Something I don't get

[LMNO]

It sounds like you're saying the only way to avoid this is to make the jump across the income gap.  It's a good thing I work for The Man™, then.

[Cain]

Not the only way.

But promoting a democratic civic culture while disassembling the power of the plutocratic corporatist elite without the whole thing turning to violent radicalism is definitely a lot harder.

[LMNO]

I've been wondering... Do you have any historical examples of a Plutocracy being taken down in any manner other than violent uprising?

[Cain]

Solon, classical Athens.

[Cramulus]

If Warren Buffet was able to convince a bunch of billionaires to start acting ethically, do you think that would make a dent?

[Cain]

It probably wouldn't hurt.  But the real change needs to happen on a political and social level.  If people want a democracy, they're going to have to participate, they're going to have to compromise and they're going to have to stop looking to leaders to solve all their problems (psuedo-monarchist or theocratic sentiment at best) and start working for them themselves.

[LMNO]

Solon, classical Athens.

Yikes.  A brief google search doesn't seem to reveal anything we could adopt to today's culture.

[Mangrove]

"they" "them" "us"

what the hell's going on in this thread?



I swear if someone mentions flouride and chem trails I'll start bleeding from my ears.

Hawk is right, in that what he said has to apply to a certain percentage of people on the planet, but that type of personality isn't exclusive to people with lots of money. 

So who's this "they"?  Bond type ultra-rich super villans bent on erradicating poor people so they can have the planet to themselves?

Lex Luthor types who look at people without 7 figure salaries as a plague that should be exterminated?

What, as I asked before, the hell is going ON ITT?

Well, then do I have a special treat for YUO!

http://www.ethericwarriors.com

[Triple Zero]

This thread is super-interesting. Just wanted to say that.

What about education? And by that I mean general, solid education in math, science, history and possibly a bit of sociology/demographics/how does our government/country/society work. (And preferably "critical thinking", but that's probably too much to ask for).

I remember Cain saying education is one of the strongest indicators of / correlation with umm economic wellbeing, freedom, equality, happiness, something good (which one was it Cain? or just generally good for most things, I guess).

I recently read this article:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/23/america-is-losing-another-generation-to-science-illiteracy/

Not sure if it was mentioned in that specific article or in the corresponding discussion on hackernews, but apparently if you raise the bar just a tiny bit from "literacy" to "functional literacy", this meaning not just being barely able to read and write words and sentences, but testing for understanding, being able to do really simple things like reading a graph, reading two half-page essays and answering questions about differing opinions stated in them, reading a bus time chart, reading a map, looking things up in the phone book or yellow pages, answer questions using a chart, etc etc etc, it turns out that over 90% of US population is NOT "functionally literate" (at least that's what the research quoted in the hackernews thread said).
I was taught and tested for all these things in school. Were you?
[ BTW if you want to see an example of the survey questions, click here, click "Search" to get all questions, and click around to some random pages ]
I mean, we're all really smart here, but if you see people unwittingly voluntary performing a viral marketing campaign for Nestle, while honestly thinking they're raising breast cancer awareness (just a recent example), there's just no way, no fucking way those 90% are going to be able to sensibly form an informed opinion about what's going on in politics and policy making.

Related, my girlfriend is currently doing volunteer work for Humanitas where she's helping a Somalian refugee / asylum seeker integrate, especially concerning all the bureaucratic paperwork form stuff that a socialist (kinda/for now) society inevitably requires. He is illiterate. Though he knows the alphabet and can probably read words and partial sentences with considerable effort. He's not dumb or stupid though, he just was never taught that shit.
But last week my gf taught him to read a map of the city. Now the concept of "map", lines on a piece of paper corresponding to a real-life territory, is probably familiar to just about every culture on earth. But the part where the map has an index on the back, and you can look up a street in the alphabetical listing, and it says you can find your street in the square on the map with coordinates B3-C4.
Imagine if you don't know that, and you got a city map of Budapest [remember that Hungarian is a completely alien language only slightly related to Finnish and nothing else] and you're given a street address to meet later that day. And every street on the map is splleriuethtiky gae, vvnfrueoooonen bej, asssrpi cuntfukkwoehxbss bip ...

Sorry I digress. This thread is not about education and literacy. Please continue!

[P3nT4gR4m]

Holy shit! I wrote the OP this morning then got fucked up-busy at work. Lot to think about. What I was getting at was the fact that, historically speaking, it appears to me that the state* can only control the masses until the standard of living for those masses falls to a level that they refuse to accept, en-critical-masse. If this happens it's because they're not getting enough kickback from the state and it's generally something the state is doing wrong. Funding cuts at all levels from grass roots up, cause the whole structure to become weak, things like policing and healthcare all go to hell at the same time, making the state vulnerable to the very attack that these conditions are causing to muster.

It mostly seems to get violent around this point, although outcome varies from case to case. sometimes it's short, sweet and some form of status quo is re-imposed. Other times there's a change of leadership and the new state either gets accepted/helped by other states or it just kinda degenerates into mad-max, warlords and cartels. This isn't far-fetched, conspiracy theory or any shit like that. Have a look around. There are a fuckton of places where this has already happened. Places where the bodies pile up in the street, democracy takes a back seat to whichever form of jungle rule the meanest bastards left standing decide to impose.

Cain, you mentioned the fall of Rome. Prolly the last time we've seen an empire implode on that level. Personally I'm of the opinion that we might be somewhere near another event like that but I'm also very aware that it's just as likely we'll sorta bob up and down a lesser, variable amount for another while yet. Problem is, like Hawk points out, they don't seem to have thought much further than fleecing the thing for all they can get and it's going to take some kind of plan to get everything back on it's feet without all the ugly, heads on spikes shit.

*in this case I'm using "state" in slightly the wrong context, because I don't have a better word. What I mean by "state" is whomever should be making most of the political and governmental decisions, hoovering up wealth and gathering power.