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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Right now, the people defining the problems (to them) and the solutions (in their favor) are TPTB. The rest of us are left squabbling and bickering over trivia.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Well, IMHO, we need more (at this point) that simply not burning each other's churches down. The de-industrialization and rampant financialism are serious problems that are biting us in the butt now, and will bite very hard if/when the USA dollar loses its value. Because right now, we're buying everything from abroad.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Other problems I would put in the "important" category are environmental- the collapse of fish stocks (needs international attention), loss of biodiversity, global climate shift, degradation of internal natural resources. We can't have a healthy economy on an unhealthy resource base - look at China, they tried it and see how well it's working for them!

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Doesn't always necessarily have to be about only money. Except Americans can't imagine any other reason to work on a problem.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So... American values are about profit/pillage, hegemony, and genocide?

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So, as far as MEN being fathers ... well, are men interested in it???

I don't know- look at JACK. Nice enough guy, but 100% interested in himself, his videogames, hot babes, and in the stinkin'-thinkin' that comes of being an alcoholic.

Not fatherhood material. Probably only good as that uncle who show up once in a while smelling lightly of booze or beer, entertaining as hell but totally undependable.

I would take a stab and say that MOST men on this board have never been fathers, and probably never will be. The only person in the past who fessed up to being a dad was CHRISISALL.

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What is the solution?

Well, once again, we- as a society - HAVE TO DECIDE WHAT WE WANT. Do we want a bunch of underwear-wearing, pizza-snarfing, video-game playing guys who only want a hot women to give them head once in a while while they're engrossed in their virtual worlds? IF NOT, WE HAVE TO MODEL A DIFFERENT BEHAVIOR ON THE MEDIA - one that portrays fatherhood as manly and not- as you say- a buffoon.

Do we want women who are doing their best to fit into this hyper-commercialized world, where they're encouraged to sleep around as much as possible in the mistaken belief that this is somehow "liberation"? Or who feel that they have to do everything by/among themselves because their male counterparts are lacking? THEN WE HAVE TO MODEL A DIFFERENT BEHAVIOR FOR WOMEN IN THE MEDIA.

Do we want a younger generation which realizes that life doesn't always give you happy endings every thirty minutes, that uncertainty, sacrifice, and even pain are part of the equation of being alive, that personal comfort and entertainment are not the highest goals in life, and that the art of being a human grownup is showing up, day after day, and sometimes just keeping on keeping on?

THEN WE HAVE TO REVAMP OUR ENTIRE CULTURE, WHICH FOCUSES ON THE IDEA THAT WE SHOULD FEAR BEING UNHAPPY, THAT OUR COMFORT AND TITILLATION ARE THE HIGHEST GOALS IN LIFE, THAT WE OWE NOTHING TO ANYBODY, THAT WE SHOULD BE JUST ATOMIZED CONSUMERS FLOATING IN A SEA OF POTENTIAL PURCHASES.

And that, my friend, would take such a sea-change I doubt that we will get there in my lifetime, even if there is utter catastrophic collapse compelling us in that direction.

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So... American values are about profit/pillage, hegemony, and genocide?- SIGNY

If it was good enough for slaveholders Washington and Jefferson, the two richest Presidents of all times, it should be good enough for you.
www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/02/22/247-wall-st-richest-p
residents/23484127/

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The little old ladies in my family talk about the energy and purpose of their life during WWII compared to the dullness of the 30s. They didn't go into combat yet life was filled with energy, even following the war. But a little at time the values of business came back into control of everything. By the time of Carter or Reagan (the old ladies argue about which one) it felt like being in the 1930s. There was far more money, but everything was again ruled by the almighty dollar.

