True but, training an adult wild eagle would take more than what its worth. Training fledglings takes quite awhile too. Its not cost efficient. I just can’t see it being worthwhile.
A con artist doesn’t call himself a con artist in public. But the more obvious are the former aristocracy of the USSR and Nazi Germany, the House of Lords and the entire “upper class” of England, India, Israel, and Iran… the FED and entire G8 and G20 except that they hide their agendas from the public.
It seems like a pretty convenient rhetorical trick to label the ruling class ‘socialist’ when they themselves never call themselves that, but do openly and frequently call themselves a ruling class. In reality, rather than the world of political rhetoric, the very fact they openly refer to themselves as a ruling class is one of the main things keeping them in power.
But hey ho, if you wanna continue reducing political debate to your personal hatred of a word then I’m not going to stop you. It just makes political discussion with you virtually impossible, despite us agreeing on an awful lot.
When you can’t see beyond the word, you see all references to it as merely a reference to a “hated word”.
But conceptualists couldn’t care less of the words. Words have meanings, such as;
That single phrase;
“means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy”
MEANS “we the elite know what is best for the species, not the species itself. And thus deserve control over them. We should be their God.” They are conceptually equal. Call it with whatever word you like.
Socialist Leaders ≡ God-wannabes
Life is NOT a single particle and cannot be sustained as one. “God” (that which determines ALL that can or cannot be) won’t have it. Particles quantize for a reason. The universe is NOT one grand particle for a reason. And life is NOT one grand controlled entity for a reason.
Global Socialism => Death.
Gee… why would I object? 
I can see beyond the word, I don’t really give a fuck about socialism at this point but I’m well aware that it has meant a lot of different things in different places and times. A lot of different kinds of people wanting a lot of different kinds of things have called themselves socialists, for a lot of different reasons. You’re trying to reduce that to calling a bunch of people socialists when they don’t call themselves socialists.
You’re overlooking a lot of the other definitions offered by the same page but since you’re a ‘conceptualist’ I imagine that does not matter.
“Collectively owned” means the same thing as “privately owned by an elite”? Really? That’s your ‘conceptualist’ ‘rationalist’ argument?
This reminds me of the time when you claimed the Federal Reserve was a ‘socialist’ institution and cited the same above definition to try to prove your point. But the Fed isn’t collectively owned, it is privately owned by an elite. I wouldn’t even call it a capitalist institution, but ‘socialist’ is an absurdity. If three people have an equal share in a business that isn’t the same as one much richer person claiming he owns the whole business and using that as his excuse to tell them what to do or to use force to make them do what he wants. Likewise a garden, or a barrel of beer, or anything that can be owned.
I think pretty much all political leaders are God Wannabes who think they know best for the rest of us.
You’ve gone from claiming collective ownership is the same as elite private ownership. Gee, why would I object?
Oh right, that’s it, it’s because they aren’t the same thing, conceptually, rhetorically or politically. What you’re saying is absolute nonsense, driven by a desire to label all things in one way - ‘all politics is socialism’ - and then deriding that label. Ironically you’re doing much the same as the ‘socialists’ you rhetorically deride.
Like I say, this makes political discussion with you absolutely hopeless. You’re a broken record with this crap, and it is UTTER crap.
Define “collective ownership”. When the Communists use that term, they mean the “People’s Party” that dictates life to all people. And yeah, I would say that is “ownership” and “collective” (in a sense). But how are you defining it such that it ISN’T merely a dictatorship of life?
If this thread has not gone off topic. Then James is an actual uncle to a real monkey…please say no…
I have thought that several times myself, but it is his thread (much like MM derailing his own thread).
Both socialism and capitalism economic systems is bullshit. Neither is very liberating for the world. We live in a post capitalism and socialism world.
There, I said it.
As for benefits of Islamism and Zionism, yeah I suppose. There are benefits of any given social system depending where you are in them. Still, I don’t like Zionists due to their infiltration into western societies and their gross over representation.
