lemur

My impression is that the evil/trouble they get into is always a byproduct of the good. For example, Adam and Eve get bodies and a garden that can reproduce/multiply and provide them with everything they could ever need or want, which is a logical consequence of God replicating his creative/productive power in them. Yet by creating the means to die and be banished from the garden (sin), God also gives them the means to go against the nature of the creation, which is to create/reproduce life. So, it's like death is a necessary byproduct of infinite creativity but so is God's warning/advice not to pursue it, as is his anger when they DO pursue it and become ashamed of their naked (pro-creative) bodies. They are not stupid. They are just experimenting with all the power God replicated into them and learning by trial and error. God's advice/warnings are like their ability to extrapolate ways to avoid suffering based on prior experience/knowledge. Once they know sin, shame, and death as well as having known paradise, eternal life, etc., they become able to choose between the two directions and seek the wisdom to make good choices (i.e. seek God). Well, they only "need" it in the sense of not destroying themselves and others and turning their lives into an eternal hell lol. They just don't like suffering, so they seek wisdom to avert it. It's just factual. If humans have the ability to choose (which some determinists assume they don't but I won't go there), then they necessarily have the power to succumb to temptation or resist it. It's only called "weakness" because temptation is, well, tempting. Adultery, theft, and killing are logical commandments because they're tempting. Smashing your toe with a hammer doesn't need to be mentioned as a commandment, presumably, because it's not tempting. My understanding is that the word, "satan," means opposer. It seems logical to me that whenever God's infinite creativity results in something that runs counter to the intentionality of the creation, it becomes a "sin" and thus something that is interesting to satan as a means to destroy God's creation. It's just creation and destruction personified, imo. Look at the story of how the angel falls, though. It is because he becomes enamored with his own beauty/greatness/power as God's best servant/angel. So, again, it's like God has the ability to create and evaluate things as good, but when an angel does this and it leads the angel to become jealous and destructive toward God, it becomes sinful. So it's like a natural evolution of creativity into destructiveness with egoism as a medium to arrive at opposition and destruction. Satan has to wait on people to act, because they can't be controlled, but seduction is already present in the story of the serpent tricking Eve in the garden. This basically sets of obfuscation in opposition to the enlightening advice God gives not to eat the fruit by telling them it will kill them. They only learned the truth after the fact, but it is interesting that the lie was designed to seduce them into self-destruction whereas the good advice was designed to help them stay out of trouble. It's not, and I think this is part of why it is tempting. It is the easy path. This is also why I think God commands Adam to live by the plants of the field by the sweat of his brow and curses Eve to pain in childbirth. It's hard to grow food and give birth, much easier to steal or hunt and have free sex without worrying about the consequences, but the plant food and birthing results in basically new life, whereas the free sex, stealing, hunting, etc. all result in destruction of life/liberty/property. Yes, am I? I hope I haven't lapsed into dogma by explaining the logic I have deciphered in these stories. There are conflicts, though. You would have to work harder to convince someone to eat healthy food and exercise than to sit around all day and eat junk food, but it would be better for their health to resist the easy path. If people would only go down the road of their natural inclinations all the time, how much trouble would they get themselves into? But realize that "God" is mostly a metaphor for the source of knowledge about nature, causes and consequences, etc. "Conversing with God" basically means paying attention to all possible sources of wisdom that can reduce your suffering and allow you to cause less suffering for others. You feel less fear of temptation the stronger your soul becomes. Who is more afraid of going into a bar, a recovering alcoholic or someone who has no problem choosing to not to drink? By theological logic, you could call the messengers of toilet-cleaner-drinking abstinence "angels" bringing divine advice. You could say it is a miracle that you didn't kill yourself drinking toilet cleaners, and you could call any temptation you ever felt to consume them as satan's demons attempting to possess you to destroy your own body. People either laugh or scoff at this kind of language because it is viewed as lofty these days, but it's really just a logical set of concepts/language, however primitive. Yes, but "natural choice" implies "easy choice" the way you're using it, which makes sense in the logic of, say, water flowing downhill. But it is also part of nature that cats eat grass that makes them vomit so they can get rid of hairballs. So while it seems slightly less "natural" to make hard choices for your own good or that of others, I think it is ultimately also part of nature, albeit the "uphill battle" part. I think you could say that the body's natural tendency to desire things that are bad for it is analogical to the emergence of satan as a fallen angel of God. Your body is hungry because it wants to "go forth and multiply" (i.e. grow) but this results in it destroying its own health in some cases (sin/destruction/killing/stealing) It does, but when you say the soul is essentially weak because it is subject to natural temptation, would you say that the will to overcome weakness with strength is any less essential? Adrenaline, testosterone, estrogen, oxytocin etc. are all natural stimulants for overcoming other weaknesses, no?

