World in the Satin Bag

The acronym stands for: Balancing Personal Freedom and Division of Wealth.Edelman wrote: Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term. And here is what I have to say: YES! I live in a country that is so extremist and radical it’s scary. On the one side, as Edelman points out, there are the folks who want the government to pay for things that, quite frankly, it can’t afford, in exchange for sacrificing ones rights and taxing the crap out of anyone who so much as tries to earn a decent wage in a country that is growing more and more expensive. On the other side are the folks who want complete control of the government in exchange for the huge gaps we are already experiencing between the rich and the poor. This second area is one in which personal freedom means nothing even if people want it. Why? Because corporate entities have the power.    Right now we don’t have a balance between the two. We have corporations trying to control things, and to some extent they do, and then we have the people who seem to want things that they really can’t have at this point. I’ll use healthcare as an example.    We all want it. We all want to be able to afford it, but the problem is that the government can’t afford to adopt a socialized medical program. It can’t. You can try to run your little figures all you want, but right now, we can’t afford such a program. It will bankrupt us, and at this point we need to think of better solutions. With the Iraq War still going and Afghanistan not exactly complete, though forgotten, we have to make sure our troops have the money they need to do what they have to do. No, we cannot pull out of Iraq. I’m not a crazy Republican, but I’m smart enough to realize that pulling out at this point would permanently damage what little reputation we have. Iraq is weak because of us. Can any of you live with the idea of simply walking out of a situation we created without making sure that Iraq can defend itself from extremists? If you can, then I propose that every time some innocent Iraqi dies a letter be sent to you with that person’s picture and any relevant information about his or her life so that you’ll always know that someone died due to a cowardly act of simply walking away. We can’t walk. That’s just one problem we face right now, and one that isn’t going to go away for a few years at least.    The next financial issue is social security. Baby-boomers are going to bankrupt that program so that all of us younger generations won’t have anything when we retire. Granted, you shouldn’t rely on SS for retirement, but some people need it to supplement other retirement funds. We have to fix this problem now before it can’t be fixed. That means finding new solutions that don’t involve raising taxes that can fund newer generations. An option might be a 401K type plan in which funds produced by your SS taxes are placed into considerably safe and secure stocks, i.e. low-risk companies that might lose you some money, but are very unlikely to ever just flat-out disappear. Why would this be a good idea? Well, for one, by having vast amounts of new money invested into our businesses we can expect to see our economy benefit from it, which will actually help secure your new SS funds for a much longer period of time. You’ll also be earning money just as you would in a 401K employer plan, which is good. You’re willing to take a risk there, why not with SS? If it means that more people might have even better lives in the future, so be it. That’s just one idea and there might be far better ones out there.    The point is that we can’t afford universal healthcare right now, and honestly, we shouldn’t have a fully socialized health program. What do we need? The middle ground. We need a healthcare system that ANYONE can afford so that EVERYONE can get basic medical care and emergency care and not have to worry about if they can pay the bill. This means finding ways to reduce the costs of insurance programs, reducing prescription drug costs, etc. The whole lot of it has to be reduced. We need a system that still has you pay, but not pay until you can’t afford to eat anymore. How do we do this? I don’t know. I wish I did know, but I don’t, and I don’t have any viable solutions. I don’t know enough about the medical field to hazard a logical guess. I’ve dealt with considerable bills, however, and I understand what one has to deal with when you only have one health insurance card and it can’t cover the whole cost.    That’s a little off the mark, but back to the topic at hand. Edelman is proposing that we find a middle ground where corporations can still bring in profits, as they should, and everyone still has a roof and food and is able to find work or get an education. One thing we should be doing is monitoring corporations, especially energy/fuel companies that claim shortages, but still bring

