Repubs 0, Demos 0--EVERYBODY gets a big fat zero...
Fell Swoop
also call for children being taken away from their parents and placed in
"group homes."
V-"Which, of course, are waaay better than orphanages."-X
It's coming, really (YAY!): The World Wide Web Jack Chick Archive!
Send comments/contributions to v...@teleport.com
Hi, Canter & Siegel !
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--The Flaming Carrot
Fell Swoop
>On 11 Jan 1995, Alex Darke (as Stacie Brown) wrote:
>> I grew up in group homes from the time I was 9 until I was almost 16.
>>
>> They taught me that this world is about dog eat dog and that if you see
>> someone you must DESTROY them before they destroy you. They taught me
>> that the value of a human life is nothing more than what the governemtn
>> is wiling to pay for it. They taught me that in the end nothing matters
>> but who has the power over you and that unless you can eliminate them,
>> they will elliminate you.
>That explains Gingrich's fondness for them. They sound like an ideal
>environment for the budding demagogue.
You're a little mixed up, Geenius--the "group homes" are part of the Democrats
welfare reform package, which was the original point of my post.
Of course, we're not going to be hearing about that for the next three months,
or see a "Murphy Brown" episode hurriedly made about it, the way we have with
the Republican plan.
Repubs want "orphanages."
"We're Milk and Cheese! We aim to please! (PTOO!)"
Jennifer Basil
: And so it comes out, in hearings today, that the Democratic welfare reforms
: "group homes."
: V-"Which, of course, are waaay better than orphanages."-X
Just goes to show you....everyone is out of touch with reality on
capital hill. *shakes head*
Jenny, gearing up to work on the next election (I've missed the
last two, so I feel like I have no one to blame but meself if
I'm unhappy.)
--
Jennifer Basil (ba...@bio.bu.edu) Has angst, will travel.
"Gas smells awful;
nooses give;
guns aren't lawful;
You might as well live."
....Dorothy Parker
Jennifer Basil
: Fell Swoop (v...@teleport.com) wrote:
: : In article <3f1hve$j...@dunix.drake.edu> sjb...@dunix.drake.edu (Stacie Brown) writes:
: : >I just don't know how in the hell to make people understnad how
: : >dangerous those places ARE for children.
: : And now he exacts his terrible revenge on poor little news groups full of
: : ghost story lovers...
: Ok...please someone, please correct me if I've missed something, which
: I hope I have..
apparently I have missed something...either way, still seemed kinda
insensitive.
sorry for the intensity of the flamage...still think it's not
something to joke about, tho.
welcome to jenny's icky irish temper!
Jenny
: --
Jennifer Basil
: : : And now he exacts his terrible revenge on poor little news groups full of
: : : ghost story lovers...
: : : (Heh.)
: : that was an inadvertant troll that made me famous...read the faq...:)
: : Alex
: Now I feel really bad that I was joking around in a thread about
: something that I care about.
: Jenny...you have probably read the email I sent you explaining all of
: this.
Yeah, I feel like a bit of a loser, but hey. Arg...I don't even
comprehend what half the messages mean in the only newsgroup I
read anymore! *sigh* Eitherway, the tone of the message sounded
jokey, and after reading your post on group homes I was amazed
and stunned anyone could joke at *all*. All *I* could do was stare
silently at the screen and try to breathe.
Once again. sorry for the intensity of the flamage. But, I think
Alex's post is a pretty strong argument against institutionalizing
children whether you call it an orphanage or a group home. I only wish
the dolts on capital hill would stop looking at 1930's movies and start
talking to people who really know.
Can I beam off, please?
Carl Beaudry
> And so it comes out, in hearings today, that the Democratic welfare reforms
> also call for children being taken away from their parents and placed in
> "group homes."
Don't blame Congress for this one.
With *overwhelming* (75% or better) majorities of Americans telling
pollsters that we've got to spend less on welfare and with the media
pandering to disinformed public bigotry by running apocryphal pieces like
the food stamp fraud story on ABC last night, is it any wonder that
Congress is responding to the groundswell of public backlash?
And lets not forget the voices of reaction that have been trumpeting the
"cut welfare" rhetoric right *here* on a.s.g.x.. All Congress is doing is
giving the voters what they are *urgently* demanding and it is *not*
reasonable to expect that an elected leader will defy huge majorities in
favor of such hateful idiocy. (Although Mario Cuomo did.)
Until voters learn some math and pay close enough attention to government
to understand the difference between entitlement spending and welfare
spending, then those with the least political protection--poor children
and their parents--will consistently get reamed by a tragically
*dis*informed political system. And we'll all see the consequences
immediately in infant and child mortality and later on in social decay and
regionalized increases in violent crime.
Just like the fallout from the cuts of the early 1980s which were enacted
amid identical rhetoric about personal responsibility, welfare queens and
wasteful excess in antipoverty programs, we're about to make the same
mistake yet again. Someday people may finally recognize that those are
calculated and manipulative lies told by people who know better and which
are aimed to seduce the middle class into a Faustian bargain with the
interests of the overprivleged.
And anyone who voted Republican this last time around is to blame for
these idiot-cretin welfare-reform proposals from both sides of the aisle.
The message of 'Contract with America' was received by *both* parties. You
cannot 'throw the bums out' in a vaccuum.
We need *more* welfare spending not less. And the only methods that have
ever mitigated the concentration of wealth in a democratic state have been
violence and taxation. You can take your pick between the two.
--Carl (liberal with an earned right to be disgusted)
Douglas Lathrop
>Alex
>(Some mistakes you can never take back...but I'm in the faq!)
What faq? You mean we actually have a faq now?
D O U G L A S P. L A T H R O P
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASGX Poster Child, Dionysus Emeritus, Monster Truck Neutopia Spokes Person
Visit Stately PAPER CUT MANOR! http://www.primenet.com/~lathrop/index.html
Fell Swoop
>Fell Swoop (v...@teleport.com) wrote:
>: In article <3f1hve$j...@dunix.drake.edu> sjb...@dunix.drake.edu (Stacie Brown) writes:
>: >I just don't know how in the hell to make people understnad how
>: >dangerous those places ARE for children.
>: And now he exacts his terrible revenge on poor little news groups full of
>: ghost story lovers...
>Ok...please someone, please correct me if I've missed something, which
>I hope I have..
>Is it just my interpretation, or are you making light of the awful
>experiences of the ONLY person on this thread who really has any
>real knowledge about what group homes/orphanages are like?
It's just your interpretation...
>His LIFE is a 'ghost story'? I don't give a flyin' hoot if it's
>a 'group home' and that's a *Democrat* word. He's making a valid
>point based on information no one else here can possibly have, and
>you respond with this crap? What is *wrong* with you?! This is
>hardly hearsay, and it's hardly political...it's his *life*.
Oh, Jenny...
>I don't think he has some political agenda here. I don't think he
>cares WHO thought the group home was a good plan. I don't think he
>cares whether you call it a group home or an orphanage. I don't
>think he cares whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. I think
>he thinks institutionalizing children in any form is a bad plan, and
>I think he knows 100 fold more than we could ever imagine.
Oh me, oh my...
>Once again, I *really* hope I missed some inside joke here. Because
>the filter you read his post through seems to have negated the only
>*first hand facts* we have here. You groan when you don't get the
>facts on one thread and then laugh when you are handed a lifetime
>full of facts on another.
You missed a BIG inside joke between myself and Mr. Darke. You can get
something of a hold on it by reading the alt.folklore.ghost-stories FAQ, or my
recent parody of it on r.a.g-s, which may still be at your site if you hurry...
>I'm stunned.
You're probably more stunned now...
>: (Heh.)
>^^^^^^^^^
>Neat. Really neat.
Hmph.
Officially beginning in the wee hours of January 12th:
The World Wide Web Jack Chick Archive!
http://www.teleport.com/~vx/jackhome.html
Timothy Burke
bea...@cc.swarthmore.edu (Carl Beaudry) wrote:
All true...but there's still more to it than this, I think. The
orphanages/group homes proposals are not in fact cheaper--they represent
MORE spending on welfare if actually implemented, which I doubt they will
be. I'd expect more likely that the incredibly puny amount of federal
dollars now going to those programs typically lumped into "welfare", like
AFDC, will simply be cut.
So why is the orphanage proposal such hot stuff all of the sudden? Why is
either party offering it, even if they never mean to follow through on it?
I think it's the next logical ideological step in the public demonization
of that mythical creature, the lazy welfare recipient, who is also
significantly envisioned in political discourse as female and black. What
is this next step? Well, since everyone's got a big political hard-on for
cutting benefits, you can't score demagogic points any more by simply
calling for more cuts.
The only way to sustain the whole ritual is to subject imaginary "welfare
classes" to actual punishment...the orphanages proposal is offered up as
part of the overall *carceral* vision touching so many other
institutions...we will not only remove people from what Republi-crats and
Limboheads fantasize is the awesome generosity and largesse of the federal
government, we will remove them from public visiblity, lock them away from
decent God-fearing Americans in "homes".
If anyone doubts this, take a look at Gertrude Himmelfarb's weird
delusional op-ed piece in the NY Times last week, the gist of which was
"Hey, Victorian Britain was a pretty cool place after all, and a great
model for the contemporary U.S.".
Douglas Lathrop
>Once again. sorry for the intensity of the flamage. But, I think
>Alex's post is a pretty strong argument against institutionalizing
>children whether you call it an orphanage or a group home. I only wish
>the dolts on capital hill would stop looking at 1930's movies and start
>talking to people who really know.
I've talked to a number of Gimps who grew up during the good old days when
disabled children were routinely institutionalized (roughly the 1920s through
the early 1960s), and Alex's post would have been all too familiar to them.
There's just something about warehousing human beings that rots the soul - it
brutalizes those being warehousing, while those doing the warewhousing either
become burned-out and cynical or corrupted by the power they have over these
other human beings who are at their mercy.
Maybe one of these days the congressional copy of _Boys Town_ will break and
they'll read Dickens or _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ instead, or listen
to people like Alex. And maybe one day monkeys will fly out of my butt.
Carl Beaudry
> The only way to sustain the whole ritual is to subject imaginary "welfare
> classes" to actual punishment...the orphanages proposal is offered up as
> part of the overall *carceral* vision touching so many other
> institutions...we will not only remove people from what Republi-crats and
> Limboheads fantasize is the awesome generosity and largesse of the federal
> government, we will remove them from public visiblity, lock them away from
> decent God-fearing Americans in "homes".
>
> If anyone doubts this, take a look at Gertrude Himmelfarb's weird
> delusional op-ed piece in the NY Times last week, the gist of which was
> "Hey, Victorian Britain was a pretty cool place after all, and a great
> model for the contemporary U.S.".
Saw it. She's been ranting like that about Victorians for years. She's as
close to an academic loon as I've ever encountered in print.
Thing is, people really *do* want to believe that the poor are
constitutionally different from the rest of us. It's far easier to
reassure onesself that one can never be poor if you believe there is some
intrinsic difference between them and us. Otherwise, it's "but for the
grace of God go I" every time you pass a poor person.
Which is a chilling prospect indeed.
Himmelfarb's history reminds me of those pieces in the early 1980s about
how slavery was really not so awful. My favorite was the one about the
odds of having ones family broken up by being sold off were 25 to 1 in any
given year--which makes it *very* likely to happen within a normal
lifetime.
What people will believe because they want to is simply amazing.
--Carl
coates
: You're a little mixed up, Geenius--the "group homes" are part of the Democrats
: Of course, we're not going to be hearing about that for the next three months,
: or see a "Murphy Brown" episode hurriedly made about it, the way we have with
: the Republican plan.
You picks your enemies, you takes your chances.
I mean: the *only* reasons the Dems are proposing group homes is because
(i) the Republicans are threatening worse and (ii) the Republicans got
enough votes and seats in Congress to convince the idiotic Dem pols
(including Clinton) that they can get reelected only by acting like
Republicans.
None of which is really a justification. Just explanation.
--
john coates
I liked the recent Village Voice cover
that puts Republican faces on the Sergeant Pepper's cover
and includes Bill Clinton in their midst, looking sheepishly
at his feet.
Jennifer Basil
: In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.950111141241.29409F-100000@world> Geenius at Wrok <gee...@evansville.net> writes:
: >On 11 Jan 1995, Alex Darke (as Stacie Brown) wrote:
: >> I grew up in group homes from the time I was 9 until I was almost 16.
: >>
: >> They taught me that this world is about dog eat dog and that if you see
: >> someone you must DESTROY them before they destroy you. They taught me
: >> that the value of a human life is nothing more than what the governemtn
: >> is wiling to pay for it. They taught me that in the end nothing matters
: >> but who has the power over you and that unless you can eliminate them,
: >> they will elliminate you.
: >That explains Gingrich's fondness for them. They sound like an ideal
: >environment for the budding demagogue.
: You're a little mixed up, Geenius--the "group homes" are part of the Democrats
: welfare reform package, which was the original point of my post.
: Of course, we're not going to be hearing about that for the next three months,
: or see a "Murphy Brown" episode hurriedly made about it, the way we have with
: the Republican plan.
: Repubs want "orphanages."
Oh, which are so different, of course. From what I've read, they have
the two most significant things in common:
1) Yank kids away from parents
2) Put them in a big old place without much hope of individual attention.
I think that was his point.
Fell Swoop
>Fell Swoop wrote:
>> And so it comes out, in hearings today, that the Democratic welfare reforms
>> also call for children being taken away from their parents and placed in
>> "group homes."
>With *overwhelming* (75% or better) majorities of Americans telling
>pollsters that we've got to spend less on welfare and with the media
>pandering to disinformed public bigotry by running apocryphal pieces like
>the food stamp fraud story on ABC last night, is it any wonder that
>Congress is responding to the groundswell of public backlash?
We *do* have to spend less on welfare. It costs an idiotic amount of money,
most of which goes to maintaining and building the system itself, not to the
people it's supposed to help.
Does anybody else remember an article back in the mid-80s where someone
figured out how much it would cost, paperwork and all, to just send every
family in the US under the poverty level a tax-free check for $15,000.00, no
strings attatched? It ended up being something like 20% of what we currently
spend--or maybe less--it's been a while.
The "welfare queen" stories are smokescreens--the fact is that welfare is a
woefully inadequate system, overloaded already with snoops and regulations,
that hampers those using it more than it helps. My sister was on it (she's
unmarried with two kids, the father's dead, and his mother kept all his money
and insurance), and was constantly thwarted in her attempts to get off. If
she got a part-time job, her benefits were cut accordingly. When she went to
college, her benefits were cut. (Although welfare *does* vary from state to
state, and if she'd moved across the river to Washington, which has a more
user-friendly welfare system, she might have actually gotten aid in going to
school instead of a kick in the butt.) She couldn't finish school, and pulled
herself off welfare and works a really crappy job, and seems to have given up
hope, pretty much, that anything better will ever happen to her.
What needs to happen, and is completely impossible, is a massive and momentary
"union busting" that allows the federal and state governments to fire just
about everyone, if not everyone, working in the welfare system, and start over
from scratch, without possible legal recourse from those fired, but doesn't
allow the government to exploit that opening later.
>And anyone who voted Republican this last time around is to blame for
>these idiot-cretin welfare-reform proposals from both sides of the aisle.
>The message of 'Contract with America' was received by *both* parties. You
>cannot 'throw the bums out' in a vaccuum.
Yeah, right. The fact that the Democratic Party has no integrity at all is
the Republican's fault. (Not that I'm saying the GOP has any.)
I have absolutely no respect for a party that controlled the entire
legislative branch for a decade and then the executive branch for two years,
and spent the entire time whining that the minority party was ruining
everything. Which is not to say that a minority party is powerless, not at
all, and the Republicans *were* responsible for blocking Demo legislation.
But that's what they're *supposed* to do. That's what Republicans elected
them for. The fact that the Democrats played the game astoundingly badly
isn't the Republicans' fault.
>We need *more* welfare spending not less. And the only methods that have
>ever mitigated the concentration of wealth in a democratic state have been
>violence and taxation. You can take your pick between the two.
Maybe. I wouldn't mind more being spent, if I knew it was being spent wisely.
I don't car that much about cheaters--somebody's always going to figure out a
way to scam--but the system should be helping people, not double and
triple-checking every request for a new pair of glasses or a wheelchair
repair...
Officially beginning in the wee hours of January 12th:
The World Wide Web Jack Chick Archive!
http://www.teleport.com/~vx/jackhome.html
Jennifer Basil
: In article <3f1hve$j...@dunix.drake.edu> sjb...@dunix.drake.edu (Stacie Brown) writes:
: >I just don't know how in the hell to make people understnad how
: >dangerous those places ARE for children.
: And now he exacts his terrible revenge on poor little news groups full of
: ghost story lovers...
Ok...please someone, please correct me if I've missed something, which
I hope I have..
Is it just my interpretation, or are you making light of the awful
experiences of the ONLY person on this thread who really has any
real knowledge about what group homes/orphanages are like?
His LIFE is a 'ghost story'? I don't give a flyin' hoot if it's
a 'group home' and that's a *Democrat* word. He's making a valid
point based on information no one else here can possibly have, and
you respond with this crap? What is *wrong* with you?! This is
hardly hearsay, and it's hardly political...it's his *life*.
I don't think he has some political agenda here. I don't think he
cares WHO thought the group home was a good plan. I don't think he
cares whether you call it a group home or an orphanage. I don't
think he cares whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. I think
he thinks institutionalizing children in any form is a bad plan, and
I think he knows 100 fold more than we could ever imagine.
Once again, I *really* hope I missed some inside joke here. Because
the filter you read his post through seems to have negated the only
*first hand facts* we have here. You groan when you don't get the
facts on one thread and then laugh when you are handed a lifetime
full of facts on another.
I'm stunned.
: (Heh.)
^^^^^^^^^
Neat. Really neat.
Jenny
: Officially beginning in the wee hours of January 12th:
: The World Wide Web Jack Chick Archive!
: http//www.teleport.com/~vx/jackhome.html
: Hi, Canter & Siegel !
: "Is good to use detectiveness! To fight hard, and then win!"
: --The Flaming Carrot
--
Fell Swoop
>Fell Swoop wrote:
>> We *do* have to spend less on welfare. It costs an idiotic amount of money,
>> most of which goes to maintaining and building the system itself, not to the
>> people it's supposed to help.
>Before I chime in with some statistics, how much do you *think* we spend
>on anti-poverty programs? (ie. those programs where eligibility is
>means-tested, where you can be disqualified if you have too much money.)
I will admit, I have no idea. My thoughts are based on the word of people you
probably detest, and the experience of friends who have been on welfare,
combined with my experience with public workers--my wife works in public
assistance in Clark County, WA, and frankly, about 75% of the staff should be
fired and replaced immediately. They are mean, cranky, unqualified people who
do nothing but create ridiculous in-house feuds and complain about not getting
paid enough, when they're lucky not to be working as maids or fry cooks.
>This is a serious question since I honestly believe that you have been
>systematically lied to on the subject. I've posted lots of numbers on this
>topic before and I'll doubtless do it again. I'm just curious as to what
>specifically has created your impression. Was it the oft-repeated canard
>about the poverty rate being the same as it was before the Great Society
>spent [insert huge number here] of dollars? If that's all it is, then my
>job is easy.
I honestly wish you would, and if I haven't proved anything else on a.sg-x, I
think I've shown that I will own up to being wrong, even *really* wrong.
>Entitlements are *not* the same thing as what people commonly refer to as
>"welfare." Broadly conceived, *any* program can be called "welfare" and
>conservative demagogues have used that term to discribe AFDC but *not* the
>business lunch deduction though both result in taxpayers bearing the cost
>of feeding some people and not others.
Educate me further, Carl, please. We can take this to e-mail, even. I am
concerned about this, and embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. I haven't
really known where to start looking, though...
>And according to the budget committee nerds, the business lunch deduction
>costs the treasury more than the school lunch subsidy for poor children.
>But guess which one is assailed by conservatives for being too expensive?
I can guess...
>> Does anybody else remember an article back in the mid-80s where someone
>> figured out how much it would cost, paperwork and all, to just send every
>> family in the US under the poverty level a tax-free check for $15,000.00, no
>> strings attatched? It ended up being something like 20% of what we currently
>> spend--or maybe less--it's been a while.
>I've seen a number of intentionally rigged computations like that. Most of
>them use the number of people in poverty *after* benefits are counted as a
>base (which assumes that current programs are maintained in addition to
>the cash giveaway) and most also ignore the net payback to the treasury
>that funds a good portion of welfare (for example, food stamps and
>surpluss giveaways are tied to agricultural stabilization programs and so
>have much lower net costs to the public.)
>I can write an awful lot on this subject if you care to cite any single
>one of those bits of disinformation. Start with P.J. O'Rourke's screed if
>you like. *Please* do. I've already dissected his claims on the subject of
>welfare in considerable depth. He even found time to praise Charles Murray
>in one of them. (prior to Murrays little foray into racial eugenics that
>is).
Was it P.J. O'Rourke who said this?
>So again, before I quote any specific numbers. Do you *think* we spend
>more than $288 billion on means-tested welfare programs?
Again, I have no idea...
>By contrast, the amount of money that pays for *anti-poverty* programs,
>(ie. the ones that *only* go to the poor) is quite small compared to
>entitlement spending and certainly when compared to entitlement growth.
>As I said, I think that you've bought the stereotype without checking the
>numbers. Tell me what you *think* the welfare numbers are and I'll post
>some numbers of my own.
I probably have.
>> The "welfare queen" stories are smokescreens--the fact is that welfare is a
>> woefully inadequate system, overloaded already with snoops and regulations,
>> that hampers those using it more than it helps.
>Yep.
>But the only way to fix welfare is to make it far more *expensive* to
>administer and pay for. Not to mention raising benefits.
>In the words of notable conservative Charles Murray: "In many cases there
>is nothing a poor child can learn that will repay the cost of teaching."
>And Murray's 1984 book 'Losing Ground' is the single most frequently cited
>conservative study of the issue. Do you endorse this too?
Ugh. No.
>
>> What needs to happen, and is completely impossible, is a massive and
>momentary
>> "union busting" that allows the federal and state governments to fire just
>> about everyone, if not everyone, working in the welfare system, and
>start over
>> from scratch, without possible legal recourse from those fired, but doesn't
>> allow the government to exploit that opening later.
>Great. After demonizing the poor *and* those working with them we can move
>on to yet another scapegoat before we admit that the vast majority of the
>voters are either contemptibly callous or so woefully misinformed about
>the nature of social programs that they are responsible for the
>wretchedness of the present arrangements.
I still stand by that statement. I know something of which I speak, and
government workers are (a) generally overcompenstated (the difference between
what my wife earns now, in salary alone, and what she made doing much the same
thing privately is just absurd--not to mention the insurance and other perks
we had none of before) and (b) largely underworked. A lot of government work
resembles that ridiculous factory in _Atlas Shrugged_, the one that collapsed
when all the real workers left, because they'd had all the responsibility
shifted to them and off of the 90% of the workers who were shirking.
(BTW, Joy is one of John Galt's stalwarts, and deserves every useless paid
retreat she gets. She's one of those people who keeps everything running,
stays out of stupid controversies, is not afraid to put her job on the line in
real ones [She and her boss went to the local media recently, and to the city
council where they serve, which they had been forbidden to do, to bring down
the county head of Social Services. It worked, and the head was asked for
her resignation, but it could have gone the other way in a second...), won't
call in sick when even when she's *really* sick, and generally is a welcome
slap in the face to me when I slack. Can you tell I'm proud of her?]
>Gimme a break.
>Blaming social program employees (many of whom *are* odious) is just
>shooting the messenger. If the *citizens* are not responsible in a
>republic then just who the hell is? I thought conservatives *favored*
>taking responsibilty?
Maybe you're right. I dunno. I find it difficult to shoulder the blame for
thousands of louts who have settled into cushy union-protected berths to mark
time until retirement, but maybe I am responsible.
>> >And anyone who voted Republican this last time around is to blame for
>> >these idiot-cretin welfare-reform proposals from both sides of the aisle.
>> >The message of 'Contract with America' was received by *both* parties. You
>> >cannot 'throw the bums out' in a vaccuum.
>>
>> Yeah, right. The fact that the Democratic Party has no integrity at all is
>> the Republican's fault. (Not that I'm saying the GOP has any.)
>No, but the fact that those who have tried to do something about the
>problem's in welfare programs have been consistently voted out of office
>*is* the fault of conservative voters. So also is the fact that present
>entitlement spending is tilted toward those who need it least. I can cite
>specific budget proposals if you don't believe me.
I wonder what you're talking about when you say "need it least,"
though. I didn't get to finish school. I didn't start until I was 24. Part
of the reason was because my parents were "middle class," but they couldn't
afford to help me *at all,* except maybe a hundred bucks at the beginning of a
semester now and then to help with supplies. You wouldn't believe how
un-employable a graphic artist who didn't even get his B.A. can be. So if
you're calling, say, student loans to middle class kids "help for those who
need it least," I can't agree with you. I need some kind of new student aid
program *bad,* but I'm not going to get it. I'm not trying to get sympathy,
certainly not from a group that includes people like Mr. Lathrop, but who
"needs it least," in your book? You included workman's comp in there.
