Evil
POSTED BY: Geezer
UPDATED: Sunday, October 29, 2006 14:39
VIEWED: 8182
PAGE 6 of 14
Citizen,
Not at all. The purpose of a corporation is to provide services to the people. Sure, there is a competition, a race to provide even better services to help more people. But it's not to stomp out competition. That happens, sure, but it's a corruption, it's not the core idea. In a healthy capitalistic society like we used to have, when someone behaves in this manner, the system pulls them back into line or breaks them up.
But to characterize social programs as charity is a gross distortion. Social programs are about control, social engineering, design and manipulate. They're far less of charity than Al Qaeda. Charity is when you give selflessly without strings or motivation. In America, social programs never fit this bill, and I doubt they often do so elsewhere.
I'm not saying that social engineering is impossible or wrong, but that if one is supporting the idea, one should be straight about what one is supporting. If you support charity, I would think you'd be more in favor of the faith-based initiative than of social programs.
Edit
Capitalism is about other people. A corporation *is* other people. And I never said it was perfect, its in serious need of reform, needs constant reform, and more now than usual. I would say socialism needed reform, if I thought the patient could be saved, but I don't. imho
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Quote:
evil when he faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident
Signy,
Not faked. Johnson misrepresented the incident as being a military clash between the US and the VC, which it was not. It was some incident involving a fishing boat or something. But he didn't fake or creat an incident in the sense that Winston Churchill created the incident with the Lusitania. It's a minor distiction, in the end, Johnson knew that he was lying, and he lied to get us into the war.
Objectively, I'd say Johnson was much evil-er than the gulf of tonkin incident alone betrays.
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Quote:No it isn't.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The purpose of a corporation is to provide services to the people.
Quote:Bollocks. Corporations have no interest in 'helping people'. They provide a service only where such a thing provides profit, profit is what corporations want, not to help people like fuzzy-happy altruistic organisations as you'd like to paint them.
Sure, there is a competition, a race to provide even better services to help more people.
Quote:Large Multinational Corporations have no place in a healthy Capitalist society, but they and the Corporatist society they foster are the enevitable result of Capitalism, which is one of the reasons why Capitalism needs to be ballanced by Socialism and vice versa.
But it's not to stomp out competition. That happens, sure, but it's a corruption, it's not the core idea. In a healthy capitalistic society like we used to have, when someone behaves in this manner, the system pulls them back into line or breaks them up.
Quote:No to characterize social programs as less charity than a terrorist organisation is a gross distortion. Actually it's more than that, its utter lunacy.
But to characterize social programs as charity is a gross distortion. Social programs are about control, social engineering, design and manipulate. They're far less of charity than Al Qaeda. Charity is when you give selflessly without strings or motivation. In America, social programs never fit this bill, and I doubt they often do so elsewhere.
Lets pick a social program, the dol. Supports people looking for work and helps to find employment. Yes very insidious and evil, EVIL I tells ya.
The gross distortion is trying to portray corporations as perfectly altruistic happy bunnies hop hop hopping through happy capitalist land helping people and handing out 'wowy-pops'.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
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Righteous,
Not arguing "democrats are more evil than republicans" I think there are points in US history in which one could argue this point solidly, but this isn't one of those points.
Democrat lack of spine doesn't prevent them from having big wars, again, look at the historical record. The US is several times more likely to go to war with a democrat at the helm.
I can argue that in one respect Clinton did more harm than Bush: He killed more people, both directly and indirectly. Sure, Bush did more damage to the institution of America (Clinton did plenty) But this is largely because he was standing on Clinton's shoulders (a) ie, Clinton had pushed it X-far, and so Bush could push it Y-far, because he had Clinton as a precedent, but also (b) Bush had a friendly congress. Clinton's greatest evil tilt was when he had congress in the first two years. After that, he was still evil, but more subdued because he had to compromise occassionally. Bush has had a solid grip on both houses, and so there has been little compromising of the agenda.
I have a big laundry list on Clinton, starting with WACO, but more importantly, sanctions on Iraq, gun-running to bosnia, bombing of several countries, vetoing the rwanda resolution (15 days or so into the conflict) and later, throwing more guns at the problem. Objectively, though, if you go digging in these people's pasts, you find that Clinton, like Bush, was seriously evil on a personal level long before he was president. Someone like Charles Manson is really a penny ante player next to these guys, totally morally bankrupt individuals.
And, on Kerry, I can't say definitively that things would have been worse. I was rationalizing the position of "why would the people vote to re-elect george bush?" Well, my point was, there wasn't a lot of choice. Kerry hadn't set him up as the peace candidate or the pro-business prosperity candidate, which imho are probably the two best ways to win an election. He was too busy playing tough guy, like bush.
Look at the past party-switch elections
Harding - peace platform
FDR - prosperity platform
Eisenhower - peace platform
Kennedy - charisma platform
Nixon - peace-ish platform
Carter - peace platform
Reagan - prosperity platform
Clinton - prosperity platform
Bush Jr - Jesus platform
If Kerry had promised to settle in iraq, and not "fight to win the peace" and had a real convincing plan to increase prosperity rather than "roll back tax cuts" than he probably would have gotten those extra couple million votes he would have needed to win.
Heinlein said "it's not your opponent that loses you the election, it's you're own supporters who stay home because you failed to convince them to come out"
Or as Al Sharpton said "*Who* wins the election doesn't really matter, what matters is *what* wins the election" meaning, the platform. The Kerry platform lost the election. Doesn't make Kerry evil. A different Kerry platform probably would have won, but that's not what the Kerry backers, his silent partners, wanted.
