[extropy-chat] Re: riots in France

[John K Clark]

"Jack Parkinson" <isthatyoujack at icqmail.com>

> there is no country on earth where 7 cents an hour
> is sufficient to meet a  person's basic needs.

That is true, it is also true that is no country on earth where 7 cents an
hour will not get you closer to fulfilling a person's basic needs than ZERO
cents an hour.

You claim to be a great friend of the poor but you say I should fire 99 out
of 100 of my employees and give all their salary to the survivor.  You say
Wal-Mart and its customers are villainous for encouraging sweat shops, so
let me propose a little experiment; go to Bangladesh or some other such
hellhole and tell a worker there that you are lobbying to have sweat shops
such as his shut down and see if he really thinks of you as a friend. On
second thought it would be better not to go there personally because they
will try to lynch you.

>  I didn't suggest dividing the wealth of the world.

Well why not?! You said before that there was already PLENTY of wealth in
the world and that the only problem was that rich people were just too
stingy, I said the basic problem was there was not enough wealth in the
world and we should concentrate on making the pie bigger not squabble
about how to cut it up; are you conceding that I was right and you were
wrong?

> $25 billion is adequate for basic food, water and medicine for everyone.
> This is not a lot of money

Forget 25, 250 billion couldn't provide just medicine for 300 million
Americans for just one year, much less food AND water AND medicine AND for
all 7 billion people on the planet. However I have nothing against charity,
I think it's fine, but to suggest that's all that is needed to solve the
problem is crazy. World poverty will be eliminated someday and probably
sooner than most people think, but when a full accounting of that glorious
achievement is made charity will amount to little more than a rounding
error.

> If terrorism (and rioting for that matter) are the radical extremes of
> massive discontent - eliminate the discontent.

Making nice to Islam will not reduce their anger one iota because the root
cause of that anger is not any specific action committed by the west. They
are angry at us for what we are not what we did. They would be less angry if
the foundation of the west was dogma, even some dogma they didn't like,
instead it is based on free markets and pragmatic problem solving (the
scientific method) and that frightens and angers them. They would be less
angry if our system just didn't work very well, but we're rich free and
powerful and they are poor oppressed and weak.

800 years ago Islam was the most advanced civilization on Earth but its been
straight downhill since, today they are not even second or third but dead
last; we have the word of The Profit so it can't be our fault, it must be
due to those evil westerners, our only mistake was embracing too many
new 16'th century ideas, we should go back to the good old 13'th century
ideas.

    John K Clark