varnlestoff wrote:

Then why promote a system that only allows those with exclusive resources and opportunity to create success.

Socialism promotes success through equal opportunity and the reward that you are helping yourself and others build a better future. Why does anybody need to have more capital than they can spend in a thousand life times. Is that what it really takes to have success? The modern idea of 'Success' has been distorted into a game called the class system.

Allhailodin wrote:



Pretty much anyone can start a business and become successful. As long as you haven't wrecked your credit and have basic understanding of how marketing works you can basically get a loan from the bank and use it to start up your business and if your business idea proves to be a good one, you can be successful.

Dozens of business are started up every day. If success was only available to those with resources then why are more and more people becoming millionaires each year, if that was true, the number of millionaires would never increase, it would actually decrease, but yet it goes up each year. Why is that.

varnlestoff wrote:

Because the majority of small businesses that get created merely become food for larger corporations to devour, or buy into their own company, making the rich richer, and giving the previous small business owner a pretty penny.

Then there is the small business owners who get investors and don't risk a bank loan, and implements an idea that skyrockets them into the realm of big business. This new big business now devours all other competition with similar practices/ideas, while making the investors richer. The investors continue to invest, and continue to become richer, while the big business continues to suck up all who come near.

You might like to believe that it's easy to have success in today's industry, but remember, success in our industry is measured in the hundreds of millions. If you are not insanely well off and destroying your miniature competition, you have not made the American dream my friend, because the dream keeps getting higher, higher, and more exclusive. Eventually there will be no more room for small business, just about every idea you could think of will already be a name brand idea with a trade mark from an esteemed company, this thresh hold is where the class division is created.

Allhailodin wrote:



Small business can be bought out, but they don't have to sell and they get paid very well.



Being rich isn't a crime or a bad thing, and people have the right to invest there money however they like. If they make high returns on their investment then that's heir right as an investor.



You don't have to make 100,000 million dollars to be successful, people who make 250,000 a year are considered successful too. Doctors don't make 100,000,000 but are still considered successful for example.

DomFortress wrote:

Stupid, when small businesses cannot survive due to market manipulations by the corporations.

Stupid, when you just justified the corporations manipulating the public into uncritical consumers with their capitals.

Stupid, when you cannot survive corporate manipulations, while individual success means little without personal freedom from the oppression known as disaster capitalism.

Stupid.

Allhailodin wrote:



You has no people skills, you need those as a sociologist, your a failure.

First if small businesses cannot survive then why do I see them everyday when I go into town ? So incorrect.

So your saying I don't have the right to profit from investing ? So I don't have the right to profit off the appreciating value stocks is that it ? Also incorrect.

We have personal freedom, we have the personal freedom to be successful, but you socialists hate success, so again incorrect.

I have the freedom to go out start a business and make 100 million dollars from it. But you socialists would take that right and freedom away from me. Just like you would take away JK Rowling's freedom to profit from harry potter.

Allhailodin wrote:



You has no people skills, you need those as a sociologist, your a failure.

First if small businesses cannot survive then why do I see them everyday when I go into town ? So incorrect.

So your saying I don't have the right to profit from investing ? So I don't have the right to profit off the appreciating value stocks is that it ? Also incorrect.

We have personal freedom, we have the personal freedom to be successful, but you socialists hate success, so again incorrect.

I have the freedom to go out start a business and make 100 million dollars from it. But you socialists would take that right and freedom away from me. Just like you would take away JK Rowling's freedom to profit from harry potter.

DomFortress wrote:

What small businesses are you referring to? When you have no factual proof to support your rampant allegations against my person, not my claims.

What's your argument of stock investment has any justification for the corporate manipulations over humanity as a whole?

Finally, what's a single mother and a social worker of middle-class descend, who liberated herself and the rest of humanity through her own literature, has anything to do with your antisocial behavior and subsequently unrealistic business plan? Do you even have an actual plan besides your pessimistic and overgeneralizing attitude? Last time I checked, you're still contradicting yourself with your own selfish ideal. Whereas myself OTOH has seen real socialistic businessmen being successful, and they still sounded nothing quite like yourself.

Allhailodin wrote:



Lol are you actually denying that small businesses exist, how out of touch are you

Lets see theirs a pizza by the slice store, a chinese food restaurant, a coffee roasting company, and bar to name a few, and yes they actually exist, I can touch their buildings with my hands and I can talk to their employees with my mouth.




Its not about humanity as a whole, its about our right as economically free people to invest our money as we see fit. I have the right as a economically free citizen to invest my money into gold or stock or land and make returns or losses on that investment.

What's your entitlement claim on personal anarchy -- not freedom -- has any societal benefit?



JK Rowling is not a failure, she is a shining example of success. She started with nothing then took a good idea, marketed it and profited immensely from it. That's a brilliant example of success.

100 million dollars may be unrealistic, but its certainly not impossible. And it's well within my rights to make and hold that 100 million dollars.

QuasimodoSunday wrote:

You guys all need to grow the fuck up and realize that this relentless debate is futile.

papagolfwhiskey wrote:



First sense I've seen on three pages of this thread.

obscurum per obscurius

Latin phrase meaning "the obscure through the more obscure;" hence, the flaw in any account that proves more difficult to understand than what it purports to clarify. In this vein, philosophers reflecting upon each other's work sometimes echo Byron's complaint about Coleridge:

"But, like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
Explaining metaphysics to the nation—
I wish he would explain his explanation."(citation)

papagolfwhiskey wrote:

Dom: I -was- going to explain very clearly where you obviously went wrong and were piling your own share of obscurity onto a very simple point.

The point was that this has long stopped being a debate and become sort of ego measuring contest between you and Alhailodin. Neither of you will actually listen or concede anything to the other. And no one else is even bothering to watch anymore. Hence why it is pointless and relentless.

But really it's moot. I'm posting this not for the above but to explain something one final time. You may have noticed that I unfriended you a month ago. (or maybe you didn't even notice, that's fine). That's because I'm not talking to you. Any future posts directed at me, or quoting one of my posts will be ignored by me. So unless you think I've said something that you MUST share with a third party, there is no point in quoting me.

For the final time. I'm not speaking to you (metaphorically, since it's actually text) anymore. Don't bother quoting me or addressing me in your posts. They will, henceforth, go answered.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.(citation)

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.(citation)

papagolfwhiskey wrote:



First sense I've seen on three pages of this thread.

QuasimodoSunday wrote:



Thank you.


Though apparently the moderators don't think so judging by the fact my post is gone. Yet they somehow ignore the relentless verbal warfare between Dom and Allhailodin, which is infinitely worse than my comment. Oh well.