Don’t know how many Chomsky fans we have on the forum, but this is an interesting read. The Egypt thread reminded me of this article. http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_nothing_like_a_democracy/
Chomsky is the man. I’ve soaked up so much knowledge from him over the years. Check out the documentary “Psywar”. Chomsky is featured in it and it shows exactly why America is not a democracy.
Deception eliminates resistance. Keep your eyes(not just your first two) open gents.
The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It’s bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re a part of it. You’ve got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I’ve still got a lot to teach you.
Dude, you have a drinking problem and are 99.9% an alcoholic. Check yourself before your wreck youself.
My feeling on this. My parents are worth a lot of money but I don’t want it. I am what I produce. Give it to charity.
What does it mean to say a person is “99.9% an alcoholic”?
To be fair, I didn’t understand Bromion’s post. Are you quoting somebody?
I, for one, am NOT a Chomsky fan.
It’s pretty obvious Bromion was quoting someone. When I googled it, I found it that it was a Gordon Gecko quote.
I’m going to watch that today. Thanks
LOOOOL
It’s from a movie, brah. Let me help you out here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/quotes
Quoting one of the most famous parts out of the most famous financial movie of all-time on a financial message board and duping 3 out of 3 posters including the biggest troll on the forum. Troll Level Expert Mode: Achieved.
I am surprised that not even one person in the thread so far can quote Wall Street. This board really needs to get with the program. At least rawraw is being proactive.
In other news, the Chomsky piece was long but really fascinating, thanks for posting. I need to read more Chomsky.
@blake LOL please do not give it to charity. Just be grateful for it and keep working hard.
I find a lot of people who had everything handed to them have self esteem issues (financially), and they don’t want to take handouts from their parents (though they have their whole life and probably still do).
Just enjoy it bro. And be glad you’re knowledgable and driven enough to still be a producer yourself.
You can give it to charity but we’ll all still look at you like a privledged asshole. If you gave it to charity, we’d probably look at you as an ungrateful privledged asshole.
It’s interesting you mention it, because when I was talking startup funding, you immediately assumed I was getting gifted from my parents… and it all makes sense now.
@chomsky
guy is a chode of the first caliber.
Sorry–never seen “Wall Street”. I think I’ll start studying for my Claritas exam now.
Anyone who works in finance and hasn’t seen Wall Street to recognize that quote… that’s embarassing.
Blake doesn’t work in finance, so fine he gets a pass this time.
Even I got that Wall Street quote.
Chomsky is a whiner. Respect for his computer science contributions, but none at all for the constant burps from his bellyache about USA.
I don’t have time to refute all the arguments he makes in the salon article - but roughly, my refutation boils down to “people are smart and empowered, they are not the bewildered herd.”
I don’t know if the tragedy of the commons and the western aggression have anything to do with capitalism. Similar things have been done in/by communist USSR, China (commie-capitalist-cheats) and various Islamic rulers. Hardly unique to the West. That doesn’t make them right, but takes away his linkage to RECD.
If you can beat Nana, Chomsky is probably a small change. BTW, do you really believe the bolded? I bet we could quantify “smart” and test it – and I’m scared of the results.
^ Yes, I do believe the bolded part. The (book)smart people assume too readily that everyone else is dumber than them. But as I get older, I realize that practices that have survived, have backing from a majority of people because they serve their purpose.
This cuts both ways. Slavery served the purpose of a majority of white people in the South. So it’s not always the good practices that survive. But the point is that they have either explicit or implicit support from the people. So just because something is unjust or does not meet Chomsky’s standard of morality is no proof that people don’t want it that way.
Hey, I know I have an illusion of choice when I visit the grocery store and I see 20 types of Ritz crackers, “original”, “reduced fat”, “reduced sodium” (reduced from what, the original too-high levels, of course), “whole wheat” (which are not 100% whole wheat - in fact enriched flour is the first ingredient - but make you think you’re eating healthy.) I am smart enough to figure out that it’s a bunch of bull, just as Chomsky did. But where he fails, and other consumers like me who are smarter than Chomsky succeed, is recognizing that Nabisco makes these pseudo-varieties because customers buy them. It’s a feedback loop, not an open loop. And customers get smarter all the time, which is why tobacco companies are fading away ad Coke and Pepsi have to rely more and more on vitamin water instead of cola. (Until, ineitably, we find out that vitamin water is crap too, and there is no substitute for real natural food.) The point is, the president of Nabisco does not come to my house and force me at the point of a gun to buy his crap. Chomsky derides this fundamental freedom of choice as an illusion. He is a whiny whiner who is stuck in the same old rut.
