widows, entitlement, charity and all that...

[_Tarski]

There...WHEW! That was a knee slapper. Now, the EPA is a rogue bureaucracy that has no constitutional or intellectual legitimacy. It is a satrapy of the environmental movement and of the cultural Left and a factory for the production of pseudoscience. It is wholly incompatible with the continuation of a free, open, prosperous, self-governing republic. It is, at its core, anti-democratic and totalitarian in nature.

.

False.

Bow down before your God, Tarski, but he, like his father, will not support you in the end

I have no idea what you mean. Who is he?
Is this one of those ironic instances where you accuse nature lovers of being "religious"?

Go huff some of that harmless Tetraethyl lead somewhere.

[Guest]

Oh I see. Because I think that government has a role in our lives I must be a left wing, pink-o, commie lover.

That's hardly an answer to my question. In fact, this idea has been a staple among the western Left since Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin's crimes, and the idea of "neo-communism" was born. It has also been a common appeal ("real socialism has never actually been tried.") used to explain the failure of all the socialist experiments of the 20th century.

It was also common among the American leftist intelligentsia in the 1930s in explaining known atrocities under way in the Soviet Union (when they were not simply dismissed as pure fabrication by the capitalist exploiters).

[_son of Ishmael]

Oh I see. Because I think that government has a role in our lives I must be a left wing, pink-o, commie lover.

That's hardly an answer to my question. In fact, this idea has been a staple among the western Left since Krushev's revelations about Stalin's crimes, and the idea of "neo-communism" was born.

It was also common among the American leftist intelligentsia in the 1930s in explaining known atrocities under way in the Soviet Union (when they were not simply dismissed as pure fabrication by the capitalist exploiters.

What the hell are you talking about?

[_Droopy]

That's hardly an answer to my question. In fact, this idea has been a staple among the western Left since Krushev's revelations about Stalin's crimes, and the idea of "neo-communism" was born.

It was also common among the American leftist intelligentsia in the 1930s in explaining known atrocities under way in the Soviet Union (when they were not simply dismissed as pure fabrication by the capitalist exploiters.

What the hell are you talking about?

Never mind Spicoli.

[_huckelberry]

Yeah, that is the point I was trying to make is that we need these things (welfare, medicaid etc). It is just that are not run right.

Do you think the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, East Germany etc. weren't "run right?"

Do you think that was the primary problem with socialism?

Since when does the epa, medicaid and welfare have anything to do with Socialism? They are capitalist styled responses to capitalist problems.

[_Kishkumen]

What the hell are you talking about?

I would say that this is the ideal response to most all of Droopy's posts, but to ask that is to demonstrate some level of interest in finding out the answer.

Frankly, I have no interest in the ravings of a bigoted lunatic.

[_son of Ishmael]

What the hell are you talking about?

I would say that this is the ideal response to most all of Droopy's posts, but to ask that is to demonstrate some level of interest in finding out the answer.

Frankly, I have no interest in the ravings of a bigoted lunatic.

I think I have learned my lesson.

[_Darth J]

Wo unto you poor men, whose hearts are not broken, whose spirits are not contrite, and whose bellies are not satisfied, and whose hands are not stayed from laying hold upon other men’s goods, whose eyes are full of greediness, and who will not labor with your own hands! (D&C 57:16)

Thou shalt not be idle; for he that is idle shall not eat the bread nor wear the garments of the laborer (D&C 42:42).

See, e.g., Joseph Smith, Jr.

and pimping 14 year old girls downtown by the Sunset Grill

See, e.g., Joseph Smith, Jr.

[_Chap]

Oh I see. Because I think that government has a role in our lives I must be a left wing, pink-o, commie lover.

That's hardly an answer to my question. In fact, this idea has been a staple among the western Left since Krushev's revelations about Stalin's crimes, and the idea of "neo-communism" was born.

It was also common among the American leftist intelligentsia in the 1930s in explaining known atrocities under way in the Soviet Union (when they were not simply dismissed as pure fabrication by the capitalist exploiters.

What the hell are you talking about?

He's talking about what he wants to talk about, as is his right, and for Droopy/Coggins it has never mattered very much whether anybody feels it is worth while listening. He basically has certain topics that he really wants to post about (in this case, the denial of Stalin's evil acts by non-Trotkyist leftists at the time they took place), and he will get there by hook or by crook. See the case of Mr Dick and King Charles's Head.

