The following quote might be useful for those of you working on the manifesto:

Never assume that you "know" human nature: "Man is always worse than most people suspect, but also generally better than most people dream." --Reinhold Niebuhr

-- Anonymous, November 13, 2000

Answers

By the way: one way to make sure that you don't put lots of spelling errors in your message is to type it in your word processor (ie Word), then copy and pste it into the message section of your posting.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2000

That's interesting... I've shown the manifesto to some other people I know and most of the problems that people have had with it have all boiled down to a fundmental disagreement with my view that given the right circumstances people would be "good". Based on the view that people are fundementally good (or even just neutral), I think the Carebear socitey would be a vast improvement, but if you take the view that people are all bad and controlled by their instinctincts then what ideal society could you come up with? Wouldn't this be about the best you could do, we should all just give up now and become Ferengi (or Americans)? If your going to write on social reform don't you kind of have to start with the assumption that people aren't evil, otherwise what's the point, why minimize the way people can screw each other if that's all we're about anyway? It's not like you could get a benevolant leader to make us all get along, their still human and evil like the rest of us, in which case why did anyone ever come up with the idea of social reform in the first place, just a really good imagination?

Isis P.S. I think I've come to the sad conclusion that I can't live without spell check, submiting this is making me nuts...

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2000