On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Catherine Driscoll wrote:
> >The US is predominately made up of thoughtless robots, programmed for mass
> >consumption and rote work. 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.
>
> um... sorry but since when do robots have debt, toys, thoughts, (attempts
> at) individuality, dress, talk, thoughts (again)
> ok yes i'm missing something i know
Yes, the concept of "metaphor".
What would you choose to represent the people who seem to be walking around in a sleep, who:
Work as slaves for a meager wage that they... ...spend wastefully in mass consumption of useless goods... ...but the wage isn't enough so they... ...drown themselves in debt Watch 6 hours of tv a day Feed their children filth from McDonalds Walk by a homeless person and not see the:
misery of his existence
threat he poses to their lifestyle Suck on booze and tobacco, but... ...think hashish and LSD and psilocybin are evil
And on and on and on.
*WHY* do they do these things?
> >The robot is programmed for fear,
>
> seems a tad impractical to me
Not at all. The essence of control is fear.
> >It would be more useful to evaluate the social darwinist theories
> >providing the foundation for programs like affirmative action.
>
> this connection is right off the scale of anything i understand
> please explain?
Why is affirmative action good, and/or necessary?
> [i promise, for people accustomed to my infidelity in email exchanges, to
> be in this relationship for at least 5 days]
I'm flattered. :-)
On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, [iso-8859-1] Daniel Davies wrote:
> I think a more interesting question might be: "How
> come the 'deconditioned', having deconditioned
> themselves, independently and self-determinedly,
> manage to take on a set of ideas which are perfectly
> acceptable to the ruling class,
Huh? Oh, I see. You misunderstand. I never said anything about libertarians being the deconditioned. There's probably a higher amount of sheeple amongst the demicans and republicrats than there is amongst the other parties, but it isn't a causal relationship.
Your misunderstanding thus clarified, your critique is inappropriate.
[snip]
BTW, and I don't mean to pick on you, but there seems to be a lot of paranoia here about any kind of libertarian position. Everything libertarian is bad, and everything bad is libertarian, I guess? Right? Did a bunch of libertarians pee in y'all's cornflakes or something? I wasn't even talking about being a libertarian in my reply to Doug, but because I mentioned it at one time or another in a different thread I get some nutty paranoid reply mixing the two.
Matt, president-elect, Evil Libertarian Conspiracy, Inc.
-- Matt Cramer <cramer at voicenet.com> http://www.voicenet.com/~cramer/ Trillian did a little research in the ship's copy of THHGTTG. It had some advice to offer on drunkenness. "Go to it", it said, "and good luck." It was cross-referenced to the entry concerning the size of the Universe and ways of coping with that.
-THHGTTG