No one is opposed to free enterprise, but free enterprise ends when it begins to have negative consequences on the rest of society and the planet (such as the dirty dealing on Wall Street that ruined the economy, hence the protests), hence regulations. Do business, but do it within the rules established by the social contract. And pay your fair share in taxes to help support the society that you used to make your money.

Now that is something I can agree with.

Tsyal, I think HNM misunderstands our ideas of a fair world to be one of uniformity while what at least I speak for is equality. There IS a difference. Uniformity would mean to give and allow each person exactly the same, while equality means to accept diversity but at the same time make sure that all people have the same access to everything. The pseudocommunist states have tried uniformity, which basically failed.
I think what instead makes much more sense is something that excerts pressure towards equality. For example someone earning only little would not pay taxes, a millionaire would (according to the legislative rule of "ownership has to serve the public") have to pay a tax simply for having that money and of course also pay a tax on income. And in between that the scale slides up. This is as it is in most European countries. Did you know that in post-war US the taxes for rich people wereover 80% of their income? And that was what lead to the "golden 60'ies", what financed the US moon programme, built a lot of the present infrastructure and so on.
It does not mean no one can earn more money than others, but the playing field is a bit more levelled by such regulations. And the next one, which is also in place at least to some degree in Europe, is to protect the people, animals and the livelihood of future Generations (that is Article 20a of the german constitution) from negative impact. And the result of course have to be rather strict environmental laws.

So this is not really that new or something revolutionary even. Tax the rich, regulate corporations, protect people, environment, the future - its all old, but the problem is that it is all too often only applied in theory and I think the OWS and sister-movements want to say that they want to see this applied to its full potential. That is simply social-democratic stuff. Probably in Germany the protests will be a bit more leftist, because here a lot of the desires of the OWS movement are already in place but there is still injustice left (bank bailouts, the debate over the property tax, deconstruction of social systems), so it may be a bit more specific.

Regarding the NA'Vi - while obvioulsy to apply to them political terms like socialist, communist, anarchist makes no real sense, what we see of their social structure is what is present in the social structures of earthly indigenous cultures. There is a lot of sharing and little accumulation of wealth. The meat from a hunt will certainly be shared by all and not only by the hunters. I doubt there will be people having a stash of some kilos of dried stormbeest meat that he can later trade to make others do work for him. I also doubt that one person owns a specific spot of land or a whole herd of direhorses - these all belong to Eywa or maybe to the Omaticaya but not to just one person. I think it is hard to say what they would do in a situation where someone has accumulated riches - I doubt they would forcefully strip him of it, but I think they would wonder why he does that. And I doubt that in their society such a thing would happen at all. And this is the crucial difference between what Engels the old communist described as the "original society" and the modern capitalist society. It is not so much about controlling and taking away of wealth, but of not allowing such accumulation to happen in the first place because obviously one mans riches are another mans poverty and no egalitarian society would want this to happen.

But I think neither of us wanted to say that you HNM are "not a true fan". You certainly are. But at least I myself am curious how your love and dedication towards the NA'Vi and their way of life, your liking of the Avatar storyline and its implications go together with your political ideas? I dont mean this as a rhethorical question.

Yeah, and it's also called hope.

Also, saying the top 1% shouldn't have 42%% of the nation's wealth is different than saying everyone should have the same amount.

here's one: Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power

there's another one I can't find from 1986 that showed the bottom 40% had 0.2% of the wealth. Saying this is unbalanced isn't wanting communism

I'm glad this is happening while I'm in college. I always pictured myself listening to the Beatles and participating in protests while in college.

Okay, why the **** is everybody singling out liberal art students like they are all this is made of??? Get over that sliver of demographic, please :facepalm:

YES, I am in liberal arts. No, I'm not going to bitch about not having any money for the program. I would never go into debt over a liberal arts degree and anyone who would is a ****ing retard.

:shock: Okay, done.

Yeah I'm with you there Moco. I'm doing a dual Arts degree: Bachelor Arts/Bachelor Social Work and I really don't see why people single out Arts students. In all honesty the Art degrees are some of the cheaper degrees available, apart from theology related degrees..

Did they say similar, ignorant things about the students who protested about the rise of Uni fees in England this year? I don't think so.

I dont get what the problems with art and social sciences students is. What culture is this that values arts, social interaction (and for that matter language, history, writing, literature, music, archaology, anthropology, the study of other cultures,.....) so much lesser than the supposedly successful topics like economics and computer science. If it was not for underpaid and underfunded ecologists, biologists, historians, archaologists, journalists and all the others, what would our culture look like - how poor deprived would a culture be that gets rid of all these things in favour of efficiency and economic success...

That is very true. If you are a social worker or carer working for a non government organisation you earn less than the average wage even though the work you do is so important for the community. If you work for the government you are on the average wage but only just. Whereas computer programmers and people in finance earn so much more.

