The winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are In A PC Nation, How Will The GOP Run? by Cheat Seeking Missiles, and To Die in Jerusalem, Part II by My Shrapnel.  Here are the full results……

Breathing under water is also a choice. But I don’t think choosing to breath under water is something you just choose and it happens. I suppose it will happen if you really want it to, but it won’t go according to one’s personal wishes.

Concerning the logic that happiness is something you choose and other people can’t choose to take away from you, it has some interseting implications to modern life. For one thing, any person’s wife could be kidnapped and the argument could be made, using helen’s logic, that the husband never had his wife in the first place. Same goes for anything else of value.

There’s something not quite right with that line of logic to me.

I also don’t agree with the logic that a person should have the power and right to take wealth from others and give it to themselves, just because seeing wealthier people makes them unhappy. The logic is also flawed for observers to take money from those that have it and give it to those that don’t, just because the have nots are unhappy with being have nots.

I don’t know if that would make anyone happy, but I do know that the ones who would have a little bit less would be miserable. People get mad as fire just thinking about having less (sharing).

I suppose when one’s purpose is to create more government stealing, not less, sharing would be seen as a choice made for people instead of made by people. After all, when the government is no longer for the people and by the people, why should free will be for and by the people either?

This leads me to believe that in actuality poor people are happier than rich ones right now.

When you aren’t worried about people stealing stuff from you cause you don’t have anything to steal, I suppose you might have a higher chance of being happy.

Happiness has nothing to do with having one’s needs met by others of even by oneself for that matter.

I get the impression through my intuition that the logic used here is that obtaining happiness does not depend upon what the government does to its people, while making people less happy can be achieved by government redistribution of wealth. Except helen’s argument is that while you had money and you had it stolen from you and redistributed, this would not have made you unhappy unless you were never happy to begin with. That’s an interesting line of logic.

It hits upon the theme that a person cannot obtain happiness by benefiting from the fruits of their choices and labors. Because what you have earned can also be taken away by those that didn’t earn it. And helen has claimed that you are not really happy unless someone cannot take your happiness away from you.

As I said in the beginning here, “The problem is, not everyone accepts Aristotle’s definition and explanation of what happiness is or should be”. Which means people are talking past each other.

The government must allow people “the pursuit of happiness,” - that’s the law - but no person or agency can guarantee that happiness will be the result.

Certainly that seems to be something most everyone, Don specifically, would agree with. But what’s important is what this signifies. It doesn’t mean what a similar statement would have meant had it come from Bookworm. For example, if the government must allow people the pursuit of happiness and helen believes that rich people flaunting their wealth distracts poor people from the pursuit of happiness, then does this not justify helen’s wealth redistribution beliefs? Wouldn’t government, by preventing rich people from flaunting their wealth, be ensuring that poor people can now pursue happiness? It’s never the bold and large print on the contract that determines the quality of the deal. It is the fine print. The things that aren’t obvious; the things that people don’t say outright.

but I do know that the ones who would have a little bit less would be miserable

Which I suppose is often a critical element in ensuring that people who are miserable obtain some joy from seeing other people’s lives wrecked.

The ultra rich don’t pay income taxes. They live entirely off trust interests and capital gains. Income taxes for corporations may be as 40 or 50% or even higher. Those with six figures but less than a 7 figure income must pay higher than a 40% income tax, either federal or fed+state.

Thus it is very easy for the ultra rich to become politically allied with people who want to redistribute wealth through higher taxes. Since higher income taxes will only hurt the majority of Americans, it won’t even touch the top 1% and higher.

And of course, if the government really wants to redistribute wealth, they can always take a percentage of a person’s savings. Increase capital gains so that you can’t gain as much money from the stock market or other investments that produce interest. That’ll really redistribute the wealth from the top percentage earners. It would also crash the economy, but that’s okay, since real happiness can’t be stolen by hunger and economic destitution anyways.

Historically there was another wealth redistribution scheme of note. No, it wasn’t called communism or socialism. It was the Spanish Inquisition. The Church, and by extension the Spanish royalty that controlled the Church in Spain, got a slice of the property of those they tortured to death or made confess.

Good times, I suppose; good enough for folks to want to recreate a similar situation.

People get mad as fire just thinking about having less (sharing).

The Spanish Inquisition sure shared in many things. Fire was also part of things.

SGT Dave - “This ‘ere tripod mounted beauty is an absolute jihadi-smiting joy to use.”

(and whoever said these numbers were useful was 100% on)

What I believe about happiness is stated more clearly in the sentence that follows the one you quoted. I said, “Happiness is a choice.”

Happiness has nothing to do with having one’s needs met by others of even by oneself for that matter. Poor people choose happiness just as rich people do. Happiness is a right no one can take away. Happiness is mostly a result of knowing who one is and having a meaningful relationship with God. (Please note: I am NOT defining what that relationship is or should be. If a person and God are happy with it, it falls under the category: none of my business.)

