I read
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. So many writers describe such outlandish behavior that there must be an audience for it, but although at first it seemed interesting, it got a little too over the top for me. Still, he made me want to go to Thailand for some yummy food.
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Why's that, Honey--nasty folk bothering you or what?
Well, here goes anyway (no one is ever going to read this long dead, never read thread, anyway, so live a little already!)
Really, for the yummy food? Burdett's pointed, perfectly balanced attribution to the ruling class of the evils besetting the brown-skinned folks trapped in the squalid economic conditions of the world's tertiary sphere didn't even bother you, didn't make you want to reach for your Ayn Rand? Or didn't you catch his words on the Eastern view of the psychosis of the West--the commodification of all things, including the non-material...you know, stuff like thoughts and emotions? (Oh, yeah. That stuff doesn't really exist, so what's the author--and all those lazy darkies--bitching about?)
I just love finding crap like this on blogs; absolutely unapologetically delivered, too. Ah, the classic stereotypical over-simplification, the straw man "argument," where you dismiss & discredit what you don't like or understand by simply misrepresenting it...state of the art scholarship, too, so maybe we shouldn't rush to judge you.
Except that's the crux of the Crusty Old School's position: those damned multi-culti liberals say that we can't judge or discern anything anymore 'cuz "nothing is true" and "everything is relative." Let's hear it verbatim, the classic canned rant:
"...I said that I thought globalization meant global competition, and that it made the basic capacity to read and do arithmetic more important." I asked Summers what the response had been. "It was," he said dryly, "seen as a distinctive perspective."
The intellos look at each other in consternation. "Aw, gee! No blaming European and Western civilization for all the world's ills?"
"Absolutely. Since there is no such thing as truth, there's no real knowledge, but simply ways of knowing."
Tell you what, Sugar, how's about you read this itsy-bitsy review of Norbert Blüm’s Justice: A Criticism of the Idea of Homo Economicus (he's a conservative, btw, but he's not bound to a self-serving ideology or limited by tired, empty cliches).
Here's a sample of the "Naked Facts" statistics near the end of the article, which can be interpreted any way you want, like everything else in a world ruled by moral relativism, right? I mean, hey--there must be some other conclusion one could reach, other than the obvious "Whitey just worked harder/lesser races be lazy/tiny elite owns the world" kinds of stuff that the stupid basket-weaving Lefties would come up with, right?
Naked Facts
Figures do not explain the world, but they save a lot of words. The list of billionaires drawn up each year by the American business magazine Forbes again registered powerful growth in 2006. 102 names were added to the list of the billionaires’ club, and the 793 billionaires in the world stand in stark contrast to the 3 billion people who have to manage on less than 2 dollars a day, with 1.3 billion having less than 1 dollar a day.
Indeed, owning billions is something different to the billions who are starving. A billion isn’t the same thing in each case. The 38 richest countries in the world with a population of 1.2 billion have, added together, a GDP of 26.7 trillion dollars. The poorer countries make do with 4.8 trillion dollars, split between 5.476 billion people.
This means an average daily income of 60.96 dollars for some, and for the others, 2.40 dollars. Here in Germany too, there is a chasm between the rich and the poor. The number of millionaires has never grown as rapidly as in the last few years. In 1970 there were 217,000 people earning over a million a year, today the figure has passed the 1.5 million mark.
* The 358 richest families own one half of the world’s assets.
The world’s 500 largest private companies control 52% of the world’s national product. These 500 groups are richer than the 133 poorest countries in the world. Between 1980 and 1995, the total assets of the 100 largest multinationals rose by 700%. These figures if anything go easy on the rich to the detriment of the poor, since the average income of the poor countries includes the income of the superrich who live there and increase the average figure. Averages tell us little about the bandwidth of the figures for which they constitute the arithmetic mean. If poverty and wealth increase at the same rate, the average remains the same. Averages thus tell us little about the extent of the difference between rich and poor. If one person eats two sausages and one person eats none, they have together eaten an average of one sausage, the only difference being that the one has eaten his fill and the other is hungry. The difference between the poor and the rich is growing. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The assets of the dollar billionaires rose by 57% between 2003 and 2005. The income gap between the richest and poorest countries is increasing, from a ratio of 3:1 in 1820, to 35:1 in 1950 and 72:1 in 1992. In 98 countries incomes are lower than they were 10 years ago, while in Africa they are down 20% on 25 years ago.