That word doesn't usually mean what you're using it to mean there. :P

Exactly. How do we as a culture value these occupations? From many standpoints - religious, spiritual, humanistic, ethical, moral, social - it should be obvious that it is valuable to do something like to care for old people, to tend to children, to help people, to keep the land they live on clean and healthy. And from these standpoints it would even be pretty clear that these tasks are more honorable and valuable than to trade stocks, property, insurances - or creating new cellphone models. For some reason, more money is paid for those occupations that do actually not fall into these ranks of being "honorable". Maybe it is actually because of that feature in that the guilt has to be paid off by money. I dont want to speculate too much on this, but the correlation seems to be that the more fun, honorable, social, meaningful an occupation is, the less money is generally paid while the more destrucive (towards one self or the world) something is, the more monetary value is attached, while it is the opposite with something one might call "honorablility" or nobleness or positiveness. Everyone applauds and gives comfortable and thankful words to a nurse or a kindergardener while the economists usually have money for comfort.
Now ponder this and tell me that there is not something very wrong with that picture. In a society that does not rely on money, what occupations do you think would flourish? Of course the ones that benefit the social fabric, the future of the people and the people at this time. While in the present system, where so much emphasis is put on money and it is given a power beyond comprehension ("everything has its price") quite obviously the opposite behaviour is rewarded.
One of the dominant factors in distinguishing agressive, violent, depressive, scared and destructive cultures/countires/tribes from their peaceful, happy, conserving and confident counterparts is the distribution of wealth. This is true for indigenous cultures as well as for present day nation states. The countires with the least difference in income between an economics manager and the janitor rank highest on the perceived happiness scale.

If we substitute money for the less advanced and more general concept of "wealth", AFAIK there is not and never was such a thing.

You kind of took it from liberal arts to many different careers, and I sort of fail to see where you're going with this other than to make the general case which Occupy Wallstreet does :P which I fully agree with, but let's be real here: a liberal arts education is far less practical than one in science or engineering and is most definitely less helpful to the community as a whole. An art specific education is not necessary for art, but you MUST in most cases have an education for science, engineering, etc. Because these other fields are more necessary to society, they are more worth going into debt over, or protesting about :P IMO, and probably in most people's.

We Are the 99 Percent

Oh and yes of course I think that all people have the same right to protest this.

I strayed in my last post, yes. Apologies.
Liberal arts - I guess this one as well as similar topics do not really serve as something one can build a career on. That is sure. But I think a culture, a civilization that claims for itself to be advanced, wealthy, progressive and productive should offer and support also people who do not make a career, support occupations that are not "needed". After all if this society is so "poor" that all occupation is supposed to be "necessary", that is against the promise of progress which said that with more progress, the freedom and leisure rises and there is more places for artists and such.

The value is that anyone can do what they want - but nobody should see that as a license to be subsidised more than any other.

Less helpful to the community? Well then, let me ask you this: What has helped you in bettering your own life?

The point of a liberal arts degree is to be a rounded educational base, the idea being that you choose a more specialized career to pursue into a full 4-12 year degree. (depending on the field and amount of education you're gunning for) I'd call a liberal arts degree education simply for rational thought.

Aren't there courses in philosophy and logic for that?

I think what Moco Loco was after is the difference between need and want. Then again I could go on a long list of needs that aren't as apparent as one would think, but that would be going too much off topic.

To put it simply, we can survive without art, but not without resources that are available to us via technological logistics. There are things that we need, and there are things we want, and art is in the latter.

Perhaps, but would we want to survive without art? How much would you want to live without music, language, pictures, design, literature, or say ...Avatar? Is there a point where our wants overlap or even supersede our needs?

I don't mean to attack your post; I'm an English major and I consider these questions often, so there's something personal for me here. Liberal Arts and Art programs are always placed under Math and Science programs in the hierarchy of education. But when I consider the things that have helped me the most in life, they were books, movies, music and paintings. I won't pretend that Engineering, Science and Math havent helped me in sustaining life, but, as John Keating so eloquently puts it:

What will your verse be? - YouTube

Here's a thought: how did you access those? ;)

What good is a network for information, if there is no information to convey?

Technology. :)

I'm not trying to put down one field of study in favor of another. I just argue against the notion that studying art is impracticable.

There is always information to convey. Some of it is just more important than others.

According to you, a scientistic hardliner. Why don't you go say that to a famous painter or composer, and see how they react, when you tell them they are in a lesser field than a scientist or economist. To existential beings such as ourselves, identity is as important as survival. Without a means of surviving, there's no one to have an identity, but without identity, what's the point of survival (and don't give me this "to reproduce" horse****, I'm talking about a higher, existential level here)?

If anything science and the arts compliment each other. How many new technologies put forward start as artist's concepts? How many scientists were first inspired by works of art? At the same time, new technologies provide new outlets for artists. One is not "better" than the other, they work in harmony.

Remember, it wasn't simply the scientist who was considered the best or most intellectual, it was the Renaissance Man, a master of both the sciences and the arts.

Alternatively, one could argue that NEITHER the arts nor science are about survival, rather, basic survival is a matter of instincts, something we've always had, something that predates both the sciences and the arts. An obvious example of this is indigenous cultures. Even if they lack the scientific method as used in modern culture, they still thrive (but they do have the arts ;)). Our basic survival is not thanks to either science or arts, but rather our instincts. And if that's the case, both are equally not means to survive, but both are equally means to live. And maybe the reason that our culture can look on and gawk at someone who chooses to study the arts and make a career out of it is because we've forgotten the importance of the art-half of our existential lives.

