How Pictures Distort

[ethics]

One of the "Picture is worth a thousand words" is making its rounds:

http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/638/belterwo6.jpg

Wow, one mother, clutching her kid against the army of boot stompers!

The caption says, “An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE (BRAZIL)”.

Al-Reuters doing its best to drum up support. But let's look at the story objectively, shall we?

"expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land"

1. So basically you got 200 squatters on land you own and they're trying to protest?
2. What mother in her right mind brings her child to a protest?
3. MST (Landless Movement) is a semi-terrorist organization that frequently kills farmers and land-owners, and work close to another organization which has destroyed 20 years of genetic engineering research a couple of years ago.

[cyrus]

These people have been totally excluded from any means of obtaining a reasonable subsistence, often through expropriation. And you are applying the legal standards of an advanced liberal democracy under the rule of law to their popular resistance? I wonder what kind of ethics informs your judgement here, an ethics of unabashed ultra-capitalism I suppose.

[ethics]

These people have been totally excluded from any means of obtaining a reasonable subsistence

So they have a right to squat on someone else's property? Got ya.

[cyrus]

So they have a right to squat on someone else's property? Got ya.

From an ethical perspective they certainly do, just like a starving person can't be morally condemned for stealing food.

[ethics]

From an ethical perspective they certainly do, just like a starving person can't be morally condemned for stealing food.

Right, your ethics are distorted, spunky. This isn't Middle East. Try to steal food there. See how ethics plays in to the hands (pun intended). Try to steal where you are as well in the great Canada. Ethics nor laws care about your intent, just the final act.

No one gives you the right, moral or otherwise, to take what others have no matter how dire your situation is, not their food, not their land, not their lives.

I suggest you ditch your title of Egalitarian there as well. I don't think you know what the word means.

[cyrus]

Right, your ethics are distorted, spunky. This isn't Middle East. Try to steal food there. See how ethics plays in to the hands (pun intended). Try to steal where you are as well in the great Canada. Ethics nor laws care about your intent, just the final act.

No one gives you the right, moral or otherwise, to take what others have no matter how dire your situation is, not their food, not their land, not their lives.

Your puns and innuendos are not just unfunny, they are also irrelevant. I am not in Canada and I have never been in the Middle East.

Anyways, back to the topic. As I assumed your ethics is an ethics of unrestrained and unabashed ultra-capitalism - the value of private property elevated over the value of human life and dignity. I couldn't imagine a more distorted ethics than these.

[ethics]

Anyways, back to the topic. As I assumed your ethics is an ethics of unrestrained and unabashed ultra-capitalism - the value of private property elevated over the value of human life and dignity. I couldn't imagine a more distorted ethics than these.

Fine, we are at impasse and will agree to disagree.

[cyrus]

Are you done with the re-editing or should I wait another fifteen minutes before I write my reply?

Ethics nor laws care about your intent, just the final act.


As a matter of fact both ethics and law do care about intent so your statement here is just plain wrong. Intent/motive is a mitigating factor in common law and in all other jurisdictions and most systems based approaches to ethics (such as deontological ethics or virtue ethics) do put great or even decisive emphasis on intent. The only ethical theory which does not is utilitarianism which is purely outcome based, but if you were following the latter you could not object to a starving man stealing food as the life of an individual from a utilitarian point of view is infinitely more valuable than another individual's property in a small amount of food. (Actually J.S. Mill mentions this very example)

[ethics]

Spunky, when you live under Communism as I have, then come back and talk to me, ok? Otherwise, you are just wasting your time. Communism > Capitalism as far as death and destruction in their own names and economic systems.

[cyrus]

The choice is not between an inhumane collectivist communism and an equally inhumane unfettered ultra-capitalism. Egalitarian forms of deliberative and participatory democracy are possible which transcend this obsolete dichotomy.

[Steve]

Why are you conflating capitalism, an economic model, with democracy, a political model?

[cyrus]

Why are you conflating capitalism, an economic model, with democracy, a political model?

Well, in Adam Smith's time the field which deals with how people conduct their affairs in the public sphere was still called 'political economy'. It was only later that economics was detached from politics and people started to see them as two separate fields. Fortunately this trend is being reversed as the surge in political-economic studies in recent years for example in New Institutional Economics, public choice theory or world systems and underdevelopment theory show.

The simple truth which many have realised is that the market is not an independent and static sphere such as in the utopian models of neo-classical theory but is rather a dynamic entity crucially dependent on a politico-juridical framework which has to be provided and continuously maintained by the state apparatus. And in turn, the market and the forms of production and distribution it creates shape and determine the political landscape of a society.

Hence a progressive and courageous model of deliberative democracy transcends the sphere of solely economic or political by bringing questions of distribution, access to resources, scope and type of collective action, etc. back under public control, that is not to say under the control of government as in statist models such as the welfarist governments of the Bretton Woods era, but rather under the deliberative and participatory control of the people.

[ethics]

Well, in the days of Adam Smith the field which deals with how people conduct their affairs in the public sphere was still called 'political economy'. It was only later that economics was detached from politics and people started to see them as two separate fields. Fortunately this trend is being reversed as the surge in political-economic studies in recent years for example in New Institutional Economics, public choice theory or world systems and underdevelopment theory show.

The simple truth which many have realised is that the market is not an independent and static sphere such as in the utopian models of neo-classical theory but is rather a dynamic entity crucially dependent on a politico-juridical framework which has to be provided and continuously maintained by the state apparatus. And in turn, the market and the forms of production and distribution it creates shape and determine the political landscape of a society.

Hence a progressive and courageous model of deliberative democracy transcends the sphere of solely economic or political by bringing questions of distribution, access to resources, scope and type of collective action, etc. back under public control, that is not to say under the control of government as in statist models such as the welfarist governments of the Bretton Woods era, but rather under the deliberative and participatory control of the people.

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student; you just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'till next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a forum, read some obscure passage and then pretend - you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?

So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.

You're a tough kid.

And I'd ask you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right, "once more unto the breach dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.

I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet.

But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in the hospital room for two months, holding her hand, because the doctors could see in your eyes, that the terms "visiting hours" don't apply to you.

You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much.

And look at you...

I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid.
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One movie, two quotes, and you look a little beaten up.