Rysheed Jordan - Skills for Life

Thank you for your response. I am still not sure whether our differences are substantial. I will arrange my responses to address your thoughts according to those that are trivial to polemical to substantive.

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Very poor job with the quote function, just saying

Building my capacity ...

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I didn't mention it because it has a higher percentage of people living under the poverty line than the US and thus was not relevant. I hope you are not an antisemite, that would be unfortunate.

And I mentioned Israel because it was in 2014 the highest subsidized country by the US, and so in a similar boat as Germany and France in terms of their economic development and prospects. Obviously there is no relation to antisemitism. But since you ask, the persons who have provided the most inspiration to me to become a prolific researcher as well as to my world views are Dr. Norman Finkelstein and his mother, who was a Nazi Holocaust survivor and was in Majdanek concentration camp as well as the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Ironically he is labelled by some Jews both in Israel and elsewhere as a self-hating Jew.

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What I want to say is what I said. Capitalism does not cause crime, any more than it causes skin rashes: if it caused crime we'd all be criminals. Certainly capitalists commit crimes. Capitalists also perform acts of charity, but I'm guessing you wouldn't say that capitalism causes altruism.

What I'd say about colonialism is that certainly some of it was a crime against humanity - although I try not to condemn people for living in the times in which they were born - but that it is caused by natural human rapaciousness and venality. (That's what's so great about capitalism: it's based on the same things.) Territorial expansion was what people did; westerners just did it better than everyone else. Is there really a difference between the plague virus invading Egypt and Belgium invading the Congo, or is that just a biological imperative. Anyway, was Alexander the Great a capitalist? Napoleon? Caesar? Were the Apache - who invaded the American southwest and enslaved native peoples - capitalists? Were the Incas? Was Hitler? Stalin? If not does socialism cause crime? Or maybe it's wearing a toga that does it?

I believe in a way you are arguing for me when you are say capitalism is based on natural rapaciousness and venality - only the primitive human emotions. An economic system in which private property rights, individual profit and self-interest motive, concentration of capital and to what end and so on. Territorial expansion was not just because someone one day got up and said hey lets go f**k with people ... oh i see some Native Americans around who have lots of land and other natural resources so lets take it from them for the fun of it.

You yourself say that Capitalism has been the biggest engine of social change; i want to acknowledge the negative aspects as well. I will however concede that the market mechanism is agnostic and is not to blame for the vagaries of human greed. I complete understand the logic of the markets. But an economic system that incentivizes individual short-term gain over larger social benefits may at times lead to social problems such as crime in which people poach elephants or traffic humans for self gain.

On the flip side Capitalism does not cause altruism, however there is a budding literature on the economics of altruism, to understand what causes altruism. Rather our species is not just primitive emotions ... we developed empathy, love and compassion.

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I'm not a Darwinian: evolution is a crock. It's easier to believe that we're characters in a video game 10000 years in the future or the remnants of a neglected cosmic fish tank than it is that Beethoven's 7th Symphony was the result of spontaneous generation in lake of mud. I do not believe that we are as a species evolving into always better forms of homo sapiens, upward towards god, any more than I think that a bacteria that develops a resistance to penicillin is becoming a better more enlightened germ.

I will concede to that. I too do not think the word evolve is appropriate. we are changing in ways that are adding different dimensions to us while we are losing dimensions. I do not think that homo sapiens are at the top of any scale of superior species. Hope this makes sense.

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I don't know that I agree with all of that: a bakery that sold bread that killed people would not stay long in business. Of course I do agree that there is a need for law, because man needs the threat of punishment to keep him from exercising his normal base instincts and descending into vicious mindless depravity. Cavils about how that law is promulgated, enacted and enforced is a different argument: every time a law is passed citizens lose more of their liberty and the government accretes to itself more power. I want as much freedom as possible and do not trust the government at all.

It might take a while for people to understand the link to poison ... it might take some time for people to figure it out while the baker goes on murdering and take the money and run. Case in point asbestos, etc etc etc. I am not sure what the balance is between amount of law and amount of freedom. In the case of the decentralized market economy, if on a level playing field , it provides individuals with many freedoms to act and be. However, some institution will have to decide on the rules of the game, especially where public interest is involved, and for me, I trust a much much more devolved government ... akin to what Gandhi had in mind.