Right, but as you said about the moon's effect on the tides being due to the gradation of field-strength instead of absolute strength, "flat" spacetime could never really be flat insofar as there must always be some degree of "net force" acting on any object or particle above absolute zero, right? I suppose what I'm saying now is that an object's inertia is like it moving under its own gravity in the form of momentum. That sounds wrong because you think of gravity as an inherent force that emerges from mass itself whereas momentum is due to an energetic push, but I think you could view spacetime curvature (i.e. net gravitation) as including momentum, which could explain why geodesics for photons are different than those for satellites, no? I'm still struggling to understand this. What kind of mass are you saying is distributed and how? I thought you were just saying that the force-fields of constituent particles had no defined boundary. You can't observe a magnetic field using photons, presumably, because photons don't bounce of them but you can observe it using another magnetic field. But how do you define where the magnetic fields begin to interact and where not? If two bar magnets were suspended in a perfect vacuum devoid of any other forces or energies, would their magnetism eventually draw them together? If all energy were taken out of any system with any amount of attractive force, the force would have to collapse the system into a singularity, wouldn't it, unless there was some counteracting force to prevent it? But like a cloud or the sky itself, the effect is due to compound light-interference through a collection of particles that would be transparent in smaller amounts or concentrations. You can't technically define the edge of a cloud without setting an arbitrary level of relative humidity to denote the boundary, right? Otherwise a cloud is just a lump in humidity that fills the entire sky, no? In practice, I agree with you. But being "undetectable and unobservable and negligible" are relative and subjective, right? I supposed "detectable by any means" would be objective, but how can "negligible" be more than subjective? That is interesting. Maybe that could be how photons get absorbed by electrons, i.e. due to gravitation of the electron at a very minuscule level. I think the key to dealing with this issue would lie in how atoms and other particles maintain volume. The empty space of an atom could be viewed as making it "buoyant" and thus resistant to condensation to the point of be susceptible to collapse under the gravity of its constituent particles. Maybe the nuclear forces are not so much holding the nucleons together as they are preventing them from collapsing under their own microgravity. This is getting very speculative, though, so I don't know how unfavorable the referees will get when they read this kind of thinking.

I'm guessing different people had different reasons. The story of the Pilgrams, however, is that people were living in Leiden and living reasonably well but that they wanted to become religiously and economically independent so they chartered the Mayflower boat to the new world to live off the land, and lost half their colonists the first winter. The famous tea party is another example where they preferred to throw away the tea than to pay taxes on it to a sovereign that didn't represent them. If their purpose was to take possession of the colonial land wealth to prosper from global trade, I would say that is a similar situation to people taking over oil-wealth, since that is also land wealth that is really only valuable because it can be exchanged on global markets for other things. If the revolution was intended to provide people with land to be independent farmers free from colonial obligations, as it is idealized, then I would say it was not just about increasing their means of consumption by altering their position in a global hierarchy of privilege. The problem everyone seems to forget about whenever there's a 'national' revolution is that these nation-states are not economically self-contained self-sustaining economies. So unless people are having a revolution to become completely economically self-sustaining, then all they're really doing is vying to shift their negotiating position in the global economy. In other words, it's like revolutionary Libyans and Egyptians are saying, "we want to take over the oil-wells so we can send the oil to China and get those people to make us more stuff in exchange." I don't think many people care about economic independence or freedom or democracy except as an instrument for getting in on the systems of global economic exploitation. If they were workers being exploited by global capitalism and what they wanted was to start cultivating more economic independence, that would be more comparable to the ideal of the US revolution, imo. But when people just want access to mineral rights to be able to lease the land for money to buy stuff from other people who produce it, isn't that just a means to become a leisure-elite of the global economy?

