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Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that everyone, everywhere, has dirty clothes in a pile.

Do you keep your clean clothes in your hamper too?

It's not actually a pile, it's a bin almost completely covered by its contents. I keep my clean clothes on hangers in the closet, and I keep my undies and accessories in that large wicker box.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Building skateparks and arboretums and hosting athletic events won't do anything as long as people can still choose tv, video games, alcohol, drugs or whatever. It's already done. We already do a lot of those things. The barrier is lifestyle.

Brawlsack

Taking an extended hiatus from gaming

Agreed on all fronts, though what I find most refreshing is your Social Security proposal. (As a corollary, what I find least refreshing is that it or something like it has yet to be brought clearly enough to legislative attention. One would think that the austerity-minded would jump at the chance to champion their "Protestant" ethos.)


Solid in theory as it relates to the nuclear family, but I'm interested to see how this would play out with adopting or foster parents. More importantly, how would it play out with adopting or foster parents who take in adolescents? The technical argument could very well fork: would adoptees' success or lack thereof, particularly where family-independent grants and scholarships come into effect, still reflect upon their new guardians' potentially abysmal parenting, or would it be considered a product of prior parentage? (Alliteration aside.)

I'm certain that the problem, assuming that your moral initiative exists in this society, would be weeded out within a handful of generations—if that—but it's a sticky situation nonetheless. If turned into a winner-take-all system, the incentive program could turn adoption into an industry. (...as if it isn't already.) If kept to those who raised the child longest—and when, specifically—then you'd see opportunists forfeiting their rights to the child and yet, given implementation of the wrong policy, nevertheless laying claim to a tax credit that may or may not legally still belong to them.

It's all very hypothetical; then again, we are dealing with hypotheticals. I'd just like to know how you'd deal with it: would it be a matter of cutting/minimizing benefits for adopters/foster parents (thus disincentivizing the process altogether, to some) or establishing boundaries for a piecemeal solution? I'm sure this is an argument to be made in favor of the status quo, no? (Not that the status quo is acceptable; I try only to flesh out the idea.)

It may sound facile, but I think the problems you are describing are so minor and so narrow in scope they aren't a serious concern. The proper legal and procedural mechanisms would materialize soon enough. And the current adoption system is so incredibly bad that I can't believe any alternative could possibly be worse.

Broadly speaking, I don't believe in adoption. My experience is that adoption fails more often than it succeeds, and that too many parents adopt because they are too emotionally troubled to have children themselves or get by without. Too many adoptive parents see the adopted child as a means to their own vanity and self-gratification - as many natural parents do - but unlike them, they feel unbound by social and natural pressure to not "take it back to the store" or just give up.

I firmly believe children need stability more than anything else - including love - and that adoption is therefore more dangerous to child welfare than raising kids in orphanages. I believe there needs to be more state-run childcare.

I see a lot of privately run creches; I find them very disturbing. One thing I saw the other day was a chain-gang for toddlers. I've spent two months in jail, and it's literally the exact same technique used by prisons. You cuff the kids to a chain, stagger their positions then frog-march them around, with one guard at the front and one at the back. Another thing I've seen is super-stretch strollers with two columns of seats facing inwards, so that the kids can't see where they are being taken and are therefore easier to control. These kids are driven around by disaffected young women who act like they're herding cattle. Then we wonder why these kids are only controllable when they're vegetating in front of the tube or jacked up on meds.

What I see there is that society simply needs to take child rearing more seriously. These ways of handlnig kids, like livestock, grows out of a basic perception of them as simply inconveniences that need to be shut up, hence the use of what are very much by design suppression techniques. Restoring traditional values via renewed faith is one solution; changing the economy so people no longer see children as merely an economic burden is another.

I think another part of the problem is the lack of professionalism in the field. These young women don't take their jobs or what they do seriously, for them it's just $10/hr, and they don't have any connection to the kids or parents. Of course, I've dealt with enough nonprofit scumbags and read/watched Oliver Twist enough to know how ugly professionalized childcare can get. I think the answer is local government: oversight of creches is something a local government can do well. And I think fully funding the system based on a rational budget out of the public purse will remove the tendency of nonprofits to develop "cash clogs" created by "shakedown funding".