It might be interesting one day to have a discussion on the following basis:

1. All but a tiny minority of people agree that the government has some legitimate role in exerting power over its citizens.

2. In a functioning democracy, it is ultimately down to the citizens, acting through their deliberative elected bodies, to decide what that role should be. Otherwise, it is not a functioning democracy.

3. Most advanced democracies have evolved systems that limit the power of those deliberative bodies to make radical changes to accepted limits of government power, so as to avoid "tyranny of the majority". In the USA, that role is played by the Constitution and the mechanisms for giving effect to it such as the Supreme Court. But given a wide enough consensus, the Constitution itself can be changed. If it could not, the USA would not be a democracy.

4. So given those rights and those constraints, what roles do the citizens think the government could play that would be most conducive to their long-term interests, which would naturally include maintaining the health of their democratic system?

I don't think there can be any a priori answers to such questions: they are questions of practical judgement. I have the impression that for Droopy however there are some a priori answers: no government role that he conceives to be incompatible with the teachings of the CoJCoLDS can ever be legitimate.

That's fine by me though. Droopy gets to vote and to advocate his views - but so do all the people who think differently. And there are probably a lot more of them than there are Droopy sympathizers.

[_keithb]

This is a very interesting OP Tarski.

I remember watching an interview of Richard Dawkins where he talked about people having a "lust" for giving, not unlike the urge to have sex that people often associate with lust. In the context of our origins as small group primates, both types of lust made perfect sense. The former lust (giving) made sense because we were likely to see the same 100-250 people again and again throughout our lives. Thus, people who were charitable were much more likely to receive help in return from other tribe members when they needed it, and this probably tended to increase their overall probability of survival. The latter lust made sense because it drove people to reproduce, again probably increasing the probability of survival.

In a modern context, neither lust makes a whole lot of rational sense. Society is now so large that we are unlikely to see people to whom we give again, thus decreasing the probability that our gifts will be reciprocated at a later date. In the case of the latter, most sexual intercourse takes place (at least in the developed world) in situations where birth control is being used, thus negating the increased chance of reproduction through frequent intercourse and the increased probability for reproduction. However, I am happy with both types of lust because I think they make the short human experience more tolerable for people able to take advantage of them.

I should also point out that there are some strange paradoxes associated with the lust for giving, probably also stemming from our origins as small group primates. For example, people care a great deal about the sympathetic widow or similar types of people that you mentioned in your OP. However, they care but little for the millions of nameless and faceless people that starve to death in the world each year -- out of sight, out of mind. This probably also stems from the human small group origins: you care about people in your own tribe but not in other tribes.

That being said, I think that charity -- even though it is probably an emergent behavior from other traits that evolved in human -- probably tends to make the world a better place overall. The visceral reaction to people suffering is one of the leading causes behind social change and pushes towards increasing social justice, among other examples.

Good OP Tarski. I would write more, but I have to get ready for class.

Natural selection may have given rise to the charity thing in the way you suggest but once it is out there and examined with the general intelligence that evolution also gave us, we can start to see it as having a sort of independent "logic" which we tend to want to respect. For this reason I can decide to give to someone repulsive or to a stranger even if I don't feel that "lust".

Mathematics may also have come about by evolution but I take it that this thing we call math is really out there in some sense. Evolution "latches onto it" because it works.
Maybe "the good" is also out there in some sense--though this is tricky to get clear on. Dennett briefly concedes the possibility of "objective morality" in his video interview with Robert Wright where he compares it to a "strange attractor" from the theory of dynamical systems. It is something that is converged on even with random initial conditions once a system is within a certain range (the emergence of the conditions for sufficiently sophisticated intelligence social behavior).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5eUnpsJGRk

I agree with this analysis. It could be that many things present in our physical world -- including math, physics, charity, reproduction by sexual intercourse, etc. -- exist because they represent a deeper reality about the nature of the universe. Indeed, if we look at charity as a strategy in a game theory model, it may very well be that being charitable towards others represents sort of a Nash equilibrium point for the system.

I didn't mean to suggest that all charity is and ever will be is an artifact of evolution. Much like math, there is really underlying utility to it as a society, even if it is applied unevenly and often irrationally (as noted in the idealization of the widow problem in your OP or the out of sight starving children in my post).