Infinite is a synonym for " ultimately undefinable." It makes sense, but there is a concept of spiritual strength that people are supposed to muster to resist temptation, etc. People are all assumed to have weaknesses, which is what evil has to work with since it cannot control you like a puppet. Likewise, since goodness can't control you either, it has to rely on enlightening you and motivating you to make good choices. Your point gives me an idea about answering the thread question, though. I.e. the devil must view souls as strong in order to be attracted to breaking them (down). Presumably, once you are completely broken down he would be no longer interested in your weaknesses because there would be nothing left to break, though presumably as long as you have the strength and will to go on living, there is something there for him to work on. You're right, though. The side of good DOES try to care for souls to motivate them to choose goodness over evil; but I think it does so in a way that is intended to strengthen them instead of making them dependent on angels, divine interventions, etc. It's like the bible quote about giving someone a fish vs. teaching them to fish. I actually forget that that one is biblical because it's used in so many contexts outside formal religion.

I've never thought about that, but it makes sense. How can you be sure that gravitation doesn't cancel itself out to some extent, even relative to a satellite far away? E.g. supposedly the center of the planet is weightless due to gravity canceling itself out in all directions, but then are solar and lunar gravity still present as the dominant gravitational forces there? Actually, that's a bad example. The issue would be whether the cancellation of gravity in the center of the planet gradually decreases as you move away from the center, and then does it also gradually decrease from the lagrangian points between the Earth, sun, and moon. In other words, when is gravity "pure" and not "net gravitation" that results from all interacting fields? I suppose this is what "spacetime curvature" refers to. I'm trying but I forgot what it means to find an integral. Is that related to taking the derivative of something to find the amount of change over time by knowing the rate? How does the rate of drop off determine the ability to observe anything? Doesn't that mix objective with subjective? Usually people say that gravity is negligible at the (sub)atomic level, because they're comparing it with the other forces that are relatively strong despite the minute masses involved. However, I don't know of any claims about the minimum volume of an electron and/or why it couldn't be so small that its gravity would be strong if anything could get miniscule-y close to it. I think there are supposedly other sub-electron particles that constitute it, though, and these are probably theorized as being bonded by stronger forces that gravity. Since electrons don't seem to stay in one place for any continuous amount of time, though, I don't know how they could ever maintain close enough proximity to anything to have their gravity play a determinant role.

I don't trust demography.

Are you trying to start a discussion or just market this book?

Good examples. The point is that there is the potential/possibility of always seeking a higher number, more antecedent cause, and/or higher power/authority. This idea(l) is what allows people to make appeals (within themselves and toward others) to higher authority. Thus, even the highest judge or king can be questioned by the lowest peasant because of this idea that they are all subject to authority that exceeds the human capability to define it absolutely. Thus the only absolute truth and/or authority is that truth/authority is contestable; and one way of expressing the ideal of truth/authority that exceeds human definition is to refer to "God." Ironically, if God existed as a defined and therefore limited being, it would become possible to seek a higher authority than God. I can't make sense of this. You're saying that mathematics is not axiomatic and that proving things mathematically doesn't rely on consistency or legitimacy of the system itself? I think I could potentially agree with what you're saying here, but I'd have to deduce some less abstract examples and test them on that level. You're right and wrong. The content of the scriptures themselves may or may not imply supreme rationality, but it doesn't work to interpret God as a culturally relative arbitrary authoritarian dictator. That is worldly authority. The whole reason divine authority transcends worldly authority is because it is undefined. It is faith in higher authority/power. It is faith that the ability to distinguish things as being good or bad is immutable. It is your power as critic to successfully obfuscate and/or de-legitimate theology as long as you want and it is the fact that the choice to recoup the ability to seek constructive meanings in the scriptures by reading them in good faith can never be permanently lost or destroyed. But, you're right, there is no supreme principle of rationality in the universe which is what makes it possible to endlessly progress toward greater rationality. That's just the nature of idealism. Ideals always transcend realities, so practice always lags behind theory so to speak. You can endlessly pursue ideals in practice without ever achieving them completely. There was no danger in building the tower of babel; just the effect that language/knowledge was multiplied beyond control.

