From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sat Oct 22 2005 - 21:26:54 BST
> [Platt]
> You hold private companies accountable by not buying their products.
> Unlike the government, no private company can put gun to your head and say,
> "Pay up or else." As for trusting government, I suggest you take a long
> hard look at world history, especially what occurred during the 20th
> century in Russia, German, Italy, Japan and China not to mention Cuba,
> Vietnam, and Cambodia.
Case:
> I decided years ago the Americans make crappy automobiles began a boycott.
> It has not resulted in better quality at all.
There are many who would disagree, including me.
> My boycott of tuna had about
> the same impact.
I guess more people wanted tuna than wanted to boycott it. The free market
is the arbiter. You wouldn't want to assume the role of market dictator
would you?
> Consumers are not now and not ever going to be organized
> enough to impose any sort of value on corporations.
Disagree. Our auto industry nearly went under in the 50's and 60's due to
poor quality. The competition from overseas made them shape up. As a
result, today cars coming from Detroit are better.
> With regards to how
> people in other countries govern themselves I think you too often judge
> them on the basis of your own culture. Pirsig discusses this at length in
> his tirades against anthropology. It is one of the few aspects of
> anthropology that he does not dismiss. In fact when he talks about the
> culture of one in Lila he is saying that we should not judge one system of
> thought from inside another system of thought. Given his other lapses into
> antropomorphism I find this striking.
You mean some cultures aren't better than others? That we can't judge that
Hitler's Germany was a lot worse than Churchill's England? Pirsig says
that's nonsense, and I agree:
"A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological
values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a
culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social
values is absolutely superior to one that does not. It is immoral to speak
against a people because of the color of their skin, or any other genetic
characteristic because these are not changeable and don't matter anyway.
But it is not immoral to speak against a person because of his cultural
characteristics if those cultural characteristics are immoral. These are
changeable and they do matter." (Lila, 24)
Platt
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