121–130 of 150 posts
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Be fair! The woman was such a godawful writer that it's hard to get to grips with any of her ideas for their own sake.
Do you think it's a valid criticism then to complain about Ayn Rand's ideas when you haven't been able to comprehend them?
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Christ fed the hungry. He did not petition the Pharisaical council to establish a steering committee to look toward the establishment of a working group to consider the possibility of soliciting public input from all interested stakeholders with the eventual goal of producing a synergistic plan for improving the condition of the urban disadvantaged.
Supposedly having magical powers, he was also not limited by inadequate opt-in contributions from a minority of society. For all of history this has been a problem too big for charity to solve.
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"The score is four/And next time more!" Yes, I know it's a counterfactual, but I can never resist the opportunity to toss out that old chestnut, because just about every time I do so, it meets two or three people who not only have never heard of it, but never imagined it possible.
Oh wow, I guess I'm in your two or three this time. I am not really sure what to make of that. Clearly not all 'mob grievances' are legitimate.
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Oh wow, I guess I'm in your two or three this time. I am not really sure what to make of that. Clearly not all 'mob grievances' are legitimate.
Now you're thinkin'! Homework: Define a function, of as many terms as you like, by which to evaluate the legitimacy of a given mob grievance.
Anyway, even if we take the 'techies' grievances with the homeless as not legitimate, I think it is important to remain honest with ourselves as to what those (not legitimate) grievances are. The author is proposing a theory of the origin of those grievances that I think discards the seemingly obvious origin.
So for example, I assume the issue the residents of Kent had with the college students was somewhere along the lines of "they were a bunch of unpatriotic smelly hippies who didn't spend enough time in class". Both of us agree that would not be a legitimate grievance. What I think is relatively unsupported and usefulness is an alternative theory that the residents of Kent thought that all the college students were "Pretentious educated snobs who, on their shoestring college student budgets, contributed little to local businesses", asserting that the hippy stuff was just a convenient excuse. I mean, that could be the case, but I would want to see a pretty solid refutation of the obvious theory before I accept that less direct one.
While the residents of Kent were obviously being hateful monsters, they were probably being straightforward and honest with their complaints.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes what the mob claims their grievance is (legitimate or not) really is what they think their grievance is.
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Oh wow, I guess I'm in your two or three this time. I am not really sure what to make of that. Clearly not all 'mob grievances' are legitimate.
Now you're thinkin'! Homework: Define a function, of as many terms as you like, by which to evaluate the legitimacy of a given mob grievance.
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We programmers tend to be a fairly self-reliant bunch. For a very special meaning of "self-reliant". The majority of programmers I know could not produce their own food, make their own clothes, build their own shelter, treat their own illnesses. These are the fundamentals of life; how "self-reliant" can someone claim to be without being able to do these (I can't do these either, but I'm not claiming self-reliance)? W…
That's not what self-relaince is. Nobody is self-reliant by that definition because even people trained for wilderness survival will die from some mundane thing without modern medicine. Self-reliance is when you can contribute enough to society on your own to get the things required to live in return without hand-outs.
I think you've mistaken "not in debt" for "self-reliant".
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Well, just off the top of my head, something like a new WPA seems like it'd be a decent start, considering the infrastructure maintenance problems I keep hearing about. Is that "workfare"? I've heard "workfare" is bad, although again I'm not really sure why.
I have no objections to WPA-style programs, and think that likely would be a good solution. Heck, it worked once before. The problem is that in addition to having let our infrastructure decay, we've let our social infrastructure decay.
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There's the problem of lock-out: how do you contribute usefully to society without some baseline to work from, and where your day-to-day activities are forced to be about the most basic level of survival?
It could be argued that the whole increase of drug use in USA is due to lockout and other effects
> In the Puritan model of charity, the rich have an obligation to do good for the poor—but the poor also have an obligation to the rich, to try to be a useful part of the same society. The article's author not only disagrees, but considers this model so obviously erroneous that she doesn't see any need to explain what's wrong with it. I find this unhelpful, because it fails to explain why subsidizing people who contr…
Note that sometimes society doesn't let them contribute in ways you're probably thinking of. I have a friend who recently got a job at a company that works to deport immigrants who have committed some sort of crime. On the face of things they try to give them hope, but they mostly give false hope, don't provide the information they need, and make holding a job impossible. Once a month they will visit home "sometime n…
Barbaric, you say? Do you then contend that the actions, which render such punishment meet, are any less barbaric? Which is worse, then? -- to lay open a man's back in answer to his crimes, and stretch his neck should he prove obdurate? Or to leave him grind his fellow men into the dust by trickery and deceit, and grow fat on the proceeds of their suffering? Or shall we handle him with kid gloves? -- as others here have rightly noted, a rich man rarely fears prison, and imprisonment itself carries great cost -- but let him once see his fellow criminal hauled down from the post with his back in bloody tatters, and you give him mightily to consider how best to save himself from a similar fate!
> In the Puritan model of charity, the rich have an obligation to do good for the poor—but the poor also have an obligation to the rich, to try to be a useful part of the same society. The article's author not only disagrees, but considers this model so obviously erroneous that she doesn't see any need to explain what's wrong with it. I find this unhelpful, because it fails to explain why subsidizing people who contr…
Someone REALLY likes the sound of their own empty rhetoric. While that's all fine and dandy, you should probably be aware that you don't necessarily get a choice as to "subsidize" people who contribute nothing to society because it is possible for people to actually negate things from society, all the way down from petty thugs all the way up to crooked, lawyered-up execs and/or politicians. The difference is that the…