Cas Stark Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 38 minutes ago, Relic said: It's not hard to trace back a lot of our society's machinations to the quest for profit. There is nothing wrong with the quest for profit, it lies behind most of the advances of the human race. Seeking profit is a negative term for self improvement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Relic Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 1 hour ago, Cas Stark said: There is nothing wrong with the quest for profit, it lies behind most of the advances of the human race. Seeking profit is a negative term for self improvement. Errr, yeah, except when your quest for profit creates a world within which horrible inequality exists. So while questing for profit might, in a vacuum, be totally fine, how one goes about it is all that matters. And we, as a society, have decided to go about our quest for MORE by making the majority have to be content with LESS. Less education, less health care, less natural beauty, less years to live, and so on. That sort of shit blows back on you. Especially the part where you deny a decent education to a large majority of the world's population. What the fuck do you expect to happen when you under educate the masses, while making firearms the biggest business in the world? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Manhole Eunuchsbane Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 Once we put a dollar value on the price of a human life... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cas Stark Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 4 minutes ago, Relic said: Errr, yeah, except when your quest for profit creates a world within which horrible inequality exists. So while questing for profit might, in a vacuum, be totally fine, how one goes about it is all that matters. And we, as a society, have decided to go about our quest for MORE by making the majority have to be content with LESS. Less education, less health care, less natural beauty, less years to live, and so on. That sort of shit blows back on you. Especially the part where you deny a decent education to a large majority of human beings. That's a nice rant, but it ignores that there has been horrible inequality since humans came out of the jungle and discovered agriculture. The history of the world is characterized by a small number of elites, followed by a slightly larger number of artisans, technocrats, soldiers, religious officials and other hangers on and people with skills, followed by the vast majority living in poverty or near poverty. There was no middle class until the Industrial Revolution, brought to you by people seeking profit. But this OT for this thread. I see the French authorities have arrested several people in conjunction with the Nice attack, so maybe the guy wasn't a lone wolf after all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Relic Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 1 hour ago, Cas Stark said: There was no middle class until the Industrial Revolution, brought to you by people seeking profit. I never understood this argument.Profit led to progress. Ok, cool. It now stands in the way of it. It's been a hundred years since the Industrial revolution. We have reaped the benefits, and we can now pretty much turn the world into a green paradise if we wanted to, while educating every single human life and providing them with food and opportunity. Instead, we have sort of decided that we accomplished enough, and the status quo is how things would continue for a majority of folks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NestorMakhnosLovechild Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 2 minutes ago, Relic said: I never understood this argument.Profit led to progress. Ok, cool. It now stands in the way of it. You said that "profit" created a world in which "horrible inequality exists." You were given a brief historical lesson about how before modern industrial capitalism, inequality was much worse and a far smaller percentage of the population had anything akin to a comfortable existence. That's the danger of making broad, categorical statements. They are rarely true. That you don't understand things like this is part of the problem with how you view the world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cas Stark Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 18 minutes ago, Relic said: I never understood this argument.Profit led to progress. Ok, cool. It now stands in the way of it. It's been a hundred years since the Industrial revolution. We have reaped the benefits, and we can now pretty much turn the world into a green paradise if we wanted to, while educating every single human life and providing them with food and opportunity. Instead, we have sort of decided that we accomplished enough, and the status quo is how things would continue for a majority of folks. This is Utopian nonsense, I'm sorry, it just is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Relic Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 1 hour ago, Cas Stark said: This is Utopian nonsense, I'm sorry, it just is. Why? Other than you thinking that it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted July 17, 2016 Author Share Posted July 17, 2016 Really getting off topic - open another thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