Keep in mind me saying this that my real father was Ashkenazi from a long family of Steins.
I have to wonder why me not liking socialism would prevent “political discussion”.
…unless “discussion” means “persuade me into socialism”…
But then, why would he care?
Owning stuff collectively.
This is recklessly simplistic. The notion of collective ownership as it emerged in the Communist tradition was as a response to the mass privatisation of the land (the basis for all nutrition and therefore for the sustenance of life) by the ruling class. There was no notion of collective ownership under the old open field system because there was no need for it.
Rousseau articulated this first, saying that the fruits of the earth belong to all of us, the earth itself belongs to no one. Proudhon advanced a similar philosophy, arguing that ultimately no one owns anything but that private property was valid as a means of resisting the tyranny of the state (I imagine you’d agree with this ‘socialist’ on that point). Both of these philosophers were responding to the mass claiming and privatisation of land through the means of enclosure, itself a response to the agricultural revolution that threatened to enrich the agricultural working class and liberate them from the serfdom that had dominated agrarian society for centuries - if not longer.
Then we got Charlie Marx, who argued that all property should be held in common, though he made the crucial and idiotic mistake of thinking that ‘held in common by the state’ could be a temporary and transitional phase in the development to a stateless communist society. Again, this was in response to the mass privatisation of wealth created by industrial capitalism, the massive disparity in wealth between those actually doing the work and those claiming to own the means of production. The same basic philosophy as Rousseau and Proudhon, but as applied to urban industrial production instead of rural agricultural production.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in the failing state of Russia, Lenin and his cohorts overturned the power of the old landowners (Russia maintained serfdom until as late as the 1860s and even abolishing it by that point made little difference), seized the land and gave it to the peasants. There was no transitional phase where the state controlled all the land for a while in the name of collective ownership. Obviously the Western powers (who you deem ‘socialist’) did not like this - they wanted mass private land ownership in the hands of the few, so they tried to kill Lenin and destroy the Bolsheviks and return to a Tsarist dictatorship. A decade later Stalin (for whom the myth of socialism/communism was just a useful means of crowd control) forcibly collectivised the land under the state, itself a regressive move of privatisation by the state that, while given a different philosophical gloss, was effectively the same thing that happened in Western Europe with the enclosures.
So, that’s how I’d define ‘collective ownership’ such that is isn’t a dictatorship of life - it emerged as an affirmation of the value of life, in resistance to an attempt to privatise the entire world in the hands of the elite. The privatisation was an attempt at a dictatorship of life, the notion of collective ownership (or more precisely, of non-ownership of nature a la Rousseau and Proudhon) developed as a response and resistance to that.
You’re being deliberately thick here. I’m not saying you have to like socialism. I’m saying you need to stop reducing all political discussion to a discussion of how you hate the word ‘socialism’ via ridiculous and pig-ignorant definitions, in particular the conceptual equating of collective ownership and elite private ownership. They aren’t the same thing in concept or in reality, and if you actually took the time to read these philosophers and understand the historical context of their work then you’d realise that. As a political philosopher you are a complete joke.
I see that you still have trouble understanding what a definition is.
"Define a “Holy Book.”
“A book that is holy.”
Can we talk about the analytic synthetic distinction and how it relates to our understanding of the way things are defined? You how some people say, “it is what it is” and other people say, “it is a dog”, or “it is a table” or “it is the president of the united states”.
It is always what it is, it isn’t always a dog, but sometimes, it isn’t always a table, but sometimes. A dog is always a dog, and a table is always a table, but that which is the president of the united states is not always the president of the united states because there are term limits.
That might actually be philosophy. I mean…I mean…just sayin…
Look it up in a philosophical dictionary if it bothers you that much. I’m not the one making an all encompassing argument on the basis of carefully selected (if irrelevant) dictionary definitions and calling it ‘rationalism’.