Roofers and maids who bust their asses all day, and slip in mop water or fall
off a ladder--they "need it least?"
This "The poor vs. everybody else" mentality has got to end, on both sides...
>And it ain't liberals who created the mistaken stereotypes of federal
>programs that you cited here. Quite the contrary, the people who have
>consistently proposed legislation to address the problems of current
>administration have been liberals like Moynihan and McGovern and Mondale
>and Califano and Jackson and lots of others from the left side of the
>Democratic party.
>Conservatives have even trashed the moderate Republicans who have tried to
>do something about these issues. The fault lies with the right wing that
>doesn't think that *any* welfare program *can* work. So it's not
>surprising that they have consistently voted for the cheapest and worst
>approaches. Which is exactly what we've got now.
If you honestly think that the left bears *no* responsiblity for the mess of
welfare, I don't know that we have anything to talk about. I'm perfectly
willing to acknowlege, say, the Reagan era's additions to the maze of
regulations hampering welfare recipients, and I'm sure there's much more I
don't know about.
>> >We need *more* welfare spending not less. And the only methods that have
>> >ever mitigated the concentration of wealth in a democratic state have been
>> >violence and taxation. You can take your pick between the two.
>>
>> Maybe. I wouldn't mind more being spent, if I knew it was being spent
>wisely.
>> I don't car that much about cheaters--somebody's always going to figure out a
>> way to scam--but the system should be helping people, not double and
>> triple-checking every request for a new pair of glasses or a wheelchair
>> repair...
>I agree.
>I'd be glad to cite a reading list of boring books on the subject since
>this stuff was what I went to grad school to learn about.
Please do, the boringer the better.
>But frankly,
>hearing someone use the disclaimer "if I knew it was being spent wisely"
>begs the question of what you would consider to be 'wise' welfare
>spending.
>You have already said that the *amount* we currently spend is "idiotic" so
>presumably one criteria of a 'wise' set of programs would be that they
>cost less than the current one. Which contradicts the first half of your
>sentence about not minding if we spent more.
I think I made it clear, later, that I thought the way the money was spent was
idiotic, not the amount, in and of itself.
>In the course of college, grad school, lots of political campaigns, being
>a Senate staff assistant and working in a child mortality research
>institute I've met *lots* of conservatives who have used that line and not
>one of them ever saw a welfare program that they were willing to pay for.
I have.
>In fact, the current crop in Congress is even trying to cut Head
>Start--which is demonstrably the single most effective welfare program
>ever devised. And one that benefits needy children directly.
And the only one I was ever directly involved in, back when my parents were
hippies. Actually, I thought until fairly recently that *everyone* went to
Head Start...
>So you'll have to pardon me if I take your statement here with a few
>grains of salt--say, a number equal to the number of dollars in the
>entitlement budget.
That would probably be wise.
steven r kleinedler
>
>You're a little mixed up, Geenius--the "group homes" are part of the Democrats
>welfare reform package, which was the original point of my post.
>
>Of course, we're not going to be hearing about that for the next three months,
>or see a "Murphy Brown" episode hurriedly made about it, the way we have with
>the Republican plan.
>
>Repubs want "orphanages."
I'm not sure I know what the difference is--- enlighten me?
--
Steve Kleinedler, GenX-icographer (and his stuffed meese, Kozmo & Jiri)
What's left: "slick" thru "tyrant"
Jennifer Basil
: In article <3f2b84$a...@news.bu.edu> ba...@bio.bu.edu (Jennifer Basil) writes:
: Oh me, oh my...
: >Once again, I *really* hope I missed some inside joke here. Because
: >the filter you read his post through seems to have negated the only
: >*first hand facts* we have here. You groan when you don't get the
: >facts on one thread and then laugh when you are handed a lifetime
: >full of facts on another.
: You missed a BIG inside joke between myself and Mr. Darke. You can get
: something of a hold on it by reading the alt.folklore.ghost-stories FAQ, or my
: recent parody of it on r.a.g-s, which may still be at your site if you hurry...
: >I'm stunned.
: You're probably more stunned now...
No, actually I'm irked. Based on the amount of email I got thanking
me for flaming you, I'm not the only one who thought this wasn't
the best thread to joke on. At first I felt like a dope, but based
on the fact that there was NO REFERENCE WHATSOEVER to what the heck
you were talking, the context I took it in makes a bunch of sense.
: >: (Heh.)
: >^^^^^^^^^
: >Neat. Really neat.
: Hmph.
Hey, it shouldn't be so amazing that anyone took it this way. Besides
you and Alex, no one else knew what the hell you were talking about.
Jenny
coates
: But the thing that people seem to be ignoring is that there IS no
: "worse" idea between orphanages, group homes, whatever.
In other words: orphanages = group homes, from the point of view of the
child.
But you realize this *is* about media, politics and images. Orphanages
have Newt on their side, but Cls. Dickens is a hard force to oppose.
Group homes haven't yet found their Dickens. Or maybe they have. Aren't
you a writer?
--
john coates For Human beauty knows it not: nor can Mercy find it!
Andre
>
> Maybe. I wouldn't mind more being spent, if I knew it was being spent wisely.
> I don't car that much about cheaters--somebody's always going to figure out a
> way to scam--but the system should be helping people, not double and
> triple-checking every request for a new pair of glasses or a wheelchair
> repair...
>
Bingo! Right on the money!
Anyone out there ever give money to charities,
like "Save the Children" that you year that pathetic Sally
Struthers whining away on TV for? Did you ever bother to
ask any of those charities what percentage of your donation
goes to directly helping those children and what percentage
goes into the administrative pockets of the fund-raising
companies and the bureaucratic machine that is doubling
as a worthwhile cause?
I seem to remember a Toys for Tots scandal in the
past year where they spent so much of their cash donations
on fund-raising that they had no money left to buy toys.........
It isn't a matter of throwing more money at the
problem. It's a matter of using the money we have more
efficiently. Maybe, in order to reform welfare, the government
should pass legislation restricting the percent of funds which can
go to administrative costs?
If we could bring that percentage down from where
it is currently, then we would have more money to spend on the
problem without having to THROW more money (both mine and
yours) at the problem. (Does that make sense?)
Jimbo
"All I want is a stable family, a stable residence, a stable income,
a stable mental state, and a stable full of horses."
Carl Beaudry
> We *do* have to spend less on welfare. It costs an idiotic amount of money,
> most of which goes to maintaining and building the system itself, not to the
> people it's supposed to help.
Before I chime in with some statistics, how much do you *think* we spend
on anti-poverty programs? (ie. those programs where eligibility is
means-tested, where you can be disqualified if you have too much money.)
This is a serious question since I honestly believe that you have been
systematically lied to on the subject. I've posted lots of numbers on this
topic before and I'll doubtless do it again. I'm just curious as to what
specifically has created your impression. Was it the oft-repeated canard
about the poverty rate being the same as it was before the Great Society
spent [insert huge number here] of dollars? If that's all it is, then my
job is easy.
Entitlements are *not* the same thing as what people commonly refer to as
"welfare." Broadly conceived, *any* program can be called "welfare" and
conservative demagogues have used that term to discribe AFDC but *not* the
business lunch deduction though both result in taxpayers bearing the cost
of feeding some people and not others.
And according to the budget committee nerds, the business lunch deduction
costs the treasury more than the school lunch subsidy for poor children.
But guess which one is assailed by conservatives for being too expensive?
And the same people who justify the former on the basis of economic
benefits to the food service industry cannot seem to justify the latter on
the basis of increased liklihood of staying in school, higher grades and
higher earnings for poor children who are well-nourished.
The hypocracy of this class warfare from the right is demonstrated most
clearly by the fact that no one is attacking the largest
entitlements--Social Security and Medicare--because those are received by
people like you and me as opposed to poor folk. So tell me what amount of
money you consider to be "idiotic" to spend on the welfare of poor people
and I'll work on convincing you from there.
> Does anybody else remember an article back in the mid-80s where someone
> figured out how much it would cost, paperwork and all, to just send every
> family in the US under the poverty level a tax-free check for $15,000.00, no
> strings attatched? It ended up being something like 20% of what we currently
> spend--or maybe less--it's been a while.
I've seen a number of intentionally rigged computations like that. Most of
them use the number of people in poverty *after* benefits are counted as a
base (which assumes that current programs are maintained in addition to
the cash giveaway) and most also ignore the net payback to the treasury
that funds a good portion of welfare (for example, food stamps and
surpluss giveaways are tied to agricultural stabilization programs and so
have much lower net costs to the public.)
I can write an awful lot on this subject if you care to cite any single
one of those bits of disinformation. Start with P.J. O'Rourke's screed if
you like. *Please* do. I've already dissected his claims on the subject of
welfare in considerable depth. He even found time to praise Charles Murray
in one of them. (prior to Murrays little foray into racial eugenics that
is).
As for me, my back-of-the-envelope estimate is that there are somewhere
around 120 million households in the U.S.. And based upon the commonly
reported number of families who are below the poverty line *before*
welfare which is 15-18% of all families, an assumption of 16% yields about
19.2 million households in pre-welfare poverty. It would thus cost ~$288
billion to send everyone a tax free check for $15,000 not counting
administrative expensives which are not trivial for any other giveaway
programs (even those aimed at the wealthy.)
So again, before I quote any specific numbers. Do you *think* we spend
more than $288 billion on means-tested welfare programs?
And compare this calculation to the $250 billion dollar depreciation tax
giveaway that happened in 1981 and again in 1990, or the trillion dollar
buildup in peacetime military spending and the point tends to *not* look
nearly so clear-cut. But the ideologues don't mention that. They just try
and scare people with trumped-up sticker shock.
You see, 'entitlements' include many different things--even some military,
police and government pensions and, depending on whose counting, ambulance
services, certain jails, legal aid, community centers, student loans,
adult education, job training, unemployment insurance, workman's comp,
pre-natal care, school lunches, rural cooperatives and a zillion other
things that *you* currently receive benefits from just like I do.
By contrast, the amount of money that pays for *anti-poverty* programs,
(ie. the ones that *only* go to the poor) is quite small compared to
entitlement spending and certainly when compared to entitlement growth.
As I said, I think that you've bought the stereotype without checking the
numbers. Tell me what you *think* the welfare numbers are and I'll post
some numbers of my own.
> The "welfare queen" stories are smokescreens--the fact is that welfare is a
> woefully inadequate system, overloaded already with snoops and regulations,
> that hampers those using it more than it helps.
Yep.
But the only way to fix welfare is to make it far more *expensive* to
administer and pay for. Not to mention raising benefits.
Make no mistake that welfare (ie. WIC, AFDC, Food Stamps, Medicaid and a
bunch of smaller programs) has *lots* of problems. But it has those
problems in large part because of the opposition to taking money from
middle-class entitlements and defense and using it for the poor. Hell,
the S&L fiasco was a middle and upper class bailout--the poor don't have
money to lose.
The present welfare state is the *cheapest* solution to poverty and easily
the worst. If you want a program that works to get people on their feet
again it's gonna cost money. But there's at least some prospect of a
payback. It's funny how the cost to the treasury of a tax cut is justified
on the basis of future tax revenues but *not* the cost of training a poor
person to work or giving them the daycare needed to do so.
In the words of notable conservative Charles Murray: "In many cases there
is nothing a poor child can learn that will repay the cost of teaching."
And Murray's 1984 book 'Losing Ground' is the single most frequently cited
conservative study of the issue. Do you endorse this too?
> What needs to happen, and is completely impossible, is a massive and
momentary
> "union busting" that allows the federal and state governments to fire just
> about everyone, if not everyone, working in the welfare system, and
start over
> from scratch, without possible legal recourse from those fired, but doesn't
> allow the government to exploit that opening later.
Great. After demonizing the poor *and* those working with them we can move
on to yet another scapegoat before we admit that the vast majority of the
voters are either contemptibly callous or so woefully misinformed about
the nature of social programs that they are responsible for the
wretchedness of the present arrangements.
Gimme a break.
Blaming social program employees (many of whom *are* odious) is just
shooting the messenger. If the *citizens* are not responsible in a
republic then just who the hell is? I thought conservatives *favored*
taking responsibilty?
> >And anyone who voted Republican this last time around is to blame for
> >these idiot-cretin welfare-reform proposals from both sides of the aisle.
> >The message of 'Contract with America' was received by *both* parties. You
> >cannot 'throw the bums out' in a vaccuum.
>
> Yeah, right. The fact that the Democratic Party has no integrity at all is
> the Republican's fault. (Not that I'm saying the GOP has any.)
No, but the fact that those who have tried to do something about the
problem's in welfare programs have been consistently voted out of office
*is* the fault of conservative voters. So also is the fact that present
entitlement spending is tilted toward those who need it least. I can cite
specific budget proposals if you don't believe me.
And it ain't liberals who created the mistaken stereotypes of federal
programs that you cited here. Quite the contrary, the people who have
consistently proposed legislation to address the problems of current
administration have been liberals like Moynihan and McGovern and Mondale
and Califano and Jackson and lots of others from the left side of the
Democratic party.
Conservatives have even trashed the moderate Republicans who have tried to
do something about these issues. The fault lies with the right wing that
doesn't think that *any* welfare program *can* work. So it's not
surprising that they have consistently voted for the cheapest and worst
approaches. Which is exactly what we've got now.
> >We need *more* welfare spending not less. And the only methods that have
> >ever mitigated the concentration of wealth in a democratic state have been
> >violence and taxation. You can take your pick between the two.
>
> Maybe. I wouldn't mind more being spent, if I knew it was being spent
wisely.
> I don't car that much about cheaters--somebody's always going to figure out a
> way to scam--but the system should be helping people, not double and
> triple-checking every request for a new pair of glasses or a wheelchair
> repair...
I agree.
I'd be glad to cite a reading list of boring books on the subject since
this stuff was what I went to grad school to learn about. But frankly,
hearing someone use the disclaimer "if I knew it was being spent wisely"
begs the question of what you would consider to be 'wise' welfare
spending.
You have already said that the *amount* we currently spend is "idiotic" so
presumably one criteria of a 'wise' set of programs would be that they
cost less than the current one. Which contradicts the first half of your
sentence about not minding if we spent more.
In the course of college, grad school, lots of political campaigns, being
a Senate staff assistant and working in a child mortality research
institute I've met *lots* of conservatives who have used that line and not
one of them ever saw a welfare program that they were willing to pay for.
In fact, the current crop in Congress is even trying to cut Head
Start--which is demonstrably the single most effective welfare program
ever devised. And one that benefits needy children directly.
So you'll have to pardon me if I take your statement here with a few
grains of salt--say, a number equal to the number of dollars in the
entitlement budget.
--Carl
________________________________________________________________________
"if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give
your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also
the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not
refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you."
--Matthew 5:38-42
"Jesus answered him, "The first commandment of all is, 'Hear,
O Israel! The Lord our God is one God; and thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with
thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength.' This is the first
commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself.' There are no greater commandments than these."
--Mark 12:29-31
ZZYZX
>: in what I said. You acknowledged that it might be a private joke, which it
>: was, and then flamed away anyway.
>
>Yeah, that's it. I knew it was a joke and thought I'd flame anyway.
>Actually, what I did was show 3 separate people the thread with no
>comment and ask them what they thought (they don't know any of you),
>and they thought the *exact* thing I did. My statement that I must
>have missed something comes from my newsfeeder..but I checked the dates
>and times and figured I probably wasn't missing something. Silly me,
>I was missing being subscribed to a newsgroup I've never heard of! I
>don't have a problem with inside jokes, but don't be stunned and amazed
>if a)someone doesn't get it and amazingly enough b) tries to *fit it
>into the context of the thread*.
I don't know why I'm entering this, but...
For some reason I seem to recall reading about 30 references to that
ghost story FAQ on this newsgroup over the last month. None on this
thread, but... I tend to be clueless, but I got the reference. I
won't comment on how appropriate it was to this thread, but man I
could have sworn that the ghost story thing was someone we all knew
and were getting kind of sick of hearing about because there were so
many references to it...
-David "ZZYZX" Steinberg (dste...@nmsu.edu) "Time for Timer"
**********************************************************************
*"It seem we all *"I can't believe I'm a junior and a *
* Live so close to that line * film major, when all I really *
*and so far from satisfaction." * wanted in this life was to marry a *
*-Joni Mitchell "Give me hope. * lobsterman and cook fish." *
*Give me hope." -Amy Ray * -a letter from Christie Searing *
**********************************************************************
Micky DuPree
tbu...@cc.swarthmore.edu (Timothy Burke) writes:
>1) Granting that in fact very little is spent on what most people
>imagine to be "welfare" (as opposed to all the revenues lost to various
>middle-class and upper-class tax deductions) what in ideal terms should
>the purpose of "welfare" expenditures be? Merely to alleviate the worst
>effects of poverty (a "safety net") or rather, to eradicate or
>transform poverty itself?
I don't think you're going to get any kind of consensus on the overall
philosophy of fighting poverty, and therein has lain a most vexatious
and unnecessary snag in discussion of the issue. This is one of those
rare issues where I think that many sides should be able come to some
sort of arrangement about the pragmatics of the issue without ever
agreeing on the underlying reasons. The various moral positions,
whether considered by absolutes or degrees, can be considered academic,
and so can issues of violence (since conservative response to poverty-
related crime is to throw Their Own Money (tm) into building little
suburban fortresses and throw Other People's Money (tm) into building
prisons), if there are pragmatic reasons why the entire economy can
benefit from the transformation of the truly destitute into economically
viable workers and consumers. And there *are* such reasons, argued even
by conservatives in this newsgroup. The unemployed and homeless
represent, or should represent, a developable, exploitable market for
goods and services.
>I would be prepared to argue that most anti-poverty programs put into
>place since World War II, broadly defined to include institutions
>ranging from public housing, homeless shelters and AFDC, have in fact
>functioned as a form of social control [other good points deleted]
No argument here. In fact, my point about treating the poor as a market
to be developed is rife with political indoctrination: become a willing
cog in the capitalist machine and you can get food and housing. But
hey, those who already have neither would consider it a bargain at twice
the price. These aren't revolutionaries or political rebels who have
chosen to opt out of the system, after all. These are people who were
red-lined or bumped from the scheduled flights of economic prosperity.
>So, how to make "welfare" something other than social control?
If you're defining "control" broadly, I don't think you can ever get
away from it completely (the number of true anarchists in any society
being comparatively small), and it doesn't all come from the
conservative camp. I've seen some of the rhetoric from the earlier part
of the century. Liberal desire to engineer a better society often likes
to jettison Carl's insistence that Good should be freely chosen. But
the internecine policy disputes of leftist factions stray from the
topic.
>One thing we hear again and again from the anti-taxation know-nothings
>[....] is that whatever wealth an individual controls is his or her
>[....] own earned without anyone else's participation.
>
>I frankly despair on this point.
This might be amenable to a little simple (if simplistic) education at
the junior high or high school level about the interconnectedness of
economic prosperity. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just some
case studies about the ripple effects of things like fiscal policy
decisions in Washington and local layoffs at the town factory. To flog
a 20th century cliche, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize
that when your neighbors are prospering, they have more money and reason
to buy goods and services from you, and when they get laid off, your
business suffers too.
But if you're talking about educating know-nothing adults, you've got me
there. Maybe we could hire Ross Perot to give another chalk talk on
national TV. :^) Bill Moyers would undoubtedly volunteer for the job,
but who A) listens to him and B) watches PBS (assuming it's still around
after the Year of the Newt)?
>Wealth is social, and exists in its present forms only because of
>massively interwoven webs of hierarchy, compulsion and power. That
>these webs are also maintained by ambition, self-interest and
>creativity is no small matter...a critique of capitalist production
>requires a lot more appreciation for the fecundity of capitalism than
>most on the Left have hitherto allowed.
I have no problem with saying that a lot of the material comfort
available to us in the West is the byproduct of the self-interest of
individuals. The reason why I call it a byproduct rather than a direct
result, though, is that only a few concerned primarily with their own
self-interest have the vision to discern the warp and woof of the web
you describe. The theory of capitalism may be built on the principle of
enlightened self-interest, but its everyday practice is demonstrably
driven by next-quarter profits at best, and by taking Other People's
Money (tm) and running at worst. "Enlightened self-interest" has no
quibble with theft and fraud as long as you can get away with it (how do
you propose having rational discourse about the future of the
commonwealth with someone who measures his enlightenment by his ability
to escape detection and punishment?), giving rise to *routine* ruptures
in your great web.
Gilchrest can go roll his eyes as I insist on dragging my liberal
morality into the discussion, but how else can you explain the
conservative reaction to the underclass but as a deep-seated character
flaw? They look on the unemployed, the homeless, the welfare
recipients, and take it as an occasion for congratulating themselves on
their conservative superiority instead of being appalled at the missed
economic opportunity represented by these poor people not buying their
goods and services. Where's the "enlightened self-interest" in that?
>You don't have to wear a hairshirt and flagellate yourself, you don't
>have to give everything to charity and go live in a cave. What you do
>need to do are two things: 1) have a little fucking modesty, okay? and
>2) acknowledge that your wealth and accumulation are dependent upon
>disciplined forms of social relations..
Ha! I made my money the old-fashioned way: I inherited it. My
grandfather, not a terribly astute investor (he was getting 6% return
back when everyone else was getting 12%), was just lucky to live and own
land in Florida before the big real estate boom. I was just lucky to
have that particular grandfather. Whence arises merit? I was born at
the right time to qualify for Social Security Survivor's Benefits for
four years of college. They eliminated that just as I was about to
leave school, but they "grandfathered" it for those of us who already
had it so that we wouldn't organize a protest. Hey, I've gotten mine, I
don't pay into the system anymore, and I don't need any SS benefits to
retire on. I could laugh my ass off at the rest of you sinking into the
tar pit. But I would eagerly vote to make all of us who got SS in
college PAY IT ALL BACK if it were part of a comprehensive across-the-
board program to stifle non-means-tested entitlements and improve
federal solvency, so I'm starting to take certain other people's casual
personal attacks about my willingness to spend Other People's Money (tm)
a little ill.
-Micky
Carl Beaudry
> If you and Carl want to continue to fund your lust for
> philanthropy with Other Peoples' Money, then it is up to you and him to
> explain why it's good for us to pay.
Only if you concomitantly explain why someone who signs a piece of paper
agreeing to pay a percentage of the cost of his home to a bank over a
period of time should pay lower taxes than someone who buys their house
outright or who rents.
For my explanation, the empirical results of unfettered markets have led
*every* *single* democratic government all over the world to fetter those
markets in various and sundry ways, some of which are better than others.
All of which are corrupt to one extent or another.
The question is *who* is a *net* recipient and who is a *net* donor to the
economic wealth pot and it's not at all clear that the presently wealthy
in this country are net donors rather than net recipients. So Mickey and I
want to keep the subsidized royalty in the upper income brackets from
robbing the rest of us.
> : moral obligation or even stretch of the imagination compels the
> : taxpaying public to *subsidize* the luxury spending of the rich?
>
> Where is the gain being made by Mr Millionaire? Where are we Middle Class
> Fools giving him any money? By giving him a tax break, we haven't
> given him anything, but merely chosen not to take what was his.
> That is not a subsidy.
You assume that the house or his salary belonged to the millionaire in the
first place. Beginning even before the Homestead Act of 1862, we have been
giving away public wealth to people who then proceed to act as though they
had somehow uniquely earned it as opposed to having been given it by the
people who cleared out the original inhabitants.
> "Tax break" does not equal "handout".
> "Losing less" does not equal "gain".
Yes it does for the reasons that John Coates has already explained. In the
private sector, it's called a "rebate." And if tax breaks are not
"handouts" then please have the maximum tax witheld from your paycheck and
send your non-handout refund check to me.
> "The government oh-so-generously not taking EVERYTHING we have" does not
> equal "entitlement".
The key phrase is "not taking everything we have."
You assume, quite contrary to the Constitution I might add, that you
"have" ownership of anything prior to the government granting your
property right. You may be in the general vicinity of some particular
thing, but until a legitimate democratic state says that it is yours, then
you do *not* own it.
Ownership is not a natural fact, it is a legal concept and laws are made
by states.
Just ask the Native Americans how natural property rights work. You are
proposing to allow another generation of people to seperate others from
their wealth by force--in this case by charging renters more in taxes than
homeowners who receive the same shared state services.
> In other words, (-a) <> a, something they should have taught you
> liberals in the third grade.
Yawn.
It just so happened that I skipped the third grade so you'll have to
forgive my ignorance as I did not have the benefit of your mathematical
dunderstanding. I was taught that A-X <> A and still believe it to this
day, where A is income and X equals the amount of the tax paid by one
group but not by another. The net difference is X. Which is the amount of
wealth that has been redistributed.
--Carl
Carl Beaudry
> Carl Beaudry wrote:
>
> >Thing is, people really *do* want to believe that the poor are
> >constitutionally different from the rest of us. It's far easier to
> >reassure onesself that one can never be poor if you believe there is some
> >intrinsic difference between them and us. Otherwise, it's "but for the
> >grace of God go I" every time you pass a poor person.
