From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Jun 07 2002 - 10:41:26 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael M. Butler <butler@comp-lib.org>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Friday, June 07, 2002 3:52 AM
Subject: TERMINOLOGY: "Capitalism" usw.
> Isms are tricky things.
>
> I've noticed a recent resurgence of a recurrent problem here. Malcom says
> capitalism might need re-engineering, and someone else accuses him of seeking
> Stalinoid megadeaths.
>
> State-supported/state-enforced commercial oligarchies are called "capitalist",
> as is the guy who started rolling an ice-cream hand truck around his
> neighborhood last Friday. Are both equally good? Equally evil?
The ice-cream truck is a closer approach to a pure free market, though today it requires paying off numerous overlapping protection
rackets, e.g. EPA, OSHA, FDA, etc.
> Did Union
> Carbide get off easy for what happened at Bhopal? What would have happened to
> an individual found directly responsible for the negligent homicide of those
> people? Why was Union Carbide treated differently?
Because its owner/contollers are members of the oligarchial ruling class. Without looking up the UC board of directors of that
period, one can safely posit an interlocking set of directorships of UC that was no more than two degrees of separation from most of
the rest of the Fortune 500 and the 'upper' levels of the Atlanticist governments (including military, intelligence, and police).
Calling this structure (crony) capitalism is no more accurate than calling it crony socialism, Fascism, Neo-Mercantilism, etc.
The word "capitalism" has been incessantly mis-used over the past century, as have "liberal", "Enlightenment", "freedom", "rights"
and so on. Today, with the bulk of the population ignorant of crucial areas of history and economics, thanks to the "dumbing down"
process of public education provided from the barrel of a gun, it is rare to be able to participate in a civilized discussion on
these matters.
In my lingo, these terms have become "trigger words" that call up robotic, scripted behavior subroutines. Ritual abuse in
government schools produces these semi-robotic serfs. A psychodynamic pseudo-code equivalent uses the word "TRAPON", as in-
{
Input "capitalism"
TRAPON "capitalism"
GOSUB [fight or flight]
}
Looking at the underlying *structure* of indivudual actions and interactions without pre-placing an "ism" label on it is much more
effective for system modeling.
> "If they can keep you asking the wrong questions, it doesn't matter what
> answers you get."
Yes, sir.
Forrest
-- Forrest Bishop Chairman, Institute of Atomic-Scale Engineering www.iase.cc
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