roachboy

1. how exactly is the attempt to ground ethics in one or another version of "the genetic record" not an expression of the same impulse that would cause a religious person to try to ground them in a god?

2. these claims about "socialism" rely on what definition of the term exactly?
there seems to be no agreement here at all.
in particular, if you erase the simple fact that socialism is a political system, how are you still talking about socialism?
it seems to me that the features that folk isolate and argue are important are in fact all arbitrary.


3. when folk look at evolution or at "the genetic record" or when they indulge in factoid accumulation about this or that animal comunity, there seems to be no agreement about how one goes about determining relevance. so not only is there a problem that follows from the fact that there is no coherent definition of socialism, or even any argument for why attribute of animal behaviour x or y would say fuck all about it, there is also no agreement about
how one should think about either the behaviours that are isolated and not-really-described or even less about the evolutionary histories that are supposed to be condensed into these behaviours.

on this, i think sapien's post no. 26 should have given folk pause. but it didnt.

one could say the same thing about baraka guru's posts above: they raise a fundamental problem with this entire direction of pseudo-inquiry. they deserve a better response than "hobbes is boring".


that said, it seems pretty clear that is happening:

somehow a debate about the "source of ethics" has been diverted into another discussion, in which ustwo wants to "demonstrate" that socialism is somehow "unnatural"--even though all the problems outlined above obtain--and willravel wants to demonstrate the opposite.

i dont understand the basis of the discussion.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite