I suppose a free country would be ruled by the majority. Since all countries are ruled by tiny minorities and the mugs have noticed this without drawing any sensible deductions, they are going to elect nobodies from television in the cretinous belief that they know such people. I can't see democracy emerging from this mess.

Surely the word 'created' sets us off on false assumptions. Things happen, perhaps.

I've spent a lot of time encouraging people to talk themselves out of suicide. If the alternative is as awful as it sometimes seems, people don't need talking into it, I think. I doubt there is anything after physical death, but I don't think we can base much on that or the opposite possibility. My own notion of logic suggests that we'd never have started on this business, but it seems to include a very strong internal pressure to keep at it, doesn't it?

All I know about IQ is that all the RAF could ever find to say about me was that I was extremely intelligent (it's doubtless gone off since I took the test!). They key point about all this inequality drivel, in my view, is that before we start using such things to make some people important, we must decide what human beings are for, as we might decide, for instance, that a knife is for cutting, at which point sharpness matters. Since humanity seems to be for nothing in particular, it is an end in itself, as are we all, and judging people on size of ears. range of voices or ability to pee far should be worth what they deserve - nothing.

I don't really think there is much 'self' to own, just various shifting mental states with a shared name. I've never fully understood the concept 'morality' either, but have always felt it was a deeply obnoxious thing to force life on anybody under capitalism. I don't quite know what people want out of casual sex - handwork, so to speak, should deal with the immediate problem - but I assume that it probably has, like so much else, to do with power. Nasty!

Just the end of capitalism and the beginning of civilisation. About time.

Capitalism is a system by which the vast majority are defrauded of much of the value of their labour in order to transfer it to a few very rich crooks. To do this it must keep the mugs living totally in the past.

It inevitably uses racism, however, as it uses every other thing that divides the mugs.

Racism, like so much of capitalist ideology, depends on antiquated thinking.. There is only one 'race' of humans nowadays, jokingly called Homo Sapiens.

'You don't tell children there's no Father Christmas' - my Mother on religion.

Bitter Crank - I think you put the climate change question very clearly. I think that even if there were a still a chance of remedial measures working, immediate profits will always come first and put a stop to them. I send a lot of time arguing with extreme-right Americans: it is an experience to end all hope! :)

I like your novel-bit, but I'd see such an opinion as something that reflects back on the character and what we are to make of her(?) . She can't mean it as literally factual or she wouldn't be a major character, so has she had bitter experiences in the past, is she laughing at someone stupid, or what? I said it was an instinctive reaction, but, honestly, who cares?

I'd give humanity three hundred years tops. I think they'll probably give up education, in the circumstances.

'Rights' are, surely, what you are strong enough to get, so yes, we should all have the right to basic necessities. Are we strong enough to overcome the full-time brainwashing that works against it though?

It would seem to me that, in practice, only people looking for a fight would react to either, which are such silly generalisations as to produce no more than a shrug. This seems to me a good instance of the differences between philosophy and literature, which is what I am interested in. I see that there is a distinction, but find my instinctive reaction is, 'Who cares'. Philistine of me, doubtless.

Thanks ArguingWAristotleTiff.

Thanks for putting me right about Knox, Edmund. I didn't do badly as a creative imitator thought, fair play!

Sorry about spelling and punctuation above - as a trained typist and an old English teacher I sufferwith this keyboard!

All this reminds me of the old (Oxford?) rhyme, which I recreate from momory:

'There was a young man who said, 'God,
Don't you find it exceedingly odd,
That that very large tree
Simply ceases to be
When there's no-one around in the Quod?'

To which, quite relaxedly, God
Said 'Nothing about it is odd,
And that very large tree
Never ceases to be -
I am always around in the Quod'.

This has all been very interesting, but I wonder if anyone could tell me just why anyone should want to live forever, taking up all that room and getting in the way of sensible development. What on earth is that good about going on and on? That is what bores do.

'You can take your hate for Zionists elsewhere. Address the general principle under discussion or don't post. '

Yes, Master! At once, Master!

I am at a loss to understand your first sentence. The dominant world power, the USA, and its opponent, the USSR, set up 'Israel' to avoid having many dp's arriving at their own gates, and the 'state' has survived ads a favoured American colony since then. It seems to me that (reasonably in the circumstances of the time) the Zionists saw their survival in imitating Hitler, and would have been content with some other reich, Madagascar for instance. Lots of pirate ships have sailed over time, but people had to stop them eventually.

Where did anyone ever get the right to property in anything? Still, we prosecute people for theft, and the Zionists are prime candidates. Even assuming that some of their ancestors actually lived in that territory, does that give us all the right to claim territory our myths tell us 'our people' once lived in? The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, who were manifestly living in that Country when the Zionists arrived, is a provable fact. It's a question, I suppose, about how far you go back. Could we establish, now, who inherits the responsibility for racist slavery in the US, and to whom compensation should be paid? Fair numbers would, given the doings of plantation owners and such, on genetic inheritance, be in both camps. Should we accept as true the Nineteenth Century fantasies of vast German hordes (swimming, doubtless, since they appear to have had no sails) repopulating eastern Britannia? We all know pretty well about what has happened over the last hundred years or so, however, and the criminal behaviour of the Zionists is definite enough, surely? But, as with the doings of China and others, have we the power to do anything about it? Probably yes, just, but not immediately.

If you want to make any absolute comparisons between people, surely, you have first to decide what people are FOR. In the long run, what is there to be perfect AT, except rotting?

The tribes had been introduced only a generation or so before, and were deliberately spread over all Athens, to avoid special interest groups developing.
Thanks.

What gives me to - perhaps totally unphilosophically - to doubt Socrates is that he wouldn't take payment from his rich pupils to help his poor family and that he survived the rule of the very nasty Thirty Tyrants most successfully, but couldn't survive long under democracy. It's the sort of thing I would tend to start from if we were discussing philosophers in Nazi Germany. Am I wrong?