Hairnet

I have gone through most of that stuff. Honestly I could have written that when I was sixteen or seventeen. Misanthropy is bad for you. I have learned with proper boundaries and empathy skills, you can be on good terms with just about all your peer group. You should not be everybody's friend, but you can have meaningful interactions with most people as long as you keep a healthy distance and you genuinely want to learn about the experiences of others. You criticize people for going to clubs and drinking, but have you ever wondered why they make that such a big part of their life? Have you ever talked to anyone about these things and attempted to learn what it is that makes these things worth while to them? The variety of perspectives and ideas you might find in people you thought were shallow might surprise you. All I am asking is that you give people the benefit of the doubt. I would suggest completing high school, and getting into college. I used some of my student loan money to get Rosetta Stone for Spanish, and it is about a hundred times better than any Spanish teacher I had in high school. If you like Italian, you can pursue a degree in international relations or international business .

I don't want to speak for Nicky, but I am pretty sure that "we" means "you and I". Maybe it includes the people reading the posts. "We" is a pronoun, it isn't collectivist. Attacking Nicky for the rhetorical use of "we" is sad. You have basically stated that you don't care what other people think, and that you don't feel that you have to justify your beliefs to anyone else. This all fine and good, as you do not have any obligation to do so. However if you want to participate in a community like ours and be taken seriously when you propose ideas or criticize the ideas others, you really should think about being more persuasive. You are already well on your way to being relegated to "ignore this troll" status by the community. I also want to explain that a brain-mind is different than a computer in a fundamental way. There is a difference between knowledge and information. Computers are really good at storing and using information, where as they have no ability to use knowledge. The human brain can forget or corrupt information but it can produce knowledge. This is why we built computers, to compensate for our inability to handle vasts amounts of information.

I am hesitant to call this a victory for the right. How subsidized are these industries? Is this another bubble that is going to burst? (These aren't rhetorical questions)

I read him before I read Rand, so I take some inspiration from his craziness. Wikipedia says its a problem but they are gradually healing from that. Overall India wants to be part of the world, not some backwards joke.

These things take time. If I told a feudal lord from england that one day english speaking people will have a giant country in the west where they all vote for their leaders and there are no nobles, he would have called it a utopian fantasy. I never said that this would happen any time soon, it could take thousands of years. As I said earlier this was a theoretical point.

How could someone possibly be responsible for a "choice" that has no clear sign of which one is right? Also, how are decisions that one can be informed about not free? It seems like you are saying that only decisions that are entirely arbitrary are made freely. As I said earlier, you could say these same things about any proposed supernatural idea, why do you choose to believe in God and not in reincarnation?

When people refer to "small vs big government" they typically mean the percent of GDP that the government takes up. A government that takes up only a small ammount of GDP could exist on a planetary level yes.

Are you arguing that belief in "God" is good because the consequences for such belief are beneficial? This is such a crass form of pragmatism I didn't expect to ever see it.

I stand by my original post. I didn't say I wanted a world government made by the people of today. I also did not say anything about it being "big". I advocate a federal body that can manage police actions that need to take place across a large geographic region. Attacking this idea only results in an absurd sort of "anarchism" which claims that the police do not have the right to "invade" somone's house even if they are a wanted murderer. International law does not hold the individual rights at their foundation. If you want police actions that must take place across the globe to be based on rule of law rather than international treaty, planetary government is the final answer. This of course would have to happen in the far future, after the majority of states were already law abiding. The context of my post was theoretical from the get go and this should have gone without saying. Technological progress has happened despite the supposed irresponsbility of people you have never met, and despite the government which have made no effort to understand.

You are starting to be a major image problem for this forum. You made no attempt to understand the context of my post.

I think it would be very difficult for our leaders to declare a total war. The international community which can influence our economic propserity doesn't like the idea of us using nuclear weapons or declaring a total war on any country. My father was a Major in the US Army and was stationed in Korea for about 8 years out of his career. When I was fifteen I asked him "Why don't we just bomb them and get it over with?". He told me that they can't. China and South Korea "can't" handle taking in millions of poor and diseased refugees with no skills after a bombing like that. Essentially the leaders of those countries don't want to deal with the situation at all and attempt to stay in a holding pattern as long as possible. From what I understand reasoning like this is a big factor in deciding who we can and can not go to war with. Our leaders care about trade zones not freedom. @OP Whats wrong with Egypt? Considering that they are currently attempting to form a republic, I think they are a "watch and see" situation rather than a "bomb the hell out of them" situation.