Ah, the infamous ‘religion’ thing. Edelman has a clearly atheist viewpoint on the subject of religion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and this isn’t in any way an attack on Edelman, but simply a point of explanation. His viewpoint is shared by quite a lot of people, including me to some extent. Religion is a wonderful, beautiful thing, for some, or it is a bigoted, ignorant cloud to others. Who holds the correct viewpoint is irrelevant.Having said that, Edelman presents this point on the subject of divorcing morality from religion: I don’t think anything good comes from the belief that we should refrain from murder, theft, and rape because someone wrote it down in a book five thousand years ago. Those of us who don’t believe in an all-powerful Being In The Clouds are just as capable of defining principles of morality and sticking to them — in fact, I’d argue that we’re more capable. If you want to continue to believe in God, great; but we can agree on moral principles regardless without the intervention of priests, pastors, rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, imams, or prophets. What I’m saying is that the species needs to be able to think moralistically in a way that’s inclusive of both religious and non-religious people.     This is a very difficult idea to discuss. One of the reasons why it’s difficult is because our society is built upon religious principles founded by Christianity. The solution to this is to think about religious ideals as non-religious. In the U.S., most of us hold on to the same basic ideals. Murder, rape, molestation, extortion, theft, and similar are bad. Adultery is not an acceptable behavior, even though many people, religious or not, do it. But, for non-believers there is no need to believe in God or to follow codes of conduct presented in the Bible such as going to Church on Sunday and the like.    I can’t say I necessarily agree with Edelman that non-religious folks are significantly more capable of adhering to moral laws than religious folks. Perhaps the reason this is said is that we often see and hear about religious people breaking their own ‘laws’, but are not exposed to the same treatment of non-religious folks. There aren’t any news reports stating that “the agnostic anti-believer was caught with a young boy last Tuesday”. The problem with religious people is that they often try to set rules that are unrealistic. The notion of sex-after-marriage is, socially speaking, an unrealistic desire. I certainly think this is a better option than the ones we are dealing with (i.e.: taped events, random sex, promiscuous sex, and the like). Regardless, it is unrealistic. Teenagers and adults are not going to follow this rule, or at least a lot of them won’t. If that were the case we wouldn’t ever have had to think about the issue of abortion, as there would be no pregnant teenagers. Well, that’s probably not entirely true. The number would just be drastically lower.    The most important point that Edelman makes is that discussion of morality should be all-inclusive. When it comes to moral quandaries in politics, we should have input from both the religious and non-religious side, and both sides should work together to find good solutions. That goes for any type of political discussion among all types of politicians. There is no reason why only religious people should be allowed to define moral issues and one of particular interest is on the issue of science.    Science, which I’m using since it is directly related to genre fiction, is something that must be understood before you can make policy on it. There have been many issues involving scientific discovery that have plagued those who considered themselves the makers of moral policy. At one point we had issues dealing with slavery, something which we consider now to be immoral. This became an issue of race and ethnicity and, in the U.S., the treatment of such races and ethnicities by Whites. We often consider this the White/Black issue, but it extended beyond that to Asians and Hispanics. What science has to do with these issues is that it was originally used to define race as a hierarchy, with Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom. Science was, for a while, used as a basis for determining that Blacks are sub-human, or not-quite-human. With the advancement of technology, however, this was proven to be a load of crap. We found that aside from skin color, Blacks are not that different from Whites, and neither or Asians or Hispanics. In fact, we’re all basically the same, with the exception of minor genetic differences that vary from person to person. Science found out that there really aren’t any physiological differences that are consistent, even in skin color. But for a time the law held firm that Blacks weren’t the same and should be treated differently, despite the grand letter of science flooded much of the White world and began to gain acceptance. We all know the result and while racism still exists, it is not in a form that is outwardly condoned by the government. Jim Crowe is gone.    Now, we are plagued by issues of stem cell research, the ethics of cloning, and even concerns over nano-technology and bio-manipulation. I’ll avoid the stem cell issue as that is a particular hot one, and move to the others. Many considered cloning to be mankind’s attempts to ‘play God’, and so it was determined that cloning technology should be stifled. We can clone some little cells and the like, but we’re not allowed to go around creating Dolly over and over, or any other such thing. The fact is that cloning is actually a part of our society, just not in a form you might consider to be ‘cloning’.    However, many of the moral quandaries surrounding technology like cloning, and even bio-manipulation, are influenced by religious ideologies, and rarely, if ever, concerned with the reality of the situation. Cloning should be