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Quote:There's no inconsistancy between those statements. But I should have expressed my opinion more clearly: Evil is a few people depriving many others of their needs RESULTING IN special privileges of a few. Perhaps its because I know so many kids with neurologically-bsed behavior problems, but I'm one of the few people on the board (perhaps Rue is another) who thinks that motivation should play little or no part in judging a person's actions. A person's basic motivation, their ability to judge and control their own behavior, usual intoxication status, ability think ahead and predict results in a broader context is visible through repeated actions over time. That's why I think there should be no such crime as "murder". I think the charge should be "causing the death of another" and then sentencing that person depending on their cumulative record. (which BTW G Bush would fail miserably.)
A few posts ago you defined evil as "...a few people depriving many others of their needs, not for betterment for everybody but for special privileges for a few." Now it's results-oriented, and doesn't depend on the objectives of one's actions, just the effects.
Another comment tho- One of the uses of the word "evil" is to trigger moral outrage and punishment. Personally, I'm not so much into retribution. But I think BELIEF SYSTEMS can be evil and evil belief systems should get the death penalty.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Geezer, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident didn't "cause" the war in Vietnam. But it was a major reason for the escalation that followed. Johnson knowingly hid key facts about the incident from the public, including the mitigating ircumstances that (1) We had just hours earlier covertly attacked N Vietnam, and (2) The Maddox had been in North Vietnamese waters just before being attacked. If the public knew the entire circumstances surrounding the incident, they would be far less likely to press for retaliation. It culd have been handled very differently and with a very different outcome.
Quote:
JOHNSON: Uh, the people that are calling me up, I just talked to a New York banker, I just talked to a fellow in Texas, they all feel that the Navy responded wonderfully and that's good. But they want to be damned sure I don't pull 'em out and run, and they want to be damned sure that we're firm. That's what all the country wants because Goldwater's raising so much hell about how he's gonna blow 'em off the moon... Because of the time difference between Washington and the Tonkin Gulf, and the time needed to transmit and receive messages from the remote naval forces involved, this sequence of President Johnson telephone calls on August begins at a moment when Washington was as yet unaware of the claimed second attack. McNamara's statement in the 9:43 AM. conversation that "this ship is allegedly to be attacked tonight" is highly significant-it means that Washington was already operating on the basis of the radio intercepts mistakenly attributed to August 4th. Equally important, LBJ and McNamara discuss retaliatory action against North Vietnam in spite of the fact that no attack has yet occurred.
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/tapes.htm
Quote:Yes lies, and yes cost hundreds of thousands of lives. And no benefit to anyone that I can see. China did not have imperial ambitions. The immediate follow-on was not a massive invasion by the Chinese into Southeast Asia, nor was there large-scale massacre of South Vietnamese.
You then state, "...and his lies cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, with little resulting benefit." seeming to imply that Johnson's lies (lies in your opinion), were the sole cause of the Vietnam war. Pretty sweeping generalization. Again informed by your V, B, and K.
One of the beneficiaries of our intervention was, of all people, Pol Pot.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
But I should have expressed my opinion more clearly: Evil is a few people depriving many others of their needs RESULTING IN special privileges of a few.
As I understand this argument, if two men vote to rob a third, this cannot be evil. After all, the majority of people involved benefited.
Similarly, discrimination against members of a minority group benefits members of the majority.
And what about acts that did not bring any benefit to anybody?
I suspect the honest definition of "evil" would be "a person or act I really dislike".
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Nah... credit me with a little more thought than THAT!
Are the two men and their families starving? Are the majority depriving a minority of basic needs to meet their "requirements" for luxury and ease? My system presupposes an egalitarian distribuiton of necessities.
Now I know the first thing that libertarians will say is... "But that destroys individual effort! Because if people get what they need regardless of effort, then nobody will do anything!" That's a false assumption of human character. Humans actually have a NEED to be productive because it gives them a sense of control over their environment. I think what destroys individual effort more than anything is to have to labor under someone else's direction and then have the fruits of your labor taken away for someone else's benefit. Nothing destroys the work ethic like slavery. But that's a whole 'nother discussion.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Quote:What about fire? It destroys life and lays waste to everything in its path, but in so doing it clears a path for new growth. Floods, for all the damage they cause to human lives, deposit fresh sediment and fertile soil. A nuke demolishes all complex life in its path, but the radiation tends to be good for plants.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Then I read Albert Schwietzer's definition, which was so much better than my own: Good is whatever creates life. Evil is whatever destroys it.
Nice, simple, and to the point.
Schweitzer's stance seems to require one to "de-villify" the term "evil." Schweitzer's "evil" isn't a willful force to be stopped, but a necessary force that must exist in balance with what he terms "good."
(Much like how I define the Force in Star Wars as being the manifestation of Creation [the Light Side] and Destruction [the Dark Side]. The Dark Side isn't "evil," it can just lends itself best to destruction, and repays its servants in kind [with disease, scars, and a rapid degenerative death that can only be staved off by further predation], while the Light Side creates and is created by life, which it nurtures and sustains [Jedi tend to live long and healthy lives, and can continue to exist beyond death, sustained by the Force itself]. Neither side can be eliminated, nor should they be; the Dark Side is as vital as the Light.)
Maybe this highlights the semantic problem: the word "evil" can be used for so many different concepts.
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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double
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