OL, she was replying, largely, to this article (as I’m sure you know…):http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html
Luftmensch,
as probably with all countries and politics the problem largely in the US is money and how much politicians and the industry are interwoven. However it seems in the US to be really extrem.
If you watch TV coal is advertised as clean energy and fracking for natural gas is also advertised as clean and rigorous monitored.
I am curious about how the power of the private industry onto politics would be in case they would not depend so much on money donations from them when it comes to campaign.
The job of a lobby group of course is to present their facts and promote the interests of the group they represent - however with this financial dependency which is crucial also for campaigning in this country it is questionable how independent politics actually can be.
One has to consider how money they burn during those campaigns.
Maybe this would have presented a lot of gridlock and too industry friendly policies.
WallStreet can and should make money but a legal way.
The more I talk to people here the more I see all they want is things to work not being so pro business which afterwards has to only answer the stock holders and not unemployed Americans.
Obama pointed out that the problem with all these bank-behaviours was, that most of what they did wasn’t necessarily illegal. It merely was immoral.
So actually, WallStreet didn’t break any laws, which is part of why it’s difficult to find the guilty ones (from the law’s point of view)…
So you would have the spirit of the law eaten away and dissolved in order to preserve the letter of the law?
How about bribery of the police? Surely that’s a crime. At this point, there have been several instances of the banks paying the local city police forces to be their private security firms. That’s the reason for so much of the police brutality and misconduct we’ve seen on video while arresting, tazing, and pepper spraying the non-violent, non-resisting Occupy Wallstreet Protesters.
If the mega-wealthy have committed no crime in order to secure “their” trillions, what crime have the Occupy protesters committed?
However, I disagree with the assumption in the first place: I think that any number of major laws were violated by WallStreet, the bankers, their viceroys, and their agents in Congress. The problem is, in America, the rich are very often not prosecuted for their felonious corruption; whereas the common citizens are prosecuted to the very fullest extent of the law, regardless of whether they have committed any crime or not.
In America, neo-Darwinian notions of “competition” and “survival of the fittest” are given all sorts of leeway. And individuals, unless they happen to be mega-corporations, are often left to die by the wayside.
WallStreet can and should make money but a legal way.
No, they shouldn’t. Wall Street doesn’t do anything, they don’t make anything, they don’t create anything, they don’t grow anything, and they don’t extract anything, they don’t service anyone, It’s just hot air.
Right on. They are just money-changing gamblers. “Too big to fail” is the most idiotic and un-capitalist statement ever uttered. And it may yet be the death of the Republic of the United States.
I’d just like to point out that that’s perfectly legal. Anyone can hire a police officer to watch them for $37/hr in New York. I have personally paid a fire marshal to stand by for two hours for a fire dancing show. It’s not under-the-table bribery, it’s out-in-the-open paid services.
But yeah, I agree with the statement about the financial industry being worthless. The only thing that entire industry ever invented that’s worth anything to anyone is ATMs.
I didn’t say that. All I said is that by current law, a lot of it wasn’t actually a crime.
It should be forbidden but it isn’t.
@Kram: Alright, fair enough. However, until not that many years ago, there were plenty of laws and regulation to keep all of this from happening. However, those laws were dropped at the insistence of the agents of “the free market.”
Although the thread will soon be locked in order to make room for more important threads (like “Ask The Person Below You”) and I will probably be banned for not being a better robot, I’d like you all to watch this vid. THEN ask yourselves what the American Revolution and the last two hundred years of American (and world) History were all about…
And then think about the future.
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
(-from Thomas Jefferson, author of Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President)
(And if I do get banned, then Sanne, OL, Dan, Jay, 3Point, ZanQDo, Ceku, and everyone else, I love you guys and will miss you all. Thanks for all the great writing on the thread and the great input on all the others and the fun times. Catch me on my YouTube channel… Peace out.)
(And to those of you who have been being shy, our efforts to moderate ourselves have come to nothing anyway. So, speak up now or forever hold your peace. You have about five minutes to dream up a better world based on the Open Source Movement before the thread gets SQUEESHED like a Tiananmen Square student under a tank…
However, for all I know, they might just shut the entire site down anyway just to be certain that “the cancer of seditious dissent” doesn’t spread from here to the farthest reaches of the Internet. But, as Franklin once said, “We all hang together or we all hang separately.”)
This thread is becoming a political dumping ground. It’s been civil, but stay on topic.
We’ve been letting this topic stay open as a bit of a litmus test. Despite the good behavior, I do not want this thread to metastasize (and it has a bit). Topic derailment is an early indicator. There will not be another warning.
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1 !
Adam, why all the drama? Fweeb just pointed out that the thread was beginning to get a bit offtopic, which it was, and reminded us to not use it as a general political playground. Let’s just continue our discussion as before, keeping in mind that it is about the Occupy movement, and continue being civil and respectful towards each other regardless of viewpoint.
There’s a reason why usually politics and religion is discouraged here, because most times those threads will break out into flamewars and name calling which is ugly and helps noone. This one hasn’t so far, I’m still amazed by that, let’s just all try to keep it that way. The moderators are actually trying to help that it may be so.
