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The Cement of Society Is...

branemrys.blogspot.com

161–167 of 167 posts

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#161
post #57
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just want to pass programs they can get people addicted to to secure votes. Example: welfare.

Maybe for the sake of argument the D politicians are cynically doing it purely for the sake of holding power so we don't even have to ask what the end goal is. Then why do voters want it? There are plenty of democratic voters like me who aren't direct beneficiaries of public assistance. Why do I and others like me support expanding social safety nets? Personally it's for me it's that I think the economy is pretty bru…

Because people who support these measures are all about the intentions and never care about the results. 60 years of welfare and things are worse off now than before.

We know the solution to poverty, here and everywhere else in the world, is to teach, help and allow people to generate wealth. Instead, programs like welfare only make people completely dependent (for generations) on stealing money from others to the benefit of politicians.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> 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. I'd like to see that argument, if you put it next to racism in the US. Racism towards Turks in Germany might be a slur on the school yard (which, I can assure you, was much more commonly used by Turkish kids), not slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. > It's pa…

> I'd like to see that argument, if you put it next to racism in the US. Racism towards Turks in Germany might be a slur on the school yard (which, I can assure you, was much more commonly used by Turkish kids), not slavery, Jim Crow and segregation.

Sure, I haven't pretended the two countries had exactly the same social and political environments. The respective outcomes for the different minorities aren't exactly the same either.

I'm not even sure what your argument is now: you appeared to be questioning the existence of systematic racism in the US, and yet are now insisting it was extremely bad. If your claim is instead that systematic racism was extremely bad but actually had no discernible effect, that's pretty extraordinary.

Though perhaps not as extraordinary as you choosing to support that with the claim that ---checks notes--- mid twentieth century Germany is a good counter example of a society where migrants didn't encounter any adult racists. Surely you're just trolling for Godwin's Law there.

> If racism isn't the great explanation, other explanations need to be looked at. You chose to neglect the fact that African Americans are not at all similar in the outcomes, even though they're all experiencing racism in the US, and were, by and large, always treated as a singular group.

I'm not sure the fact some African Americans do better than others in any way detracts from the argument that systematic racism is a thing which negatively affects the group. Not all outcomes of shootings are the same; this is not evidence bullets cause no harm. We can look at as many complementary explanations for ethnic minority underperformance as you like, and it's not going to remotely undermine the OP's claim that racism has an effect.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#163
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why not demonstrate it works in a few test states It's tough to do some things at the state level because there's less money at the state level vs the federal level. It's a lot easier for a business to move from a state to avoid taxes meant to pay for healthcare by rerouting fund from the private market to the public market than it is to leave the US entirely. The federal government gets it's taxes first from incom…

> there's less money at the state level vs the federal level So if anything, it means to me that we need to work on increasing roles of individual states and decreasing federal powers.

That's more of a question of where you come down on the idea of federalism. Personally I think way more stuff makes sense to have created and funded uniformly across the country than fragmented. The biggest budget sinks at the federal level of military and entitlement programs like social security make sense to be there. The military for obvious reasons makes more sense to have funded from there and then social security et al as well because people often move from where they were working to where they retire so trying to fund that at the state level get's a bit dicey for moving the money to where the old people actually are.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#164
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…

About symbolic violence, is what Marx says too?

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#165
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…

About symbolic violence, is what Marx says too?

No, it's not. Marx thought workers could come to consciousness about their conditions through work, which Bourdieu did not.

Re: The Cement of Society Is...

#166
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

Who'd've thunk, two sociologists on the orange website! I thought about including Marx, but it seemed a bit complicated, because there is no trans-historical conception of social cohesion in his work. Marx arguably thinks the glue of bourgeois society is ideology. Work is the glue of a class-in-itself, which is not coterminous with "society" under capitalism.
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