PvP Lives Here

This is where you are wrong and why I disagree. You assume government is necessarily an extension of the will of the citizens. The whole point of the "99%" is that wealthy interests are far more persuasive on legislation than the voice of the common person. Do you honestly believe special interest groups don't force laws on a regular basis or prohibit them from happening? The wealthy get to determine right and wrong in this country. Thus, they can justify their toxic self-interest by keeping government weak and then manipulating it.

Moreover, you just contradicted your earlier sentiment. Before you said government was at fault for the financial crises like it was some abstract entity perched above our society. According to you government alone could be blamed for not providing regulations. Now you are conceding that government is a mere tool of the people. Could it be then that the people behind government are at fault - the forces that influence law the most? You just argued against yourself.

In a more general sense, confining notions of right and wrong exclusively to government is illogical. If government is the collective will of the citizens, as you argue, and law is the ultimate articulation of their values, then right/wrong must by definition come into being before is is placed into law. You act like government was the chicken before the egg since time immemorial. No, we as people are capable of collectively deciding these moral issues, independent of law. Codifying these sentiments obviously helps in maintaining the common good, however, the very issue at hand is that wills of a view determine what is right and wrong for the collective. Moreover, all notions of right/wrong are going to be subjective. Government is more an embodiment of which moral narratives have agency and power than an objective indicator of good. Thus, notions of morality as self-reliance and interest are not surprisingly prevalent because these are often the subjective rationalizations of the wealthy, who have the capital-power to impose their narratives through the instrument of government.



I said I was going to be addressing Act X in my post, asshole. Learn to read. I very explicitly indicated that I couldn't thoughtfully respond to you until I knew your actual opinions on government and this financial mess, which is why I asked you to provide them. Once again, learn to read. Would you mind telling me your viewpoints?

Also, if you don't care, then I am going to read your asinine posts as trolls.

In conclusion, learn to read. Reading is good. Reading is fun. Reading is cool. Learn to read. Learn to read. Learn to read. Aprender a leer es vida.

Edit: Learn to read.

Hello, Kettle. Meet pot.

If you read my initial post the only thing I said was that the "clear" message Jonas referenced wasn't clear to me as an outsider, and that I felt '99%', as a slogan, didn't quite convey that message. I have no viewpoints to tell. In light of that, I'm not entirely sure why you responded at all other than the pure excitement of getting your jimmies rustled over imaginary internet fights.

This wasn't an issue of me misreading your sentiment, as you did with such audacity to mine. I was trying to do you a favor by understanding the lens you are approaching this subject matter from. When you said you didn't understand the 99%, I wanted to know what about it you didn't understand. Quite frankly, you are behaving like a petulant child. You aren't an idiot and you obviously have some sort of opinion on this matter. But, if you want your feelings to remain invisible then by all means don't share them.

I guess I will give you a couple lead in questions. Do you acknowledge a relationship between political influence and capital in the United States? Do you see the financial crises as an embodiment of failures of an economic-political system?

At least to me, the whole 99% vs. 1% has a lot to do with these questions. The protesters see horizontal impunity for so many of those involved in this financial crises and they are looking at the underlying causes that allow it to happen.

What? When I say government I mean people running the government. I'm not saying that the system of government is at fault. I've never said that. The system of government is, like capitalism, completely at the will of the politicians power to change literally anything.


Have not once argued this. I said that law is the government's notion of right and wrong. A citizen of a country has to abide by this whether they agree with it or not. Thus it is the standard for right or wrong. Obviously people are going to have their own principles, but when it comes down to it, if you live here, you agree to live by the same rules that everyone else agrees to live by.


I fervently disagree with this. You think "people" have the ability to make their own decisions because you have that ability. The reality is that 99% of the population needs help breathing. Read into this quote and use it as a cornerstone of your next argument since I obviously mean it literally and hold it as one of my few dear truths.


Hence law making it objective.

----------

And anything about lobbyists having power over politicians is just shitty politicians, aka a government problem.

I just want to point out you called me an asshole in the last two points, then finished the combo with chanting "learn to read".



And again, you're still not understanding my post no matter how adamantly you claim otherwise. So, I will elaborate on my personal stance a bit, because apparently you are totally unable to put aside your conservative witch hunt and listen to anything anyone says if you suspect them as such.

