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Rick Reuben wrote:None of what you say about policing the religious nut cases means a damn thing until you attack the head of the snake. You don't reform a crooked belief system. You destroy it, and rid the system of the toxins.

fyp

Rick Reuben wrote:

honeyisfunny wrote:

Rick Reuben wrote:Why don't you atheists try and do something useful for society? Go after concentrated money power.

How?

You're serious? Try free speech, for starters. Tell the truth. Speak about who has the money and tell how they got it. What do you think 'concentrated money power' means? It means it's concentrated in one place- the financial world. Wall Street, London, the central banks. If you had hornets on your property would you swat individual hornets as they flew by, or would you locate the hive?

Everyone who looks at history has always known why societies rot from the core: excessive greed and excessive militarism. Look for who profits from money and war and you will find the malignant tumor that has burrowed into every society that sells its soul for the devil's bargain of money from debt.

( I know you weren't looking for a real answer, but I wrote one anyway. )

I am looking for a real answer.

I frequently agree with things you say. I don't think many people on this forum would disagree with your not-exactly-groundbreaking speech above that is essentially "religion is the opiate of the masses".
Of course it's convenient that so much of the population of the planet works for fuck-all money because they think their reward will come in heaven or their version of it.
Of course it's not a coincidence that when you look at survey maps of the UK from as recently as 100 years ago, the biggest house in every town is the vicarage.

You're not telling anyone anything they don't know. Every one of your posts goes like this:

RR makes statement

Someone disagrees with the manner of the statement

RR thinks that people disagree with the statement itself and calls everyone an arsehole

I think most people on this forum have realised the same thing and that is if you follow anything far enough into the details you find something fucked up about it. The world is a shitty place. The 'free speech' you speak of isn't really 'free'. The news isn't really the news. Etc.

There are many ways to deal with this, it seems to me that the best one is to understand the limited time you have on the planet and try and put it to good use. By that I mean day-to-day.

I can go and stand on Speaker's Corner every Sunday for the rest of my life screaming about the injustices in the world but if I treat the shop assistant like shit tomorrow morning, or I don't give my seat up on the train for the elderly person or I make loads of noise in the street at 3am because I don't give a fuck then - no matter what my political viewpoints or my level of knowledge or intelligence is - I am still an arsehole and first and foremost the world needs less of those.

edit

So far you have defined this action as posting on the Electrical Audio board. If that's all you got man the banking monster is going to rip your balls off and feed them to the media.

Rick Reuben wrote:
Who cares about the messenger? The message is everything.

No it isn't. The more difficult the pill is to swallow, the more brilliant and persuasive the 'messenger' has to be. If the messenger is boorish and obnoxious, and instantly responds to gentle questions with 'you are a moron', then it's forgivably unlikely that anybody will give a damn about what he has to say, even with a receptive audience.

Swinging the world toward the path of social and political justice is going to take sober collective intelligence - qualities I can find on this board in abundance, and the same slow, logical tactics I use to (say) persuade my mum that the immigrants aren't all bad.

I know you know all this, but I suspect you just enjoy your heelish persona too much.

If you really were disturbed about the world, you would be making yourself heard in any medium you could.

OK. ATTN: EVERYBODY ON THE EA FORUMS. EVERYBODY ON THE EA FORUMS. In the last couple of days I have read a couple of good and important articles in my daily newspaper.

This one about how the bankers screw everybody.

And this one about trying to make a citizen's arrest of an Iraq war criminal.

There. Now I can get back to my busy, busy, complicated life secure in the knowledge I have done just as much as Rick Reuben did today to improve the lot of the world.

Rick Reuben wrote:

honeyisfunny wrote:.

I don't care.

Don't you get it?

The story here is not what you think about my personality.

Who cares about the messenger? The message is everything. Finding fault with the messenger is just one more lame excuse cooked up by those who don't want to tell the truth about 9/11, elite money power, and designed wars for profit.

I frequently agree with things you say.