I thought money and survival were the entire point of Malcolm Reynolds' existence. Then River aimed a loaded gun at Mal's face, reawakening him to a bigger universe that he had stopped caring about. ... Before that gun in the face, Mal was exclusively about money and surviving – and a little sex with Nandi, the doomed hooker. Mal had been ranging across a vast universe and yet the total purpose of his life was at the same level as an amoeba. He was microscopically small minded. Even with a gun in his face, River had to cock the hammer on the pistol to get Mal to stop talking long enough to hear River's goal, which was much bigger than money or survival, alcohol or sex.

River only had to say a word and Mal got the point. Mal's a very fast thinker when he is forced to be. At gunpoint. That's why he was fun to watch.

For most people there is no River in their life to explain with a gun to their heads the bigger purpose in life than money. They will be little old ladies

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before faintly sensing the point Mal clearly saw after one word from River. But they could understand while young.
Which American businesses serve a bigger purpose than moneymaking? I know they are out there, but few and far between.

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Trump is a fat sack of $100

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bills walking upright. Trump is richer than all the Powerball Lottery winners from this year and last. He is far richer than Washington and Jefferson, the previously richest Presidents. He is the personification of money glorified. And he has a realistic chance to be President, which is a sad thing to say about Americans' values and purpose.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/donald-trump-mediocre-businessm
an
America doesn't have to be this way.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Which American businesses serve a bigger purpose than moneymaking? I know they are out there, but few and far between.

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There are? I know none. The definitional purpose of a business, in American law, is to make a profit. Anything else in a non-profit or a foundation or a charity or a scam.
. . .
I have not got to the end of my thinking about Trump.

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“I have great relationship with God.” When Trump calls, God always answers the phone because, you know, it's Trump! the greatest human God ever created!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

. . . where do their loyalties lie?

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Ba...

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... humbug. You lose when you try and reduce the actions and beliefs of 300,000,000 people to 2 things or try and do a list "American Values." That so 90's.

We have many attributes, and many even seem in direct opposition.

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The underlying law of corporate globalization its media presentation is undeniable, but taboo to name. Whatever stands against the transnational corporate market as the cosmic engine of humanity’s well-being is anathematized and annihilated in one nation after another. The methods range from bombing social infrastructures in Slavic and Arab societies to silencing and reversing undeniable facts exposing the lies of the system. No alternative to feeding resources into the life-blind growth juggernaut has arisen at a productive level. The media repel any real economic reform as unthinkable.

In this borderless chaos of corporate globalization which now strips even the social infrastructures of the European Union to pay big banks and dispossess workers, the mass media select out whatever joins the dots of the cumulative catastrophe unfolding on both social and ecological planes. No real threat to collective life security computes except constructed enemies who mutate from one Orwellian hate object to the next. The collective life capital on which everyone’s continued breathing, water, nutrition, biodiverse surroundings, social security and knowledge depend are not even conceived.

... Perhaps the worst problem of this system has been the way in which the lives of the younger generations have been sacrificed beneath notice. There is no private profit in enabling the young to understand and flourish as human beings. But there is ever more profit in exploiting the young’s increasing market demand as well as cheap labor. The vast and growing global businesses of junk foods, violence entertainment, and selfie-chatter have one thing in common. They depend on the young as unthinking spenders. In this way the next generations are made pervasively addictive consumers degrading human life capacities the more corporate commodities are consumed by them. Maximizing corporate sales and ‘investor’ profits is the sole value criterion. Even infants in the crib are consciously conditioned into this expanding addictive-junk cycle as “job-creating growth”.

... A deep core of our problem is that the US has in fact no collective ... interest or consciousness in its constitution, its dominant social sciences, its actionable laws, or its white fundamentalist religions. Western market and political doctrine repudiate collective consciousness in principle. Only self-maximizing atomic individuals with no binding life community alone exist to this ruling mind-set. Self-serving corporations and consumers compete for survival according to market rules whose algebra is life-blind. Endless “trade agreements” override any society’s collective laws if they reduce expected profits to private transnational money sequences. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the latest extension of this sociopath metaphysics built into the ruling market paradigm.- John McMurtry, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada

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No, sorry, you are looking to the past for ways to live in the future.