1 billion people have no access to clean water, 600 million do not live where they want to live, and instead have been displaced or have fled. 30,000 people die every day for lack of food or drink. Children die, 8,000 of them every day of diseases that inoculations would have protected them against. For many there are no doctors, no schools, for their parents no work. They lack everything that is necessary to live.
250 million children are forced to work in the same regions where 900 million adults are out of work. The children toil, their parents hang around at home, with no job to go to. One half of the world starves, the other half grows fat. Global schizophrenia? The world has gone mad. What is spent in the USA (8 billion dollars) and in Europe (11 billion Euros) on ice-cream and cosmetics alone would cover the costs of providing 2 billion people with a basic schooling and clean water. A drop more fairness, not more, and misery would be banished from this earth. Mankind, “creation’s crowning glory”, “the child of god”, homo sapiens – l’animal rational. What magnificent words we use to describe our species, and how appalling is the misery in which the larger part of mankind is sunk. We are able to put a man on the moon, but incapable of allowing justice to prevail on earth.
What is the point of a probe on Mars if the wells in the Sahara are drying out? Man, the creature of reason, wastes his intelligence on trivialities. I do not wish to get involved in the dispute on the accuracy of the figures on poverty. For even if the number of the poor were exaggerated, as is unlikely to be the case, the misery cries out against heaven. Does the scandal begin when one child starves to death or when a million children starve to death?
Figures, statistics and charts are dead matter. They can be used as an argument to support the call for justice, but it will not inflame the call. The uprising against injustice is lit by mankind’s innate awareness that all have a claim to be recognised as members of humanity. This is a right and not charity.
Norbert Blüm, Gerechtigkeit: Eine Kritik des homo oeconomicus.
(ISBN-10: 3-451-05789-1), p. 15 et seq.
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Wait, wait, wait. I know how y'all would respond to the inherent unfairness, cruelty and inefficiency of cannibal capitalism: Why, it's just plain linear increase, as divined by Uncle Malthus! (Who just happened to be the inspiration for Uncle Scrooge, coincidentally enough):
“A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, and if society do not want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact, has no business to be where he is...The poor (should) simply die and thereby decrease the surplus population.”
Essay on the Principle of Population (1803)
Or...? Here's another side of Malthus (and, by extension, Smith and Rand and even Mussolini, for that matter), which you might not have caught yet.
(Btw, I do not buy into the empty rhetoric of the "Left" either, so don't feel unfairly set upon; the whole so-called spectrum is an empty sham..including all those "Libertarians" who subscribe to the standard manipulation of scarcity/fear of real individual autonomy scams...well, peace unto you, Friend. Really. Ever try this sort of Libertarianism? It even allows for humor, if you can imagine!)
"Honey"? "Sugar"?
I don't know whether to call you "High Fructose Corn Syrup" or "Vinegar".
the Eastern view of the psychosis of the West--the commodification of all things
The "Eastern view?" There are plenty of Easterners who also "commodify" things, if I understand what you, High Fructose, mean by commodification. I don't see a good alternative to decide what's valuable by putting a price on things. If I decide what's valuable, I'm guessing you may not like it, and if you decide, I probably won't like it either. Anyway, even if something is commodified, we don't have to buy it if we don't want it.
Yes, there are many poor people in the world. You, Vinegar, blame capitalism, apparently seeing the world economy as a zero-sum game, and believe that growing wealth is at the expense of the poor.
In fact, what you, High Fructose Corn Syrup, might call global commodification, or what I would call trade, has helped to eradicate much absolute poverty over the past decades, first in Japan, then in Southeast Asia, and more recently to China and India. Yes, many of their people remain poor, but the standard of living for others keeps rising. The countries that are mired in poverty remain so largely because of their own economic mismanagment.
Vinegar, you don't mention a solution to the abject poverty that remains, but presumably it involves taking money from those who have too much and distributing it to those who have too little. Those who receive the handouts may very well become dependent on them, and those whose money is taken will be discouraged from producing, and progress will slow down. Maybe you can live with that. But once they've taken money from the trillionaires, billionaires, and millionaires, they'll take money from everyone.
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