OT: About America in this NG

It is not bigoted. Do you mean "big OT"?

I am merely making a suggestion for a voluntary program that would help poor people financially and give them better options for taking care of themselves without being saddled with children they can't afford. It would be offered equally to anyone without regard to race or IQ or income.

Please tell me why you (and others) find this proposal so "evil"?

That IS a huge problem. But it's a wonder that teachers can help any student learn the basics, with overcrowding and rampant violence and a "hands-off" policy with little support for discipline from families at home.

Paul

That article says the kibbutz (communal) kids felt scarred, abandoned, sought more mental help, and had lower attainment than the moshavniks (non-communal).

The testimonials in the comments--poignantly--amplify that.

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That's worth exploring.

To which American 'villages' is Hillary referring? Is she seriously suggesting America should emulate tribal societies? Are they happier, more prosperous, more secure, better fed, better educated? Does Hillary think their too-commonly murderous way tolerates diversity better, or offers more opportunity? And which inner-city "village" does she think you should send your kids to to educate, to optimize their chance of success?

Let's be clear: what Hillary's suggesting is nothing like an idyllic village--some serene, peaceful, supportive backwater of a society on some South Pacific island--mutually cooperating to raise children. She thinks the government can raise your kids better than you can. What she's really saying is that the Borg could do a really good job, it just needs more taxes.

It's more gulag than village.

It's like thinking a shelter would love Mutley as well as you, know him as well, treat him with as much dignity, care and attention. Not to mention how he'd miss you.

er

My cousins grew up in such a place, on an idyllic South Pacific island where little kids run and play in packs, sleep at whoever's house they wind up that night, and learn from whoever wants to teach them.

(Aside: and where did the kids so raised--my cousins--choose to raise their /own/ families? America. They bailed.)

Their parents were 1960's hippies seeking escape from (American) capitalism, full of socialist ideals and theories. Once on scene, they decided the sweet, naive, ignorant local savages needed lifting up from their third-world 'plight.'

They decided what the local folks needed was cash, so they could trade in the world economy for various goods--machines, technology, etc--to 'improve' their lives. So, ironically, said hippies started an export company, trading a natural, organic resource from the island for hard currency. It was the first such entrepreneurial effort there--no one else had tried.

When it started working--after all the hard work, ingenuity and investment--the gov't nationalized it. And promptly ran it into the ground, leaving nothing. They then jailed my relatives for not being able to pay back the business loan, after the gov't had nationalized the business. Thereafter ensued a dozen-year ordeal, just recently ended, which stripped them of their freedom, and much of what they'd spent a lifetime earning.

This is Obama's America, on display. This is his vision, his model: of cronyism, statism, State favorites in business, and so forth.

You'll be glad to know that they're undeterred. Still hippies, still socialists, they still believe, even after it imprisoned them. Ironically again, they call their other enterprise--the one their own children fled--'The Village.'

I greatly admire my uncle, his idealism, his doggedness, and his dedication. I would not, however, want this experiment tried here, yet it /is/ being tried, as we speak.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

But it'll be different this time. Lord Obama is in charge.

...

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Lord help us.

[snip]

The anecdotal evidence for one failed experiment (which seemed to have failed because of a corrupt government) does not negate the viability of the concept. There are many intentional communities and cohousing ventures that are thriving and some have been in existence for many years. There is also the "Transition Town" movement which shows promise, and sustainable permaculture must be an integral part. Local currencies are also helpful to stabilize the essential economy.

I think the inner cities are just about lost causes and the only salvation must come from (mostly black) leaders to abandon their victim mentality and promote family values and self-discipline and non-violence. The self-destructive gangster rapper paradigm and acceptance of crime, violence, and materialism must be supplanted by something wholesome and constructive.

The "village" concept will not work if people are motivated by greed, power, and materialism. It is also doomed if it is an island in the midst of a larger framework of a nation or government that is controlled by those with conflicting ideals. As such, it may need to remain "poor" in terms of conventional measures of wealth, so as not to be a target of greed. True

wealth is determined by individual freedom and happiness, and having human needs satisfied.

It may very well be that the bulk of human beings do not have the right mindset for this to work. We have, after all, evolved from primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos who are highly individualistic, competitive, and

gratuitously violent. We are fortunate to have co-evolved with wolves and the dog (canis lupus familiaris), where survival of the pack is paramount, but we must use our superior intellect to engineer a global society that

will not blow itself up. At this point it seems that irrational fundamentalist religion and corporate and individual greed are winning, however.