It depends on what is technologically and economically viable. I think that a planetary government is desirable. If humans in the future decide to colonize the solar system, a unified government will be harder to accomplish due to the great distances an expenses. Federalism is also an important principle here.

  Why is this choice a special one? I could easily say by these principles that "My choice to believe in reincarnation is a personal one and we can harvest what we planted".

You made your point in the first argument. You should have nailed for essentially reasserting his original point twice-over.

Don't argue with random strangers who attack you as soon as you start to explain yourself. Someone like that decieved you into thinking you were going to have an exchange of ideas, but instead turned the conversation into a way to chastise you for your supposedly bad ideas. Those kinds of people deserve to be ignored and ridiculed .

Can edit provide evidence for the moral downfall of society, or how an excess of entitlement programs are causing major economic problems?

Do you have any evidence of this? Over all I would suspect that the US would be on the lower end of corruption, and somwhere in Africa or South East asia to be the worst. It sounds like you are using a definition of corruption that most people don't use. I think it is important to recognize that the vast majority of things you might consider corruption are expected of our politicians and are often argued to be for the greater good of society, That is, if there were no expectation for it, it would not exist. In other countries, the government is supposed to work one way, and then it behaves another due to a lack of honesty. However, our government works as intended.

Maybe we should be refrencing the hundreds of years of orthodox and catholic writings about Christianity?

  This is a strategy for obtaining a better society, but I think that you are overstating the case. I also think that a more ethical society would benefit us no matter what the political system was. Immoral and moral people advocate all sorts of political ideas. I have met scumbag libertarians and I have met centrists who hold more virtue than most people.

I am going to be charitable. Are you saying that selfishness is pursuing one's desires? Some desires are good and some are bad, ergo pursuing your own desires is an amoral concept?

What I am about to say is a pessimistic way of looking at things, but I would argue the following: You were forced to live. No one asked if you wanted to be born, and now you are most likely going to experience intense pain, madness and death. Now, you have the next eighty years or so to make it all worth it. The phrase "You only live once" is often used as an excuse to do something goofy at a party. However, when one examines the fact that they will only live once, the preciousness of their own existence becomes obvious, and the desire to waist it on petty things vanishes. So I ask myself at least, what makes the pain, suffering, senility, and death worth it? The answers to that don't include spending time around crazy people who I secretly despise. Just to make it clear, life is not just pain, suffering, senility, and death. In fact those can be very small parts of life if you are rational. If you are not rational, and spend time manipulating people, violating the rights of others, and just being and over all asshole, you will push the good out of life and bring in the bad. Ethics are for your benefit, for you to live your life. You can use game theory to imagine situations in which unethical actions may bring an advantage to someone. However this usually doesn't take into account the full context of an individuals existence.

    Sorry I need you to write your rejections to my point more clearly. I am not sure how to respond to your post. I think the sturdiness of the American system comes from the knowledge and philisophical discourse of the founding fathers, the fact that the system was a compromise between diverse business interests, ancient anglo-saxon and nordic traditions of oath swearing (contracts), and the fundemental honesty revered in english speaking countries. So in otherwords, we have a culture that favors honesty, doesn't like tyranny, wants people to obey their contracts, but also expects government and business to cooperate in the name of public interests. These expectations alone explain the behavior of our republic.

This kind of analysis really shows what is wrong with our system. Republics have always been plagued with businessmen and politicians using force to gain more money. Ancient republics were often ran by crime families that controlled everything. Our founding fathers understood the potential for chaos and tyranny in this because of what history had taught them and their experience with the constitutional monarchy of england, which a lot like a republic. America has a very sturdy system however. We have numerous devices to keep the govenrment safe from tyranny and corruption. I think that the main problem today is that people WANT business and politics to mix, and honestly every time we have had tyranny in this country it was because the people asked for it.

I don't remember the specifics of that story. He commited a rather petty crime. Its more akin to a parking violation than it is to armed robbery. There are legal things someone can do that are more reprehensible. I think that he would pay the fine given by the courts and the fee for the ticket , and then maybe write a letter of apology. After that he is in the clear by my book.

    Are you saying that OP may be suffering because he has not translated his thoughts into real action?