No Looting in Japan

@spendius,

The original idea of the protestant work ethic, i.e. of the thing which makes current economies possible, was to eliminate the spare time required for sin. When the puritans and what not found out the thing was creating wealth in unheard of quantities, they assumed they'd discovered a flaw in the system.

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@gungasnake,

Well gunga--that's quite plausible I suppose until you consider that sin was defined as anything which didn't help the powerful to continue living in the style they were dynamically accustoming themselves to live in and to prevent any interference with the continuation.

Obviously, to say that there was no such thing as sin was the greatest of all sins. But it might be an even greater sin to conspire to encourage the avidity of the desire for outward significations of being in proud possession of superior genetic material to the extent that the whole project turns into a gamble betting to beat the house with a desperate double or quits strategy which sometimes works but has high impact if it doesn't.

It's hard to judge whether it's a flaw or not.

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@djjd62,

djjd62 wrote:

weird how the germans and the japanese make really f'ed up porn, something to do with being conquered nations i wonder

That's only because we've got gun laws and a socialised health insurance - both inventions by the Conservatives, btw!

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@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

The original idea of the protestant work ethic,....

That really depends on what you call
a) original
b) protestant.

Luther, Calvin, Zwingli?

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@Walter Hinteler,

Didn't your great Goethe say that the trouble with man is that he can't sit quietly in his room? And without work the energy of such a man would blow the roof off.

Does sitting quietly in one's room take too much effort and running around like a frenzied monkey with its tail on fire is actually much easier. Perhaps we are being fed hyper-activity additives to keep the stock markets up. And we all want that don't we?

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@gungasnake,

No, the Protestant work ethic came in some lame way from the doctrine of predestination put forth by John Calvin.

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@plainoldme,

Quote:

No, the Protestant work ethic came in some lame way from the doctrine of predestination put forth by John Calvin.

Why would anybody who believed in predestination ever bother to work?

Ever had any sort of a course in basic logic??

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@gungasnake,

The carrot was that no one knew who was predestined until they achieved success. You worked. If you achieved success, then you were predestined to go to Heaven. Didn't you learn about the Protestant ethic during the Civil Rights Era?

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@plainoldme,

Predestination would imply that the future was already written out like the pages of a book. For that matter the existence of intelligence itself is an overwhelming argument against predestination: there would be no need for intelligence or decision-making faculties and they would not exist in a predetermined universe.

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@gungasnake,

10, 000 people are ******* dead, and this is only thing worth posting?

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@TuringEquivalent,

I did actually post a link to the Japanese embassy webpage for donations and other offers of assistance yesterday.

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@gungasnake,

I'm surprised TE's dross got to you gunga.

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@spendius,

you're right.....

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loved the take from my fave radio guy this morning

love how people in america get upset when some people take advantage of a situation to rip things off, but the cock **** bankers (love satellite radio) who destroyed the economy get bonuses and keep their jobs

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@djjd62,

Best thinking I know of on money and banking:

http://www.webofdebt.com

There is also an emerging public banking movement which could have significant impact on many of our problems.

http://publicbankinginstitute.org/

North Dakota has totally escaped the recent financial grief and the most major part of that is probably the simple expedient of owning its own bank.

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@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Easy answer - they have a culture where wealth and possessions are not placed at the highest pinnacle.

Unlike ours.

Nonsense, Japan is a hugely materialistic nation and materialism just really isn't the differentiating factor at all. The real fundamental difference is that Japanese celebrate conformity and honor while most Western cultures celebrate individualism and self-expression (a side of the spectrum I favor myself, but that I recognize comes at the cost of some of the law and order that they enjoy).

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@parados,

parados wrote:

I don't believe I put in words in your mouth gunga.

From here it looks like you are the one obsessed with your political dead horses like taxes and guns, and if gungasnake had started a topic about the finer points of cheese and wine you'd probably have some stupid political obsession to make it about.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

From here it looks like you are the one obsessed with your political dead horses like taxes and guns, and if gungasnake had started a topic about the finer points of cheese and wine you'd probably have some stupid political obsession to make it about.

Not only that, he and six or ten others like him would vote the topic down and, guess what? That's right, Prince Charles and his mistress would that very day be saying to themselves:

Quote:

Say, you know what, it's getting awfully hard to find really good wine and cheese in London these days, and I've heard that there is a website called "Able2Know" which frequently has good information on that sort of thing, let's check that out and if that turns out to be the case, see if we can't provide some major financial backing for that Able2Know site!!

But they wouldn't be able to find the snake's good advice about wine and cheese because the usual eight or ten shitbirds had voted the topic down to zero as uaual, and you'd never even know that you'd been fucked.

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@gungasnake,

If you don't like it then why do you play such a willing foil? You helped them make this thread about the political obsessions with things like "demoKKKrats" or whatever stupid names you have for them.

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@Robert Gentel,

This is why in Japan often times when there's some banking scandal or corporate scandal and it uncovers a CEO's malfeasance or stealing, you sometimes hear about their suicide.

Conversely in USA, many times when there's a CEO in the same sort of trouble (within time as the scandal cools off), they shift over into politics or over to another company.

1 Reply

No Looting in Japan

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