Paul

But fundamantalist religion and corporate values, together, are well suited to an orderly, just, and prosperous society. It's sex/drugs/rock-and-roll, urban crime, cultural/language separatism, single-mother families, and buying/breeding herds of underclass voters that are amplifying class warfare in the USA, and making it less governable.

You don't see a lot of Mormon drug-turf wars, or much murder as a tool of corporate competition. Plymouth Colony was a better social model than modern Detroit.

I've been around a few utopian societies, little ones like single-house communes and bigger stuff like New Island. They tend to be unstable.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Oh, good grief! What unbelievable naivete. Nothing else need be read.

No. Not at *all*. Especially Fundamentalist religion, which tends to be highly apocalyptic. The big idea that creates an orderly, just and prosperous society is empiricism - because otherwise, you have no idea what "order" is. Physics really didn't know until Claude Shannon what entropy/order were in any useful way.

If fundamentalism and corporate values created a good society, Saudi Arabia would be a paradise. besides, at it's core, fundamentalism is

*total anathema* to corporate values to begin with.

Corporate values don't lead to much of anything beyond Schumpeterian creative destruction. Nothing wrong with that but it's a limited regime of value-creation. There is very little "why" in it, any more than there's a "why" in a servo motor.

Indeed, I consider WalMart 1) a significant corporate leader and 2) founded on *progressive* principles - Sam Walton is from the same place as my people, who were overwhelmingly big-P Progressive. The idea is to do as much good as possible while doing well, and they do this rather ruthlessly - to create maximum consumer surplus. But the reasons behind this were Sam's hatred of poverty; it's LBJ done "right".

*Actual* fundamentalist religion ends up being something that denies physical manifestations as illusion. This is true of all of the Big Three, plus Buddhism. I don't know enough about Hinduism to say, really. They're based on Primacy of Consciousness ( in the beginning was the Logos/Word/$DEITY.... ). It's a fantastic *metaphor* , but by being fundamentalist, it's taken *literally*.

No, the people who put us over the mud-scrabbling level were those like Ford or Vanderbilt, and they had a much more physical idea in mind.

Gad, no. Not much of that matters at all. See "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray - there's a Big Something Else in the middle - those are not even causes at all, but symptoms ( and only symptoms if you don't actually understand them ).

Dr. Murray is, after all, a Serious Empiricist... but even then, the current corporate model ( which he calls Belmont ) suffers from significant and egregious cargo-cultism. Corporations tend to be hotbeds of grey mediocrity.

it didn't scale. It's fine if you want to lead a calorie-constrained, poverty ( and louse ) ridden existence. You can reinvent it now, on the plains of Kansas.

Way, way , way unstable.

--
Les Cargill

You're conflating two different elements of the story, the child- rearing method, and the parallels between their government and America's Great Leap Forward.

The child-rearing works fine there as far as I know--I haven't talked to my cousins about it. I only know that as adults they chose to leave, to raise their families elsewhere.

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A handful of possible successes does not disprove the literal billions of examples that two loving parents raise the best kids.

But, in any event, that's not what Hillary was saying. She's saying that cold, disinterested, unionized bureaucrats can slop and raise single womens' kids better on feedlots than the women themselves can. That the women need not care for their kids, that's the government's role. That has nothing to do with community. It ruins it.

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As a canine evolutionary question, it doesn't advance one's blood line to have your meat snatched and given to competitors. If you're bonded to a pack, you defend your pack. And, pack attacks pack. Or, in this case, PAC.

What Obama represents--taking, and redistributing--isn't cooperation. That's how it's promoted, but it's something else. Something divisive. Corrosive. Bad. It sets people against each other. Frightens makers and savers. Many, many more people today are spending their time, creativity and energy setting aside stores and hiding things rather than working, worrying whether Obama will take their life savings by inflation, VAT, expropriation, or all three.

Legitimate government is supposed to protect people, not prey on them, protect property, not take it. Now that it's the latter, people are defensive, hiding, hunkering down.

It's destructive.

I'm still optimistic for America--we know what to do, we're just a little lost. But socialism isn't the way. I've explained why--it's not kind, not caring, not benevolent; that's just marketing.

James Arthur

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I used to think Mao was a ruthless murderer. Nothing of the kind--he was a Progressive, just trying to do what was best for everyone. Mao was one of the first promoters of sustainability; the result was the opposite.