The government must allow people “the pursuit of happiness,” - that’s the law - but no person or agency can guarantee that happiness will be the result.

In the US, because we are a first world country, we have a high average standard of living. And because people have the propensity to desire what they see, it must be hard for the truly poor to maintain their focus on what happiness really is, when they see others flaunt such material wealth.

Yes, I would like to see the government participate in redistribution of wealth. I don’t know if that would make anyone happy, but I do know that the ones who would have a little bit less would be miserable. People get mad as fire just thinking about having less (sharing).

This leads me to believe that in actuality poor people are happier than rich ones right now. Poor people know how to share what little they have. Rich ones are afraid the government might “steal” their happiness.

If someone can steal your happiness, you don’t have it in the first place.

Happiness is a choice. So I choose happiness.

When the Democrats reform the tax policy so that the poor don’t pay any tax, how will tax breaks then provide an advantage to the poor?

I say, instead that, only as to those incapable of providing for themselves should we step in.

Take it one step farther. Those that receive society’s charity are nothing but the unpaid servants and artists patronized by the aristocracy. It is they, the ones maintained by society, that owes society an obligation and a duty, not the other way around.

Being patronized by the aristocracy is not a state any peon, serf, slave, or poor person should want to be in. But they do. That’s human nature for you.

The fascinating additional aspect is that the intellectuals and spiritual leaders have convinced the poor and the disadvantaged that they are the ones gaining power by going on the dole of the rich and powerful. How that logic works, nobody knows. Then again, nobody knew how the logic that kings had the divine right to rule worked either, but that wasn’t a big problem to most people. Up until the revolution that is. Which is what happened in Russia and Cuba when intellectuals and aristocrats convinced the poor that they deserved more than they were getting from the ruling power. The ruling power, like the Shah of Iran, that were disenfranchising the intellectuals and aristocrats. You notice how convenient how that kind of power struggle always exists when a revolution starts up? Rarely have the people ever benefited from a revolution of any kind. It was always the leaders of the people, and the requirements for leader automatically mandated that you are educated, advantaged, rich, and powerful. Which simply makes the classwarfare struggle of “poor vs rich” into a propaganda device for one group of nobles to everpower another group of nobles.

Which is what it is. It’s a struggle amongst the rich and privileged factions for dominance. Bill Clinton, the first black President, vs the Republicans, promoting institutional racism. Clinton’s white and a Democrat, part of the long and proud tradition of Democrats in keeping slaves ignorant and powerless. But did most black folks care about his skin color and history when they made and voted him their first “black” President? Not particularly. This again proves that human beings love self-deception. If you give them even a hope of winning, even if they unconsciously know it is false, they’ll take it if nothing better comes up. Obama came up and he was better to most black folks. But still, the poor and the masses at the bottom have an enormous tendency to fall into the traps of those at the top, to be used as cannon fodder against aristocrats by aristocrats, by slave owners against slave owners, by Americans against other Americans.

We went to the Mk 19 range

Wasn’t that the same grenade launcher used in Vietnam?

So, you get more of that behavior and society pays are terrible price…all in the name of “compassion”, of course.

Just as there is fake liberalism vs real liberalism, so is there fake compassion vs real compassion.

A child dependent upon a parent is not free.

A slave living in the Master’s house is not free, either. But that’s what a majority of blacks in America wish to recreate with their support of the Democrat party. How they justify this as living up to the example and heroism of people like Harriet Tubman and blacks that were killed and enslaved by the Democrat party, whites, and Amerindians, I have no idea.

Most Americans, let alone black folks, don’t know that the Cherokees and other noble savages owned slaves. That when the Americans and white people outlawed slavery after the Civil War, American Indians still kept them cause… Amerindians wanted no part of the Union. Just like the South and their Democrat leaders, coincidentally.

Working in the master’s house is a less physically killing task than working in the fields where heat exhaustion can kill and nobody will even notice for you are just property. But that kind of comfort, in relation to what could have happened, is not the key to happiness.

Frederick Douglass wanted knowledge because his owner didn’t want him to have it. That was all the reason he needed to become educated on his own time. Now a days, people can give black folks a white man’s education and if you accept it, you are now an Uncle Tom. Someone who submits to white man’s rule… by becoming as educated and knowledgeable as the white man.

Someone tell me when it ever has been true in human history that an oppressed people have refused to learn about and acquire the tools that made their oppressors dominant in the first place.

In the end, that brings up an interesting question about whether blacks today are really oppressed under such myths as institutional racism. A truly oppressed people would wish to become stronger and better, to acquire the tools, power, and knowledge of their oppressors in order to resist their oppressors and make their own place in the world.

Harriet Tubman, for all her life experiences, were able to work quite well with people like John Brown and Quaker abolitionists that provided the safehouses for the Underground Railroad. You can’t fight the oppressors unless some of your oppressors help you out. That’s a basic principle of guerrilla warfare. Thus refusing the help of some of your oppressors means… you ain’t really shackled hard enough to care. Why would any slave fighting for freedom care which political party helps him out? But now a days, people do care. Because they were made to care when they were born in the Master’s house.

