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The Cement of Society Is...

branemrys.blogspot.com

121–130 of 167 posts

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#121
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world. Research on the US system accords with the overwhelming evidence from all around: it would work. > eg, I'm not sure how they're connected ... medical research Let's clarify. The repugnant gouging in the…

> The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world. Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive. I'm sure it's possible, but if you need more funding, you need more ta…

> Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive.

Cut new grad salaries in return for halfing their student loan, otherwise the outrageous cost of education is being subsidised by the sick and elderly.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world. Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive. I'm sure it's possible, but if you need more funding, you need more ta…

Not qualified to have an opinion on that, though of course that doesn't prevent me from a back-of-the-envelope calculation: * A third of US healthcare cost is assumed to be administrative overhead just caused by the current system. "Cutting U.S. administrative costs to the $550 per capita (in 2017 U.S. dollars) level in Canada could save more than $600 billion, the researchers say." [0] * Median wage level for health…

I'm sure there are large cost savings possible, Canada seems to spend about half as much on administration (17% vs 34%) [1]. While not quite four times as much, that'd still be significant, though whether it's guaranteed to have the same effect in the US is uncertain. Canada and the US may be neighbors, but they're quite different in culture.

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-2818

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#123
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fine example of what I mean. To me, from the left, there's very little room to question the existence of systematic racism. [0] From my perspective it flows pretty cleanly from several pretty solid facts. Black people were literally property for several hundred years. Once that ended there were explicitly racist laws and actions to keep black people out of any kind of economic or political power. [1] Maybe…

An issue I see with that line of thinking is that Turks in Germany are also a lot poorer than native Germans, get lower education and rely on welfare a lot more, commit more crimes etc. Yet they immigrated barely 60 years ago and were immigrating as workers, not refugees. Turks have never been enslaved (quite the contrary, they've been slave-owners for much of their history), there were no racist laws against Turks,…

I don't think many Germans would argue that Turkish immigrants and their descendants have not been subject to significant degrees of racism and discrimination. It's particularly hard to claim with a straight face that the cultural similarities between between Turkish Germans and African Americans are much more obvious...

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#124
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fine example of what I mean. To me, from the left, there's very little room to question the existence of systematic racism. [0] From my perspective it flows pretty cleanly from several pretty solid facts. Black people were literally property for several hundred years. Once that ended there were explicitly racist laws and actions to keep black people out of any kind of economic or political power. [1] Maybe…

An issue I see with that line of thinking is that Turks in Germany are also a lot poorer than native Germans, get lower education and rely on welfare a lot more, commit more crimes etc. Yet they immigrated barely 60 years ago and were immigrating as workers, not refugees. Turks have never been enslaved (quite the contrary, they've been slave-owners for much of their history), there were no racist laws against Turks,…

Is it possible that different parts of the world, with different ethnic and migratory histories, might have different dynamics that lead groups to wind up in impoverished situations? Once groups of people are in poverty, yes, I would expect the issues you mention: lower educational outcomes, increased welfare reliance, and increased crime rates.

In the US, the combined demographic trend of Black, urban, and "in poverty" can be traced in substantial part to specific racist policies in the New Deal and post-WWII eras. There's more detail available, but:

a) a substantial amount of government subsidy and policy in those periods was designed to encourage people (especially young families started post-war) to move out of cities, buy land, and raise families there (through low interest rates, development subsidies, etc). This allowed the people who benefited from those policies to start building generational wealth, and essentially created the single-family self-owned non-commercially-functional lot as the fundamental unit of the suburbs.

b) The benefits of many of those policies were both openly and subtly denied to black people, all over the country. Many of the New Deal and post-WWII policies explicitly excluded black people from benefiting. Additionally, redlining (where banks had explicit policies that denied mortgages to black people) and deed covenants (where developers and communities explicitly disallowed sales to black families). This prevented those families from benefiting from the wealth injection I mentioned earlier, occurred all over the country, and was only banned in 1968.

c) After that, poverty is a pretty easy steady state to maintain for specific groups. You just need long-term, focused policing strategies, constant downward pressure on educational and municipal funding, and policies that encourage urban real estate consolidation (and thus rentership).