Here's central planning, in life:

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

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could just remove every one that sticks out that will make governing much easier, just keep every one afraid committed to the system and everything will be nice and easy to govern

whether top of the pyramid is kim Il Jong or God and the punishment is death or eternal damnation is only a minor difference, just start the brain washing young and make the potential punishment scary enough and no one will dare step out of line

you should watch Demolition Man, it easy action movie but the is a morale to it

-Lasse

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The kids certainly did feel scared and abandoned from time to time, and grew up to be less secure adults. This meant that they attained less in some areas, and more in others than moshaviks. This doesn't make them damaged.

Which is what anecdotal evidence does, and right-wingers are correspondingly prone to cite it whenever they want to make a point that isn't actually well-supported by the evidence.

ld",

That's malicious nonsense. The point is that children are influenced by all the adults they come in contact with, and if they don't come in contact with enough adults in addition to their parents their social skills - as adults - aren't what they might have been. The government doesn't really come into it - school and pre-school are arenas where children do work on their social skills and these are often government supported, but government is primarily interested in formal education, rather than developing the social skills they've got no obvious way of measuring.

Only when you've got through with misinterpreting what is being said to make it fit with you paranoid fears of "big" (by which you mean barely adequate) government.

tter

There's no evidence to support that claim. Well integrated communities provide more support than the traditional nuclear family on it's own, and can usefully supplement a defective nuclear family, but they don't do as well as the nuclear family if they are required to replace it. Whence foster-parents rather than orphanages.

It's obviously not Obama's America - as you point out, this was a third world government, indulging in the primitive rapacious behaviour that unrestrained elites have been getting away with since the start of recorded history.

Your aim is to replace your own government with it's less primitive, but still antiquated, defences against this sort of behaviour, with something less potent, less well-funded and more susceptible to your particular silly ideas.

In the sense that you want to see the Tea Bagging Republican Party elected to perform a slightly more subtle version of the same kind of rapine on the bottom 99% of the American income distribution.

The US electorate wasn't silly enough to elect Romney to transfer even more of the US GDP into the pockets of the top 1%. but they weren't sufficiently well informed to throw out the Republican congressmen who still give this greedy and self-damaging crew a majority in congress, and the inadequate US rules on electoral expenditure make it difficult to make them better informed.

Sadly, you have confronted the enemy, but failed to recognise it as yourself.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 I would not, however, want this experiment tried here,

No matter how silly the right-wing message, krw can be relied on to say "me too".

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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It might help if the communities offered any career path other than gangster to the rising generation.

Low quality education training people for non-existent jobs doesn't exactly invited people to any kind of constructive engagement in the slice of society that they are exposed to.

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What a pity. They always are. There are other motivations which may balance the biological imperatives, but they don't eliminate them.

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Unfortunately, if the scheme can't offer at least "well-off" in competition with immediate environment, it's doomed. The wealthy end of the income distribution isn't a real problem - people can aspire to wealth, but they all know that only a few of them are going to make it. Modern industrial society has the capacity to deliver a reasonably high standard of living to pretty much everybody, and a scheme that can't do that hasn't got a lot to recommend it.

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Bonobos aren't anything like a violent as chimpanzees, and the whole thrust of human evolution has been to evolve an ape who can cooperate in larger groups than the other apes. Our natural social unit - the tribe - unites some 150 individuals. This is more than any other ape can manage. It is suspected that language evolved to help this process. Human's gossip where other apes groom one another, and language makes it easier to keep track of free-loaders and to prevent them from dragging down the performance of the group as a whole.

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The dog has evolved the capacity to read human social signals, but our hunting packs are larger and more effective than canine hunting packs

- I doubt if they taught us anything.

We've been working on it for a while now. The US is stuck with a somewhat under-evolved constitution, but other countries have done better.

In the US this may be true. The Arab Spring looks more like a a success story for the Radical Enlightenment, though violent and reactionary elements may be able to hijack some of the transitions to a different political organisation, as they so often have in the past.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[snip]

You've got the "orderly" right - though such societies tend to give fundamentalist thugs the right obe be disorderly in the pursuit of a "higher" order. Justice and prosperity are only available to those with a lot of clout within the fundamentalist power structure, and such societies tend to stagnate and eventually get taken over by better run neighbours.

What a remarkably unrealistic perception. It's the steady concentration of wealth and property in the hands of the top !% of the US that is making it less governable. The US has a bad case of rampant inequality

and it's costing it economic growth. The rich would actually do better if they invested more in the working class, and the rest of the population has noticed that it isn't doing any better from one year to the next while the rich get progressively richer. They've got the message clearly enough that they didn't elect Romney, but they've yet to realise that they should vote out Tea Party Republicans at every possible opportunity.

