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ayn rand is worse than Hitler | |||||||
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dobnits Posted:
Have you come into some money? Are you in anyway related to anyone in the Bilderberg Group? |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 5:44AM | View Muhammad I m har...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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scully Posted:
I left. Don’t know if I would “recommend” that to anyone. The consequences were obvious and simple: broken relations with parents, but supposedly happy future for me and my family. |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 1:19PM | View Inconnu's Profile | # | ||||||
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Agreed. And Dobnits, maaaaany people are completely unable to pull their way out of things. There’s tons of reasons why even in this country, but can you honestly say that everyone in sub-Saharan Africa should just go ahead and die of AIDS because, “Heh. Bootstraps ****.”? |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 1:34PM | View 1337xxxxxxxxxlol...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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Im speaking of an IDEAL society here, as in the best possible one in my opinion no less. Money itself should be proportional to positive impact on society. Positive impact however comes from either a fortunate mistake or from being intelligent (for the most part, there are ALWAYS exceptions). Plenty of people have been useful to humanity without having a Harvard diploma and they got their just deserves. Many of the instances that you (by you I mean the usual crowd) are so kindly putting words in my mouth over have more important things to worry about than to be perfect, every society does. This is mostly through the interference of other powers. But with enough willpower and a brilliant plan, people can overcome obstacles even as foreboding as that, and they deserve the highest of praise.
As per the original topic, I was saying that Ayn Rand definitely had a point and was nothing at all like Hitler. Society is invariably flawed as well, as Chile mentioned with the cheating scenario. I can only hope that if there is something on the other side, they are given the worst possible fate. Furthermore I never said that not going to school means you should die. (again, thank you for explaining it on my behalf without consulting me) Being an outright idiot should lead to the lack of pbuming on genes.
A few more facts of the matter.
1.) Some people have claimed my views on society are skewed, wrong, sometimes even monstrous, I’m sure a few of you are thinking the same. To which I reply, “thats probably why I’ll never be president.” I’m a dangerously cynical, even morose individual, at times being outright cold, and I don’t think anybody can change that. But I prefer to utilize this through verbal action rather than something else.
2.) Please don’t make this thread about me. I merely wished to put my two cents in. Maybe I was a little too “honest” about my views, but we don’t have to wreck this over that.
3.) To scully’s scenario. Why can’t the other kids do just as well? |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 7:42PM | View dobnits's Profile | # | ||||||
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I agree with Ayn Rand to an extent; as dobnits pointed out, her conclusions make sense within certain contexts and under certain limitations. My biggest problem with Objectivism is that it’s far too idealistic. It sounds good in theory, but the world simply doesn’t work that way. I’m a Libertarian in theory, and a Liberal in practice, for this exact reason. It’s also worth pointing out that a society in which everybody always acted entirely rationally would be boring as hell.
In response to the original post, Hitler was directly responsible for the murder of millions of people solely on the basis of their ethnicity, while Ayn Rand is not directly responsible for any killing that I am aware of, and if she were, it would have been by standards of intelligence, ambition and the willingness to work towards one’s goals, which I consider somewhat better criteria for determining who should live or die—though I can’t justify any sort of murder with a straight face. Saying Ayn Rand is worse than Hitler is an obvious exaggeration/lie. |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 8:19PM | View BobTheSqueakyWea...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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You know, if this weren’t so much a troll-free zone, I’d think we’d all just been trolled. |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 10:22PM | View Sooper_Duper_Fay...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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dobnits Posted:
I’ve been sitting on my comments for a few days because they were pretty rage filled for a while.
So, say someone has Aspbergers or Autism, for instance… they’re functional, but they’re never going to be rich without someone handing them a ****load of money. They didn’t earn it. So they’re just better off dead? These “CLODS” don’t deserve the chance to do something with their lives, even if it’s just bringing a smile to their parents’ faces?
How about someone that got into a car accident at an early age and is paralyzed for life? What about someone that was doing well and fine for themselves before some catastrophic accident happened to them? Does that change if the person is at fault or if someone else is? |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 11:20PM | View spacekadt's Profile | # | ||||||
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What about the contribution to society which artists and musicians make?
Although some may achieve monetary success at a later age the vast majority will be lucky to scrape out a meager living while pursuing their artistic dreams. Often it takes years of dedication to ones art before achieveing a level which could be deemed a contribution to our society as a whole. So what do we do in this situation? They’re not making money but they are contributing.
