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#34576 05/27/10 11:30 AM
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coberst Offline OP
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Crude Poetic Justice?

Wikipedia informs me that “poetic justice” is a notion that fictional literature takes on as a cultural demand whereby literary outcomes must support moral standards by justifying in the end the virtuous behavior of the good guy and punishing the bad behavior of the bad guy. Furthermore logic is also maintained.

How can our (American) present troubles be considered as poetic justice?

Let us just examine the great human manufactured catastrophes visited upon us in the last few years; the Great Crude Oil Smear, the deadliest mine disaster in three decades, the greatest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, and the looming global climate change induced by human activity.

The common element in all of these catastrophes is our three decade guiding premise that Government is the problem while Free Market forces are the solution.

Poetic Justice results because the American people are punished, with a great crude oil smear, by the logic of their commitment to the free market and their dark suspicion of government regulation.

Perhaps God is a practical joker!

.
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coberst Offline OP
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In a democracy such as we have in the United States the people are sovereign and thus responsible for the situation that exists. The lack of intellectual sophistication of the citizens is the fault of those citizens.

The basic problem began when the people allowed them self to be convinced that government was the problem and that the free market was the solution. These problems developed because the American citizen left Corporate America free and unregulated.

The American people are too naive to comprehend the problem and too frightened of reality to accept their responsibility.

An oligarchy controls public policy in America. The oligarchy consists of those who manage the great wealth of American institutions. This oligarchy designs our educational system to graduate good producers and consumers and does not desire independent thinkers.

CA (Corporate America) has developed a well-honed expertise in motivating the population to behave in a desired manner. Citizens as consumers are ample manifestation of that expertise. CA has accomplished this ability by careful study and implementation of the knowledge of the ways of human behavior. I suspect this same structure applies to most Western democracies.

A democratic form of government is one wherein the citizens have some voice in some policy decisions. The greater the voice of the citizens the better the democracy. The greater the intellectual sophistication of those citizens the better the democracy.

In America we have policy makers, decision makers, and citizens. The decision makers are our elected representatives and are, thus, under some control by the voting citizen. The policy makers are the leaders of CA; less than ten thousand individuals, according to those who study such matters. Policy makers exercise significant control of decision makers by controlling the financing of elections.

Policy makers customize and maintain the dominant ideology in order to control the political behavior of the citizens. This dominant ideology exercises the political control of the citizens in the same fashion as the consuming citizen is controlled by the same dominant ideology.

An enlightened citizen is the only means to gain more voice in more policy decisions. An enlightened citizen is much more than an informed citizen. Critical thinking is the only practical means to develop a more enlightened citizen. If, however, we wait until our CT trained grade-schoolers become adults I suspect all will be lost. This is why I think a massive effort must be made to convince today’s adults that they must train themselves in CT.


“Thomas R. Dye, Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, has published a series of books examining who and what institutions actually control and run America. to understand who is making the decisions that affect our lives, we also have to understand how societies structure themselves in general. Why the few always tend to share more power than the many and what this means in terms of both a society's evolution and our daily lives. they examined the other 11 institutions that exert just as powerful a shaping influence, although somewhat more subtle: The Industrial, Corporations, Utilities and Communications, Banking, Insurance Investment, Mass Media, Law, Education Foundation, Civic and Cultural Organizations, Government, and the Military.”

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coberst Offline OP
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The United States with 5% of the global population, which consumes 25% of the global production of petroleum, becomes tarred with petroleum; that is poetic justice!

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tarred , feathered , drawn and quartered.

but look on the bright side , with all the fines that
BP faces and the investigation into the other oil producers
and there associations with the MSM there may be even more fines
enought to pay for our national debt.

this is most likely just the tip of the iceberg.


3/4 inch of dust build up on the moon in 4.527 billion years,LOL and QM is fantasy science.
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To be poetic justice, don't they have to have done something 'morally' wrong? What's that? Anything that was only wrong because it caused the problems doesn't count. It has to be punishment for some other badness.

Imagine a story where the main character dreams of flying, so he builds a plane and has some success with it. Then at the end he crashes and dies. That's not poetic justice! That'll make the reader feel annoyed! It's what you're saying about America tho.

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Oh I know what they did wrong. They wrote dates in a random and useless way! Month/day/year ??? Put it in order of significance guys!

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coberst Offline OP
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Wiki says: “Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct."

To call this situation poetic justice is not to say that it is justice that this should happen to the United States. It is to say that if this was a literary novel and this happened to a country in the same manner then we could evaluate it to be poetic justice.

To say that this is poetic justice is to point this out so that we all might learn something very important about human actions in the real world. We Americans go blindly along "jus doin what comes naturally" without ever analyzing our actions in a critical and sophisticated manner.

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But what's wrong with that? It seems to me the idea is more like "bad guy does something wrong to others, his same actions then cause something bad to happen to himself"

Not "Some guy does something risky, eventually he loses the gamble and gets hurt by it".

In the movie Avatar, when the main character gets to walk, he immediately goes running around crazy without considering the consequences, but doesn't get any poetic justice like "trips over and becomes paralyzed again". In fact he's rewarded for his reckless actions.

What's America done wrong in drilling for oil other than to risk environmental problems?

Originally Posted By: coberst

actions in the real world. We Americans go blindly along "jus doin what comes naturally" without ever analyzing our actions in a critical and sophisticated manner.

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Originally Posted By: kallog


What's America done wrong in drilling for oil other than to risk environmental problems?



And therein we find the rub. Without a degree of sophistication we go about without any comprehension of the complex problems that face us from many directions.

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Originally Posted By: kallog
Not "Some guy does something risky, eventually he loses the gamble and gets hurt by it".


I know its not like BP was involved in the bribery of the MSM
to avoid the actual inspections onboard the actual oil rig
they were simply doing the inspections on paper while in bed , its so much easier and fun that way , and less expensive.

less expensive in a short term way of thinking perhaps but whats the crime here?

its nothing but the same thing they did in college by using cheat sheets instead of doing the actual studying and learning process.
so its basically something they learned in college and in life.

if you want to score more learn to cheat...


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Originally Posted By: paul
I know its not like BP was involved in the bribery of the MSM
to avoid the actual inspections onboard the actual oil rig


Hmm so maybe we should say it was BP that got poetic justice, not America.

BP was taking risks that would have hurt America. Then one of them turned around and hurt themselves. That sounds like the poetic justice the OP described.


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