Nah, the whole deal is to achieve these goals -

Make people too stupid to care -
"To achieve - Deceive Deceive Deceive!"
"Look around you, this wonderful environment.. SO clean, and well maintained.. You don't need to know anything about that, just enjoy.."

Once people are stupid, raise the adults to raise the kids to be raised by me and my buddies. This way, I can oversee the success of my objectives, and have little to worry about from external influences on my population.

From there, use the people to make my life awesome.
(Also get the people to generate a huge database on themselves,
for everything from research to strategic planning.. That'll help
ensure that my kids will have all the information they need to learn what will make someone happy enough to do anything I want them to.)

Naturally, when a large group of people learns to survive by delegating responsibilities to anyone who'd have em (.gov being the primary - "I'll be your daddy!" personality out there...)
then you're going to get a lot of fail.

I mean, how is someone ever going to become more resourceful and intelligent if that person never actually does anything for himself?
The only things I really hear people griping about these days is having to drive a piece of paper across town, or wait in line..

Boy, what a HARD LIFE it must be, to never have to worry about freezing your ass off, or plowing 500 acres of land in 115 degree weather, but man.. How could ANYONE put up with waiting?



IT'S LIKE PLAYING AN RTS WITH REALLY CRAPPY AI.

Agree...

but, can I ask,

What could be done to bind political decision to the Community Welfare? as opposed to Corporate Welfare...?

Isn't this thing Cultural... ?

I mean, in China when a Politician is caught lying, well...

In Japan, ... he is given the right to "do it" to himself before the system "does it" to him...

Apart form nationalistic/cultural considerations, I will try to frame this question within a Game-Theoretical perspective :

Games can be Competitive, or Cooperative as defined by the works of John Nash Jr, Von Neumann and Stackleberg among others.

Within both these two classes, Games can be Information complete or Incomplete ( i.e. the "players have full access to the state of the System ( Ideal Market economy, Chess ) and act according to Rational Decisions, or they are eluded about the real state of the system, therefore hindering their capacity of making a rational decision, and as a consequence, to play "strategically" ( i.e. Information *IS POWER* ))

In a Competitive game, the *INDIVIDUAL* will strive to maximize its payoff function, given an initial information on the state of the system, and a set of actions he/she can perform ( Policies in Politics, moves in chess, etc ), if the game is Zero Sum, or Symmetric, the maximum expected payoff is bounded by the least admissible loss of the other part, and the minimum expected Payoff is bounded by the maximum admissible loss of the complementary. ( the so called MiniMax principle of Nash )

In a Cooperative Game ( as theorized by Stackleberg ) the Player is expected to maximize its return function, by closely binding to a Leader Policy ( Following the Leader, and therefore minimizing its " distance" from a purported objective imposed by the Leader, he who gets "closer" maximixes its payoff.

The sharing of Information is encouraged in Cooperative Games, although discouraged in competitive ones.

The convergence to a pre specified goal is accelerated in a cooperative game, and this convergence is global among the players ( although at different rates ), although noy monotonically increased in Competitive games.

I.E. Competitive games ( Individualistic ) do not strive for the welfare of the whole as its final goal; Cooperative ( collectivist to use a word I have read somewhere in this thread... ) Games tend to maximixe the aggregated utility of the *COLECTIVITY* ( i.e. Nation, Club, Village, and why not Mankind ...)

Given these FACTS, I will make a few questions :

What needs to be done to change the competitive nature of most ppl to a Cooperative one...?

as a Corollary to my first question, I will particularize the following :

Given that a Politician is supposed to rule for the sake of collective interest, sware upon some purportedy inquestionable value like a Constitution, blah, blah, blah...

What must be done to bind the Decison of a Policy maker (Judge of the Supreme Court, Corporate Manager, Politician, etc ) to maximize the utility available to EVERYONE ?

BRGDS

Alex


EDIT: Last but not the least, what must be done to acheive a complete cooperation between Nations in order to converge to a hypothetic "Nation Earth"...?

You see, IMHO living as we do in a Limited Environment should have enforced our ability to build partnerships of understanding and common management of scarce resources... ( although some people who defend individualism will completely disagree with my point of view... ) and in the long run, this would be more advantadgeous to everyone, including the defenders of individualism themselves...

But the first step to acheive this, passes through the establishment of a set of Abstract Principles to be respected ( the Spirit of the People, or the WolksGeist from LawMakers like Karl Von Savigny ) which would ultimately converge to a WeltGeist ( Spirit of the World )... and not the Material and Objective goals of Corporations, as ruled by the decision of the Supreme Court...

But I guess this is getting way off topic, and IMHO my phillosophical deambulations are hardly understood by anyone who does not have the same Ideas I have...

That's simple. Take the "career" out of the politician. Most of the problem stems from the need politicians have to get elected/re-elected. That takes HUGE great whacking quantities of cash. Individual donations are nowhere near enough, so politicians continually go hat in hand to corporations to get enough dough to keep being politicians. If they don't do their "donors" bidding, they don't get more cash and they don't get to keep their job. Now with the new SC decision, corporations don't actually have to fork out any cash to buy their politicians. They just have to threaten to bury the politicians under a sea of negative advertising.

