Leftist dogma holds that individuals are not responsible for their failures and any successes are just “luck” (“You didn’t build that”) so why is it surprising that higher numbers of them would cheat?
“UNDER capitalism”, ran the old Soviet-era joke, “man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.” In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity. […]
The game was simple enough. Each participant was asked to throw a die 40 times and record each roll on a piece of paper. A higher overall tally earned a bigger payoff. Before each roll, players had to commit themselves to write down the number that was on either the top or the bottom side of the die. However, they did not have to tell anyone which side they had chosen, which made it easy to cheat by rolling the die first and then pretending that they had selected the side with the highest number. If they picked the top and then rolled a two, for example, they would have an incentive to claim—falsely—that they had chosen the bottom, which would be a five.
Honest participants would be expected to roll ones, twos and threes as often as fours, fives and sixes. But that did not happen: the sheets handed in had a suspiciously large share of high numbers, suggesting many players had cheated.
– The pendulum begins to swing, but careful Bill, the Narrative™ has not been cleared to begin telling the truth just yet.
– Remember the last time you started telling the truth prematurely it cost you your job.
Greetings:
Back in ’73, I woke up one morning in Murmansk, USSR. I was working for Columbia University’s Lahmont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time. No hilarity ensued but one day as we were being bussed about town, one of the deck crew asked one of the RusCom scientists accompanying us what all the billboards by the train station were. “Propaganda.” was the correct and succinct reply.
But, my personal favorite will always be. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
– The full quote: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, and then we pretend to buy groceries with the pretend money we pretend to earn. You can almost hear our pretend laughter over the growling of our empty stomachs.”
– More non-news from the land of pretend.
illiberal fascism news
Elizabeth Warren’s List for Progressives Is EERILY SIMILAR to Hitler’s Nazi List
is this moral laxity or a healthy disrespect for authority
most of failshitamerica is moral laxity. the ” pay for my pleasure” crowd robbing other peeps be baracky.
yes yes yes but still my friend
that is a non sequitur
which means you have to buy the next round
non sequitur
here be
> a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.<
nah foodstamp owns failshitamerica
and the sandraflukers prove it
Conversely, the more people are exposed to great meals within a capitalist system, the more appreciative they become. Tru fax. I just made out like a bandito escondito.
Invited an old unloveable sot over for dinner on his b.d. Honestly did not expect him to respond on account of him being so difficult and remote. Turned out a great salad and steak, and I mean great. Of course I was cooking for myself, as always, and he was merely invited. Today I learned he opened an account in the bottle shop downstairs for me to draw down, and they don’t even have the means to do such a thing. He paid them some sum, I don’t know how much yet, but I’m expecting a couple hundred dollars, or there’d be no point in bothering. All for this, a few days ago.
Man, that was good too. I’ve been thinking of that since I made it. Thinking of marching right down to Tony’s and getting another steak and doing it all over again. Steaks fried in a pan are not supposed to be that good, but it is.
And then, on top of that, I checked the mail today after ignoring it for three days. There was a greeting card saying “thanks for the great meals this last year ” while passing through. A well-traveled fellow who stops in here and there, now and again, once in awhile, as it were, and sometimes instead of going out and catching up, I’ll make something here. Because, honestly, I can do better. Included in the card was a pre-paid charge card to Whole Foods for $100.00. Very convenient that because W.F. is a few blocks up the street.
Both these blokes did very well by capitalism. Both travel extensively. Both eat out mostly. Both know great food when it is served to them, and know regular food too. And both apparently appreciate it and I see for myself it does bring out the best in them. I benefitted from that and I’m very well chuffed right now by receiving their tangible expressions of gratitude that I was not expecting at all.