Where is the argument that this isn't an example of systematic racism denying black people many of the benefits available to the rest of modern American society?

The argument isn't that this was applied to all African American people, the argument is that it was applied to enough to create a correlated gap.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#125
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that it's a purely syntactic collection. Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter. I think society is held together by a process, not an event, so what could the "X of society" be in that case? "The covalent (primary) as well as van der Waals and hydrogen bonds (secondary) of…

> Viewed semantically, the "cement of society" produces a strange image, as if a single event could, once set in a given form, hold society together forever and ever thereafter. But the collection doesn't concern events, at least the majority of it, but attributes or customs or ideals, etc...

I think that says more about the aptitude of the metaphors in the collection than about whether "cement of society" (where cement normally is poured and ignored) is the best metaphor we can use for what I see: "X of society" where X is an agglutinative process that needs constant renewal (first gained then maintained?) by a society's members.

(In my society we often speak of "tisser des liens" to weave society together, but I think felting is a stronger metaphor than weaving or knitting. The artificial structures of the latter two can be unravelled relatively easily by pulling at loose ends, but the random interlacings of the former resist such abuses.)

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrMwxe2ya5E&t=346

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#126
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, of course, I never thought about the perception from the other side. Yes I know that, I believe the things I do though because I either think they're correct, they should be correct, or I hope they'll be right some day, I think I've considered and synthesized information from various sources not just one or a small few. I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what…

> I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what I've read etc. but if I didn't think I was at least partially right why would I believe it. Everyone believes this. It becomes dangerous when we start assuming these are the correct beliefs. > I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here. Just talk to conservatives, in my experience they…

Might I add that I've had and seen much more success talking to people outside of social media, where people of every political persuasion seem more concerned with performative outrage (makes sense, since that's what social media is designed to encourage).

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't doubt conservatives feel like liberals believe in nothing but power, and I'm sure the left has a few marks against it on that count. But I'd appreciate a few examples of them behaving in such a manner as knowingly lying about how deadly a disease is and then having large crowded in door events shortly afterwards[0]. It's easy to manufacture a narative that has the left drinking the blood of babies, but how mu…

>I'd appreciate a few examples of them behaving in such a manner as knowingly lying about how deadly a disease is and then having large crowded ....

Lol are you shitting me? Didn't you notice the mobs of leftist chuckleheads, erm, I mean "anti-racism activists" burning the cities down over the last couple of months, complete with excuses for why it's not REALLY a covid transmission problem, and, like business owners have insurance so it's not REALLY destroying livelihoods and property; where Trump rallies or jaunts to the beach or going to the hairdresser or a sit-down restaurant totally are covid transmission death cesspits you evil racist bigots[0]. There are hundreds of articles, thousands of memes making fun of what is obviously a completely ridiculous pair of ideas to hold in one brain, but which left leaning people in America seem universally to self-seriously hold.

The fact of the matter is, the right was more correct than the left when it comes to Covid; it's mostly a nothingburger unless you're over 70. Even the CDC says so at this point[1].

Of course, other than people like Ioannidis, they were correct via instinct rather than statistics. That's kind of the point of conservatism. It's a basket of prejudices with known survival advantage.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-evaluate-c...

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Death rates (mind you, among lardy diabetic americans):

0-19 years: 0.00003

20-49 years: 0.0002

50-69 years: 0.005

70+ years: 0.054

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that my whole world view is a conglomeration of what I was taught, when I grew up, what I've read etc. but if I didn't think I was at least partially right why would I believe it. Everyone believes this. It becomes dangerous when we start assuming these are the correct beliefs. > I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here. Just talk to conservatives, in my experience they…

Might I add that I've had and seen much more success talking to people outside of social media, where people of every political persuasion seem more concerned with performative outrage (makes sense, since that's what social media is designed to encourage).

oh, for sure! Humans just aren't designed to communicate in a one-to-millions paradigm, and it shows strongly in the political divide we all face.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#130
post #75
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

weird how one of the messages we keep hearing is that automation is just around the corner and everyone needs to be paid to not work. with the breakdown of this and many of the others in the list, it seems to me like someone understands this and doesn't want a cohesive society.
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