Hi Nix,
To answer your last question there, neither, capitalist society runs on profit. Without the potential for profit, our current society would collapse. People don't do much if there is no potential for them to get anything out of it. Even charitable deeds which seem like nothing but kindness benefit the person giving in a mental way. People give money to charity because it makes them feel good. People do nothing just to be nice. People do things because the see a benefit in doing it, or they just feel like they should. All of this is detailed in that book I told you to look at in another post.
Where you quoted me there, you took my comment a bit too literally, I was saying things change. You need to adapt to those changes in order to survive. That's how it is in nature and society. I have certain things that I believe to be my fundamental rights, and I would be willing to die to defend those rights. But that is only because I gain more of a psychological benefit to resisting than to just give up and die.
And nix, I agree with you about the environment! You read my first post on the environmentalism thread; the environment is getting steadily destroyed by humanity. I just feel that your solution is poorly thought out. For example, you constantly talk about how we should all grow our own food and turn back to nature. Like I said in another post of mine, farming is extremely damaging to the environment! Small scale farming is inefficient, and requires overlarge amounts of labor for the return you get. You kind of steered around that point in the environmentalism thread, so I would still like your response to that.
I understand you will never advocate the destruction of the environment, and I sure as hell don't want you to. But can't you acknowledge that the methods you propose are not the best path?
Also, in my opinion the G20 meeting is just a political gimmick that makes the voters (and the leaders themselves) feel like their leaders are doing something. In the case of the US, it just involves sucking up to your leaders to give us a better world image.
Which leader said capitalism has failed? I hadn't heard that.
You want the truth? The goverment has failed. They screwed up; miserably. Failures in the market are mostly due to poor government regulation, be it too much or too little. An example in my government (US). I'm assuming you guys over in Europe hear about Bernie Madoff. If you haven't, he was a guy who set up a 50 billion dollar ponzi scheme. The sad part, a financial analyst told one of our regulatory boards, and they ignored him! That isn't a failure of capitalism, it's a failure of government.
Unbrideled capitalism would be a disaster, I'm not denying that. But with a capable government, capitalism works great.
What I've coined "public stupidity" is the thing that is destroying the US. Most americans have no knowledge of the issues affecting their country, they don't really care either. We are losing our position in the world heirarchy because we don't focus our attention on important subjects. Some celebrity getting drunk and stripping at a party gets as much media attention as information about an important diplomatic meeting. Hell, the recent events in Georgia and Israel only made the front page of our local paper when they each started. After that they were relegated to a small article containing casualty figures in the World section. To me, the idea that you can confine all important world events onto a single page shows how much we ignore what's going on in the world.
China is pulling ahead of us because they are still in the position where they appreciate what they get. Kids here in the US get offered a great education for free and don't even take advantage of it. It's like what a person said above, "comfort breeds complacency". That is why empires rise and fall. Once your on top, most people and nations don't feel the need to keep improving on their lead. So long as they're on top, and stay there, everyones happy.
You can preach the death of capitalism all you want, but it's a good system that's here to stay. Capitalism is not at fault for these latest economic problems. Capitalism is the reason our standard of living is as high as it is today.
You seem to think it's either the environment or us, no compromises. I disagree, I choose to think our technology has allowed us to have the best of both worlds. I think that is the fundamental difference between our two viewpoints. Wouldn't you agree?
Ben