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I don’t believe in Jesus
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I have what I have because I provide a service or good someone else was willing to pay me for.
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I don’t prefer a world without art, however, I don’t think I should have to be forced to pay for a person’s shitty art just because they feel they want to be an artist and should be paid to do their art even if no one wants it.
I used to think that way, then something happened:
After a decade of being the IMF’s poster child, Argentina started to collapse under the weight of economic depression, double digits unemployment and a banking run.
some unemployed, extremely poor people started to block roads to protest the state of things.
At first i thought “they are criminals, the constitution and the laws guarantee free travel on this country”, then i reconsidered.
i had the following thought “if you live in a place does not care for you, does not protect you, does not give you the means to earn your food and your home, does not educate your children (and did not educate you , so you can not earn enough to pay for an education for them), if you live in such a place, and you and yours are practically starving, why would you give a fig about the laws of that place?.”
If you exclude people from society, do not expect them to follow the rules of that society.
My final conclusion, bringing me to the left of the political spectrum after being on the right of it, was that the free market is not the panacea to all problems in the world, that the government has a duty to stop people from falling out of society and the more affluent citizens have to contribute to that effort, because if the social contract fails, the country does not work, and we are all in this together.
I’ve seen what happens when you do not “spread the wealth” and believe me, its not pretty.
That would be Eric Raymond, not Richard Stallman.
oops, you are right
You cannot have a world with great art without allowing for the existence of “shitty” art as well. Also note that not everyone agrees with what is great vs. what is shitty.
There has never been and never will be 100% agreement on what great art is. Pick your masterpiece, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Shakespeare’s King Lear: some minority thinks it’s shitty.
Mainly, your argument is a strawman fallacy, however.
Are you so sure that the person you’re refusing to share with doesn’t have a similar claim?
What’s the relevance of Big Oil to the jock/nerd analogy? Maybe it’s something you can say about the political parties, but I don’t see the sense in “Republicans are like bullies because both Republicans and bullies are supported by Big Oil”.
ummm, my argument was a little tenuous, the reasoning was that no self-respecting nerd would support oil as an energy source at this point in time. (unwarranted assumption #1231313…)
Why do you think violence is the last resource of the incompetent? What, pray tell, is the last resource of the competent? I also find it funny that you put the smart people in the Democrat’s camp. Seriously? The R bloc is hugely upper class majorities (Protestant, white, etc) and the D bloc is massively lower class (poor, minority race). You think the latter is the more educated group? No, the dems aren’t nerds. They’re stoners and the smelly kids that no one wants to talk to. The Rs are the preps, not the jocks.
I’ve heard this argument numerous places. The issue with that was not Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. It’s using $150,000 of taxpayer funded campaign money to buy the wardrobe.
Well, where to start.
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Most nerds would recognize the “last recourse of the incompetent” line from the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov, i wrote that as a joke mostly, violence should be the last recourse, but sometimes there is no other.
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I say nerds, and bullies (then replaced with jocks, because bullies was slanderous to most republicans who, i have no doubt are decent people), not intelligent and not intelligent.
also, upper class does not mean intelligent see: Bush, George W… . I’ll let others more informed about speech patterns in the U.S. tackle the (seemingly) implied correlation between whiteness and intelligence in your post, i may be seeing racism where there is none. -
The smelly kids nobody wants to talk to is probably a nerd.
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Care to refute the points i made above?
You could say that, but you’d be wrong. Republicans are all about ideology over reality. Creationism over evolution, ignoring AIDS in hopes it will magically only kill sinners, supporting abstinence over sex education even when it’s proven not to work, supporting the Free Market as sacrosanct no matter the cost, supporting the Iraq war or wars in general as being “just about to turn the corner” no matter how much of a disaster they become; and on and on. The idea that the Republicans are more practical than Democrats is pure hogwash. They are, in fact far LESS practical.
The Democrats tend to be concentrated among the well educated. The majority of the Republican base are the ignorant and isolated, and heavily anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-rationality. And, the Democrats tend to be right more often. So yes, they are smarter.
No; the Republicans are the dolts whose “education” consists of some heavily religious school that’s essentially one step up from a madrasa, listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching Fox News, and reading books like The Turner Diaries; salted with a minority comprised of the privileged whose education consists of partying while Daddy’s money guarantees them a “Gentleman’s C”
I care more about the fiscal side of things, so to me the Republicans reperesent those who can create value for societ and want sciety to keep incenting the creation of value and the Democrats represent those who can’t or don’t create value and want society to redistribute wealth from those who created it to everyone else.
Hardly. The people who “create value” are the working class, not the rich parasites you think deserve all the rewards and all the rights.
perhaps vulcans and tribbles?
Right, factory workers create the value. I guess the products sell themselves, the factory workers had the idea of creating the products in the first place, and they had the money and guts to finance the factory themselves.
I think none of the 2 extremes are right, yes, the workers should get more of the wealth produced by the business and many managers and executives are just dead weight, on the other hand people like steve jobs, the 2 founders of Google (i dont remember their names right now) do deserve each one of their hard earned billions.
As i said above, i think Obama, the democrats, most of the SDMB posters and i coincide in this: Capitalism works, the free market works, but not unchecked, the government has to intrude from time to time to avoid massive wealth accumulation, monopolies, unregulated disasters like the recent one in wall street, huge pockets of misery, things like that.
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.”
— Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
No one is banning art. I just don’t see why I should work so someone else can basically pursue what is a leisure activity or a hobby. If you can make a living at your art, go right ahead. There are plenty of people who do.
How much value would Microsoft or Dell or Amazon have created without Bill Gates, Mike Dell or Jeff Bezos?
The objective shouldn’t be to make it as easy as possible for rich people to become wealthier by avoiding their tax obligations and cheating the working classes. The objective should be to enable people with new and innovative ideas to become wealthy through hard work and innovation.
That’s the problem with you “power to the working man” types. 99.9% of the working class is incapable of doing anything other than mindlessly tending their machines all day. But who comes up with the ideas for what to build and how to build it?
Yeah i said as much the other day when i was talking about it with the city fathers of Carthage, the dodo, and the ghost of Napoleon :).
I didnt say “Violence does not solve anything”, I said “violence should be your last recourse”, if you truly do not see another way, violence is preferable to many things.
As for the issue of “Value” generation, what do you think about my attempt to compromise between your position and that of Der Thris?