Define ‘drone’…
John Travolta starred in a film, “Phenomenon”, as a good-ole boy car mechanic in CA who had an alien encounter or something and woke up to gradually discover that he had become an ultra sensitive/aware genius. He thumbs through a foreign language translation book and immediately speaks the language fluently (I actually met a person who really does that). He senses the pre-effects and predicts an Earth quake before the USGS detects anything. He decrypts a military classified radio code.
So the military, suspecting him of being a spy of some type, captures him and gives him an IQ test. During the test, the psychiatrist asks him a simple question concerning what time a man would arrive in CA if he left from NY and the flight took X hours. George (Travolta) began asking detailed, seemingly irrelevant questions of the psychiatrist who finally got flustered and demands that he stick to the subject because all of those questions were irrelevant and just a distraction.
In response, equally as terse, George quickly runs through a very exacting analysis of how to predict the proper time in such a situation, revealing very clearly that every single question he had asked was essential to being able to give a correct answer to the question. And then proceeds to reveal the exact minute of arrival. The psychiatrist was stunned.
The problem is that if anyone says anything that isn’t very largely what someone else can identify as true, the first person seems as an idiot to the second. When the distinction between what people believe is too great, discussion between them becomes really tricky and requires special effort (such as asking for definitions of terms). But what if it is the judge, the psychiatrist, who is the actual idiot not realizing how very little of what he believes is actually true and thus he is incapable of making such judgments? Would he be wise to simply answer the simple questions that just might clear the air? They usually don’t answer such questions out of fear of being trapped by someone they have already judged to be an adversary. They fear commitment to any affirmative. And they often think that they can perform legitimate experiments, despite their inabilities to assess even the validity of the experiment.
People who are easily upset by certain attitudes in others tend to over-react in defense without realizing how very little they actually knew with which to assess the actual attitude they fear… but that doesn’t stop them from creating such attitudes simply by over-reacting to the suspicion of them.
In response, I asked a simple (“recklessly simplistic”) question so as be able to answer his question. He then flies into rant and frustration concluding with “as a political philosopher you are a joke!” I merely asked for his definition of a word that was apparently very relevant.
Yet, he never answered the question that I asked. The question is very relevant to the concern at hand, but seemingly irrelevant to the hyper-reactive judge (who of course has that Gray Syndrome thing and thus accuses me of his hyper-reactivity to the word that he over-reacts in defense of).
Such is the situation online. Everyone being a judge concerning things they know almost nothing about and yielding a judgment of the other people trying to discuss it. It isn’t a whole lot different than the three blind men and the elephant.
Someone/thing that blindly pursues a course unaware of who put him on that course, or even that there is a “who” involved.
So what’s the argument? That Israel would never spy on it’s neighbors, or that the idea of them using surveillance equipment on wildlife to do it is absurd? The only absurd part that I see is that if Israel was using cameras on eagles to spy on Lebanon, that they’d take the time to advertise it by inscribing ISREAL on the device.
I defined it by explaining its conceptual origin, rather than by going on dictionary.com
Perhaps actually engaging philosophically with a political philosophy question, rather than with reductionism, labelling and hatred is where you got confused…
So if I don’t identify the ruling class as “socialist” and despise them because I’ve labelled them as such, you think I’m blind and unaware that there even IS a ruling class?
That’s hilariously dumb. Keep it coming my man.
I love how you’re unable to even grasp what’s at stake in this story. Perhaps if you tried, y’know, updating your perspective to account for the last 2000 years you might realise that there’s more to life than Christian fundamentalism. Or not.
If you don’t have an answer to my question, you could just not reply at all. Anyway, to bring the point home, if I was Israel, I would sure as shit spy on Lebanon, and I was the Lebanese, I would sure as shit be expecting it. Using wildlife isn’t as far-fetched as you seem to think it is, so I don’t get what’s so ‘phobic’ about looking into such a thing. As I said, the only thing far-fetched about this is that Tel Aviv would stamp “PROPERTY OF ISRAELI GOVERNMENT” or whatever on their super-secret spy birds.