>
> That was one of Neil and Bill's big hot-buttons while we were working on
> 13th-GEN, too. They seemed to think that we've inherited that sort of
> thinking ourselves. They were pretty emotional about it...
I think they're right to a very large extent.
But it's not just GenXers and it's not just money. It's the experience of
any human being in the throes of fear, revulsion and dread.
Try watching a 65-year-old talk to an Alzheimers patient or see how you
feel in the presence of someone with AIDS. The effect is the same--we
invent reasons why it couldn't happen to people like us and feel
uncomfortable in the presence of such apparent counter-examples. We all
want to place distance between ourselves and the afflicted and it's
perfectly right and normal to want to do it.
Everyone wants to believe that there is something seperating themselves
from misfortune whether it's really there or not. I think that having
money is just an occasion of the more general experience--which is
revulsion toward the poor.
Such revulsion is not for the most part a rational conclusion, it's a
visceral reaction that seems clearly warranted when you are in the middle
of it. You cannot take the most callous right-winger to a homeless shelter
without them experiencing it firsthand. That's why they stay away from
those places and seek to hide the problem.
Even those of us who would proudly drink a toast to the dignity of the
impoverished would hesitate to drink it from the same bottle as one of
them. Prejudice against the poor exists on both the right and the left
and, as George Orwell put it, belief in the inferiority of the poor "can
be reduced to the obvious and quite sensible perception that the lower
classes smell."
The only way to be rid of that revulsion is to eliminate the
impoverishment--or the impoverished. And it isn't because I like the poor
that I want my taxes raised to help them any more than my affection for
AIDS victims causes me to want AIDS research funded. On the contrary, it
is revulsion that motivates both.
--Carl
___________________________________________________________________________
"When we establish a paradigm of how we *ought* to live, free
of the biases of our social position, then we can call our philosophy
just. For only behind the veil of ignorance, and only from a viewpoint
independent of man's current relationships, can we establish an objective
justice, for which we may strive."
--John Rawls,
final Harvard lecture
Carl Beaudry
> I don't have any problem at all with government spending as long as
> they're not spending it on something I think is truly a Bad Thing.
> My problem is with they way they fund their spending.
That, sir, is unprincipled to say the least.
Unless you earned your property before the government was set up and the
state was imposed upon you after the fact, you cannot consistently claim
that the government has taken *anything* from you--*ever*, since at best,
you were in the general vicinity of some property before the state but did
not own it any more than a fish owns the ocean.
> ...it annoys me greatly to watch people defend what I consider to be theft
> (yeah, I'm one of those) with untruths.
The cure for which is superior argument. Furthermore, 'theft' is a null
concept without a prior theory of property rights just as 'lies' is an
unproven libel until such time as you can prove a contradicting truth.
--Carl
Carl Beaudry
> Which is why some of us are libertarian, not Republican. If we're
> going to prune government or redesign government, plainly there are less
> injurious ways to do so than to *start* with those citizens most genuinely
> dependent on it.
Then just be sure to keep spelling libertarian with a small-l. Or, better
still, find another word altogether.
My distaste for that particular breed comes from what they do when they
get together and attempt the art of politics, where, as a matter of
expediency, they seem to consistently target the politically vulnerable
*first* and in the case of David Stockman, exclusively.
> Uh, maybe I'm wrong -- but isn't the whole point of an "agricultural
> stabilization program" to keep food costs *high*? So that America's
> beleagured yeomen of the soil won't go broke from having their incomes
> plummet? Or have I totally not grasped something?
You're half right. The program exists to keep prices *stable* and the
business profitable. In an ideal world (as far as our government is
concerned), that would mean low domestic food prices but even lower
production costs resulting in our competing successfully in foreign
markets.
In fact, without the billions of dollars in subsidies, farming would long
ago have been monopolized with predictable effects on food prices.
Currently, half a dozen companies control about 80% of the food market
through various means but because of the federal programs their operations
are approximately as regulated as the cable-tv companies.
It throws a monkey wrench into the ideology to consider that governments
have been controlling agricultural prices in most of the developed world
for 70 years--precisely as farming has become more and more efficient and
productive.
> First of all, if we abolished giveaways like Social Security checks to
> the well-off, it might release some pocket change which could then be
> directed towards actual welfare. As you yourself have pointed out, it is
> SS that is the real money-eater and that is a real give-away.
But see, it isn't.
S.S. would be totally self-funded were it not for the cost overruns in the
rest of the budget which S.S. money is presently being diverted in order
to cover the other $200 billion deficit. This is why D.P. Moynihan wanted
to stop that charade so we would have to face the reality of our $400
billion annual deficit which derives principally from interest on the
debt, middle-class entitlements, Medicare and defense if one excludes S.S.
from the regular entitlement budget as was the case previously.
And the amount of S.S. that goes to wealthy people is a small fraction of
the total because of the fact that the wealthy are a minority of the
population. So I don't think that you could find anything close to $288
billion that way.
At this point, the only discretionary budget categories capable of
realizing those kinds of cost savings *in* *addition* to balancing the
budget which must be done just to keep interest payments from swallowing
the budget are Medicare and Defense. Both of which the liberals want to
address with specific cost-saving mandates--a single payer system and
spending cuts and both of which conservatives oppose changing.
To be honest, non-medical middle-class entitlements are probably a wash
because if the government doesn't provide them to the middle-clasee it
will decrease the amount of taxes those people are willing to pay for any
reason. And since most of those programs tend to go toward things that are
already public-private parterships like education and home finance I'm not
sure that economic efficiency would be improved much anyway.
> It could also be assumed that any elderly actually in poverty
> would move from one to the other and not be harmed.
Yep. But we both know the age demographics of poverty. Over half are under
25, so those don't do much, dollar-wise, to S.S.. What we need is a wealth
transfer from the old to the young.
> Second, the administrative costs are a function of how intelligently we
> set up the giveaway. If we make the $15K/yr. a negative income tax, it's
> not obvious why we can't use a pre-existing bureaucracy (the IRS) to run
> it. That has got to save at least some costs in setting a bureaucracy up.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm all for it!!!!! Have been for *years.*
The negative income tax was what George McGovern ran on (though he was
only going to give everyone $1000) and it was last seen as the
Humphrey-Hawkins guaranteed national income bill in the mid-1970s. Milton
Friedman and all the monetarists criticized it during the Carter years as
being an engine of inflation.
If we could flip a switch and enact it tomorrow for anyone who was not
demonstrably mentally incompetant, I would do it. The problem is that
there isn't any money in the budget to pay for it now that the opponents
of Big Gubb'ment(tm) have run up so goddamn much debt. And the very same
people opposed guaranteed annual income for identical reasons--they said
that it would make government too big a part of the economy and that it
distorts the market leading to inflation and killing the incentive to be
productive.
It is *precisely* the history of guraranteed annual income proposals that
have led me to distrust libertarians as really being
conservatives-in-drag. Your advocacy of a guaranteed annual income,
assuming of course that you do in fact advocate it, constitutes the
political equivalent of a sex-change operation and I could never in good
conscience call you a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist in the face of
such a major heresy.
> Third, I have a question. What do you think the hidden costs to the
> U.S. of *not* having a $15K/yr. program are? Me, I'm inclined to think
> that they're substantial, and that in 20 years we might find that we *save*
> money by reducing social pathologies associated with non-effective welfare.
> What's your guess?
I'm inclined to agree. I'm also inclined to agree with Milton Friedman
that the short term result of a GAI bill at least would be inflation as
lots of people who could never afford basic things saw their living
standards rise very rapidly.
But the measurable costs of doing nothing are all too familiar--the
further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few amid vast zones of
deprivation and a sinking middle-class that is displaced as automation
increases and employment in physical production drops even further. The
result will be either state redistribution of wealth if the government
holds or a Russian-style meltdown if it doesn't.
The question is whether or not those who are relatively well off--and
statistically, despite my humble origins, I am compelled to count myself
among them--are willing to bite the bullet and stop pissing away the
future.
> > You see, 'entitlements' include...a zillion other
> > things that *you* currently receive benefits from just like I do.
>
> Some *you*s do, some don't. The _Wall Street Journal_ recently had an
> article about poor whites in Appalachia who would have a very hard time
> with the above pronouncement. Here is yet another benefit I would see from
> the $15K/yr. program: it would be race-blind.
Not if the IRS does it. You need a residence and someone who will vouch
for your identity even to pay your taxes or get your refund. Neither of
which is available to the poorest. That's a real problem. If you are poor
you cannot even get a bank account or a government check cashed without
giving a fraction of it to someone.
> More to the point, it would
> be *perceived* as race-blind, which might convince poor Appalachian whites
> that voting for welfare cuts is not the last word in political wisdom.
> Right now, I suspect that a lot of *possible* voters for an improved
> welfare program vote against the existing programs because they feel that
> they are completely left out of them.
Frankly, I think that a large fraction of the low-middle and working poor
who currently vote for welfare cuts would oppose anything that *was* race
blind for the usual familiar but deplorable reasons.
> > The present welfare state is the *cheapest* solution to poverty and easily
> > the worst. If you want a program that works to get people on their feet
> > again it's gonna cost money. But there's at least some prospect of a
> > payback. It's funny how the cost to the treasury of a tax cut is justified
> > on the basis of future tax revenues but *not* the cost of training a poor
> > person to work or giving them the daycare needed to do so.
>
> Again, I suspect that that could only be achieved by cutting other
> giveaways to the not-poor. Not physically impossible...just politically
> awfully hard.
Yep. What we need is a demagogue on the left with half the talent at
prevarication of Newt Gingrich and then perhaps the votes will
materialize. I would like to believe that it could be done strictly with
factual analyses but that isn't going to happen until a majority of the
voters master the subtleties of multi-variate regression analysis.
> > In the words of notable conservative Charles Murray: "In many cases there
> > is nothing a poor child can learn that will repay the cost of teaching."
>
> Is that from _The Bell Curve_?
Yep. Makes you just want to hurl doesn't it?
> > And Murray's 1984 book 'Losing Ground' is the single most frequently cited
> > conservative study of the issue. Do you endorse this too?
>
> As -- probably -- the only human being on the entire 80,000-member
> a.s.g-x newsgroup, besides yourself, who has in fact READ _Losing Ground_,
> I must take some issue with this. In _Losing Ground_ Murray was critical
> of welfare programs because he thought that they augmented poverty through
> unintended perverse incentives. He was not in my recollection opposed to
> efforts to end poverty per se -- merely to ones that didn't work. To
> quote from _LG_, ACCURATELY: "There is no such thing as an undeserving
> five-year-old."
I've already posted my screed about Murray's numbers in *both* books and
my judgement of his opinion is altogether different. While he *poses* as
being a reluctant opponent of antipoverty spending, he then proceeds to
present what can only be termed intentionally cooked numbers in order to
'reluctantly' conclude that such programs are inherently futile.
Such a conclusion would be unwarranted from his data even if his numbers
were not cooked and virtually every other social scientist in the field
has pointed this out which makes me wonder how someone can reluctantly
leap to such a laughably unwarranted conclusion.
The fact that he was unemployed himself until the American Enterprise
Institute and the Heritage Foundation took him in doesn't make him any
more credible in the academic independence department. Now, if his
methodology were sound then his funding source wouldn't matter. But it is
not. I'll post a full critique of 'Losing Ground' if you have the time to
respond to it, but I'd rather do it by phone since it would fill volumes.
> > I'd be glad to cite a reading list of boring books on the subject since
> > this stuff was what I went to grad school to learn about. But frankly,
> > hearing someone use the disclaimer "if I knew it was being spent wisely"
> > begs the question of what you would consider to be 'wise' welfare
> > spending.
>
> Like V-X, I would also be glad to see that reading list.
Will do.
> But frankly, reading this paragraph makes me wonder how awful the
> current system has to get before those of us who detest it get taken
> seriously by the Left.
'The Left' isn't the problem for the simple reason that it has no
political power in this country. What passes for the left wing of the
Democratic party would be center-right just about anywhere else. Plus,
'The Left' already wants to overhaul the system as did the mainstream
Democrats like McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis and Clinton all of whom
ran on promises to do so. (Carter did make a few nice changes when
Califano headed H.E.W.)
> I've already written at great length about the
> genuine atrocities of the Los Angeles public school system and won't again.
> I'll merely note that if the public schools in Los Angeles were *private*,
> somebody on this newsgroup would be very loudly pointing them out as proof
> of the incorrigible eternal viciousness of capitalism.
That's not fair, some of us would have pointed them out as example of the
eternal goofiness of Californians and an unfortunate historical
demographic selection process of Californians. I mean, Hollywood movies
suck rocks too and it's not because they're privately made. :)
--Carl
terra
[VX:]
: > : in what I said. You acknowledged that it might be a private joke, which it
: > : was, and then flamed away anyway.
[Jenny:]
: > Yeah, that's it. I knew it was a joke and thought I'd flame anyway.
: There was no hint of context-shift *or* the inside joke in the post that
: Jenny flamed. This is an exchange where the absence of inflection in
: cybertalk is a real problem.
or it was just a very effective case of:
| ,//:, ,/
| o:::::::;;///
\_/ >::::::::;;\\\
'''\\\' \ (pardon me, but i'm "ASCII-line-and-sinker-impaired")
It was an inside joke which turned into a very public troll. I don't see
the big deal. I remember being very embarassingly trolled by "jesse
garon's" assertion that anyone who doesn't know who was Truman's vice
president is a moron. That was not _clearly_ an inside joke (to me
anyway) nor did it have a hint of a context-shift. That's why it was so
embarassing when I bit so hard onto the bait. (though I think it was
just intended as a joke and not intentionally meant as a troll).
I don't see the difference, so let's just give VX and Alex a break and
drop it pleeeeeease.
-terra, kinda likes cybertalk...
--
Terra Goodnight
http://www.primenet.com/~terra/
Carl Beaudry
> Anyone out there ever give money to charities,
> like "Save the Children" that you year that pathetic Sally
> Struthers whining away on TV for? Did you ever bother to
> ask any of those charities what percentage of your donation
> goes to directly helping those children and what percentage
> goes into the administrative pockets of the fund-raising
> companies and the bureaucratic machine that is doubling
> as a worthwhile cause?
Yes. Ralph Nader publishes annual ratings of charitable organizations
where the throughput of organizations is estimated based upon independent
financial audits.
'Save the Children' is indeed pathetic. Charities range from around 3-5%
to 100% throughput and those run by conservative "Christian"
televangelists perennially score very low. Literally hundreds of millions
of dollars are being bilked by the cretins of the National Association of
Religious Broadcasters through various allegedly charitable scams. The PTL
club was one such scam and the host of Lynchburg, VA based operations will
have the IRS looking for hooks till doomsday while the Rev. Falwell
retires fat and happy.
At the risk of offending the faithful, fundamentalist "Christian"
charities have traditionally been bottom feeders in these audits. By
contrast, Catholic Relief Services rates bear the top. Which I ave no
explanation for. But I have personally seen non-profit organizations that
operated far more extravagantly than large for-private corporations.
Still, government programs are a different matter because they are
administered with the force of law and have Congressionlly mandated
accounting practices that differ from private organizations and make it
harder to misuse funds.
> It isn't a matter of throwing more money at the
> problem. It's a matter of using the money we have more
> efficiently.
Actually, I think it's a matter of both.
> Maybe, in order to reform welfare, the government
> should pass legislation restricting the percent of funds which can
> go to administrative costs?
Which is the opposite of what conservatives have been demanding for the
last 40 years. It has been the continual harassment of federal welfare
programs that has caused paperwork to absorb an increasing share of the
costs so that there is a paper trail to prove that money hasn't been spent
for political purposes or on cronies.
It seems that you can take your choice between a certain level of spoils
politicking or administrative overhead costs.
--Carl
Erich Schwarz
> ...how else can you explain the
> conservative reaction to the underclass but as a deep-seated character
> flaw?
How about massive stupidity? :^}
(Uh, maybe they'd *prefer* your explanation to mine...)
> They look on the unemployed, the homeless, the welfare
> recipients, and take it as an occasion for congratulating themselves on
> their conservative superiority instead of being appalled at the missed
> economic opportunity represented by these poor people not buying their
> goods and services. Where's the "enlightened self-interest" in that?
Nowhere. Which is why those of us who believe in "enlightened
self-interest" can get as appalled as Kantians about a lot of 1994 America.
--Erich Schwarz
Erich Schwarz
> My grandfather, not a terribly astute investor (he was getting 6% return
> back when everyone else was getting 12%), was just lucky to live and own
> land in Florida before the big real estate boom. I was just lucky to
> have that particular grandfather. Whence arises merit?
Not to be too annoyingly disputatious, but when I read this, it
occurred to me that maybe it was those "not terribly astute" personality
traits -- that prevented your grandfather from getting a 12% rate on
watered stock in the 1920s -- also enjoy actually living in Florida and
owning land in it for its own sake.
In my experience, chance favors the prepared mind. Not absolutely
always, but often enough that that's the way to bet. I think that there's
a lot more earned wealth out there than liberals like to admit.
Which still makes the unwillingness of today's rich to invest in
America's poor utterly dumbwitted...
--Erich
Erich Schwarz
brackets.
Micky DuPree wrote:
> My grandfather, not a terribly astute investor (he was getting 6% return
> back when everyone else was getting 12%), was just lucky to live and own
> land in Florida before the big real estate boom. I was just lucky to
> have that particular grandfather. Whence arises merit?
Not to be too annoyingly disputatious, but when I read this, it
occurred to me that maybe it was those "not terribly astute" personality
traits -- that prevented your grandfather from getting a 12% rate on
watered stock in the 1920s -- [that made him] also enjoy actually living
in Florida and owning land in it for its own sake.
In my experience, chance favors the prepared mind. Not absolutely
always, but often enough that that's the way to bet. I think that there's
a lot more earned wealth out there than liberals like to admit.
Which still makes the unwillingness of today's rich to invest in
America's poor utterly dumbwitted...[but what the heck! Soak the poor!
Vae victis! That which kills you makes me stronger, mein Liebchen!]
<whoops...disregard that last, inadvertantly revealing, outburst...>
--Erich
Jason Kodish
>
>coates (coa...@is.nyu.edu) wrote:
>Wrong. It simply means he's paying less for his share of all those nice
>little things. When you start giving them to him for free, then he's making
>a gain.
Which means *I* have to make up the difference. So his tax break means
I have more taxes to pay.
>Dude starts with 0.
>You take A from him in the form of various taxes, he has -A left.
>You decide the next year to take nothing from him, and he doesn't have A, he
>has 0 again. You haven't subsidized or given him anything; he hasn't made
>any gains.
X amount of goodies needs to be bought. Dude A gets a break. Dude B
has to make up for that break.
Comprende?
--
____________________________________________________________________________
Jason Kodish, | R - 1/2 g R =T
University of Alberta | un un un
Department of Gravitational Engineering |(Einstein Field Equation)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_____..---======~~^~~=======---.._____
______________________ __,-='=====____ ================ _____=====`=
(._____________________I__) - _-=_/ `--------=+=-------'
/ /__...---===='---+---_'
Jason Kodish
>Yes, dammit. You live in a SOCIETY. Humans are social animals, not
>abrogation of their responsibility to the system that enabled them to
>become strong. You can call that "socialist" (and probably will). I
>call it HUMAN. There is no civilization without taxation.
And those who forget these lessons often are found paying for them in
far worse ways than merely taxes.
Deny a man food,shelter and the neccessities of life, and he becomes a man
with nothing to lose.
A man with nothing to lose is a *very* dangerous creature.
>"I believe in property rights; I believe that normally the rights of
>property and humanity coincide; but sometimes they conflict, and when
>this is so, I put human rights above property rights." -- Theodore Roosevelt
:-)
>
>--
>Keith Ammann is gee...@evansville.net <- NEW ADDRESS!
>DNRC Lord High Geenius and Minister for Vegetability
><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>"I don't know that it will make a difference in the end, but it's important
>to object to abuse even when bullies continue to impose their way." --S.W.
><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
>Dig my home page: http://www.evansville.net/~geenius/geenius.html <- NEW!
>T-shirts for sale! E-mail me or see home page for details.
Jason Kodish
>
>
>Then I guess, as you say, "all bets are off". I don't have any problem at
>all with government spending as long as they're not spending it on something
>I think is truly a Bad Thing. My problem is with they way they fund their
>spending.
And what,pray tell, is a Good Thing(tm)?
>people defend what I consider to be theft (yeah, I'm one of those) with
>untruths.
Unless,of course, it is you doing the theiving.
Jason Kodish
>
>
>It's sort of like what I always say about "development" in the Third
>World--most people (though importantly not all) in the development industry
>would be horrified if someone "developed" in front of them.
And let's not forget that in this world,the poor far outnumber us.
By a long shot.
There's a work of fiction called Cataclysm by William Clark, I'd highly
recommend it. It's a story of what happens when the Third World defaults
on all it's debts. And a story about how venerable our society truly is.
Consider how much of our money is stored electronically, and what a few
good hackers could do....
coates
: At the risk of offending the faithful, fundamentalist "Christian"
: charities have traditionally been bottom feeders in these audits. By
: contrast, Catholic Relief Services rates bear the top. Which I ave no
: explanation for. But I have personally seen non-profit organizations that
: operated far more extravagantly than large for-private corporations.
In general, I would guess that part of the explanation for different
throughput is whether the organization is embedded in larger organization,
with goals (and budgets) of much larger size, so that the advantage of
skimming in the smaller organization is outweighed by the risk of
reputational damage to the larger organization. E.g., Catholic Church
would look bad and lose more; Falwell could give a crap because he has no
loyalty to or concern for anyone other them himself. I would bet that
Catholic Church, overall, is probably pretty low on the throughput scale.
But then maybe that's my know-nothingism coming out.
Maia Gemmill
: Ha! I made my money the old-fashioned way: I inherited it. My
: grandfather, not a terribly astute investor (he was getting 6% return
: back when everyone else was getting 12%), was just lucky to live and own
: land in Florida before the big real estate boom. I was just lucky to
: have that particular grandfather. Whence arises merit? I was born at
: the right time to qualify for Social Security Survivor's Benefits for
: four years of college. They eliminated that just as I was about to
: leave school, but they "grandfathered" it for those of us who already
: had it so that we wouldn't organize a protest. Hey, I've gotten mine, I
: don't pay into the system anymore, and I don't need any SS benefits to
: retire on. I could laugh my ass off at the rest of you sinking into the
: tar pit. But I would eagerly vote to make all of us who got SS in
: college PAY IT ALL BACK if it were part of a comprehensive across-the-
: board program to stifle non-means-tested entitlements and improve
: federal solvency, so I'm starting to take certain other people's casual
: personal attacks about my willingness to spend Other People's Money (tm)
: a little ill.
This reminds me of an argument I had with my mother a couple of years
ago.
My paternal grandfather is fairly wealthy, and I guess someday I'll probably
inherit a good-sized chunk of it (though probably not for 15 years or
so...my family has long-life genes). I was arguing something along the
line of "tax the rich and feed the poor," when my mother said, "but they
want to take away *your* money, *your* inheritance." I answered, "And what
did *I* ever do to deserve that money?" She just kind of looked at me for
a moment, and let the subject slide.
--
Maia Gemmill
Generation M: Club P
I think they know.
Eep.
Carl Beaudry
> Timothy Burke wrote:
>
> > 2) One thing we hear again and again from the anti-taxation know-nothings
> > who shriek, Daffy Duck-style "Mine, mine, mine" ... is that whatever
> > wealth an individual controls is his or her...own, earned without anyone
> > else's participation.
>
> Nice put-down here and below, but what alternative viewpoint do you
> seriously uphold? "From each according to his ability, to each according
> to his needs"? You go try having *no* property rights if you like. I'll
> watch.
Nowhere was that implied.
The all-too-familiar BolshevikContrast Gambit(tm) is a straw man. (Or,
more appropriately, a 'red herring.') The argument proposed here is one of
constitutionally and legally *limited* property rights as established by a
democratic state. Or, to recall Keith's appropriation of Theodore
Roosevelt:
"I believe in property rights; I believe that normally the rights of
property and humanity coincide; but sometimes they conflict, and when
this is so, I put human rights above property rights."
And, Constitutionally speaking, there are not many protections of property
rights and those which exist are fairly limited. There is nothing
approaching the "Congress shall make no law...." language. And while you
are correct that property rights must be respected universally, I defy any
libertarians out there to defend the view that property rights *precede*
the law, either logically or historically.
> ...the only reason most of [the poor] are *alive* is that modern
> capitalism has made it possible to feed and clothe several more billion
> humans than in that wonderful pre-industrial era of high virtue and low
> life expectancy. Take away the social arrangements that make rich
> Republicans rich, and most of the world would starve.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Technological assimilation predates capitalism by several millenia. It
predates democracy and has persisted in states that lacked both. It is
even found amoung lower primates, ferchrissakes! And it would seem that
technological and social advance is *not* a sine qua non of markets as
much of the Third World amply demonstrates.
Furthermore, the greatest gains in productivity have been in those states
which *did* limit property rights to a far greater extent than that
proposed by even the mildest libertarians--indeed it is those states which
libertarians seek to 'restore' to the dedicated purpose of
wealth-building.
> OK, specify *what* percentage of his money he has the right to say that
> about ["Mine! Mine! Mine!"]. Obviously you think it's less than 100%.
