Why Today's World Sucks.

[XUioX]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Bush is our almighty Deciderer.

I've always heard negative things about Bush, never positive things. Would anyone enlighten me?

I have a feeling he might be remembered only for the War in Iraq rather than the "good things" he has done for our country.

Well everyone by now knows that Bush was a horrible president. He made alot of wrong and stupid choices that caused our country to get hurt, like the wars.
Also he uses our tax money to make bombs and weapons for war.

Yes because work ethic is all it takes.

Of course!

I mean, Americans came up with inventions and better knowledge/understanding which led us into better lifestyle. You look anywhere else, its just a poor place with people on the streets, all led by a leader that won't do anything to help.

[foilman8805]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Well everyone by now knows that Bush was a horrible president. He made alot of wrong and stupid choices that caused our country to get hurt, like the wars.
Also he uses our tax money to make bombs and weapons for war.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but either way I just had a really good laugh at your expense.

[XUioX]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but either way I just had a really good laugh at your expense.

Well when i hear "Bush makes war" and "Bush takes all our tax money for useless ****" countless times, it might mean something.

[bluguerrilla]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

It's called the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

Go read a book about it and figure out why other nations aren't as developed as ours.

[foilman8805]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Well when i hear "Bush makes war" and "Bush takes all our tax money for useless ****" countless times, it might mean something.

Ah, so you drink from the poisoned chalice that the media offers you.

[immawhiteguy]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Free Will is why the world sucks.

If there wasn't free will, we'd all be the same and do the same. No need to complain and everything if it's identical. And you couldn't about the lack of individualism since it's all you've known and ever will know.

e: Free will's the cause of conceit, anger, opinions, and all of the other negative things we have in the world.

[xXDominationxLyfexX]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

I agree with you 98%

[Nyokou]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Free will does not exist in communist/dictatorial countries and they are the most messed up countries in my opinion.

[immawhiteguy]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Free will does not exist in communist/dictatorial countries and they are the most messed up countries in my opinion.

Because it's led by a human, who expresses free will in their ways of controlling the country they lead, making them flawed. Since they're flawed, their views and actions in leading said country are flawed.

There wouldn't be leadership in a world of no free will since no one has the ability to do any different than everyone else.

No free will would suggest the lack of good or evil, since it is all the same at a neutral point. Meaning lack of alternative views, ideas, or expressions, meaning there's only agreement and no negative responses.

[Nyokou]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

You don't get it at all.

If those people had free will, they would be able to choose their leaders - choose leaders that are responsible and answer to their needs.

What you're basically asking for is a world with a leader that has NO free will and people with NO free will either? What the hell. You might as well lock up everyone in cages.

[devonin]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Man, it's a good thing nobody moved this to CT. At least here the thread can stay open.

[Tokzic]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Or, you know, it's could just be the general instincts that are in all living creatures around?

You know, the one that drives you to survive because it's encoded in us from birth?

Yeah, all byproducts of that.

This is exactly it.

Everything that's wrong with the world isn't a product of conceit - that's too vague and doesn't cover a lot.

What does cover everything is when people let defunct evolutionary instincts that can't develop fast enough to keep up with our world get in the way of logical thought.

[devonin]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

Everyone in this thread who is taking something even resembling the side of the OP needs to go read the book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn.

I'm a philosopher by training, and specifically an ethicist, so this is at least a little bit my area of expertise. You want to be crediting the ills of the world on the fact that we've developed a hieracrhical society, where some people are placed above others, and decrying this as having led to slavery, genocide, war, poverty etc etc, does that about cover it?

It never ceases to amaze me the degree to which even having the discussion is so inherantly arrogant and superior and nobody seems to notice. We toss around lofty ideals of total equality, perfectly equal rights for everyone, and don't realise how completely full of ourselves we are to talk like that.

You know what we are? Animals. Sure, we use tools, we have a seemingly more developed form of communication, we create more forms of art than it seems like most animals do, and most importantly, we're the only animals who've decided that we're -above- the laws of nature. In fact, elephants paint, dolphins communicate, orangutans use tools, really the only thing we do that other species don't do, is feel we're objectively superior to all other species.

Go out onto the African Savannah some time, and tell me whether there is equality. Every herd, every flock, every pride has an -incredibly- rigid hierarchy. The leader is the leader, undisputably, and anyone who tries to dispute it either kills the leader or is killed by them. Animals that lose out in such contests are even stopped from mating, thus functionally saying "you lose, your entire genetic line loses."

If you get too old, or sick, or injured, you are either killed, or left for dead. There is no poverty among the animals, because the only thing you can lack is food and shelter, and without those you just die. We've made it VERY easy for our sick and elderly and homeless to continue living for -years- draining the economy without putting anything back into it, when any other animal species would have left them for dead right at the get-go.