I don't even think language should be identified with other forms of ethnic identity, such as nationality, race, or religion, but it does by many people almost by default. But when you say that states should be ethnically neutral (and I agree actually), you're left with the issue of what to do about language culture, because it is quite difficult for any and all languages to be equally or even sufficiently practiced in the shadow of one or more languages viewed as dominant. This is especially the case, imo, when ethnic identity assertions create intimidation against using languages other than the one preferred by those whose ethnic identity and preferences are dominating publicly. Would you hold the same view of such "cherry-picking" if your regional economy was suppressed and you were applying for visas to regions where economic opportunities looked better? Personally, I think the economic migration issue would be helped if there was better economic integration (harmonization) among various regions. The conflict is between whether to raise material standards in poor regions, reduce materialism in wealthier regions, or some of both. I think it has to lean more toward reducing materialism in wealthier regions, because people have been talking about increasing material standards for the global poor forever and it just doesn't happen. I don't think it can, actually, because I think the wealthy economies have created unsustainable consumption patterns that necessitate class-divisions to limit consumption for the lower classes and ensure they contribute large amounts of labor to providing the wealthy with their privileges. But, you're right, this is a topic that spills over into new threads.

Ok, this is the ironic thing about modern authoritarianism: it derives strength from gentleness of command. I.e. aggressive personalities get immediately identified and resisted as being Hitler-esque or Napoleonic, etc. It is the soft-spoken, kind authority figures that seduce people into submitting to their "gentle authoritarianism." With modern media, authority can even be completely disconnected from any human individual or people. Sometimes we are motivated to consent to certain ideologies just because they are portrayed as sensible in the media and, of course, dissent is portrayed as a form of aggression or hate. The message is that if your heart is filled with love instead of hate, you would not make waves by going "against the flow." In this mode of gentle, decentralized authoritarianism, when/how is political/cultural independence supposed to emerge except as part of a popular trend of political dissent from an unpopular regime? Multiparty politics can also factor into authoritarian propaganda machinery. Right-wing parties, for example, are used as black-sheep to motivate people to support left-wing parties out of fear for the alternative. This happened pretty strongly during the Bush presidency and I believe it also has been happening in the way the Tea Party movement is portrayed. I don't pay attention to European politics as much as I should, but there seems to be a typical theme of right-wing "extremism" rising in times of economic dissatisfaction to motivate support for social-democracy and/or social-economic welfare structuring more generally. Don't automatically blame it on language. I might just have a habit of writing complex sentences or you might just have a habit of dealing in simple sentences in whatever language you're working with.

I think ethnicity has been used along with other things to generate collectivist social solidarity because it makes people easier to control. All these things you mention have this effect. Although some people will argue that social control is in and of itself beneficial, that is a vague and overly broad argument, imo, that has to be dissected into specific instances and consequences of particular mechanisms of control. Outside of social control, though, ethnic proximity has the benefit of allowing people to be geographically near people who speak a common language and/or family members. The problem is that bitter divisions between people who define themselves as having ethnic belonging in the nation and those they regard as ethnically other and/or not belonging; the problem is that those divisions form among people who speak a common language, have common cultural experiences, etc. Thus, when anti-migration ideologies are popular, the people they target are being banished from situations in which they can speak (adopted) language and practice (adopted culture). Imagine you're an EU muslim and you get banished to somewhere in the middle east. What do you do with your EU language(s) and culture(s)? I wouldn't be too quick to assume that ethnic-organizing is on the same page with democracy. Remember that a half century ago, democracy involved a deadly conflict with national socialism. And should the emergent government be able to regulate migration arbitrarily?

no, but it probably depends who you count and who you don't.

