>>37
I don't think there was really a market for pornography in Europe, except perhaps in the larger cities and among the wealthy who had more leisure time. There was, however, still prostitution.
I'm not sure when the catholic church actually tortured and burned people just for doing those things. They usually reserved that for "heretics"
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Anonymous2009-10-20 13:47
What else wasn't a problem in the Middle Ages? Unemployment. Sure a lot of serfs had crappy conditions but at least they had work and food.
What else did we have in the Middle Ages? Geocentrism, young Earth creationism, flat earth theory, hollow earth theory, and phlogiston theory.
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Anonymous2009-10-20 23:52
>>45 What's wrong with those things? All the word science means is the "branch of systematic study especially of the physical world." What makes the left wing study more valid than the right wing or any other study that confesses the truth about God?
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Anonymous2009-10-21 1:02
The truth that god was invented by humans to allay fear of the unknown, and was later co-opted by the unscrupulous to control people.
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Anonymous2009-10-21 9:30
>>47
>HURF DURF PPL FEARZ TEH UNKNOWN
Cool cliche, tool. How about coming up with a realistic world view and actual reasons?
What system do you propose that could work better than the free market? Socialism perhaps? Got news for you: it's what we currently have and it's failing us, miserably. We haven't been a true capitalist nation in a very long time.
>>39
Altruism is neither good nor evil. However many of the greatest evils of human history were only possible because of altruism.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 0:40
>>52 Pure laissez-faire capitalism is what caused the Great Depression.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 0:40
>>53 Government intervention is what caused inflation in the Weimar Republic.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 4:24
>>53
An erroneous oversimplification. The current market, relative to the early 20th c., is highly regulated yet an economic depression as serious remains a possibility. This is the kind of shit people are programmed to say by our greedy oligarchs. It makes the people saying it feel like they're educated. The irony, of course, is that the people who say it usually believe that they are "liberal", when the truth is they're still wedded to the massive and frighteningly unstable fiction we call the Free Market. It's a system who's time should have come to an end 40 years ago, but our technologies have been twisted into a propaganda machine that few have the power to understand or resist. Back in the 60's Neil Postman argued that we should be teaching media ecology instead of english because as modern technological humans our primary, bla bla bla... If you don't know who Postman was, or Marshall Mcluhan, look 'em up. Anyway, we've been sold a bill of goods. Literally. And until we can break out of our intellectual conditioning, the next step forward will continue to elude us. Which brings me to... >>52
The simple answer. An end to the ridiculous, idea that they can't co-exist. Forcing an entire group of people(a Nation) to employ only one is the source of the trouble. It's clear that in today's political paradigm people choose the conservative "fuck off and leave me alone" side, or the liberal "let's all work together", and together attempt to create systems that are a balance between the two. This not only doesn't work, leaving us all sitting on the proverbial fence, but it breeds hypocrisy, the true hallmark of contemporary America(USA). The simple answer? End the hypocrisy. If you want to be left alone, so be it. It is a new age. You will be provided with land, and connectivity. The rest is on you and whatever relationship you develop with your neighbors, Bubba. And as for you socialists, come on along. We're gonna do some science, support ourselves, and protect the free people. And you're gonna do what you're told. You can't have it both ways.
This is obviously not a constitution. It's a starting point. Constituting the system described will be a bit more tricky, but we could do it, if we had the balls. If we had the integrity. Which brings me to >>48 and >>50
There's your realism and reasons, you ignorant little troll'y' cunt.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 13:25
>>54
It was more like if they had actually paid the reparations they would finish somewhere in the 1980s
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Anonymous2009-10-22 15:13
pure free market capitalism is just as stupid an economic ideology to try to use as communism
both make ridiculous assumptions about the nature of humans and thus have enormous holes that get exploited by the greedy or the immoral
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Anonymous2009-10-22 16:24
The same rednecks who overly support free trade are poor and unemployed because of it. Way to go!
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Anonymous2009-10-22 16:26
I finished reading a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Austrian school economist Robert P. Murphy and it's full of crap.
