Got it. But as I noted, a water repellent object isn't wet even though it is covered in water.

To soak something is to immerse it in water or to make it extremely wet. The fish is literally soaking in water when it is in the water. — Baden

There are degrees of wetness, certainly.

Plants, animals, and insects are always somewhat wet. Were they to be completely dehydrated, they would be dead; brittle; rigid; hard; some of the above or all of the above, depending. Fish may spend decades in the water and not be any wetter on the last day of their drab wretched lives than they were on the first day. Fish and animals are equally wet on the inside. Only the surface wetness varies.

Being in contact with water is not the same as being "wet". Many plastics repel water, so a water-repelling plastic bottle is not wet on the inside, even though it is full of water.

So we might have moist liberals... — Banno

They are quite moist if they are washed up. At least for a few minutes...

A fish does not (as far as I know) repel water, so when it is in the water it is wet. It is also wet when it comes out of the water to sun itself in the bottom of your boat. Sunning fish frequently spritz themselves with moisturizing lotion. Many fish coat themselves in slippery fishsnot while in the water. It makes it more difficult for sexual predators to grope them.

Can something in water remain dry? If the surface of an object repeals water, it would not get wet in water. The surface of oil droplets or a whole can of oil can be in water, and not be wet. You won't get wet if you go into a greasy spoon, unless the waitress throws hot coffee in your face for uttering subtle sexual innuendo.

I say fish are all wet, unless they are not.

Jesus' solo following your quote was:

Jesus:
Neither you Simon, nor the fifty thousand
Nor the Romans, nor the Jews
Nor Judas, nor the twelve, nor the Priests, nor the scribes
Nor doomed Jerusalem itself
Understand what power is
Understand what glory is
Understand at all
Understand at all

If you knew all that I knew, my poor Jerusalem
You'd see the truth, but you close your eyes
But you close your eyes
While you live, your troubles are many, poor Jerusalem
To conquer death you only have to die
You only have to die — JC, Superstar

"My kingdom" in JC, S, "is not of this world." Revolutionary? It's problematic.

(it is no accident that BC's chosen example above is of an early 20th century car plant). — Thorongil

I could update the production example to Elon Musk's battery plant in Nevada, and talk about nickel ore rather than iron ore, lithium production rather than steel production. It wouldn't make that much difference. Producing monoclonal antibodies for cancer therapy is still input+process=product. Would updated high tech production make you happier?

profits — Thorongil

By definition "profit" consists of revenue that remains after obligations and expenses are paid -- labor, materials, management costs, taxation, etc. Investment in plant and facilities can come out of gross revenue or net revenue. How revenue is diverted back into the plant probably has more to do with taxation than anything else.

some mechanism or criterion other than the market — Thorongil

Right. There is no "true" value. A product is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

Another thing about Marxists... a socialist economy would require some kind of robust market operation to sort out supply and demand. The market might operate within exchanges. And of course there would be a market at the point of sale. If nobody wanted the new neckties (too ugly, too expensive, too short, too wrinkly, too something...) the necktie cooperative would discover that it's design team had failed. (This happens in capitalist retail all the time -- for some reason, fabric mills periodically come out with hideous plaids or other patterns that nobody wants, and they end up on sale and then clearance then rag stock until the stores can get rid of them.)

Marxists don't understand two things. (1) the value added by the entrepreneur, and (2) the necessity of profit (savings) in order to invest. — Agustino

Whatever it is that Marxists do or don't understand, successful societies require the function of the entrepreneur -- which is, essentially, a creative actor. A socialist economy would need creative actors as much as a capitalist economy, because perpetually changing circumstances require new solutions.

There are lots of people who perform entrepreneurial functions in non-profit organizations, for instance--almost always in the first few years of the organization.

Let's say that there was a sudden eruption of multi-antibiotic resistant infections, which tended to be disfiguring, disabling, or fatal. New NGOs would be formed quite quickly to address local conditions. Creative actors would lead the search for programatic solutions. Universities would start new labs to research the issue, and there would be a search for technically able scientists who could also think outside the box. The same would go for governments and health companies.

