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The Cement of Society Is...

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Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#71

Post by XorNot »

bobthechef wrote: post #23
aaron695 wrote: post #14

Religion is an interesting one. It's certainly a cement. It's easy to see the negatives really hard to see the positives but they will be huge, it's so ingrained it will have shaped everything. We will perhaps never know if it was a net gain or not.

> It's easy to see the negatives really hard to see the positives but they will be huge, it's so ingrained it will have shaped everything. We will perhaps never know if it was a net gain or not. Perhaps for you, but in any case, "religion" is not a single thing and not all religions are equal. Besides, every society has a religion. Every person has a faith. In the US, it is liberalism. In the Soviet Union, it was the…

I have absolutely no idea why this comment was downvoted so heavily.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#72

Post by nurettin »

jboynyc wrote: post #68

As a sociologist, I can't help but notice some glaring absences. Allow me to amend: ...gift-giving (Mauss, 1925): Giving gifts creates an obligation to reciprocate, tying people together in bonds of mutual obligation. ...collective effervescence (Durkheim, 1912): People engaging in repeated ritual action which aligns their focus on a common object (Erving Goffman called this "interaction ritual") and who become attun…

This bourdieu fellow seems to be inspired by kafka rather than society as a whole.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#73

Post by Lammy »

blhack wrote: post #21
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound like a nitpicker, but "basic understanding" and "facts" are two very different things: facts are facts. Their understanding has more to do with the interpretation. And if we all agree on interpretation of the facts, then cementing the society becomes too easy of a task.

You're in a car. The speedometer reads 50mph. How fast are you going?

"It doesn't matter, as long as enough other people agree that 50mph means the same thing."

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#74

Post by 082349872349872 »

aaron695 wrote: post #14

Religion is an interesting one. It's certainly a cement. It's easy to see the negatives really hard to see the positives but they will be huge, it's so ingrained it will have shaped everything. We will perhaps never know if it was a net gain or not.

"The Art of Conversing With Men" (an 1805 translation of a 1788 work by Knigge) has two chapters:

    XXIX. On conversation with devotees, puritans and hypocrites.
    XXXI. On conversation with deists, freethinkers and scoffers at religion.
in which he suggests that neither godbotherers nor militant atheists (who are united in their emphasis on orthodoxy over orthopraxy?) are likely to produce stimulating conversation.

https://books.google.ch/books?id=PtQGAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA90#v=onep...

original available at https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/knigge/umgang/chap005.html §§ 27-28.

(note that in §26, Knigge says "Die Erde ist so groß, daß eine Menge Narren nebeneinander Platz darauf haben" which is to advise against wasting time with fools who are Wrong on the Earth. I'd hope that, like angels on the medieval pinhead, we could easily make room for an infinite number of fools who are Wrong on the Internet, and still have place left over here and there for reflective conversations.)

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#75

Post by kome »

jboynyc wrote: post #68

As a sociologist, I can't help but notice some glaring absences. Allow me to amend: ...gift-giving (Mauss, 1925): Giving gifts creates an obligation to reciprocate, tying people together in bonds of mutual obligation. ...collective effervescence (Durkheim, 1912): People engaging in repeated ritual action which aligns their focus on a common object (Erving Goffman called this "interaction ritual") and who become attun…

hey fellow sociologist!

the one that imho is really missing is "work", from smith to marx till the present day it has been a cornerstone of social science

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#76

Post by bleepblorp »

bobthechef wrote: post #16
rtkwe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier to believe when from your understanding of the world the other side is blatantly lying and misrepresenting things. It forms a bit of a positive feedback loop where seeing bad intentions leads you to being less likely to give slack so you see more bad intentions. From the left looking rightward at Fox News and many local stations (increasingly owned by and forced to run identical scripts from Sinclair Broa…

You do realize that the "other side" has the same EXACT perception of you, right? It would be nice if people were a bit more skeptical of their preferred news outlets and opinion makers. What I see instead is the continuing existence of the same bubble that led to the shock and surprise at Trump's election. An absolute refusal or inability to consider other views, an inability to interpret events in historical contex…

Conservative perceptions of their opponents have very little basis in reality as most of what conservatives perceive regarding their opponents is projection intended to deflect from their own misbehavior.

Conservative messaging is driven almost exclusively by fabricated outrage for which there is no non-conservative equivalent; non-conservative messaging is driven by outrage over actual conservative behavior.

Non-conservative media spreads outrage at factual abuses of power by conservative elites (such as the dismantling democratic norms, or police brutality) while conservative media creates outrage by giving voice to fabricated controversies created over trivialities, such as over tan suits and arugula, or by amplifying non-genuine controversies manufactured by astroturf groups.

There's no more of an equivalency between conservative and non-conservative media any more than there's an equivalency between actual public health experts and the kind of people who think injecting bleach cures COVID-19. There is such a thing as objective reality and the history of the past forty years of conservative politics is a history of conservatives abandoning objective reality in favor of delusions they find comforting.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#77

Post by jacobush »

smegcicle wrote: post #49
flamble wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing "underhanded" about it, and it's nowhere near being "experimental": almost every country in the developed world has universal healthcare and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence demonstrates its superiority in every criterion. If you think that the debate over healthcare has anything to do with the substantive merits of one system over another, you're viewing it through the wrong lens. It is pu…

>Medicare for All being a success in one state would change little at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU eg, I'm not sure how they're connected, but it's obvious that the majority of medical research is being done over here, and I never see that mentioned in the comparisons between our systems and overseas; if the overpayment we're doing over here is necess…

Your "peak healthcare", available to your landed gentry, is the best in the world, no doubt.

One could stop all research for decades, and the US as a whole would still be better off if what was available now was distributed evenly.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#78

Post by 082349872349872 »

Finnucane wrote: post #9
anemoiac wrote: post #6

...currently crumbling?

Add some rebar.

Which mafia runs a racket on the cement trucks of society?

(Last time I was viewing an x-ray, the orthopedic doctor was surprised to find out that not only does the fracture pattern qualitatively indicate what happened, but there's even a quantitative method to calculate the stresses from angles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohr%27s_circle

There's even a graphical analogue method, which may be carried out with paper, pen, and protractor, but I've been using software for so long I no longer recall the details.)

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xlYCvu9pkc

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#79

Post by bleepblorp »

flamble wrote: post #34
smegcicle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

opposite extreme: "'progress'- whatever the cost"... for some reason referred to as 'woke'? (still need to work on understanding that angle) "replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass somet…

There is nothing "underhanded" about it, and it's nowhere near being "experimental": almost every country in the developed world has universal healthcare and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence demonstrates its superiority in every criterion. If you think that the debate over healthcare has anything to do with the substantive merits of one system over another, you're viewing it through the wrong lens. It is pu…

I'd say the real divide over American healthcare funding reform is not between the industry and everyone else but rather between those Americans who believe government should work to improve the lives of the people and the 40% of Americans who see the role of government as preserving existing social hierarchy.

The healthcare industry does pour a lot of bribe money into preventing reform; see e.g. killing anti surprise billing legislation. However, the bulk of research into why the US doesn't have universal healthcare access points the blame at the blocking minority of Americans who'd prefer not have healthcare for themselves if the alternative is people lower on the social hierarchy (read: non-whites) having healthcare.

This is likely a far harder problem to fix than the already nearly insurmountable problem of excessive corporate influence over government policy.

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