New Mars Forums

More or less, neoliberalism.

What I'm saying is that what we need to do is reverse the very worrisome trend that has appeared over the last thirty years or so, and keep improving our standard of living. What is happening now is that the standard of living of a tiny minority is increasing very rapidly, while for most it is actually declining, if this is measured by real hourly wages.

It used to be the case that what you were saying was correct, the rich would get richer and poor would get richer. That is roughly the situation in America from WWII to the mid 1970s.

Technology has certainly kept on advancing since that time, and it isn't known, if the current trends keep up, when it will begin to really stagnate. But barring some extreme development, if these trends continue, it must do so at some point. It may well be that these trends will turn around well before that point is reached; but the political realities driving them are still going strong, and looking to get even worse. Perhaps we will find some amazing new technology which will reverse these trends even despite the political situation. IT has been widely praised as such a technology, although it clearly has not had an effect even approaching what would be necessary.

But it is perhaps more likely that given the political realities of our time (do you think that a manned mission to Mars is so likely now?) and the present feelings of the masses, we will have to reverse these trends without such technology if we ever plan on having it.

It seems to me that it would be a great pity to destroy such unique places when one can engineer forms of consciousness which would thrive in the unmodified enviornment.

Well, by relevancy I mean in a position to explore things that consciousness has not already explored, or do things, etc. To be on the cutting edge, so to speak.

One might note that humans are now the 'relevant' species on this planet, that position no longer being held by apes, who do dwell in their place. I think any future post humans will probably exceed present humans on a similar scale.

I suggest curious readers google 'transhumanism'.

It occurs to me that the chief reason for the apparent unpopularity of large space initiatives at the present time is that people are afraid for their material security. Per hour wages in the US have been mostly falling since the late 1970s. The healthcare system is the most inefficient in the industrialized world, and the only one that leaves substantial portions of the population without coverage. Unions have been crushed, with workplace organization dropping by about two thirds since WWII. Organization in the non-public sectors is back to pre-New Deal levels. Meanwhile 1% of the population owns 40% of the wealth, up from 20% a quarter century or so ago.

People will be less timid about sacrificing money to what are percieved as hugely expensive ventures if they are not forced to live in constant fear by an oppressive system.

I think with regards to Bush's plan, this article is worth looking at:

[http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, … 37,00.html]http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, … 37,00.html

I think McCurdy is, at least, worth paying some attention.

prome is right regarding the people in our society. It is basically governed, in the final sense, by a small "core" of individuals. When only 50% of the electorate even votes, much less has a deep committment to some kind of political ideal, there is something definitely wrong with the society. What would a really democratic society look like? Well, the most democratic modern forms that I've ever heard of are the Israeli kibbutzim. In most of those, you had about half of the relevant electorate show up for voting on every issue. That's very interesting, and I think this kind of real democracy is something we should strive towards.

You're also right to say that there isn't a clear line between government and business. That's because the more wealth a person accumulates, the more they inevitably tend to infringe on the liberty of other people. That's just inherent to the concept of having a small few make the decisions about wealth that affects a much greater many. Those few by definition have the power in the society. Mussolini actually said "Fascism may as well be called corporatism because it represents the merger of state and corporate power". He was right.

Anyway, regarding anarchism, as far as I understand it, anarchism is the idea that you can reach a state in society where there isn't a need for an organization which keeps people from hurting eachother, because people have no impluse to do that. It's definitely true that, at least in some places, a society like that is attainable. We know this because it has been attained ; there have been small communities where people lived communally and there was essentially no crime. Everybody knew eachother and everybody was basically friendly and human toward eachother. Whether this can be attained without grouping people into small communities is unknown ; I don't know if it has ever been done before. There are basic structures that we assume would have to put in place to allow that to occur, and there are some instances that I know of where such structures were put into place, like in some parts of Spain in 1936, in the big cities even. They were basically egalitarian arrangements. However, given that this experiment in egalitarianism was destroyed with help from all the major world powers (USSR, Nazi Germany, USA) it isn't really possible to say, as far as I can see, with too much certainty what the "final" outcome would have been had the experiment been given a decade or so to mature. There are others, too, though that's probably the best one.