I don't care. Until you act on it, I don't care. If you really were disturbed about the world, you would be making yourself heard in any medium you could. I see no evidence that you are. It's laughable that you wrote eight paragraphs about me. In the time that took, you could have written eight paragraphs about elite money power. But you didn't.

If you have something to say, prove it.

Everything you say is so presumptious, it's like you pick a subject in order to debate it and not to actually exercise the free speech you speak of and try and educate or convert people to your line of thinking. It seems to me you just enjoy an opportunity for some righteous fury or, worse still, smug satisfaction.

You don't know me, you don't know what I do in my day to day life.

About 6 years ago I decided to walk out of my job for a large corporation. They sacked me before I could get the satisfaction of telling them to fuck themselves. Either way, I left. It wasn't the corporation I minded as much as the tax I paid on my earnings and how I couldn't do anything useful with the earnings anyway. For example, any significant purchase that could genuinely affect my quality of life would commit me to debt and hold me in the same job or similar for a long time to come.

So I jacked it in. I decided to only work in jobs for public organisations - like the education sector or the council. I ended up in charge of a yearly budget for the upkeep and improvement of the community centres in the city I live in. Even this was almost as bad as the job before because of the choices the council made and the way they squandered their money.

So I made an active decision to not have a normal day job. This was 3 years ago. Rather than being a decision made from being a lazy bastard, it was made because I felt I wanted to move myself outside of the cycle of money and spending and borrowing somehow. I just wasn't sure how. I opted for self employment and I earn just enough to live on, something in the region of £3000 a year, usually less. This places me below the tax bracket so I pay no income tax each year and it also makes me legible for assistance in paying my rent which, as someone who has given enough money to the government over the years, I take gladly.

It has also put me outside of the realm of mortgages, loans and hire purchase by effectively destroying any credit rating I had and giving me no disposable income to even consider it with.

I did all this on purpose. I don't know what my plan is with it in the future. I guess if I impregnate someone soon I may have to change my plans. But at the moment, on a day-to-day basis, I am outside of the loop of money in this country as much as I possibly can be. I've even consdiered emigrating to further distance myself from it and my best friend is doing that very thing in 2 weeks when he moves abroad with his belongings in a car and nowhere to live when he gets there.

Now Rick, this isn't a competition. I fully expect you to also do things on your own part to back up your foamy ranting with actual action. But that's what I do.

[quote="Rick Reuben] It means it's concentrated in one place- the financial world. Wall Street, London, the central banks. If you had hornets on your property would you swat individual hornets as they flew by, or would you locate the hive?

( I know you weren't looking for a real answer, but I wrote one anyway. )[/quote]

So the answer is to point out that banks ahve all the money?

I have no problem accepting that what someone holds dearest may be a product of "unreason"--i.e., love for another human being, faith in God, excessive regard for David Yow.

We're not Vulcans. I think if we're honest with ourselves we'll find that our most cherished objectives are pretty irrational.

Rick Reuben wrote:
There's only one real battle, and that is to educate people to this fact: capitalism, along with debt and speculation, is a crime. People must be made to understand that economic calamities and chronic wealth inequities are the work of sinister, immoral scum, and not the result of some unpredictable systemic breakdown. People must be taught to recognize the villains.

The failure of the modern progressive movement is this: it insists on compromising with the greedheads, in an effort to form a more humane economic system. That's a completely failed strategy. There is no need to accomodate human greed in any economic system. Those who are driven by greed must be eliminated before any rebuilding can commence...

Rick Reuben wrote:
There's only one real battle, and that is to educate people to this fact: capitalism, along with debt and speculation, is a crime. People must be made to understand that economic calamities and chronic wealth inequities are the work of sinister, immoral scum, and not the result of some unpredictable systemic breakdown. People must be taught to recognize the villains.

The failure of the modern progressive movement is this: it insists on compromising with the greedheads, in an effort to form a more humane economic system. That's a completely failed strategy. There is no need to accomodate human greed in any economic system. Those who are driven by greed must be eliminated before any rebuilding can commence...

Now watch while Ricky fixates on me for from a few hours to a few weeks.

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06-07-08