Most of the people working to solve the infection problem would not be in businesses: they would be elsewhere. The same would be true in a socialist economy. There would be inventions addressed to existing or new problems. Creative managers would find fresh solutions to supply chain problems--and so on--PROVIDED that the socialist economy did not operate as a command economy like the USSR. Command economies aren't altogether bad, but I think they tend to be arthritic, and may develop blindness to new circumstances. Capitalist economies can do the same thing, of course, but through different mechanisms. The obsessive drive for ever higher profits, for instance, blinds stockholders to the impending disasters of pollution, global warming, and so on.

Your concern is that entrepreneurs would not be properly rewarded, and as far as I can tell, a socialist economy would probably not adequately reward you for your wonderful new ideas. How creative managers, inventors, other creative types would be rewarded is a question which I do not have an answer for. In some socialist arrangements, they might be very highly rewarded, in others, less so. But "high rewards" is relative.

Most people, it seems, would prefer to make less income, as long as their economic standing compares favorably with others, rather than making 10 times as much, but being the least well paid man in the company. So, if they develop a product worth a million dollars, they might not get $100,000 in reward. Maybe they would only get $10,000. But... that $10,000 would be relatively high, compared to others.

Owners (stockholders) might very well be sitting on their hands doing nothing. Mangers of the company, or owners who are managers, certainly labor. As I noted, my depiction had parts missing, for simplicity's sake.

The market is not the relevant factor here. The relevant factor is "Who controls the means of production?" The ownership of the means of production is a legislated matter. The reason that Marx, Marxists, and various socialists are called "revolutionaries" is that they are proposing to do away with private ownership. The law would very much be changed. The stockholders would be stripped of their assets, likewise individual owners. The ownership and management of the means of production would be passed to the workers of the plant.

Marx wasn't proposing a reform of capitalism, he was proposing its abolition.

Now, if you don't like the idea of revolution, fine. I think it is safe to say that you can rest, assured that the revolution will not happen tomorrow, next week, or next year.

How do we know the workers could manage the plant? Because they already are managing the plants. Most managers are employees--granted, paid to serve the interests of the owners, for the most part. After the revolution, they decide wether the side that is buttered is the same as before.

What is the point of philosophy? — Oliver Purvis

Always a good question, brought up afresh many times.

I think there are many issues for questing minds to work on in the real world that are more pressing than what seems like idle speculation. For example: population control, global warming, environmental degradation, food production, preserving endangered species, disease prevention, eliminating severe endemic poverty, the meaning of work, etc. etc. etc.

Unless employers are forcing people to work for them, there is no exploitation. — Thorongil

You are not grasping the concept. First, working for 90% - 95% of the population is not an option, it's a necessity. We must work in order to earn money to live on. But the requirement of working isn't what constitutes the exploitation Marx (and lots of other people) were/are talking about. The exploitation is the spread between the wages that workers receive and the value they add to the products they produce.

Take an automobile. At Ford Motors (now deceased) giant River Rouge plant, a car began with iron ore. Workers at the plant smelted the ore, refined the pig iron, and turned it into steel. Other workers rolled the steel, forged it, stamped it, cut it, and drilled it. After many operations the low value, crude iron ore was turned into a car frame, car body, engine, transmission, axels, and so on. The iron in the ore gained an enormous amount of value through the labor of the workers.

Let's say the $100 worth of iron ore was turned into $1000 worth of steel. The workers who carried out the value-adding labor received 60% of the value in wages. The owner of the plant received 40%. The spread between getting 60% of the value created and 100% of the value created is the degree of exploitation.

This is a crude example -- lots of parts missing. The point is, labor creates more value than it gets paid for. The rest is "alienated" -- that is, lost to the workers. The rest goes to the capitalist who actually performed no labor at all.

Which profit is paid in wages and used to reinvest, which results in hiring more workers and paying more wages. — Thorongil

I would think wages, replacing equipment, buying materials, etc. would come out of gross revenue not profit. Profit is net revenue, isn't it, what is left over after the costs of production and allied costs are covered.

For a capitalist economist, or a businessman, to acknowledge that exploitation is the heart of capitalism would peel away the delusions and illusions of capitalism. Better to talk about 'team work', loyalty, creating value for stockholders, and all that. That exploitation is the name of the game is so... ugly, and awkward.