Whatever the outcome, I think it is pretty much certain to make a better world if we get rid of totalitarian arrangements in society, like the ones that exist inside corporations, and replace them with free, democratic ones.

In my view, any attempt to predict the future on an issue like this is a futile endevour. The idea of a "succession of empires" breaks down to mean simply that one empire died out and after a while another one arose, etc. That's not a pattern, any more than throwing random dice and then finding that your dice doesn't always give the same number is a pattern. In economics people like to play wizard too. So you'll see stuff about 50 year "Kondratieff cycles" in which global growth rises and falls. They just pick the model to fit the data. When the data no longer fits they just pick another model. Etc. It's all fraud, ultimately.

On a side note, our "liberation" of the Afghan people has left more poverty, chaos and destruction than beforehand. The "government" of Afghanistan controls little more than the capital city of the country. The rest is ruled by warlords, drug trafficers and other nice guys.

In Iraq it is difficult to predict what the situation will ultimately turn out like. There are many factors to consider. However I think we can be sure that if US hegemony is continued, then the wealth of the country will flow one way or another to the US and its British client. The Iraqis are already beginning a gurriella war against the invaders, with unknown consequences in the long run.

Finally we might note that the recent invasions and atrocities by the US probably to some extent derive from the fact that US hegemony over the rest of the world had slowly been decreasing formely. In part, I think this is a desperate attempt to reverse the trend.

If we were gods and knew everything, then it would be ok to say to someone "You are not doing what you should be doing, therefore you will starve". However, in the real world, we are not gods, and for someone to starve because they are not obeying the orders of someone else is intolerable. Perhaps the person is right in what they are doing ; it could be. Why should they be forced to obey another?

And lest you reply with something like "but they must also support themselves", it ought to be noted that many people do things for a living which have no clear role in furthering human survival. If everyone grew what they ate, and built their own houses, and wrote their own books and so on, the situation would be rather different.

Furthermore, since in our society most of the relevant wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small elite (1% of the US population owns 40% of the wealth, though the share of wealth which they control that is relevant to employment, ie in the form of enterprises, is doubtless much higher) they end up commanding everyone else in exchange for survival, hardly a just arrangement.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is not something I know too much about, but looking over this post I do want to say a few words regarding the West and the Middle East. The West has consistently engaged in imperial actions there, to further its own profit. It is pretty clear to me just from the basic outlines of the situation that support for Israel is just part of this basic imperial style. Israel is clearly the party which is acting most tyrannically in the conflict, because Israel is occupying territory in violation of international law and UN resolutions, and is attempting a policy of ethnic cleansing and colonization by using terror to gradually excorcise the Palestinians from the region. Some Israelis on the right talk openly about "transfer", that is, forcibly removing the Palestinians as a bloc from the land that Israel has conquered. The situation resembles in some ways the US colonization of the Western US and the genocide which was a part of it. Any discussion about atrocities committed by Palestinians must be understood in this imperial framework. Israel is by far the most powerful country, and indeed, as Clark has noted, it is capable of much more destruction than it has already perpetrated, including that of the nuclear type. If the Arab countries ever banded together and launched a successful invasion of Israel, Israel would doubtless launch nuclear weapons, with devestating effects on the region. This situation alone, forgetting all the other ones, makes a complete mockery of any US concern for "weapons of mass destruction". The US supports Israel to the tune of $3 billion per year, over a third of the US foreign aid budget.

We know Iraq had WMD more than a decade ago (we supplied some of it), but they claimed they destroyed it after Gulf War I and there is no evidence anybody has ever found which refutes this claim. Anyway numerous sources have stated that even if they didn't destroy it, the vast majority of it would have degraded by now.

As for Bush, they may "fool themselves", in the same way that Hitler "fooled himself" when he invaded Poland, but given that the "fooling" was done with a total lack of evidence (in Bush's case, evidence that Iraq had WMD and was about to attack the US, in Hitler's, that Poland was about to attack Germany) and with very clear external motives...