> So, what percentage of his money *do* you think he should be able to claim?
> 10%? 0%? What?
That depends upon the tax code and his state of residence.
> Most people earning wages are paying something like 30+% of their
> income in taxes already. Is one-third of a human being's productive power
> too little?...
Coincidentally, 30+% of the population still lives in poverty despite our
limited welfare state. Is cutting one-third of citizens out of the economy
too few for the system to be deemed unfit? What percentage would *you*
say are expendables?
We liberals want taxes to be low in the same way that capitalists want the
poor to be fed--up to a point.
> Am *I* allowed to decide what my obligation to society is? ....
Frankly, your rhetorical dalliance with a guaranteed annual income
proposal is the most revealing thing you've posted thus far. If in fact
you favor such a thing then I am hard-pressed to find any fault with your
political-economics at all, comrade Schwarz.
> There really is a virtue in people saying "mine, mine, mine." It's
> hard to see sometimes, but it's there.
Of course there is. That's exactly what the non-wealthy are doing when
they petition for a redistribution of wealth.
--Carl
___________________________________________________________________________
"The cost of living hasn't seemed to affect its relative popularity."
--Anon.
Geenius at Wrok
> Keith Ammann wrote:
>
> > The purpose ought to be to keep people out of poverty, period...
> > I recommend indexing the minimum wage to the
> > poverty level so that any one person working 40 hours per week at minimum
> > wage can support himself and two dependents at subsistence level. Then fix
> > welfare so that it pays 75 percent of that amount. Let people who work
> > less than 30 hours a week collect enough assistance to bring them up to
> > that 75 percent level -- but if they wanna make 100 percent, they've
> > gotta work full time.
> >
> > The importance of allowing one person to support three is that it allows
> > one parent to stay home and support children. I don't care which parent
> > stays home to raise the kids, but I firmly believe that one or the other
> > should...
>
> For the record: I would happily pay taxes to support this *and* to see
> it in the form of $15,000/recipient in cash.
Thank you, sir. It's so rare that someone agrees with me. :-)
Unknown
>
>The following is fiction, for now:
>July 12 2012
[...]
> There is talk of killing, of killing the guards, and
> taking it out the streets.
That might be a tad difficult since the liberals have
almost finished disarming the public up yer way.
All in the name of "reducing crime" eh?
Erich Schwarz
> Yes, the concept of property rights
> is a valid one. But you have to pay your bills too.
Yep. I agree with you.
It's not that I think tax rates should be zero -- they *can't*, even if
you're living in Libertopia. Nor do I think that we can get from here to
an anarcho-capitalist Libertopia in one fast step -- incremental reform of
the existing system will be needed first, and for some time to come.
It's just that it seems to me that some people sort of mystically
confuse themselves with the deity, Government, and then make pronouncements
about property rights from that apotheotic position. *That* has the same
effect on me as fingernails screeched along a chalkboard. Government is
not a god and individual human beings are not its votaries. And, contrary
to what Carl seems to be saying, I don't think that individual property
rights are something that are utterly subordinate to the whims of
government -- for the same reason that I don't think that the First
Amendment is.
--Erich Schwarz
Soviet prosecutor: "Who gave you a licence to write books?"
Joseph Brodsky: "Who gave me a licence to be a human being?"
Carl Beaudry
> ...contrary to what Carl seems to be saying, I don't think that
> individual property rights are something that are utterly subordinate
> to the whims of government -- for the same reason that I don't think
> that the First Amendment is.
Pardon my presumptuousness, but you have said almost *exactly* that when
you argued that all rights derive from the willingness of people to take
up arms to defend them--including the First Ammendment.
To the extent that the government represents the biggest, most powerful
heap of force presently assembled, it *does* justify Schwarznerian rights
until such time as someone else teaches it an evolutionary lesson in
long-term practicality. Your stated ethical empiricism gives you no other
available ground upon which to defend a rights position.
As for me, I contend precisely the opposite: that no government may
ethically violate the categorical moral imperative regardless of what
people are willing to fight or vote for. And I also grounded the provision
of life-sustaining necessities in the same categorical morality which does
not depend upon gunpowder for it's moral ground, but rather upon moral
reason.
--Carl
______________________________________________________________________________
"You can build a throne out of bayonnets, but you cannot sit on it for long."
--Boris Yeltsin
(quoting Russian proverb)
Timothy Kordas
> And that this made him more meritorious than people who get intrinsic
> pleasure from living in, say, Cleveland? (Don't laugh; there must be
> some.)
hehe...given a choice between Cleveland and anywhere in Florida I think
I'd be forced to live in Cleveland.
(and actually the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra is, supposedly, the best
in the nation...the Cleveland Museum of Art has a very nice Asian collection
...and both the Cleveland Cinematheque and the Cleveland Museum of Art
show loads of awesome movies)
-Tim
(lives in Cleveland)
--
Timothy J. Kordas
http://bambi.eeap.cwru.edu/tjk/tim.html
Carl Beaudry
> I'm sorry it looks that way. But if society really is the
> irresistable arbiter of all things -- including personal ability and
> property rights -- why does it matter? Presumably if Society Deified
> agrees with you and Timothy, my dissenting opinion is of ant-like
> insignificance.
There you go again.
You're conflating an empirical question with a moral one. It is not a
question of whether society is an 'irresistable arbiter of all things' but
rather whether any individual ought to be. I say not. For the simple
reason that people make mistakes.
In the scientific world, mistakes are not corrected by empirical data
springing forth from some empirical data tree, but rather by a systematic
and *collective* applied reason which works very hard to select specific
bits of empirical data which are then used to establish empirical
propositions within the collective.
So while you fancy that one person may be right and the world mistaken,
being right in a vaccuum is an act of monumental empirical inconsequence,
however important it may be in an intellectual or moral sense. It is thus
*your* reliance upon empiricism which argues for the moral
inconsequentiality of individual heretics. I submit that such a thing is
inconsistent with your true beliefs.
> When I see the "all wealth is social" argument, I basically
> hear "no wealth is actually yours to actually have, so cough it up,
> capitalist scum." That's not a particularly exciting imperative.
You are selectively hearing that argument in much the same way that Yoder
misinterprets the Golden Rule as implying self-abnegation. It does not.
The argument that "all wealth is social" does not mean that you own
nothing or that evryone owns everything, it means only that you rightfully
have no absolute claims to any material outside of your own body. (Except
possibly for oxygen, food and water).
Consider the example of mother and child. While the child resides
internally, you affirm the Daffy Duck principle with respect to the fetus.
Later, as an infant, you affirm a slightly weaker version of property
rights so that particular parents still have particular claims to
particular infants but society restricts what they may do to that child.
Later still, you observe progressively weaker versions of the Daffy Duck
principle until the child is an adult at which point you abridge *all*
chattel rights on the part of the parents.
The point is that there is an entire range of property rights within this
most basic and natural unit of human organization.
Similarly, there should be an even greater range of property relations
within a complex society. And this means that the most extreme form of
chattel governance--the "Mine! Mine! Mine!" rule (as espoused by Duck, D
et. al.; 1954) cannot be allowed to supercede that myriad of arrangements
and must be restricted to the material spatially contained within a living
individual.
--Carl
Kelly T. Conlon
>That might be a tad difficult since the liberals have
>almost finished disarming the public up yer way.
>All in the name of "reducing crime" eh?
Well, no 2nd amendment here. As much as I hate to see the draconian
anti-gun measures being proffered up by the Liberal, there is nothing in
the constitution to stop them.
KTC
--
Kelly T Conlon / con...@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca / Bureaucracy is as wrong as
cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite
potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to
the complete parasitism of a virus / William S. Burroughs, "Naked Lunch".
Erich Schwarz
>
> [Erich Schwarz wrote:]
> > Who gets to define the class of non-wealthy? And who manages the
> >system that makes such definitions? Who will the nomenclatura be this
> >time?
>
> Maybe I'm being thick, but I'm not sure what a property right is. Certainly
> I can eat the Ho-Hos in my fridge whenever I want.
Not if some loose-cannon Whiny Liberal suddenly enacts a "Windfall
Excess Ho-Ho Tax," to be paid instantaneously in kind... ;)
> I can't, of course, eat
> the Ho-Hos in your fridge without your permission. It's in between I get
> confused. Why can't I beat people up with _my_ stick?
There are a lot of possible answers to that question, depending on what
sort of "why" you have in mind. For a Kantian answer, direct your request
to "bea...@cc.swarthmore.edu".
In most libertarian discourse, the answer would be: "Because you're
choosing to use your property to damage the property of somebody else, in a
manner that you are neither adequately compensating them for nor obtaining
any form of their informed consent for."
> After all, it is
> _my_ stick, and who are you to limit my property rights by imposing conditions
> upon my use?
Consider the alternatives to such conditions. Unless you are the
Stick-Bashing World Champion, *you* are going to live in perpetual
uncertainly about whether you will make it home with an un-dinked body that
night.
> I can imagine an argument based upon your property rights, in
> particular the idea that you are your own property and I shouldn't damage
> it. After all, though, you knew that it was always a possibility that I could
> whap you with a stick if I wanted to.
But you're completely confused about what libertarians are advocating.
Generally they advocate a society in which initiating force and
perpetrating fraud are outlawed. Plainly gratuitously bashing somebody
with a stick is not kosher in that view.
> If this
> sounds a lot like an analogy for getting laid-off...
Not to me. There is a complex and subtle sense in which failing to
provide charity for the unemployed may, in the long run, be self-lacerating
in the same way that bashing people with sticks is. But, in general, I do
not believe that you can equate my refusing to hire you (jeez, you must be
desperate -- you want to be my assistant in lab, 50+ hrs./wk, earning less
than what *I* make? you fool...) with my beating you upside the head.
> Still, I'd be interested in the answer.
There's my answer.
--Erich Schwarz
Jason Kodish
>
> No: I'm ridiculing -- gently, I hope -- the idea that libertarianism
>constitutes a "moral vacuum." By asking just what the point is of debating
>individual libertarians if they are rebellious mites, bereft of the one
>source of all Light that is called Vox Populi.
>
Libertarianism doesn't constitute a moral vacuum, but libertarianism without
recognition that the capitalist system is not perfect, and will leave
some people out does.
In the end when the basic needs of all people can be met(through technology,
or other means), and the sole reason for working, and producing is to
gain extra benefits,we will have true liberty. Until then, your guaranteed
anual income is the next best thing. Something this leftist will easily
support.
>
>--Erich Schwarz
>
> "Yoooooooo-eee-ooo-eee-oooooh!" --Tarzan, while tree-swinging
Douglas Lathrop
> Why is it that _The Bell Curve_ has gotten such a thrashing from the
>left in this country? Because they can prove that there is no validity to
>the central points raised by that work? I don't think so. Because there
>have been, historically, horrific abuses of eugenics? Yes. And they're
>right to be roused by that precedent.
> I react to Marxism the way leftists respond to eugenics, and for
>exactly the same reason -- *massive historical abuses*.
> Please note what I am not saying here. I am not saying that anybody
>whatsoever who cites Marx is automatically willing to run a gulag. I don't
>think that. I also don't think that anybody who writes works about a
>genetic basis for intelligence is automatically willing to run gas chambers
>either, for that matter.
> What I am saying is that, with something like 40 million humans in
>this century killed by collectivist regimes, I have at least *some* right
>to stand up this newsgroup and challenge rhetoric that strikes me as
>collectivist. Just as Carl Beaudry has a right to challenge Murray and
>Herrenstein's writings, in the dark light of Auschwitz.
This is an illuminating point, and a valid one.
I've been following this thread closely, and I've concluded that the reason
it's going in circles (like so many of the threads around here) is that Erich
is arguing from a practical AND philosophical standpoint, while the statements
of Carl et al. about the nature of wealth are purely theoretical.
I have a hard time discussing pure theory - in part because I have no
formal grounding in philosophy, but also because I can't consider things in
a practical vacuum. When you're arguing theory, it's too easy to rationalize
or become an apologist for those times in real life when the theory has been
abused (or, in the view of your opponent, taken to its logical conclusion). I
mean, if you're going to make me a convincing case for egalitarianism, you
have to deal with what's happened in history when equality (or bringing
down the better-off, which IS sometimes mistaken for equality) has been
pursued at all cost. And the same thing is true if you're going to argue that
productive individuals were torn from the thigh of Zeus and are thus rightful
masters and mistresses of all they survey. I just can't accept it when
egalitarians look at gulags, or anarcho-capitalists look at sweatshops, and
then say, "Well, that's not what will happen when *real* such-and-suchism is
tried."
Back to lurkerhood,
Doug
D O U G L A S P. L A T H R O P
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Visit Stately PAPER CUT MANOR! http://www.primenet.com/~lathrop/index.html
Carl Beaudry
> > What I am saying is that, with something like 40 million humans in
> >this century killed by collectivist regimes, I have at least *some* right
> >to stand up this newsgroup and challenge rhetoric that strikes me as
> >collectivist. Just as Carl Beaudry has a right to challenge Murray and
> >Herrenstein's writings, in the dark light of Auschwitz.
>
> This is an illuminating point, and a valid one.
Except that I challeged Murray and Herrenstein in the dark light of
America in the 1980s, not Auschwitz in the 40s which I do not see as a
likely result of such vicious propaganda as 'The Bell Curve.' Far more
likely is the crucifixion of innocent and unprotected poor children on the
alter of windfall profits for the rich.
Anyone who thinks otherwise had better be able to explain why a nation
that annually spends $22 billion *at* *all* *levels* on welfare apparently
thinks that it spends too much. Particularly when *over* *2/3rds* of all
welfare recipients are children. (Source: House Ways and Means Committee
quoted in yesterdays Philadelphia Inquirer, p.1)
That is a clear and present link to the impending danger of welfare cuts.
By contrast, no such link has been shown between the welfare state as
espoused by American liberals and the drastically antidemocratic
collectivism of Stalinist Russia. That is the mythos of radical right
wing in this country with absolutely *ZERO* evidence to support it. Yet I
still hear it parroted.
So, unless Erich wants to also defend slavery and colonialism which killed
easily as many as Soviet communism, comparisons like that ought to be
dispatched en haste.
And at risk of sounding like an apologist, 40 million dead Russians is a
humongolopoulos stretch, as no one that I know of can document more than
10 million when you exclude those killed directly by Nazis though most
people think the number is around 20 million over half a century. (And
even *that* number needs to be compared with the alternative of extended
Balkan warfare and famine which had been the rule in that part of the
world before the communists came to power and which has resumed in their
wake.)
I also questioned the character and good intentions of Murray whose
obvious manipulation of numbers to please his sponsors is academically
sinful and worthy of heaps of derision. And I made valid methodological
charges to accompany each criticism of the work. So it's not the case that
I'm just grinding some ideological axe.
> I've been following this thread closely, and I've concluded that the reason
> it's going in circles (like so many of the threads around here) is that Erich
> is arguing from a practical AND philosophical standpoint, while the
statements
> of Carl et al. about the nature of wealth are purely theoretical.
I disagree.
I would *vastly* prefer to have a purely practical discussion of the issue
but Erich doesn't ever disagree at *that* level which is why I maintain
that he's a stealth liberal. Good God! The man favors legalized drugs and
a guaranteed annual income!
At a purely pragmatic level, I can easily make the case that casting ones
political lot with the anti-welfare crowd is the act of a moral miscreant
and I can use David Stockman as an empirical example. But Erich hasn't
ever done that. He votes the same way I do! But since Erich persists on
wanting to rescue what he seems to feel is the baby trapped in the
libertarian bathwater, the argument necessarily focuses on etheria like
property rights rather than votes in the Senate.
--Carl
Steve Andrews
Burke, tbu...@cc.swarthmore.edu writes:
> In article <schwarze.ccoma...@131.215.5.32>,
> schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu (Erich Schwarz) wrote:
[snip]
> > Political failures are the norm in public education, not the rare
> > exception. I wish this wasn't so -- frankly, I'd rather have the U.S.
> > public schools work as well as its publicly-funded scientific
research than
> > otherwise. But public education in the U.S. really is a hideous sore
on
> > the body politic, and as damning an indictment of the public sector
as any
> > factory town is of the private sector.
>
> Sure. But private sector management of the schools wouldn't be any
better.
> The problem is not with the public/private nature of the management. The
> problem is a) available resources and their distribution and b) the
lack of
> classroom autonomy in either public or private management.
Agreed. Too much is spent on 'administration' and not enough on
salaries, supplies, maintenance, construction, etc.
I think another problem is the backgrounds (economic, familial) of the
students coming into school. My wife has students whose parents tell
them to get in fights so they aren't perceived as wimps. My wife can't
combat that during 180 hours of school a year. The mother and
grandmother of one of her students are always making excuses for the
student, and overreacting to every perceived slight, no matter how minor.
The mother is my age, sill lives with her mother, and cannot read or
write beyond an elementary school level. She has no job or survival
skills, and her son is being raised the same way; he's a classic victim.
How can a school system educate him and make him aware of the importance
of an education when he comes from that environment? There are schools
filled with students like that, and I think that blaming the schools for
failing to educate is the easy, incorrect way out. Maybe if all they had
to do was educate, would I be willing to blame the schools and the
teachers. Schools are asked to counsel, teach 'values', teach drug use
prevention, teach basic social skills, and control unruly students, with
no means of discipline available. Shouldn't most of these things be done
by the parents in the home before the kids get to school? Should we
expect the schools to pick up the slack left by
inattentive/poor/nonexistent parenting? Is it possible to hope for a
solution?
Sorry for the rant. Since my wife is a teacher, I get a little upset
thinking about all the 'blame schools for everything' mentality I see in
news reports and politics.
Steve A.
Steve Andrews
schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu writes:
> Chris Lehmann wrote:
[snip]
> Let me make one point: it is not obvious to me how you can say in
one
> breath "public schools aren't so horrible" and then in the next say
"give
> parents vouchers and they'll all flee the schools." Kind of a cognitive
> dissonance there, wouldn't you say? :^}
The reality is "public schools aren't so horrible"; the perception is
that they are all cesspools of violence, failing facilities, and horrible
teachers. Parents with that perception are the ones referred to in the
comment "give parents vouchers and they'll all flee the schools." But
you probably already knew that.
>
> > The fact remains that the public
> > schools, I think, manage pretty well given the disdain out society
has
> > shown with education of late...
>
> Heh heh. It's not "of late." In your copious free time ;) check
out
> Richard Hofstadter's _Anti-Intellectualism in American Life_. And gape
at
> anti-educational quotes from 250 years ago...
I may do that; it may be preaching at the choir, so to speak, but what
the heck. Any idea why this sentiment seems so deep rooted? Is it
unique to USA culture? Has their ever been a pro-intellectual period in
American life? Should I just read the book? : )
Steve A.
Chris Lehmann
: Chris Lehmann wrote:
: > How do you propose to educate the kids whose
: > parents don't care about a voucher?
: They do care. California's voucher initiative had a massive "Yes" vote
: among inner-city blacks in Los Angeles a few years ago. It was the whites
: in the San Fernando Valley who helped defeat it -- at least around here
: where I live.
hmmmm.... of course, this begs the question of voter turn-out... thinking
out loud... could there be a correlation between those parents who voted
and those parents who would care enough to educate their kids?
I think that there are a lot of inner-city families that care about their
kids, I also think that there are a lot of families (in and out of the
city) who don't care about the child's education. Those kids would lose
even bigger in a privitization scheme.
: > Where will the funds come when all
: > the "good" kids leave? Who will you get to teach in those schools?
: Good questions, and the rest of your post's questions are good too.
: Right now the only thing I can do is refer you to _The Brain Race_ by David
: Kearns and [first name?] Doyle. That's the only serious detailed proposal
: I've ever seen that strikes me as addressing the issues you raise.
: Let me make one point: it is not obvious to me how you can say in one
: breath "public schools aren't so horrible" and then in the next say "give
: parents vouchers and they'll all flee the schools." Kind of a cognitive
: dissonance there, wouldn't you say? :^}
Well, on one level, yes... although, remember, I did say that private
school has all *kinds* of advantages by being able to pick and school,
whereas public school has the mandate to teach all the kids. Plus, I
think that right now, public schools are getting a bad rap. So perhaps,
the perception of problems would cause parents to flee, when, in
actuality, private schooling isn't necessarily better.
Despite having the deck stacked in it's favor, I'm ot sure how much
"better" private schooling is on the whole. I'm a public school high
school boy, and I went to a college where there were a *ton* of private
school kids... (some rich, some not-so-rich... whatever...) and with many
of the high school educations they got, I'd stack my Pennsbury High
education up with any of them. Of course, being from a private school
meant, in many cases, that they had better feeder programs into colleges,
and that *is* an advantage, but for my money, few private schools could
have had teachers that were much better than *some* of mine.
: > The fact remains that the public
: > schools, I think, manage pretty well given the disdain out society has
: > shown with education of late...
: Heh heh. It's not "of late." In your copious free time ;) check out
: Richard Hofstadter's _Anti-Intellectualism in American Life_. And gape at
: anti-educational quotes from 250 years ago...
Sure... we agree here. :) But I'm scared that it might be getting worse.
: Good for you!!
Thanks... When I hear from schools, you'll all know. :)
Chris "Playing the waiting game..." Lehmann
--
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c...@access.digex.net | http://www.access.digex.net/~cdl/chris.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
terra
: Despite having the deck stacked in it's favor, I'm ot sure how much
: "better" private schooling is on the whole. I'm a public school high
: school boy, and I went to a college where there were a *ton* of private
: school kids... (some rich, some not-so-rich... whatever...) and with many
: of the high school educations they got, I'd stack my Pennsbury High
: education up with any of them.
Chris, pardon me if I'm somewhat naive here, but "Pennsbury" sounds just a
teensie bit more um, advantaged than say "Chavez High". Care to stack up a
Chavez High Education versus a private school? Remember your public
school education (and mine, which was also quite good) is in another
universe than those obtained at many of our inner-city public schools.
I don't think it's the Pennsbury kids, but rather the Chavez kids that
may have the most to gain by selecting their educational institutions.
-terra
--
,//:, ,/ Terra Goodnight
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>::::::::;;\\\
'''\\\' \ ASGX Home Page: http://www.primenet.com/~terra/asgx.html
Erich Schwarz
>
> Erich Schwarz wrote:
>
> > Carl Beaudry wrote:
> > > In the scientific world... ...mistakes are not corrected by empirical data
> > > springing forth from some empirical data tree, but rather by a systematic
> > > and *collective* applied reason...
> > ^^^^^^^^^^
> >
> > A gross and misleading oversimplification -- not unexpected, coming
> > from a non-scientist, but disappointing.
>
> Me, a non-scientist? You mean there's a club I have to join?
For all know you may in fact be a crypto-scientist. :)
The problem is that in your pronunciamentos on "In the scientific
world...", you're being very, VERY good at maintaining that "crypto-"
status, at least as far as I'm concerned. Your description of science is
about as off-base, in my experience, as Newt Gingrich's rapturous
descriptions of roseate orphanages and Jeffersonian bible-thumping.
> As I understand it, science is the exercise of reason in an attempt to
> understand the empirical world. No one told me that I needed a secret
> decoder ring. Damn!
As I understand it, science is the systematic exercise of reason and
experimental work in an attempt to understand the world.
Being a scientist on some level is probably universal -- just as being
a philosopher or politician is, in some basal sense, also a universal
profession.
Which is neither here nor there. Not everybody is Kant or Einstein or
FDR. And not everybody can comment on What Doing Science is Actually Like
from equally cogent first-hand experience.
I made a decision to do molecular biology when I was 12. I majored in
it at college when I was 16. I started my first lab work just shy of 18.
I've coauthored two research papers. I'm writing my first research paper
as the primary author right now. I've got another project that I hope to
complete and publish as my second primary-authored paper -- specifically,
development of a new technology for detection mutations in populations --
by late 1995.
I've spent about half my life learning how to do this, and I've gotten
my first grey hair while still in grad school. I've gone to about 300
seminars in my field, read roughly 500 to 1000 professional papers about
it, peer-reviewed about 25 papers that went into major journals. The paper
I'm about to publish is entirely my work -- unlike a lot of people, I'm not
publishing as "my work" something that was handed to me 50% done, or work
that's in fact been heavily aided by technicians -- and that means that I
am thoroughly familiar with every step of the procedures, in all their
splendid drudgery, from making the phenol solutions to computing the
phylogenetic trees.
I do this goddamned stuff. You don't. That's not an insult and it's
not a value judgement -- Ghu knows there are lots of more pressing things
in the world than cloning brain-genes from flies, and you've probably done
at least some of them, so good for you!
It just means that, when I see you write these incredibly
authoritative paragraphs about WHAT SCIENCE IS REALLY LIKE, and I find that
they bear little resemblance to what I've actually experienced the actual
doing of science to be like, I get a wee bit testy for some weird reason.
> But since I'm clearly deficient in that department, perhaps you might act
> as spokesperson for the Dr. Science Fan Club cabal and explain exactly
> what part of the scientific enterprise you contend is *not* collective?
> But please state your hypothesis in words and phrases *entirely* of your
> own invention.
