[ExI] christmas songs 2

[Anna Taylor]

seienchan at gmail.com wrote Tue Dec 11 01:36:14 UTC
2007:

>Okay, well. The story assumes that charity is a good
>thing. This is just plain wrong. If I give my money
>to a poor guy to buy food, well, he'll use it to buy
>food. Or drink. Or cigarettes. That's what that
>amount of money can be used for - not things like
>education or books or things that would promote the
>poor guy learning stuff/bettering himself, because
>food would come first. I'm more rational than he is,
>I know better how to make other people happy. It's
>better that I use the money I have to make myself
>happy and help me learn more and better myself,
>because then I can make things better in general for
>people by coming up with better philosophy and ideas.

What's the point of having better philosophies when
people are starving to death? How can you be positive
that you know what makes other people
happy?Philosophies are understood by people that have
lived and experienced and wish to educate. Some ideas
are good and some are bad.  The idea is to set memes
that are beneficial for all, not for the chosen few.

Charity is a good thing!  Obviously you have never
been in any circumstance that required you to yield to
charity otherwise you would understand that not all
people that need a helping hand are those that are
drug addicts or are going to buy cigarettes. The idea
behind the Scrooge idea was to show how all the money
in the world doesn't bring you happiness and at most
brings you closer to solitude because one fears the
lose of something that appears so relevant.  Once
Scrooge discovers the idea of giving he no longer
holds close the idea of possession.  
I still think it's a great story.

>So, in light of that, I guess I'd write the ghosts
>out of the story - the supernatural is boring
>compared to human achievement. I'd replace them with
>real people, philosophers and the like, who are
>rational and know things. They would explain their
>good ideas to Scrooge, who would then implement
>them and infer more rational things from them. He
>would then spread his good philosophy to everyone he
>knew/met/could get to listen, to replace their bad
>anti rational memes.

It really had nothing to do with the ghosts:)  Scrooge
was created by someone that wrote that story.  I
wonder if that person was aware that his story would
be used as an example on the Extropy list some X
amount of years later? Memes are ideas. The Scrooge
idea is a story brought forth to give example of maybe
something that the writer dealt with personally based
on his experience and wanted to set an example as of
what not to do.   What is wrong with that?  It depends
on what you believe the story is about.  Those that
have been in need of help will recognize the story,
others that haven't, won't!

It's nice to meet you Seienchan, I do hope you
continue to post some of your thoughts, you've given
me some things to think about tonight, thanks.

Anna
   




      Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail.  Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca