>
>ROTFL! We should be so lucky!
>
>I hate to break up this little "no I'm the underdog" love-fest, but
>utilitarian individualism is certainly NOT predominate in the US. "By
>their fruits ye shall know them". Judge the actions, not the words.
>Where are all these utilitarian individualists on election day? Voting
>for Gore and Bush????? Yeah right.
do you know what utilitarian individualism is? this example doesn't suggest to me that you do. there is no contradiction here. voting for either of the two candidates or any of the candidates does not preclude one from being a utilitarian--whether moral, political or both!? but one thing is clear, you can't possibly be a utilitarian individualist because if you were, you wouldn't type the above in quite the way you typed it.
>The US is predominately made up of thoughtless robots, programmed for mass
>consumption and rote work.
hmmm. you're starting to sound like a structuralist marxist who tends to portray the average person as a "dupe" or "cultural dope". that is, all social theories need to explain why the world works the way it does. they also presume to know something the ordinary person doesn't know, can't know, or refuses to know. in order to do this, they have to explain why ordinary people don't "get it". (why they are like robots, in your example) that you revert to this means that you need now to explain how it is that you and your fellow think-alikes get it, what makes you different, special, unique so that you are among the enlightenerati and the rest of the unwashed are not.
>The robot is only superior if you judge
>superiority using amount of debt and number of useless toys. The robot
>knows nothing of utility and lives his life trying to stamp out the little
>individuality he has. The robots dress alike, talk alike, and think
>alike. The robot is programmed for fear,
is this dave you're channeling here or what!? btw, you should read c.wright mills and herbert marcuse on the same phenom! (i won't hold my breath though. rotf!)
>and has been conditioned to
>associate fear and unpleasantness with responsibility, so the robot does
>anything to abandon responsibility whenever possible.
basic utilitarian algorithms...
>The equivocation of social darwinism with libertarian political philosophy
>is absurd. Libertarians believe in cooperation and charity, we just don't
>want to be forced to cooperate and support charities at the barrel of a
>gun.
i don't think you understand what social darwinism is. see herbert spencer, a grand old daddy of liberal social theory--as in old fashioned liberal social theory (see also, d.d.)
>It would be more useful to evaluate the social darwinist theories
>providing the foundation for programs like affirmative action.
you are talking about social engineering i think yes?
kelley