Wiki mentions his left-wing anarchic persuasion. I admit I've only read "Treasure of the Sierra Madre", but I honestly can't see any political taint to his work. Sure, it highlights the evils of raw capitalism, but, outside of the anarcho-capitalists, I don't think you'll find much argument t here. It's a very fine novel, and has a lot to say about the human condition.
Just to knit pick a bit, if you were to dig deep into capitalism or socialism or anarchism, you would see those are explorations of the human condition. Politics then is drama woven around that. Maybe I'm being overly poetic. My point is that those concepts and phenomena that are sometimes so hotly debated are not somehow inherently adverserial or tainting, for the lack of a better word. There's no such thing as a dangerous idea, only a dangerous reaction. If a man owns up to every reaction, nothing imaginary has power over him.
You're right. I always presumed that nitpicking refers to picking at loose threads in something that is knit (as in something you can't help not doing). Apparently, nitpicking refers to picking nits off someone; nits as in flea eggs.
The greatest irony is they're just another throwback to Platonic thinking, and completely---I mean truly---worthless in practical application (i.e real life, vs. academic theory).
People organize themselves in "capitalistic," "socialistic," and even "anarchistic" manners depending on the context, and level of scale (informal, local, global, etc.); many times even pushing one way, then the other; and finally ending with a mix that would be foolish to arbitrarily try and separate, much less "categorize" (what has that ever achieved, but some wishy-washy "more accurate communication?").
Politics is basically the human drama over power, in its rawest form. Everything else is a derivative of this drama.
An interesting aside: the "every programmer thinks every problem can be solved with more tech" extends to other areas, viz. economics, "political science"/geopolitics, etc.
All problems are people problems; and most people problems are power problems (which themselves are super-ordinate to ego problems).
Platonic thinking is a new term to me. Seems to be summed up by "tell me how it is and I will tell you why".
I think people problems, to an extent, have to do with what we identify with. Am I a male, a national, a church member, a political partisan, a human, an animal, a piece of life, a body, a mind, etc.? All those identifications are fine if you can switch between them. Problems start when you're stuck with one, even if it's not useful anymore. It's that loss of freedom or flexibility that fascinates and perplexes me.
There are a shocking number of people that think raw capitalism is just and good and anything bad can be explained by regulation. Especially in North America.
The Overton window has moved so far to the right that even criticising that is considered "left wing".