Forgive me if I’m overlooking or confusing an issue, I’m not familiar with the writings of this philosophy and don’t have the time to research this myself currently. |
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Posted On: 11/16/2009 11:27PM | View duca's Profile | # | ||||||
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i dislike libertarianism, objectisvism and anything like it because it results from a complete lack of understanding.
anyone who believes those kinds of things is unaware of the lack of control they, and others actually have in their lives. |
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Posted On: 11/17/2009 12:28AM | View nanalatinojesus ...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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also, this is going to sound horrible, but we need people who is not as “smart” and “rich” to do all the jobs you don’t want to do. who’s gonna clean the mcdonalds bathroom, who’s gonna clean your streets, serve you your coffee etc etc. |
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Posted On: 11/17/2009 12:32AM | View ChilePepino's Profile | # | ||||||
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ChilePepino Posted:
Technology is making labor obsolete. Veer is making me feel all warm inside. Jesus Cristo Vencedor. This thread is wonderful. |
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Posted On: 11/17/2009 9:16AM | View Zagreus's Profile | # | ||||||
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dobnits Posted:
WARNING!!! Log in to see images! ahead!!!
If you’re gong to start talking ideal society, I think your number one mistake is bumuming that money should even exist. Money is an artificial creation meant to give us motivation to work because otherwise too many people wouldn’t bother getting jobs. In an ideal society we wouldn’t rely on greed motivation to get things done and it’s this greed motivation which drives Capitalism that allows for the Southparkian Gods and Clods we’re talking about here.
Ideally, people would work because they want to benefit society as a whole and they would do what they can with what knowledge and ability they have, which if lacking they would go to school to increase. If unable to learn for whatever reason or unable to find a vocation they specifically enjoy, they may be relegated to the jobs your so called “ambitious elite” might not care to do such as driving a big rig. On the other hand some people simply love to drive, some people love to cook food, clean up, build houses or furniture. When the motive is simply the betterment of society as a whole it may not be a perfect distribution but the lack of a profit motive would allow people to follow their own dreams or at very least explore opportunities without being forced into a job they don’t like in order to “get that pension” (I work with so many angry people who claim to be trapped by their pension) or to simply pay the bills.
Without money floating around, there would be absolutely no need for jobs such as banking, insurance, or even most service positions as people could simply pick up whatever items they needed and ideally as they would not be driven by greed and materialism, would not fill their houses with useless knick knacks. With all of these people in the work place suddenly not working, we could divvy up the workload so that we’d only need to work 25-30 hours a week to maintain the same productivity which would free up the artists to work on making our lives more interesting and beautiful with their music, art, movies, games etc… While those lacking artistic talent would do their part to support artists as they create or others as they learn.
There would need to be an organizational structure to divvy up resources and this would take the place of a government which would no longer be necessary (If people can care about others we don’t need to be forced to act civil to each other so their role on our lives can be minimized). They could then simply direct building projects and city works to make sure everyone has homes, running water, roads, parks and so forth according to who actually needs it.
Of course I’m talking ideal society here and most people are thinking how this would never work, but it does work perfectly well in small scale with the family unit. For the most part people will clean and maintain the home, or their section of it, simply because it needs to be done. Someone will cook and clean because others are hungry, they do what they can to support their children while they go to school and learn and as they do their responsibilities increase until they are taking care of their parents in their old age. Admittedly in our society taking care of our elders is becoming more rare and this is unfortunate since we are in a capitalist society which tells us to “**** everyone else for our own personal gain” That is the entire basis of the system with a complex theory that ends with everyone being well off anyways. It doesn’t work too well in practice however because if you make the basis of a society ****ing everyone else over, someone will be ****ed over and as such it cannot be ideal. Hell without money and with everything being free combined with a mindset of “having what I NEED, plus a bit to amuse me in my free time” there would also be no crime to have to worry about.
If we were to have a society that became more and more ambitious and worked harder and harder to achieve power and richness, eventually it would become so cutthroat that people would be unable to relax. Everyone would have to make sure that someone else wasn’t trying to take their job, their home, their money and they wouldn’t be able to show any weakness as a more ambitious person would exploit that to get more for themselves. Everyone working non stop all day scheming in order to maintain a balance sounds a bit less ideal than relaxing and helping each other out.
The one thing that would be a little less hippie-tastic in my view of an ideal society would be the eugenics portion. We are devolving as a race and while I’m not saying “let’s kill the genetically inferior” we are also suffering from overpopulation, depletion of natural resources and we’re everyone able to live the same standard of life as we have in first world countries it would be impossible to support. If those who had crippling genetic diseases simply didn’t have children we could start lowering in population and hopefully fairly quickly. We need a certain population growth at this point to maintain our economic structure but without an economic structure to support it would be less of a problem.