White Walker Texas Ranger Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 A little more on topic: had educating people to be better people as opposed to educating them to have more knowledge ever worked? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted July 17, 2016 Author Share Posted July 17, 2016 Latest thing I just heard reported. The driver had been planning the attack for some time. He did a dry run with the truck before Bastille Day. In the text messages on his phone there's a message to one of the six people being held by police saying, "Bring more weapons". And as has been mentioned up thread, the police in Nice say 'he was radicalized very quickly', once he started going to the mosque in April. So, not a person 'who never went to the mosque'. Not a lone wolf, it seems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DunderMifflin Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 Congratulations?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Arryn Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 5 hours ago, Cas Stark said: There is nothing wrong with the quest for profit, it lies behind most of the advances of the human race. Seeking profit is a negative term for self improvement. Atlas Sucked! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Arryn Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 15 minutes ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said: A little more on topic: had educating people to be better people as opposed to educating them to have more knowledge ever worked? Depends what you mean by better people. If that means understanding an obligation to something more than your selfish interests, sure. Most of Ancient Greece had some level of that...and, Cas may correct me, but I believe they made the occasional 'advance'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
James Arryn Posted July 17, 2016 Share Posted July 17, 2016 9 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said: Latest thing I just heard reported. The driver had been planning the attack for some time. He did a dry run with the truck before Bastille Day. In the text messages on his phone there's a message to one of the six people being held by police saying, "Bring more weapons". And as has been mentioned up thread, the police in Nice say 'he was radicalized very quickly', once he started going to the mosque in April. So, not a person 'who never went to the mosque'. Not a lone wolf, it seems. Crime committed. A) It was probably a black guy. c) How can you say that? A) statistics! so, tell me...is A affirmed if it ends up being a black guy who committed the crime? Not even getting into the info, which as of now is sketchy and filtered, but can you see why I have a problem with the assumptions, or is my analogy broken? You're one of my favourite people on here, and it's freaking me out that you're going down this path. What hope for us if the good people are thinking in blocks? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DireWolfSpirit Posted July 18, 2016 Share Posted July 18, 2016 1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said: Latest thing I just heard reported. The driver had been planning the attack for some time. He did a dry run with the truck before Bastille Day. In the text messages on his phone there's a message to one of the six people being held by police saying, "Bring more weapons". And as has been mentioned up thread, the police in Nice say 'he was radicalized very quickly', once he started going to the mosque in April. So, not a person 'who never went to the mosque'. Not a lone wolf, it seems. You could have read this 7 hrs earlier on the previous page where it was already posted? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JGP Posted July 18, 2016 Share Posted July 18, 2016 5 hours ago, NestorMakhnosLovechild said: You said that "profit" created a world in which "horrible inequality exists." You were given a brief historical lesson about how before modern industrial capitalism, inequality was much worse and a far smaller percentage of the population had anything akin to a comfortable existence. That's the danger of making broad, categorical statements. They are rarely true. That you don't understand things like this is part of the problem with how you view the world. Oh, really. I've made leaps and bounds into kinder-gentler territory, yet this opinion in its entirety is rather amusing insofar as you've related it. 1 hour ago, James Arryn said: Depends what you mean by better people. If that means understanding an obligation to something more than your selfish interests, sure. Most of Ancient Greece had some level of that...and, Cas may correct me, but I believe they made the occasional 'advance.' The ancient Greeks were far from the only historical precursor to promote such, and it didn't necessarily make anything 'better.' For instance: Sparta lauded excellence of the individual, provided it conformed to thier very limited parameters for such, and enslaved an entire people to enable their pursuit-- while Athens, despite being held up as some kind of paragon of progress, more often than not tore down anyone who dared fly too high. Anyway. I like the idea that education would help bridge gaps, whatever those may be, but I was also one who figured that the Internet would be a great device in making the world small and aid to an overall sense of global community. And while that may be the case in some regards, its also had a converse effect. Does it [education] open doors? Of course it does. Do those lead anywhere that doesn't benefit the individual first and foremost? Not always, but usually. I don't think generosity and altruism are things people can learn from a book, or example. I suspect it's either inherent to their nature or something they later pick up due to personality and subsequent experience. Same with being open minded, generous, altruistic, whatever. You got it or you learn it, but seldom from a book. And no, I don't think any of this is off topic really. Asides, sure, but far from irrelevant. For myself, I was somewhat sad all day, and only half managed to get my blood up when I saw a NY police officer's statement [on FB] about sheep, sheep dogs and wolves. Like human beings are so simply divided, radicalized or no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted July 18, 2016 Author Share Posted July 18, 2016 8 minutes ago, James Arryn said: Crime committed. A) It was probably a black guy. c) How can you say that? A) statistics! so, tell me...is A affirmed if it ends up being a black guy who committed the crime? Not