Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
How do you differentiate between a person of religion and a rational theist?
Personally, I wouldn’t.
ETA: Which is to say, one is a subset of the other. Not all religious people are rational, but all theists are religious.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to UglyTruth,
Avoiding the pointy things and the burny things of the afterlife isn’t practical?
Correct.
The natural rights
Natural rights are a highly contentious idea. This may be hard to accept to anyone who has had to swear that they find certain truths about them self-evident. But unfortunately "self-evident" is usually a way of invoking no reason at all. You can swear away to them as much as you like, but that doesn't convince me of anything. I never found Hobbes, Locke or Paine very convincing on this particular score.
It seems that "natural law" is most frequently invoked to assert opinions about morality without justification, and it's most often done by religious people who find the idea of a morally neutral universe hard to even fathom.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to UglyTruth,
It is. You can’t swear an oath without doing it.
Yes, I certainly can.
Merriam Webster definition:"a formal and serious promise to tell the truth or to do something"
Oxford definition:
"A solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness, regarding one’s future action or behaviour"
and most other dictionaries in a brief search give the same level of commitment to there being a deity involved.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to UglyTruth,
Swearing an oath is essentially an act of calling deity to witness.
No, not really. It's making a strong promise, which you can maybe be held to. If you have to call a deity to witness, then it's by definition a religious thing.
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Judith Collins' dog says she was treated "Ruff".
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Thanks Joe. Yes, I'm optimistic. I don't think history will repeat itself by following the same path as the last big capitalist crisis. We've evolved a little bit as a species since then, and there's nukes. I think that bit-by-bit capitalism will morph into a better system. It could take a long bloody time, but I think it will. I'd rather it happened sooner than later and think we could take simple positive steps in that direction, which is why I bother to speak on it at all. But eventually I think even the richest capitalists themselves will come to realize that raising the bottom dramatically is actually to their own personal advantage, quite aside from it being the morally right thing to do. They will still have the greatest access to the goods of humanity by far, but they must surely see in the end that a society in which humans are more fulfilled by default is a better one to live in. I don't see an end to a rich poor divide (well not for a long time), but I do see a society in which the divide might not be quite such a burden on the true productive potential of the species.
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<continued>
Basically, we have to move beyond the model that "productive" work should be the basis of social growth and personal value. We should still reward that kind of work, because otherwise it will not get done, but it should not be the basis upon which our survival, health and comfort rests. The reward for it should be icing on the cake. The doing of it should, in itself, benefit society, who should be empowered to reward it. It's no use doing paid work that no one can pay for.
Essentially, we should acknowledge that humans having a lot of leisure time is not only the new normal, but it's also a good thing. It is, after all, from a personal point of view, something that most people strive for. It could and should be symbolic of a high state of social development, rather than something we fear as disastrous because our economic system breaks down. It's my opinion that people would still, on the whole, work. They prefer to anyway. Bone idle unemployment is very depressing. It's a trap people can't get out of when their work is not deemed productive, so they can't even afford to do it. Yes, there are some extremely lazy people. But that's not a natural equilibrium state for all people, just a feature of some people.
Yes, the capitalist system as we currently already have it can provide this for a substantial fraction of the population, given the right circumstances. But it doesn't seem to be able to do it consistently, and it has never done it for everyone. This idea of punitive unemployment is still structurally built in. It's actually only quite a small change to get rid of that altogether.
Which is why, if I must say the thing that I would certainly vote for in a major party, it is a strongly coherent and credible plan to bring about a universal basic income. I think it would do more than practically any other measure we could design to reduce inequality in our society, and I don't think it would lead to a massive decline in productivity at all. It would just lead to a huge rise in general well being. We need to acknowledge that our "safety net" is not the right model, that everyone should actually be tethered above the tightrope in the first place, so that it's very difficult to fall off. Then the safety net need not be capable of taking the entire weight of all the beneficiary classes, and is there for exceptional need, rather than normal need.
We're already almost half-way there. We have a UBI for the elderly. It's an excellent model and I really hate it when people my age get all jealous and say it should be attacked. It most certainly should not. It should be extended. It should be what everyone gets.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Chris Waugh,
No repeat of the Great Depression, just a reset to the historic norm.
Right, but accompanied by a very, very long stagnation of all growth in the West. For the industrializing world, it's a time of progress. Good for them, but if inevitable, then also times that the already developed nations have no blueprint for at all. Their economies are still predicated around work and reward, even though they have "safety nets". But if the safety net becomes the new normal, you'd have to hope that it is a pretty decent one. The historic norm is not exactly a high bar. I can envisage a steadily widening gap between haves and have-nots until you have the equivalent of aristocracy and peasants again.
To put my cards on the table, I think Social Credit had the most realistic blueprint. When they first arose, they were a less appealing form of socialism to the trade union + safety net one that we already had, for many reasons (a major one being that the world had just not yet had enough of superpower vs superpower war). We were still addicted to the idea of strong nation states with well employed work forces, and we created demand for them with war. That kind of economy, which lead to very high levels of prosperity in the Western world was predicated on the neverending demand that could be created by war.
But somehow we've gone beyond that. We still war, but with nowhere near the same sense of unity and purpose. We may be moving back towards that model, if we can't find another way. I think there is another way.
<continued below>
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Rich Lock,
I don't know. It could just slide and slide and slide. The Great Depression was very noticeable because most of the industrial output of the world came from Europe and the USA. But now that's shifted substantially, and it could just be a sustained downturn that never stops, as industry shifts to the Third World, until labour prices stabilize. We don't have a New Deal up our sleeve this time, because that already happened, and the welfare state is older than my parents. We need a different idea.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Rich Lock,
Yeah, and Europe wasn't built in a day, too. It might have a number of failings economically, but one thing is pretty sure - they're not going to set on each other in response to a sustained downturn, the way they have for the thousands of years before. So that, at least, is a pretty big leap forward. It would be nice if I could feel quite so optimistic about the Russians.
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