago?
>>>>
>>>>Is there any reason to believe that people will get better over time?
>>>
>>> By what criteria? If we're talking a Christian or golden rule one, I
>>> like to think we have.
>>
>>Why do you think that we have?
>
> When I look back only a century or two, I see slavery, colonialism,
> and a form of capitalism so callous that people were literally worked
> to death. Less than ten years before my birth, Hitler and the Final
> Solution. One doesn't have to aim very high to do better than that! We
> and the other industrial powers are anything but perfect, but at
> least, on some level, we try.

Given Saddam Heissein, Bin Laden, the Taliban, and others, I see
no reason to believe that given favorable circumstances the same
conditions would not exist today.

Consider North Korea.  I think technology has allowed sufficient worldwide
communication to make it much harder to maintain such a condition.  I don't 
think
that people are inherently better and would we wouldn't have dictators
just as bad today.

As to people working themselves to death, until sufficent technology was 
available
people in every system worked themselves to death.  Technology changed the
standards by which we live and allows us to be more generous.

Take away those conditions and would we be more generous than our ancestors?

>>> But moral criteria change with time and place,
>>> and it's not always easy to establish a basis for comparison. Forex, I
>>> read somewhere that the distribution of wealth in this country is now
>>> as lopsided as it was in the 1920's.
>>
>>I've read to the contrary, with more people becoming millionaires
>>and more people moving to upper income brackets in the last 10
>>years than ever before.
>>
>>Home ownership is at an all time high, and even those defined as "poor"
>>can in no way be equated with what was poor in the 1920's.
>
> That last is true, as I think I implied. The rest sounds to me like
> right wing spin -- numbers that sound good but have no economic or
> social significance. It's logical, for example, that there would be
> more millionaires, thanks to population growth and inflation; it's a
> cherry-picked "statistic" that has no actual bearing on income
> distribution, which according to every source I've seen has been
> widening.

Actually, it's my understanding that the percentage of people that are
considered wealthy is actually increasing.

>>Income inequality is not inherently good or bad either.
>
> Well, nothing is inherently good or bad, but if the reality is a
> country in which virtually all the gains of the growing economy have
> been going to the top 10% while regular people struggle to maintain
> the same standard of living, and in which some /working people/ are
> forced to live in cars, I vote for bad.

All of the gains have not been going to the upper 10%, and those top
10% are paying over 50% of the taxes, providing services to those
that pay no or little taxes.

As to living in cars, etc, let's look at the statistics of how those that
are defined as poor actually live:

a.. Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. 
The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is 
a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or 
patio.
a.. Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By 
contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population 
enjoyed air conditioning.
a.. Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds 
have more than two rooms per person.
a.. The average poor American has more living space than the average 
individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities 
throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign 
countries, not to those classified as poor.)
a.. Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two 
or more cars.
a.. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over 
half own two or more color televisions.
a.. Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or 
satellite TV reception.
a.. Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, 
and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the 
same for poor and middle-class children and, in most cases, is well above 
recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do 
higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above 
recommended levels.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, 
air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a 
microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a 
VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home 
is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is 
not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's 
essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally 
far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal 
activists, and politicians.

In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is 
supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours 
of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per 
year--the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the 
year--nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official 
poverty.
Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of 
poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 
million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the 
fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted 
out of poverty.

There are very few cases of people living out of cars, and with 81 federal 
social programs and most states having equivalent programs, the need for one 
to actually live in a car is suspect.

Also, even in terms of health insurance, the figure given out most often is 
that there are 45 million uninsured people in the US, however if you break 
that down, 15 million of those are eligable for some form of heqalth care 
under a federal program right now but do not take advantage of it, and 
another 13 million make over 50K a year (MN classifies someone making 67K 
wealthy and in the top tax bracket) but choose not to buy it.    If one 
considered the illegal alien/undocumented worker population as being the 12 
million that are usually reported, that leaves a *much* smaller portion of 
the population that are actually  about 5 million.

>
>>Wealth is a poor standard for judging good and evil.
>
> I consider discrepancies in wealth /wrong/ to the extent that I can
> find no social purpose or social harm in them. In that, they're no
> different than the likes of killing, in that right (a just war) or
> wrong (a murder) depends on context.


You assume that there has to be a social purpose for such things; there 
doesn't.  If you're proposing that all aspects of life must be classified in 
terms of a social purpose and controlled to obtain that outcome (which I 
would consider a lack of freedom), then we completely disagree on the 
purpose of government (which is fine).

Some people inherit money...that's called luck.  Some people make more money 
than others through hard work, investing in themselves (an education), and 
taking risks (starting a business).  That's called earning their money. 
Some people aren't willing to work that hard because they have other 
priorities in their lives, don't have the talent, aren't willing to go to 
college, risk their savings, etc.  That's fine and *no* judgment should be 
made in either case.

At some point, if the wealthy are paying their taxes, giving to charity, 
living their lives without trying to harm others... what they make is none 
of our business.  If  it's more than I make, good for them...I don't hold it 
against them for a second.  I don't envy them, resent them, want to take 
anything away from them in the slightest.  It's simply none of my business.

You could move towards the old argument Aren;t allpeople equal? Shouldn't 
everyone make the same amount of money?  That's a discussion by itself and 
not a workable plan.

>
> Anyway, morals are very variable: we think the Pashtun are creepy
> because they practice pederasty and harbor the likes of Bin Laden,
> they think we're creepy because our women run around half-naked and
> we're greedy and we ignore the principles of hospitality. So we have
> either to assert that a single moral system is favored over the others
> -- a moral system which just happens to be the one our own society
> holds up as an ideal, naturally -- or we have to think of morality as
> involving a varied response to a deeper purpose, and ultimately accept
> the possibility that morality evolves much as our genome does.
> (Caveat: I've skipped for want of time a lot of useful philosophical
> dialectic, e.g., Kant's categorical imperative.)


I suppose it depends on how large a set or morals one is defining.  If one 
suggests a small set of morals (don't kill, don't steal, etc) it should be 
shared.  Unfortunately that's not even the case, given that women in other 
countries are casually killed with no legal ramification.
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