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A, the HDI was created by the UN, so it's somewhere between suspect and complete hooey and B, according to that index the US is the 8th happiest country in the world. I notice that it's behind Germany again, where 60 years ago they were shoving human beings into ovens and baking them like pop tarts. Nowadays half the German population thinks Auschwitz was a myth, which perhaps explains their self-satisfaction. .

HDI is not a measure of happiness but a broader measure of well-being. It is based on a concept that Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen developed (for whom the idea of maximum freedom is key), and the index was also developed another south asian economist Dr. Mahbub ul Haq (both inspirational to me). The 8th position is telling that an economy of 16trillion when we factor in health and education falls to number 8. Whereas Norway with an economy of .5 trillion is number 1. Germany is higher because they do better in health and education as well and invest in their people.

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I'm not going to argue about Zambia with someone living in Zambia. However, 76 percent of the Zambian population lives below the poverty level, the HDI ranks them 5th from the bottom on the happiness scale, and whatever economic successes they've had recently seem to be the result of (a) jettisoning their socialist economy and (b) aid from the world monetary fund. If that's true they seem to be embracing the free market rather than rejecting it.

Zambia is becoming more market oriented. What one has to keep in mind however is the baseline following the rape and pillage. Zambia only gained independence in 1964 and current poverty rate has come down to 60 percent in a short time but it is the figure of 42% in extreme poverty that is also heartening. Anyhow I am not Zambian nor live in Zambia. I am conducting economic research here on elephant poaching to determine the most effective way to address this crime

Building my capacity ...

I mentioned Israel because it was in 2014 the highest subsidized country by the US, and so in a similar boat as Germany and France in terms of their economic development and prospects. Obviously there is no relation to antisemitism.

I believe in a way you are arguing for me when you are say capitalism is based on natural rapaciousness and venality - only the primitive human emotions. An economic system in which private property rights, individual profit and self-interest motive, concentration of capital and to what end and so on. Territorial expansion was not just because someone one day got up and said hey lets go f**k with people ... oh i see some Native Americans around who have lots of land and other natural resources so lets take it from them for the fun of it.

You yourself say that Capitalism has been the biggest engine of social change; i want to acknowledge the negative aspects as well. I will however concede that the market mechanism is agnostic and is not to blame for the vagaries of human greed. I complete understand the logic of the markets. But an economic system that incentivizes individual short-term gain over larger social benefits may at times lead to social problems such as crime in which people poach elephants or traffic humans for self gain.

On the flip side Capitalism does not cause altruism, however there is a budding literature on the economics of altruism, to understand what causes altruism. Rather our species is not just primitive emotions ... we developed empathy, love and compassion.

It might take a while for people to understand the link to poison ... it might take some time for people to figure it out while the baker goes on murdering and take the money and run. Case in point asbestos, etc etc etc.

I am not sure what the balance is between amount of law and amount of freedom. In the case of the decentralized market economy, if on a level playing field , it provides individuals with many freedoms to act and be. However, some institution will have to decide on the rules of the game, especially where public interest is involved, and for me, I trust a much much more devolved government ... akin to what Gandhi had in mind.

HDI is not a measure of happiness but a broader measure of well-being. It is based on a concept that Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen developed (for whom the idea of maximum freedom is key), and the index was also developed another south asian economist Dr. Mahbub ul Haq (both inspirational to me). The 8th position is telling that an economy of 16trillion when we factor in health and education falls to number 8. Whereas Norway with an economy of .5 trillion is number 1. Germany is higher because they do better in health and education as well and invest in their people.

Zambia is becoming more market oriented. What one has to keep in mind however is the baseline following the rape and pillage. Zambia only gained independence in 1964 and current poverty rate has come down to 60 percent in a short time but it is the figure of 42% in extreme poverty that is also heartening. Anyhow I am not Zambian nor live in Zambia. I am conducting economic research here on elephant poaching to determine the most effective way to address this crime

Yeah well you're not doing a very good job. See how easy this is to read with just a slight bit of editing?

