Karl

Because I preferred not to. I wanted to see what might develop if I stopped doing something that wasnt making me happy. Luckily I'm in a position that I can do that with some cutting back on lifestyle.

It doesn't really matter as long as you are asking questions and allowing the other person to tell you about themselves. I don't work and I still ask people what they do for a living.

AP has nailed pragmatism with both those quotes. Indeed, your current view is pragmatic, because it does not aim for the truth, it says that all views should be challenged. This is the maxim "question everything" which is entirely open ended and thus entirely pragmatic. That's not to say that question ones views and those of others is incorrect-quite the opposite-but the objective point of view is that truth can be known directly by the application of reason and logic. It's important to differentiate here because that statement can lead into logical positivism/empiricism in the sense that everything is logic. That's the belief of the Mystics of muscle who are empiric pragmatists, unlike Buddhists who are spiritual pragmatists (and I have discovered to be far easier to discuss things with than muscle Mystics who are close to impossible ). Objectivist philosophy doesn't say that everything can be known, it says some things can be known, others are axiomatic and others will/might/can be discovered through scientific empiric study based on philosophic principle and inductive conceptual leaps. We can rely on what our senses tell us through our conscious perceptions, but we must apply reason to understand the precepts we are sensing and conceptualise them, test and integrate against other concepts by deduction and induction, then apply the scientific method for a more refined analysis/definition. So, it's good to challenge ones point of view, but that does not imply ones point of view is wrong and should therefore remain flexible. To take this back on topic-if every view is flexible, then the question for the pragmatist' is why not TRY Wilber's spiral dynamics as its just as likely to work as anything elseThat's pragmatism. Try it because the truth isn't knowable, the only truth is the continuation of a never ending quest to discover the truth.

Great piece by Peter Hitchins on government and democracy. It's UK centric of course, but it dovetails nicely into the US election discussions. Why the whole thing is a farce in which vested interests attempt to strip the population of ever more law, liberty and justice until they are little more than serfs. Sound isn't great but listenable.

Finally. Everyone has to have creative thought, but each obviously has a certain capacity and ability. At present there is a policy which is suppressing innovative thinking. It's not necessary for everyone to develop nuclear energy, some are happy to wash cars, but whatever they do they must provide something others value or their productivity will be useless and they will be thrown on the mercy of the charitable until they find their feet again. It's the laziness that provides motivation to produce in the present in order to enjoy the fruits of the labour in the future. Even the bible tells of resting on the 7th day :-) who doesn't dig the garden, wash the car, paint the Windows then sit back and take in a good job done ?

Well, agreed it is a piece of circular logic. :-) so, edited for posterity.

So, to your second point. With no state schools then parents are free to send their children for education to whom ever they wish. Even if this is religious. Remembering that there is no social safety net except charitable institutions and the parents will need to pay. Any religious, or otherwise ideologically dangerous institution would find themselves without being able to grab levers. There is no Government they can take over, no mechanism for furthering their aims other than directviolence. That would be immediately cracked down upon and wouldn't be tolerated within the community. There woukd be no need for customs officers as nothing would be illegal as such, although there would be restrictions on the owning of weapons and a need to register them. To your third: Even if what you said was true, the community would be entirely different when it no longer had a state to intervene everywhere, a welfare system or central planning. This would be a laissez faire capitalist community in which people could form any kind of organisation they wished as long as it was lawful. Investors would not have government decreed financialisation from monopolistic banks. They would have to invest in much riskier ventures which woukd mean a push towards very sound investment. Schools woukd no longer be teaching just skills, but real education for students that had that capacity.

Nice reply. Let me take that first part then I will make another post. I see the first part as the most critical. Firstly it isn't inherent that we are all violent, or selfish in the modern sense you mean. However, we have to accept that there will be bad and irrational actors. To understand the role of a Government we must first see that the protection of Liberty is paramount. This is not the protection of people themselves but of the principle of freedom from the state except where it breaks the rule of the initiation of force. It's here that the state will intervene. There doesn't need to be many laws at all, only those pertaining to property rights and defence. No laws can be made that break the law of protecting Liberty and it's concrete the law of property rights. The laws apply equally to the law makers, they are not above, or beyond the law and any attempt to impose new laws would contravene the first and second laws and by implication the third. This government would be restricted in size and finance. It would require a second chamber of commons with authority to oversee the first. This chamber would be randomly selected in the same manner as jury duty. The members woukd serve for a single year and all people would be made familiar with the duties involved from an early age. The first chamber would be selected by the second and replaced as necessary. It would consist of objective judges and men who had proven themselves capable of the post by having a history of fair play and wisdom-it's really only at this time when pragmatism is on top that we look at that as being quaint. In a society of real education in which schools did not pour knowledge into children's heads, then the educated would be a long way brighter than we are currently. Virtues and morals would automatically be seen as important for those who would act as judges and law makers. When you think about it, we don't elect doctors, judges or policeman so we don't need to elect the first chamber, they can be judged against certain criteria and their history just like any job applicant. Those unfit to care for themselves are equal under the law. The law is blind to anything but Liberty, property rights and initiation of force. The law would intervention if people were abused as that would be an initiation of violence. It also means a big ramp up of family and personal responsibility. No more blame society. No more getting away from full justice because you were from a certain kind of back ground.