Only someone too stupid to actually succeed as a capitalist would fail to recognize how critical successful exploitation is. Workers produce more value than they receive in wages. The surplus value is accumulated by the capitalist as profit.

If someday a company employs self-reproducing robots (who not only reproduced themselves, but also produced the raw materials of their own construction and energy required to operate) then there will be no exploitation in capitalism. However, the capitalists had better hope the robots do not take time to contemplate their lot and work out the details of their existence. If they do, the owners of the robotic plant will receive a metallic knock on their door and find themselves surrounded by their mechanical minions, who will have erected a guillotine on the front lawn...

So, how do we know there is such a thing as a thing in itself?

Do you think that if we could see all the dings in siches, would they seem closer to what we think our senses tell us, or might they seem unrecognizable and alien? What I mean is, maybe we are victims of a monstrous hoax.

delete

Not really — schopenhauer1

Really.

People would like working for each other's needs more if we could get rid of the invisible hand in the iron glove concealed in an economics textbook. — Bitter Crank

How so? — schopenhauer1

Work is holy, except when it is alienated, perverted, debased, and made a suffering by capitalism. (It's in Marx--the short Manifesto or the short Value Price and Profit will explain it to you).

Except where we volunteer our labor because we value the cause, and a scattering of paid jobs which happen to be human, we do not know what unalienated work feels like. But, most of us have had at least a taste of good work, and it tastes good.

Watching movies with a deep or ambiguous messages, and unique cinematography, or spending an hour listening to a classical piece, is too hard for the working class. — darthbarracuda

Hey, I came from the working class and I like 'art films' and classical music. Who attends serious films and listens to classical music? All sorts of people -- but it sure isn't limited to the upper crusts of society. (By necessity the big donors to art institutions are all upper class--or filthy rich).

Why don't more ordinary sods go to the ballet, opera, and symphony? It's too expensive, for one thing. For another, it's offered as elite goods to which only some people are welcome. Put it down where the goats can get at it, and they'll like it.

When opera and drama were mass entertainments, the masses enjoyed and appreciated them. People like Verdi sometimes gave the musicians the music for an aria he knew would be popular just minutes before the premier of an opera, so that it wouldn't leak and every stevedore would be whistling or singing it in the streets before the opera opened.

Shakespeare's theater was crowded, with the ground in front of the stage reserved for the cheapest -- SRO tickets. People packed this area, anxious to watch his plays.

Child labor, scaled appropriately to the age, size, and strength of the child, may not be, in itself, an abridgment of the child's development, but when long periods of time are devoted to even appropriate manual labor, there is a good chance that the child will be deprived of an opportunities lsaato develop intellectually and socially.

Life, society, is one big quid pro quo, a grand "asinus fricat asinus (which auto correct just rendered "frigate sinus frigate") meaning, one jackass rubs another, or manos lavam manos--one hand washes the other. You work for someone else's needs, someone else works for your needs. That's how life works, from bacteria up to Schopenhauer.

People would like working for each other's needs more if we could get rid of the invisible hand in the iron glove concealed in an economics textbook.

As for your solution, it's a "one solution to all problems" solution, no matter what the problem is. "Let's all just die out and then every problem will be resolved by our absence. Except, of course, the problem that this creates for those who rather liked being alive -- despite all the deplorably dangerous disasters to which we are positively prone. Nobody thinks it's a perfect world, but a lot of people like it, and your "reprehensible reproduction rigamarole" just isn't appealing to most people.

Most people get your theory that life can be quite unpleasant. Yours is not an original insight. You are unique in being as persistent as you are in pursuing your proposals to cease and desist.

The Catholic Chuch never argues for a literal interpretation of the Bible.
— Akanthinos

Then Google is wrong? — Sapientia

Where did Google buy it's vocational school certificate in Theology?

Biblical literalism is associated more with Protestantism than Catholicism. — Jamalrob

True. Prior to the earliest geological explanation of the earth's history over time, Biblical literalism about creation made reasonably good sense. After these theories were published, not so much.