I simply don't agree. The fact is, people in well-adjusted settings don't succumb to those temptations. The truth is that none of those are really as fulfilling as the alternatives. Basically everyone really and truly would rather go outside and do stuff rather than do drugs and alcohol.

That is the key - I question your contention that it has "already been done".

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

As you said, though, what's missing is consistency. If your Social Security views were to materialize as public policy initiatives, what would come of them upon legislative review? Ideals must be tempered with some degree of pragmatism—otherwise, they're fluff. I can virtually guarantee that if this solution were proposed, the proper legal and procedural mechanisms would not be apparent to lawmakers and the public at present. It would be bogged down into oblivion and discarded in favor of the aforementioned status quo. Thus, no change.

(Mind you, a far simpler transition to this (i.e. your) way of thinking would come alongside bottom-up reform of American education. But that would take, realistically, a generation, and perhaps another generation to become concrete. Gradual, yes, but equally susceptible to reactionaries and reversal.)

I'd like to think this is somewhat relevant, and if it isn't, it's at least interesting:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/1 ... -to-person

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

The article is disingenuous. What it is actually describing is Orwellianism. The goal of the article is to make a point of doing the same thing that was an unintended result of welfare, which is to diffuse class conflict by tearing apart the social fabric and practicing divide-and-conquer tactics against an atomized society.

That is what they really mean by "rioting is a transmissible disease". They don't actually want to change people or society, they want to remove all means by which people can share ideas outside state control, with the ultimate goal of enforcing totalitarian thought control over every individual citizen.

I recently read a book called People's China that described the exact same process: send small cadres of political activists to troubled regions, break the population up into small focus groups each directed by a cadre member, who then pedantically blames their problems on vaguely defined malcontents, and leverages social pressure and ideological circular arguments against anyone who instead blames the prevailing leadership.

Feminists and other radical left-wing political activists do it too - I remember observing the exact same methodology during my freshman year at SFSU when a big convention was called over an alleged hate crime (revealed to have been perpetrated by the victims themselves the day before the convention, which then proceeded as planned, blaming the "callous response" to the incident). The great irony is, watching right-wing media spitting vitriol about these people wouldn't tell you half as much about what's really going on or why it is evil as reading an old book from another era...

Following this analogy, or the world of 1984, if you like, the result is that you wind up with a strung-out patient, increasingly reliant on the pallatives that will sooner or later suffer systemic and irrecoverable collapse.

We saw that after the fall of the USSR. The Soviets are gone, but the big problem they left behind is not poverty, pollution, or the lack of markets, but the utter chaos of a society atomized by design for the purpose of establishing the Communist Party as the only source of ideas or authority. (I read a very interesting book written about this, actually written in the 1980s, before the fall was even foreseen, but the title escapes me atm and the book is in a box back in Sacramento)

This approach, if implemented, would be the same thing. Bullying and harassing individual citizens, rule by terror, that would solve none of society's problems and leave behind total chaos when inevitably the system craps out.

All free market economies inevitably degenerate into totalitarianism. The winners become fewer and fewer, the losers more and more numerous, the wealthy have to tighten their grip to hold onto the status quo. Regressivism - ever-narrowing social enfranchisement - in action.

Right-wing pundits describe Hitler as a product of "socialism" or "liberalism", but what they choose not to call attention to, is the fact that Hitler came to power because, and only because, he was funded by wealthy interests who had gotten fat off the liquidation of assets to pay Germany's military debt and indemnity from the Great War. (An excellent book, The Arms of Krupp, describe how the machinations of defense contractors had caused the war in the first place).

The rich thought they could use Hitler's totalitarian ideology to blame unpopular minorities and poor and/or sick people for all the nation's problems, so they could hold onto their assets and prevent Germany from turning into the prosperous socialist democracy it ultimately became.

Of course, it didn't work out quite how they wanted. And even if the Germans had won WW2, history would have played out almost exactly the same as it did when they lost (for reasons I described in detail in another thread). The rich had lost the game even before they sat down to play. History always has the last word.

(This is not a Godwin because the comparison is completely relevant. And if you do not believe me, Google it.)

No - the only way forward is progressivism. This country can only be fixed when more people are stakeholders in society.

(also: you need to play SMAC. no, really, you do. it WILL change you)

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.