Solutions

Time to piss some more people off...

Short-Term

1. Shorten the work day to four hours.

2. Provide a public alternative to social media websites.

3. Legally abolish the practice of inheriting fortunes.

4. Shut down all credit card companies and imprison their stockholders.

5. Nationalize all corporations.

6. Legally abolish planned obsolescence.

7. Increase the number of teachers per classroom and decrease the number of students.

8. Eliminate the boss/partiality dichotomy in parenting and promote real friendship, trust, and honesty between parents and children.

9. Criminalize alcohol consumption and possession.

10. Abolish the death penalty.

11. Legalize assisted suicide.

12. Criminalize the production of meat.

13. Promote automation in the industrial and service sectors of the economy.

14. Criminalize all forms of gun possession.

15. Criminalize pregnancy.

16. Teach how to think in the classroom before presenting any individual item as a fact; discourage memorization and tradition.

17. Eliminate all legal age requirements for everything and encourage individual demonstrations of skill and responsibility.

18. Encourage corporate collusion using an "open source" method.

19. Encourage the free downloading of any kind of media.

20. Shut down frivolous businesses (jewelry chains, professional sports franchises, record companies) until we can confirm both that no businesses can utilize child labor for acquiring their raw materials and that there are no longer major threats to sentience warranting immediate attention and resources.

21. Legally abolish the lottery.

22. Criminalize all forms of gambling.

23. Reform public broadcasting in all realms of media such that there is greater public awareness of its presence; make critical thinking entertaining in an effort to gradually phase out the currently prevailing forms of entertainment in media.

24. Scorn those who promote indefinite growth -- whether of population, economic output, or irrelevant information about our personal lives.


Long-Term

1. Make everyone on Earth a member of the government.

2. Allow ideas to rule our lives, regardless of who their originators are.

3. Do away with Daylight Saving Time and time zones.

4. Eliminate all languages except one.

5. Institute peer review by unaffiliated parties in all empirical matters.

6. Replace corporate advertisements with individual advertisements of new ideas and innovations.

7. Abolish the monetary system and all methods of trading and bartering; eliminate private property and the general conception of ownership of anything, whether intellectual property, ideas, or material goods.

8. Eliminate the concepts of the school day and free time in favor of an augmented concept of nurture; allow only certified, temporary personnel within youth centers to raise children -- never their genetic parents; eliminate the distinction between life lessons and academic lessons in favor of a unified model for raising children under a singular mode with uniform methods.

9. Eliminate the dichotomy of socializing and the news media in favor of fully transparent, technologically facilitated communication.

10. Design architecture to accommodate moods in innovative ways; stray from modern, square-shaped designs wherever possible.

11. Engineer a highway system for goods and raw materials such that said materials arrive at a given location on demand at the press of a button, thus encouraging individual creativity as a replacement for corporate appropriation.

12. Penalize extended privacy.

13. Eliminate all forms of extrinsic motivation.

14. Instead of retroactively treating symptoms of problems one-on-one indefinitely, address each emergent problem at its source.

15. Painlessly terminate as many consenting conscious agents as possible while enrolling the rest into full-time simulations of reality aimed at reducing as much suffering as possible.

16. De-emphasize individuality and personal identity; make all efforts to improve Earth about moments, experiences, and sensations rather than persons, rights, etc.

17. Remove the presence of finite resources from society altogether; promote cyclic alternatives.

Re: The Pragmatic Paradox

http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Am-Stuck-Pondering-Philosophical-Pragmatism/1282372?edited=t

Problem 1: Assuming that conceptual systems such as "pragmatism" exist anywhere beyond their places as constructs of cognition convenience in the mind

There is no such thing as pragmatism beyond the meme; it's just a summation word used to define a number of philosophical tenets, and has no innate physical basis. Therefore, it could be stated that pragmatism -- or any ism, for that matter -- is similar to, for example, government-imposed age requirements in that both are artificially constructed for convenience, but neither can be directly deduced by the physical properties of the universe. Put simply, there is nothing preventing us from inventing a new ism similar in scope and definition to pragmatism, but with one additional or one less tenet; ultimately, it's just a word, while its individual constituents are what we should instead be discussing. Even if "pragmatism" weren't useful, again, it's just a word for a handful of concepts, so if any one of those concepts were independently functional, it would be ideal to implement it, regardless of the flaws inherent in "pragmatism" itself.

Problem 2: Assuming that pragmatism has no use

It sounds like your professor is confusing the utility of pragmatism with the lack of useful ideas in his life. Just because you're incapable of inventing ideas of practical merit doesn't mean that the ideal itself is impractical; everything around us has been implemented as a result of its practical value. "I don't see any use in thinking up useful ideas" is a non-sequitur, and even contradictory, as you've pointed out. More likely, the intended meaning was, "I don't see any use in any of MY ideas, so looking for useful ideas must not be useful." Is this more accurate interpretation any more logical? No. In fact, it's so stupid that it actually succeeds in reducing philosophy to its semantics component, all for the glory of some adorable platitude and a bit of ego sex. Tell him to grow up!