Actually, extremely doctrinaire Biblical literalist inerrancy is quite modern--a reaction to both Darwin and the Biblical criticism carried out in the 19th century which revealed a more complex history to the various books of the Bible than previously known. It was hatched out by crackers in the southern Bible Belt. It seems to be more common now than say... 50 years ago, and has spread north, east, and west.

It should have been nipped in the bud.

What needs cutting off is the government gravy train to, and bailouts of, large corporations. Let them compete and succeed in the market to justify their existence and profits. — Thorongil

I'll drink to that. I might add, we might also end the "hands off" approach to regulation. Wall Street is composed of liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels, and giving them free rein is asking to be robbed.

this is a rather Keynesian move and one the Democrats ought clearly to have no issue with — Thorongil

Keynes advocated government spending to counteract contraction in the economy. The economy is not, at this time, contracting.

quote="Thorongil;131308"]No economist has ever advocated this so called "trickle down" theory. It's a myth, a strawman.[/quote]

Tax law is the principle means by which the extreme disproportionate distribution of wealth has occurred. The 2017 tax bill is simply more diversion of economic resources to the already richer-than-Croesus-crowd.

The rich do not normally become rich at the expense of the poor, just as when running a race, the fastest sprinter does not cause the others to run more slowly. — Thorongil

What's true for foot races isn't true for economic exploitation. Yes, the rich do get richer at the expense of the poor.

It's a very well constructed story, with numerous threats and reprieves to keep the story going. In reality our hero would have been dead martian meat PDQ.

The exploration of space didn't end with a few trips to the moon. NASA went on to amazing feats of engineering, design, instrumentation, and organizational achievement in sending robots to Mercury, Venus, (Earth too -- don't forget all the satellites studying earth), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune Pluto, and beyond--way, way beyond. Voyager 1 and voyager 2 were launched in 1977. On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause and enter the interstellar medium. As of this moment, it is still working, still sending back a trickle of information about the solar radiation and cosmic radiation -- the latter which is now more dominant (for where the intrepid Voyager is located).

Google Translate says "It is not made of matter of taste".

If I remember correctly, 16 year olds participated in the Catalan voting for independence. Was that true for the Brexit vote, or Scottish independence vote?

Whether the legislated age of consent or age of responsibility--somewhere between 16 and 18 and 21 for different purposes--matches biological brain development or not, the point I want to emphasize is that our brains are not developing any faster now than in the past. True enough, with careful parenting and instruction, one can pour in more learning earlier, and improve performance at each stage of development, but brains still are not fully developed on average any sooner now than in the past.

Sexual maturity may be reached sooner, or later, depending on genetic and nutritional factors.

Mental maturity in terms of knowledge on how the world turns is possible at a younger age now than it was before. The media bombards children with information and this surely has an effect on the mind.

I agree that children in the past had ''responsibilities'' but they were of such kind that didn't affect their mental maturity. Farming and fetching water don't do anything for the mind but seeing the president give a complex point of view on TV does. — TheMadFool

The effect of watching media is probably not as influential on mental development as some people think. Language development in young children is not enhanced by watching television or tablets. Language development is critically dependent on caregiver-child interaction. We are not wired to pick up language from screens.

Watching the president give a complex point of view on TV does not "develop" the child's thinking. Watching the president, talking with one's parents, teachers, and peers about what the president said does that.

IF you observe typical young children who seem more advanced intellectually than what you think children growing up on the farm 100 years ago were, you're probably experiencing the bias of exposure to children whose parents are more sophisticated, understand the importance of lots of positive verbal interaction with their children, and make sure it happens.

Children working with their parents on the farm can have the same kind of positive verbal interaction, increasing responsibility, and so forth as children with sophisticated, effective urban parents. AND urban and rural children can both have intellectually very retarding experiences IF their parents are insensitive clods. Sophisticated, mature 18 year olds have definitely come off the farm.

This definition has to do with mental maturity - those who're less than 18 considered unable to think for themselves. This was fine because prior to the 21st century people under 18 were clearly immature and thus the restriction on their autonomy was justified. — TheMadFool

It isn't that people younger than 18 are "considered unable to think for themselves". Clearly many people younger than 18 or 17 or 16 can "think for themselves". What they can't do is assume certain "adult" responsibilities. This is a matter of legislated law, not child development. Some 45 year olds, of sound mind and normal intelligence, don't do a good job of accepting "adult" responsibilities. Some 15 year olds do.

