Maybe one day in the future all of humanity will unite as one society and we'll realize that we're all brothers and it'll be a real big kumbaya moment like John Lennon's "Imagine".

And in those times people will look back on the charters and constitutions of our nations and see them as myths the same as you view the Bible or Star Wars today.

The Bible is just the old myth. Now we have new ones. They will also prove to be bullshit.

Capitalism is a fairy tale that permeates your life and I bet that understanding it would be helpful to you.

There's no such thing as "America" either but it matters very much to millions of people what it means.

I wouldn't throw out the myths so quickly if I were you!

Have our myths gonna away because science has provided better answered or have they just changed form?

The myth of Hades is probably not relevant to us anymore because we have science to explain seasons. But what about our shared myths about how the economy must work or what is "America" or what is "liberty"?

What you've written reminds me of a scene from Il Postino, when the postman is trying to understand why Neruda writes in metaphors. The whole movie might be a good way to think about myths and metaphor...

Anyway:

You see, Mario...

I can't tell you...

in words different

from those I've used.

When you explain it,

poetry becomes banal.

Better than any explanation...

is the experience of feelings

that poetry can reveal...

to a nature open enough

to understand it.

With a soft spot for Nazis, both Heidegger and Eichmann. Sometimes I wonder if she just did it for the controversy but I think she truly did believe that the Nazis were, like they say, not bad people, just following orders.

She was also a racist with elitist attitudes against "Oriental" Jews which was common back then and actually still somewhat common today in Israel but obviously no longer acceptable among the educated. I'm a Moroccan Jew who she would have looked down upon, so kind of not a fan of her elitist yekke bullshit!

What a weirdo.

And he fucked Hannah Arendt which makes no sense until you read about Hannah Arendt and realize that she was pretty weird in her whole life.

Ah, good point!

Great point that last one. Why is it that idiot leaders just pop up in every country simultaneously? Because it's all one big global game.

Is not every change in society made by random individuals? Sometimes working together?

Big if! How are you going to get everyone to be charitable?

Jesus, super famous, with the Bible, super famous, has a an entire religion, said that we should help the poor, his ideas have been around 2000 years. Still, we have poverty.

You're telling me that Peter Singer is going to do a better job of getting everyone on board? He's going to be more influential than Jesus?

>, further highlighting the need for increasing investment in global economic development. Development of strong market economies is the single biggest predictor of reducing poverty in a nation.

That's true in the neoliberal order but why must we have the neoliberal order?

Isn't that the point of this article? To search for solutions to poverty beyond the neoliberal order and not within it? Because within it we are claim success at having only 80% of the world earning less than $1000/day or whatever. That doesn't sound very successful to me at all!

(Oops, it's still very early in my time zone. My bad!)

I still wonder if the people who had the wrong impression of the number of people in poverty also had the wrong definition of poverty. We should use measures more universal, like, "How many people per years will experience hunger as pain?" Saying that someone earning $3/day isn't in poverty doesn't speak to me at all!

> Hardly ever is there a person who makes it their life goal to re-impoverish people.

It's basically the mission statement of many corporations. The IMF has austerity plans to "help" poor nations.

Nestle buying up the sources of water in order to resell water to poor people is an attempt to reimpoverish people, for profit.

No one explicitly has the aim to impoverish people but we set up systems to allow us to do it while obfuscating the guilty. And when we fail to obfuscate the guilt, we give charity! Charity was invented to relieve us of our guilt.

It's not surprising that people would guess wrong because their basis for what counts as extreme poverty is probably inflated.

Ask those same people if they would consider themselves impoverished on $1000/year and they'd probably almost all say yes. And they'd be wrong there, too, according to the "experts".

Edit: BTW, your link is funded by the libertarian Koch brothers, for whom the current system has been wildly beneficial. How convenient for them that so much progress has been made under the system that has also made them billionaires! The countenance of your sources is dubious, dude!

> There’s certainly lots to be improved in capitalism but whether it can be improved on is yet to be demonstrated.

Probably the same was said of every economic system. It can't be bettered until it is.

Technology is a force multiplier, true, but it works for all sides and it's owned by the wealthy. I'm skeptical of it.

Facebook helped organize the people voting for Donald Trump and Brexit.

Even more ridiculous: Charity has existed for literally thousands of years and has yet to solve poverty. Yet people hold on to the notion that this will eventually work.

When? Are we half way done with the project of eradicating poverty? Or is it just another 2000 years perhaps?

>He seems to be saying that you can’t successfully change a whole economic system in a way that clashes with human nature but you might be able to work within in it to alleviate the problems.

It is kind of a ridiculous way of thinking on Singer's part, though. He suggests that our current system of capitalism can't be changed, though it's only 250 years old and came into being exactly as a change in economic system that no one thought could change.

So he suggests instead charity, which has been around for thousands of years and has yet to solve poverty.

If anything, a change in the economic system is more frequent (a few times in recorded history) than charity's ability to solve poverty (thousands of years, still no success). Yet he claims that the latter is more likely to work?

No I have exploited the global south in order to earn my wealth.

I'm going to give back the heart valve.

To be fair, hospital pricing is kind of a game where the hospital says, for a completely fictional example, that fixing the valve in my heart costs 327k dollars. And then the insurance says, nah, we'll give you 20k. And the hospital says okay.

So really it cost 20k but the hospital inflated the cost so that, should I turn out to be a deadbeat, then can deduct 327k as a loss or charity or whatever.

Determining the actual cost of saving a life is difficult work.

My heart surgery cost about 1000 African children.

Oh well, I guess is should've just died. My bad.

Good points!

To be clear, I didn't ask my question because I was certain that there is no use for studying this! I just think that we ought to always be asking ourselves if a field of research is worthwhile. (At least that's how I operate in my life and work.)

Imagine a trolley and you hold the lever. One path leads to the creation of 11 seasons of M*A*S*H. There other side leads to bad TV.

However, the rail to Hawkeye and Radar has 500,000 Koreans lashed to it.

What do you do?

>Upvoting because it's a good question, but I couldn't disagree more with the premise.

I love this! This is what we ought to be about, right?

What you say makes a lot of sense. I do agree that there is room for studying what we do to criminals and why. We came a long way from what you described to, for example: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=60 (read some 20 or so pages, perhaps 15 minutes?)

I guess that my concern is more about the practical. What's the point in determining that if Putin should be imprisoned given that we can't do it,

In practice, I do see use in that we might get the definition right and then teach our kids so well that we potentially raise a society that would never wage an unjust war (for whatever definition of unjust you want).

Or I suppose that maybe some 15 year old in Azerbaijan or whatever will in 30 years be the leader of the nation and maybe he'll remember Biden wagging his finger at Putin and learn right from wrong and he'll not wage a war because he learned morals that way.

But I just read and article proclaim that Biden is calling Putin a war criminal like it's some big proclamation that is going to have any effect on this war and I think that is bullshit. The outcome of this war is unaffected by such a proclamation.

In conclusion, studying war so that we can teach our kids morals around war is good. Beyond that, these moral judgements on an active war seem pointless.

As before, please disagree, up vote, and educate me!

Who would exact punishment? How would America etc even put Putin in jail?

I agree that awareness is good and that is what Geneva convention did. It wrote down what everyone already believed.

Enforcement seems impossible.