So what can we do? Term limits doesn't do the trick because it doesn't address the need for the money to get elected. It also doesn't address the problem of politicians hopping from one position to the next. If you really want government to be aligned with the citizens, you need to scrap elections entirely and replace them with a draft. Everyone living in the country runs the risk of being drafted to serve in the government for some period of time. Contentious objectors can opt out and join the military.

Hi Hangdog42

This is an Interesting propopsition...

The Draft thing...

Deserves a deeper study...

BRGDS

Alex

LOL, and won't they be motivated.

I should think that in the age of the internet, it wouldn't be too hard to implement more democracy. Let people draft and vote laws directly rather than through representatives. Some won't bother but some don't bother now either. Some will make stupid choices but so do their representatives right now.

Many aspects of it are. But the bottom line is that all governments are corrupt.

Up to (but very much excluding) the current administration, the US culture (I think shared with the British) has been to permit the press to be as openly hostile to the government as they may from time to time choose to be. Most other countries exert more control over the press with things like the "fairness doctrine" (with advocates for more government deciding what is "fair") that the Democrats were recently trying to push here.

I am familiar with those stereotypes, but reading the major news from a distance doesn't give the impression that any of that is true of modern politics. Whatever does or doesn't cause apparently powerful people in China to suddenly be out of favor, scape goated for something, and executed, it certainly doesn't seem like "caught lying" has anything to do with it.

But there is a cultural difference of the US compared to past (I don't know about current) Japan that I think is relevant to this discussion. Two to three decades ago I had a number of occasions to have some visibility into the decision processes of a particular situation that occurs in business.
1) At some time in the past business X has cheated business Y in some manor for which the legal system provides no practical redress (often the lack of redress was caused by a corrupt judge). So X got away with it.
2) Later there is an opportunity for a mutually beneficial cooperation between the two businesses. The Japanese culture as I understood it was for Y to reject the new opportunity now matter how profitable it seemed, because accepting it sends a wrong message to anyone else considering cheating them. The US culture is to accept the new deal because the past is gone and the future isn't here yet and US businesses operate in the present. (I personally think US business culture has a serious flaw there).

It is relevant because of the same culture in liberal voters in the USA.

Because of the free and sometimes hostile press, a lot of misdeeds by politicians are exposed in the USA that would remain secret in most countries. If those politicians are liberals, those misdeeds are ignored by the voters. Liberal voters will vote for a liberal politician when they know (s)he has committed crimes and lied to them and betrayed those who trusted her/him in every situation. As long as the politician is correct on the issues, forget everything else.

The press is quick to accuse prominent Republicans of similar misdeeds. Sometime (Palin for example) it works despite there being nothing behind the accusations. Sometimes it fails because there was nothing there, creating the illusion from a distance that there is no cultural difference between liberal and conservative voters. But if you dig into each case, it becomes clear that conservative voters will drop any candidate when there is anything of substance behind the accusations, while liberal voters will stick with known criminals.

If you're willing to vote for criminals, you can be sure to get criminals.

So did you vote for Bush to serve a second term after we all found out that him and his henchmen lied through their teeth to invade Iraq? Or did you "drop" him like ALL good conservatives are supposed to?

Since we don't seem to share the same reality, I don't expect I can convince you of anything.

Remember that really big "lie" Bush told us that British intelligence had told the US administration about the Iraqi attempt to buy Yellow cake Uranium?

To a liberal, there is nothing other than sometimes the importance of the underlying issue distinguishing that "lie" from all the lies that liberal politicians were caught telling.

A conservative might notice a couple important differences that a liberal can never see.

1) Bush definitely wasn't lying! There is no debate that British intelligence made that report to the US administration and never repudiated it. What Bush said was literally true in the only straight forward interpretation of his words.

We know from long experience with both Clintons, that you can't say a Democrat was "lying" just because the the straight forward meaning of what (s)he said was something (s)he knew to be false. There often was some strange interpretation that no listener would think of, that makes the words true. Well, it turned out later that even after the strange interpretation of words it still wasn't true. But we were taught you need to rule out any strange interpretation before a Democrat's falsehood can be called a "lie".

I guess you want to apply the reverse to Republicans. The literal statements might be true, but if you disagree with the deeper intent you can call it a "lie".

2) After all the dust settled, it turns out Wilson was lying. The mission to Niger to investigate British claims was a fake. He made the trip but never did any investigation. The administration conspiracy to punish him was all a lie as well. His wife was not "outed" by the Whitehouse. The "secret" was "leaked" by other reporters and by someone in government who didn't even know it was secret. It could be leaked by such people because it was never really a secret.

