Selfishness and Society

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by greymare

oh crap

You should know that all our finest minds were sent to Australia!! All our finest criminal minds that is

Tao

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by greymare

oh crap

oh I do love to just sit and watch the intellectual cut and thrust

s.

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

So dont diss the scots!!

I was with you till you said "golf"

s.

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

I was with you till you said "golf"

s.

lol, if u ever lived with a scotswoman youl know why we invented golf. Any excuse to get out the hoose for a few hours

[seattlegal]

Originally Posted by greymare

yeah, ok Tao, you scots might have been the brainy ones, but you dont have a crocodile dundee or steve irwin, now do you???

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

Dundee and Irwin... lol...both Scots names

Originally Posted by greymare

oh crap

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

You should know that all our finest minds were sent to Australia!! All our finest criminal minds that is

Tao

ROFLMAO! Thanks for the great laugh!
(We just had a foehn wind come down off of the Olympic Mountains and everyone has been really grouchy around here!)

[Netti-Netti]

Originally Posted by seattlegal

So they can void the notion of individual rights and conscience, and that we must surrender our power as individuals to them. (All under the fear of 'mob mentality,' of course.)

Is it accurate to say that the aforementioned mob mentality is an informal, secondary or derivative aspect of the Nanny state or a more formal ideological component without which the Nanny state cannot function?

[greymare]

at least our men wear pants, not skirts

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

Sir Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was indeed a scot. As was Logie Baird, inventor of the television, and Alan Campbell-Swinton invented the cathode ray tube. And the first suggestion for the telegraph too appeared in a Scots magazine in 1753, though it would have to wait 47 years for the invention of the battery to be realised. Where would the space program be without tubular steel or tarmacadam? Both given to us all by scots. How many lives has penicillin or quinine saved?, thanks again to scots. The founding father of Sociology, Adam Ferguson, a Scot. Another Ferguson, patrick, gave the world the breech loading rifle. Or the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, founder of the US Navy, John Paul Jones, Paleobiology, William Nicol, Refrigeration, James Harrison, Radar, Sir Robin Watson-Watt, Paraffin, James Young, Logarithms, John Napier, Kelvin Scale, Lord Kelvin, Iron bridges, Lord Telford, Hypodermic syringes, golf, geosciences, cloning, fax machines, the decimal point, cure for scurvy, pneumatic tyres, colloid chemistry, brownian movement, bakelite, the bank of England, antisepsis, anasthetics and of course whisky....and more, all came from Scots. Where would America be without all of those? The Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh have for centuries been regarded as among the finest seats of learning and innovation in the world. Long before Harvard or Princetown were ever conceived. So dont diss the scots!!

Swallow hype? How many of these you just mentioned are Scottish *AMERICANS?* As for dissing Scots, not at all my friend, just putting into a proper context.

How often do Scots come to the aid of America or Americans? I am not asking about Scottish Americans aiding America, I am asking about Scotland. How much aid did Scotland send to assist in the cleanup of lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001? How many Scots came to aid the flooded districts in New Orleans? For that matter, how many countries sent any assistance, or even offered?

Nah. America is expected to aid everybody else. But when America takes a blow to the chin, so what? They deserved it. BOHICA. And I'm supposed to take that kind of attitude with a smile on my face? Now who's swallowed the hype?

[Paladin]

STARTREK.COM : Biography











i tried really really hard not to post this but my head started to hurt and the voices wouldn't leave me alone untill i did... sooooo.... okay

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

At the forefront, the sharp end, of all British Empire invasions were the Scots regiments.

Ah, so is this an admission that all of the atrocities done in the name of the British Empire were in point of fact by the physical hand of Scots? In other words, we should be blaming Scots for the atrocities of the British Empire? That is how it comes across to me. Of course, that creates a bit of a "pot and kettle" quandary then, doesn't it?

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

As for the US food aid you speak of, I know this.... I also know it usually is required a few years after they supply weapons to dictators. Very few humanitarian disasters have been unavoidable. And time after time US food aid has been used for political ends too. I hear often from Americans about this lie they are fed by their leaders, of their charity and giving. And as i state here again according to New Internationalist based on UN figures the net flow of wealth is to the US on a ratio of 8:1. So you can swallow the hype, still dont make it true.

