Killarney, keep in mind the old saying that throwing pearls to swine is a total waste of pearls. Let Lego believe in his capitalist fantasies even as it disintegrates.

The U.S. is being held up by printing money but that will soon come to an end. Then we will have a massive depression, one which might wipe out the fabulously rich.

Then perhaps we can start again with a system that doesn't worship greed and endless war!

Dear LEGO,

The bible does not claim that the world was created in 7 days - only that the heavens and the earth were created at the time and then in 6 days, not 7. To interpret this biblical statement as a statement about the physical world, as known by modern science, is indeed intellectual bankruptcy. That the earth is flat and the centre of the universe are very practical ideas in most circumstances: it all depends on the circumstances of applying those ideas, so that was not incorrect and made perfect sense at times when the fastest means of transportation was a horse.

In other words, the differences arise because the words 'heavens' and 'earth' were used differently in other eras than in this particular era when people tend to be so obsessed with the material/physical/objective world.

As for "Europe who could not wait to embrace free market capitalism": Europe could not wait to have a free market, where people may openly produce, buy or sell whatever they like for whatever consideration they agree to. Europe could not wait to have the state no longer interfere with their lives. That however has nothing to do with capitalism.

Socialism/communism (difference is only a matter of degree) is when the state/government directly controls the life of its people. Capitalism is when the state/government controls the life of its people indirectly and covertly via corporations that it supports in various ways and who could not exert power over people otherwise. Neither is good. In fact, those two evils can even live side-by-side.

In other words, free market and capitalism are two completely different things.

Dear David G.,

Very few people worship greed and those too must be insane.
Most of us, however, have greed to one degree or another.
Greed is not the property of the rich or of the poor.
Greed is not dissolved when one either receives wealth or loses it.
The only remedy to greed is finding a deeper spiritual cause to live for.

The world would be a far better place if it got rid of socialism entirely.

A world that is built upon worshiping power above all else is disgusting. Power makes pigs of us all, turns us into power-grubbers and whores who have no depth of character or nobility!

The apparatchiks should be driven out of existence. They should be replaced by philosophers and artists and playwrights and humanitarians, people who have something valuable to offer to the world.

Dear Yuyutsu.

I haven't read my Bible since I was 15 years old, and realised that it was just a bunch of old legends written by ignorant people who obviously did not have a clue about anything. I remember that after God created the Earth, the dummies who wrote it claimed that God then "created the stars", as if the little bits of flickering light in the heavens was just an afterthought. These people did not know that the Earth is just a grain of sand on a beach compared to the immensity of the universe.

The amazing thing is that there are still a lot of religious people who still believe in this crap. Many Christians believe it, and all of the Islamic world believes it. This is what blind faith can do to your reasoning abilities. And David G is in the same class of people if he is still in denial about capitalism not beating socialism. How anybody can disregard self evident reality because their ideology is more important is an amazing thing. But we see it here quite often with the people on OLO who never cease to denigrate the western world that they choose to live in.

I think that some of these people have a compulsive need to think that they are smart and they have been conditioned at school by the left wing teachers and the media to believe that "smart" people always attack the western world, especially the Americans. That is as far as their limited reasoning abilities can take them. Anything that contradicts their sacred belief system is an attack upon their fragile self esteem. To recognise that they were wrong would force them to confront the limits of their own intelligence. So they will continue to deny even the most self evident fact because the alternative is unthinkable.

To admit that they were wrong would be to realise that they are not smart at all. This they can never do. Better to deny reality and keep advocating complete nonsense than learn something about yourself that you don't want to know.

LEGO, I am not troubled by you being an apologist for capitalism and endless war. The world is filled with such folk.

I know that you have been programmed to hold right-wings views that you have and that you are an advocate of endless greed and 'might is right'.

I know also the you find those who don't share your narrow, elitist views a nuisance, and threatening, and you wish you could put us into the POL LEGO re-education camp where our views would be beaten out of us.

Do you think that greed and a desire for war is instinctive in humans or is it programmed? How did you arrive at your current position? Was it drilled into you via parents or school or was it achieved by serious reflection and philosophical examination?

I await your response!

To David G

Like yourself, I left school programmed to think that Imperialism was utterly wrong, racism was utterly wrong, all men were created equal, and that the democratic socialisation of the means of production was the way to run an economy. But I lived through a time when many former colonies who's people demanded independence from colonial rule. sank right back into barbarism. Which according to the trendy social theorists ( the angry young men of the day) was never going to happen. Many colonies went from well governed profit making concerns to totally dysfunctional societies forever holding out the begging bowl to the rest of the world.

Next I questioned racism. If all men were created equal, why was it that the same races and ethnicities were always a failure? No matter if they ran their own countries or inhabited the countries run by whites, they always became dysfunctional. The only excuse that the socialists could come up with, was that it was all the white guys fault. White people "oppressed" black people, discriminated against them, and kept blacks from reaching their full potential. That is a racist argument in itself. I therefore concluded that the socialists were not so much pro black as anti white, and that is still a position I hold.

Next came Socialist Britain, which in the early seventies came close to bankruptcy, and was so paralysed with socialist inspired union strikes that the PM of Britain, Labor leader Jim Callahan, gave up trying to talk sense to the idiots and he simply resigned. He told the fools to sort the mess out that they had created themselves. Into his position came a remarkable woman, Margaret Thatcher, a brilliant grocers daughter who gained a science and a law degree, and who began to claw back Britain from bankruptcy by reversing socialism. She closed down a lot of government owned coal mines that were helping to keep Britain broke.

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