Political compass for the21st century

[pbrower2a]

(03-14-2021, 11:35 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(03-02-2021, 04:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: AH, so you are Bill the Piper. I see the connections. Down with hedonism! Tech forever! Welcome back.

Here again you oversimplify my positions. It took me some time to think how I should respond to it.

"Down with hedonism" - I do disagree with hedonism as a philosophical position that pleasure is the supreme good. It's great to enjoy wine, women and song, but a civilized person puts other, more complex goals first. But societies and movements opposed to all pleasure often end up stagnant and opposed to most innovation, like the Amish or Orthodox Jews. This is certainly not my ideal.

Yes. Hedonism at best is play, and play is often the best way to learn certain things and develop talents. Maybe the real problem is with witless debauchery, abandonment of which makes one "healthier, wealthier, and wiser" (to suggest Benjamin Franklin). Fully enjoying a woman (and hoping that she fully enjoys me) with Mozart on the stereo and a nice Cabernet readily available sounds really, really good. 

Hedonism is a rightful reward for competent work, prudence in spending habits, and loyalty to extant organizations. It is a valid incentive. Medals are not enough. 

I am not well aware of Orthodox Jews, although I see Reform Judaism fitting much that I am. As for the Old Order Amish... I live near many of them. Theirs is a hard way of life, but I recognize their virtues. These are the sorts of people who will thrive if the bureaucratic cover for American commercial inequity collapses. The Old Order Amish are good businesspeople; it is just that their world has no room for bloated bureaucracies to fill with people too over-educated to do farm work or carpentry. Education to eighth grade and only until age sixteen does not fit me.    

Quote:"Tech forever" - I hope that modern tech never gets lost. But today overuse of digital technologies, cutting people away from own bodies and emotions and from other people, is a bigger threat than technological regress. I have criticized Millennials for that, but you choose to overlook this part of my message. Extropianism, as defined by Max More in 1988, values above all "intelligence, functional order, vitality, energy, life, experience, and capacity and drive for improvement and growth". Yes, this includes tech and in my previous incarnation I have advocated perhaps too much for biotechnological solutions. But living things have more extropy than computers. Social organization is certainly extropy. Art is extropy too.

As a rule, one technology supplants another as a newer one is more efficient in use of materials and in the techniques of manufacturing. Even something so banal as container freight has its purposes: reducing the number of hands for moving freight from one conveyance (between ships, rail, and trucks) to another... and greatly reducing pilferage, once a big cost of shipping. I am reminded of an old Mad Magazine spoof on the way of life of longshoremen, which included the question

"How many color TV's do you have?"

If you didn't have one, then you weren't a real dock hand. Dock workers were paid basically little in wages but whatever they could steal. That is a corrupt arrangement, but something understandable. Color televisions back then were still luxuries, and stevedores rarely paid for the ones that they got. Maybe they traded something else expensive, like liquor, for a color TV set. 

Mainframe computers used to be costly; now they are mostly worthless. The space necessary for one of those might now as well have a more profitable soft-drink machine. Recorded VHS tapes? When was the last time that you watched one? Do you still have a console TV from the 1970's, perhaps in French Provincial? Nice cabinet... but what could you do with it. It is obsolete. Shopping malls, once the definitive expression of American consumerism, are often dying. 

It is possible to save some money by not being an early-adapter, but that goes only so far. At a certain point you are simply accepting someone else's junk... like his LP records of Guy Lombardo, Liberace, or 101 Strings.