As an informed reader of the news, the very first questions I wanted to ask when Wilson made his first claims about Bush's "lie" were: Why would the CIA assign this person (with a well established anti Bush agenda) to gather information relevant to Bush's "desire to invade Iraq". Whoever they assigned, why would they not have taken measures to require their investigator to report only to them and not independently release their findings? Then the news media told me Novak wouldn't have asked those same questions, but instead a government conspiracy forced the answers to those questions onto him (after other reporters refused to publish them).

So what did/do you believe about who was lying that time? Now that so much has become public about who told what to whom when, you need incredible blinders to still take the liberal view on that one. Whether you finally figured out you were on the wrong side that time (as very few of my liberal acquaintances have) but still believe every other accusation you ever heard against a Republican, or whether you even still believe in the conspiracy against Wilson, either view means you're not open enough to actual information to ever be convinced of the basic realities.

Quite right johnsfine.

Dear Dog!!
All I asked was if you voted for George Bush a second time!
A simple Yes/No answer would have sufficed, but instead you try to re-define the word "lie", which according to you can also be true (in the case of bush) just as long as the person telling them didn't know!

So as long as the president doesn't know he's being fed bullshit information, then he is blameless in the whole thing? As a leader he is responsible for the f-ups of those working under him.

Seriously, you need to grow up. Your black-and-white idea of "conservative" vs "liberal" is downright childish.

And even if I conceded to your warped idea of "truth", the intentions of your country became very clear soon after the invasion. Slow pace at restoring order and basic services to the Iraqi people while very quickly taking control over their oil wells indicates that economic exploitation was high up on the list of priorities, not dealing with a supposed WMD threat.

Yeah, when a "conservative" can do no wrong in your eyes it's very hard to take you seriously.

Nonsense:

You don't think that totally changes your question?

How am I trying to redefine "lie"? Bush gave true and correct information that he also believed, that happened to support a bad decision (that he honestly believed was good). Do you really want to redefine "lie" to make that a "lie"? Of course not. That could catch both sides. You seem to define "lie" as disagreeing with you. That's a much simpler and more understandable definition.

I never said he wasn't responsible. Those in the CIA giving him bad information were also responsible. But as leader, Bush is responsible for his mistakes. Mistakes are different from lies and crimes. Lies and crimes are very evident when you look at Clinton, Clinton, Obama or Reid or any of the other liberal demagogues currently running the USA. Unsupported accusations of crimes are all you can find on the other side, but I don't expect you to look below the surface.

My "warped" idea that saying things you honestly believe is telling the truth and saying things you know to be false is lying? !?

But that didn't happen!

We didn't take over their oil wells and we were even slower at helping their new government get anything resembling control of their oil wells than we were at helping them rebuild basic services. After the invasion, oil production largely stopped. It has been very slow coming back.

If you need to believe we're villains, you ought to notice we must be terribly incompetent villains.

Yeah, I know. Still, I do believe that a random sampling of Americans would actually do much better than the current pack of morons. Generally people take things like jury duty seriously, so I'm hoping they might take government service seriously. They certainly can't do any worse.

Been there and done that. See California. Their mess is largely caused by the fact that pretty much anyone can put a law up for referendum. The end result is that since people love spending money that's not theirs and hate spending money that is theirs, spending skyrockets and taxes are slashed. Statewide bankruptcy is the result.

I will concede that it was a "loaded" question, but it didn't change it. Did you vote for Bush's re-election?

Oh for crying out loud!
You expect me to believe for one moment that the Bush administration honestly and naively bought, without question, the fabricated "information" they were fed? Are they all brain-dead zombies with no critical thinking skills?
In 2001 both Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice state that Iraq is essentially crippled militarily and that the USA is capable of keeping them from developing WMDs.

Do you really expect me to believe that in 2 f-ing years Iraq was able to go from a washed out failure of a country with a pathetic excuse for a military to a nation devoted to acquiring WMDs at all costs?
And given the public statements that Powell and Rice made in 2001 (and at the time there was no excuse to invade), I assume they were backed up by reliable intelligence.
When planning to invade Iraq the very least that could have been done was to redouble efforts to verify all this very convenient information about Saddam trying to get his hands on uranium, specifically to avoid making a huge f-up!

This points to the Bush administration lying outright to the world about WMDs in Iraq and then having a convenient scapegoat (George Tenet) to take all the blame once everyone finds out that they have been duped.

Right, so Halliburton gets awarded contracts without public bidding (which by the way include access to iraqi oil wells), and Iraq's so-called democratic government is being pummeled to pass a law essentially allowing the majority of the country's oil fields to be snapped up by corporations (never mind the other "nice" changes you decided to make to their laws to benefit you while you are occupying them).

Plenty of corporations have made a killing (sorry for the pun) in Iraq off the backs of the government funded invasion and the thousands of dead soldiers. I'd say you aren't doing too bad.

Of course I did. There was no choice of Bush vs. someone good. There was a choice of Bush vs. someone worse.

No. I already commented on what I expect you to believe.

I don't think there is any point continuing arguing with you.