At 11:37 5/10/99 +0200, Martin William Smith wrote:

>You advocate taking anti-depressants to mask the symptoms of the
>stress caused by doing demeaning work?  Or have I misrepresented what
>you said again?  Aren't you suggesting that people who don't have
>privileged jobs should take anti-depressants to lessen that stress?
>Marie Antoinette lost her head for saying basically the same thing.

Sorry - that was meant to be flippant.  Email doesn't communicate such
things effectively.

>There is no implication in what I said.  I do clean up after myself.
>I clean my own toilet.  I am not employed as a toilet cleaner.  I
>wouldn't want the job because I don't like doing it.  I don't like
>doing it because it is smelly.  I don't want to eat limburger cheese
>either.  I don't want to eat limburger cheese because it is smelly.  I
>don't consider eating limburger cheese to be demeaning.

Yet if you were forced to eat limburger cheese, because it was determined
that you had no better skill to benefit society, would you not find that
demeaning?  Because, let's face it, I don't think a career in "sanitation
engineering" is exactly the dream job of all that many people.

>In that case, my problem is to find a place to live.  The landlord's
>greed is his problem.  I think this came up because you alluded to
>the apparent contradiction between your willingness to pay rent to a
>property owner and your belief that property ownership is wrong.  I
>have forgotten the context in which this point was made.

It did, but I'd suggest that an individual's greed is a societal problem,
because that greed will impact on others.  Greedy people wish to increase
their wealth, which tends to be at the direct expense of others.

>I agree.  That is why I argue that activists should support the
>process of covering the world with western-style capitalism and
>democracy.  The western-style capitalist democracies advocate
>western-style capitalism and democracy for the whole world.

In part I agree with where you're going - however, I could not bring myself
to advocate this, because of the horrible short and medium term losses of
life and liberty that this would entail.  It's a given that we already have
enough food being produced to feed everyone in the world (1.5 times the
amount, from what I've been told).  We also have the resources to be able
to construct shelter, which is just as important.  So I'd rather see that
done immediately, as opposed to in a few hundred years time.

>All true.  I'm not arguing that activists should become fascists, and
>I'm not arguing they should stop protesting things like environmental
>destruction and human rights issues.  I'm arguing that they should not
>organize to stop the spread of western-style capitalism and democracy,
>because as soon as any such movement becomes big enough to be a real
>threat, it will become the enemy, and it will be deja vu all over
>again.



>The support I am referring to is not the kind of support you are
>referring to.  I am referring to what happened when the "Asian
>Contagion" began, and the economies in the far east collapsed.
>Whats-his-name George Sorros was accused by (was it Suharto or
>Mahatier?) of manipulating the currency.  He may well have been
>manipulating the currency for all I know, but the western governments
>and the IMF, etc all demanded that these countries must play by
>wester-style capitalist rules.  When they resisted, western-style
>capitalist support dried up, a political crisis ensued, and Suharto
>and his family were removed from the A list.  I call that support from
>western elite.

I'm not entirely sure that it happened in this way.  Mahatir Mohammed from
Malaysia was the one who imposed restrictions on capital.  It seems to have
helped Malaysia weather the capitalist crisis better than some of its
neighbours, but I'm far from up-to-date with the intricacies of the
Malaysian economy.  Suharto did very little except continue to steal from
everybody he could, and so when the Indonesian economy went pop a lot of
workers found themselves in trouble.

>That's all true, but those people did not protest against the sucking
>up.  Again I don't have the context of my "I doubt it" remark, but
>protesting in favor of sending in troops to stop a bloodbath is not a
>futile protest as I have tried to explain that term.  I am not arguing
>that there should be no protests.

I'm beginning to understand what you define "futile" and what you don't.

>I don't have any objection.  You aren't justifying your actions on
>moral grounds.

It's not possible to justify those actions on moral grounds *alone*, but to
some extent I would claim morality for them.

>I think the bullet-proof arguments will become apparent when
>western-style capitalism and democracy have spread everywhere.

Do you imagine that you and I would agree on such arguments?

>I think Kofi Annan came close to actually starting the process when he
>threatened to throw the US out if it didn't pay up.  All it will take
>is for a significant number of powerful nations to realize (according
>to western-style capitalist and democratic principles) that there is
>nothing preventing them from starting a new UN, with or without the
>US.  In poker it's called calling the bluff.

It'd be fun to watch.  I'd hate to think of what the US would do - it seems
like a very strange place sometimes.

Alister