Child Sex Trafficking: And a the desensitization of global TV viewers.

Great Debates
41

I don’t claim that capitalism invented poverty. And I don’t claim that the world would be a paradise without it. This is not an anti-capitalist rant.

A free pyramidal society starts with a pool of humanity. Some will find themselves on top, whether by their own ingenuity or fortune of birth, and many will rise to the middle classes, and some will lack the intelligence or the initiative to avoid a life of poverty. The poor are part of the pool which makes extreme wealth possible, simply looking at it from the other direction you see that “wealth implies poverty.” But the poor don’t vanish into thin air. It is not as if you were sorting through a crop of apples and tossing the rotten ones into the garbage. As Jesus said, “you have the poor with you always.” So it is hypocritical for someone enjoying the comforts afforded by a system to look at another intrinsic part of that system and pass moral judgment. The extreme example of this is a man, gorging himself on prime rib and pastries, observing the lack of morals of a hungry man who steals a loaf of bread.

I don’t believe that morality is absolutely relative, but it is relative to a great extent. For example, every day some debutante marries a promising young man because of the physical comforts promised by the union, bringing to it her pert breasts, sparkling smile, and firm young bottom. The deb will thereafter be known as a pillar of society. But the desperate young woman who fellates Miss Debutante’s husband in exchange for a crisp fifty-dollar bill would be considered a whore.
When I talk of the “cosmic equation” I am not talking about specifics where the purchase of a big-screen t.v. from Pete’s Electronics Shop in Peoria can be linked by a consequential chain of events to the selling of 12-year old Susie X in Thailand. I am talking about big pictures, large concepts of human stratification. And I am saying that if people are not willing or capable of making real changes in that structure then don’t make a show of beating your breast.

Sexual submission and prostitution are as old as humanity and exist under any social system, whether it is pharoahs or feudal lords or plantation owners or any order where the weak submit to the powerful. (The argument can be made however that smaller organizations such as tribes have less sexual depravity because of the more personal relationships and the trust required between the leader and the tribesmen.)
Don’t mistake television images for closeness of the event. There is more pain in the world than any person’s armchair empathy could possibly comprehend. Shedding a tear in your dip is as feckless as trying to extinguish the sun with a squirt gun.

42

Wealth in and of itself is not a bad thing. LOT’s of wealth, in and of itself is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s considered THE good thing. Wealth is what allows us to feel certain that we have the option to fulfill desires and/or impules. We strive for it, and evidence of lacking it, is our inabiliy to have a life where our intent is not circumvented or violated against our ultimate consent. This is true, individually, for every being on earth. Wealth more than anything, is defined as the posession of certainty; certainty that we will be able to continue being certain. It’s about using your intent to preserve your ability to have an intent, otherwise known as survival, so far as intentional beings are concerned.

Wealth is attributed as access, potential, this free space of mind from which certainty is derived and stress can abate. The primary problem that people get so frustrated about with wealth, is when people think that access to something means that you have the right to exersize use of the material able to be accessed before it is translated wealth. Wealth that is translated means that all beings can use it, which gives society and each individual MORE wealth, more certainty. When someone decides to run amuck with untranslated wealth that has been accessed by society, they are basically making it VERY difficult for society to translate that wealth. This phenomsnon is the hording of capitalism. It’s the anti-thesis of being an intentional being. People who do this, aren’t considered “evil”, they just aren’t considered intentional beings – their processing of information is not an actual state of intentionality, but rather a simulated one, using linguistic tokens to simulate the intelligence of intentional beings while representing the intelligence of lower animal forms.

An intentional being is not going to use coersion to get the wealth back from you, as this entire act contradicts what it means to be an intentional being in the first place. If you’re going to figure out how to assure that your existence can run intent without circumvention or violation of consent, you need to live that way, otherwise you’re knowlingly signing your own death warrant. The moment you violate the intent of another being against it’s consent; even simulated intelligence, as an intentional being, you are contradicting the purpose for being an intentional being.

The point here is that the contention that wealth implies poverty, is only true when unintentional beings and intentional beings co-exist. Eventually intentional beings will get a handle on the situation. Translated wealth doesn’t necessitate the poverty wealth dichotomy… it is untralstated wealth that is USED that accounts for this situation. Of course looking upon the globe and seeing the USE of untranslated wealth, is evidence that this occurs for the whole system.

Currently, it is absolutely true to state that welath implies poverty, in all instances. You only need to observe the use of untranlated wealth (stratification) to know this to be a fact. The acceptance of this untranslated wealth forces all of the lines being exploited as “evidence that you even deserve it”. Of course you deserve it, but the point is that you actually don’t posess it until it is translated wealth, which is a concept that non-intentional human do not grasp. They are not aware of themselves.

43

Its not just a system it’s the law.

From the link

44

It’s not difficult to make positive claims about 3 “pareto people” who invert (at a 96.2% rate) the 80:20 rule of wealth distribution that you cite, an argument that leaves an unresolved contradiction.

With regards to statistics in general, from my point of veiw, I have a 50% chance of actually existing, and from this, there is an additional 50% chance that you and I exist. There’s only a 25% chance that I should humor you even writing this post. State lotteries are usually designed between 1:2 - 1:3, rarely as low as 1:4. We all know that even these odds will bankrupt you quite quickly. No reasonable statician would bet that this post exists.

45

The Pareto Principle is interesting but when I envision a rule behind the correspondence of wealth and poverty it is the bell curve, or the normal curve, of statistical distribution.

The Pareto Principle may even be one half of a bell curve.

46

It pretty much is half a bell curve. IANA stat guru but IIRC bell curves only work on an Apples-Apples comparison. The Pareto principle is used for isolating high and or low performing patterns within a group.

Like it or not we are not all born with the same combination of skill, ability, and opportunity. The latter half of olnav’s post starts to demonstrate that. For example, being born in the US and having the higher standards of living that we do will contibute immensely to your position in the grand scheme of financial success.
As a very loose example:

Born in the US

survives childbrith process

Does well in school

Survives to legal adulthood

does well in college or first employment

gets the promotion

gets another promotion

aquires investment capital to start own company

survives brutal competition

company seen as valuable enough to be bought by another company for an immense profit.

In each step above many others are “selected out” some of us die, some of us make poor decisions, some of us miss opportunities. The chance of my choices and opportunities placing me in the position of someone like say Bill Gates is so tiny its not even in my realm of realistic possibilities that I will ever see the man in person.

Pareto’s law has nothing to do with fair, it has everything to do with reality. If more people looked at things in this 80/20 mindset, the world would be far less of a shock to many people.

47

Well, it sucks to be them.

[opens another beer while getting ready for the Super Bowl]

48

drachillix,
My actual point was that reasonable statistics shows that we are unreasonably posting to each other. The point here is that we are unreasonable staticians.
Yet, we are making statistical claims. Self refuting.

Even if the rule is correct, my first point was that “high or low performing patterns within a group” is itself subject to inversion with very little effort. I can define high performance work as translating wealth; state that only 20% of the population does this. People who translate wealth don’t use or accept untranslated wealth. The other 80% of unintentional human beings are in a mindless rat-race of competing for wealth in a very manner that is the opposite of high performance. Simply accepting startified wealth is evidence that a person is a low performer, or, is not really doing anything other than circlar reasoning to accept that wealth and consider themselves 'deserving of that wealth" or a “high performer”. Therefor I can state with certainty that you’re more likely to be exposed to and represent the circular thinking patterns of 80% of the population, that aren’t intentional beings.