The mere fact that a sick or homeless person can live in our society puts us WAY WAY ahead of every other species on the planet in terms of being generous and equal and caring for everybody.

Slavery is nothing more than a more systemic version of the hierarchy that already exists in nature. In nature, the alphas in a social group can functionally demand anything they want from the omegas who will comply or be killed. This is basically slavery. In fact, what humans do is just doing slavery wrong. We got it in our heads that a certain type of person ought to be slaves regardless of their actual capabilities. The sheer volume of completely ignorant, uneducated, non-contributory racists and proponants of slavery we've had over the generations is actually a little staggering. We just historically applied inferior status onto races/social groups instead of onto the weak and ineffectual. Slavery is nothing new to the natural world, we've just screwed it up.

Genocide at least is a uniquely human idiocy. In nature, the animals (Oh those ignorant animals that we're so much better than) have a much keener sense of the balance of an ecosystem than humans do. It would never occur to animals to try to exterminate anything completely because they seem to grasp how the system works and how important these cycles and webs are to their survival.

But again, even genocide is simply an existing natural practice writ large and stupid. To do genocide properly, your ultimatum should be "submit or die" not just "die or die" because engaging in any kind of conflict with anybody is inherantly about power.

In any power relationship, the "right" way to assert your power is to give the target of your aggression the option to submit to you (Hey look, becoming slaves) because frankly, simply setting out to exterminate people you could be enslaving or at least making do some things that you want (leave and never return, or, build me this pyramid) is actually an inherant sign of weakness. You don't feel you could actually control them so you just kill them all.

What it all comes down to is actually, you're right, conciet. But not in the direction you seem to want to apply it.

You see the arrogance as some people deciding they are better than other people. But that's crap. Be honest here, some people -are- better than other people. Maybe not universally better, but in any given area of knowledge, set of skills, or inherant ability, you can easily rank people in order of their facility with that thing. Tasselfoot is better than me at FFR, MrRubix is better than me at mathematics, Tiger Woods is better than me at golf. Why does acknowledging that people are different, and that for a given thing these differences could be ranked somehow imply an invalid assertion of superiority?

You run into problems when someone says "I am a better person than you, universally, objectively, in all respects" because in most cases the person making this assertion is likely just -wrong- and arguing from ignorance, but frankly, if I could find -no- arena in which I was your superior, I don't actually have a fundamental problem with admitting that you are superior. Arrogance is only arrogance when it isn't justified. Otherwise it is a statement of fact.

We like to think that we're "Better than animals" because of all of our advances in ways to oppress and kill each other, or let people sit around and sponge off our economy, but as Douglas Adams put it so perfectly:

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

[moches]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

A greater irony comes from your avatar, which represents the idea that a single person can be the best ever at something - your very avatar represents what you abhor the most. Really, Pokemon is a wonderful example of everyone in existence being concieted, because that is all that show and game are about. Being the very best. So I kind of think you're a tiny bit of a hypocrite at the moment.

rofl, just noticed.

It's nothing too be taken too seriously, since it's just an avatar. But you're right, I see 4-year olds in the backyard beating each other up over a playing card game. I can't say Pokemon is completely to blame, but the companies marketing the idea of being the very best are just appealing to our vain nature. But then again, marketing the idea of equality doesn't exactly trigger a craze, does it?

I talked to a friend of mine on this issue, and he made a point I remember very well. He said that as humans we feel a right to be proud of our race, gender, and characteristics, and to vigilantly defend them. This pretty much defuncts the idea of just conceit contributing to the world's deterioration, but when someone gets proud enough to persecute anyone else who isn't like him, that's when society falls. e.g. Hitler, the Crusaders, Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.

post

Arrogance is arrogance when you start thinking that being better than someone in some aspect entitles you to disrespect that person. How many chick flicks have you seen with the bitchy bitch who thinks she's better than everyone else because she's hot? A prime example of what a lot of people are like today.

When you say that we are bigheads for presenting equality, I'm not saying treat everyone else the same. I'm saying respect everyone for who they are, what their skills are, and how marvelously flawed they are. And that includes dolphins.



edit: i'm changing my avatar today. i've outgrown what the message means. thanks for clarifying that, Mal.

[foilman8805]

Re: Why Today's World Sucks.

A greater irony comes from your avatar, which represents the idea that a single person can be the best ever at something - your very avatar represents what you abhor the most. Really, Pokemon is a wonderful example of everyone in existence being concieted, because that is all that show and game are about. Being the very best. So I kind of think you're a tiny bit of a hypocrite at the moment.

Was this directed at moches or me?

Probably both now that I think about it, because my avatar depicts Mantine being the best.