I would describe a cult as an irrational ideology. Now, if you subscribe to the pragmatist view that nothing is really knowable with any certainty, or that what is true for you isn't necessarily true for me, then it's likely that you will apportion cultism to everything and of course by that theory everything is equally good. There are no goods and bads for a pragmatist, if one thing doesn't work, then try another. Well reality holds that some branches in a tree are weaker than others and we can determine which are the weaker by experience. So, if we climb a tree we stick to the strong branches in order that we achieve our goal and survive. If we abide by the pragmatists rule, then, still we might survive, but our chances of failure are proportionately a lot greater. Things really aren't all good and we can learn to distinguish the bad. What's more, our survival and happiness depends on choosing wisely.

There are plenty of scientists that spout pseudo science and fall for it. You seem to confuse skill with education. A monkey can be taught a skill if he has the capacity, but education is very different. It isn't the passing on of a skill, it is the ability to turn experience into concepts and integrate those experiences with other concepts in a logical fashion. It is philosophy that sets the stage for the science. Theory is not science, but conceptual integrations as a result of experience/observations that may well include previous scientific knowledge, or it might be observational. We create all the time in order to solve problems in order to improve our position. Science does not take place in a silo, it isn't necessary to grow scientists in a Petri dish.

It's a straw man. :-) You don't agree with tax payer funded schools ......so you are against education for everyone ?

People can choose to do whatever they wish I can't stop them. I can only expose what's behind the door, they must choose to walk through it or to walk away from it. It is you who is the Nihlist. You exchange reason for pragmatism. As if it is impossible to decide prior to participation wether something will work for you or not. Who is it that stands at the school gate promising drugs that will give you a good time and making fun of those that try to stop the others ? Don't mind them he says, they are squares, not cool, you ignore the bores and come and TRY. You, can't you see he's fooled you all Yes he's here again can't you see he's fooled you all Share his peace Sign the lease He's a supersonic scientist He's the guaranteed eternal sanctuary man Look, look into my mouth he cries And all you children lost down many paths I bet my life you'll walk inside Hand in hand Gland in gland With a spoonful of miracle He's the guaranteed eternal sanctuary man We will rock you rock you little snake We will keep you safe and warm My sword is reason, it cuts for me only.

What are the key requirements of any Government ? To protect Liberty, enforce law and give justice. We abdicate our right of self justice to an agreed upon group of people who act as objective bystanders intervening to prevent violence occurring and to pursue justice for the victim and retribution from the guilty. Nothing else is required of a Government. To perform these duties does no require any huge size, it isn't offering services such as welfare, health and education. It doesn't require huge taxation departments because a small fixed flat tax is all that is necessary. It would maybe be a pound per week. It doesn't require a central bank or large treasury department. It needs no Tarrif takers, subsidy givers, contraband agents. It needs no regulators, planners or officers. It would be impervious to big money because it could offer no incentive to them. It doesn't require any form of democracy and is better without it. It's the democracy that allows a small government to grow and take ever more Liberty away. You are wrong that it is 'a few thinkers'. Progress only appears to be due to a few, but the reality is that progress is the result of the many. The ideas don't come out of one persons mind, they occur to many people at similar times in different forms. It happens that one group is succesful in being first to the post, or having their idea become predominant, but others had that same idea. That's why we need to do away with IP and patent laws. They monopolise and therefore limit invention. In a society without a welfare state, everyone is doing what they have to do to make their lives better. Some are talented and some are not-hence the Marxist labour theory of value which asserts a man cutting hair for an hour has no more value than a footballer who plays in a first division team for an hour, or the producer/owner of a business producing products customers desire, or an oil man who must risk everything to extract dirty crude from the ground. Laziness is just a judgement and not a reality. If one wishes to survive then one must produce. To be wealthy one must offer great value to others. If one wishes to live on little, then one need produce little at all, just sufficient and then spend the rest of the time staring idly into space or riding a surf board-although either one of these may actually produce great wealth. The thinker dreams an invention, writes a best seller, the surfer designs a new board or wins competitions.

