Do you support the RMT?

kaz7 said:
He was being patronising and repeating this is what a picket line is rather than answering the question , i like him but thought watching that exchange that fame is going to his head
Click to expand...
Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers.

It was nothing to do with his “fame” and nothing seems to go to his head.

She was literally trying to compare a picket line of 5 people with the riots of the miners’ strike 40 years ago.

It was disingenuous and got the shrift it deserved from Lynch.
 
kaz7 said:
He was being patronising and repeating this is what a picket line is rather than answering the question , i like him but thought watching that exchange that fame is going to his head
Click to expand...
Disagree entirely. She sounded almost unhinged because he wouldn’t fall into the trap of saying the picket line would physically stop people crossing it.
And he did answer the question which was what will the picket line do, the answer being they will picket.
 
metalblue said:
Ah yes point 4… I was getting there ;) As you rightly point out neoliberalism has created huge gaps between rich and poor - perhaps neo-Keynesian was the right balance but the unions weren’t about to give up and we don’t have time machines. Nonetheless humans are largely greedy by nature - neoliberalism allows greed to flourish- be that greed of the left or the right, they both have “I want” lists and expect someone else to pay for it. Keynesianism failed due to greed. Neoliberalism has nearly failed due to greed once - on that point the incessant need of companies to need to earn more drives risk taking and fraud - we need to take our foot of the pedal a bit. Perhaps climate change will bring a reality check but I doubt it as we “want” the climate to be fixed but we still “want” cheap clothes, energy, holidays, food, etc. The great con of our time is politicians telling us we can have all those things and still reduce/remove climate change… bollocks, we change or huge numbers will die be that physically or their way of live… we may tut tut or shed a tear at the news, but will we really care when it’s someone else paying the price for our “wants”? There is that greed again.
Click to expand...

Great post and I apologise for not being able to reply sooner. Been preoccupied.

With this greed business, I am conflicted.

On the one hand, there's a lot of evidence that we are a more spontaneously empathic and altruistic species than many imagine, which is why I am a bit suspicious of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand-type assessments of human nature.

All that evidence can be found under one roof in Matthieu Ricard's doorstop of a book Altruism. Interestingly, Ricard is the son of Jean-Francois Revel, According to the Wiki, 'Revel was a French philosopher, journalist, and author. A prominent public intellectual, Revel was a socialist in his youth but later became a prominent European proponent of classical liberalism and free market economics.'

Contrastingly, Ricard's multi-disciplinary study is also an attack on free-market economics and its underlying assumptions. So he could, in a sense, be reacting against his father. Ricard himself has a PhD in molecular genetics but eschewed a scientific career in order to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. In that role I think he currently serves as a translator for the Dalai Lama.

But no-one should imagine that he is a woolly thinker who espouses New Agey bollocks because of that. He is actually very clued up about both Western and Eastern philosophy, as well as economics, behavioural and evolutionary psychology, and a lot more besides.

For all that, I guess that I am conflicted because even Buddhist psychology - shorn of its supernatural/metaphysical accoutrements - admits that we are a greed-driven species. More than that, our psyche is additionally contaminated by hatred, as well as a fundamental ignorance of how things are.

Ricard has been dubbed 'the happiest man alive' in neuroscientific terms (see below) so maybe that makes him more optimistic about our ability to overcome greediness and our incipient tribalism. I am not so sure, as this attitude seems to engender an inherent myopia that - when allied to the narcissistic and even psychopathic tendencies exhibited by quite a few political leaders these days - might just lead to the death of us as a species.

www.gq.com

Get Inside the Mind of the World's Happiest Man

Monk Matthieu Richard has it figured out. And he wants to help you figure it out, too.
www.gq.com www.gq.com

Apologies to readers of this thread for taking this thread off topic again.
 
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