h a l f b a k e r yWhy on earth would you want that many gazelles anyway?
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Human Area
Take the regions of international conflict, and declare them human areas belonging to no country. | |
The idea is — declaring areas of conflict — "Human Areas" — as free and owned by no country, and
protected by international special forces, obliged to preserve freedoms to internationally transparent,
constructive and friendly activities.
This way, "Humanity" as entity could take away areas from
countries, if they are conflicting, and at the
locations of conflict, turning conflicts into opportunities, creating an incentive for countries to avoid
conflict.
Then, all places owned by "Humanity" would have a special visa-free regulation, so anyone could go
to live, work and have fun, without limitations of stay or requirement to leave.
To start off, some of the developed countries could donate some of their land areas at the borders (imagine, Finland
and Sweden to open a "Human Area 1" fattening their border at some limited span) to help create exemplary "Human Areas"
(prosperous economic zones). Then, motivation to serve the improvement
livelihoods of people of the world in general, could be a cause noble enough to have the forces originally loyal to the
particular countries to start working for creation of the new "Human Areas" as
prosperous economic zones much desired. Given the security created in such zones, factories and service
providers eventually may want to relocate, and the lands of "Humania" could become
synonymous with prosperity :)
NOTE: I'm writing this, since cannot find the idea I've written before. In the previous description of the
idea, that I can't find, there was numbering suggested, like: "Human Area 1", "Human Area 2", ...,
"Human Area 51", and someone suggested that European Union works like that, though it doesn't,
and someone suggested that an idea of "Refugeea" had been existing somewhere, except that
refugees are usually powerless to claim land in ways that strong international communities believing
in ensuring human (rather than nation) rights could.
Tragedy of the commons
https://en.wikipedi...gedy_of_the_commons
" ... originated in an essay written in 1833 ..." [8th of 7, Oct 30 2020]
(?) Adam Kokesh behaving like a politician
https://duckduckgo....h%3Fv%3Dop0kcVQpwT8
[spidermother, Nov 06 2020]
[link]
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Fascinating idea. Of course, it totally disregards the darker sides of human nature, but give it a go ... why not ? What could possibly go wrong ? |
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The best thing is to start small; somewhere like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. That's not very big at all. |
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Let us know how that works out, won't you ? Don't forget to budget for plenty of mops and buckets for cleaning up all the blood. There will be a lot of blood. |
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// Let us know how that works out, won't you ? |
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I most definitely will let you know how it goes, [8th of 7]. This could get
pretty involved, and differ wildly from place to place, but the general
perimeter protection and defense technologies may be quite similar. |
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// Don't forget to budget for plenty of mops and buckets for cleaning up
all the blood. There will be a lot of blood. |
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Perhaps, they would fall for economic benefits. If the factories to be built
would make what both countries need at a good price... Every specific
area may be different, especially mountains with temples. |
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//international special forces// |
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Constantinople experienced the rule of international special
forces in the Catalan Grand Company and, separately, the Fourth
Crusade. Central Europe had Wallenstein's international special
forces during the long nightmare of the Thirty Years' War.
Compare also the Foreign Legion in Algeria, and the (very
international) Waffen SS. More recently, consider some of the
behaviour of UN peace-keepers in certain parts of the world. |
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Can you explain why it would be different next time? |
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Also, // "Humanity" as entity // is problematic. To see why,
please consider H G Wells' "Open Conspiracy", with particular
attention to the beginning of Chapter XIII. |
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[8th], do you favour the traditional mop-and-bucket, where the
bucket has some built-in mechanism for wringing out the mop?
