Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Well I would like to see all banks nationalised - credit union style.

We can't borrow more than is there and the profit made from our borrowing is ploughed back in.

Chances?

Parmenides shows any philosophy that denies the idea of the good/the one as the highest idea of the mind will fall into moral relativism and nihilism.

There is a hierarchy in existence based on the good as the fundamental term. But it is unfashionable to say so because to moral relativists who worship 'equality' at their fundamental term it sounds 'fascist'.

Further because a hierarchy grades things according to how close to the good they are the moral relativists regard it as 'discriminatory'.

Which means they have a 'pig philosophy' because pigs do not discriminate what they eat. Which is fine if one wants to be a pig.

But if you'd rather swing on a star, carry moon beams home in a jar....

these people need to read george soros. his basic thesis: free market zealots foolishly believe that the markets' job is to find an equilibrium price for the real world, whereas the truth is there is no equilibrium as the markets affect the real world just as much as the real world affects markets.

nowhere is that clearer than in the current crisis, where the markets this week reached a moment of truth that their problems were out of control and were going to lead to an enormous recession that would just feed back to compound the financial meltdown.

people who claim that the markets won't learn their lessons if the appropriate punishment is not meted out forget keynes' famous dictum that in the long run we are all dead. what is the point of cutting off your nose to spite your face? i would rather have the financial system fully nationalised (for a while) than spend the next decade in an economic depression. people can learn a lesson by walking up to a cliff and looking over the side - they don't need to jump over and feel the consequences as well.

and anyone who claims that somehow this crisis was engineered by politicians in order to further their own devious accumulation of power is a fool and not even worth arguing with.

UNDERSTANDING

I have just read a New Scientist piece that says we might not understand 'death'.
Baroness Warnock has raised a storm among those who, perhaps, do not understand 'life'.
I am quite sure we do not understand money.

We are born - money is all around, and it buys stuff. How many of us, subsequently, go through the exercise of considering what money IS and what it represents; as a consequence, avoiding its misuse and abuse?

NOT WANTING TO LOOK FOOLISH

benagyerek (#3) "anyone who claims that somehow this crisis was engineered by politicians in order to further their own devious accumulation of power is a fool and not even worth arguing with."

Not politicians.... 'financiers'. The latter persuaded the former to give them control a long time ago.

Surely it would be foolish to argue with that?

Paul,

I suppose I will have to check out all your hyperlinks for enlightenment but I actually don't understand a word.

Sorry.

Oh I see - I have to read 645,000 words of 1950s American novel to find enlightenment.

Ah, ignorance is bliss!

WHO IS ALISA ROSENBAUM?

Instead of reading like or wondering who might be, folk here would be far better off reading Quine on extensionality, Skinner on stimulus control and behaviour management and on how we make a mess of matters - all of whom are now being sold short in my view.

jj @ 5

agreed that it was of the making of financiers, although i disagree it was "engineered" by them, as this would suggest they knew what they were doing.

Has anybody read Gravity's Rainbow? There's a lot of Skinnerism in that.

THERE'S A LOT OF SKINNER IN

Whilst there's certainly a lot of radical behaviourism in Walden Two (and Skinner said he thought it might work in China), there's far more of Skinner's student's work behind the exploitation of behavioural economic laws in the recent sub-prime/credit crunch given that the teaser rates which helpless sub-prime clients were ensnared with are straight out of the which was essentially Chung and Herrnstein's work from the 60s and Herrnstein, Vaughan, Ainslie, Rachlin and others in the 1970s (rebadged, in my view, as Prospect Theory by Tversky and Kahenman in 1979) with Kahneman getting the Nobel in Economics for it in 2002. Tversky and Kahneman cognitivised what's essentially a behavioural law of reinforcement which applies across species, and which should (as they did not) have been considered in the context of diversity, i.e. the Gaussian distribution of impulsivity/behavioural inhibition/self-control (which is not so curiously all very politically incorrect/inconvenient in Liberal-Democracies). That is, this is all which is why it's politically irresponsible not to regulate those who exploit this for personal gain whilst disingenuously using caveat emptor and equality law/Human Rights in defence of their predatory behaviour.

It's ironic that the country where Skinner thought Walden Two might work is a Democratic-Centralist state whose constitution is , which would no doubt have treated the above behaviour as a crime against the people. Who said the Cold War was over? The Stalinists seem to have the Trots on the run...or at least by what matters to them most....money.