Okay, but Israel is irrelevant to a discussion of countries that have a lower poverty rate because it has a higher poverty rate. Antisemitism is a popular past time among progressives, who mask their distaste for The JEWS in terms of sympathy for the Palestinians and condemnations of Zionism. Whereas a lot of them just don't like Jews. I'm happy to believe that you're not a bigot but it was a strange thing to pull out of the air.

I'm certainly not arguing for you: I take you for a naif. You seem to think that man is perfectible, whereas human beings are the most pernicious species of vermin nature has ever suffered to crawl across the face of the earth.

I don't take your point about conquest. Territorial expansion happened for the same reason lions hunt gazelles. And yes I do believe that someone just woke up one day and said let's go kill them and take their stuff. Let's kill those people because they're a different color and let's kill those people because they have a different god and let's kill those people because their women are hotter than ours. The common theme is let's kill, not the free market. The Normans didn't invade England because they were capitalists, they did it because they were pirates.

Yes, capitalism isn't perfect. But capitalism doesn't make people kill elephants. Until recently most poached ivory ended up in China. Are the Chinese capitalists? The western slave trade in the main involved the Portuguese and Spanish crowns buying African captives from African monarchs to farm sugar cane for Iberian noblemen in Brazil. That had nothing to do with the free market.

Shurg. Chimpanzees are empathetic when it suits them and my dogs love me and my dogs are pretty primitive.

Poisoning people is both a crime and a tort. Only a sociopath poisons someone intentionally and doesn't think he's doing wrong. No one knew asbestos was poison. When they found out they stopped using it because the cost of continuing to use it outweighed the cost of finding a substitute. Certainly there are cases where cost benefit analysis contributed to human misery - exploding Ford Pintos for example or Bhopal. But those behaviors were already illegal and evil. Of course there are cases where the public good requires collective action. But in the US today everything is couched in terms of the public good and everything requires collective action. We are no longer citizens of a representative government, we are subjects of a repressive one.

In the first place, the difference between Germany and the US in 2014 was .01, 916 vs 915. So evidently they're not doing a whole hell of a lot of investing. In the second place Germans have an inflated GDP because there are 200,000 US soldier and dependents there who pump billions of capitalist dollars into the economy. By all means bring them home and let the Germans protect themselves from Putin and let's see how their economy fares. And in the third place US life expectancy suffers because of a high accident rate and crime, notably homicide and drug use, which are endemic to pathologies that result at least in part from flawed and faulty centrally planned government policies.

I'd give the elephants guns. A well armed population is a safe one.

No feelings of antisemitism here. But for me it is possible to separate criticisms of Israeli policies from any hatred for the religion. It is an economy propped up by heavy subsidies and it does not do a good job of poverty reduction unlike Germany in particular on which i shall explain below later.

I argue for diversity and expansion of human emotions beyond primitive emotions. Hey why not use them if we developed them. You say we do show charity and empathy ... can we broaden to those ideals? Or primitive emotions always win out? I do not believe so ... and neither do you.

For a system that is not perfect who seem to hold quite ideal views about it.

I have presented my analyses of the factors that can cause capitalism to generate crime. The structure and system of capitalism is unfortunately clogged by a species called homo sapiens sapiens. The system operates on a mechanism of incentives. And even in a system of devolved decision making, incentives can create crime, and if they do we should not be surprised if that happens. Marx wrote extensively on the tendencies of capital accumulation. Lenin later wrote about the imperative for imperialism.

For one thing you are making US sound almost as approaching fascism ... i wont write about the factors that constitute fascism but it might be dictator away.

Small pox infected blankets have been deliberately used in the age of merchant capitalism. 

You well know how to look at dat and you know well that my argument was about trends. So move on to table 2 -4 of the Human Development Report 2015.

Who is stagnating so that even Ireland moves ahead of US.

But specifically when you look at the trends you will see how investing in people for a country that was destroyed not only by Nazism and WWII has made such amazing strides. Of course the Marshall Plan had a lot to do with it but Germany want on its own way after some time. In particular look at the inequality adjusted HDI ... 

they said they were pacifists.

Will you two guys get a room already.

To the extent that the Israeli economy is less robust than the German one it's because Israel spends an obscene amount of money and time defending itself from anti semites who believe that it should not exist as a country and that its inhabitants should be murdered. To the extent that you compare Israel and Germany I assume you are being ironic, because without Auschwitz there would have been no need for Israel.

