Subject: Re: [OFFTOPIC] Re: Death penalty for LISP ? [ was: Re: Is LISP dying? ] From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/08/14 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.forth Message-ID: <3143652901722811@naggum.no> * Timo Tossavainen <tt@cs.uta.fi> | One must first wonder what is wrong with the system that produces these | kinds of people that commit the crimes. what's wrong is thinking that political systems produce any kind of people. "societies don't produce people. people produce people." if a poor person turns to crime, that only explains why he's poor, not why he's a criminal. likewise, if a poor person _demands_ that others keep him alive, that also explains why he's poor. normal human decency, however, implies that we take care of people who come to us and ask for help in a way that makes it worth our while to help them, but begging is so disgustingly demeaning that one should _never_ help beggars. this part of normal caring for other people has been destroyed by organized welfare, and people are turned into beggars because that's the only thing that works: the worst part of organized welfare is that you don't get help if you aren't sufficiently "needy". requiring people to compete with others in terms of being the most needy is a really, truly horrible thing to do to them, as any prospect of bettering your condition also means you don't "deserve" support from the organized welfare, anymore. my take on it is that people who are allowed to think that they can _demand_ that others keep them alive and well start to think they are _deprived_ of it if others don't actually keep them alive and well, and such attitudes may well lead to criminal behavior as it already ignores the rights and needs of those who are required to care for them with nothing tangible in return, not even a thank-you. stuff like that works in a traditional family setting, where having a child is an obligation that lasts at least 18 years, but societies don't produce children in the literal sense, either, so something above and beyond nature is needed and it's important that people agree on this and appreciate it. an annoying, smelly child who demands candy from its parents in a grocery store is a different story altogether from an annoying, smelly grown-up who demands change from the same parents outside the same store, albeit for exactly the same reason. I also keep reminding myself that what is now the Western Civilization was once made up of people much less well off than what we call "poor" today, yet somehow they managed to become one of the most affluent civilizations in human history in the course of a few hundred years. what made it happen? it sure wasn't welfare from outer space, and massive numbers of people died prematurely to make it happen. it is politically correct today to accuse Europeans of stealing all the wealth from today's poor nations, but none of these poor nations ever _had_ any massive wealth to steal to begin with. did we rob them of chances? I don't get it. chances don't come in a fixed supply, and we didn't steal _all_ of their natural resources all at once, anyway. what made Western Civilization? I don't know, but I know it wasn't a demand that somebody give us a chance and until we got it, we would sit on our asses and wait, so I don't understand why we have started to reward such demands so much. #:Erik -- (defun pringles (chips) (loop (pop chips)))