Comments on: Working Class Guys, redux

By: MaxDamage

MaxDamage — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:09:58 +0000

Flit, understand your position, I think, and while I’m a big fan of moderation and caution I cannot abide by sloth and laziness. You’ve not distinguished between greed and ambition or personal industry or even motivation.

Seems it’s the goals that you differentiate by, the results being immaterial?

I have a difficult time with the ends justifying the means, whenever the ends are the same. Just doesn’t seem, you know, fair.

– Max

By: Curtis

Curtis — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:44:17 +0000

Socrates at a fair, “how many things there are that I do not need.” These days all wants are needs and all needs are rights.

By: fliterman

fliterman — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:07:23 +0000

BillK – Thank you for that very interesting proverb reference…. which also happens to impressively cover far more than greed.

Keynes had a very interesting take on greed in 1931, at the start of the Great Depression. Knowing greed undesirable, he nevertheless recommended to “pretend” temporarily, that greed was good.

“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.”

While I admire Keynes and think I know what he was trying to say, I don’t buy this quote. In addition to the normal moral and ethical problems with greed, I also believe in the following quote by Frenchman, Emile Durkheim in 1897:

” From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. “Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.”

… And theft quickly follows.

[SnakeE - Less than 170 words, if you're counting.]

By: Bill K.

Bill K. — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:48:51 +0000

Fliterman, does this agree or disagree with your thinking?
Old definition of greed:
The leech has two daughters, “Give,” “Give.”
Agur, Proverbs 30:15, circa 950BC

By: Flatlander

Flatlander — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:27:16 +0000

Among the correlaries I learned in Naval Aviation:

All things in moderation – including moderation.

By: badbob

badbob — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:06:55 +0000

Geo6,

Understand? Y.G.B.S.M.

Hell, I get a headache and reach for the excedrin every time I read their entries (they probably do the same for mine).

All I can say is the patience and logic exerted by Lex and others to deconstruct..well..they are better than this Gunga Din is all.. : -)

Snake usually handles it about right, the ol’peckerwood.