>
> And when you do, see if the resulting noises sound more like a chimp on a
> termite mound or Louis Pasteur.
You're missing the point completely. It is not necessary that one
invent everything from scratch in one's own life to be individual and
creative. What is necessary is that one be able to take the givens and do
something *with* them that is beautiful, original, difficult for others,
and enlightening to others. The struggle to do that is intensely
individual. It can't be anything else. The individuality begins at the
very moment that one has in fact made some effort to learn from the
collective what is statically and previously known. From that point
onward, one is as alone as, in my experience, I have ever been.
The driving forces that make people do this for a lifetime are, in my
observation and experience, intensely selfish. We do it for a Ph.D.
degree. For self-love -- to feel exquisitely clever. For the right to
play the game again, by becoming a well-funded and tenured professor. For
self-approval -- to be able to say, "That discovery helped lead to a cure
for cancer, and *I* made it." For the right to soar out of the herd and
touch excellence. For splendor.
If you try to fit that into a Procrustean bed of collectivism, it will
die. To the extent that people have tried, science *has* died. And if you
try to winnow out the people who do it for what you or Kant would consider
the wrong reasons, you will have depopulated the field. Nobody does this
work for *either* the pay *or* "to follow the categorical imperative."
The paradox is that the final expression of one's individuality is to
add something to the collective store of knowledge. Ultimately, the great
mark of success for a scientist is that people cite one's work as if it
were just a plain fact -- without bothering to remember who did it. Here
one sees a kind of cyclic harmony between the two principles of collective
and individual effort. The individual can't *sustain* the science because
by definition it is only useful when communicated, and the individual can't
*hang on* to the science because he or she is mortal. Science must be made
collective knowledge to be of permanent use -- and that is the thin grain
of truth in your gibes about it.
Yet without the successive efforts of strong individuals, the
collective knowledge of science will sicken and putresce into sludgy and
useless dogma.
The collective gives science permanence, but the individual gives it
life.
How terribly dead the world will become, if either science or any other
area of human endeavor is ever allowed to become a shrine to the general
will.
--Erich Schwarz
Carl Beaudry
> 6 million Russians dead in gulags *for 1941-1945 alone* and that the "20
> million dead in WWII" figure should actually be "14 million killed by
> Nazis, 6 million by the home team." [...]
>
> And, BTW, when I said "40 million dead from collectivism", I meant
> Russia *and* China *and* Cambodia. And I was trying deliberately to be
> conservative in my estimate.
Granting this in arguendo, numbers on that scale defy rational calculus.
Not because they don't mean anything, but because they are spread out over
half the world and half a century and counted with a skewed methodology.
But since you seem intent on getting me to play devils advocate, imagine
me with a great big red KGB hat (Quath can vouch that I do own one)
beating my shoe on the desk at the U.N. and shouting that easily that many
and more died of famine and colonial wars (not to mention world wars)
within market economies during the same time period even though enough
food was produced in those economies to feed everyone.
Now you may not find that point convincing, but, like your 40 million
figure, it *is* an aspect of what happened on planet earth from 1917 to
the present. And you cannot blithely say that collectivism killed those
40 million people without also by the same calculus saying that capitalism
killed the other millions as well, thus making your point somewhat moot at
best.
But both atrocities *did* really happen.
And while I can and *do* categorically blame *both* sides for violating
the categorical imperative and crucifying innocent people on the alter of
economic theory, your ethical position of "long-term success *equals*
morality" *by definition* only allows you to find moral fault with the
losing side.
--Carl
__________________________________________________________________________
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the
ability to function."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
Erich Schwarz
> Germany was hardly tolerant of opposing viewpoints. Still isn't, yet it
> seems to be doing ok. Why does it keep doing so well?
*IN 1931-1945*! Which is exactly when its brightest people all left!!!
Before 1931, it damn well *was* tolerant of the intellect compared to
places like Italy. It was the first country in history to have large-scale
funding of basic research in the sciences, for crying out loud. And people
like Frederick the Great, however despotic they were towards the
unfortunate bulk of their people, at least did have the sense to support
thinkers like Voltaire.
FWIW, the high point of Germany's tolerance for intellect pretty much
coincides with the period where it became the world's leader in higher
learning -- about 1815 to 1929, I would date it, or between the infusion of
French thinking caused by the Napoleonic Wars to the start of Weimar's
collapse. This also coincides with the period where it went from being a
hodgepodge of peasant duchies to being one of the world's first
technological and economic great powers.
I keep trying to get off this thread, but the trolls on it are well-nigh
irresistable...
--Erich
Carl Beaudry
> Carl Beaudry wrote:
>
> > As I understand it, science is the exercise of reason in an attempt to
> > understand the empirical world....
>
> As I understand it, science is the systematic exercise of reason and
> experimental work in an attempt to understand the world.
Since experimental work is a subset of 'the exercise of reason,' I fail to
see the heresy of my allegedly naive position--or much difference between
it and your own. In fact, the *only* difference is my distinction between
the world and the *empirical* world which was legitimated by a member of
your guild--Dr. Heisenberg--though it was established by philosophers
centuries earlier.
And in view of this rather striking correlation between my
'oversimplified' view of science and your own, you may have to excuse me
when I reassert that rationally figuring out how the world works *is* a
universal human occupation just as politics is. And on that account, I
shall genuflect to your professional standing as the arbiter of all
empirical fact on the same day that you bless Newt Gingrich's hegemony
over what is the proper role of government.
The fact that you may *feel* lonely working in a discipline that
nevertheless requires collective judgement hardly disqualifies the
enterprise from being collective. Anytime you feel particularly isolated,
you may wish to recall LBJ's discription of the oval office as the
lonliest room on earth.
The whole point of me calling science a collective discipline was that no
individual can establish what consitutes acceptible standards of proof and
practice. That rather banal point was the sum total of my original post
which you found to be such "a gross and misleading oversimplification" and
apparently sufficient grounds for excising this 'non-scientist' from the
ranks of those who rationally attempt to understand the world.
I would have found your response much more incisive if only I had made the
argument which it refutes so thoroughly.
> Not everybody is Kant or Einstein or FDR. And not everybody can comment
> on What Doing Science is Actually Like from equally cogent first-hand
> experience.
While I can understand your annoyance with presumptuous little
know-it-alls like me making pronouncements about what you consider to be
your professional turf, I *am* after all the author of my own words and
that qualifies me to report that I did *not* comment on the inner motives
of individual scientists but rather on the need for those individuals to
be replicated and confirmed by a collective group. That's the sum total of
my post that you found so objectionable.
I defy you to show my words to any contrary effect.
That you *rewrote* my statement as "What Doing Science is Actually Like"
with a capitalized proper noun construct of your own devise suggests that
the difference between what I actually wrote and what you held to be so
arrogantly mistaken did not altogether elude you.
This context-morph is approximately as insouciant as interjecting a
limerick involving Nantucket into a discussion of Aristotle's 'Poetics' on
the grounds that they are both about poems and just about as useful since
you *affirmed* my original statement at the end of your post but only
after bludgeoning a chimera which must have been terribly frightening
given the row it occasioned.
Nevertheless, if you felt your professional toes being stepped on, it is
only because they extended beyond your own scientific suburb into an area
to which you *have* no definitive scientific proof--the motives and
character of most other scientists.
While not as extensive as yours, my scientific training and practice has
been in the social sciences and that training suggests that you are no
more enabled to comment on the interior motives of other scientists than I
am to comment on those of computer nerds.
Such a thing is perhaps suitable for survey research, but not individual
proclamation, since, to my knowledge, social science affords no
professional courtesy of that kind. So if my little screed trod too
tenderly upon your professional toes, it is perhaps due to the position of
your toes and not to my rhetorical feat. (Pun intended.)
In short, from a social-scientific standpoint, your lifetime immersion in
the profession constitutes anecdotal evidence at best with zero
experimental control, and I doubt that is the methodology you have chosen
for your own research papers.
> I do this goddamned stuff. You don't. That's not an insult and it's
> not a value judgement -- Ghu knows there are lots of more pressing things
> in the world than cloning brain-genes from flies, and you've probably done
> at least some of them, so good for you!
>
> It just means that, when I see you write these incredibly
> authoritative paragraphs about WHAT SCIENCE IS REALLY LIKE, and I find that
> they bear little resemblance to what I've actually experienced the actual
> doing of science to be like, I get a wee bit testy for some weird reason.
As a layperson whose post did not involve or impugn your professional
intent, I cannot rule out the 'male PMS' hypothesis as an explanation of
your reaction to my original statement. But as someone trained in the
specialized use of language, I can empathize with you since I experienced
a similar reaction when my carefully worded statement about the sociology
of science was recast as a universal proclamation about the animating
principle of all scientists for the singular and undisguised purpose of
netting a few red-herrings.
I just hope you like seafood.
> > what part of the scientific enterprise you contend is *not* collective?
> > But please state your hypothesis in words and phrases *entirely* of your
> > own invention.
> >
> > And when you do, see if the resulting noises sound more like a chimp on a
> > termite mound or Louis Pasteur.
>
> You're missing the point completely. It is not necessary that one
> invent everything from scratch in one's own life to be individual and
> creative.
But I was not missing that point, I was making an entirely *different* one!
My claim was not about *why* you choose to do what you do. I am almost
totally ignorant of that. Rather my argument was about the *place* of
that work in the social order vis-a-vis the need for a legitimating group
of practitioners to judge it. And I fail to see how your dalliance with
the brains of flies uniquely qualifies you to refute that point.
> The driving forces that make people do this for a lifetime are, in my
> observation and experience, intensely selfish..... For splendor.
This manifesto, eloquent though it may be, constitutes one survey
datapoint and not an empirically established fact of natual law. So
you'll have to pardon me if I question the exceptionally broad polemical
conclusion that you drew from it down below.
> If you try to fit that into a Procrustean bed of collectivism, it will
> die. To the extent that people have tried, science *has* died.
First of all, this assumes a totally different meaning of the word
'collective' than I had used--and hardly a common one at that.
You seem to assume that 'collectivism' intrinsically means donning some
kind of Lilliputian straightjacket as opposed to simply exhibiting and
expecting reciprocal honest concern for other human beings (what Kant
called good will.)
Secondly and more ironically, you have ignored the *empirical* challenges
that Tom Bitterman posted to even your distorted characterization of
collectivism. Germany, Russia and Japan come to mind as not-terribly
laissex-faire, yet scientifically advancing societies.
The Sputnik team managed to upchuck their scientific hemlock where no man
had gone before despite being ensconced in what could hardly have been
deemed a free society of atomized individuals. And certainly the German
academies that produced so many great scientists should put your error
bars on steroids. Need I mention the Japanese corporate-state culture?
I submit that science, like art and politics, *is* a universal human
occupation and it cannot be killed short of human extinction, though it
can certainly be hindered by human stupidity which is not confined to
communist governments I'm afraid. Stupidity is alive and well in the
capitalist order and doing just fine.
> The paradox is that the final expression of one's individuality is to
> add something to the collective store of knowledge....The individual can't
> *sustain* the science because by definition it is only useful when
> communicated, and the individual can't *hang on* to the science because he
> or she is mortal. Science must be made collective knowledge to be of
> permanent use -- and that is the thin grain of truth in your gibes about it.
FYI, that 'paradox' was 100% of the original point that I was making.
That you consider it to be a 'thin grain of truth' says more about your
interpretation of my post than I had ever intended to say about science in
the first place.
Nevertheless, if you require a promethian mythos to validate what is
nevertheless anecdote, conjecture and personal opinion, then I'll recount
that I owe my current circumstances to the fact that I was too ignorant of
computer science circa 1980 to realize that mainframes were the key to
doing interesting computation. May they rest in peace.
But while I've been doing this for approximately as long as you've been
doing what you do, I nevertheless cannot speak with authority on behalf of
my collective discipline the way you have just done any more than I am
qualified to speak for my generation.
I am, after all, only one datapoint. With no experimental control.
--Carl
__________________________________________________________________________
"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet
hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young."
--Konrad Lorenz
Erich Schwarz
of practical reasons -- it's a Good Thing that I'm getting a reply to each
of my posts with about a 7-day time lag. :^}
Carl Beaudry wrote:
> And while I can and *do* categorically blame *both* sides for violating
> the categorical imperative and crucifying innocent people on the alter of
> economic theory, your ethical position of "long-term success *equals*
^^^^^^^
> morality" *by definition* only allows you to find moral fault with the
> losing side.
Practicality, not success. Practicality is a rational expectation from
morality, which fairly well correlates with success. But success is
*guaranteed* to no mortal.
Now that I've corrected your misquote --
1. One corollary of my hypothesis is that *we'd all be better off if
avoidable famines out here had in fact been avoided*.
I've *never* argued that because a (U.S.) bundle of behaviors was on
balance more successful than another (Soviet) bundle, therefore the U.S.'s
behaviors were not merely relatively superior but absolutely optimal.
Had I ever espoused anything *that* inane you would indeed have a
point. I haven't, as my repeated posts in favor of major structural
reforms of the United States indicate. There is in fact a lot of long-term
*im*practicality (read "evil") in America today. That we have not already
sunk under it is a tribute to such practicality and virtue as we already
possess, but it is no basis for snoozing on our laurels.
To say it again, since you seem to find my viewpoint as hard to
understand as I find yours: the fact that I consider the capitalist world
on balance strongly preferable to the collectivist world in no way means
that I am happy with the status quo here. Nor does it mean that I think,
because the "bad" of the U.S. et al. is much better than the "worse" of the
U.S.S.R. et al., that there is no practical or ethical point in trying to
change "bad" to "better" here.
2. Despite your willingness to play devil's advocate, consider the
following scenario: at *any point in history* of your choosing, from 1918
AD to 1989 AD, you are told by a superpowerful ET that you are going to be
randomly placed in some position in either the U.S. or the Soviet Union --
with a straight 50% chance of winding up in either nation, and with your
position determined by a roulette wheel weighted by actual human
population. Knowing nothing else whatsoever about what your status was
going to be -- beyond the statistical probability that you were more likely
to be in a large classification of humans (e.g. factory worker) than a
small one (e.g. industrialist) -- which society would you find yourself
hoping to wind up in?
Me, I'd pick the U.S. any time, from 1917 on. That would be reflective
of my perception that, *on balance*, the U.S. was preferable for the median
human being (whatever *that* is.)
If you like, you can object that this is a skewed comparison because
the Soviet Union was horribly oppressed by 5000 U.S. Marines landing in
Vladivostok for 1 year -- or whatever -- and that the comparison thus ought
to be between the U.S.S.R. and some other country.
If so, please specify exactly *what* nation in the capitalist world you
think *would* be a valid antonym of the U.S.S.R.
(If you pick a country like "Portugal," please then examine a world map
and almanac, compare the natural resources of the U.S.S.R. and Portugal,
and ask yourself how come it is that a *capitalist* Portugal about equals,
in its effective median standard of living, a *collectivist* mega-multi
trans-continental behemoth of an empire-country spanning 11 time zones and
with a boatload of the world's oil, metals, farmland, water, and smart
people.)
--Erich Schwarz
Erich Schwarz
> ...imagine
> me with a great big red KGB hat ... I do own one ...
What a depressing artifact to own.
--Erich (finds KGB hats about as
repulsive as Waffen-SS
uniforms, and for identical
historical reasons)
Erich Schwarz
> It's interesting, though, that the people pushing the voucher plan never
> make any distinction between well supported suburban public schools like
> yours and Lehmann's (and mine) and your Chavez High. Would a voucher
> program have any practical use in Pennsbury's school district?
The real point is that with a voucher poor parents have at least the
possibility of paying for a private school comparable to Pennsbury. Right
now they basically have to live in Pennsbury or they're out of luck.
Another real point is that with money in their hands, poor parents can
demand that a bad school shape or else. Right now that's sort of hard to
do, and the administration of places like Los Angeles knows it -- so
there's no substantive reform.
> I became convinced some time back that vouchers are really just a crafty
> way of funneling public funds into parochial schools. Any private school
> that wants to stay "elite" (read: elitist) can just hike its tuition,
> say, $200 a year over the voucher amount, keeping out the riff-raff.
And any parent who gives a hoot can save $0.55 a day to compensate for
that. :)
To be a bit less facetious: the real point of a serious voucher program
("serious" IMO is a voucher that gives to each child *exactly* as much
money as is being spent in taxes for the public school system per child --
around here, around $4500 per year) is that, while with $0 vouchers the
marginal cost of a private school's doing what you describe is zero, with
$4500/yr./child in the hands of "riff-raff" it gets *hard* to do
discriminatory pricing without losing market share.
> Besides, in a district where the public schools are really THAT bad, all
> the well-off kids are in private schools already.
The *point* is that we goddamned *cannot* settle for the current bowl
of crap in which we accept public schools miseducating the 90% who are not
well-off! That is the point of giving vouchers to everybody!
Jeez, Keith! :^}
> All that will happen
> when vouchers are introduced into a bombed-out public school system is a
> massive shift from the publics into parochial schools, which are so
> strapped for cash that they'll take anyone.
And which tend to work on about half as much per child for comparable
quality of education, at least here in L.A. This is a horrorshow?
Also note that parochial schools need not be exclusionary. I don't
recall ever being *asked* if I was Catholic during 4 years in Loyola High
School -- hell, when asked our family's religion, my dad wrote "apostate"
on the application form! (True story!)
Frankly, I think there are more parochial educators who actually want
to educate than you may think. Not that parochial schools are a panacea --
Catholic grammar schools, for instance, have a deserved reputation for
being awful. But it's not the case that it's crummy public schools or the
void.
> Then the public schools will
> be poor, violent, undersupported and mostly atheist, and the
> right-wingers can pat themselves on the back for giving those little
> heathen brats just what they deserve.
The right-wingers are laughing at both you and me, Keith, right now.
They've got the system they need to keep 90% of America dumb -- and they've
got advocates of public education to fight for it, from good intentions but
not necessarily well-aimed ones. :^/
> Besides, I recall seeing a study once in which it was revealed that the
> quality of a school was totally uncorrelated to the amount spent on each
> student per capita, the nature (public, private, parochial) of the school
> itself or any political factor.
FWIW, I recall a study refuting that study.
> All that mattered was whether the
> parents cared. If you want to shore up urban public schools, you have to
> make the parents care first. Otherwise, NOTHING will work.
Well, it's not either-or. Parents need to care. My second-hand
observation is that parents in Los Angeles *do* care, a LOT, including the
blacks in the allegedly indifferent ghettos. But they have nowhere to go
-- and the people arguing for public education at all costs don't know or
care just how bad the existing system in Los Angeles is.
--Erich Schwarz
Brian Upton
bea...@cc.swarthmore.edu (Carl Beaudry) writes:
|>
|> In fact, I'd like to see *anyone* rationally explain curiousity. I can't.
|>
Curiousity increases the odds of species survival. I mean, as far
as I can tell, higher brain function is just a particularly sophisticated
collection of techniques for correctly extrapolating future events.
We perform pattern recognition, make generalizations, reason about
cause and effect, all to better anticipate what the universe may
throw at us. In this context curiousity seems perfectly natural. It's
a behavioural predisposition toward gathering information about one's
environment. Of course it sometimes results in the death of a pack
member, but with any luck it will be a low-status male so the impact
on the survivability of the local gene pool will be negligable. This
also just happens to explain why science is so often the province of
geeky guys with poor social skills ... .
Present company excepted, of course.
--
+-------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Brian Upton | "Books? Books? My god! You don't understand. They were far |
| Chapel Hill | too busy living first-hand for books. Books!" -J. March |
+-------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
Geenius at Wrok
> Geenius at Wrok wrote:
>
> > All that will happen
> > when vouchers are introduced into a bombed-out public school system is a
> > massive shift from the publics into parochial schools, which are so
> > strapped for cash that they'll take anyone.
>
> And which tend to work on about half as much per child for comparable
> quality of education, at least here in L.A. This is a horrorshow?
Damned straight. Bad is bad enough; bad plus religious orthodoxy, I
wouldn't wish on a dog. Especially since (in my experience -- YMMV)
parents of parochial-school kids are less concerned with education than
with conformity and obedience.
> Also note that parochial schools need not be exclusionary. I don't
> recall ever being *asked* if I was Catholic during 4 years in Loyola High
> School -- hell, when asked our family's religion, my dad wrote "apostate"
> on the application form! (True story!)
Yeah, but you still had to take religion classes, right? No one ever
learned analytical thinking skills from that.
> Frankly, I think there are more parochial educators who actually want
> to educate than you may think. Not that parochial schools are a panacea --
> Catholic grammar schools, for instance, have a deserved reputation for
> being awful. But it's not the case that it's crummy public schools or the
> void.
Don't EVEN get me started on Catholic school quality. I'll just cite one
anecdotal example and then shut up: When I was in high school, my mom
tutored students in math for SAT preparation, and I earned extra bucks by
scoring the sample tests for her, so I got to see the scores. One of the
classes she taught was at Regina Dominican in Evanston, Ill. The median
math score in that class was about 240. You get 280 just for writing
your name on the answer sheet and handing it in blank. By the end of the
course, they'd labored to get their scores up to that 280.
--
Keith Ammann is gee...@evansville.net
DNRC Lord High Geenius and Minister for Vegetability
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
"Imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."
-- George Orwell on the 1990s job market
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dig my home page: http://www.evansville.net/~geenius/geenius.html
Erich Schwarz
> Of course [proto-science] sometimes results in the death of a pack
> member, but with any luck it will be a low-status male so the impact
> on the survivability of the local gene pool will be negligable. This
> also just happens to explain why science is so often the province of
> geeky guys with poor social skills ... .
You don't mean ME? ...do you?
> Present company excepted, of course.
Damn straight!
--Erich
Timothy Burke
schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu (Erich Schwarz) wrote:
> I confess that I don't yet have a fully articulated opinion of what the
> net effects of capitalism on the Third World have been overall. I suspect
> there's fewer happy answers there than in the U.S., which does after all
> have a lot of slack to give away -- we're rich enough to make mistakes and
> still all have enough to eat *and* still make money at least sluggishly. I
> would welcome comments from somebody who has thoroughly thought through the
> economics of how one makes a Third World country into a First World
> country.
>
A big topic in my field, and one I've thought about a lot, but a good
answer must wait until *after* I've polished off today's work...just so
you know I'm not slagging off on this subject.
Carl Beaudry
> Erich Schwarz wrote:
>
> > Also note that parochial schools need not be exclusionary. I don't
> > recall ever being *asked* if I was Catholic during 4 years in Loyola High
> > School -- hell, when asked our family's religion, my dad wrote "apostate"
> > on the application form! (True story!)
>
> Yeah, but you still had to take religion classes, right? No one ever
> learned analytical thinking skills from that.
I beg to differ in the strongest possible way. Not only were religion
classes among the best and most analytical classes at the Catholic HS I
went to, but they tended to focus on a lot of subjects that one wouldn't
expect to see in a religion class--Plato, Pascal, Freud, Maslow, et. al.
as well as other world religions.
The picture of a robotic Gregorian pedagogy coupled with an orthodox
theological indoctrination is wrong. It was largely abandoned by Jesuits
in the eighteenth century for the simple reason that it didn't work very
well. Obviously, the modern approach isn't foolproof either given my
unrepentant agnosticism, but I never met a Jesuit who couldn't give you a
helluva good analytical argument for the existence of God.
> Don't EVEN get me started on Catholic school quality. I'll just cite one
> anecdotal example...
But that *is* anecdotal. The numbers that I've seen are tilted *grossly*
in the other direction.
Still, lest Erich think that I'm some kind of stealth libertarian, I
should point out that all the test score comparisons that I've seen
confirmed my anecdotal experience with people who went to school in the
Soviet Union--their state schools are a modern educational miracle
corpared to even our best private schools and it had nothing to do with
school choice.
--Carl
Carl Beaudry
> Japan.....South Korea....Taiwan.
All of these countries were heavily subsidized both directly with aid, and
indirectly with trade agreements, not to mention by having the West ignore
some really abhorrant repression and torture. These things were done
because these countries were seen as bulwarks *against* communism. That's
not the case anymore.
I submit that without such a menace to occasion such assistance that it
quite likely would not have happened and that the development would more
closely resemble the present Third World, with a small minority of trade
interests controlling the countries oligarchically. (With the possible
exception of Japan, which was technologically quite developed prior to
WWII.)
> 2. While capitalism has not yet made every inhabitant of the planet as
> wealthy as the U.S., collectivism most certainly has had an incredible
> power to blight economic growth.
Compare Russian and American GNP percapita in 1917 and again in 1985.
While there's a difference in growth rates, I don't think it's as big as
you do. And while it's fair to say that the communist development had to
be coerced via threats of arrest, that happens every day to poor people in
the capitalist world too.
Again, I'm not defending the other side, I'm defending using a consistent
yardstick to measure both. And I don't think yours is anything close to
consistent.
> There is very little question in my mind that capitalism would have been
> better for Russia, not because I have any illusions that it would have been
> Utopian, but simply because a capitalist chimpanzee on amphetamines could
> have run a country better than the Marxists actually did.
This is precisely the kind of ideologically generated conclusion that
irritates me to no end. And the fact that I *agree* with it ought to
license me to cuisinart it's reasoning without hearing about
gulag-worshipping leftists. It annoys me because it doctrinairily
overlooks what we can learn from them. And one of the things we can learn
is just how good a state run school system can be if it's made a real
social priority.
