I could kick myself.

I wrote an answer to your latest post, Navigirl, and I erased it by mistake.

What I said was that I understand your position much better now, thank you. It is a bit of a misnomer to call yourself independent, but that's okay. What you do is you develop several options of transferring your dependence from one to another provider.

For instance, your mother was trapped. You avoid being trapped by transferring your dependence on an abusive male to a life where others depend on your work, and you depend on your pay.

I understand, it is a good plan, and I am happy you are doing it. I would not call it independence; I would call it "to keep options on changing a dependence from one provider to another, at your own discretion."

Of course, "independence" is easier to say and shorter to write, but hey.

At least I understand. Thanks for the explanation.

V

During the 70's I use to say that the increase in violence in the entertainment industry is going to numb peoples responses to actual crime.

Government and university studies have confirmed through the years that as graphic violence in entertainment increases people become less shocked by actual violence.

Copy-cat murders now happen all the time. They pick up the idea from graphic news and/or movies. So do we let society become inoculated and turn a deaf ear to rape and murder? Society is becoming less sensitive.

So is protecting society (at some point) needed or should an individual have his "right" to view any depraved thing he wants knowing history can predict the outcome?

By the way, most news and entertainment companies claim "freedom of the press". If they didn't receive lots of attention or money (advertisers) for this type of publishing they wouldn't show it. They push the drugs and violence only because society is now addicted and it makes them money.

Just like the Roman's did in the Colosseum.

Thanks, now i have a sense of what you are saying.

There are two sad points to consider: that violence is attractive to human beings, inherently, that is why the media has more and more of it: it sells over all other things. The news, the movies, the tv shows, they all show violence, coz the only two things that sell are sex and humour.

Humour is hard to produce, and expensive, coz we don't have enough talent. Plus humour, although most people enjoy it tremendously, is a bit of an "uncouth" genre; it is not a "serious" genre, you laugh, and you don't take it seriously therefore. I have been taken humour to be the most serious of all human endeavours both in attitude and in art, and therefore I don't have that problem.

And sex... if the highly successful American industrial society, along with its religiosity, culture, morals and hard working attitude, included beside these not a propensity for and a cultural embracing of violence, but for and of sex, then we would have the same problem. We would fornicate all over our neighbour's biblically coveted azz with the same vehemence as we are doing our practice rounds at the shooting range.

You see, the Bible teaches against both, even more against violence, than against sex. "do not kill" is easiest to break with violence; "do not overdo sex" is not so destructive.

We could have gone either way, I mean, you had to break either one, or the other commandment, to make life bearable on the long run for a long-run movie making industry. America chose violence. Europe chose sex.

And though Americans are growing more resilient to violence, and Europeans are growing more resilient to sex, we both share the tragic fate of having to assault (or in another word, f) either one or the other of the commandments for the sake of a thriving entertainment industry.

Whereas a person who believes in the ultimate supremacy of humour as the most valuable source of entertainment, will laugh all the way to the grave.

The bible has not one joke, not one commandment about, or against, laughter. I live a life and an inner life which is though unfornicated, it is also unhurt; unscathed, other than by its own cutting jokes.

----------

That said, I am not religious, it's true, I am an atheist, and I hate religiosity with a pitch. But I do live a life as if I obeyed religious teachings and accepted religious values that apply to a lifestyle. That is so because despite the reasons given by them how they got to the knowledge, religions know what kind of life lived by individuals and by families are good for all or most people in a given community. The religious leaders realized, a long time ago, or whenever, what the things are that are conducive for the good of society, what behaviour of individuals are conducive for the good of society. (Whatever the "good of society" means.)

Society has NO Rights beyond the Rights of the Individual!

Civilization? Never heard of it. Man has reverted to a state of primal bestiality, akin to reptiles hugging the ground. History confirms the total lack of civilization, we merely have become sophisticated, not civilized.

we agree

The collective right of all of the individuals as a group has been set aside for the lawyers perception of the right of the criminal individual.

The age old discussion: the good of society VS the right of an individual.

I think there is another discussion, also age old: what is the 'good of society', before asking which of the two (the "good" of society or the "good" of the individual) is more important and should take precedence over the other.

Yours here is at least a definition, albeit not without problems.

All of the individuals as a group rarely have a concensus over what is good for each. Two-thirds may be happy with something, the other third may not. Is that good for the group as a whole?

Others will say what's good for the group is what's good for the group's survival. This is another one, although if I spend 70 years in jail for a crime I did not do, it's good for the group (my example deterred others from doing the crime I did not do), but it's very not good for me.

Or one-third will be happy, EXTEMELY happy with an event or decision, and two-thirds may be mildly annoyed. Can we give weight to annoyance and discontent, and can we give weight to a good feeling? How do you compare the two opposing group's "good" in the positive sense (for one third) and "good" in the negative sense (for the two-third majority of annyoed people)?

Society works and behaves like a biological being, but more like a single celled being, not a complex thing like humans or earthworms. Society either survives, and/or multiplies, or else dies. This is single-cell life course. Humans are not the building blocks of society as cells are the building blocks of humans, because humans and their cells are each sentient in a stand-alone format, but a single-celled animal's components are not sentient in a stand-alone fashion. But humans are of society, so society can't be viewed as a single-celled being. It has components of qualities, of lifes of both single-celled and multi-celled animals. What does it make of society? It is impossible to say from where we are in it.

So to compare the good of a human individual to that of society is a futuile and impossible task. You can't judge society as a sum total of all individuals' sum of "good", because that would necessatite a model of society as a multi-celled unit, but it's not, it is much more like an aemoeba, which has no sentient units, whereas society does.

So... how do we know what society feels, and how do we know it feels anything at all?

These are unanswerable questions. I would rather be caught dead than to talk about "good of society" as a phrase of which I think it made sense or had any meaning, in a humanly intuitive and immediately grasped way.