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The future is about Change.

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It's up to you: Change or it will Change you. Or you will just be heard shouting as you spin down the drain of history.

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The US - most modern nations - are made of many micro societies, and they can work and function just fine together

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as long as there are equitable laws in place and a fair system of applying them.

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It's still a work in progress - always will be. Anything man creates will likely be flawed and will always need care and attention. If you can't handle the imperfections or the actual, honest work (not bitching on a forum) it takes to maintain - go be a hermit.

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The point of the thread is for your to tell everyone what everyone should be doing. We all know that.

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So go ahead - tell us what we're doing wrong and what we should be doing instead.

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Tell us of your perfect Society. Guide us since we can't be trusted to live how we want to. Save us from ourselves O' Great Snigglet!

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as long as there are equitable laws in place and a fair system of applying them.

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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
... And all you're doing is trolling.

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Go fuck yourself you piece of shit.

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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
... And all you're doing is trolling.

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That's funny. According to you I want to bomb civilians, I'm a fan of ISIL, and now I hate old people. Go fuck yourself you piece of shit.

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Originally posted by second:
I saw an article about evolutionary theory and economics. You might notice that parts of society you dislike are the same parts of evolution that you don't like. Put another way:

Neither biology nor society are intelligently designed.

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I know that the popular notion is that biology is designed by God and society is designed by Man, but then why is there an abundance of weird species and weirder societies if the Designers are Intelligent? If species and societies were intelligently designed once-upon-a-time in the golden past, why do defunct societies and dead species outnumber by far the living?
http://evonomics.com/updating-paul-krugman-evolution-groupie-econ/

"The idea that functional organization exists at lower levels of a biological hierarchy, such as individual organisms, but then ceases to exist at higher levels, such as social groups and ecosystems, was deeply antithetical to the Christian worldview, which assumed that a universe created by God must be harmonious from top to bottom. While Darwin was somewhat muted on this theme, his bulldog Thomas Huxley gave it full throated expression in his essay on Evolution and Ethics published in 1893. Huxley was emphatic that evolution doesn’t make everything nice and that ethical human society must be cultivated, in the same way that gardens must be cultivated to keep out the objectionable species."

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Originally posted by G:

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Originally posted by second:
Are you proving that there is no such thing as intelligent design? Because I believe your reply is the type of evidence that fundamentalist Christians can fling into the face of scientists and other doubters of the brilliance of fundamentalism.

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Twabba who? My reply was intelligently designed (crudeness and all) for the person is was aimed at. I do try and go for accuracy.

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FWIW I have spent countless hours with "old people" - most of them with dementia - in the last 12 years so that last f*cking lie of hers hit a little too close to home.

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The war on cash is escalating faster than many had imagined. Having documented the growing calls from the elites and propagandist explanations of the "benefits" to their serfs over the last few years, with China, and The IMF entering the "cashless society" call most recently, International Business Times reports that Norway - suffering from its own economic collapse as oil revenues crash - has joined its Scandi peers Denmark and Sweden in a call to "ban cash."

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
"I believe that nearly all humanity has a surplus of primitive urges and a shortage of self-control. The shortages tend to defeat all rational or intelligent designs for societies and we are left with the mess all around us."

That's pretty much the 'human nature' argument. We're all too full of chaotic primitive urges. No way could we form societies where millions of people live in a single city without mayhem and murder every day on every corner!

Human nature is far more tractable than you give it credit for. Especially when people have a reason to buy in to the system.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

They do it because they've been taught that that's where cars get driven, even before they learn to drive, even before they learn to talk, even before they learn to walk.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, what does this have to do with humans?

Human organizations are also dominated by energy transfer. Those organizations which harvest and direct energy the fastest and most efficiently will tend to survive. Assuming that there are human parasites or predators among us, since they have a tendency to acquire the most energy with the least effort, they have a tendency to reproduce their own strategy the fastest.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I'm going to pound the point about energy transfer some more, because so far nobody seems to have gotten my point.