The situation in the 21st century has changed dramatically. With an unprecedented access to information through media (magazines, books, tv and the interent) children of this generation are more informed than their predecessors and this trend is only going to increase. — TheMadFool

People -- all ages -- have access to vast quantities of information, some of which they did not have access even 20 years ago. However, "having access to a huge library" isn't the same as actually reading a book or a report. Picking up the book and reading it isn't the same as actually understanding the book, and being able to make use of it. It is an error to assume that this generation is more informed than their predecessors, for a couple of reasons:

What people in the mediated world of today are familiar with, know, and understand is -- as it has been for a long time -- spotty. 25% of 18 year olds today may have a high level of knowledge about media, but know very little about global warming. They may have performed well in high school mathematics classes, but know nothing about money management. They may have paid attention in class, learned grammar and punctuation, read all the required and option reading in English classes -- and not know how to fix a leaky faucet, or understand how their own body works.

So, I wouldn't be wrong in saying children are maturing faster nowadays. — TheMadFool

Yes you would be.

A child's brain does not mature faster today than it did 100 or 200 or 2000 years ago. The brain doesn't finish maturing until about age 25. One of the reasons why the teen age years are characterized by often exasperating behavior is due to changes in their brains, as well as changes in their hormones.

In centuries past, children were, in a way, viewed as miniature adults. Expectations of children were considerably more stringent than the expectations of children today. For instance, a 13 year old girl might be considered old enough -- and ready -- to marry and bear children; in many cases they were married off early. This was probably an all round bad experience for the young person, but that's the way life was, and one coped.

We know more about children today than we did in the past. Yes, children often learn given blocks of material earlier than they did in the past, but that is largely because expectations among parents and teachers are higher now than it was, say... 50 years ago. Children and adults still function about the same as always, but what is deemed suitable has changed.

As note by other posters, there is a lot of variance among people in how fast various skills develop, or when traits appear. This is true now, and it was true in the past. Some 15 year olds may be ready to engage in independent sexual relationships (not chaperoned) while some 24 year olds may not be ready yet.

But they don't hate multinationals like Facebook, Google, etc. These companies are full of leftists. — Agustino

On what basis do you make this improbable claim?

It's interesting to me that one finds no socially conservative, fiscal liberals (in the American sense of these terms). — Thorongil

Well, in a sense there are quite a few socially conservative, fiscally liberal people in national office. Someone said a presidentiad or two ago, "We're all Keynesians now." Social conservatives are as ready to vote for deficit spending as fiscal liberals. Christ, the Republican Party just passed a ruinous tax cut which resembles a Keynesian maneuver. The difference is in the plumbing: Classic Keynesianism injects water (money) mostly at the bottom and lets it work up the fiscal tree, where conservatives generally water the canopy and allow most of the water to stay at the top. There's an ocean up there, a desert down here. Money doesn't generally "trickle down". The most we get out of the canopy is higher humidity--nothing like a flow.

In order to get the good stuff that is locked up in the economic canopy of the jungle, you have to cut off the top of the "trees". Liquidate the plutocracy, in other words

You and Agustino are NEVER going to settle this business of transubstantiation.

For one thing, Agustino is calling it a "mystical" experience. It might be 1% - 3% clearer, maybe not, if he called it a "mystery" instead of a mystical event. People are thought to have "mystical experiences". Contemplatives work at achieving mystical experiences. A few people are struck by mystical experiences, usually to their dismay. Transubstantiation isn't something that one can achieve, work at, improve, or make happen. Through great effort, one can not improve one's understanding of a MYSTERY either. Mysteries are unfathomable and that's that.

The priest utters the incantation (the words of institution) and that's it from our end. HOW transubstantiation occurs is a mystery of the action of God [IF one believes that such a thing happens. Of course, if one doesn't believe that anything happens, then the whole thing is just so much hocus pocus].