Now a days, people who live well because of the sacrifices of people like Tubman and Douglass, are more hostile towards white people than Tubman ever was. This is called being spoiled, in case you didn’t know.

Tubman soon met with General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the “contrabands” in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering former slaves for a regiment of black soldiers.[105] US President Abraham Lincoln, however, was not prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states, and reprimanded Hunter for his actions.[105] Tubman condemned Lincoln’s response (and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the US), for both moral and practical reasons. “God won’t let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing,” she said.

[106]
-Wikipedia

This kind of degeneration into retardedness I am describing applies to everyone in the world. Especially Americans. Everyone has seen the rich daddy earn his wealth and then his son inherits the money with no appreciation of how to make more or what was done to create that wealth. This is what has happened to America on the macroscale.

People will never be happy, in the end, when they live on the whims and wealth of others. They must know that their life and achievements were made by their own hands, not the hands of their slave master’s or ancestors. People can have fun parties and be spoiled at the same time, but they will never have a chance at happiness until they acknowledge the debt and duty they owe to those that had gone before.

Nobody will give a slave his rights. He had to fight for them. But fighting as defined by killing slave owners was meaningless. Fighting in the Union’s forces, however, meant much more. The Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam believe they will take their freedom from the Republicans and white folks through fighting. They have forgotten that violence is never a permanent solution to political problems.

Violence and war can only be a means to an end, the means by which an American can demonstrate that he is worthy of the trust and respect of the Al Anbar Sunni tribes that once resisted American forces.

How will Black Panthers demonstrate to Republicans and Democrats that they are worthy of the additional rights they demand? By Having Jessy Jackson and Al Sharpton aid Democrats against Republicans, categorically defining the Black Panthers as being nothng but a political tool of the Democrats? I think not.

It is a total disgrace, in more ways than one, how African Americans and non-African Americans refused to see the benefits of liberation and security brought to Iraq by America. This is the American Civil War all over again, when blacks had the choice of supporting white folks they didn’t particularly like against white slave owners they really didn’t like. Now it is, “we don’t care about other people being enslaved by dictators, we just care about ourselves”. As if a population can maintain their rights, with that attitude, for long.

Slaves back in 1861 had the excuse of being ignorant and uneducated. Now a days, what is the excuse of people that they don’t know about the suffering being alleviated by American military forces? The same military forces that made the Emancipation Proclamation a reality for all slaves in the Union? That they are as ignorant of and apathetic about white man affairs as some black slaves back in the olden days? What a waste of the ancestors that bled and killed for the rights all Americans enjoy today.

Please read the bottom part of this post for how race equality can really occur

As to how all this is relevant to the pursuit of happiness, all I will say is that nobody who is locked into the enmity and envy that is the “class struggle” of victims vs oppressors, will ever be happy. No matter what we do. The first step to getting out of victimhood is to stop thinking like a victim and stop thinking of your oppressors as oppressors. A slave that keeps thinking of himself as a slave and his owner as the Master, will continue to be a slave under his master. He ain’t getting any happiness on this cycle of reincarnation.

I think that it is telling that so many so-called Christians on the “Left” define happiness in purely materialistic rather than moral terms. I think this gets to the original Rousseau-ian view of humanity that people are shaped by their environment, rather than the moral choices they make in life. So, in their view, government (the State) has a duty to provide for the materials needs of its citizens, which it can only provide by stealing from it s productive citizens (thereby rendering them slaves of the State), in order to mold its wards into “good” human beings.

If, however, “good” or “bad” people are the product of moral choices they make, then providing for their material needs only enables them to make “bad” choices by shielding them from the consequences thereof. For example, having a baby out of wedlock used to be a “bad” choice (for the mother, the child and others influenced by their example) with bad economic and social consequences. This provided a bad incentive for women to have babies out of wedlock. However, when the State intervenes to meet all the material needs of the mother and baby (what many would define as “compassion”, right HelenL?), the disincentives for bad behavior are gone and it becomes no big deal. So, you get more of that behavior and society pays are terrible price…all in the name of “compassion”, of course.

Even more important, however, is that when people depend upon the State to protect them from the consequences of their moral choices, then not by any definition can they be considered to be free. A child dependent upon a parent is not free.

Then the murderer becomes a political prisoner.

The poor become wards of the state.

Those with no health insurance, by choice, become insurgents.

The wealthy, through hard work become reviled for their hard work.

I have been both poor and wealthy in my lifetime, and I am thankful for a system that gave me that opportunity, and the one that gave my grandfather the opportunity to rise above the system by leaving his old world.

You want to buy into the system that sent people here for opportunity? Not me, I’ll take freedom to even fail every time.

Sorry for the rant folks, but this angers me.