You know, perhaps America got itself into a bit of a fix, but our infrastructure is built on internal cumbustion and variations of the automobile and freight trains. America is far too large for any practical mass transit outside of the larger metropolitan areas. Be that as it may, our government decided recently that it would be wise to begin investing into some form of alternative fuel to power those vehicles. Biofuel, made from maize/corn and other organic resources, resources grown here in America. Which means that corn normally used for food stuffs is being diverted to the fuel process. Up goes the price of American food. At the same time, oil supplies are extremely volitile, a big part of the reason for giving biofuel a try. Yes, I am aware of the part America's exploits in Iraq are doing to contribute to this volitility, but there are other world economic factors that play into it as well. As a result, Americans have higher fuel prices. Add in the mortgage meltdown from liberal financing policies, and the typical American family is being really put upon at this moment in time financially. So, who is bitchin' about the rise in food prices, and the diversion of grain from the food stocks? It is those we *give* the stuff too, because now we're in a bind ourselves and don't have it to send, they are bitchin' that we aren't sending enough. There are nations with their hands out blaming us because we don't *give* them what they want.

Piss on 'em. Let 'em grow their own. If they could.

It's not enough that I can't hold on to enough of my own earned money to keep my own head above water, I have to contribute to some inconsiderate and ungrateful pissant who *won't* grow his own food? Not can't, won't. And has the audacity to get pissed at me because I won't give to him, when I'm teetering on the edge of bankruptcy my own damn self? And some bleeding heart who isn't standing in my shoes is gonna tell me I've got a bad attitude, that I have "swallowed the hype?"

OK, sure, there needs to be a paradigm shift in how the world operates. Let's give the bleeding hearts what they want for a moment, just imagine. Take away all of the polluting industries and industries that use any non-renewable resources.

You just killed the planet.

But juan, you're talking out your nether regions! No, I am not. Take away the industry, you take away the paycheck, you take away the means to provide for and maintain the family unit. *If* you could find some way to replace industry with some idealistic but fantasy business that would be fine, but in order to get the things a person wants and / or needs *they must by definition* impact their environment. So, we all go back to growing our own, burning fires and cow pies to keep warm in the winter and cook our food. OOOOPS, that adds carbon to the air. Can't have that greenhouse gas. So freeze your buns off under three feet of snow, my lovelies. Then when your child catches pneumonia, take him/her to the nearest non-existent doctor. Non-existent? Well, yeah. Who's gonna go through all of the trouble and years of study to work miracles with nothing for no reward?
What are you gonna pay the doctor, chickens?

And on it goes...as the dominoes of modern society come tumbling down.

There are too many lilly livered liberal fantasies about living in harmony with the environment, blah blah blah. None of which take reality into consideration. All of them are idealistic soapbox daydreams without any viable solution to get to where they want to be. I hear a whole lot of demolition decriers, no builders among them (dreams of building the impossible do not count). To get to where the fantasies want to be requires a great deal of logisitical pain that is always foisted on someone else, the proverbial "them," usually the wealthy Americans. Which means the poor and middle class bread earners struggling to get by as it is.

Do I feel for those who didn't get enough to eat tonight in less fortunate countries. Of course, I'm not a hard hearted person. But I can't help but wonder how much of the *hype* is two-faced. Why don't these "poor, hungry" people feed themselves? Why don't they plant a garden, or glean a field, or harvest a forest? Or fish, or hunt, or otherwise develop and exploit their environment like our forebears have done for countless generations? Why all of the sudden, in the last few generations, are they dependent on my tax dollars to sustain them?

I just don't get it. And until I hear a *viable* alternative, I don't really even want to hear it from the soapbox standers who have lost touch with the reality on the ground.

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

lol, if u ever lived with a scotswoman youl know why we invented golf. Any excuse to get out the hoose for a few hours

Fair enough

s.

[Snoopy]

Should this thread be retitled Jingoism Free For All?

s.

[seattlegal]

Originally Posted by Netti-Netti

Is it accurate to say that the aforementioned mob mentality is an informal, secondary or derivative aspect of the Nanny state or a more formal ideological component without which the Nanny state cannot function?

Netti-Netti, I apologize for "speaking in riddles" here, but I think the following song lyrics expresses the struggle for power I'm trying to describe quite well:

UNDEROATH - WRAPPED AROUND YOUR FINGER LYRICS

Think about it in the context of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

[greymare]

i apologise for my low blow, Tao

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by greymare

i apologise for my low blow, Tao

lol...thats not a low blow!!..Wearing 'skirts' in this climate we have much thicker skin than that ;-)