Socialism chupa la iguana grande because you’ve got your hand in someone else’s pocket. Lots of someones. Everybody’s pockets, everybody’s hands And it creates resentment rather than ambition and generosity. That’s what I make of it. This experiment was interesting. I did not know it makes liars too.
i love your stories
The Yellow Menace, true to his cult of slackers, luvs him a free meal.
you have no evidence to support that theory
none
yellow menace stalking>>> ::free meal:: <—— evidence
in real life people struggle daily weekly monthly to think of good acceptable reasons for turning down free meals
you do understand that yes?
but I suspect a bour3 meal more than transcends these pedestrian free ones people constantly threaten you with
and yes there’s evidence he has a whole blog
– Well hey then, why fight it. Follow your natural instincts and scarf up that freebee!
there was somethin’ bout the way the blue lights were shinin’
bringin’ out the freedom in your eyes
Of course: when you are reared under a system which holds that people have rights to property, and that your neighbor’s things are not yours, you are going to be more honest than someone who is bought up under a system which holds that private property is evil, and that you have a right to what others have. This should be a lesson to all employers: never hire anyone who was s supporter of the Occupy movement, because he will be untrustworthy.
[…] Darleen Click of Protein Wisdom also noted the story. […]
The study reveals nothing about the nature of the link between socialism and dishonesty. It might be a function of the relative poverty of East Germans, for example. All the same, when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one.
Rubbish. “Without God, humans are but animals”. One’s moral character is strengthened by exposure to a religious upbringing; if said upbringing is inculcated into one’s mindset as continuing faith, then we have a better chance of finding a Person if Character.
How many of those tested were behaving as humans having true strength of character, and how many acted out of innate Darwinesque responses, built in to ensure their own survival, even when those responses include the need to lie and cheat, or, in other more stressful circumstances, to steal, kill?
Moral elasticity is human nature, especially when one is challenged by stress. All I’m pointing out is that one’s morals might be less elastic if one has faith in a thing that exists outside the confines of one’s own skull.
Humans are but animals, we can say. Animals with speech. Animals characterized as possessing logos. Animals with high proficiency at calculation. Tool-making animals. Animals which have communicable and lasting speech called “writing” or “books”: thus animals possessed of very long and very wide-ranging, if yet at times somewhat inefficient, memories. Animals which distinguish, hence reckon on, cause and effect (and perhaps too often make mistakes regarding this). Animals which have learned to seek out explanations of cause and effect, and which believe once they have fully grasped these relationships, “know” or understand something about the objects into which they inquire (they call this “science”). So they become animals which can frequently think through events and through a symbolized passage of time to come, to occasionally and correctly grasp future events (yet animals which may again, too often make mistakes on this score). Humans are as well animals driven by their eros, their longings, their desire for beauty — in the mass, it can seem, beauty in all things.
Characterizing further, humans are social animals, political animals (some say) which primarily must live in groups, which by nature are made to live in groups, and which only thrive in the company of fellowship or friendship in non-sanguine relations with others of their kind, and conversely, are certain to suffer when deprived of such elective amity. Voluntary reciprocity achieved, it might be said, results in tiny squirts of euphoric brain hormones dispersed within the thinking-feeling organ, thus reinforcing this inbuilt behavior.
Humans are asocial animals, apolitical animals, others say, which though they may live in ad hoc groups, nevertheless function solely with a view to individual benefit (i.e., with robbing and thieving), unlike the social ants or the social bees which more rigidly follow scripts harmoniously attuned to the welfare of the colony or hive.
Does the city have a god? (Damn straight it does.) Adequate to the truth — Inadequate to the truth? Doesn’t matter, does it? Better align with the city, or else hide any dissent very deep, if living further is your object, because cities, we know, are always founded with coercion and force — violence — and have been seen not to take too kindly to the denial of their highest things. Cities ought not be faulted for this necessity, if only because there is and never has been any other means available to them for the maintenance of their existence.
I tend to think that at our core we are self-interested, and to the extent that we are driven to act in someone else’s interest it is with the intent of furthering our own.