By in large, I identify with the protesters. I'm a moderate democrat and I come from a working class family. I agree that corporate influence in government should be extremely limited. I believe in government regulation. I think that moderate European socialism could possibly be a good thing for this country. What I dislike about the protests is that I feel their message is scattered and vague. I feel that the '99%' logans portray the wrong attitude about the protests. I feel that the people posting signs all over facebook to the tune of "my life is so hard, and it's all the 1%'s fault!" takes away from the powerful talking points. In short, I believe in most of what they are protesting, but I disagree with how the protesters approach it.

It isn't about people making ethical decisions, it is about people who want to keep their jobs doing what they were told to do. Did the people generating and selling Mortgage-Backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps know that they were probably going to collapse? If they weren't retarded then yeah, they did. But if they didn't sell them they would be fired and the company would just hire someone else to replace them. If the company itself refused to sell the mortgages, then they could not remain competitive in the industry and would risk going out of business or falling way behind in profit margins compared to their competitors. There was incentives leading the economy towards its own collapse. This is not the corporations' fault for following these incentives (I mean, really, do you really expect firms to give a shit about the hypothetical macroeconomic fallout of their decisions?), it is government's fault for not regulating the industry and allowing those incentives to exist in the first place.

Law is not the same as morality. There are unethical things that are legal (like adultery) and ethical things that are illegal (like contracts with no consideration). They often overlap because one of the policies in law is to prevent bad outcomes, and unethical behavior often results in bad outcomes. That overlap doesn't make them identical, however.



Unfortunately this is not true. There are a variety of psychological factors at play that prevent people from behaving as rational actors even most of the time. People are, for example, really really bad at evaluating risk. That's why you can make a whole career out of it if you can do it. Nevertheless, evaluating risk is absolutely essential to making rational choices.

****************************************************************


Bacon, I appreciate this position, but on the other hand it does seem to be working. It's hard to argue with results, and this movement is very clearly spreading, gaining support, and dominating the conversation. The tactics may not be what you or I would consider best, but that seems a fairly weak objection in the face of success.

i just want to point out as i have earlier on in the thread.. that the moment someone calls you names in an internet forum said writer calling names loses the opportunity to change the mind of the person they are calling names and will never *win* the argument with the person you are arguing with. This then causes the person being called a name to dig there heels in harder and at this point the writer is probably at best able to still hold the opinion of the readers. However they do run the risk of alienating the *friends* of the name called and then they will end up backed in a corner with others *defending*.

imho.. best to stay away from name calling if you are actually trying to change opinion or have any kind of srs discussion.

on topic

i am trying to get a mortgage atm.. and you would not believe the hoops you have to go through to get a measly 120k - bank statements for the last 4 months, pay slips for the last 4 months and a letter from my lawyer saying i have wherewithal...

seem though the mortgage lenders are self regulating atm .. how long it will last.. oh.. 10-15 years i believe is the cyclical nature of economy...

Lol. This is why I stand by my point. Arguing morality is like arguing which color is the best. I wouldn't consider adultery unethical at all, and I think it's totally fine that we disagree. That's why we have laws to tell us definitively who wins. Obviously Law =/= Only Existing Moral System, but it's the moral system the US government uses to judge it's citizens.


Unfortunately, no shit. Again, I'm obviously not saying that all people act perfectly in pursuit of their personal goals. I'm saying self-interest as the predominant motivation for action is both understandable and generally true.

The law is not a moral system at all, is my point. Oh, and arguing morality objectively is quite easy and common. Philosophers do it all the time.



If you can't predict which choice people will view as self-interested, what value is there in knowing that it's their motivation?

So which color is best?


Autopsy is almost as important as diagnosis.

Was the word "objectively" too long for you to finish?



Wow, that's pithy. I wonder if we do autopsies to help us diagnose in the future?

Was the word "color" too abstract for you to directly replace it with morality?

You do understand that if morality can be discussed objectively, and color cannot, then one cannot replace the other?

Yes, if morality could be discussed objectively, and color could not, one would not be able to replace the other.

-----------

Though, actually it doesn't matter if you disagree that "best color" can be objective. My comment asks you "which moral view is best?". Which is replacing color with morality. So they can replace each other in the sentence even if you don't believe the ideas are the same.