Or would you consider the Enjo system, which uses less water
but probably takes longer at scale? |
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For this specific application, the traditional mop is superior. The issue is not so much one of water efficiency, but economics. It's undesirable to retain a mop that's been heavily contaminated with blood and other bodily fluids, and while chlorine bleaches will effectively sterilize the bucket, the soft, absorbent material of the mop head is more difficult. |
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Rather than autoclaving, it's more cost-effective to dry the head and then incinerate it; the handle can be re-used. |
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I'm thinking more water cannon and heavy earthmoving
equipment, if history is any indicator of likely outcome/s. |
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//areas of conflict// So basically all nation states are instantly declared obsolete and the entire territory of Earth and Outer Space is annexed by the Benificent Republic of Humania under its Glorious Leader [Mindey]. Everyone will be nice to each other and everything will be really quite nice. |
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//It's undesirable to retain a mop that's been heavily contaminated with blood and other bodily fluids, and while chlorine bleaches will effectively sterilize the bucket, the soft, absorbent material of the mop head is more difficult. // |
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Supercritical CO2 ? ie: dry clean. |
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Yes, but you'd have to look closely at the cost/benefit of cleaning vs. disposal. |
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It'll be interesting when someone discovers oil or a
valuable mineral resource in one of these
'owned-by-everyone' places |
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You've got a good idea there, [kdf]. How about writing a project proposal to the Soylent Corporation ? |
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Don't feel bad about that, keep doing it ...it'll become more easy and natural, you'll find yourself liking it ... join us, don't be afraid ... you'll wonder why you ever hesitated ... |
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// interesting when someone discovers oil or a valuable mineral resource in one of these 'owned-by-everyone' places // |
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A well-known phenomenon <link> |
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Do all new joiners get a deponent participle, or was "Locutus"
some sort of special deal? |
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He was the result of a technology-demonstrator project put forward by Marketing - "Oppression with a human face". |
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As predicted by Engineering, didn't end well ... |
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"We'd have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those pesky kids ... " |
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So when China wants to offload some of their
people westward, they simply fight for an area of
Mongolia, send a bunch of refugees and its
automatically no longer Mongolia? |
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Mindey, I recommend you read "Distress" by Greg Egan, and "The Ungoverned" by Vernor Vinge. |
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I don't see that //... international forces, obliged to preserve freedoms ...// is a real thing. Once you set up something called "forces", it is instantly a contradiction in terms to expect them to be "obliged" to do or not do anything. It's like a woman wishing for a violent and domineering husband who only violently dominates her in such a way as to prevent her from being violently dominated. |
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As long as the irrational belief persists that controlling people - or allowing oneself to be controlled - is compatible with freedom, any attempt to fix anything will only make things worse. People mistakenly see the state as a social organisation, whereas it is an antisocial one. |
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I don't want to discourage your good intentions; prosperity and freedom are worthy goals. They are topics that I have taken very seriously for about six years now. The concept I've landed on is something like "freedom without asking permission" - which is the only kind if freedom that makes any sense. If you're waiting for someone - or something - to give you some measure of freedom (which phrases like //special visa-free regulation// suggest to me) then you have already settled for precisely the freedom that a slave has - i.e., as much freedom as his master chooses to allow him, i.e. none at all. |
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// I don't want to discourage your good intentions; // |
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That's fine, we're willing to do it on your behalf. |
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Perhaps I should clarify. It appears to me that genuine good intentions do exist, but are much rarer than most people are willing to admit. Neil Stevenson makes the point very nicely in Cryptonomicon, where he introduces the character of the priest by telling the story of billions of years of the more badass clusters of molecules eating the less badass clusters of molecules, but somehow giving rise to cluster of molecules that turns out to be a halfway decent bloke. |
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Most of what is portrayed as good intentions turns out on closer examination to be malevolence wrapped up in layers of virtue signalling bullshit. As the saying goes, there are some people who, no matter how bad things get, always find a way to make them even worse. |
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In that mix there is the avoidable tragedy of people who genuinely want things to be less hellish, but have been misled - in fact, indoctrinated - into advocating things that can only cause unnecessary pain and suffering. This includes _all_ attempts at "political solutions" - a blatant contradiction in terms that always comes down to "just add violence". |
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So I definitely want to discourage people from advocating such appallingly nightmarish scenarios as that described in this idea, but I'm willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt by assuming, until they prove otherwise, that they just haven't thought things through yet. |
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[spidermother], what, in your view, defines whether something is
political or not? |
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This is not a trick question, but a genuine attempt to avoid
misunderstanding. |
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That is a good question. By 'political' I mean anything involving power relationships, or percieved power relationships, between or among humans as individuals or groups. |