Evolution started us out better off among others of our own kind, and has reinforced social behaviors — but even among our own kind we are constantly jockeying for advantage. Greater status and more opportunities to mate fall to those who are better at jockeying; those less successful do better by following the higher-status individuals.
I posit that herd and hive behaviors are extensions of this tendency, and serve better those species in which individuals are less intelligent — but this doesn’t scale to the point of perfection, in which absolute individual intelligence leads to total independence from others, unless one chooses to argue that God is not Creator but rather the ultimate product of evolution, which must be an argument for some other day.
. . . those less successful do better by following the higher-status individuals.
heh. In troop-ape mating studies it has been found that lower-ranking males do indeed “do better” by intimately following the higher-status males’ actions, and seek to grab a quicky from receptive females when the higher-status males’ attention or presence is elsewhere.
You mean like Bill Clinton did? ;-)
guffaws: a slick-willy was never better named!
….Which asks the question “Would it be possible to be any more of a two-faced lying sack-of-shit than this deuchebag?
That’s not the question I’m asking, BBH.
The question I’m asking is how Israel is to proceed with its war aims when confronted by a primary “ally” taking the part of its enemies? What can possibly be the right strategy for Israel to both meet its citizens’ demands and needs, while managing to continue to conduct its military operations in the face of a growing opposition to those war aims from the vast majority of the (openly Jew-hating) nations of the world — Canada’s government being the sole and remarkable exception to that — which nations of the world will work to see to it that Israel’s enemy Hamas survives her every efforts to defeat them, if not even to go so far as to offer Hamas a chance to claim victory over her, as well as maintain their control of the weapons which now bombard her daily, and will do so again, should Hamas remain in power in Gaza?
– The right strategy? Well for the bastard Progs like Kerry and the rest of his Left wing loons, most especially the campaigner in chief, they don’t give a FF about the war or Israel or the Palestinians. All they care about is war, any war puts the total lie to their limo diplomacy, and they just hate that. They are useless aholes that never accomplish anything, and just keep lying and trying to keep the kid on any “unrest” that makes them look bad.
– Not one single issue has been resolved under Bumblefuck, not one. The list of world wide problem spots and unrest just keeps getting larger and larger. All that happens is the lap dog media simply stops reporting the news after a few weeks. We have to get our gd news from the foreign press because our media is such a bunch of commie loving whores.
– Latest from Gaza.
It is not from the point of view of Israel’s enemies I ask the question BBH, but from Israel’s point of view.
While I suppose not only Israel but we her friends too must bear in mind the views of nasty people like John Kerry and his boss the ClownDisaster, to say nothing of Khaled Mashaal or Recep Erdogan, if only in order to correctly arrive at the strategy we seek to understand, i.e., one which will enable Israel to succeed in her aims and not be defeated, it isn’t as though the machinations of the nations allied with Hamas are unknown to us. Does repeating them add weight? Maybe so. I don’t know.
Still, what’s missing is the way for Israel to proceed with success as its basis. This constitutes a grave uncertainty as of today.
**** “Hi. This is the President. Is Senator Schumer in?”
“Not today, sir. This is Yom Kippur.”
“Well hello, Yom. Can I leave a message?” ****
It’s good to see Aussie Michelle again Caecus, thanks for that.
– The way to succeed with aggressive, asocial enemies has been shown throughout the ages, and hasn’t changed one iota. The way they stop is when you kill enough of them that they can’t fight anymore.
– But for the Left, all of the Left, and that now includes the entirety of the Democratic party and most of the Republicans as well, stability, any stability is the kiss of death until they’re in power. Then, of course, they seek totalitarian rule. They try to stop any sort of stabilization which would thwart their aims at power. They haven’t achieved total control yet, so they keep undermining any attempts at stabilization.
– If you haven’t figured them out yet you’re not paying attention. Aholes like Kerry are the worst of the savant morons because they are so self consumed they neither recognize, nor do they care that they are being used like a rented mule. Useful idiots is too gentle.
God what a moron.