To start this off I want to link to Edelman’s original post. He presented five moral challenges to humanity: sustainable energy, divorcing morality from religion, balancing personal freedom with division of wealth, drop nuclear options, and getting serious about global human rights. I’ve been thinking about these for a while, some more than others, and so I’m going to write a series of posts addressing the issues.First up is sustainable energy. Edelman wrote the following: As I’ve written before on my post about Global Warming Skepticism, I don’t particularly care about the Earth, except inasmuch as we can’t live without it. Right now, letting the Earth die means letting us die. So it’s imperative for the species’ survival that we either a) learn to conserve the planet’s natural resources, b) figure out how to keep the species going using renewable resources, or c) invest heavily in survivalism science that will let us live without them. (Or, more likely, a combination of a, b, and c.) Personally, I’d be happy living in a funky sci-fi dome city, but making something like that sustainable is much harder than it looks. Ergo: investing heavily in alternative energy is a moral imperative.     Now, the issue here isn’t whether global warming is real, but that we’re going to eventually run out of burnable fuel sources like oil, coal, etc. I think no matter how we look at it, option ‘a’ isn’t viable. We will run out of oil. We can’t expect to conserve it when the world is eating it up as fast as it is. How do you conserve a non-renewable fuel source? So our options are pretty much ‘b’ and ‘c’.    So what are our options for ‘b’? Well, renewable implies that we don’t really have to think about it. It’s a source that will be there even if we blow ourselves up. The sun and wind are two constants that we know we can use.I mentioned a link to the maglev wind turbine, which has the potential to really improve our energy efficiency. A couple hundred of them taking the space of the big windmill types in the California hills could easily power the entire state and a couple of other states too. The only problem with wind is that it is a source that isn’t 100% reliable. The wind is a constant. It will always exist, but it doesn’t blow the same every day, and sometimes it doesn’t blow at all. The only thing we can rely on is that it ‘will’ blow at some point. However, from what I understand the maglev turbine isn’t exceedingly expensive and if we build them all over the country in places where we already have the big windmills, we are looking at a lot of energy.Perhaps an option with such turbines is to build extras and use large generator facilities, namely the facilities we already have in place for our current power sources, to build up surplus energy supplies that can be used when wind power isn’t giving us what we need.    Solar energy, however, is a super constant. The sun doesn’t stop shining. The only thing that keeps us from getting the most from it are the clouds and night. But the great thing about solar energy is that we don’t need to have ground based solar facilities. In the future we could have large space-based facilities and use technology we already have to beam energy down. Yes, we can actually beam electricity (as a laser or as microwaves). It’s been done and in a decade such technology could be perfected. But again, we can use generators to store excess energy produced by ground based facilities. There are already plans being proposed to build solar facilities in California and other states, and I linked in a previous post to a plan in North Africa. A facility covering one square mile could power the entire U.S., at least for electric needs.    But solar doesn’t end there. The solutions for solar are nearly endless. Remember, the only time that solar energy doesn’t work is when it’s dark. You can still get energy in an overcast sky, just not as much. Look at the average scientific calculator, almost all of which use a small solar strip, and you’ll be able to see how effective solar energy is, even when the day isn’t bright and sunny. The greatest solution to energy needs is to remove all business policies that don’t allow people to put solar panels on their houses. Anyone who lives in California will no doubt be aware how difficult it is just to put panels on your home. You can’t just put them up and plug in. You have to pay the power company off first, since they’ll likely lose you as a customer. If we get rid of these sorts of policies and make it easier for people to put panels on their houses we’re looking at energy independence. Building facilities in various locations would also do wonders. Household solar panels are actually a lot cheaper than they used to be. We can now produce them for around 30 cents USD per watt.    A good solution, then is to combine both. If we were to place maglev turbines and power facilities across the country in places where we already have alternate energy sources in effect and also make it easier for people to put panels on their homes, then we can expect to see our energy problems going away. We won’t need nuclear facilities anymore and we won’t need any other facilities that have the potential to damage the environment (though nuclear facilities do have some environmental benefits). Add in large generator facilities in places where old power facilities existed and we’ll have loads of surplus energy that could, in theory, be sold to other countries or simply saved in case of an emergency. (Other methods for energy are using cold air currents and even energy produced by the ocean currents)Fuel for cars is the next issue.