Please don't tell me what I believe. I live with an inner monologue that makes Pink Flamingos look like It's a Wonderful Life. I know exactly what I think about human beings and it's not that with a little aromatherapy and fewer transfats they'll all become charitable and empathetic. It's that the ones who shouldn't be hung should be flogged.

I am not under any illusions about the market. All I believe is that it's demonstrably less worse than everything else.

Look, say I agree capitalism causes crime. I do not believe that, I believe criminal behavior is endemic to the human condition and predates economics. But let's for shit and giggles say I agree that capitalism causes crime. Now, what else causes crime? Love, faith, truth, beauty, freedom, all those things. So what point exactly are you making? How about we start a campaign to disincentivize love and beauty, it'll lower the crime rate, whata you say, no more of that if I can't have her no one can stuff, whata you say.

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You throw out these facts like they are meaningful. Whereas this is just a non sequitur. It has as much impact as saying that non small pox infected blankets have been deliberately used to keep people warm. So what. Some frontier sociopath killed some injuns by giving them a fatal disease. So what. If there was nothing in it for him he wouldn't have done it? So what. No one does anything unless there's something in it for him, it just depends on which something the particular human being thinks is important. Jeffrey Dahmer didn't eat people because of Adam Smith, he ate people because he liked the way they tasted.

Sure I agree. But it is in my interest also to cooperate to make sure that instead of undermining people, we all gain if we do not steal from the poor.


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In the first place, Nazism did not destroy Germany. That's like saying alcoholism destroyed an alcoholic's liver. Whereas it was the booze. The Germans were all Nazis until they weren't and then they were all shocked shocked I tell you by what that zany Hitler guy was doing. In the second place had the US simply went home after Berlin fell everyone in Germany would now be speaking Russian. There would be no United Nations, there would be no adjusted HDI, there would be no Germany as it exists today and there would probably be no Europe. That there is has nothing to do with German investment and everything to do with US investment. 

Not quite and in some cases incorrect. I dont have time for detailed answer on this. Hitler was already undermining its economy through massive price controls and rationing of food since 1936 to feed the war investments but it meant that by 1947 food production feel by 51% and industrial output by 33%. On the issue of US investments, that is also a red herring, Marshall Plan aid to Germany was not that large. We are talking about only $2 billion through 1954. Even during its peak, this aid was less than 5% of thei rnational income. In other words, it was peanuts. Ironically the countries that received heavy/heavier aid grew slower than Germany. At the same time, Germany was already making repayments well in excess of $1 billion. And the most important one i think was paying off the Allies (thank you US) to the tune of $2.4 billion annually to pay for occupying Germany. The positive bit was that the lack of need for investments in defense and heavy investments in the country coupled with what Alan Greenspan writes about policy changes that were really the trigger behind the German revival.

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You sure they didn't say pachyderms?.

Actually i think i have come up with the answer on poaching and management of this National Park. Kick the state out or rather contract the state to leave on the condition that the communities own the national park; maintain biodiversity and management. Privatized it, continue to make tourism money and capture it through a community cooperative, and then see what the poacher get anything.

Just to be clear about the need for Israel, we both know the facts of history of the need for Israel goes back to 1891 with the advent of the term called Zionism

Some further facts were that Hitler initially wanted to banish the Jews from Germany so wasn’t completely hostile to the Zionist homeland idea. That’s why so many German Jews managed to survive after Hitler came to power by emigrating to Palestine.

If it means anything to you, I fully recognize the right of Israel to exist

However often the term anti-semite, peppered with a vague mention of the Nazi holocaust, is used to distract debate.

Finally your initial comments were how france and germany's listing ahead of US on poverty is best explained by heavy US investment.

You are entitled to your opinion.

I am not under any illusions about the market. All I believe is that it's demonstrably less worse than everything else.

Please present your facts.

Not quite and in some cases incorrect. I dont have time for detailed answer on this.

Hitler was already undermining its economy through massive price controls and rationing of food since 1936 to feed the war investments but it meant that by 1947 food production feel by 51% and industrial output by 33%.