Having watched "recession" define people's economic attitudes in one way or another for so much of my life, I have come to the conclusion that "'acceptance of one's lot' and happiness" suffers from a sense that there is some level of materialism that was once possible or that is potentially possible but not being 'provided' by 'the economy.' I have found that when people are economically comfortable, they resist dissent because they view it as a potential disruption of an economic status quo that favors them. Then, when they are economically uncomfortable they resist dissent even more because they see it as an impediment to finding their way back into the money. The only time I see (most) people dissent is when some official or other cultural visibility is regarded as unpopular and then these same people will dissent because it is popular to do so. Precious few people resist being "flocking sheeple." I think you're assuming that democracy refers to party-representation and governance by delegations. I'm referring to the civil discourse at the ground-level of democracy. Much of the time in "democracy" people are being represented in parties and have their governance delegated in a way that pacifies them by reflecting their political self-image BUT at the same time they are caught in a fear to dissent from myriad institutions. Such institutions range from democracy itself, to a party ideology they have come to support and defend against others, to even their own self-image. I.e. at the most radical level, citizens in democracy get caught up in authoritarian culture that usurps their freedom prior to its governance. This is why I think a critical function of representative democracy is to give such people impetus to dissent, because this is what liberates their political will from submission to "the benevolent dictatorship of popular rule." Of course there is resistance to this form of liberation because people have become comfortable with preferring benevolent authority over the vulnerability of individual responsibility that comes with being in a state of dissent.

People all have unique lives and genealogies of experience, but there are universal commonalities. One is that people experiencing relative deprivation are likely to experience more intense pleasure and desire for it than someone who has easy regular access to it. So relative poverty and material comfort are mixed bags. When you're poor, you have less but appreciate it more. When your material standard of living rises, you keep desiring more because things aren't as exciting as when you're deprived of them. I don't think anyone is blissfully ignorant of anything, except perhaps how desensitizing western materialism can be. I think people realize that they can achieve happiness with relatively small material increases, which is why there is tension and conflict over economic development. On the one hand people want to progress economically but on the other they don't want to get swept into a flood of western materialism that appears to spoil so many westerners if you pay attention to the media. That and they don't want to give up all their traditional ways of doing things to adopt modern forms of labor and technology for everything.

To me, ethnicity is an individual's sense of cultural identity and while it may make reference to collective/categorical ideas like race, nation, religion, etc. it can be mixed and/or multiple. Thus, I already think it's a bit of a problem when some people treat/view ethnicity as a relatively homogeneous group of people who are all basically the same culturally. I think this represses recognition of individuality, which is of course part of the culture of collectivism procured using ethnic-identity in many cases. So, to answer your question specifically, ethnic-identity can't really be clearly defined, but it is still utilized as an impetus for social and individual organization in various ways - of which statism is sometimes one. Materially they're not usually, but where they are successful is in promoting cultural hegemony and regulating cultural behavior in a way that promotes the ability to practice certain ethnic culture more than others, i.e. in the form of allowing speakers of a language to interact broadly using that language, have institutions in the language, socialize children, etc. The uglier side of them (imo ugly) is that they can also promote ethnic legitimacy (by regulating belonging via migration rules, for example) and promote a higher standard of living for citizens than is available globally, because they can exclude non-citizens from access to tax-funding. I'm weary of using examples to discuss this, because that would presume that existing manifestations should serve as a guide for potential ones. It's like looking at who's currently in prison as a guide for what kind of laws should be made to incriminate and imprison people. Why is ethnic identity and the will to differentiate and separate so much stronger with European culture, do you think? I have the sense that ethnicism is promoted at the level of cultural ideology/propaganda. It isn't really logical, though, that so many people dislike the idea of the EU as an institution for continental integration yet they also don't want to dis-integrate the nation-states any further. I mean, you should either support ethnic autonomy and statism/separation or freedom of movement/residence/work etc., right? It also makes me wonder why people were against the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain if they like having separately governed ethnic-nations so much. Yes, ethnic territorialism is always a basis for social-exclusion, disenfranchisement, subjugation of individuals/individuality, and ethnic violence like war, terrorism, genocide, etc. but this is because so many people are willing to defend ethnicism to the death, which means they must really like it (or at least be afraid of losing it through intermarrying, mixing, sharing public/economic resources, and otherwise interacting and integrating). But I find it awkward to claim to imply that it is legitimate to protect the ethnic territorializing of existing regimes to the detriment of others who would seek similar territorial autonomy just because it supports economics and politics that serve the interest of the existing regimes. Isn't that like telling someone that they can't have the same rights as you do because if they did, it would interfere with your ability to have those rights?