The scientific example is a fine one. All of those 'might have beens' you
listed assume that Russia had the marvelous educational system in place
that the communists built up from nothingness. Most of the Soviet Union
was illiterate in 1917 and they were in space less than 50 years later.
None of the capitalist miracle-countries you listed accomplished that
feat. Where do you think those scientists and engineers *came*
from--despite the brain drain?
How many competitors does the U.S. presently have in aerospace? Or
weapons technology? If a chimp can run a country better than a commisar,
why didn't the higher primates in, say, Brazil accomplish what the
communists did in Russia?
--Carl
coates
1. Individuals need society; society needs individuals.
1a. Individuals can become self-sufficient once they have benefited
from society (in the form of family, schools, etc.).
1b. Individuals should not seek to avoid society's claims, even though
they can.
2. No pure form of capitalist or socialist society has ever existed.
3. In the absence of even one reliably pure empirical example, comparative
history at best only confirms pre-existing ideology.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
--
john coates For Human beauty knows it not: nor can Mercy find it!
Carl Beaudry
> Carl Beaudry wrote:
>
> > And while I can and *do* categorically blame *both* sides for violating
> > the categorical imperative and crucifying innocent people on the alter of
> > economic theory, your ethical position of "long-term success *equals*
> ^^^^^^^
> > morality" *by definition* only allows you to find moral fault with the
> > losing side.
>
> Practicality, not success. Practicality is a rational expectation from
> morality, which fairly well correlates with success. But success is
> *guaranteed* to no mortal.
OK, but what evinces practicality if not success? It may be that not
everything practical is successful, but how can something be successful
without being practical? This may be the root of what I believe your
mistake to be.
> 1. One corollary of my hypothesis is that *we'd all be better off if
> avoidable famines out here had in fact been avoided*.
Why would my late grandfather be better off? He died long before he could
have become aware of any harm to his progeny. And for that matter, why
should one *care* about one's progeny in the first place? Children strike
me as being terribly impractical critters.
> I've *never* argued that because a (U.S.) bundle of behaviors was on
> balance more successful than another (Soviet) bundle, therefore the U.S.'s
> behaviors were not merely relatively superior but absolutely optimal.
But empirically speaking, to be the best extant example *is* to be optimal.
Anything beyond a previous empirical summit can only be considered to be
superior with reference to an *external* measurement. Like the
categorical imperative for example. Otherwise how can you possibly know
that one has surpassed the previous mark and not simply done something
different but not superior?
Or is it your contention that you do not know this except in hindsight?
If so, I've got other problems with your theory.
> To say it again, since you seem to find my viewpoint as hard to
> understand as I find yours: the fact that I consider the capitalist world
> on balance strongly preferable to the collectivist world in no way means
> that I am happy with the status quo here. Nor does it mean that I think,
> because the "bad" of the U.S. et al. is much better than the "worse" of the
> U.S.S.R. et al., that there is no practical or ethical point in trying to
> change "bad" to "better" here.
It's not your *viewpoint* that I find hard to understand, but your
measurement technique. If we are the current epitome, then it seems to me
that there is a built-in, conservative, empirical-ethical refutation to
each and every reform you might offer. And that refutation is:
"Empirically, we are the most moral bungh o'primates ever, therefore your
changes constitute a breech with what we know morality to be and thus must
be immoral on that acount."
By contrast, I can easily say that every extant society rots to varying
degrees compared with the ideal of the Golden Rule/categorical
imperative. And I can empirically demonstrate that point by pointing out
violations of that principle.
> 2. Despite your willingness to play devil's advocate, consider the
> following scenario: at *any point in history* of your choosing, from 1918
> AD to 1989 AD, you are told by a superpowerful ET that you are going to be
> randomly placed in some position in either the U.S. or the Soviet Union --
> with a straight 50% chance of winding up in either nation, and with your
> position determined by a roulette wheel weighted by actual human
> population.
Whether consciously or not, you have just replicated John Rawls 'veil of
ignorance' argument for a liberal share-the-wealth democracy almost
verbatim. It is precisely because of the reasons that I would rationally
choose the U.S. that I would choose a U.S. with a welfare state over one
without it.
If this conception illustrates your notion of social justice, then you are
an even more orthodox liberal than I had previously thought.
> If you like, you can object that this is a skewed comparison because
> the Soviet Union was horribly oppressed by 5000 U.S. Marines landing in
> Vladivostok for 1 year -- or whatever -- and that the comparison thus ought
> to be between the U.S.S.R. and some other country.
>
> If so, please specify exactly *what* nation in the capitalist world you
> think *would* be a valid antonym of the U.S.S.R.
Brazil is a better match to Russia circa 1917 than the U.S..
Brazil was a colonial (and largely feudal) monarchy that underwent
economic upheaval when slavery was abolished in 1889 and has witnessed
genocide, starvation, ecological catastrophe and terrible political
repression while maintaining a market economy that was integrated with the
West.
It's a big country of 150 million people with arguably more *usable* land
than Russia with lots of minerals and a far superior climate and, like
Russia circa 1917, it was agrarian and illiterate in 1917 with no history
of self-rule or democracy. It's *still* 40% illiterate with 60% working
in agriculture.
Brazil is also an interesting comparison since it's current wealth is in
large part dependent upon committing what is arguably as much
environmental havoc as anything the Russians did and it's got humongous
inflation problems and economic instability too. It's been a military
dictatorship for much of it's history just like Russia and it's GNP is
around $313 billion (which is less than most estimates of communist
Russia's) and it has nothing that compares to the Russian technological
infrastructure.
One thing that does make Brazil *unlike* Russia is that it never had a
World War fought on it's major cities or a border like the Chinese border
to defend from attack. Though it does have some of the nastiest organized
criminals in the world. So the question is, would I rather be in Russia
or Brazil during that time period? It's a much tougher call. But I do
like warm weather.
--Carl
Timothy Burke
Lessee, on the debate re: what constituted winning the "Wheel O'
Historical Fortune" between 1918 and the present (or, cuing the Bing
Crosby: "Would you like to own a new car/unless prevented by a race bar/or
would you rather...be a Red? A Red is an animal that...etcetera
etcetera...")
I promised this morning to offer the E-Z Guide to Capitalist Takeoff in
the Third World, but I'm tired and I have miles to go before I sleep and
all that sort of jazz.
The quickie digest version of one part of my own answer to this whole
question is as follows:
1) It's a mistake to take the nation as the unit in which capitalist (or
even socialist) development or underdevelopment has taken place--a mistake
made by both dependency theorists and neoclassical economists alike.
Rubbing the serial numbers off of a book by James Ferguson that I much
admire, the nation "Lesotho" is taken by development people as a "problem"
whose alleged solution lies within its borders. The trouble is that both
its "underdeveloped" workers and its state elites are basically
transnational. If you want to understand what capitalism has done to
Lesotho, you shouldn't take Lesotho as your unit of analysis.
2) So the question of "take-off" becomes more complicated that either
Walter Rostow or Andre Gunder Frank would have it. Take-off for whom? And
what's the difference between the elite of Singapore and the elite of
Ghana? The difference, IMHO, is not necessarily the degree to which their
respective economies are capitalist or otherwise, or the degree to which
their nations have "taken-off"--it's the difference between the relative
structural position of their elites in the global economy and the degree
of autonomy and power that position permits. And equally, there are both
homologies and profound differences between wage laborers in the two
places--differences that are the products of particular local experiences
with colonialism and postcolonialism, and similarities in that both groups
are relatively disempowered both in relation to their local elites and in
relation to the global economy.
3) Anybody who peddles a magic formula for "take-off" is peddling snake
oil, not merely because they aren't addressing these issues of
articulation between local, regional, national and global political
economies, but because only so many places can possibly "take-off" and
move towards the capitalist center at any one time. Here's where I'm still
a pretty straightforward Marxist, because I really believe that capitalism
*requires* a labor reserve on both a global and a local scale. If everyone
gets to be "developed", then who is going to clean up the shit, mine the
gold, and make little umbrellas for daquiris at starvation wages?
Jason Kodish
>Countless individuals contribute to the body of knowledge that one
>individual learns that in turn leads to that moment of genius/madness
>that is scientific progress. It's the progress that is unique,
>fascinating, amazing, or even life-saving.
Indeed, I do science mostly alone,but also through communication on the
Net. However, it took greats like Newton,Einstein,and Bohr to ply the
waters before me. I only hope someday I can do the same for someone else.
>-Kasar (both feet firmly in the individualist camp)
As my feet are in both camps.
Tom Bitterman
>
>Timothy Burke wrote:
>
>> Seen from outside of the
>> superpowers, in the eyes of the vast majority of humanity, "capitalism"
>> and "actually existing communism" have ended up looking pretty much the
>> same.
>
> Which may be a good point, but ...
[deletia]
> 2. While capitalism has not yet made every inhabitant of the planet as
>wealthy as the U.S., collectivism most certainly has had an incredible
>power to blight economic growth.
I would guess that the Nazi war machine had a lot to do with the lousy shape
the Russian economy was in in 1945. Given this, plus a long history of
lousy rule by the monarchy, it's astonishing that they did what they did in
only 20 years or so. The U.S. had hundreds of years to get where they got,
plus a paucity of invasions by foreign countries, plus a rather agreable
climate.
[deletia]
>There is
>very little question in my mind that capitalism would have been better for
>Russia, not because I have any illusions that it would have been Utopian,
>but simply because a capitalist chimpanzee on amphetamines could have run a
>country better than the Marxists actually did.
This would explain the fairy wonderland Russian is now. After all, they're
more "free market" than they used to be. Why aren't they rolling in the
dough?
> I confess that I don't yet have a fully articulated opinion of what the
>net effects of capitalism on the Third World have been overall.
If capitalism were ever actually tried in the Third World, we might know. As
it is capitalism is used as a think cover for letting U.S. corporations buy
everything there. The inhabitants then get to improve their lot by switching
from subsistence farming to growing coca for export and suffering from
malnutrition. But hey, that's market forces at work, so it's ok.
>I
>would welcome comments from somebody who has thoroughly thought through the
>economics of how one makes a Third World country into a First World
>country.
One word: protectionism. Blow off this bull about "open markets". Big multinational
corps will kill you and eat your soul. Kill the missionaries. All of them. Take
from the more advanced nations and give nothing back. Only come out after you make
something that the most powerful competing nations can't do without. This
is a good description of the two biggest successes in this field: Japan and
Singapore.
>--Erich Schwarz
Tom Bitterman (aka tbitt...@csi.compuserve.com)
#include <disclaimer.h>
of course, you can be left with a scary culture
Tom Bitterman
[deletia of entire people]
>Also, FWIW, some of the best critical thinkers I've met, both in RL and out
>here, have been educated by Jesuits.
Hey! Franciscans rul, dood. And they don't have that particularly nasty
image to live down. I wonder what Dominicans are like.
>(Actually, Fr. Cahill damn near made a priest out of me... "give me a boy
>before he's twelve" and all that.)
The chastity thing is what blows it.
>>-Micky
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
> Michael LeBlanc / "That which does not kill me makes me linger"
> m...@netcom.com /
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Bitterman (aka tbitt...@csi.compuserve.com)
#include <disclaimer.h>
of course, the all-male thing didn't help
Erich Schwarz
>
> Erich Schwarz wrote:
>
> > Carl Beaudry wrote:
> >
> > > As I understand it, science is the exercise of reason in an attempt to
> > > understand the empirical world....
> >
> > As I understand it, science is the systematic exercise of reason and
> > experimental work in an attempt to understand the world.
>
> Since experimental work is a subset of 'the exercise of reason,' I fail to
> see the heresy of my allegedly naive position--or much difference between
> it and your own.
In the first place, I don't much care whether your views are "heresy."
Heresy is what a good scientist is paid to produce, after all. :)
I care about whether your description of what I do for a living even
vaguely sounds right.
Your original post cited science as something which validated the idea
of "all X is social/collective." Specifically, you said that science is
collective reasoning. The problem is that, while your view is true as far
as it goes, it is hardly exhaustive. Take the very massive role of lone
individualistic reasoning out of science, and you haven't got science in
any form that I've actually seen it done. That is why I wrote that your
description of science was a deceptive half-truth. It *is* true but it is
*not* the whole truth and what you are leaving out *is* deceptive by its
absence.
In the second place, science is *not* simply a subset of "the exercise
of reason." It is a hybrid activity which includes *both* philosophical
reasoning *and* technological tinkering -- often of a very mundane yet
necessary sort. It is the fusion of thought with action that gives science
its peculiar ability to generate new truths. Conversely, it was the
disdain of Greek philosophy for the manual arts upon which science
partially draws that did much to stultify the human mind for 2000 years.
As I believe Karl Marx pointed out.
> And in view of this rather striking correlation between my
> 'oversimplified' view of science and your own, you may have to excuse me
> when I reassert that rationally figuring out how the world works *is* a
> universal human occupation just as politics is. And on that account, I
> shall genuflect to your professional standing as the arbiter of all
> empirical fact on the same day that you bless Newt Gingrich's hegemony
> over what is the proper role of government.
But I'm not trying to lay down *one* description of How Science Really
Works. I'm merely trying to correct what you yourself have done in that
regard. On the basis of some degree of experience. I understand that it
may seem unfair, or elitist, for me to say this: but I do know something
about what my own job is like that you yourself may not be able to deduce
by pure, un-empirically-encumbered logic.
> The fact that you may *feel* lonely working in a discipline that
> nevertheless requires collective judgement hardly disqualifies the
> enterprise from being collective. Anytime you feel particularly isolated,
> you may wish to recall LBJ's discription of the oval office as the
> loneliest room on earth.
I tend to suspect that LBJ was right, and that that was yet another
example of what I'm writing about.
You can call something "collective" and you may have a point: but I
tend to suspect that *neither* science *nor* politics function properly
without, in the end, the free action of strong individuals.
The basic thing about science I've noticed is this: if you succeed,
your success has a thousand adoptive fathers, and your work is rapidly
assimilated into the common store of knowledge. As it should be. And
after that, your work is superceded in about 3-5 years by new young-Turk
individualists who pound out their own stuff that makes your work seem
wondrously quaint. As they should do.
But that's all after the fact. Before you can succeed, you have to go
down into the lab, day after day, for years. And you have to go to the
bench and make the experiments work in reality -- which they seldom do on
the 1st-3rd tries, in my experience -- as well as they do in the textbook.
And you have to do that alone. There is no "collective judgement" in the
trenches of experimental science. There is no group mind upon which you
can call when you are really in the middle of actually trying to do your
job. Or, to put it another way, there *are* other people's opinions -- but
they usually diverge wildly, and at best are seldom completely useful or
accurate.
There just is no collective _deus ex machina_ that will in fact take
any serious amount of the weight of science off your back, when you are in
fact not merely a commentator on science but actually a working scientist.
If you're not a strong individual with an amazingly arrogant belief
that you yourself were chosen by Fate to go into a lab and do great things,
you will not survive that.
Most people in my field don't talk about it -- most people in my
field, like Kathleen, would prefer to stay out of the picture. Good for
them. But I have this weird desire to not see my own field painted
*solely* as "collective", with the role of the individual minimized for
political purposes. So I'm going to be really annoying and arrogant and
keep saying this: the collective gives stability to science, but the
individual gives *life*. Take individualism out of science and what you
have is a dead lump of static assertions.
The fact that LBJ observed that independently in his own field merely
makes me think that this is probably a universal thing in *any* profession
that requires excellence.
> The whole point of me calling science a collective discipline was that no
> individual can establish what consitutes acceptible standards of proof and
> practice. That rather banal point was the sum total of my original post
> which you found to be such "a gross and misleading oversimplification" and
> apparently sufficient grounds for excising this 'non-scientist' from the
> ranks of those who rationally attempt to understand the world.
I'm not trying to excise you from "the ranks of those who rationally
attempt to understand the world." Nor would I argue that any one
individual can establish what consitutes acceptible standards of proof and
practice for the field *as a whole*. But what I *do* think is that one
individual *can* and, on many occasions, *has* managed to significantly
change the standards held by the community of scientists *for a given topic
of study*.
Which is not trivial.
The obvious instance is that of Einstein. There are less obvious
instances in my own field, including my current thesis advisor. No one
scientist can make all of science spring into being, but people like
Einstein come a lot closer to that ideal than most of the rest of us. That
fact deserves as much emphasis as your own observation that "no individual
can establish what consitutes acceptible standards of proof and practice."
It was to try to re-balance the account of science in this newsgroup that I
have written my recent posts about my own experiences and observations of
science.
> I would have found your response much more incisive if only I had made the
> argument which it refutes so thoroughly.
It's not what your argument says, but what it leaves out, that
initially appalled me.
> While I can understand your annoyance with presumptuous little
> know-it-alls like me making pronouncements about what you consider to be
> your professional turf, I *am* after all the author of my own words and
> that qualifies me to report that I did *not* comment on the inner motives
> of individual scientists but rather on the need for those individuals to
> be replicated and confirmed by a collective group. That's the sum total of
> my post that you found so objectionable.
>
> I defy you to show my words to any contrary effect.
Again, I agree that individual reasoning needs to be "replicated and
confirmed by a collective group." The problem I had with your post was
that it described the process of science as one of "collective reasoning."
Which, as I first wrote, is a deceptive half-truth. It is indeed
crucial that there exist a collective standard of criticism in science.
That, however, is neither sufficient for science nor necessarily
characteristic of the scientific enterprise as it is actually done by
actual human beings.
> Nevertheless, if you felt your professional toes being stepped on, it is
> only because they extended beyond your own scientific suburb into an area
> to which you *have* no definitive scientific proof--the motives and
> character of most other scientists.
Agreed. In fact, as Kathleen's post demonstrates, my own experiences
and viewpoint are *not* universal.
Which is an important fact.
But if you're going to write about this stuff, it *does* help to have
the actual experiences of people who do *not* share your view of scientific
reasoning as being simply "collective." A single data point is not enough
by itself to establish a universal theory of anything; but, if it sharply
differs from what is implied by your posts, it demands attention by the
mere fact of its existence.
> In short, from a social-scientific standpoint, your lifetime immersion in
> the profession constitutes anecdotal evidence at best with zero
> experimental control, and I doubt that is the methodology you have chosen
> for your own research papers.
It isn't even the methodology I would choose to try to arrive at a
genuine view of how science works. What I would do, at a minimum, is in
fact do systematically what this thread has done very unsystematically --
get a lot of different observations. Plainly, my own observations aren't
by themselves universally valid. What I do think they are is sharply
divergent from the way in which you yourself have described science. Since
my own views have themselves been adequately demonstrated to be
non-universal by Kathleen's post, what we're left with is a position in
which *nobody* is presently able to describe science completely.
It may be the case that science in practice is a complex mixture of
interacting elements -- some as individual as Ayn Rand would have liked,
some as collective as any social-democrat could desire. Properly
describing that mixture and the interactions of its elements is a serious
job which is indeed beyond my present capacities. What I do wish to
assert, however, is that even my limited perspective makes me strongly
dissent from the way in which you have until now chosen to portray my
profession.
>
>
>
> > I do this goddamned stuff. You don't. That's not an insult and it's
> > not a value judgement -- Ghu knows there are lots of more pressing things
> > in the world than cloning brain-genes from flies, and you've probably done
> > at least some of them, so good for you!
> >
> > It just means that, when I see you write these incredibly
> > authoritative paragraphs about WHAT SCIENCE IS REALLY LIKE, and I find that
> > they bear little resemblance to what I've actually experienced the actual
> > doing of science to be like, I get a wee bit testy for some weird reason.
>
> As a layperson whose post did not involve or impugn your professional
> intent, I cannot rule out the 'male PMS' hypothesis as an explanation of
> your reaction to my original statement.
Actually, I was writing this in response to your post asking me why
you didn't have "a science decoder ring."
Frankly, I think my response to *that* was comparatively cogent and
temperate.
> > > what part of the scientific enterprise you contend is *not* collective?
> > > But please state your hypothesis in words and phrases *entirely* of your
> > > own invention.
> > >
> > > And when you do, see if the resulting noises sound more like a chimp on a
> > > termite mound or Louis Pasteur.
> >
> > You're missing the point completely. It is not necessary that one
> > invent everything from scratch in one's own life to be individual and
> > creative.
>
> But I was not missing that point, I was making an entirely *different* one!
>
> My claim was not about *why* you choose to do what you do. I am almost
> totally ignorant of that. Rather my argument was about the *place* of
> that work in the social order vis-a-vis the need for a legitimating group
> of practitioners to judge it. And I fail to see how your dalliance with
> the brains of flies uniquely qualifies you to refute that point.
And my claim was not that there was no need for a legitimating group of
practitioners to judge my work. My claim was that any attempt to define
the non-collective part of science as being that part of science which is
"*entirely* of your own invention" is a strawman. There is *no* part of
science that is *entirely* of one's own invention for the same reason that
there is no atom in my body as I write this that is *entirely* my atom,
only my atom, that has never been part of any other living thing.
For you to describe the collectivity of science as being due to its
having no parts that are *entirely* of an individual's invention leaves one
wondering, if that is the case, why the idea of individuality in science is
even possible at all. That is the problem with your argument. It is not
that I can refute it or that I am even concerned to refute it. It is that
your argument is, paradoxically, too strong.
If "individuality" required the ability to create *anything* ex nihilo,
it would not exist, and we would be unlikely to have it as an overwhelming
element in the experience of at least some scientists (e.g. myself.) Since
in fact I at least (and other people who are lurking, but who have
e-mailed me) *have* seen that individuality is a non-trivial element of the
actual doing of science, it follows that your gibe, "...see if the
resulting noises sound more like a chimp on a termite mound or Louis
Pasteur", is grotesquely pointless.
Given that individuality *is* a large driving element of science, and
also given that in fact I can no more create *anything* entirely of my own
invention any more than I can create the atoms of my own body through my
own efforts, it follows that individuality (as manifested by creativity) in
science must have some other basis than the ability to create anything
entirely of my own invention.
To explain this discrepancy, I postulate that individual creativity in
science consists not of the creation of things entirely of one's own
invention -- as your gibe challenged me to claim that I have done -- but
instead consists of the rearrangement of preexisting entities in novel
ways. This view of creativity is neither specific to science nor original
with me; I first saw it advocated by Douglas Hofstadter in an essay on the
music of Chopin.
> Secondly and more ironically, you have ignored the *empirical* challenges
> that Tom Bitterman posted to even your distorted characterization of
> collectivism. Germany, Russia and Japan come to mind as not-terribly
> laissex-faire, yet scientifically advancing societies.
As you are well aware, the high period of German scientific progress
abruptly ended when Germany decided that it would no longer remain
hospitable to the individual intellects of rather non-collective folk like
Einstein. The resulting exodus of strong individuals vitiated German
science, and it has yet to fully recover.
Russia's record is terribly stunted compared to what it might have
been. Its chief triumphs have been in areas requiring very little support
from society -- theoretical physics and mathematics. In even genetics,
Russia's government managed to take an *existing* cadre of genetics and
destroy it in the 1920s. For details I refer you to any encyclopedia entry
on Lysenkoism.
Japan is perhaps the best instance to cite because here there *is* a
growing scientific community that lives amid a culture that is seriously
different from the American molecular biology community. Like Kathleen's
post, this demonstrates that my own views are no more exhaustively true
than yours. It is yet unclear, however, whether Japan will fully develop
its scientific capacities; what I have seen so far is that the bulk of
Asian researchers visiting Caltech tend to be emigres from South Korea or
China, while Japan's brightest minds seem to go more often into
(unpublished) applied research for industry.
> I submit that science, like art and politics, *is* a universal human
> occupation and it cannot be killed short of human extinction, though it
> can certainly be hindered by human stupidity which is not confined to
> communist governments I'm afraid. Stupidity is alive and well in the
> capitalist order and doing just fine.
But I submit that it is precisely to the extent that a regime *fails*
to efficiently frustrate individual initiative -- either through sheer
sloth, or through having loopholes for lucky individuals -- that it will be
able to preserve the vitality of science, art, or politics in spite of its
collectivism.
Stupidity is indeed present in the capitalist order -- indeed,
stupidity is so omnipresent under all regimes that I tend to agree with
Frank Zappa, who proposed that stupidity, not hydrogen, was the most common
element in the universe. But, in my view, it is not stupidity that *kills*
the spirit of science (or art or politics.) It is collective rationality
enthroned.
> > The paradox is that the final expression of one's individuality is to
> > add something to the collective store of knowledge....The individual can't
> > *sustain* the science because by definition it is only useful when
> > communicated, and the individual can't *hang on* to the science because he
> > or she is mortal. Science must be made collective knowledge to be of
> > permanent use -- and that is the thin grain of truth in your gibes about it.
>
> FYI, that 'paradox' was 100% of the original point that I was making.
Fine.
> That you consider it to be a 'thin grain of truth' says more about your
> interpretation of my post than I had ever intended to say about science in
> the first place.
The problem is that you chose to cite this as an *example* of something
with which I have felt it necessary to take equal issue: the seemingly
bland, yet in fact ideologically loaded, assertion that "all wealth is
collective."