On the issue of US investments, that is also a red herring, Marshall Plan aid to Germany was not that large. We are talking about only $2 billion through 1954. Even during its peak, this aid was less than 5% of thei rnational income. In other words, it was peanuts.

Ironically the countries that received heavy/heavier aid grew slower than Germany.

At the same time, Germany was already making repayments well in excess of $1 billion.

Actually i think i have come up with the answer on poaching and management of this National Park. Kick the state out [and ] Privatized it. 

Please don't tell me what I believe. I live with an inner monologue that makes Pink Flamingos look like It's a Wonderful Life.

Foad, if you aren't careful I might write you in instead of Johnson come November.

The need for Israel stems from the fact that every country in Europe went about systematically ghettoizing and murdering Jews over about a 1000 year period - all except Ireland, because as Joyce put it, they never let them in in the first place.

Auschwitz was meant as a euphemism for that: pogroms, ghettos, and deportation. Auschwitz wasn't even a murder camp, it was a work camp. The extermination camp in Oswiecim Poland was called Birkenau. And the concentration camp system started at Dachau, in the early 30s. Other than that you make some salient points.

Yeah, "so many" Juden made out great during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, excellent point. If only Hitler had been more efficient the poor Palestinians would be home by now.

Congratulations. Who else do you think shouldn't be murdered besides THE JEWS. Make a list. Be specific.

It's also used to describe someone who has a problem with THE JEWS, which I'm starting to think I was right about you three posts ago.

Yeah, that's not what I said at all. What I said was "Countries like Norway and France ... would be no where as prosperous as they are if the US had not spent trillions protecting them from Slavic depredation." Meaning bankrolling NATO. Have we moved on to the part of the discussion where you paraphrase what I said incorrectly and then refute it? Because they have a word for that.

So THE JEWS are entitled to not be murdered and I am entitled to have an opinion about why they were. That is very magnanimous of you, thanks.

Yes, my facts. Let's see. You're worried about capitalism killing elephants and you ask for facts about socialism being worse. Okey dokey, here are some facts: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot killed 100 million people in the name of socialism. I'm not sure how many elephants they murdered, so that might not impress you, but I find it somewhat compelling.

Okay, well I don't have time to read your supposition and half formed thoughts. Hence I have <hosed> them.

Wait you mean after Allied bombing completely destroyed Germany's infrastructure and the Allies seized their country and all their assets and put them under military rule food production and industrial output fell? Gosh, who would have thunk it and who would have thunk to blame it on Nazi price controls. 

In the first place two billion in 1954 is 20 billion today, which is 7 times the amount of US aid that goes to THE JEWS you keep mentioning. In the second place, US aid to Europe between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall comprised trillions of dollars spent on defense, to which trillions Norway and Switzerland and Germany and the majority of eurotrash countries contributed a piddling amount. Which had they spent a commensurate amount on defending themselves they wouldn't have had it for "investing in their people," whatever the hell that pollyanism means.

If 2 billion is "peanuts," what kind of nuts is one billion.

So your final solution to the murder of elephants is capitalism and small government? Why didn't I think of that.

I hope you are better whatever it is you do

Philly Inquirer – Verified account ‏@PhillyInquirer

Judge won't lower bail for aspiring basketball star charged in shooting, attempted robbery.  http://bit.ly/1XseKXB 

I met Fr. Rock on a Butler road trip this winter, he's terrific. It speaks volumes to see him by Sheed's side during this process. I find it very interesting that the trail is being forwarded to a private indicting grand jury. Ploy? The new wrinkle explaining that Sheed ran into the rec center to hide the smoking gun in a 13 year old's backpack absolutely ruins his plea that he's  a role model for the younger generation in the community. The evidence is overwhelming and the court isn't budging on the bail, sad stuff.

Quote from: Ez_Uzi on June 17, 2016, 10:44:14 AM

I hope you are better whatever it is you do

Three days ago you were sucking my dick, today you're complaining about the taste and bragging about your college degree. What happened in the interim, oh that's right, you spent it with my boot in your ass. Bye now stupid, say hi to the elephants.

<remainder hosed>

As expected Mr. Dershowitz

it's not my fault I'm an antisemite.

Of course not, it's the Jews fault. Everything is.[\quote]

<shmata>