Edit for addendum: I’m aware that it’s not easy to make a distinction between on- and offtopic for a topic like this. One could argue that in the light of what’s happening, everything politic is related. But let’s try our best.
Adam, Fweeb didn’t say, the thread is going to be closed right now (else it already would be) but rather said, this is the last warning to stay on topic (e.g. Occupy Wallstreet, rather than politics and philosophical ideas in general)
Also, it always was a thread that actually isn’t allowed by the rules, yet it is still open. Ask the person above/below you and similar, all conform to the rules, as far as I know, no matter how important or valueable they may or may not be.
And finally, I don’t think you did anything to get banned. After all, this thread flourished in a civil manner. Don’t paint the devil on the wall and simply stay on topic 
(Simply can be very difficult at times, though. I’m having a hard time to perfectly stay on topic with a topic as controversal and extendible as this one. I’ll try though)
That guy who said to hold on is ridiculous…
Edit: ah, Sanne beat me to it
Drama aside, I agree with Adam. It’s not nearly as important, but there’s a connection to be seen between peaceful protesters being beaten and dispersed, and very civil threads on BA being locked down and members being banned. The latter hasn’t happened yet, and in the grand scheme won’t hurt anyone all that much in itself, but it’s looming and the possibility is telling of a grim zeitgeist.
But yeah, I would suggest not using language intended to get people riled up. As much as I advocate against having moderators who do nothing but jump into threads and issue warnings and punishments, much as I advocate against cops doing the same, at the same time it’s best not to give them a reason to, most of the time.
Alright, alright. To be honest, I sort of bit my tongue and simmered for a couple of days after that warning.
Still, I agree with those of you who say that something like the Occupy Movement implies many inter-related things, and it’s very hard to draw a distinction between what is “allowable” discourse and what isn’t. I actually don’t mind moderation. I’m not a savage (usually) and I tend to have a visceral dislike of anarchists. However, I find vague moderation confusing. Even capricious.
Still, I think my point (if I had one at all) was that there was something meaningful and important in this thread. The bit that Sanne wrote on the Open Source Movement in response to the “Are Jobs Obsolete” article. I think there really was something important there, and I wanted to hear more. It seemed like a very big idea that was just on the verge of being born. And yet wasn’t quite.
It seems like every epoch in human civilization is punctuated at the beginning by a boiling soup, society trying to make do with the Old Ways of doing things that don’t really quite work anymore. And yet, from a few steps back, it can be seen later by historians that that was the moment when the world changed into a new era. And a completely new way of doing things. Although the people at the time seemed very confused about what was going on.
I think we’re in one of those times. And I think everyone knows it.
What isn’t clear, exactly, is a vision of the world to come.
And I think that’s what we’ve been grasping, however moderately and well-mannered, after.
I just think it would be a shame for the thread to die or be locked in mid-reach.
And that was, essentially, the reason for my little “drama.”
Apologies to anyone who was offended. And for anyone who suspected that I wasn’t being 100% serious or that there was a tongue-in-cheek element to it: +1. 
However, I actually think there’s a chance the thread might even just die off of lack of interest, boredom, or old age. Still, there was a giant intellectual-philosophical-sociological question at hand. The very dawn of a new age. My point with this thread in the first place was to fire the imagination of people who I consider to be very intelligent artists, scientists, and engineers (not to have a group temper-tantrum.) We’ve avoided the latter, but I’d like to go back to more of the former…
:eek: I hope it wasn’t this that prompted the warning. If it was, consider myself confused.
Obviously (:)) I also find those ideas very important and thought it very relevant and on-topic. I hope we can not only merely report on events and tell each other how bad things are, but also share our ideas on how to make things better.
Adam, I liked it how you extracted the heart of what I said and presented it in that form, thank you. That’s a big part of what I’m about. I also would like to talk about those ideas more, like the exchange with kram1032 about competition/cooperation, which was very stimulating and got me seeing things from a new perspective.
Just passing by… lol.
btw this forum has currently 6500+ online users :eek: :eek:
:eek: I hope it wasn’t this that prompted the warning. If it was, consider myself confused.
No, no, hun. Probably, more likely, it was my constant posting of videos that got the warning, coming as it did just after another one of my “news updates.” I posted all those not only to inform on current events of the movement, but also, hopefully, to inspire some thought and conversation on the larger issues of the world at work in creating the world of tomorrow.
However, since the warning was so general, we can’t exactly know what incurred the warning shots in our general direction…
Obviously (:)) I also find those ideas very important and thought it very relevant and on-topic. I hope we can not only merely report on events and tell each other how bad things are, but also share our ideas on how to make things better.
Yes, exactly. I thought it was funny that Goran posted that Star Trek passage (my fave episode), but oddly relevant to the discussion, and even more so to the world at large as we stand now. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere in another (now locked) thread, the utopian ideals of Star Trek ARE incredibly admirable, even if idealistic (and I think ideals are the most admirable thing about humanity, short of good actions…)
However, as is pointed out in Star Trek many times, the utopia of the Federation where there is no material want, no hunger, no poverty, no lack of education, no lack of opportunity, no striving for war, no casting out of anyone because their differences…
all of these were only made possible by WWIII, and millions upon millions of people vaporized by nuclear weapons and suffocated by chemical attack.
