British atheist identity.

[jonb]

There is quite and interesting academic discussion on this programme from 13.57 about how non believers identify themselves.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kdyw3#play

[Baruch]

Well that would be the British version.  Here in the US it is similar ... lets go back to the 19th century, but let the Arabs play the part of the Indians and the Chinese play the part of the Africans.  But otherwise it is Dickensian and plutocratic ... producing a Les Miserable society of evil policemen and destitute masses ... working or not.  So in our culture here it is ... death to FDR/Truman/Eisenhower.  Pretty much since the election of Nixon in 1968.

Basically the managers of the pensions, don't want to pay out ... because they are criminals, like all the others in the management class.  In a criminal society ... this shouldn't be a surprise.  This is why a series of revolutions like in Europe in 1848 (which mostly failed then) should be expected.  Unfortunately the Middle Class is part of the problem ... they are managerial wanna-bees ... so really no loss if the current economy eliminates them.

[jonb]

Nobody could accuse you of not listening, but if others only listen to the part from 13.57 they are not going to have the slightest idea what on earth you are talking about.
As a reply to your response about the first half of the programme, my wife worked at quite a high level in the Lloyds insurance market in her younger days and her view is that all British pensions are basically a ponzi scheme. I often feel that that sort of a discussion is for the authorities to distance themselves from the day when the system fails.

[Baruch]

Nobody could accuse you of not listening, but if others only listen to the part from 13.57 they are not going to have the slightest idea what on earth you are talking about.
As a reply to your response about the first half of the programme, my wife worked at quite a high level in the Lloyds insurance market in her younger days and her view is that all British pensions are basically a ponzi scheme. I often feel that that sort of a discussion is for the authorities to distance themselves from the day when the system fails.

I was posting as I listened to the whole thing ... was quite nice of you to share the whole thing ... on to the rest now that I have listed to all of it ...

On the atheist/agnostic thing ... it seemed pretty typical.  The bits about class vs everything even in the atheist/agnostic part was so ... un-American.  But the idea that hard atheist is not something you want to admit to, in America, is quite true.  We have classes, we just never admit to them.  And the idea you can tell someone's class by which newspaper they read was quite alien.  We used to have two newspapers in every town, a D and an R ... but now just one, and they are all R papers.  Just as the Rs have taken over all of the radio stations.  Bottom feeders.  Only the ACLU cares about the civil rights of atheists, and they are pretty powerless ... otherwise BLM (Black Lives Matter) wouldn't have had to be organized.  The old civil rights organizations of the 60s have been coopted years ago.

On your wife's view of pensions ... that is widely believed here in conservative circles.  I wish the managerial class would just stop being in denial, put on their Freddy Kruger masks and start murdering all the old people.  Waiting for the inevitable either induces a panic attack or boredom.

Since Lloyds managed to put itself into bankruptcy in 2008 ... I can't blame your wife's skepticism.  On pensions ... personally, I regard the whole economy as a Ponzi ... more or less successful, because the larger the Ponzi, the longer you can keep it going ... and if long enough, you can play generation to generation ... the early-in folk die off and you don't have to keep paying out to them ... this helps with paying out to the newer members (which is where the Ponzi goes to die).  But Ponzis are also easier to run if you can print your own money.  Basically people would be better off with private savings rather than pensions ... even SSN.  But the government, having spent the nest egg, has no ability to return monies previously input .. so that we can reinvest our own instead.  Basically it has been taxed and spent away in an outrageous political lie, like all other politics.  My mother (who lives on SS and Medicare, a second generation recipient) never could convince her mother (a first generation recipient) that the government didn't have a big vault of money somewhere (grandmother believed in FDR) ... where the contributions of employees/employers had been steadily accumulating.  I am nearly old enough to take some money out of the system for myself ... but I know even better than my mother ... any money is fantasy money, no different than game money from Monopoly.  It isn't even a Ponzi if the money is counterfeit?  It helps if Mr Ponzi controls the police and the army.  Given our incompetent and evil leadership ... it may all end in tears soon enough.

[jonb]

Something I have felt for quite a while.
I am as you would guess , quite happy to heckle a speaker from the back of a crowd. My experience of doing this is that quite often after I have been ejected and the meeting is over, a good number of people who were at the meeting and you would expect to be allied to the speaker would say thanks to me and say things like 'that had to be said', but these people would never speak out for themselves.

I have come to the conclusion that most people will just go with the easiest path. In Britain that is to not bother with the church, in America from what I gather the easiest path is to identify as christard. Which makes me wonder if we remove from the lists all the soft people that go along with things could it be that even in America the number of hard christards and committed atheists might be about equal?

[Baruch]

Most things in society are about compliance with whatever the norm is and usually the norm isn't too pernicious  Most people just want to be average Joes and get on with their lives ... without any extra drama.  If we were fundie Muslims ... we would be calling for the execution of apostates ... and we wouldn't even know ourselves that we were wrong.  It is no different with British or American culture.  Now, us more "terrified" folks are like the guy in the Pod Persons movie ... our neighbors are all "sheeple" and we are like Cassandra telling the Trojans to burn that big wooden horse.  Things usually do go well, along the easiest path, until they don't.  Consider people lucky enough to be alive in Germany in the 1930s and had the opportunity to get out.  Very few Germans were able to stay in and fight ... they pretty much were isolated and easy to kill off.  But in the NWO ... there isn't any place on this planet to flee the regime ;-(

I am not politically active ... but I am economically active.  There are very few people willing to consider that the US might become the next Zimbabwe/Weimar.  It is both inconceivable, and causes heart palpitations to think about it ... so most don't bother.  You can show them charts going back to 1913 ... how the FR has failed like the US in Vietnam ... but as a live memory, anything more than 12 months ago is simply forgotten, even Vietnam.