even getting into the info, which as of now is sketchy and filtered, but can you see why I have a problem with the assumptions, or is my analogy broken? You're one of my favourite people on here, and it's freaking me out that you're going down this path. What hope for us if the good people are thinking in blocks? If you go through this thread, on page 1 all I did was report what I saw on the news. Then you'll see on page two the next day I said the driver may have been influenced by ISIS who in their magazine suggest people use vehicles as weapons to run down and kill people. You may even recall a 'lone wolf' did that with his car in Quebec when he saw two military men walking through a parking lot at a mall. That Quebec experience here in Canada certainly suggests that this is what the incident could have been on a grander scale. But I then went on to say "The details released about the killer also mentioned he had just lost his job. Pretty horrible when you think the only door open to you in the circumstances is to kill as many people as possible." Not radicalization, but maybe a reaction to job loss. That was Friday morning, on page 2. That's followed by no comments from me, but lots of back and forth by various posters over 3 pages. Friday afternoon, after hearing a great deal more about how Nice is actually a centre of radicalization in France, 2nd after Paris, I said you had to consider he had been radicalized in prison. Reports were being made that he was a petty criminal well known to police and had been in and out of jail, but someone then posted that he had received a suspended sentence and never went to jail. What is wrong with understanding that people get radicalized? How do you think young people from Canada, Australia, the UK and countries across Europe have ended up fighting for ISIS? Why do three teens born in southwestern Ontario decide to go to Africa, join ISIS and take part on an attack on an oil refinery in Tunisia? Why do five friends in Calgary, all born in Canada to parents who fled here to escape violence, decide to join ISIS in Syria? To die there in glory? Then I said "Nice still is a centre of radicalism, and self-radicalization through the internet, the mosque, by reading news reports about terrorist acts or by hanging out with the guys on the corner is a possibility you have to take seriously. Whether or not he belonged to a group followed by security services, he could still have decided to go out in a blaze of glory as a good soldier. As I said, whether or not he was a lone wolf, you can't discount those influences, a problem in France, Germany, the UK, the USA, Canada and a lot of other countries. The two guys who committed terrorist acts in Canada two years ago weren't members of any cells either, and seem to have decided that if life is shitty, going out in a blaze of glory by killing people is the way to go. That's a really scary thought." You have to consider he may have been radicalized, is what I said. But oh no, everyone jumps in and says he has no faith, he doesn't go to the mosque, oh yeah, I spent a week in Nice, now I'm radicalized. How long do you think it takes to get radicalized? Didn't you study history at university? How many stories have you come across about middle class university students who attended one meeting of the socialist club and became dedicated communists, virtually overnight? How about parents who sent their kids to university and never saw them again, because in a month or two they totally changed and rejected their parents and their bourgeois lives? And don't make a comparison with white guys in the US who get pissed off and take their guns to the school or the movie theatre or the McDonalds and shoot people. Nobody in the world does what Americans do with guns as often as they do. And I have no words for people who said, oh, so you're saying only Muslims do that. I mean, wtf? The IRA were Muslims? The Basques are Muslims? Mark Lepine who shot 24 women engineering students was a Muslim? Anders Breivik was a Muslim? Are you guys nuts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Which Tyler Posted July 18, 2016 Share Posted July 18, 2016 OK, there is increasing evidence that fits the political narrative (as there was always going to be, whether genuine or not, causative or not - it was politically imperative that such links were "found"). Today's BBC article points out that "There is no indication that the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was a jidhadist." Also on the BBC: "Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the investigation had not yet found evidence linking attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel to terrorist networks. " That he planned things a few days beforehand do NOT make this a "new normal" and do NOT make this a terrorist attack of any description; let alone an action by Daesh. Even their own claim limits itself to him being influenced by their call. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swordfish Posted July 18, 2016 Share Posted July 18, 2016 23 hours ago, Relic said: Errr, yeah, except when your quest for profit creates a world within which horrible inequality exists. So while questing for profit might, in a vacuum, be totally fine, how one goes about it is all that matters. And we, as a society, have decided to go about our quest for MORE by making the majority have to be content with LESS. Less education, less health care, less natural beauty, less years to live, and so on. That sort of shit blows back on you. Especially the part where you deny a decent education to a large majority of the world's population. What the fuck do you expect to happen when you under educate the masses, while making firearms the biggest business in the world? Except virtually all of the benchmarks you call out here have steadily risen for the last couple hundred years. So... There's that.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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