behavioralist, on 17 November 2012 - 11:50 PM, said:
Is it Treason when government exploits the governed?
Not usually I don't think. It's better referred to as just 'exploitation', or more cynically as 'politics'.
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When you are being paid to expedite the common will of the governed, you are privately as secretive as any thinking person. Doesn't this translate into the inevitability that you will hedge your bets by exploiting them?
I guess I don't understand the 'hedge your bets' part; the exploiters are hedging their bets against what that is undesired?
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For example, The Pentagon Papers: fabricating a war. And the Cold War, philosophical differences as a pretext for limitless industrial profits. And the trillion-plus dollar reaction to nine-eleven; money that could have been applied towards children's rights and the exposure and prosecution of pedophiles (my work in preemptive parental education certainly could use a few of those dollars).
Nothing is more destructive, more terrifying, than the cost of abusing children. There is no one working with children anywhere in any modern culture, who does not expect a child to be conditioned to where it cringes at his or her glare!
Simple remote control. Simple reliance upon children having been previously abused.
I'm not quite following the child abuse tie-in to treason. Are you analogizing abused children to the exploited, and noting how they are both 'controlled'?
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So isn't it likely that, given time (time already given long since), the exploitation of the governed becomes far more lucrative,
---than expediting their common will?
I don't necessarily see that 'exploitation' and 'expediting their will' are mutually exclusive choices, maybe if you had an example here. I know your post is supposed to be taken at a high-level, I'm not knocking you here, it's just to me 'exploitation' can manifest itself in many different possible ways. If you're referring to things like the War on Terror, that was a very (and 'too') expeditious implementation of the common will, and
simultaneously there was/is undoubtedly lucrative exploitation also going on.
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Won't any political leader, no matter how you vote, impoverish his nation further in his own self-interest?
How many corporations are queuing up at the doors of the elected to have their wheels greased for a reasonable consideration, covertly paid out? Would your guess tally with mine:every single one of those that survive?
Maybe not literally every single one, but I think I'm mostly in agreement with your gist here. Where I would differ is that there is a great deal of 'reasonable consideration' that no longer even needs to be covertly paid out. I think nowadays most of this consideration in return for their investment, sorry, 'political donation' to political leaders now takes the form of changes to legislation concerning taxes and government regulations affecting their industry or business and is not covert.
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The poverty of nations is the impossibility of conserving human potential during upbringing.
Thought (just like yours), the covert competing for rewards, is the poverty-induced fasting period.
When you can't have, you devote the time to thinking about having.
Thought is the mental equivalent of an empty stomach growling!
If you are stupid enough, you don't settle for that, but abuse the few things you can have, like the obese and otherwise addicted.
And it is not a question of not having what the wealthy have! It's a question of having what no one could possible conceive of!
---because of crippled human potential; abuse of children.
I'm having trouble following this, I think just too many big topics and ideas all in just a few sentences, child abuse, thought, treason, addiction. 'Having what no one could possibly conceive of'? If no one including you can possibly conceive of it, how can you then know that 'it's a question of having' it?