As the population declines and actually starts to become healthier as time goes by, we would have no need to have our cities and towns grow along with our resource acgreat timesulation to support the growing number of people. Construction efforts would be relegated to maintenance and improvement of existing homes and infrastructure as well as beautification projects while nature would be able to reclaim all of the extra space created. Resource consumption would drop, fish populations would come back, forests would regrow, pollution would decrease… As it stands this will only happen once we hit the population limit and wipe ourselves out in a global catastrophe but selective breeding would help with that.
We would need only get rid of one thing which is the genetic imperative to spread our own genes. Those who want kids but have cystic fibrosis can be caretakers, adopt, run daycares, help raise their nieces and nephews. We would all be involved in the raising of children to a greater extent for the betterment of society as a whole (as opposed to the betterment of ourselves only) and while they may not be OUR genes, once we get rid of an individualist attitude, we would be able to see our contributions in the raising of a child as equally valuable. Certainly it would be a better mark left on the world to help raise a child who makes an impact than to insist you have a diseased child simply because those muscular dystrophy genes happen to have “belonged to you”.
Personally it saddens me that we are moving further and further away from such a society, even on the familial level, but I do believe it possible to create and maintain. Even if a small country were to manage it they could export their own resources and simply have currency on a national level to import those resources they lacked. We need to start thinking of each other instead of just ourselves in order to start heading in the right direction but despite my “hey, if everyone loved each other…” hippie, communist anarchist attitude. I think it will only be possible once we rendour ourselves nearly extinct and start over again. Even then it’s not 100% but it sure as hell isn’t happening in my lifetime without it. In the meantime I’ll try not to let that stop me from living as best I can like those who would live in my ideal society and try to convince one or 2 others that maybe It’s not that crazy an idea.
/Log in to see images! |
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Posted On: 11/17/2009 3:01PM | View Dunatis's Profile | # | ||||||
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spacekadt Posted:If people want to donate or whatever, that’s fine. But the problem is that too many people take the “Gee, it would really be nice if” to the level of “Government should make people give!” That’s called conspiracy to commit theft, actually. |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 7:50PM | View OverclockedJesus...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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Dunatis Posted:No, money is a common medium of exchange used to eliminate the double-coincidence of wants which is such a problem in barter. As we have wants and will trade to sate those wants, it simply is easier to have a common medium of exchange, isn’t it?
On The Origins of Money by Carl Menger |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 7:54PM | View OverclockedJesus...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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I recall reading something about money is essentially debt, but not necessarily debt in the way you think it.
If the world had no net debt, there would be no money and barter would be pointless. An ideal society like that is entirely communistic, and while that does look ideal on paper, human desire ruined it and we got Marxism.
Ideally, yes, everything would be free and nobody would care. People care, we’re never reaching that point. The closest we can get is capitalism, which is effectively a trade of service by invoking a medium which implied indebtedness. The cycle of debt and non-debt effectively works as a bank functions: you recieve medium, and in exchange, they want compensation. Money works the same way, you provided effort to someone, and they compensate you with the medium, which you may trade for products which have been determined to have taken equal effort.
tl;dr: Unless you remove humans, communism isn’t working. Ever. |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 10:02PM | View Master_Troll's Profile | # | ||||||
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Master_Troll Posted:No, it’s not even that. It’s an exchange-facilitator. |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 10:05PM | View OverclockedJesus...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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OverclockedJesus Posted:
If you’re talking truly “ideal” in the sense most people in this thread are talking, there is no need for exchange. In order for any “exchange” to happen an inequality would need to be present. And the presence of inequality makes a society not “ideal”. |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 10:28PM | View Indiana Jonas's Profile | # | ||||||
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Hobart Bliggity Posted:Right, because there would be no lifeforms which have desires and will, and there would be no scarcity. So we can simply dispense with that counterfactual posit, as we do have desires and will. And there will always be scarcity. |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 10:53PM | View OverclockedJesus...'s Profile | # | ||||||
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OverclockedJesus Posted:
So then you’re not talking “ideal” and this entire argument is pointless. |
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 10:56PM | View Indiana Jonas's Profile | # | ||||||
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No, the supposed ideal is a peculiar instance of the Nirvana Fallacy.
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Posted On: 11/19/2009 11:00PM | View OverclockedJesus...'s Profile | # | ||||||