There is far less adverserial relationship between companies and consumers than Chomsky assumes. Yes, companies try to fool us, but they also offer genuinely needed services that we could not provide for ourrselves. And BTW, as far as innovation goes, the government came up with the atomic bomb while AT&T came up with the transistor, Xerox PARC (I believe) with the mouse, Pfizer with Viagra. So there.
Here is a simple definition of smart: if you get what you want in life, then you are smart.
It’s not about what you know, how much money you have, whether you can impress people with your charm and wit. It’s about results. Knowing what you want and getting it, that’s all that counts.
1recho fits his own definition of smart. Fancy that.
^ This is an honest question.
Do you think you are smart or dumb?
It’s not particularly self-serving on my part, is all I am trying to say.
Although, feel free to snigger if that’s what you want - that’s what makes you smart. Wanting it and getting it.
Are you smarter than a bumble bee or not? A bumble bee just wants to fly around and collect pollen. It most likely satisfies more of its wants than you do. So by your definition, a bumble bee is most likely smarter than you.
Getting what you want is certainly a good thing (at least in the short term; if you want just Big Macs, maybe it’s not such a good thing in the long term), but it’s not automatically smart. You may be smart enough to get what you want, and that is also a good thing, but that’s different than being smart on its own.
It is also possible to be too smart for one’s own good, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t smart… it just means that being smart isn’t the only thing that’s important. That’s why “intelligence” is not the same as “wisdom” and not the same as “good instincts,” all of which are valuable.
It’s similar to saying “if you can get what you want, you’re fast.” The idea being that “if you are too slow, you can’t get what you want.” Therefore if you got what you want, you’re obviously fast. It just doesn’t hold up to scruitiny.
I agree with bchad. Your definition of smart is very flawed. So you’re saying that coked up celebrities like Lindsay Lohan or teenage snots like Justin Beiber are “smart” becase they can get whatever they want?
What about drug dealers who get what they want for a specific period of tiime, but end up getting caught and spending their life in prison?
Also, shouldnt the quality of “what you want” play a factor? If a drug addict knows that he wants meth and always finds a way to get it, does that make him smart?
bchad and earv, fair points. So OK, my definition of smart doesn’t quite cut it. What would be a better definition?
bchad seems to be leaning towards “if it helps your long term well-being” though I don’t want to presume.
I hope we agree that merely “more knowledge” does not equate to “smarter”.
There’s “Knowledgeable,” which means you know a lot of things.
To me, “Intelligence” is about how you process knowledge to gain new knowledge or insights into new situations. Most people who are intelligent are also knowledgeable as a result, but more knowledge does not mean more intelligence, necessarily. The world is full of idiotic bean counters and trivia collectors.
Wisdom is a more intuitive understanding of how things (and particularly people) work and act. Sometimes intelligence goes wrong when it suggests things that people with wisdom know aren’t true or practical, but it is also true that “conventional wisdom” is often flawed or sometimes no longer applicable to the world as it is today.
I think what you are getting at is the importance of being able to apply knowledge to solve problems that lead to satisfying your wants and desires. So that’s applied intelligence, which is a kind of smarts that is indeed worthy of respect.
I think where your initial definition went wrong was 1) it assumed that because applied intelligence was what you most valued, other kinds of intelligence didn’t really count as intelligence, and 2) it didn’t account for the fact that often people get what they want either a) by luck, b) by coercion, or c) by not wanting very much in the first place. It would be odd indeed if my intelligence were a simple function of how little I wanted - there’s a kind of buddhism in there, I suppose, but it’s not what most of us think of as intelligence.
(note that I am equating smart with intelligent here.)