Like that statement, your "thin grain of truth" is *true* in itself,
but (IMNSHO) positively *misleading* in isolation.
Had you chosen *philosophy* for that sort of example, I'd have said
nothing. Since you decided to pick as an example something that I *do*
think I know something non-trivial about, you got a core-dump.
> Nevertheless, if you require a promethian mythos to validate what is
> nevertheless anecdote, conjecture and personal opinion, then I'll recount
> that I owe my current circumstances to the fact that I was too ignorant of
> computer science circa 1980 to realize that mainframes were the key to
> doing interesting computation. May they rest in peace.
>
> But while I've been doing this for approximately as long as you've been
> doing what you do, I nevertheless cannot speak with authority on behalf of
> my collective discipline the way you have just done any more than I am
> qualified to speak for my generation.
>
> I am, after all, only one datapoint. With no experimental control.
Yep.
But it is still the case that, were I to write a post saying "all
reasoning in computer science is individual," I'd be ill-advised to
*expect* you to agree, and I'd be really ill-advised to dismiss your
experience on the grounds that you are merely one human being instead of
being Legion.
--Erich Schwarz
Erich Schwarz
> Still, lest Erich think that I'm some kind of stealth libertarian, I
> should point out that all the test score comparisons that I've seen
> confirmed my anecdotal experience with people who went to school in the
> Soviet Union--their state schools are a modern educational miracle
> corpared to even our best private schools and it had nothing to do with
> school choice.
Isn't the libertarian response to this obvious?
Give the children of the poor vouchers to travel to Vladivostok and
Archangelsk and get an education there!
The perfect Hegelian synthesis of Schwarzian thesis and Beaudrian
antithesis!
--Erich "Well, it sounded like a good idea..." Schwarz
Micky DuPree
>Carl Beaudry wrote:
>> ...imagine me with a great big red KGB hat ... I do own one ...
>
> What a depressing artifact to own.
I'm crushed. I thought irony was a GenX virtue.
-Micky
--
I trust you paid the fair free-market price for it,
Comrade Beaudry.
Dave Mooney
> You can throw in a dollop of Wilsonianism (Pete, not Woodrow, that is) and
> not give them any return visas, thus lowering the cost of state services
And why not throw in a dollop of Wilsonianism (Brian, that is) and let them
have fun fun fun till daddy takes the vouchers away. Or maybe Amanda
Wilsonianism and give them each ten points, just to make it fair?
dave
--
Dave Mooney | dog...@io.org | "The government is run by people who
CanterSiegelGreenCardArmenia | watch the Simpsons!" -- Joan L Brewer
Carl Beaudry
> Your original post cited science as something which validated the idea
> of "all X is social/collective."
Timothy's original statement was that "all wealth is social." And I added
the corollary that it excluded wealth contained inside individual human
bodies. You may recall the bit about 'society ending at the skin' and all
that. None of which is affected one way or the other by your little
polemic about scientists. But congratulations on some fine expository
writing anyway.
Nevertheless, in fairness I'll point out that each and every one of those
INDIVIDUAL scientific notables you mentioned shared one COLLECTIVE trait:
they told other people what they learned. They shared the wealth of
knowledge because, for whatever reason, they apparently thought they
should.
That was 100% of the analogy that I made when I cited science in *two*
*sentences* of my "800 line post" which you found so convenient to
otherwise ignore.
And no less a scientist than E.O. Wilson made precisely the same point on
TV (caCHING!) last night and, come to think of it on *public* TV at that
(caCHING! caCHING!)when he was explaining the difference between human
society and ant society. Only he generalized the claim to all areas of
endeavor and reward and not just to science.
In short, you did a marvelous job of making a point that had already been
well taken for granted both by me and everyone else on the port side of
the "all wealth is social" fence. Certainly, you were not arguing that
scientific findings should be anything but shared, Socrates [caCHING!]
would have it no other way.
And since you clearly were not claiming that scientists should treat their
knowledge like Bill Gates treats software licenses I fail to see how my
"half-truth" was deceptive in the least. Who was deceived? Apparently
not Timothy or Quathleen.
> Take the very massive role of lone individualistic reasoning out of science,
> and you haven't got science in any form that I've actually seen it done.
> That is why I wrote that your description of science was a deceptive
> half-truth. It *is* true but it is *not* the whole truth and what you are
> leaving out *is* deceptive by its absence.
Indeed you flatter me to the point of calumny.
My post was *far* less than a 'half-truth,' it was but an *infintessimal*
fraction of truth and was never represented as anything else. If it had
indeed approached the 50% mark, it would easily be worth ten Nobel prizes
in any field you can name. But I was not attempting to exhaustively
circumscribe scientific reasoning as Kant did, but I was rather merely
selecting *one* aspect for comparison to a similar aspect of material
wealth.
It's a good thing I didn't use a figure of speech like "the hobgoblin of
small minds" for I would certainly have earned a lecture in occult
mythology and brain stem neurology.
That I stumbled upon such a hot-button is far more interesting to me as a
quasi-professional social scientist. And it would seem that I'm not
nearly as alone in my puzzlement over your reaction to my analogy as you
aspire to be in your lab.
> In the second place, science is *not* simply a subset of "the exercise
> of reason." It is a hybrid activity which includes *both* philosophical
> reasoning *and* technological tinkering -- often of a very mundane yet
> necessary sort. It is the fusion of thought with action that gives science
> its peculiar ability to generate new truths.
This is a minor terminological difference.
And at risk of further inflating my tie-in point totals, my posts on the
'Pointy-Heads' thread [caCHING!] should make it clear that freely chosen
volitional acts are products of reason if they are deliberately chosen on
rational grounds. 'Practical reason' is reason governing volition. The
upshot of that on the other thread is that empirical science is not an
arbiter of moral reason, here it implies only that if you think in order
to do it, it's an exercise of reason.
> Before you can succeed, you have to go
> down into the lab, day after day, for years. And you have to go to the
> bench and make the experiments work in reality -- which they seldom do on
> the 1st-3rd tries, in my experience -- as well as they do in the textbook.
> And you have to do that alone. There is no "collective judgement" in the
> trenches of experimental science. There is no group mind upon which you
> can call when you are really in the middle of actually trying to do your
> job....
>
> There just is no collective _deus ex machina_ that will in fact take
> any serious amount of the weight of science off your back, when you are in
> fact not merely a commentator on science but actually a working scientist.
It truly is refreshing to see a confessed capitalist embrace the notion of
labor as the source of value. In fact, it's a positively endearing
symmetry to the economic sphere:
Material wealth also depends upon individuals laboriously going down to
the factory/farm/office each day, which, like your lab, is owned by
someone who lets them use it in order to apply their intellect and muscles
to create something of value. There is no collective ownership in the
trenches of laissex-faire wage labor, there is no group store of wealth
which you can call upon to do your assembly line job and your paycheck has
one name on it too.
Furthermore, there is no collective guarantee of success that will remove
even a small part of the weight of producing not only more than you are
paid in salary but more than anyone else in your competitive position can
produce. And all of this happens so that when you finally do create
something of value, it can be taken by the capital owner who is not merely
a commentator on your success but the lone direct arbiter of your ability
to continue to produce it there.
Are you sure you want to get into a "working-class hero" contest with a
registered Democrat. :)
> Again, I agree that individual reasoning needs to be "replicated and
> confirmed by a collective group."
Then how is that not analogous to the distribution of wealth being
legitimately arbitered by a society? That, and *not* the psychology of
experimental researchers was the topic that I was addressing.
> > Nevertheless, if you felt your professional toes being stepped on, it is
> > only because they extended beyond your own scientific suburb into an area
> > to which you *have* no definitive scientific proof--the motives and
> > character of most other scientists.
>
> Agreed. In fact, as Kathleen's post demonstrates, my own experiences
> and viewpoint are *not* universal.
>
> Which is an important fact.
An "important fact" from me, a "non-scientist." Is that possible? :)
> Actually, I was writing this in response to your post asking me why
> you didn't have "a science decoder ring."
>
> Frankly, I think my response to *that* was comparatively cogent and
> temperate.
Good thing I didn't mention the "Dr.Science" coffee mug that I had college. :)
> And my claim was not that there was no need for a legitimating group of
> practitioners to judge my work. My claim was that any attempt to define
> the non-collective part of science as being that part of science which is
> "*entirely* of your own invention" is a strawman. There is *no* part of
> science that is *entirely* of one's own invention for the same reason that
> there is no atom in my body as I write this that is *entirely* my atom,
> only my atom, that has never been part of any other living thing.
First of all you *were* questioning whether or not there was a need for a
legitimating social group to sanction the fairness of a particular
distribution of wealth--hense the analogy.
Secondly, you are making our collective point for us. "All wealth is
social" means the delimitation between what is yours and mine is
*arbitrary* and can be legitimately altered by the political process. I'm
willing to grant you absolute sanction over the wealth of atoms in your
body and the thoughts in your head, but everything else is *properly*
subject to negotiated settlement with others of your kind.
By questioning *that* idea, you justly inspired the analogy, by explaining
your position you made it seem to fit snugly.
> For you to describe the collectivity of science as being due to its
> having no parts that are *entirely* of an individual's invention leaves one
> wondering, if that is the case, why the idea of individuality in science is
> even possible at all. That is the problem with your argument. It is not
> that I can refute it or that I am even concerned to refute it. It is that
> your argument is, paradoxically, too strong.
How so? My position is both consistent and clear [caCHING!] when it comes
to delimiting individual and social wealth of all kinds.
Materially, I can easily tell where your fist ends and my nose begins so
the standard that your epidermis delmits your individuality hardly
presents much difficulty. Conversely, shared words and concepts are the
norm among social animals like us and also presents little difficulty. It
is "intellectual property" that risks a conceptual quagmire.
But I resolve both kinds of property consistently by saying that
intellectual or physical property is *absolutely* private insofar as it is
enclosed by an individual. Once outside of that individual, it is
properly arbitered by the society through a myriad of governing
contractual arrangements deriving their moral authority from the
categorical imperative/Golden Rule via the social contract.
Wherein lies the problem?
> Given that individuality *is* a large driving element of science, and
> also given that in fact I can no more create *anything* entirely of my own
> invention any more than I can create the atoms of my own body through my
> own efforts, it follows that individuality (as manifested by creativity) in
> science must have some other basis than the ability to create anything
> entirely of my own invention.
To be sure you cannot make something from nothing. And a capitalist can't
create economic wealth ex nihilio either, but rather he *takes* things
from elsewhere and rearranges them to resell. Of this we apparently
agree.
AND THAT WAS PRECISELY THE POINT THAT TIMOTHY WAS MAKING ABOUT WEALTH!!!!!!
That's why the analogy fit!!! Because economic producers have some inputs
which they do not buy but nevertheless receive, they should also have some
outputs which they do not sell but nevertheless give away.
> > Secondly and more ironically, you have ignored the *empirical* challenges
> > that Tom Bitterman posted to even your distorted characterization of
> > collectivism. Germany, Russia and Japan come to mind as not-terribly
> > laissex-faire, yet scientifically advancing societies.
>
> As you are well aware, the high period of German scientific progress
> abruptly ended when Germany decided that it would no longer remain
> hospitable to the individual intellects of rather non-collective folk like
> Einstein. The resulting exodus of strong individuals vitiated German
> science, and it has yet to fully recover.
General Relativity was published in 1905 produced by a resident of a
repressive undemocratic society that ironically *had* the first welfare
state. Contrast freedom and science there with freedom and science in
Mexico at that time which was mighty hospitable to strong individuals. Or
compare it to any number of other places at that time.
At best, your normative historical claims seem exceedingly selective on
this point. It's perhaps also the case that scientific advance correlates
to patronage and it's first cousin welfare spending better than to an
unquantifiable like 'freedom.'
> Russia's record is terribly stunted compared to what it might have been.
And so might our own be. So what? You are assuming this conclusion and
not proving it. You do not know what they would have accomplished
otherwise and it's a silly exercise to base your proof on such a
speculation.
Besides, Sputnik happened in an unfree society before a free one managed
to replicate the feat. Is that just a bad data point? That Soviet
science was not the equal of American science is not the point since it
did not start from an equal position either. And it's certainly the equal
of Brazil's achievements and there is no shortage of capitalism or guns
there. And I'd be hard pressed to say that the technological gap between
the Soviets and America widened between 1917 and 1985. It was always
sizable.
> Its chief triumphs have been in areas requiring very little support
> from society -- theoretical physics and mathematics.
You're forgetting aerospace and nuclear engineering, not to mention
weapons and satellite tracking technology. And they also did some pretty
cool computer science even though they didn't have the hardware to run it
on.
> In even genetics, Russia's government managed to take an *existing*
> cadre of genetics and destroy it in the 1920s. For details I refer
> you to any encyclopedia entry on Lysenkoism.
Lysenko is an interesting choice considering the New York Times just
published a full page article on the current revival of work involving the
heritability of acquired characteristics. Perhaps some form of Lamarckism
isn't completely out of the picture just yet.
To be sure, the Soviets did some serious and quite literal violence to
philosophy in the name of "historical necessity." Of that there is no
doubt. But I don't think empirical science suffered as much on balance
when you consider the massive subsidies that it got from the state both
directly and via education.
In all honesty, I think the historical record makes a fair argument that
funding is more important to science than political and social freedom and
the record of free societies in that regard is decidedly mixed.
> Japan is perhaps the best instance to cite because here there *is* a
> growing scientific community that lives amid a culture that is seriously
> different from the American molecular biology community. Like Kathleen's
> post, this demonstrates that my own views are no more exhaustively true
> than yours. It is yet unclear, however, whether Japan will fully develop
> its scientific capacities; what I have seen so far is that the bulk of
> Asian researchers visiting Caltech tend to be emigres from South Korea or
> China, while Japan's brightest minds seem to go more often into
> (unpublished) applied research for industry.
Ironically enough, my experience is that some of the best social science
is done privately as well as some of the best computer science and
engineering. But in Japan, there are direct and indirect subsidies just as
there are here. But if one 'collectivist' (actually corporatist is more
appropos in this case) society can produce impressive science, why use
that as a reason to hack apart liberal Americana?
> But I submit that it is precisely to the extent that a regime *fails*
> to efficiently frustrate individual initiative -- either through sheer
> sloth, or through having loopholes for lucky individuals -- that it will be
> able to preserve the vitality of science, art, or politics in spite of its
> collectivism.
And yet again here, you assume but do not prove that the "regime" is
attempting to do any such thing. The mixed record of free and not-so-free
societies does not bear your assertion out any more than the scientific
triumphs of monarchies refutes it.
But it seems that like many creatures, scientists have managed to adapt to
a myriad of climates and a few rigorous social science controls are all
that are needed to debunk your freedom and science correlation theory.
But it's going to take some serious philosophical work to even put that
theory in a semi-testable form given what I've seen so far.
> But, in my view, it is not stupidity that *kills* the spirit of science
> (or art or politics.) It is collective rationality enthroned.
It's perhaps revealing that you phrased this as you did.
I have never witnessed a 'spirit' nor a ghost in a lab or anywhere else.
But you certainly reacted to my post as though you had. What I see are
things and what I make are inferences and deductions and none of them have
yet "enthroned" anything resembling what *you* seem to mean by "collective
rationality."
I have never even *seen* such a wraith in real life. Not in Washington and
not in Russia. To my knowledge nobody thinks as you fear they do in this
respect.
Furthermore, I believe that it is precisely this kind of collective mental
activity which is freely shared with others in forums like this that
exorcizes those spectres *from* art, science and politics. Not to mention
Usenet. All are collective *because* they are free, not despite it.
> Had you chosen *philosophy* for that sort of example, I'd have said
> nothing. Since you decided to pick as an example something that I *do*
> think I know something non-trivial about, you got a core-dump.
But you *do* commit acts of philosophy!
And philosophy is every bit as collective as science, or any published
knowledge for that matter. The point does not change based upon
professional jurisdiction. Philosophy is the undefined intellectual quest.
> But it is still the case that, were I to write a post saying "all
> reasoning in computer science is individual," I'd be ill-advised to
> *expect* you to agree, and I'd be really ill-advised to dismiss your
> experience on the grounds that you are merely one human being instead of
> being Legion.
On the contrary, all human reasoning is presently done *by* individuals,
whether in computer science or donut production. Such a statement does
not provoke a maelstrom of protest since it's obvious--just like "all
wealth is social."
I am just not haunted by the revenant of atomization the way the
collectivist spook torments you. In fact, I like individuals so much, I
decided to be one.
--Carl
______________________________________________________________________________
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was
standing on the shoulder of giants."
--Sir Isaac Newton
Douglas Lathrop
>Carl Beaudry <bea...@cc.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
>> You can throw in a dollop of Wilsonianism (Pete, not Woodrow, that is) and
>> not give them any return visas, thus lowering the cost of state services
>And why not throw in a dollop of Wilsonianism (Brian, that is) and let them
>have fun fun fun till daddy takes the vouchers away. Or maybe Amanda
>Wilsonianism and give them each ten points, just to make it fair?
I'd add some Dennis Wilsonianism, too - pump 'em full of drugs and toss them
overboard to drown.
Doug (and yes, I'm in a dark mood today)
D O U G L A S P. L A T H R O P
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASGX Poster Child, Dionysus Emeritus, Monster Truck Neutopia Spokes Person
Visit Stately PAPER CUT MANOR! http://www.primenet.com/~lathrop/index.html
Carl Beaudry
>Dave Mooney writes:
>
>>Carl Beaudry wrote:
>
>>> You can throw in a dollop of Wilsonianism (Pete, not Woodrow, that is) and
>>> not give them any return visas, thus lowering the cost of state services
>
>>And why not throw in a dollop of Wilsonianism (Brian, that is) and let them
>>have fun fun fun till daddy takes the vouchers away. Or maybe Amanda
>>Wilsonianism and give them each ten points, just to make it fair?
>
> I'd add some Dennis Wilsonianism, too - pump 'em full of drugs and toss them
> overboard to drown.
OK but only if you also include the requisite amount of Flip Wilsonianism
and dress 'em in drag and call 'em 'Geraldine' first.
--Carl
Jason Kodish
>
>Carl Beaudry wrote:
>illiteracy rate is about 65-90% -- "true illiteracy" being defined, in my
>elitist opinion, as a condition in which one does not compulsively read *at
>least* one serious book a month during one's adulthood.
Define "serious" book.
>
>--Erich Schwarz
Erich Schwarz
>
> schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu (Erich Schwarz) writes in
> response to Carl Beaudry:
>
> > The problem is that you chose to cite this as an *example* of something
> >with which I have felt it necessary to take equal issue: the seemingly
> >bland, yet in fact ideologically loaded, assertion that "all wealth is
> >collective."
> "SOCIAL"! "SOCIAL"! "SOCIAL"!
I stand corrected.
> You've made a beeline back to Reds under the bed again.
> Like Kathleen, I'm going to point out that if we didn't
> know you better, we'd almost be *forced* to conclude that
> you're deliberately misinterpreting this in a typically
> McCarthyite manner. It simply would not be logical that
> someone of your verbal and reasoning talents could make
> the same confusion of words and concepts by accident over
> and over again.
It's also not "logical" that Carl would cite the allegedly
"collective" nature of scientific reasoning as an argument that all wealth
*ought* to be "social," but he did. The connection was originally his, not
mine.
> *Are* the words genuinely synonymous to you? Is that the
> root of the problem?
Whether they *are* synonymous seems to depend on who's saying them and
why. Again, I didn't invoke "scientific reasoning is collective" as a
bolster to the idea that "all wealth is social." Carl did. I merely
reacted to that characterization of scientific reasoning rather strongly
because, as I've explained at considerable length, it is a deceptive
half-truth given my own first-hand experience.
> Is regulated capitalism genuinely no different to you than
> communism?
Regulated how?
Regulated by laws that, for instance, make murder an unacceptable form
of trade competition? I would say that's not quite identical to the First
Soviet Five-Year Plan, yeah. :)
Regulated by the sort of social guardrails that free people from the
fear that one business failure could leave them forced to sell their
children into slavery to stay fed? That, too, I think is at least
partially non-overlapping with communism. Certainly I'm not advocating a
negative income tax because of a secret desire to wear a bigger KGB hat
than Carl can. Your own post on property also showed that social welfare
and an appreciation of capitalism can coexist.
My real qualms begin not with laws against murder or social safety
nets for the economically incompetent, but with further laws that are
supposed to prevent monopoly or grossly unequal outcomes in the
marketplace. I think such laws are often well meant, but are also very
dangerous, and liable to go wrong.
The trouble I have with a slogan like "all wealth is social" is that
it says nothing in fact about what regulations on property are desirable,
but in fact can be interpreted to mean that all wealth above some very low
level is dubious or unmerited -- and thus worthy of
confiscation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H redistribution. I know that you yourself
don't interpret it that way, but I'm still having a very hard time figuring
out what Carl's interpretation is. His own responses about whether 90+%
taxation is confiscatory haven't been nearly as clear as yours, to put it
mildly. Seeing him then proceed to invoke science as an example of why all
wealth is social doesn't relieve my qualms -- especially since his
descriptions of science have, in my opinion, huge individual-shaped holes.
--Erich Schwarz
Ronald Bruce Monroe Irvin
Jason Kodish <jko...@thwap.ve6mgs.ampr.ab.ca> wrote:
>In article <3gc02j$9...@agate.berkeley.edu> hub...@garnet.berkeley.edu writes:
>>
>>At least one post and certainly a large wave of e-mail to the author
>>have praised Erich's rant. Well-written it is, no arguing that.
>>
>>However, ahem, I feel I must weigh in (10pts) with this perspective
>>from another wing of science:
>>
>>I do science.
>
>As do I. :)
Me too. Well, it's _supposed_ to be scientific. At least ground-water
monitoring has _some_ scientific basis for it. Usually.
< deletia >
>
>What's really humbling is the awareness that there is so much to learn,just
>to begin making it in the field.
>Where once we physicsts had only to play around with some glowing rocks
>and shoot alpha particles through gold foil, today we must know
>abstract things such as topology,abstract group theory,differential
>geometry,and others. Not to mention complex analysis,differential equations
>(linear, and nonlinear), and of course all the basic maths.
>It's incredibly daunting at times.
Geez, my master's was MUCH easier. Clay mineralogy, sedimentary petrography,
x-ray diffraction methods, solid-waste management methods, and some basic
grain-size stuff went into the work I did. Tectonics, optical minerology,
economic geology, geochemistry, and igneous and metamorphic petrology and such
were sort of stuff an M.S. graduate should be exposed to. (Hydrology and
geohydrology I took so I could get a job :) But these were (mostly)
interesting courses, and weren't _that_ hard.
OK, so tracing the development of the earth's modern atmosphere from planetary
accretion to its post-Devonian composition isn't something everyone expects
in a mid-term, but hey...
The many hard parts to my thesis:
1. figuring out what might be interesting
-ended up with something my advisor said he hadn't seen done
2. figuring out what could be accomplished within the scope of a
master's thesis
3. cutting that down to what I could afford without much monetary support
4. determining methods to use - this should have been a warning sign:
some things I used were well-known: XRD, grain-size analysis
some things weren't: acid-leaching of metals from clays
5. doing the research, with all the compromises dealing with materials
at hand and what could be reasonably done with them: No one told
me I couldn't dispose of mercury-contaminated materials... initially.
Dealing with students who waltz into the lab while one is measuring
out toxic chemicals and won't believe you could possibly be busy.
6. trying to find literature to support your findings, and finding out
that what you've done is a bit more original than you thought
Anyone interested in the catalytic conversion of acetic acid to formic
acid?
Trooper
who's too lazy to publish his findings and hopes some other fool
will run the same experiment with enough statistical data to
support some of the more interesting findings that he had to
leave out.
--
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Launchpad is an experimental internet BBS. The views of its users do not
necessarily represent those of UNC-Chapel Hill, OIT, or the SysOps.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Erich Schwarz
>
> At the risk of serious faux pas, let me suggest:
>
> 1. Individuals need society; society needs individuals.
True. Some of us constitutively feel the need to assert one half of
that more loudly than the other half, but plainly you're not going to have
either around long without the other.
> 1a. Individuals can become self-sufficient once they have benefited
> from society (in the form of family, schools, etc.).
Big lacuna here. *CAN*, yes. But my observation is that some
individuals are VASTLY more competent to become self-sufficient than
others. Even in a fairly narrow socioeconomic environment (the Division of
Biology at the California Institute of Technology.)
The problem is that, if there are vast differences in competence
between individuals, what do we do with people whose competence is
antisocially high?
Conversely: what happens to us as a society if, guided by a commendable
zeal for social justice, we so smooth out society that young people reach
adulthood having been blunted of the individualistic traits that might
*make* them exceptionally competent?
One stereotypical leftist approach is to try to define the problem of
excellence out of existence, or frantically attempt to ignore it. To take
recent instances on analogous threads: "Well, Marie Curie was socially
determined: she didn't earn two Nobel Prizes as a woman in an exceedingly
sexist/racist circa-1900-French society *on her own*." Excuse me? "Well,
what does it mean, anyway, that she earned two Nobels? It's all
arbitrary." Shyeah, right; I wish *I* was that "arbitrary."