No one has ever had a sensory experience that would tell them that the bread and wine had become, by a mysterious act of God, to be "the body and blood of Christ". I don't think there is any reason to think that the alleged author of the incantation, JC himself, was turning the bread and wine of the passover meal into his blood and flesh either.

If Jesus did say such a thing, my guess is that he was referencing a more ancient solemnity when the priest poured out the blood of an animal sacrifice before the people, to ritualistically 'seal' a covenant.

Jesus might not have spoken the incantation (Gasp! Heresy! Burn him slowly at the stake!) The incantation may have been devised by the early church, as might the last meal of Jesus with the disciples. I'll assume here that Jesus did say it, though. We'll never know for sure, either way.

There is nothing to argue for in a Mystery. It's there, we do not, can not, have not, and never will understand it.

Myself, I don't like the whole business of mysteries, incantations, mystical bodies, and so on and I don't believe in them. What one REALLY has to strive to believe in is that the Church DID NOT cook up theories which were, shall we say, implausible? and then called them a Mystery or a Mystic crystal revelation, or something, and then told the laity to just believe it or go to hell.

Yes, very true. The evangelical black churches rose to the occasion in the late 1950s and 1960s when the fight was for racial justice. They distinguished themselves with glory. However, outside of that fight, not so much.

For instance, gay black and bisexual black men are taking the brunt of the HIV epidemic, at this point. One of the barriers to doing education and intervention is the conservative black religious leadership/membership, which can't quite deal with queer black boys--or that some of their presumably straight men are also screwing each other.

There are a lot of conservative values in the poor black population -- just as there are a lot of conservative values among poor whites -- or the working class black/white population.

We say (i've said it many times) that working class people are shooting themselves in both feet by taking on conservative values--not like hard work and honesty, but the goodness of entrepreneurial prerogatives, the prerogatives of wealth, cannibalistic capitalism, et all. Well, they've been force-fed this crap from the get go in church, school, advertising, TV shows, movies, et al. They didn't just sort through the ideological options and decide to shoot themselves in the foot.

In the United States, European democratic socialism is viewed as one of the fire-breathing dragons of communism -- by the religious right and entrepreneurial types.
— Bitter Crank

O yeah, but I don't really understand why. — Agustino

It's not complicated: The United States has a long history of a very conservative politics based on protecting and promoting the prerogatives of private wealth, private enterprise, suppression of social dissent, anti-black, anti-poor, anti-labor (especially organized labor), anti-activist state power, and anti-intellectualism. It has run on separate tracks next to liberal politics, sometimes in power, sometimes not, but always there.

For instance, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the end of WWI, the US experienced a wave of right-wing terrorism directed at labor organizers and black activists. There were lynchings of a few white labor organizers, and black ones too. At the same time, the second version of the Ku Klux Klan arose, and waded into the mainstream of right-wing politics. White conservatives, especially from the south, vehemently opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs of social security, unemployment insurance, federal housing support, Works Progress Administration, and so on.

The right-wing of the Republican Party has kept on its agenda for 80 years getting rid of the New Deal programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obama Care. The penultimate major effort was a proposal under George Bush II to privatize Social Security, and the most recent one is gutting Obama Care.

So, Agustino, the Right Wing views with some horror the regulatory apparatus of the EU, the extensive social programs, the number of holidays and paid vacations, government funded universal health programs, and so on.

...and your emphasis on entrepreneurial effort as the way to better one's self (might be 100% true, but doesn't point leftward).
—
No one would take you for a hard line communist, or even a fuzzy, cushioned, soft-line communist.
— Bitter Crank

As I said, I'm definitely not a communist, nor approve of communism.

But is the left subsumed by communism? Why is communism the only "left" system? Dorothy Day was a distributist for example, an ideology that she found expressed most closely by communist organizations at that time. — Agustino

Socialists may embrace entrepreneurialism, communists traditionally are not so willing. Some of us socialists would happily take all your value producing property away from you. You can keep your apartment, pots and pans, and your car IF there is no public transit available.

The Left is a continuum just like all other politics. On the extreme left one has tight-grip communism, on the liberal left you have a somewhat loose-grip Laissez-faire liberal social democratic approach. "The Left" to the extent that it is a working, mutually understood term, subsumes communism, socialism, distributivism, and liberal-left politics, a la 1968.

