NP PRC-related

[Doug Millison]

Actually, profiting from organ sales in the world today is capitalist
behavior, made possible by the capitalist system that governs the world
economy and virtually all national economies (with the possible exception of
North Korea, and in its external trade arrangements even N. Korea operates
within a capitalist system).

It's true that trade and commerce go back to the earliest beginnings of
history(commercial records being the first written records), but capitalism
doesn't, it's a later development that was, in fact, spread throughout the
world by the Europeans who devised this system.

Comparing national atrocities is going down the slippery slope; the Western
powers, U.S. included, hardly have the moral high ground in this regard, and
only a media propaganda machine as powerful (if not more so) than anything
Orwell imagined lets U.S. residents feel smug and complacent and better than
those terrible people in those horrible places somewhere else -- I don't
feel particularly comfortable in a society that lets homeless people die in
the streets and lets young children suffer because of a lack of nutrition,
shelter, medical care, etc., right in front of our eyes.  The markets for
those human organs are primarily in the U.S. and Western Europe, after all,
where people are quite happy to use money and privilege to profit from the
suffering of less fortunate people far away (cf. Pynchon's vision of the
colonial far away from the white-domed capitols of the Metropole). One of
the things I especially like about Pynchon is the way he cuts through that
sort of argument (dodo vs Nazi genocide of the Jews, capitalist v.
communist) and blames the systems we erect to manage human affairs -- the
market system of capitalism being one of those systems. He makes very clear
in GR that markets cross national boundaries along with the War that
generates profits to fuel the markets. 

I stand by my earlier statement:  Greed and exploitation obey no boundaries,
as long as the political, economic, and social systems we erect use greed
and exploitation to motivate and manage the way people behave. The
qualification calbert wonders about is necessary, because there are other
ways to motivate and manage behavior --  love, trust, family and community
bonds, spiritual values. (They can work very well, and have done so at times
in the past, until some greedy, exploitative mofo comes along and spoils
it.) The system we live in blinds us to these possibilities, although they
never go away entirely; Pynchon shows us in his fiction rare moments when
people manage to break through and treat each other decently, despite their
enslavement to the system.

-Doug

 calbert:
[snip]