There were not many survivors after that horror.
But the people who did survive were so appalled, and so filled with shame and repentance, that they vowed mankind would never again inflict such evil upon itself. Not for any reason.
It bothers me that such tragedies sometimes seem the only wake-up call mankind has a habit of answering. How is it that men are so dense that they can ignore the want, suffering, and loss of so many of their fellows until it boils over into general conflagration?
As I’ve implied before, man being a social animal who relies on communication and the spreading of ideas to do his evolving for him, it seems to me that we’ve hit a new paradigm with the internet. Instant communication would seem to carry with it the instant change of minds. If only that were so! But still, as far as the capacity of the human brain and perception makes possible, it would seem that global attitudes change much more swiftly now than at any time in man’s history. We have, in fact, become a single global organism.
However, much of our philosophy is little more advanced than the thinking of the Age Of Enlightenment. Back then, steam power was science fiction. Horse-speed on land and sailing speed on the oceans were the speed-limits of human communication.
The market economics of Adam Smith, with it’s dense “checks and balances,” were the closest thing to a self-aware system they could devise. And we are still paying, now more than ever, for Alexander Hamilton’s skullduggery (at the risk of being “political”…)
The Electoral College (those of you in other countries who don’t have such a thing and don’t understand what I mean by the term, sorry, but I’m not allowed by moderation to go into it, suffice to say it’s boring, corrupt beyond imagining, and completely obsolete) may have been a great idea in an agrarian America populated mostly by unread farmers, and the closest those people could come to to something resembling a simple computer program played out on the macro level by humans…
But it seems to me that we are so far beyond any of that now.
If anything, Jefferson’s old notion of educated, intelligent, gentleman sovereigns may be upon us.
We don’t have to leave the house to vote now. We don’t have to leave the house to do anything anymore. Even groceries can be ordered online and brought to our door.
If you’ve read Asimov’s “The Naked Sun” and other books, you’ve read about a world of plenty on which the people each have an estate which can provide for all the needs of it’s inhabitant. The people of that world never see each other face to face. They want for nothing. And each has all the rights of an emperor. (I guess I should point out that Asimov, as usual, was being slightly extreme, as the people have all become hermaphrodites and are so terrified of coming into contact with another human that they would go into a paroxysm were it to happen, but it’s a digression on sci-fi…)
Anyway, I just finished watching the “John Adams” miniseries, and my head is spinning about how little we’ve progressed from the same issues of the time. So I think it would be better if I left off here and let you others jump in, before I write a book…
Adam, I liked it how you extracted the heart of what I said and presented it in that form, thank you. That’s a big part of what I’m about. I also would like to talk about those ideas more, like the exchange with kram1032 about competition/cooperation, which was very stimulating and got me seeing things from a new perspective.
Well, I liked what you said, as always. You seem a veritable fountain of good ideas. I wish they made more of you. I’d go down to the local SanneMart and buy a dozen, and then my lonely ill-advised ill-considered ill-spoken illogical days would be through. 
But yes, I definitely would like to hash all this out in a way that made sense. Basically, not only was I simply interested in the Movement, but I’m working (I mean, PROCRASTINATING!!!) on a sci-fi script for an animated story that takes place a few hundred years in the future. To tell that story, I have to understand what happened, even if only in a hazy way (although I already plan for there to be flashbacks to “present day”), during this weird sociological bottleneck period we find ourselves in on Earth here. So I had ulterior motives for starting the thread, you see… 
SanneMart
I’ve been wondering, how do you pronounce your name, Sanne? Is it “sane”, “sannie”, “san”, “sanay”, “sannay”, “sanee”?
OL77, thank you for asking!
A bit OT, I hope nobody minds:
Sanne has two syllables, emphasis is on the first. Pronounce the first syllablelike “sun”, but with a soft s sound, more like a z, so we get “zun”. Last syllable “ne”: this sound isn’t often found in English. The “e” in “the” comes closest. It is no “ay” or “ei” sound, it is very flat and short, but it’s no short “i” either. Try putting the “e” from “the” after “zun”, so we get zun-ne or zun-neh, but short neh. Not easy to describe.
Freaking MINDREADER!!!
Oh my god! So great. You know, I’ve been wanting to write EXACTLY THE SAME POST FOR A MONTH NOW, WORD FOR WORD!!! I even made a list of all the possible phonetic pronunciations of Sanne.
You’re a classic, OL.
(I think Sanne and ZanQDo had a little girls meeting in the little girl’s room one day while smoking a little girl’s “cigarette” and said: “Okay, what are the CRAZIEST names we could come up with that would TOTALLY mess with that typical male ego and composure? Has to be some phonetic craziness. Men always assume so much from a name… especially when they don’t realize it’s just a joke… hardy har har!”)
So; like Xanadu. Except without the du…
He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes the shirt he’s got
But he don’t know what it means
Don’t know what it means
And I say: “Yeeeehhhh:P”
OKAY!: BACK to the REVOLUTION!!!