What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society?
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Saturday, April 25, 2026 00:05
VIEWED: 18057
PAGE 14 of 22
Signy, I think we are pretty much in agreement.
I think someone said something on another thread or this one, they start to get blurred, it could have been you even. The problem is that there is no limit to power of corporations. I actually think your FF were spot on when they tried to take steps for the devolution of power but they only foresaw government power, not business power. Kind of blind of them really, given how much money and power the landed gentry had in Great Britain, which even then translated into political power. Or perhaps that came a little later?
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Not so much blind as it was deliberate, at least on behalf of Hamilton, cause that was sort of his plan from day one.
-F
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I gave you just a few recent examples of where governments stepped in on behalf the wealthy few to smash the many poor. And the point is that governments aren't "helpless" in the face of abuse of economic power, or helpless in the face of forces like population (over)growth and automation, they are complicit.
BUT THEY DON'T HAVE TO BE.
IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE AS A SPECIES, we have to stop thinking that evolution will lead us out of our misery. We need to start taking a conscious, pro-active stance on where and how we will develop, as a society.
Turn power over to women? Adjust our sex ratio to be 90% female? REALLY push for birth control? Localize production again, so that it will be more robust to catastrophe? None of this is in the direction we're heading, but hey... the direction we're heading is off a cliff. Maybe we need to try something different.
So, to answer the question What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society? I guess we can ask What is our response to these abuses of power?
Here's one:
BOYCOTT BOTTLED WATER.
ANY KIND.
Water-bottlers are stealing clean water from populations who need it more. Yeah, I know... small steps. Baby steps. Start with that. Nestle will be pissed. It should be.
THINK OF MORE.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Now I'm going to get a little snarky, and not about the right wing (who everyone knows are just a bunch of tools) but about liberals. Because it seems that liberals are capable of asking the question What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society?. But when presented with specific examples of HOW our indecent society is being forced on us at gunpoint, appear to have no answers at all.
That's the difference between liberals and leftists.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I'm guessing, based on my own reaction, that the collective we were silent not because we don't have our own thoughts on the issue, but because your proposals just made things super awkward and we were trying to bite our tongue for your sake. But I stop biting my tongue the moment I'm provoked.
All of us have discussed what we think needs to be changed to make society not a parasitic blood sucking cancer on the face of humanity to death. Literally, we are taking terminal diagnosis all around.
So don't shame us or talk like you're better than the rest of us. Either you know exactly what all of us think and would recommend and can probably describe our particular positions without any input from us by now, or you haven't been listening.
Talk is cheap. And frankly, talking about how each of us plans to change things is a good way to give the enemy intelligence on how to stop us. Forgive me for declining your kindly worded encouragement.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Talk is cheap. And frankly, talking about how each of us plans to change things is a good way to give the enemy intelligence on how to stop us. Forgive me for declining your kindly worded encouragement.
Honestly Byte... Haken IS Big Brother.
Everything we have posted here over the years has been thoroughly considered by the Republic every step of the way for the last 12 years at least.
If you believe in Haken, I have some real estate on the North Pole you might be interested in. Comes with a sleigh and some shiny reindeer. One of them even has a bright red nose.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Honestly Byte... Haken IS Big Brother.
Everything we have posted here over the years has been thoroughly considered by the Republic every step of the way for the last 12 years at least.
If you believe in Haken, I have some real estate on the North Pole you might be interested in. Comes with a sleigh and some shiny reindeer. One of them even has a bright red nose.
Jack:
Please start making sense.
Love and hugs,
Everyone.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
BOYCOTT BOTTLED WATER.
ANY KIND.
Water-bottlers are stealing clean water from populations who need it more. Yeah, I know... small steps. Baby steps. Start with that. Nestle will be pissed. It should be.
THINK OF MORE.
Fuck Nestle. I got your back here Signy.
I always say that anyone who buys Lotto tickets or otherwise gambles with money they need is just willingly paying a "STUPID TAX". That doesn't even come CLOSE to the UBER-STUPID tax that people pay for bottled water. If you live in Crook County, IL, you also pay a "10 cent per bottle deposit tax", but the funny thing is, you can't redeem that anywhere by giving those bottles back. They CALL it a DEPOSIT tax, but when you buy a 24 pack of bottled water you pay an extra $2.40 tax that you CAN NEVER GET BACK!!!!
Bottled water in America, unless you drink from a well and shit in a septic tank is not only superfluous, it is utterly asinine.
Yeah.... Let's pay a Multinational corporation that employs 90% of its workers out of the US to provide us with water that doesn't in many occasions even meet the US standards for filtering and bottling.....
Fucking idiots.....
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Jack:
Please start making sense.
Love and hugs,
Everyone.
Love you too Byte....
I assure you that when you open your mind to it all that it will be crystal clear.
I apologize for not painting a MUCH clearer picture for you... I am hindered by my modest upbringing and my inability to make my own creative works to perfectly describe things to you and to others. I must rely only on works others have made to kind of "get the gist" across.....
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I wish I could make my own pictures that perfectly captured those thousand words, rather relying on somebody elses' pictures that paint only 850 of them, as well as 150 more that are either superfluous or talk about things I don't agree with.......
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Yeah, I understood you. The problem is what you said, as I explained, didn't make sense.
And it's not an narrow thinking thing, so choke down the smugness for a second. I'm paranoid, probably more paranoid than you are, but I can also think rationally.
Haken is not deleting people's posts (which was a ridiculous assumption for you to make in the first place) and Haken is not Big Brother beyond that the internet itself is a permanent recording of what we say.
As ever, you place far too much importance upon whatever a bunch of people on an obscure internet message board might have to say. You have to understand how Big Brother actually searches for targets.
The first way is the direct way - you have to piss some bigwig off. And when you piss them off, it's obvious, because it feels like a giant boot stomping down on your face. The site gets pulled and all the usual money sources like paypal suddenly refuse to transfer your funds. That's what happened with Julian Assange, even though he's a jackass.
I'm sure they sent monitors here and there to Fireflyfans in the early and post movie years, but nothing happened and nothing we did really alarmed them. Because honestly, most sci-fi fans couldn't fight their way outta a paper bag. If we were really dangerous, the site would be long gone.
The second way is indirectly. They have web spiders that basically run a find on thousands of pages a minute looking for certain keywords. Then someone has to check the false positives. It's slow and inconvenient and doesn't work worth beans.
In short, the reason we're still here talking on this site is because they looked at it and then decided we're harmless.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME