Thoughts on a Conversation With NavCat

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I prefer passing a current-events quiz and/or basic economics.

We had that once.  They called it "Jim Crow".

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Bad analogy.  Sharks do what they do because they have a brain about as complex as an analog relay.  Enormous mega-corporations do what they do for reasons that cannot be explained without first having read Milton or Dante.

1.  Limit the size of corporations.  This can be done by taxing the dogshit out of C corps, and leaving S corps pretty much alone.  This only works if you follow #2.

2.  Prevent corporations from owning other corporations.  Period.

3.  Remove the corporate veil, then bust the shit out of anyone caught forming trusts.

4.  Abolish the stock exchange, and all public trading in private entities.  The stock exchange is one of the three reasons we are in the shape we're in today.

The above allows individuals to profit from their own hard work, but prevents corporations from assuming a life of their own.

This would definitely go a long way toward solving the problem. Only hitch is that it'll never happen as long as corporate money rules Washington.

So we eat the corporate money.  It will take a while, but it will be worth it.

[Adios]

Bad analogy.  Sharks do what they do because they have a brain about as complex as an analog relay.  Enormous mega-corporations do what they do for reasons that cannot be explained without first having read Milton or Dante.

1.  Limit the size of corporations.  This can be done by taxing the dogshit out of C corps, and leaving S corps pretty much alone.  This only works if you follow #2.

2.  Prevent corporations from owning other corporations.  Period.

3.  Remove the corporate veil, then bust the shit out of anyone caught forming trusts.

4.  Abolish the stock exchange, and all public trading in private entities.  The stock exchange is one of the three reasons we are in the shape we're in today.

The above allows individuals to profit from their own hard work, but prevents corporations from assuming a life of their own.

This would definitely go a long way toward solving the problem. Only hitch is that it'll never happen as long as corporate money rules Washington.

So we eat the corporate money.  It will take a while, but it will be worth it.

That's going to require a very large appetite.

[Elder Iptuous]

I prefer passing a current-events quiz and/or basic economics.

We had that once.  They called it "Jim Crow".

Yeah.... i prefer the good old fashioned 'paper bag test'
.
.
..
.
..
bring a paper bag with a banker's/incumbent's head in it, and you can vote....

[navkat]

Another thing that would help is to remove the legal precedent that identifies a corporation as an "entity" entitled to pretty much the same rights as an individual.

That's the "corporate veil" I mentioned.

then let's break it down. corporate entities are scary as fuck.

In my philosophy about Emergence I described them as lifeforms. That doesn't mean I agree with their existence, just that I'm not surprised. They're not alive like humans are, either. Or dogs, or mice. If I were to place them on some sort of animal scale, I'd liken them to Amoeba. Primitive, shapeless and caring only for food and survival.
In that respect, I think corporations as a lifeform are barely touching the second circuit on the 8 Circuits Model. Nations and tribes might go a littlebit further.

ok enough sidetracking.

Corporations act like they're persons, but they are not.

Even without the law saying that they are, you can tell it is in their interest to appear as humans. To disguise themselves. Like this gloopy amoeba with a simile of a human face at the end of one of its tentacles. I noticed for the first time when I saw some ads on the street for a new energy corporation. The text on the ad was talking as if the corporation was a person, talking directly to me, saying something like "Actually, nothing changed." (EnergyCorpA is now named EnergyCorpB). But if nothing changed, why'd they change their name? Of course EnergyCorpA got eaten by the larger amoeba of EnergyCorpB, which was now extending one of its masked tentacles to keep up its appearance of humanity, while being a faceless megacorporate entity.

ok still sidetrakcing, sorry, I'll stop now

I really liked this sidetrack.

Picturesque, metaphorical language speaks to my grey matter.

It speaks to a lot of people's gray matter.  In fact, picturesque, metaphorical language speaks so well to so many people's gray matter that well-reasoned arguments are only needed to convince the people to come up with new metaphorical language to persuade everyone else.

With a population that has largely never seen the inside of a formal logic classroom, much less actual critical thinking, all you need to mobilize a voting majority are vacuous animal based metaphors.  See, corporations are like babies, so you shouldn't through them out with the bathwater of all the bad things that have happened to your government.  Or they're like parasites, and while it's an interesting academic ethical dilemma if it's "fair" to wipe out a species just because that species happens to eat you, feet-on-the-ground salt-of-the-earth people like yourself with children to feed know that there's no reason to give 20% of your labor to tapeworms.  Or they're like packs of wolves, an optimal grouping for efficient resource gathering, unfairly set upon by individual wolves who seem to think that it's unfair that other wolves should work together, and try to force every other wolf down to their level of social and organizational incompetence rather than forming packs of their own.

There's a reason the top religions of the world all rely on simple parables to teach complicated theology, rather than just teaching the skills needed to understand complicated theology.

(That said, I do like the image of a giant ameoba with a smiley face on it trying to convince people that it's just a really big, oddly shaped person.)

Did you just call me a sheep with a lot of big words?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I prefer passing a current-events quiz and/or basic economics.

We had that once.  They called it "Jim Crow".

Yeah.... i prefer the good old fashioned 'paper bag test'
.
.
..
.
..
bring a paper bag with a banker's/incumbent's head in it, and you can vote....

THIS.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE HAVE A SYSTEM.

[Bu🤠ns]

to this whole thread.. I learned so much from all of you.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Another thing that would help is to remove the legal precedent that identifies a corporation as an "entity" entitled to pretty much the same rights as an individual.

