I like that sport: if you call me "politician" you don't offend me [I've been even elected in the past]. Anyway you're right [and I'm not going to eat children ... at least when I'm not too hungry! But this was nutritional political satire ...]
You're welcome. I've read the works of the personages you mention [the Mein Kampf included: why to avoid to know?]. Marx and Keynes were matters of study for me [my education is economical], Machiavelli has been a personal interest [all Italian politicians study Machiavelli's works] and Hitler has been a kind of family cultural interest: I've got German roots.
Yes, the internet is a way to transmit information. I gave up looking at that information as either true or false in the binary sense. Two opposing news sites reporting a story with the same facts can lead us to very different conclusions. Even some of the science we see here can be both true and false at the same time. It's not the technology that's the problem. It's the people using it for things like profits and politics. The greatest irony is that we see how the other side is being manipulated by this information, but we can't begin to imagine the very same thing is happening to us. As has been pointed out, we do seem to be a lot closer in our political beliefs than what forums like this suggest. Sadly, the attitude that sees politics as team sports and technology as the venue puts a damper on most reasonable discussion. I guess the only reason I'm still here is because I keep hoping that others will see that all this verbal shin kicking isn't doing anything other than dividing us further. I guess that means I still have a bit of optimism left in me.
Hi again, AlpinLuke. It's fun, in a way, to read some people's posts in which they say, for instance, that so-and-so is a communist, and be certain that the poster hasn't a clue as to what Karl Marx actually wrote about it. Regards, best wishes to you and yours.
Hi, Adfundum. It's been a nice chat. We do well to remember that Pandora's Box, at bottom, contained Hope. Once that is gone, there's truly nothing left. Regards, and best wishes.
Fair enough. I don’t think labels are particularly useful anyway except for determining a starting point for conversation. For example, if you had described yourself as a nihilist, asking questions about how we define “good” would be pointless. Sometimes (not always) labels are the shortest path from A to B. Another way to say what I’m getting at is labels are inadequate to describe an individual but they can often help us eliminate points or concepts that don’t belong in the description of an individual. I’m more interested in the process of how you decide what is good. And how you weight individual advantage against collective advantage or species advantage when applying “good”. Because all can’t be simultaneously advantaged in most cases. That’s how the concept of eugenics came to be—focusing on species advantage while only giving lip service to the individual. Again, using eugenics as an example, a logical consequentialist argument can be made in favor of eugenics, whereas it’s much more difficult to justify from a deontological approach (in most traditional western society, although that is changing). As far as mathematics and logic, I certainly appreciate their complementary aspects. But when it comes to proofs or nuts and bolts of theorems etc. it’s out of my wheelhouse completely. If I attempted to monetize my knowledge of Godel’s work I would starve to death. I don’t know much about Hofstadter‘a work. I’ll check it out.
I was born in 1972. When I was studying in an Italian economical high school Socialism was a licit alternative to Capitalism [I studied real Socialism]. So, probably I've lived the moment when real Socialism [or even Communism] became pragmatically impossible.
