Anti-capitalist riposte

This is a response to Matthew Buckley's letter, "Defending the WTO" [Letters, July 31]. No, WTO activists are not "just kids who for racial reasons do not fit in in North America." They represent people who do not want entire populations to be subservient to big corporate bodies running governments. They seek true social change.

Buckley's comment about how it gets "kind of boring watching immigrants work through their inferiority complexes with all their narrow-minded ranting and raving about the WTO being the root of all evil" is in itself racist, xenophobic and narrow-minded.

Here's a truly constructive, attainable alternative to globalization: a global cybernated resource-based economy, one that is based on resources, not money. (More information can be found at www.thevenusproject.com.)

"What is wrong with consumer culture?" Buckley asks. There are plenty of things wrong. Capitalism exploits and wastes our lives by making us "work" unnecessarily at places we hate, doing useless "jobs" that waste our lives, our creativity and intellects in the stupid pursuit of money, thus ultimately exploiting us. Capitalism also assumes that resources are infinite, and that people can go on forever cutting down forests, contaminating the air by driving polluting vehicles, polluting the water and slaughtering animals with no ill effects on the planet.

This is clearly false. The studies of Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows, founders of the Venus Project, have also shown that many of the dysfunctional behaviours exhibited by human beings are directly caused by the inhumane, ignorant, selfish, unfair, elitist, capitalist system in which we live. Capitalism is also self-defeating, with the advent of automation and new technologies displacing countless people out of their jobs.

There is no longer any reason to withhold goods and services for money. This is an idea that is completely irrelevant and insane in a technological era in which all goods, homes and services could be provided to all at no cost through the implementation of a global cybernated resource-based economy.

So I ask Matthew Buckley and all of you: which world would you rather live in? The crumbling soon-to-be wasteland of today's world? Or would you rather live in a resource-based world economy, where goods, shelter and services would be available to all at no cost; where the maximum human potential could be realized in every human being; and where the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt, environmental degradation and unnecessary human suffering would be viewed not only as avoidable, but totally unacceptable? If you choose the latter, check out the Venus Project.

» Chris Morris

More relationship advice

How dare Melanie Kerridge, the "sad, single mom" suggest that staying in an unhappy relationship for the sake of our children is appropriate [Letters, July 24]? How dare she suggest that settling for less than happiness would help the development of our next generation? What are we as parents, if not setters of example to our kids?

As a 32-year-old male who was the product of unhappy parents who stayed together, I can tell you firsthand that parents who stay together just for the children set up an emotionally hopeless dynamic for their kids, teaching them by default that the most we can expect in life is to be in an unhappy relationship. What kind of message is that to give to our children? I would never stay in a relationship that turns sour, even if I think in the long term it might work out.

I would suggest that it is Melanie Kerridge who is naïve, not Rebecca White. Ms. Kerridge seems to believe that counselling is the solution for every problem in a relationship. Maybe for some, but for most people separating is the only answer in order to have other productive relationships to learn from and to have fun in.

We all need to have several relationships in our lives before we really know our capabilities and ourselves and are ready to be with our true love and to have children. These relationships teach us how to love ourselves, to respect others, to understand the human condition, and to get over the myth of the power-money-sex dynamic. Unfortunately, for some of us, we meet our true love and get married before we are truly ready to be with them, before we have truly grown up, before we have learned.

How can anyone honestly expect their true love to stay with them if they believe in myths like compromising their own goals by staying in a situation that isn't working actually teaches children something positive? What's important for children is that both parents stay in the life of the child to an adequate degree, not necessarily in the life of the other parent.

Parents do not have to be together for children to know that they are loved, and for themselves to know that there is more to life than going to a dull job everyday and having kids. Ideally, if parents can remain friends while separated it would be better for everyone. But sometimes the level of neediness and anger makes this impossible.

» Tim Manning

Resto too bizarro

Your recent food columnists, Alice and Yanka, are an embarrassment to your newspaper and an insult to your readership and the city's food industry. Please poison their next meal.

» Robert Gerlich

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