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thinkahol *

Wall Street Protests: Carnival or Revolution? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...can-you-hear-them-now-3

Wall Street Protests: Carnival or Revolution? - NYTimes.com

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Oct 11
     
    ludicrous
Levy Rivers

Op-Ed Columnist - The End of Philosophy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07Brooks.html

morality philosophy brooks

shared by Levy Rivers on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
David Corking liked it
  • Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.
  • Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.
  • Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.
  • We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.
  • They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.
  • Levy Rivers on 08 Apr 09
     
    As our brain sorts out of the thousands of bits of info it takes special note of those things your system of values and interest. We take note of those things that have been socially enriched objects and concepts
Peter Dearman

MIDEAST: Environment Emerges as a Major Casualty - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp

Gaza Israel war crimes warfare Palestine atrocities atrocity UN

shared by Peter Dearman on 04 May 09 - No Cached
  • A ban on materials required for their maintenance, including cement, steel and pipes, left them in a state of disrepair.
  • Israeli bombs hit the already fragile sewage and water treatment systems, causing drinking water and raw sewage to mix across some of the most populated areas of Gaza.
  • Tank shells hit the strip's largest wastewater plant in the Sheikh Aljeen area of Gaza City, sending sewage cascading directly into neighbourhoods, farms and into the sea.
  • Peter Dearman on 04 May 09
     
    Countless fruit groves across the Gaza Strip are now gone, entire farms bulldozed. The remains of thousands of destroyed homes emit toxic asbestos, while dilapidated infrastructure dumps raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea. An already deepening environmental crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip has been further compounded by the recent war.
  • Peter Dearman on 04 May 09
     
    Gaza is a Kafkaesque situation that makes a joke out of rational geopolitical discussion.
David Corking

Op-Ed Columnist - The End of Philosophy - NYTimes.com | April 2009 - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07Brooks.html

Culture

shared by David Corking on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
    • David Corking
      David Corking on 08 Apr 09
       
      This makes no sense - perhaps Herbert doesn't want us to reason about it!
  • hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.
    • David Corking
      David Corking on 08 Apr 09
       
      This is certainly a vital question, but I don't think that link is hard, but instead obvious.
  • David Corking on 08 Apr 09
     
    A little pompous, but provoking and informative all the same.
David Corking

You are being lied to about Pirates | w w w . P e t e r S a n t i l l i . c o m - 0 views

petersantilli.com/?p=173

Law Culture

shared by David Corking on 21 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
  • Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories
  • European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.
  • this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters
  • 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
  • George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
  • David Corking on 21 Apr 09
     
    a column from the Independent - a fascinating alternative view of the Somali Pirates
David Corking

The Iain Dale interview | LabourList.org | April 2009 - 0 views

www.labourlist.org/alex_smith_iain_dale_interview

education culture politics

shared by David Corking on 12 May 09 - No Cached
  • Boris Johnson, the test case for a Tory government. He’s overturned the tariff on gas-guzzlers; he’s only building social housing in already deprived areas, he praised the sub-prime mortgages in America; he destroyed cycle lane budgets but still called himself green. And those are the very few things he has done…Good. I like politicians who don’t legislate a lot.
    • David Corking
      David Corking on 12 May 09
       
      Great exchange!
  • I don’t regard it as a Socialist Conspiracy, but I do regard it as a monolithic bureaucracy where not enough is spent on direct patient care. To my mind, you could break it up into smaller geographical units, decentralise it more efficiently on a regional basis.
    • David Corking
      David Corking on 12 May 09
       
      Is this a vote _for_ the postcode lottery?
  • I was selected as a candidate by a very conservative constituency – having told them I was gay. If you’d said to me ten years ago that that could happen I’d have laughed. Margot James herself was selected in a marginal seat. I willingly pay tribute to Labour on gay rights
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I hit back. Having said all of that, I’ve always had a soft spot for Derek, and he shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that he set up LabourList up and it’s going to go on without him,
  • David Corking on 12 May 09
     
    I would love to increase the number of teachers by 20%. I would love to, and to be fair to the Labour government have done a lot on that. But to just say that everything's perfect and we need to spend every pound that we're spending now is just being an ostrich.
Bakari Chavanu