Human society (and human evolution, and human societal evolution) isn't about our specific social constructs at all.

But just because there isn't a biological basis for the features of "human nature" that have been pointed out, doesn't mean that there aren't real physical drivers compelling society in one direction or another.

As an example of non-human, physical drivers, I look at reproductive strategies of all sorts of animals. Some animals are harem species. Some are seasonally monogamous. Some are polyandrous. Some just breed indiscriminately. Some species are fecund, some have only a few young. There are many ways of continuing each species, but they all have to be survivable if the species is going to continue! It's all about transferring food (energy) from one generation to the next. http://www.earthlife.net/birds/mating.html

Now, all of these species face constraints. I read a very interesting article about red deer in Scotland (Clutton-Brock), a harem species in which the largest, fastest-growing males get to breed. This sets up an internally-driven evolution logic in which males continue to get larger and larger ... and larger and larger ... which each passing generation. On average, males are about twice as large as females.

Why don't they get larger still? Well, large males are energetically costly. They require a LOT of food, both in the womb and afterwards. Females which have had male calves the previous year tend not to breed successfully the year afterwards for example. But event which capped this evolutionary trend during this particular study was a killing blizzard, in which food was very scarce. ALL of the males died, except the very smallest one, because his muscle mass didn't require so much food. The females did much better, nearly all of THEM survived, except some that had been stressed by having had very large male calves the summer before.

That kind of hit the "reset" button on that evolutionary trend, at least for that moment.

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But this whole "harem species" thing ... I know, one male, many females. It's a kind of wet-dream for some human males, because they imagine THEMSELVES as the dominant male, but the reality is that for harem species, life sucks for most males.

It seems such an odd system: breeding so many males, only to dispatch them later in life. Hardly functional!

But then when you compare what happens with birds, it makes sense: Many birds are at least seasonally monogamous. That because the chicks are SO demanding ... they have to grow so fast, they eat so much food! ... that BOTH parents are required to keep the next generation going. Males, in that strategy, are a necessary component of species survival. In harem species, where males don't contribute at all to the survival of the young (and in fact compete for resources) the point is to GET RID OF EXCESS MALES.

Harem species aren't an indication that males are important. What they are is an indication that males are disposable.

If you take that logic- that it's all about successfully gathering and preserving energy for the next generation without too much waste - you'll see most strategies make sense. They have to, otherwise the species wouldn't survive. Predators which require a lot of concentrated energy tend to have small numbers of young. Over millenia, their over-survival would have decimated their own prey (food source) and so for them small litters are tolerable for survival, even perhaps preferable. Top predators have the smallest of all litters, and their survival isn't a top priority. Male bears, for example, will eat cubs, and male lions will kill the cubs bred from the previous male.

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So, what does this have to do with humans?

Human organizations are also dominated by energy transfer. Those organizations which harvest and direct energy the fastest and most efficiently will tend to survive. Assuming that there are human parasites or predators among us, since they have a tendency to acquire the most energy with the least effort, they have a tendency to reproduce their own strategy the fastest.

MAYBE in evolutionary time this will all balance out, but so far the advances in technology keep introducing parasitical/ predatory processes faster than evolution can weed out the societies which develop them. Possibly humans are fatally flawed, and will NEVER overcome the evolutionary driver towards short-term growth/ concentrated power in time to survive to the next stage.

But I think the concept of "human nature" is, in a sense, a misdirected one. The irreducible "nature" of humans which makes this all possible- both the rapid advance AND the internal parasitism/predation- is that humans are a SOCIAL SPECIES and seem bent on maintaining themselves in the heart of a group (for safety) despite the sacrifices that might entail.