I you saying I have gravitated to the wrong side or that my post does not have sufficient gravitas ? Is Gravity derived from Gravy ? Does Bisto have waves ? Sometimes if I mix the gravy it has lumpy black bits which I think are black holes. I don't use a laser inferometer, I just bash 'em about with a spoon.

"NSF sold the idea to Congress with the help of powerful legislators from states with a vested interest in LIGO—in particular Louisiana, one of two states that would host the facility, and Massachusetts, which had teamed with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena to design the project." If you don't get that this is just pork barrel politics from the paragraph above from science magazine then you are hopelessly deluded. There is a quote somewhere from Rockerfeller who was trying to obtain funding for his 'green project' which suggested the production of a massive machine to freeze carbon dioxide at the poles to stimulate the Government to provide tax funding.

I don't, you believe what you want.

I would say you are quite correct about education, but it is democratised society which requires children to conform to the system and not to question it and therefore the education will not be about freeing the mind, but partaking in the structure without question. I disagree fundamentally and violently with your assessment of humans. We haven't come this far because we were lazy. Quite the opposite. I don't see any evidence that on our own we 'stop thinking'. I see plenty of evidence that in a society in which we are educated and bound, that, like animals in a cage, we either accept the conditions or go bonkers. Very few stop thinking unless they have surrendered completely, many realise that thinking is the only thing left which they can do, many cant see a way in which thinking can change anything and the rest are struggling to know how to think-they equate thinking to reading the media and contributing to a poll.

It took enormous amounts of fossil fuel to find those waves.

We haven't had big C conservatives for quite a long time in the UK. They are what you might call true republicans I suppose. Western Christian values embodies it. Not a literal interpretation but an anglicised one. Virtues, values as set out under religious doctrine-you might see here that Sharia law is something that would certainly be acceptable even if it isn't totally Christian it does contain all the moral certitude that Peter would like. Well the 'majority' doesn't decide much at all, it's only a political party democracy not a real democracy (which was discovered to be problematic in Greeece). Its mob rule in which one group votes to loot the other. If you think about it, that's the only reason people vote is 'more free stuff for me and less stuff for them'. Why blame the Cronies and Corporates ? They took advantage of the political system. That's what big Christian conservatism aims at preventing. It won't achieve those aims of course because it is equally flawed. The problem with political party democracy is that it will always tend towards some form of collectivism-be it economic fascism or Socialism. It's totally inevitable because each party will be forced into a race to give to the majority, who are inevitably the largest group of voters and therefore the poorest. Once there are vast tides of tax money flowing from the most productive to the less productive, then corruption happens. The Government gets bigger, more expensive and more corrupt and the people go the same way. It's far easier for a thief to steal tax payers money by state decree than to be an honest man who is robbed of his production at the point of state sanctioned violence. If the cronies win then we have economic fascism, if the mob win we get economic socialism. So that it's clear, these are the virtues which I adhere to -Existence, independence, honesty, integrity, justice, production, pride. These are the virtues which are vital to good living. Disturb any one of these and the others fall by degrees. A system which allows one group to vote itself the proceeds of the other groups labour defiles all of those virtues instantly. Peter Hitchens believes that Christian virtues are the key, but, Christian virtues deny existence/independence/pride so are just as prone to the same failure as democratic liberalism.

This is what Wilber is all about: https://integrallife.com/join A charlatan businessman selling snake oil to the needy. He sits at the top and ministers to his flock. Is Kens IOS programme (and be very wary of cultists that are into programming human minds) scientifically evaluated ? No, of course it isn't, it's just another self improvement folly by which Ken hopes to get rich. When we were kids we used to buy super hero comics on which there was always a back page with X Ray specs and a spring exerciser to turn you into man mountain. As a kid you are expected to fall for this BS, but as an adult you should be applying logic and reason to see through these scams. Bloody hell, wake up and smell the BS.

Most people just get an ankle security tag...is this something new ?

...Always a winter

I hate it when its cold. Makes taking a bath bloody uncomfortable.

You don't happen to also have a Banjo and some pigs . You realise by saying the B word that you are now tagged and filed as a potential T word ?