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Mutually voluntary interactions are non-political (as I'm using the term here). Authority in the sense of expertise (e.g. Steven Hawking is an authority on black holes) is non-political; authority as applied to those who are percieved (mistakenly, in my view) to have a special right to use or dictate the use of force _merely by virtue of their label_ (such as "police", "judge", "premier", "mayor") is political. |
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In my mind, "social" and "political" are quite distinct concepts with no overlap. |
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A stark way of putting it is that politics is one group of people violently dominating another. It's not a comforting view, but it was only when I started looking at things that way that EVERYTHING started to make sense. |
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// politics is one group of people violently dominating another. // |
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Actually, "All animal life is one group of creatures violently dominating another." |
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Where there is prey, predators will evolve. Hint: Don't taste good to eat. |
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I think politics is wider than this. I think that voluntary affilliation can be political - I don't want to sit beside you, I want to sit beside -her- today. Maybe you can construe this as me violently dominating you by removing my sitting-beside favours, but I think that would be pushing it. |
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I think doing nothing can be an intensely political choice. |
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Like I said before if everyone was nice all the time then everything would be OK. Its very simple. |
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I think that this is a hair worth splitting. Voluntary association may be social; wanting to sit with her rather than him may be personal; but neither is necessarily political. |
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(I left out "affiliation" because it DOES have political overtones. I'm also not sure about //voluntary affiliation//, because it implies that there could be involuntary affiliation, which is a whole can of worms). |
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I am involuntarily associated with every other being on this planet, like it or lump it. |
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I also wonder if it is a classic 3-body problem. I wonder how much of economic theory is based on the assumption that there are only 2 agents. |
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That's an interesting term to introduce here. |
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Marriage, for example, is often treated as if it were a three body problem. The third body was once an abstract entity called "the church", and is now an abstract entity called "the state". Even the language shows the schizophrenic nature of this. When each of two bodies has said "I thee wed", isn't the job done? Why does a third body need to step in and say "I declare you man and wife?" |
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// I am involuntarily associated with every other being on this planet, like it or lump it. // |
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Very John Donne. "The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling ..." |
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That last question, as I said, was not a trick question. |
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Now, [spidermother], here comes the trick question. |
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When I was an undergraduate, I once went along to a meeting of
anarchists. I wore a navy surplus greatcoat and a lopsided
beard. I didn't look like Bakunin, I looked like Cap'n Birdseye's
smack-head nephew, but the anarchists were very accepting. |
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Here's what I witnessed. Most people in the room were
aimiable, and displayed no fault beyond a slightly tenuous grip
on reality. Except there were two individuals who seemed
decidedly less aimiable than the others. These two stood up
and announced what the group was going to do, and the group
then did it. |
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Of course, being anarchists, these two had no formal authority.
So does that mean that what passed there was strictly social,
and not at all political? |
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I once went to a meeting of apathists. Actually, thinking back, I think I meant to go but for some reason didn't actually manage to. |
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We tried to organise a self-help group for amnesiacs, but no-one remembered to turn up .... |
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[pertinax] As it is a trick question, the answer, of course, is Mu. |
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To the extent that the behaviour was political, the participants were not behaving as anarchists, and without knowing the motivation for going along I can't say whether it was political or not. People do not always live up to their stated ideologies. |
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Anarchism does not exclude going along with what someone says to do; it does exclude the belief that someone has a special right to command and that others have a special duty to obey. It literally means "no rulers", not "no organisers". |
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(I do appreciate the irony of someone trying to be in charge of anarchy; but the same contradiction is present in the idea that people can control other people in a way that benefits them or makes them free, simply because the ones doing the controlling call themselves government. It's not slavery and extortion when you call it a tax (not).) |
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But who pays the people who build the roads? |
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But who will pick the cotton? |
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Consumers who prefer natural fibres to synthetic ones ? |
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When EVERYTHING starts to make sense, it's
probably time to change meds. |
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//without knowing the motivation for going along I can't
say whether it was political// |
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OK [spidermother], thank you for that answer. Next
question: |
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If I understand you correctly, all formal relationships are
politics. Furthermore, *informal* relationships may or
may not also be politics, depending on people's
motivations. So, the next question is, what is the
difference between a bad "political" motivation and a
good "social" motivation? |
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//When EVERYTHING starts to make sense, it's probably time to change meds.// |