Skepticblog » Capitalism-A Propaganda Story - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...capitalism-a-propaganda-story

comment politics micheal moore micheal shermer

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • When Michael Moore said that capitalism should be replaced by democracy, it didn’t make the most sense, I agree. However, it is well known that the economic system of socialism change how effective a political system works. Captialism, when allowed to go to extremes can also interfere with our political system.
  • Suggestion #1 Shermer should stay out of politics and economics. #2 He and all of you should read this: How the Servant Became a Predator, Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws By William K. Black Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City
  • Michael Moore is a fantastic skeptic. He doesn’t fall for the cultural mythologies of our age. The fervor that some people hold for their favorite economic systems is much akin to that held for religions. People get bent all out of shape when someone is sacrilegious enough to point out the problems and disconnects within their worshipped system. Some people think that there is some kind of magical something or other to their economic system that makes it function automatically. When you go looking for the “man behind the curtain”, you find out how frail the system really is.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The microeconomics that drive the lives of ordinary people and businessmen do not necessarily coordinate with the macroeconomic needs of a nation.
  • In this latest installment in his continuing series of what’s wrong with America, Michael Moore takes aim at his biggest target to date, and the result is a disaster. The documentary is not nearly as funny as his previous films, the music selections seem contrived and flat, and the edits and transitions are clumsy, wooden, and not nearly as effective as what we’ve come to expect from the premiere documentarian (Ken Burns notwithstanding) of our time. And, most importantly, the film’s central thesis is so bad that it’s not even wrong.
  • Even if people were more educated individual behavior is determined by the structure of society.
  • I fail to see how businesses only operate without coercion. Businesses only operate without coercion if they have been coerced to do so. There are many examples in history of businesses taking as much control of their employees’ lives as possible. It is only due to government regulation that we do not have more businesses treating employess as property as some coal mines once did.
  • If we ask which economic system produces the greatest human well-being, the overwhelming evidence is already in: we know economic libertarianism doesn’t work. The only serious question, the only question for critical thinkers, is what balance between state and market (assuming we can even make a meaningful distinction between them in some cases) is ideal?
  • Both are idealistic, purist and pseudo-rational systems of belief that were the basis of the greatest ideological divide of the 20th century. I think it’s time we grew up from both and set about the hard task of finding out how to really make an economic system work for us, and not the other way around.
  • In general, libertarians seem to have a blindspot when it comes to noticing the self-serving aspects of their beliefs. They often spout words like “liberty” and “freedom” without even considering that they might be truly wanting “liberty” from responsibility toward others and “freedom” from paying back the society that has often served their interests quite well.
Bakari Chavanu

The root cause of war is oligarchic capitalism | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...igarchic-capitalism-1397733231

capitalism middle east

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 06 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • After World War Two, Britain and the USA pressured the United Nations into confiscating Arab land to form the state of Israel, making the Arabs pay for the crimes of the Germans. In addition to providing a nation for the Jews, Israel would be a forward base for Western economic and military power in the Middle East. To the Arabs it was another European invasion of their territory.
  • In the early 1950s, the USA and Britain overthrew the government of Iran because it tried to nationalise its oil industry, which was under Western control.
  • In the mid-1950s, Egypt decided to nationalise the Suez Canal and use the income from it to help their people out of poverty. They were willing to pay its British and French owners the full market value for their shares, but Western governments and Israel responded violently, invading and bombing Egypt into submission.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The USA and Britain committed similar atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Indonesia and Afghanistan. We overthrew their governments, installed dictators, undermined their economies - all to strengthen our business interests. In every nation where we now have terrorism, we had first assaulted them.
  • Capitalism is always at war. The violence, though, is often abstract: forcing us either to accept low-paying, exhausting jobs or starve; denying us adequate healthcare, education and economic security; convincing us that human beings are basically isolated, autonomous units seeking self gratification. But when this doesn't suffice to keep their profits growing, the violence becomes physical, the cannons roar, and the elite rallies us to war to defend "our" country and destroy the fiendish enemy.
  • Since 9/11 the USA has killed over 300,000 - a hundred times more than died in the World Trade Center. The overwhelming majority have been civilians.
  • As Martin Luther King stated with simple eloquence: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government."
  • Since they don't have our military power, they resort to guerrilla warfare. As Mike Davis wrote, "The car bomb is the poor man's air force."
  • www.amazon.com/dp/1897455844
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