I think that, to some extent, a society can choose to either elicit or
discourage the intellectual and moral properties of a Curie in its
citizens. And I worry that our own society may not be eliciting those
properties very well. Thus, my attempts to remind people that such
properties arguably *exist*, and are not trivial or inevitable.
We can choose to encourage excellence. We can choose to squelch it.
But if we *want* excellence we are going to have to *recognize* and
*reward* excellence. And that's going to mean that some people are going
to be rewarded for having achieved more self-sufficiency than others
through their *internal* differences from those others.
> 1b. Individuals should not seek to avoid society's claims, even though
> they can.
*Which* claims? The sane ones? Or the "jump in thet-there active
volcano to keep the crops fertile" sort?
Have you never observed that many of the so-called "claims" of society
are directly analogous to the "claims" of dysfunctional parents? "Don't
marry that person, he/she's Not Our Kind." "Don't have sex before
marriage; never mind if you can't afford to get married before you're 30,
and you hit puberty at age 13." "Don't argue with me about
politics/religion/society, even if I am drooling constitutively and haven't
read a serious book in 35 years. Believe what I believe."
Here are some "claims" of society that I am totally convinced *should*
be thwarted: "Don't resist the draft -- never mind that it's for an
unConstitutional war, being fought in [pick your favorite butt-end of
nowhere] in a totally half-assed manner, for utterly vague purposes."
"Don't demonstrate against unConstitutional wars, just because you think
blowing 100,000 Iraqi teenagers up for cheap oil is a Bad Thing." "Don't
smoke marijuana; smoke tax-subsidized tobacco and drink sociallyĞsanctioned
alcohol, they're much better for you." "Don't publicly and loudly question
whether Christianity is not, in fact, about as sane as worshipping Zeus."
"Don't vote with your feet against mediocre education by relocating your
children into a school that will actually teach them to read."
I'm not trying to be obtuse, by denying that society *needs* individual
contributions to keep it going. I *am*, however, very intensely
questioning whether *any* society in fact ever really has the brains to
know what individual contributions will in fact make it better. I think
individuals may be better at judging that than society. And when society
gets really jinky about some stupid "claim," I think it is entirely proper
for individuals to kick society in the pants rather than give in.
"He serves the state best, who obeys it least." --Thoreau
> 2. No pure form of capitalist or socialist society has ever existed.
This doesn't keep us from saying, for instance, that the U.S. is
considerably more capitalist than Maoist China. :) It's the
shades-of-grey problem -- worth pointing out, but I'm not sure it
forestalls comparison.
> 3. In the absence of even one reliably pure empirical example, comparative
> history at best only confirms pre-existing ideology.
I think that in fact it may not be impossible to make sensible
comparisons; but I agree with you that, at the least, it is very very hard.
> Discuss amongst yourselves.
Meat thrown to the pirhanhas! ;)
--Erich
Erich Schwarz
> Erich Schwarz wrote:
> In short, you did a marvelous job of making a point that had already been
> well taken for granted both by me and everyone else on the port side of
> the "all wealth is social" fence. Certainly, you were not arguing that
> scientific findings should be anything but shared, Socrates [caCHING!]
> would have it no other way.
What I am arguing is that there is a necessary and large element of
individual judgement and reasoning in science which at times reaches
anarchic levels. It may be something that you already know, but your
writing about "In science, for instance, collective reasoning..." scarcely
made your awareness of that evident to me.
> And since you clearly were not claiming that scientists should treat their
> knowledge like Bill Gates treats software licenses I fail to see how my
> "half-truth" was deceptive in the least. Who was deceived? Apparently
> not Timothy or Quathleen.
Both Timothy and Qathleen seem to take individuality in science -- or
life -- for granted, and thus focus on trying to rein it in with societal
rules. This isn't a dishonorable position, but in this newsgroup I find
that there is very little articulated awareness of the other side of the
story: namely, that individuality is non-trivial, that it is the fountain
of vitality in both science and other enterprises, and that an excessive
adulation of "collective" reasoning or standards can utterly stultify
individuality.
> My post was *far* less than a 'half-truth,' it was but an *infintessimal*
> fraction of truth...
Have it your way. It's a deceptive nano-truth. :)
> > In the second place, science is *not* simply a subset of "the exercise
> > of reason." It is a hybrid activity which includes *both* philosophical
> > reasoning *and* technological tinkering -- often of a very mundane yet
> > necessary sort. It is the fusion of thought with action that gives science
> > its peculiar ability to generate new truths.
>
> This is a minor terminological difference.
I disagree. It's a huge difference. It's the reason why our knowledge
of the natural world scarcely changed from Socrates to Galileo, then
exploded after Galileo demonstrated that being able to make good telescopes
was more important than being able to eloquently cite Aristotle.
> And at risk of further inflating my tie-in point totals, my posts on the
> 'Pointy-Heads' thread [caCHING!] should make it clear that freely chosen
> volitional acts are products of reason if they are deliberately chosen on
> rational grounds. 'Practical reason' is reason governing volition. The
> upshot of that on the other thread is that empirical science is not an
> arbiter of moral reason, here it implies only that if you think in order
> to do it, it's an exercise of reason.
If you broaden the definition of "think" to include *any* output of the
nervous system, your point is quite true. Also quite trivial. If you
tighten up the definition of "think" to mean only discursive knowledge --
knowledge that can be put into words, knowledge of the sort that Eric
Scheidler says you need to write clearly about -- then I actually think
you're wrong.
Really being able to do experimental science has a major element of
thinking with your spinal cord and with your dream-generator. These can't
just run amok, or you'll fail; they need to function in a complementary
manner to discursive knowledge and logical reasoning. But I think that
philosophy bigots have a big tendency to downplay physical intelligence,
reflexes, and intuition as central elements of actually doing science. I
think that in science, you have to have a physical feeling for the work
that goes below words; and you have to have the ability to at least
intermittently think in wordless images that leap beyond formal reason.
Take those things away, and I suspect you're going to be extremely limited
in what you can do.
Both physical and imaginative intuition are, IMO, nourished by direct
contact with one's subject matter, which means in practice that you need to
be working with your hands and your eyes as well as with your logical mind.
There is no practical way I've seen of doing that but to walk to the lab
bench and do the actual drudgery of actually doing experiments. I don't
think any amount of philosophical logic-chopping can substitute for that --
although I also think that the logical rigor exemplified by Kant is a
necessary complement to it.
> > There just is no collective _deus ex machina_ that will in fact take
> > any serious amount of the weight of science off your back, when you are in
> > fact not merely a commentator on science but actually a working scientist.
>
> It truly is refreshing to see a confessed capitalist embrace the notion of
> labor as the source of value.
I don't. Labor is the source of incremental value. Capital is the
wherewithal upon which labor works -- preexisting, static value. Both are
valid and necessary.
Given a huge skew in the valuation of one over the other, a balanced
mind will want to correct the skew. Thus I find myself writing essays in
defense of property when I see what strikes me as Marxist reasoning, and
essays in defense of the individual worker when I see top-down nonsense
being written about my own work. Were I on a different newsgroup, facing
different biases, I'd probably be writing the opposite correctives.
> > Again, I agree that individual reasoning needs to be "replicated and
> > confirmed by a collective group."
>
> Then how is that not analogous to the distribution of wealth being
> legitimately arbitered by a society? That, and *not* the psychology of
> experimental researchers was the topic that I was addressing.
I might agree that it was analogous, but I would then say that the
arbitration of society was only tolerable if *it* were kept in check by
some sort of veto power by the individual. In the case of governments I
consider that veto power to be emigration or rebellion. In the case of
scientific paradigms I consider that veto power to be intellectual dissent
or heresy.
> > Agreed. In fact, as Kathleen's post demonstrates, my own experiences
> > and viewpoint are *not* universal.
> >
> > Which is an important fact.
>
> An "important fact" from me, a "non-scientist." Is that possible? :)
Something tells me that calling you a "non-scientist" managed to hit
one of your *own* Extremely Hot Buttons. FWIW, that wasn't intentional.
:^}
> > Given that individuality *is* a large driving element of science, and
> > also given that in fact I can no more create *anything* entirely of my own
> > invention any more than I can create the atoms of my own body through my
> > own efforts, it follows that individuality (as manifested by creativity) in
> > science must have some other basis than the ability to create anything
> > entirely of my own invention.
>
> To be sure you cannot make something from nothing. And a capitalist can't
> create economic wealth ex nihilio either, but rather he *takes* things
^^^^^
> from elsewhere and rearranges them to resell. Of this we apparently
> agree.
Does he "take" them or does he pay for them? Is capital theft?
See, I *don't* agree that capital is theft? Do you? If not, why use
the word "take" instead of the word "buy" here?
> AND THAT WAS PRECISELY THE POINT THAT TIMOTHY WAS MAKING ABOUT WEALTH!!!!!!
>
> That's why the analogy fit!!! Because economic producers have some inputs
> which they do not buy but nevertheless receive, they should also have some
> outputs which they do not sell but nevertheless give away.
To the extent that they *are* being subsidized by society it *is*
reasonable for society to expect recompense. The quarrel we have is that
you seem to have a much larger estimate of how many subsidies they're
receiving than I do. Which may well be an accurate idea in many particular
instances, but which I submit cannot be simply postulated for all producers
in society. It has to be specifically judged -- and the producer himself
or herself has the ultimate say in that judgement, in the sense that if
society's idea of what it is owed gets confiscatory, he or she *should*
disagree with society and *should* in some way extricate himself or herself
from the power of that society.
> > > Secondly and more ironically, you have ignored the *empirical* challenges
> > > that Tom Bitterman posted to even your distorted characterization of
> > > collectivism. Germany, Russia and Japan come to mind as not-terribly
> > > laissex-faire, yet scientifically advancing societies.
> >
> > As you are well aware, the high period of German scientific progress
> > abruptly ended when Germany decided that it would no longer remain
> > hospitable to the individual intellects of rather non-collective folk like
> > Einstein. The resulting exodus of strong individuals vitiated German
> > science, and it has yet to fully recover.
>
> General Relativity was published in 1905 produced by a resident of a
> repressive undemocratic society that ironically *had* the first welfare
> state.
As I carefully noted, in a post that you have chosen to not quote here,
the liberty of Germany was quite selective. My point was that in 1905,
academics in Germany enjoyed as much intellectual freedom as they probably
had anywhere else on earth at that time. I am well aware that this freedom
was a sorely limited privilege. But that does not refute the fact that,
when Germany decided that it would no longer extend this freedom to its
scientists, an exodus began that would (among other things) cause American
universities to reach world status, and provide a lot of motivated and
skilled workers for the Manhattan Project.
> Contrast freedom and science there with freedom and science in
> Mexico at that time which was mighty hospitable to strong individuals. Or
> compare it to any number of other places at that time.
See above.
> At best, your normative historical claims seem exceedingly selective on
> this point.
No. I'm being "selective" in the sense that I am forcing you and Tom
to focus on what is relevant to the specific issue being discussed here. I
am *not* claiming that *any* society in 1905 extended, to the bulk of its
people, the intellectual freedom that would have allowed large numbers of
them to be creative thinkers. I *am*, however, suggesting that, to the
extent such freedom was later extended, scientific reasoning by the common
people became possible.
> It's perhaps also the case that scientific advance correlates
> to patronage and it's first cousin welfare spending better than to an
> unquantifiable like 'freedom.'
I am sorry that I cannot *quantify* freedom for you. If I could do
that I would publish the paper in _Nature_ and become very famous.
Meanwhile I just have to use the words of the language that we are using
and hope that there is a residue of ability in my listeners to just get my
drift now and then.
> > Russia's record is terribly stunted compared to what it might have been.
>
> And so might our own be. So what? You are assuming this conclusion and
> not proving it. You do not know what they would have accomplished
> otherwise and it's a silly exercise to base your proof on such a
> speculation.
It's not all that silly if one observes the outright execution of what
had been one of the finest cadres of geneticists in the world. Frankly, if
that doesn't give you a sense of wasted possibilities, I'm not at all clear
on what would.
> Besides, Sputnik happened in an unfree society before a free one managed
> to replicate the feat. Is that just a bad data point?
It's an incomplete one. The U.S. had had the ability to orbit a
satellite by 1955. That was prevented from happening only by a top-down
order from Eisenhower.
Also, it is worth noting that once the U.S. felt motivated to excel in
space, it outpaced the Soviets quite impressively. Sputnik may have been
Russian, but Apollo 11 and Voyager II were American.
> > Its chief triumphs have been in areas requiring very little support
> > from society -- theoretical physics and mathematics.
>
> You're forgetting aerospace and nuclear engineering...
^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
No, I'm charitably not mentioning nuclear engineering -- which is a
disaster on wheels in Russia.
> ...not to mention
> weapons and satellite tracking technology. And they also did some pretty
> cool computer science even though they didn't have the hardware to run it
> on.
The computer science is applied math -- which, like theoretical math,
requires a lot less support from society than genetics.
I am pleased to see that you agree with me that the Soviet threat in
weaponry, aerospace, and satellites to the Western world was respectable
and real. Perhaps it *is* the case that tyrannies can efficiently build
the tools for enslaving free societies. This is indeed impressive, and it
validates the decision by American leaders to wage the Cold War. But it's
not of much interest to anybody who is instead concerned with the promotion
of non-military science.
> > In even genetics, Russia's government managed to take an *existing*
> > cadre of genetics and destroy it in the 1920s. For details I refer
> > you to any encyclopedia entry on Lysenkoism.
>
> Lysenko is an interesting choice considering the New York Times just
> published a full page article on the current revival of work involving the
> heritability of acquired characteristics. Perhaps some form of Lamarckism
> isn't completely out of the picture just yet.
No theory in science is ever "completely out of the picture": witness
the revival of light-as-particles after 200 years in which light-as-waves
reigned. It remains the case, however, that what is being called revived
Lamarckism today is (1) a quite limited subset of genetic phenomena, (2)
only slightly less controversial among serious geneticists than cold fusion
is among serious physicists, (3) explicable as an interesting extension of
preexisting molecular genetics, not as an utter miracle, and (4) a damned
poor excuse for slaughtering serious geneticists in the 1920s.
> To be sure, the Soviets did some serious and quite literal violence to
> philosophy in the name of "historical necessity." Of that there is no
> doubt. But I don't think empirical science suffered as much on balance
> when you consider the massive subsidies that it got from the state both
> directly and via education.
I seriously doubt that a Russian biologist would agree. It has been a
terrible struggle for Russian biologists, even *with* Soviet subsidies and
education, to catch up with the West after the ground lost in the 1920s and
1930s. In part this was due to the fact that the Soviet regime saw to it
that biologists had to wait a *year* to recieve Western research journals
and that they could go to prison for Xeroxing them.
> In all honesty, I think the historical record makes a fair argument that
> funding is more important to science than political and social freedom and
> the record of free societies in that regard is decidedly mixed.
In all honesty, "Russian genetics was just fine" is one of the
*weakest* arguments you have ever made. I'd drop it if I were you.
> > Japan is perhaps the best instance to cite because here there *is* a
> > growing scientific community that lives amid a culture that is seriously
> > different from the American molecular biology community. Like Kathleen's
> > post, this demonstrates that my own views are no more exhaustively true
> > than yours. It is yet unclear, however, whether Japan will fully develop
> > its scientific capacities; what I have seen so far is that the bulk of
> > Asian researchers visiting Caltech tend to be emigres from South Korea or
> > China, while Japan's brightest minds seem to go more often into
> > (unpublished) applied research for industry.
>
> Ironically enough, my experience is that some of the best social science
> is done privately as well as some of the best computer science and
> engineering. But in Japan, there are direct and indirect subsidies just as
> there are here. But if one 'collectivist' (actually corporatist is more
> appropos in this case) society can produce impressive science, why use
> that as a reason to hack apart liberal Americana?
I'm not trying to "hack apart" liberal Americana. I'm trying to keep
this discussion from flopping completely over on its left side by letting
you and Q. and Timothy just assert stuff that is nano-true but terribly
skewed on the side of collective versus individual reason/judgement.
> I am just not haunted by the revenant of atomization the way the
> collectivist spook torments you. In fact, I like individuals so much, I
> decided to be one.
And I like societies so much, I decided to try saving them from
themselves.
> "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was
> standing on the shoulder of giants."
>
> --Sir Isaac Newton
Good quote, but one has to *be* a giant to climb onto a giant. :)
--Erich
Micky DuPree
> It's also not "logical" that Carl would cite the allegedly
>"collective" nature of scientific reasoning as an argument that all
>wealth *ought* to be "social," but he did. The connection was
>originally his, not mine.
This is another instance where I do not feel comfortable trying to
paraphrase Carl. However, I would like to point out that the
similarities you're trying to underscore in the analogy don't amount to
much. This is because the basic analogy between physical property and
"intellectual property" breaks down before you get to this point. Most
notably, if you share your knowledge with those who have less, you do
NOT personally end up with less than when you started.
A collective model of human information validation, transfer, and
storage therefore does not necessarily translate into a collective model
of human physical property.
-Micky
--
And I didn't have to read a book to figure that out, nyahh ....
:)
Micky DuPree
Carl is right. Your reasoning is badly flawed. You compare mid-20th-
century America with mid-20th-century Russia and say, "See, the results
speak for themselves. The American system is better." What you fail to
acknowledge are the relative differences of both countries prior to
1917. Czarist Russia was an economic backwater, a social disgrace, a
political anachronism, and a scientific joke prior to the revolution,
while at the same time America was starting to come into its own as a
world power. After the revolution, in spite of its own political and
moral monstrousness, in spite of the deprivations of global economic
depression and world war fought on it own soil, the Soviet Union still
managed to become a major player on the stage of world science and
technological advancement. Not as good a player as the U.S. on balance,
but easily a more significant player than a whole host of exceedingly
freer countries. And they managed this in a few decades starting with
virtually *nothing*. In terms of relative gains, in terms of making
utilitarian comparisons of scientific and educational progress on the
basis of *a level playing field*, the Soviet Union's relative results
were nothing short of miraculous whereas ours were decidedly lazy and
mixed. But we started with more and, partly by the default of not
having to wage devastating wars on our own soil, emerged from the
earlier conflicts of this century on the top of the heap. As long as we
didn't seek to actively undermine what we already had going for us, our
preeminence in many fields was virtually guaranteed by the fact that
most of the rest of the developed world had some very deep wounds to
lick.
The truth is, scientific and educational advancement do not correlate
well to the political freedom, the economic deregulation, or even the
moral decency of a society. However much all of us here may value all
of the above (I'll go out on a limb and say that no one here has ever
harbored a desire to be a citizen of the Soviet Union, and BTW, IMNSHO,
you owe Carl an apology for that crack about the KGB hat and the Waffen
SS), only a completely unscientific adherence to an irrational ideology
could possibly maintain in the face of history itself that your ideals
of political freedom are either necessary or sufficient for the
advancement of science and education. Political freedom, economic
prosperity, and moral decency are all worthy goals, as are scientific
advancement and educational progress, but if you seriously want to
improve the latter two, you must intellectually disentangle them from
the former set and seek real cause and effect rather than rely on
ideological reflex to answer all of life's questions (especially
questions that no one in the room has even *asked* you).
I have no idea whether either one of you has any use for this
interjection since it's not much more than an irritable paraphrase of
certain points that Carl has already made, but I can only suppose that
if you didn't want any interruptions at all you'd be doing this via
email, and it's difficult to follow this particular exchange without
exasperation bordering on anger. My knowledge of history, with a few
exceptions, is only good to the broad survey level, and yet EVEN I can
look at before-and-after pictures of America and Russia and put two and
two together. Either your vaunted reading has been a poor friend to
you, Erich, or perhaps you to it, and America is indeed in trouble if
its strongest, freest individuals cannot grasp the basics of empirical
observation and simple deduction without resorting to prejudice.
-Micky
--
Was it Czarist Russia they called "the sick man of Europe" or am I
thinking of the Ottoman Empire ... ?
Erich Schwarz
> The form of individuality which I take Erich to
> be defending is a historically specific one, contigent on all sorts of
> peculiarly modern conditions.
In detail, yes, which is why I'm a technophile -- one of the
major "peculiarly modern" conditions is the fact that we don't
all live on farms anymore. Which is utterly dependent on our
being able to have 5% of the population feed everybody.
Broadly speaking, though, *some* form of individuality
in what might be considered a Western form existed for at least
subsets of people (specifically, males in the top 10% of the
population) long ago. The Greeks at Marathon went into battle
shouting "Freedom!" By modern standards they were utter hypocrites:
but the *idea* of freedom in the Western world arguably began
with them, and that isn't trivial.
--Erich Schwarz
Thomas James
: Erich:
I must say that on first reaction I side with Erich: I find
the thesis that political freedom is not necessary for good science
to be disturbing at some gut level. If I have been following
this thread correctly, this thesis evolved (mutated?) from an
earlier discussion in which the relative importance of individual vs.
collective effort in science was was being debated.
It's clear that an authoritarian society, such as the Soviet
Union, can achieve impressive scientific and technological results.
Sputnik, atomic reactors, various pieces of weaponry (e.g. fighter
planes, submarines) all come to mind when thinking of Soviet
achievements in science and technology. There is also no
question that Soviet contributions to theoretical physics and
mathematics have been substantial.
[It is perhaps ironic that some of the greatest contributions
from this collective nation were made in fields in which the individual
ability or brilliance of the practitioner is most important.]
If we take 1900, say, or 1920 as the baseline, it's also true that the
Soviet Union started considerably behind the U.S., making these
achievements even more impressive. The evidence clearly supports
the disturbing thesis mentioned above.
However, I perhaps part with Micky and Carl when I
consider the question "Was the science done in the Soviet Union
as 'good' as it would have been if the Soviet Union had been
more free?" I don't think this question can be answered
definitively, but I have been impressed with how poorly
scientific and technological advances were *applied* in the
former Soviet Union and its satellite states. One has only
to read about deforested regions in eastern Europe due to acid
rain, Chernobyl, or the desertification around the Aral Sea
to conclude that the Soviet way of doing things lead to serious
environmental (and hence social) problems.
You may wish to argue that I have redirected the discussion
away from the practice of pure science, but I think that in
considering the quality of science one also has to consider
how it is applied.
You may also want to point to Three Mile Island, Love Canal,
or the deforestation around Sudbury as examples of the misapplication
of science in the western world. The difference, I believe, is
in the level of responsiveness (and responsibility) of those
individuals who are responsible for ministering to the public good.
Sudbury is green again, people living around Love canal were
moved away, and the nuclear industry has tightened its standards
considerably. My understanding is that similar problems in the
Soviet Union were ignored for as long as possible.
Returning to the question of whether the science conducted in
the Soviet Union was as good as it could have been, here
the example of Lysenkoism certainly is an example of
how a repressive or authoritatian society, can, if it so
decides, quash a particular kind of scientific endeavour.
The Soviet Union did not benefit by redirecting those people to other
avenues of research - they were simply killed.
Apart from the obvious implications for biology, there
must have been a chilling effect amongst scientists in general.
One of the most important things about conducting science is being
allowed to 'follow your nose'. With the example of Lysenkoism,
how could scientists in the Soviet Union not have been very cautious
about what they chose to study? How could this not have impeded the
progress of science in the Soviet Union?
I'll stop here. Comments?
: The truth is, scientific and educational advancement do not correlate
: -Micky
--
__________________________________________________
Tom James
tja...@emr1.emr.ca or (better) ja...@agg.emr.ca
standard disclaimers
Christa Heuser
Erich Schwarz <schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu> wrote:
>Jason Kodish asked:
>
>> Define "serious" book.
>
> A serious book is REALLY HARD to read on your own. This is why
>self-education is so admirable when it actually happens in a deep way: it
>is *hard hard hard* to do, just like actually doing those physical
>exercises for one unbroken year and getting in physical shape is *hard*.
...
But doesn't that define serious books in terms of the reader's level
rather than the book? Does that mean that what is a serious
book for one person is fluff for another? I mean, I try, once
a year, to read Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_. I fail, because
it's just too damn hard. OTOH, _The Foundations of the Metaphyiscs
of Morals_ was dead easy in comparison. Does that make it non-
serious? I knew lots of people who, sad but true, had a real hard
time getting through it. Does that mean it's "serious" for them
and "non-serious" for me?
I read voraciously, both serious and non-serious books, but my
criteria for "serious" would be a little different. For me, a
serious book is a book about something important that I wouldn't
know if I hadn't read it. I guess I'm defining in terms of
the reader as well, but not in terms of level of difficulty.
So, for me, _Understanding Comics_ by Scott McCloud was a serious
book. Sure, it was easy reading, but it made me think about
things I'd never thought about before. _Consciousness Explained_
by Daniel Dennett was a serious book. _Goedel, Escher, Bach_
was serious, even though it was fun--and humorous! The
_Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals_ was serious, even
though it's easier to read than the first Critique.
I'd definitely agree with you that people ought to be reading
lots of serious books--but I wouldn't advise everyone to slog
through Kant every month just because it's hard. If people are
going to read serious books, they have to be worth reading for
something more than the mental exercise.
Christa Heuser
chr...@io.com
serious book this week: _The Psychology of Everyday Things_