Day 09 -- My beliefs
I could go on for quite a while listing arithmetical statements that I believe, but I suppose it would be more exciting to mention things that I believe and most people don't:
This would be a better world to live & die in if suicide could be made the most common cause of death.
The stock market has very little to do with the operation of market capitalism.
The economists, who have taught the biologists so much, would do well to learn something from them: that successful systems accumulate parasites. Among the vilest institutional evils in the rich countries are the promotion industry (parasitic on the market) and the drug laws (parasitic on the government). Right, shmight! Left, shmeft! Markets and governments are both too powerful; far more of what people do for each other should be done for fun, without the mediation of either.
To understand oppression the second thing one should always do is blame the victim; the taboo on doing so is stultifying. In particular, people who let themselves be influenced by television advertising are asking to be swindled, and by thus creating a market for swindlers they poison the entire body politic.
Mass entertainment (by which I mean entertainment in which the chief measure of success is the size of the audience) is a morally depraved activity. In order to maximize the size of an audience, one must make use of fashion and intergenerational hostility -- that is, of fear and hate. Those are base motives, and the business of appealing to them is bound to attract bad people and make them worse.
Many undoubted evils are irremediable. (It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!) In particular, the problems posed by ethnic pest zones such as the Middle East and the Balkan peninsula are insoluble.
Neither art nor nature is a moral category; they are merely the interior & exterior of the region that has been altered by deliberate human activity; they have no more moral content than indoors & outdoors. In particular, to call behavior or food or rights natural is not to recommend them.
That should do to go on.
This would be a better world to live & die in if suicide could be made the most common cause of death.
The stock market has very little to do with the operation of market capitalism.
The economists, who have taught the biologists so much, would do well to learn something from them: that successful systems accumulate parasites. Among the vilest institutional evils in the rich countries are the promotion industry (parasitic on the market) and the drug laws (parasitic on the government). Right, shmight! Left, shmeft! Markets and governments are both too powerful; far more of what people do for each other should be done for fun, without the mediation of either.
To understand oppression the second thing one should always do is blame the victim; the taboo on doing so is stultifying. In particular, people who let themselves be influenced by television advertising are asking to be swindled, and by thus creating a market for swindlers they poison the entire body politic.
Mass entertainment (by which I mean entertainment in which the chief measure of success is the size of the audience) is a morally depraved activity. In order to maximize the size of an audience, one must make use of fashion and intergenerational hostility -- that is, of fear and hate. Those are base motives, and the business of appealing to them is bound to attract bad people and make them worse.
Many undoubted evils are irremediable. (It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!) In particular, the problems posed by ethnic pest zones such as the Middle East and the Balkan peninsula are insoluble.
Neither art nor nature is a moral category; they are merely the interior & exterior of the region that has been altered by deliberate human activity; they have no more moral content than indoors & outdoors. In particular, to call behavior or food or rights natural is not to recommend them.
That should do to go on.