They complement each other, but one works for basic survival.

Science improves everyone's quality of live, whereas art is only subjectively valuable. There is constant progress in science, and there can be none in art, unless inherently scientific in nature (like JC's advances).

What if art was the inspiration to the science? If that's the case, then art also improves everyone's quality of life, even if it is indirectly by being subjectively value to the person behind the scientific innovations. People these days seem to denigrate arts to simply "pretty pictures or music," while forgetting just how deep it runs in our history and our scientific advances. I think Leonardo da Vinci is the perfect humanization of the relationship between arts and sciences. The modern world wouldn't have one without the other.

Lest we forget that the Renaissance era - a time of equal value/mixing of arts and sciences - was one of the richest intellectual eras in the history of humanity, and is one of the very reasons why we even have a modern world to begin with...

Tsyal, that's a pretty big leap and some indirect reasoning. If that's the best you've got, I think science wins the funding.

It is, usually, the other way around.

...so what of the Renaissance Man? :hmm:

Society was not only completedy different 350 years ago, but that was back in the time where both art and science were small enough for one person to be able to know most everything. That isn't the case anymore.

So that justifies marginalizing the arts? Or suggesting that they can't continue to work in conjunction with the sciences?

Oh, and.
POLYMATHS: 20 LIVING EXAMPLES | More Intelligent Life
Top 10: Modern Renaissance Men - AskMen
List of people who have been called "polymaths" - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Still plenty of names in the 20th/21st century.;)

Polymathism isn't dead, no matter how much you want it to be, and science and the arts are still highly intertwined, no matter how much you don't want them to be.

The Enduring Relationship of Science and Art

V - Exactly, Ashen Key! :)

Given over here an Arts degree would also get you a degree in history, I'm side-eying all of this 'Arts is useless' talk. History affects the present, affects the future, and can help stop people (and thus also governments, because governments are made up from people) from making the same mistakes over and over.

You can't understand oh, say, 9/11, without knowing something of the recent (as in, at least a century) history in the Middle East. You can't really get to the bottom of people's anger with the US unless you understand the past over a hundred of years of the US's international behaviour (which, if you study history, has a very, very clear pattern). And so on for Australia, Ireland, Germany, Egypt, Morocco... History is important.

It's more than a little disturbing seeing people be so dismissive as to the arts.

I'm actually pretty sure no one was talking about history, and Ashen, that degree situation in wherever "over here" is is pretty uncommon to my knowledge.

And Tsyal, if by "marginalize" you mean exclude from student financial aid, I strongly say yes. Does anyone need a liberal arts degree? Hardly.

Australia, when I studied it. History over here is an Arts degree.

Same here. Both sciences and arts (including history) are encompassed in the College of Arts and Sciences, at least at my Uni.

Where will new great authors come from if we do not teach comprehensive English? Where will new anthropologists, political activists, and politicians come from if we do not teach comprehensive History? Artists if we do not teach comprehensive art? Musicians without music theory? Who will translate yet-to-be-decrypted ancient writings without language studies? Most importantly, who will teach the next generation about our history and saga and intellectual past if we do not sustain and nurture it today? Liberal arts are an important part of society. They may not smash atoms or make vaccines, but they are the intellectual value in the background that makes modern society and culture possible.


Think about this: Without liberal arts study, there very well might have been no Avatar, from Cameron's cinematography, script writing, and directing, to Horner's score, to Frommer's Na'vi language. The movie that we all know and love, the reason we are even here to debate right now, was made possible thanks to the liberal arts.

It is possible to write a book, study politics, or look at anthropology with no past experience; "success" in these areas depends entirely on what you want to achieve. (A 3000 word story with punctuation mistakes, strung together with cliches, and flat characters is acceptable in certain circumstances.) There is no such leeway in engineering.

You know how much you can buy with $300m, right?

But without proper education and resources, it is nearly impossible to truly master these subjects and make a living out of them. And that still doesn't change the fact that we need trained and educated individuals to keep history alive for the next generation, and institutions to teach the next generation these subjects.

And with the volatile global political climate these days, you underestimate just how much finesse and skill it takes to run the world politically. Do you think there was much leeway in the Cuban Missile Crisis? The precision needed to build a stable building is the same precision that keeps the world from devolving into a thermonuclear wasteland. The difference between global politicians and people squabbling in the comment sections of Youtube videos or news articles is the knowledge, skill, and experience one can get at a University.

And besides, the resources for someone to be able to study these subjects without past experience needs to come from somewhere, right? How many of those books, articles, TED talks, etc. that people use to study arts on their own time came from a professional in the field?

And even if you have $300m, that still doesn't change the fact that you still need the people with the know-how in language theory and music to pay with said money.

With all that said, do I think (or was I implying) that liberal arts is for everyone? NO, of course not, but there still needs to be some select few in society who are willing to be the "scribes" of the arts, so to speak.