I Think

It looks obvious that your daughter has what it takes to be successful. Getting laid off from any job is a growing experience that most overcome by finding even better opportunities. I believe your daughter is one of those people.

She didn't do anything wrong; tell her that!

well bumpers

We have been telling her. A while back, a teacher told my daughter that he so admires the way she was running her place, he uses her as an example before the class he teaches.

Another Gulf disaster underway - Why can't they invent a fool-proof spigot to put on those things?

Earworm of the morning:
City of New Orleans, Judy Collins version

Insert pun re Anthony Wiener's wiener.

They tell me there is a new heir to the British throne. I should care because -?

Never mind my daily rambling. According to spendi I am an atheistic sex pervert, because that is true of all atheists. I am, therefore, as the dirt from the bottom of your shoes. Screw the guy if that's what he truly believes.

What's a spendi?

He spends a lot of time on a2k, but doesn't have a clue as to what he's posting; a "spendi."

Rally the rest of the crew around you, CI. Then you can all point fingers and yell "Na na na na na".

I don't think that at all ed. I have done posts to the effect that you are a fine, upstanding, hard-working citizen who is not rewarded to the extent you deserve. And you know I have.

I have never said that insistent non-believers are sex perverts. I have said that insistent non-believers have personal issues with the moral code of the Church. I can argue, and have done, that chastity is a perversion.

There has never been any moral condemnation from me relating to wanking, promiscuous shagging of females, animals, knot holes in trees, divorce, adultery, homosexuality, double headers, dogging, frottage and the catalogue of woe Kraft Ebbing drew up. If those things damage society if practiced wholesale, and why would they not be if they were respectable, I might take issue with them on that basis. A simple practical consideration. Which is the reason the Church condemns them. The moral considerations are a device to reinforce the practical matters. They are far cheaper than prosecutions and deterrent punishments and have other important functions relating to property relations, social surveys and record keeping, theatrical ceremonials, labour relations, and suchlike. Art, singing, festivals and Easter bonnets.

We do it now. If you all went to confession once a month with a CIA officer the NSA would not need to spy on us. But a strong moral principle would need to be inculcated that it would be "wrong" to lie. Otherwise you would treat them like other social surveys and the government would end up in confusion due to all the contradictory bullshit data they had collected. And a trust would need to be created that what you told the CIA officer, or officeress in this new world of Equality, would be strictly in confidence in a way that the law could not violate.

We have also taken a moral stance in recent years about price-gouging. It can be argued that such behaviour is highly commendable and conforms to all known evolutionary science. It is not so long ago that it was those things.

Darwin's pottery money would have price-gouged as eagerly as a whore at a convention of tank cleaners and waste disposal executives.

Now it is thought of as Immoral. Certainly a socialist's definition of Immorality. How did that happen? Especially if price-gouging is highly commendable and conforms to all known evolutionary science. It can't be made illegal because they're all at it and it can't be allowed to flourish because it does the job government bureaucracies are there to do. So it's immoral. You all tut tut when you hear 0f cases. No mention of the bureaucracy feasting on the misery in disaster zones year after year. They are manned by angelic heroes and heroines.

Do you see the point? It is the "insistent" that is the main thing and not the unbelief. Unless, of course, a case can be made that the wholesale practice of the activities I mentioned is just the thing to take us, hale and heart, into the future and maintain our position in a competitive world. In which case the insistence is justified. If not---well!!

The activities can't be made illegal either as that would disqualify too many people from high office and who would we get to run things? So we have moral inhibitions. And the Church is needed for those. Offshoots being a form of lucrative begging when celibacy, obedience and poverty are not required. (I know, I know--I've heard it all before).

I think you're a decent chap ed. I just think you don't understand my argument. The Hippies didn't last long did they.

Thanks, spendi. On the other hand, you misread evolution to think that wanton screwing over of others is the sole aim of evolution.

Evolution has no aim unless an intelligence is guiding it. It is a natural process much interfered with these days. It is not acceptable to majority opinion.

The "screwing over of others" is its powerhouse. That is what the survival of the fittest means. It has no moral content. If you claim it has through the mechanism of social evolution you have lost the argument before you start.

That is not what survival of the fittest means. This is why you could never convince anyone you have the correct answers.

I indulged a couple of beers last night. Which I needed like Draino Jello shots. But it made me more mellow after a tough week. I plan to get back to my regular routine this upcoming week.

Correcting and doing rewrites, I had been apprehensive going in, fearing I might be disappointed by what I already have down. But I am in love with it still and will persevere. Only thing- There are no explosions or car chases. Oh well. One story ending I have always loved was in Dr. Faustus. He he (he said, devilishly).

What does it mean?

Can you not see that you have a non sequitur on your hands there?

The premiss does not infer the conclusion. It could do if your premiss said what the survival of the fittest means. But as it doesn't the premiss is meaningless. And no conclusion can be inferred from a meaningless premiss.

I do not seek to convince anyone who thinks your premiss has any validity because they are very unlikely to have any influence. Unless they are dictators.

Capitalism, by a sort of evolutionary process, grants success, wealth and influence to men who wouldn't dream of thinking that "That is not what survival of the fittest means" had one iota of meaning. They have fought brute nature with their bare hands and not by a sweet, easy and complacent verbal gesture which happens to underscore the position they take.

It must be really strange to set out to teach all the nation's kids the rationality of the survival of the fittest and to complacently deny that it means screwing anything fit to be screwed. Indeed, be indignant at anyone who suggests they are synonym phrases. Which they self-evidently are.

It's like giving sex lessons to 4th graders with a banana and a milk bottle.

A mercenary survival of the fittest may succeed in the short term (since humans have only existed for a short term) but unabated it does not succeed, because it over reaches and will likely extinct either those who practice it or the whole species. Evolution would meander onward, heedless that cut throat capitalism or other like practices once made a foray into into the field.

That's fortune telling ed.

It's an informed prediction.

Incidentally, this statement is ****.

" So we have moral inhibitions. And the Church is needed for those. "

The church helps keep people in chains for the upper classes.
Also I don't accept morality so much as enlightened self interest.

So I assume you think Mr Madoff is a political prisoner and that there's nothing wrong with price gouging. As I do.