My sense is that there is within capitalism a culture of work-subjugation that basically views submission and obedience to authority as being a good worker and deserving reward. To me it is like a behavioral reward system you would use to train animals, but it seems to be exceedingly popular among the people who flourish with it. It is ironic to think that capitalism emerged from protestant ethics like the ones published by Thomas A Kempis (I think in the 15th or 16th century) where he says that submission to an employer should be whole-hearted (Imitation of Christ). I suppose that's what people think they are doing when they stop thinking critically and just do what they're told or what others expect of them, but to me this ethic results in the most senseless economic activities. Uncritical submission to social expectations of work is where I think any economic system goes wrong. It is like the moment where the workers proverbially "sell their souls" because they give up critical creative voice in their economic contribution. I don't see anything wrong with engaging in economic activity with social responsibility in mind. It's when people are stuck in a system of behavioral rewards and punishments for (dis)obedience to collective authority that it becomes a problem and this happens as easy with capitalism as with communism. I just think capitalism holds more potential for liberating individual critical thought and will power from collectivism because of the emphasis on respecting private property. Of course, corporatism usurps this value to subjugate individuals to corporate property and management by reference to collectivism, similarly to communism, imo. Ironically, I think Marx himself viewed individual creative control over her/his labor as a value that he viewed as being undermined by worker-alienation in industrial capitalism. What I don't understand is why he advocated forward progress of capitalism into totally collectivist communism, since that would seem to only further alienate individuals from control of their own labor. Maybe he thought that if the workers would own the means of production, they would not try to control and subjugate each other the way owners/management does. Imo, workers exercise most of the repressive social-control in workplaces, and the unions are a formalization of this. Socialist governments coordinate union control with manager/owner control by adding government control to the cocktail. I guess all this is making me sound libertarian too. I'm not sure what libertarianism all entails, but I just think economic activity should be emergent from the individual level (ground-up), should be non-exploitative, and I think the rational values that emerged under protestant capitalism, such as individual work ethic, saving, and frugality (avoiding unnecessary spending and waste) are all means for achieving good, both individual and social.

This topic is a little awkward, imo, because it implies legitimacy in ethnic segregation; but since globalism has been for centuries evolving as national-statism and seems to continue in that direction, I am curious what people think of this. Should each ethnic identity be associated with a corresponding region or should regional governance be neutralized of all ethnocentrism - or something in between? How should ethnicity be regulated in politics/governance?

I don't know if there's an objective way to study it, but I would venture to guess that as popularity of a certain government official or ideology grows, the greater apprehension people feel to question, resist, and dissent from what they see increasingly as a social imperative. The Asch experiments in conformity provide maybe a little insight, but I think more can be found in the way trends in politics and consumption are narrated. Unpopular political positions are not only reasoned with in a neutral way but demonized and otherwise discursively bullied. This sends the signal to the public not to identify with unpopular ideologies. Yes, some people will be brave enough to take sides with the oppressed, but how many will side with the dominant ideology to escape oppression? I think it's ironic that you compare "advanced, benevolent, and progressive democracy" with "a hugely repressive fascist state," because I think the latter sincerely believes that it's the former. But how can democracy claim to be progressive where progress is taken to mean unified movement? Isn't democracy the interaction of conflicting viewpoints without fear of dissent? If dissent is repressed by pleasure of reward instead of pain of punishment, is that any less repression? And when consent is given out of fear of dissent as having the painful consequence of being treated as a social pariah, isn't that also a form of coercion albeit an unintentional one? Yet when the Hitler or the Bush becomes exceedingly unpopular and thus popular to criticize, political critique gets socially rewarded instead of stigmatized. Isn't that more conducive to dissent and thus democracy?

Sorry, I get so annoyed with this whole symbolic performance game. I wish people would skip all the symbolism and just work at a functional level. The problem with this would be that it would become painfully clear how many "functionaries" don't really do anything functional. Their job is basically acting, and then people argue over the role they're performing to "imply priorities?" Instead of being so cynical about it, maybe I should just ask what a critic like me is to do when we think much if not most of this symbolic nonsense is a waste of time and resources and should be radically reformed? Generally, I find it sufficient to mention that phone calls and other forms of telecommuting are sufficient for a great deal of work, but when someone says that showing up at the office with a tie in a relatively new car is an important "priority implication" that justifies devoting enormous economic resources to it globally, I feel like I have to raise the yellow flag a little higher.