But you chance of dying a violent death there was rather higher than in modern Detroit. There's been a remarkable decrease in violent crime over the past few centuries

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Mormon communities may be low on drug-turf wars, but there are other crimes - which tend to get reported a polygamy rather than sexual abuse when there Mormons involved. And corporations don't need to murder people. Buying them off off or framing them is a lot cheaper and and doesn't generate anything like as much negative publicity.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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You do love over-simplifications. But then again, so did Mao.

He was a successful military leader. That does involve making up your mind quickly, and carrying through whatever plan it was that you'd come up with.

He turned out to have picked the wrong plan, and he was in a position where it was rather difficult for his colleagues to change his mind.

That's central planning with just one central planner. Uninhibited free market economics can lead to much the same kinds of disaster - the US invented anti-trust legislation to avoid one set of such disasters.

The fossil-fuel industry's active sabotage of any effective action against anthropogenic global warming promises to deliver another. Since you are as single-mindedly convinced of the correctness of your silly ideas as Mao was convinced of the correctness of his, we can only hope that you (and people who think as incompetently as you do) don't get into a similar position of power.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

The billions of examples include demonstrations that some two-parent families raise totally disastrous kids. The evidence that one particular approach works most of the time isn't evidence that it raises the best kids - because it raises the vast majority of kids, it may well have raised the best kids, but those kids might have done even better in a slightly different environment. The "best" kids, are - by definition - different from average kids, and may profit from a slightly different home environment, with lots of un-related tutors to develop the kid's unusual skills.

Where did she say that? Find the quote. Nobody in their right mind is going to make such a ridiculous claim - it's falsified by pretty much every orphanage ever set up, which is why orphans now get placed with foster parents rather than stuck in orphanages.

It probably wouldn't. Victorian England survived poor-houses and orphanages, though the orphans involved didn't have good survival statistics, but you do appear to be setting up a nonsensical straw man, invented purely for rhetorical convenience

And lying about what he's doing isn't argument.

Or so you keep on telling us.

It certainly provokes you into posting downright lies.

It might, if they were silly enough to take your fatuous propaganda seriously.

Because lying propagandist - like you - are going to a great deal of deceitful trouble trying to persuade them to act that way, rather than investing their efforts productively.

You don't want that, and the Tea Party doesn't want that, because if the US economy were to recover on Obama's watch, the rubbish you broadcast would look even sillier than it does now.

But, from your point of view, a government that runs the economy so that almost all of the growth in the GDP ends up in the hands of the top 5% of the income distribution is doing exactly what it ought to.

Your preferred approach really would be destructive, but you are too brainwashed to realise this.

Your "explanations" have as much to do with socialism as your economics has to do with the real world. You can't even tell the difference between socialism and communism.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

[snip]

I'm pleased that at least some of us can have a polite discussion, even though we may disagree on some (or perhaps all) of what others believe. The truth, probably, lies somewhere in the middle of most of these arguments, and centrism is inevitably the course that will be taken for the most part. Neither of the more radical "sides" is likely to be correct, and perhaps

there is no single correct way to deal with the problems of our nation and the world. There are just too many people, with too many fundamental differences, and the environment (natural and political) is changing too

rapidly and unpredictably to be dealt with effectively by a "one size fits all" strategy.

The most important thing, IMHO, is the ability to bring all ideas to the

table, and discuss them rationally and respectfully. I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I don't completely embrace any single political "side". I can see some merit in many opposing ideas and usually a compromise can be reached that will be effective and beneficial to all. But what I see from most "right-wangers" is an unconscionable adherence to a very extreme set of principles and an unwillingness to admit any possibility of error, or any modicum of correctness on the other side. It becomes especially disgusting and dangerous when conservatives, particularly, hold the American people hostage and are willing to sabotage any progress and improvement just so they can claim their own monopoly on what they consider absolute truth.

I try to think "outside the box", and offer ideas not often expressed, because it seems that things that have been tried many times have failed, and something perhaps radically different is needed. Staying the course with tired and obsolete tactics, expecting a different result from that which has been proven innumerable times, is the very definition of insanity.

Paul

Yes Bill.S kvetches about that regularly, but won't do a damn thing to get any kind of job. He is too surly to work as any equivalent of a wallymart greeter. Maybe he should try panhandling, "will pontificate about work for cash".

?-)