On 1/26/2013 12:13 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, January 26, 2013 11:55:22 AM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote:
On 1/26/2013 11:45 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, January 26, 2013 11:36:45 AM UTC-5, JohnM wrote:
Craig, I read many of your posts, none was so pessimistic so far.
Ah, maybe I was being more sarcastic than the internet allows. I
was intending to mock those ideas by quoting Scrooge, as I think
that there is nothing further from the truth than the idea that
character is completely independent from their circumstance -
that people with no shoes can pull themselves up by their
bootstraps or who have been born into a system of oppression can
free themselves by belief in the free market or some such thing.
Craig
Hey!
What exactly is a system of oppression? Could you describe an
actual situation in Nature that is "oppression-free"?
Slavery, or apartheid are systems of intentional oppression, but
poverty in a land of plenty is oppressive also, even if oppression of
the poor is an unintentional effect. If it takes two million peasants
to prop up one Imelda Marcos, then being born into the system which
does that is an oppressive one, and not one which you can escape by
adopting a positive attitude.
Just because life isn't free of oppression doesn't mean that if an
Imelda Marcos manages to tyrannize a country that it is the will of
Nature. To the contrary, the will of Nature is for the oppressed to
kill and eat their oppressors at the earliest opportunity.
Craig
Hi Craig,
Setting the drama of humanity aside, can you point to some actual
cases of this in Nature? Any deer "oppressed to kill and eat their
oppressors [wolves] at the earliest opportunity"? No! I dare say that
you are building a flawed argument on a flawed premise. I submit the
entire idea of "oppression", as you are using it, is a figment of human
imagination. We humans have the unique ability to behave in ways that do
not actually solve problems but instead just "make us feel better" about
our crappy living conditions and the problem that is causing us pain
does unchecked. Every case in history where the "oppressed to kill and
eat their oppressors at the earliest opportunity" was one of chaos and
malice, nothing good ever came of it alone. It is only when we face our
situations factually and rationally and solve the problems that we
improve our situations.
Let's consider the case of Imelda. How was it that she was able to
do what she did? She had the force of government to implement her
'oppresion". I submit to you that it is government that is unique in its
ability to oppress, as it has the monopoly on the *legal* use of force.
Any line of reasoning that leads to the implication that government (or
a proxy thereof) can can alleviate or otherwise assuage "oppresion" is
only substituting one Imelda for another.
--
Onward!
Stephen
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