Is it possible to have socialism or communism without it basically elevating corporatism further above individuality? The one thing I like about capitalism (at least in theory) is the individuality possible with private property/control of resources (including oneself). It seems to me that communism makes individuals subordinate to the proletarian collective, which is supposed to over-ride the individual's will to even have their own thoughts about collective interests, let alone their own prerogative/freedom. Personally, I am for non-corporate capitalism or at least a form of capitalism that limits corporate activity to the minimum necessary for industrial efficiency. I am also for individuals being able to express their own will with regard to corporate work. I can understand the mentality of individuals coordinating their activities to achieve certain goals "collectively" but it's when the "collective" becomes a rationale for suppressing individuality that it really becomes oppressive, imo.

In a sense, I can say I'm "inside a building" because I define the inside as being the area that starts when I walk through the door and can no longer see the outside walls. However, in another sense, "inside the building" could be taken to refer to insulation, wiring, plumbing, or other things that are not visible without penetrating some surface of the building. I suppose that's a bad example because it is contextual, but take the example of a cloud instead. From a far distance, a cloud can appear to have a very well-defined perimeter that is opaque to light-penetration. However, as you approach the cloud in an aircraft, it is never really clear exactly when you penetrate the surface to enter the "interior" of the cloud. In fact, when it's foggy I usually think about being inside a cloud from some other perspective. With physical force-fields, I think the issue becomes more fundamental. If you are standing on the surface of the Earth, you are clearly in its gravity-well (field). But the moon is also in the Earth's gravitational field, so when you are standing on the moon are you in both fields at the same time? Likewise, are we on Earth in both the sun's gravity field AND the Earth's? What about the moon's? The tides suggest that we are. But still we can say that we're "on Earth" but not "in the Sun" or "in the moon" right? But why? What is it about crossing into the atmosphere from outer space that justifies saying that one is now "on Earth" instead of "in outer space?" Since the moon has no atmosphere, can we then say that we are not yet "on the moon" if we are 10m above the surface even though we can fly in a plane 20,000ft above sea level on Earth and say we are still "on Earth?" Likewise, if the moon is just as much part of the Earth's gravity-well as is Mt. Everest, why shouldn't we say we are "on Earth" when on the moon? Doesn't the intersection of the gravity-wells make the Earth-moon system akin to what a molecule is vis-a-vis its constituent atoms? If anything, it seems to me that the boundaries of massive bodies are assumed on the basis of the intersection between electromagnetic and electrostatic forces and gravitational forces. If you were to go by gravitation alone, would there be any basis for delimiting the gravitational field according to how the protons and electrons within it are arranged? Couldn't these other forces just be seen as "internal topology" within a gravity field? Likewise, couldn't the sun and planets be viewed as "internal topology" of a single solar gravity field? This is all admittedly counter-intuitive, but I wonder how accurate intuition is when dealing with objective physical relations. Certainly intuition always seems to be misleading at the sub-atomic level.

Is that like when unions fine people for doing work above, beyond, and/or outside their contractual call of duty? And is "giving lots of money to good workers" a reward system for submission to union "management?" This doesn't sound much different than authoritarian capitalism except class-distinctions are denied and management is off-limits for critique because it is supposedly of the proletariat for the proletariat. Or am I misinterpreting?

My general impression is that democratic civil discourse is most anti-critical during a popular regime. In fact, this may even form the basis for authoritarianism since people are most afraid to dissent when what they are dissenting from is overwhelmingly popular. An extreme example would be the difference between the way Hitler was "heiled" during the height of Nazism compared with how he is regarded since. A less extreme example might be the way dissent was repressed and feared shortly after 9/11 compared with the popularity of criticizing Bush as a bad president since. This begs the question of whether unpopular leaders should in fact be replaced with more popularly legitimated ones or whether it stifles critical democratic discourse to do so.

I wonder if that's because they get hungry for even more change or because the excitement of change results in fear of where it is leading, which incites social unrest that boils over. Then it of course makes sense that everyone will say that they were rebelling for whatever cause prevails after the revolution. When do you ever hear people come out after a revolution and say that they were for a different change that the one they got? Probably this is because post-revolutionary regimes tend to be naturally repressive insofar as the supporters of a new regime are going to be very protective against it being undermined (like protecting a newborn baby). Does this mean that "pro-democracy revolution" is an oxymoron?

Or maybe overly formal.