That's the "corporate veil" I mentioned.

then let's break it down. corporate entities are scary as fuck.

In my philosophy about Emergence I described them as lifeforms. That doesn't mean I agree with their existence, just that I'm not surprised. They're not alive like humans are, either. Or dogs, or mice. If I were to place them on some sort of animal scale, I'd liken them to Amoeba. Primitive, shapeless and caring only for food and survival.
In that respect, I think corporations as a lifeform are barely touching the second circuit on the 8 Circuits Model. Nations and tribes might go a littlebit further.

ok enough sidetracking.

Corporations act like they're persons, but they are not.

Even without the law saying that they are, you can tell it is in their interest to appear as humans. To disguise themselves. Like this gloopy amoeba with a simile of a human face at the end of one of its tentacles. I noticed for the first time when I saw some ads on the street for a new energy corporation. The text on the ad was talking as if the corporation was a person, talking directly to me, saying something like "Actually, nothing changed." (EnergyCorpA is now named EnergyCorpB). But if nothing changed, why'd they change their name? Of course EnergyCorpA got eaten by the larger amoeba of EnergyCorpB, which was now extending one of its masked tentacles to keep up its appearance of humanity, while being a faceless megacorporate entity.

ok still sidetrakcing, sorry, I'll stop now

I really liked this sidetrack.

Picturesque, metaphorical language speaks to my grey matter.

It speaks to a lot of people's gray matter.  In fact, picturesque, metaphorical language speaks so well to so many people's gray matter that well-reasoned arguments are only needed to convince the people to come up with new metaphorical language to persuade everyone else.

With a population that has largely never seen the inside of a formal logic classroom, much less actual critical thinking, all you need to mobilize a voting majority are vacuous animal based metaphors.  See, corporations are like babies, so you shouldn't through them out with the bathwater of all the bad things that have happened to your government.  Or they're like parasites, and while it's an interesting academic ethical dilemma if it's "fair" to wipe out a species just because that species happens to eat you, feet-on-the-ground salt-of-the-earth people like yourself with children to feed know that there's no reason to give 20% of your labor to tapeworms.  Or they're like packs of wolves, an optimal grouping for efficient resource gathering, unfairly set upon by individual wolves who seem to think that it's unfair that other wolves should work together, and try to force every other wolf down to their level of social and organizational incompetence rather than forming packs of their own.

There's a reason the top religions of the world all rely on simple parables to teach complicated theology, rather than just teaching the skills needed to understand complicated theology.

(That said, I do like the image of a giant ameoba with a smiley face on it trying to convince people that it's just a really big, oddly shaped person.)

Damn, you're fucking GOOD.

[Cain]

Cultivating virtù.

Dealing with the problem of hegemony.

Exposition sometime later

[Golden Applesauce]

Did you just call me a sheep with a lot of big words?

On an unrelated note, what do people have against big words?  Big words are the ones that usually have several obvious roots in them, while short but uncommon words are much harder to figure out.  "Multidisciplinary" isn't really any trickier than "discipline," despite being 7 letters and 4 syllables longer.  "Antidisestablishmentarianism," despite not being a real word, is still easy enough for grade school students with the "my word is longer than your word" freudian complex to puzzle out what it means, despite never having heard it in context.  "Arachnaphobia" and "Telecommunications" are likewise long.

Then you get words like "chordate", "waif", "ecrue", and "qat" (okay, the last one's foreign, but Scrabble-legal, so whatever) which, well, good luck figuring the first one out without serious greek/latin skills or the last without knowing anything about Yemen.

[LMNO]

While I agree with you, that last post had you coming off like kind of a prick.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Did you just call me a sheep with a lot of big words?

On an unrelated note, what do people have against big words?  Big words are the ones that usually have several obvious roots in them, while short but uncommon words are much harder to figure out.  "Multidisciplinary" isn't really any trickier than "discipline," despite being 7 letters and 4 syllables longer.  "Antidisestablishmentarianism," despite not being a real word, is still easy enough for grade school students with the "my word is longer than your word" freudian complex to puzzle out what it means, despite never having heard it in context.  "Arachnaphobia" and "Telecommunications" are likewise long.

Then you get words like "chordate", "waif", "ecrue", and "qat" (okay, the last one's foreign, but Scrabble-legal, so whatever) which, well, good luck figuring the first one out without serious greek/latin skills or the last without knowing anything about Yemen.

Big words make Ayn Rand cry.

[navkat]

Did you just call me a sheep with a lot of big words?

On an unrelated note, what do people have against big words?  Big words are the ones that usually have several obvious roots in them, while short but uncommon words are much harder to figure out.  "Multidisciplinary" isn't really any trickier than "discipline," despite being 7 letters and 4 syllables longer.  "Antidisestablishmentarianism," despite not being a real word, is still easy enough for grade school students with the "my word is longer than your word" freudian complex to puzzle out what it means, despite never having heard it in context.  "Arachnaphobia" and "Telecommunications" are likewise long.

Then you get words like "chordate", "waif", "ecrue", and "qat" (okay, the last one's foreign, but Scrabble-legal, so whatever) which, well, good luck figuring the first one out without serious greek/latin skills or the last without knowing anything about Yemen.

Big words make Ayn Rand cry.

Ayn Rand doesn't cry; she just picks herself up and strives for excellence in spite of you with no regard for your silly sympathies and weaknesses.

[LMNO]

Or, at least she writes a novel where she pretends to do so.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Or, at least she writes a novel where she pretends to do so.

But only after being raped by her ideal mate.