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Anonymous2009-10-22 16:29
Economics has been subject to criticism that it relies on unrealistic, unverifiable, or highly simplified assumptions, in some cases because these assumptions lend themselves to elegant mathematics. Examples include perfect information, profit maximization and rational choices. Some contemporary economic theory has focused on addressing these problems through the emerging subdisciplines of information economics, behavioral economics, and complexity economics, with Geoffrey Hodgson forecasting a major shift in the mainstream approach to economics. Nevertheless, prominent mainstream economists such as Keynes and Joskow, along with heterodox economists, have observed that much of economics is conceptual rather than quantitative, and difficult to model and formalize quantitatively. In a discussion on oligopoly research, Paul Joskow pointed out in 1975 that in practice, serious students of actual economies tended to use "informal models" based upon qualitative factors specific to particular industries. Joskow had a strong feeling that the important work in oligopoly was done through informal observations while formal models were "trotted out ex post". He argued that formal models were largely not important in the empirical work, either, and that the fundamental factor behind the theory of the firm, behavior, was neglected.
Despite these concerns, mainstream graduate programs have become increasingly technical and mathematical. Although much of the most groundbreaking economic research in history involved concepts rather than math, today it is nearly impossible to publish a non-mathematical paper in top economic journals. Disillusionment on the part of some students with the abstract and technical focus of economics led to the post-autistic economics movement, which began in France in 2000.
David Colander, an advocate of complexity economics, has also commented critically on the mathematical methods of economics, which he associates with the MIT approach to economics, as opposed to the Chicago approach (although he also states that the Chicago school can no longer be called intuitive). He believes that the policy recommendations following from Chicago's intuitive approach had something to do with the decline of intuitive economics. He notes that he has encountered colleagues who have outright refused to discuss interesting economics without a formal model, and he believes that the models can sometimes restrict intuition. More recently, however, he has written that heterodox economics, which generally takes a more intuitive approach, needs to ally with mathematicians and become more mathematical. "Mainstream economics is a formal modeling field", he writes, and what is needed is not less math but higher levels of math. He notes that some of the topics highlighted by heterodox economists, such as the importance of institutions or uncertainty, are now being studied in the mainstream through mathematical models without mention of the work done by the heterodox economists. New institutional economics, for example, examines institutions mathematically without much relation to the largely heterodox field of institutional economics.
In his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, Friedrich Hayek, known for his close association to the heterodox school of Austrian economics, attributed policy failures in economic advising to an uncritical and unscientific propensity to imitate mathematical procedures used in the physical sciences. He argued that even much-studied economic phenomena, such as labor-market unemployment, are inherently more complex than their counterparts in the physical sciences where such methods were earlier formed. Similarly, theory and data are often very imprecise and lend themselves only to the direction of a change needed, not its size. In part because of criticism, economics has undergone a thorough cumulative formalization and elaboration of concepts and methods since the 1940s, some of which have been toward application of the hypothetico-deductive method to explain real-world phenomena.
Witches all, and we all know what should be done with witches.
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Anonymous2009-10-24 15:23
>>52 However many of the greatest evils of human history were only possible because of altruism.
What? Name some for me.
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Anonymous2009-10-25 6:06
>>66
Communism. Thugs like Stalin could only have risen to power on a wave of good intentioned fanatical utopian idealism.
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Anonymous2009-10-25 8:42
>>67 Thugs like Stalin could only have risen to power on a wave of good intentioned fanatical utopian idealism
Yeah but Trotsky was a generous man
I mean... a SHELFISH man (sorry) http://www.mailstar.net/stalin-purges.html
"By extension, one owns any product of one's life. Be it an idea, materials harvested through our own efforts, refining of such a material or assembly of components to make a whole. This is all good. At any stage in the process, value is added."
this would include the children. Do you OWN your children? Can you as a human being OWN a other human? Can a Potato OWN a other potato?
>>78
Or a mathematician. Actually all scientists deal in absolutes. If it cannot be defined in absolutes, it unscientific and suspect.
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Anonymous2009-10-31 14:36
>>78>>79 good luck defining ethics using the scientific method. At best it's a philosophical argument like Descartes' one that god exists because it can be described.
At worst it's Objectivism, which ethics consist of whatever Miss Rand says this week.