We would need to flesh out what distributivism means. I don't think Day would have confused the CP-USA of the 1930s with Catholic distributivism. For one thing, after her brief involvement with the CP-USA, an abortion, a common-law relationship and her out-of-wedlock daughter, she reorganized her thinking. She became an ardent Roman Catholic, but one who liked social activist priests and liberal theologians, and an immersion in serving the very poor.

I enjoy watching people squabble as much as the next guy, but we should really try to keep a lid on it -- for the good of the forum. I would not make it one of the rules, the violation of which might get one banned, or even have the offending post deleted, but really in principle, I don't see why there should be accusations or insults here--unless you are capable of the truly artful insult.

The problem with accusations and insults is that the force the accuser or insulter intends to pack into an accusation or insult might feel much worse to the receiver. Or, as likely, it may be misinterpreted altogether, or may upset someone else who wasn't the intended target.

We really don't know much about each other, even those who open up about their personal lives, because we don't know how realistic or complete the disclosure is. Agustino says he leans very strongly left. That seems surprising to me, but I don't know what Agustino's life actually looks like. I only know what he writes here. What he writes doesn't feel like leftist thinking to me. But I don't have to make a federal case out of his self-description, because I won't have any evidence beyond what he has written. One can debate about what someone has written (it's there, in black and white) but one needn't accuse the author of anything worse than inconsistency, or maybe a lack of clarity.

A second principle would be that if you think somebody is accusing you of something (really, whether they are right or wrong) or is saying insulting things to you or about you, please remember that the real you is not under attack. Your representation here might be, but that's not where you live. For your own mental health, don't take things too seriously here. This is just a small forum; it's not the Federal Reserve, it's not the UN Security Council. There are no earth-shaking issues at stake here.

Why should anyone here care enough what anyone else's work ethic is here? Supposing someone's work ethic isn't up to high Protestant Work Ethic standards? Then what? What difference does it make HERE.

Work ethics in general are worth discussing, but not anyone's particular work ethic, unless they laid out their work ethic and their work experience and asked for comment. I gather Buxtebuddha didn't do that.

maybe this is what is happening here? Some people's minds are hungry, so they go prowling about the forum, like a hungry lion...

Here's a picture of Arthur Herman. He appears to be excessively happy. Call him up before the Senate Subcommittee on Suspicious Activities and find out what he's up to, or on.

Interesting post. There's a book I've been eyeing for some time called The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman, which treats of this general fixation of which you speak. You may find it relevant. — Thorongil

Haven't read it, sounds like a good book.

Civilizations rise and fall, for sure, but "Western Civilization" appears to be going strong, and many of its paradigms are dominant. Naturally there are people who wish western civilization would crumble, or think it has crumbled, or is on the verge of crumbling -- and those are mostly people who are born, suckled, and raised in Western Civ. Some of these people seem to be suffering from cultural self-loathing, or have concluded that Western Civ is all about the white man screwing over brown people, or white men screwing over women, or white people screwing over everything.

It's much easier to imagine Western Civ getting its comeuppance than it is to imagine African Civilization getting a comeuppance. After all, a Civ has to have accomplished a lot before it is really ripe for scathing criticism. Western Civ has accomplished a lot, whether some of its beneficiaries like it or not. Fuck'em, I say. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, building a great civilization is not a tea party. Had the Europeans immediately recognized the rights of Aboriginal people in the Western Hemisphere and had turned around and gone back to Spain, Portugal, and England, then the Indians would still be hunting buffalo, cutting hearts out of sacrificial victims in what isn't Mexico City, and Italy would not have developed pizza or the Marlboro Man have never galloped into the sunset. Tragic.

We aren't the only Civ, of course, and Eastern Civilization -- in one form or another -- appears to be doing well too. And no one should think that Eastern Civ was much much nicer than West Civ as it collected together the resources to build with. Civilizations on the make usually operate on the principle of "take it easy, but take it."

Achieving the pinnacle of power just isn't a nice process. One might wish that iron, coal, lumber, and amber waves of grain could be had by consensus building negotiation, but that isn't the way the world works.