Share your life with me and I'll share my life-sustaining tools with you. Money is just one of them.



Like my heart.

You are mistaken. We are the collective shapers of both our ideals and our lives. The difference between them is up to us. We're just very slow to adapt from our old ways based on myths and superstitions.

I can't speak for anyone else, but every spare dollar I have buys me more BTC. I've been loving these 300 days.

Earth doesn't claim to own anything, nor does the universe, nor does any other known form of life. Only Homo Sapiens claim ownership, and only for around the last 5,000 years of our 100,000 year existence in our present genetic form.

We created this destructive concept out of convenience. Now is the time our species to mature beyond simple selfish convenience and embrace our role as planetary stewards.

1 BTC valued in what? If you want my valuation of bitcoin measured in fiat currency...

I'd say both men are confused about the reality of the relationship between temporary animals (which we Naked Primates are) and the relatively permanent Earth.

The civilized man operates under the very dangerous delusion that the Earth and its fruits belong to him, when in reality man belongs to the Earth. Until human civilization rids itself of this delusion, we will continue to destroy ourselves and everything around us.

"The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry, and what he eats is land."
-Chiksika, to Tecumseh





Yours with nature's righteous fury,

World Citizen Beliathon

Property is the First Theft - the creation of a state of non-equilibrium among men.

Capitalism concentrates the wealth of humanity in the same manner that gravity concentrates the matter of the universe. Larger bodies of wealth have more "financial gravity" -  they siphon wealth away from smaller bodies. This creates inequality, instability, crises, and eventually total collapse.

Private property also creates poverty. With poverty comes desperation and crime. With crime comes violence. So to answer your question, free trade breaks down into violence the moment a starving person tries to take an apple from a wealthy person, and force must be applied to prevent the Second Theft, nature's urge to return to equilibrium.

All things tend toward equilibrium and homeostasis. Capitalism creates a temporary state of non-equilibrium among men; thereby sewing the seeds of its own destruction. This imbalance cannot last forever, judging by present global circumstances I'd say ~300 years is already stretching the limits to the maximum.

So you see, property is cirime; capitalism is violence; hierarchy is chaos. All our instincts compel us back toward equality, compel us to feel empathy, repulse us from tolerating the starvation and suffering of our peers. Capitalism, my friends, is a damned, doomed, dying system.



All things based on myths and lies are mere shadows, and they will melt away when bathed in the light of the information age.

According to who? You? Property rights are a set of laws which arose from the cultural-economic traditions of the feudal era, much like inheritance. They're not "human rights".

This is as close as human rights get to property rights, and to you it will probably sound like dirty socialism:

"Economic, social and cultural rights are socio-economic human rights, such as the right to education, right to housing, right to adequate standard of living, right to health and the right to science and culture. Economic, social and cultural rights are recognised and protected in international and regional human rights instruments. Member states have a legal obligation to respect, protect and fulfil economic, social and cultural rights and are expected to take "progressive action" towards their fulfilment.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights recognises a number of economic, social and cultural rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) is the primary international legal source of economic, social and cultural rights. The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women recognises and protects many of the economic, social and cultural rights recognised in the ICESCR in relation to children and women. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination prohibits discrimination on the basis of racial or ethnic origin in relation to a number of economic, social and cultural rights. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also prohibits all discrimination on the basis of the disability including refusal of the reasonable accommodation relating to full enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic,_social_and_cultural_rights

Think about it. Just 200 years ago human beings were property (slaves), and in many places only white male adults could own property.

Why it's all around you of course. Even in your mind in the forms of fear, jealousy, and hatred. If you cannot see it by now, it is probably beyond my power to cure your blindness. You've been blind a very long time.

The most difficult part about discerning truth from falsehood, is that you must learn to unsee the false reality before you can see reality. You must first forget before you can remember.

Closing your eyes to the false reality is the first step, and because it's so terrifying most never take it. Except those of us who have been forced to by great suffering.

That capitalism necessitates systematic hierarchy-based violence is not a matter of opinion up for debate, it is a self-evident fact.

Saying "capitalism will always be with us" is the same as saying, "our world will always be governed primarily by violence". I don't believe that's true, not for one moment.

Dawn of agriculture -> storage of food -> competition for land/human labor -> slavery (we realize its unjust and end it)-> serfdom (we realize its unjust and end it) -> wage-slavery (we realize its unjust and end it) ->

It's not so much sarcasm as it is his writing style.

He's saying: those who want people to be controlled have good intentions, but they have misguided notions about humanity. And the best of intentions doesn't matter when you have bad information.

This man was a science fiction author, which is one of the reasons I chose to quote him. Let me share another Heinlein quote with you:

"I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that [b]the world does change[/b]. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea."

Now, bear that quote in mind while you read this:
 
"Before capitalism, there were other ways. Feudalism was what existed in Europe for a thousand years before we had modern capitalism. And before that, slavery - yet another system - another way of organizing who does the work and who gets the profits and so on. And the interesting thing is that every other system that we have a record of in the human race, was born, evolved over time, and eventually passed away. What always has intrigued me, is the need for those people living in capitalism today, to think it's going to be the great exception. It was born, basically in England 300 years ago, it has evolved over the last three centuries. But when you say, "yes, but that means it will also pass away and give rise to another system", people get all kinds of strange worries because they don't want to think about that.

And so they begin to imagine that this system [capitalism] will be forever, in a way no other system in history has proved itself to be."
-Dr. Richard Wolff

Sounds like a lack of reading comprehension to me. Read the last sentence aloud repeatedly until you understand the true message of the quote.

Hint: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

Is my company's private intranet a threat to the HTTP protocol?

No it is not.

Great post Genjix. To that I would add these:


"Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
-Robert A. Heinlein

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”
- Howard Zinn

"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg."
-Oscar Wilde

"I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn

I would also add President Dwight D. Eisenhower's exit speech from 1961, and John Steinbeck's Nobel prize acceptance speech from Stockholm, 1962

The answer is a definitive no. This is like asking if your company's private intranet is a threat to the HTTP protocol. It's laughable, really. The two are not even in the same league.

The "G" in BIG stands for "guarantee". Welfare is in no way guaranteed, and state governments make recipients jump through dozens of annoying hoops as a strategy for "thinning out" the number of needy folks they have to support. It's rather cruel.

Go to any foodstamps office in a major city and check out the lines. It's like the Great Depression all over again inside those places.  

Source: I have worked at a foodstamps office

This man is smarter than OP.

Yes, we should instead continue concentrating all the money into the hands of the wealthiest 0.5%, that's been working out great for us so far.