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Good point. I meant everything within the domain called "politics" started to make sense. It's much like someone saying that EVERYTHING makes sense once he notices that his "girlfriend" is fundamentally abusive - all he means is that everything about "the relationship" make sense, because there was no relationship; just the pretense of one. The behaviours that didn't make sense at the time suddenly make sense when he tweaks his language from "my girlfriend" to "that lying skank". (Yes, I speak from experience.) |
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I think that I was suffering from a psychological double bind, which I call Schapelle Corby syndrome. She was locked up in a cage for years and lied about, which is bad enough; but wrongly imagining that something called "the government" gives a shit about anyone - or even exists - only adds unnecessary suffering. Thinking "If I can only convince them that I am innocent then they will stop hurting me" is delusional. Michael Jackson summed it up: |
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"All I want to say is that they don't really care about us." |
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//If I understand you correctly// You don't. I don't mind being questioned, but now you're putting words in my mouth. |
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Sorry, my bad. Suppose, then, that I retract my last
paragraph and go back the words of yours that I quoted,
viz., |
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//without knowing the motivation for going along I can't say
whether it was political// |
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If you *could* somehow know the motivation, what
feature(s) of that motivation would tell you whether it was
political? |
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//what features// The political ones. //By 'political' I mean anything involving power relationships, or percieved power relationships, between or among humans as individuals or groups.// [spidermother] |
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For a real-life example, see Adam Kokesh; it seems clear to me that his motives are political, even though he claims to be non-political (Link). |
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// (Yes, I speak from experience.)// |
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That sucks dude.
Just know that you will now be able to see that look in another person's eyes from this point forward... |
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But there are *always* power relationships. Where there is love,
they become less important, but they don't stop existing. Only
the hermit is free from power relationships, and even that
changes quickly when someone finds oil (or sweet water, or
arable land) under his hermitage. |
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When my children were young, I had some power over them.
When, in due course, I lose the last of my marbles and they
choose my nursing home, they will have some power over me.
With love, we try not to abuse these powers, but they still exist. |
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You may say you're only talking about competent adults, but
there's no sharp line between the competent and the
incompetent, nor between the confident and the diffident; there
are only differences of degree, which generate power
relationships whether you want them to or not. |
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Your move (if you still want to play this game). |
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I think I can respond to both comments at once. |
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For me it comes down to reality and ethics. |
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I like Spooners condensing of all principles of law to two words: live honestly. |
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I'm not certain that there are *always* power relationships, but they are very common, and often disguised as something else. |
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I don't have a problem with the fact that parents have power over their children. I don't think it helps to consider that to be either political or bad; it's just a fact of life. |
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Likewise, anywhere there is love there is always power, or at least the potential for power. If someone loves me, or depends on me, then I can use that to wield power to my own ends - but it would be unethical, if not monstrous to do so. |
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I'm not trying to describe anything terribly complicated here; and I think that we probably have a lot of common ground. I've sometimes thought "Even my cat gets this!", and later, sure enough, I read "The most important fact is that there seems to be a mutual liking between certain domestic cats and domestic cat owners, a rewarding and fulfilling dialogue based upon the fact that both parties are content that neither will take advantage of the other" (Bruce Fogel, The Cat's Mind). |
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There are individual human beings who are only interested in taking advantage of others, and there are institutions that produce the same outcome. The power relationships that I would call bad are those that are cultivated or used to take advantage of someone else; to damage someone else for personal gain. |
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What I am saying is that all aspects of politics in the common usage - "government", "courts", "police", "schools", "taxes", "councils" - are based on lies, and are all fundamentally about taking advantage of people. There's a thought that in attempting to understand anything about human interactions, one clue that you might be onto something is that you really don't like what you are seeing. I didn't want to see the world of politics that way; for a start, it meant I couldn't, with a clear conscience, have any kind of "government" job. |
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The state has been modelled as a parent (parens patriae). Sadly, it's always an abusive one. We need to grow up. |
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And [2 fries], you're right about being able to spot them easier. The nagging question is "Why did I get sucked in in the first place?" The best answer I've heard is "Your genes don't care about whether you're happy." |
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My toolkit for not being abused is now: |
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//we probably have a lot of common ground// |
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Yes, but if we don't get organised someone will come and
enclose it. ;-) |
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Taking pain gets passed biases.Is the the goal to grow to best you can be or beyond limits not fathomed yet? |
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