OT: About America in this NG

I firmly believe in the concept that "it takes a village to raise a child", and thus kibbutzes and intentional communities and communes are even better than the traditional nuclear family. The kibbutz, apparently, is also based on strong religious and moral principles, which I see sorely lacking in many households. I really don't give a fig if the parents are married or not.

What matters is their deep sense of rational morality and ethics, and their availability as role models for their children. In an extended community

with a sense of common purpose and sharing, and an open-minded acceptance of alternative lifestyles (as long as they are not violent or destructive),

children should grow up with a more varied and healthier experience that

will enable them to cope with a fast changing and uncertain society. Materialism and love of money and individual glory are the ingredients of a self-destructive civilization. Lone wolves die; the pack survives.

Paul

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Civilisation is about cooperation. Materialism, love of money and desire for glory can all be means to getting that cooperation to work. Idealism is fine, but other motivations shouldn't be neglected just because they can be destructive if taken to excess or practiced in isolation, and idealism on it's own can go seriously wrong.

Yep. Before LBJ I lived in a racially-mixed neighborhood. Nobody noticed. All of us were just working stiffs. Primarily WWII Vets, with well-kept houses and lawns.

Now that neighborhood is a slum. And so drug-ridden that it's scary to drive thru. ...Jim Thompson

Baloney put forth by a leftist who has never provided for or raised a family.

Indeed packs survive... you can find them in every slum.

Lone wolves become managers and entrepreneurs >:-} ...Jim Thompson

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Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson hasn't noticed that managers and entrepreneurs aren't lone wolves but rather leaders of their little packs. Wolf society isn't a model for human society - it does have a lot more in common with chimpanzee society - and neither has evolved mechanism that let packs collaborate with other packs.

Providing for and raising a family hasn't exactly educated Jim - he may be proud of having done it, but it's left him the same ignorant redneck that he was when he went to MIT and learned quite a lot about electronics, and nothing much about anything else.

How lucky we are to have you here to teach us about the rest. Aren't you just a bit too full of yourself?

Bill thinks he has a 20 gallon mind in a quart hat, when the ratio is more like a single Hydrogen atom in a 55 gallon drum.

I'm entitled to give Jim a hard time. He notified his friends at the FBI that I was dangerously anti-American, which was both foolish and malicious. That fact that it must have destroyed any credibility he might have had with his friends at the FBI should have been enough to set him right, but he doesn't seem to have noticed that he made an ass of himself.

As for being too full of myself, do find some proposition where you can prove me wrong - it happens from time to time, but not very often, and you don't promise to be a fruitful source of educational information.

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Mike does love these little analogies. He was a technician - and apparently a very good one - and he has the usual technicians scepticism about engineers, and the usual technicians inability to follow what's actually going on over his head.

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Ya know Paul it is really astounding just how far you have bought into the popular stereotypes. Disgusting.

See:

?-)

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I don't think that he is denying that teenage births are decreasing, merely asserting that they remain too high.

Since he is also asserting that what's important is the proportion of teenage mothers who are single parents, as opposed to mothers in a stable and persisting relationship - an issue which your document doesn't address at all - you aren't actually addressing the substance of his comments.

One could reasonably argue that the decline in teenage birthrates has been concentrated in the more responsible fraction of the female teenage population, and that it's the residual population of feckless nitwits who are still having children they can't look after properly, let alone raise to become responsible adults.

Paul is so leftist he lives in Maryland >:-}

Having had grandparents who lived there, Appalachia is full of poor people, who have no debt, own their own home and farm land... and piss on the Feds at every opportunity ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Where do you get this thing about Jim and FBI? Sounds like a paranoid delusion.

Well, at least I don't presume to do what you do here all day long: peddling left-wing agit-prop as "education." Mybe you should try yo work for a living at least part of the day. Didn't you write a while back that you still wanted to work despite of your retirement age?

But I also heard that lately the Obama administration is trying to wean them off that dangerous independent life style and convince them of the advantages of food stamps and other available federal aid programs they are "entitled" to.

Yep. I've heard that also. But I doubt if it'll "take". Even I have to be careful driving back thru those hills... driving one of them thar' furrin cars sets them off :-) ...Jim Thompson

It's his paranoid delusion - he's boasted about doing it here several times. I've got no evidence that he actually did anything, but he's not into subtle humour.

You clearly haven't been exposed to left-wing agit-prop, if you get restive about being exposed to the results of regular academic sociological research.

It's been an ambition for almost ten years now. While I was stuck in the Netherlands, the endemic ageism made it a futile ambition - I got a couple of job interviews before I turned 65, but nothing after that. Australia isn't quite as bad - I've still yet to get a job interview, but I've talked to a guy at an employment agency (who didn't like my chances in the immediate future) and I'm going out this afternoon to talk to a guy who might be able to use me if the right customer shows up.

ur retirement age?

True. But the prospects aren't promising.

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If they knew enough to be able to try to borrow money, the banks wouldn't lend it to them

It's unlikely that they see the significance of any social organisation outside of their 150-odd person tribe.

And your evidence for this claim is?

Peasants come in a wide range of different varieties. Jim's family might have owned their own farm, but they were active in the larger economy, and wouldn't have been remotely eligible for food stamps. Small farms don't support a particularly comfortable life-style, and modern Europe has been "rationalising" agriculture for the past century or so. In Australia, the number of people engaged in agriculture peaked in the 1890's and has been declining every since as mechanisation progressively increased the productivity of individual agricultural workers.

Peasant farmers on small farms don't have the capital to mechanise quite as dramatically, and rarely want to sell their land and more into some other business, so the French and Germans have rationalised their agriculture rather more slowly.

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Wow, Paul. What a bigoted post. Does that come from zero real contact with poor people? Nor does it help that the politicians and the educational system teach entitlement thinking.

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