As individuals, with an individual POV, we suck. We tend to absorb the paradigms passed on to us by authoritative individuals (The rain gods need sacrifice.) whether is really works, or not. In fact, we are EXCELLENT at denying reality in favor of dogma until it becomes so unworkable, so unsurvivable, that it has to be abandoned. And it makes sense that it would be that way: The humans which were able to discard their individual POV in favor of a group POV would have lived in larger groups, which would have been safer, and have led to all kinds of knowledge transfer and technology development. As I have said before, the same ability that allows us to imagine electrons is the same ability that allows us to imagine purple dragons. The good and beneficial comes with the bad.

What we have are runaway systems, which just get bigger and bigger, like a snowball rolling downhill. More and more people are integrated into these systems. Whether these systems are created by sociopaths or simply taken advantage of is irrelevant (I think it's both), ultimately they become self-destructive as internal corruption and parasitism expand. Like the male red deer, these systems are vulnerable to shocks, and pointed towards failure, because they aren't robust to change. And people will do whatever it is they need to do to fit into these societies. Changing human behavior will not redirect how societies/economies behave and evolve.

The challenge is to figure out how to short-circuit those physical drivers (feedbacks) before they lead to self-destruction, especially now that we have the technology to ruin the entire planet, when the consequences go beyond our village, city, or region.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

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That makes modern humans second born. I don't know what the scientific name for third born is, but there is reason to believe it is out in our world and playing havoc with second born because sapiens are so easily deceived.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

Anyway, I haven't concluded anything, but I think UK Le Guin had an answer for the predators - and that's to have a society without 'power structures'.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
I wasn't ignoring anyone, I was thinking.

I can see that there could be an interesting split between the tendency for most people to be more docile - self-domesticated as I've heard it described - and the few human predators to become increasingly dominant.

FWIW, among the many blurbs I've read there was an interesting experiment done with bacteria, by embedding a mix of different energy sources (citrate, acetate, sugars and sugar-alcohols) in the agar of petri dishes. Some bacterial colonies rapidly selected for mutations that allowed the fastest use of one energy source. They multiplied rapidly, spread quickly, used up their preferred energy source, and then died because they didn't have enough genetic variation to ultimately succeed. Other colonies, for unknown reasons, developed a variety of mutations allowing different energy sources to be used. Their numbers didn't grow nearly as quickly, and their distribution tended to be spotty, but the cultures lasted a long time as they were actually successions of population mixes over time.

Anyway, I haven't concluded anything, but I think UK Le Guin had an answer for the predators - and that's to have a society without 'power structures'.

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A well-planned street grid and an elaborate drainage system hint that the occupants of the ancient Indus civilization city of Mohenjo Daro were skilled urban planners with a reverence for the control of water. But just who occupied the ancient city in modern-day Pakistan during the third millennium B.C. remains a puzzle...

The city lacks ostentatious palaces, temples, or monuments. There's no obvious central seat of government or evidence of a king or queen. Modesty, order, and cleanliness were apparently preferred. Pottery and tools of copper and stone were standardized. Seals and weights suggest a system of tightly controlled trade.

The city's wealth and stature is evident in artifacts such as ivory, lapis, carnelian, and gold beads, as well as the baked-brick city structures themselves.

A watertight pool called the Great Bath, perched on top of a mound of dirt and held in place with walls of baked brick, is the closest structure Mohenjo Daro has to a temple. Possehl, a National Geographic grantee, says it suggests an ideology based on cleanliness

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What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory. Paleopathological analysis demonstrated that leprosy and tuberculosis were present at Harappa, with the highest prevalence of both disease and trauma present in the skeletons from Area G (a pit of skulls located south-east of the city walls). Furthermore, rates of cranio-facial trauma and infection increased through time, demonstrating that the civilization collapsed amid illness and injury. The bioarchaeologists who examined the remains have suggested that the combined evidence for differences in mortuary treatment and epidemiology indicate that some individuals and communities at Harappa were excluded from access to basic resources like health and safety, a basic feature of hierarchical societies world-wide

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