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Private schools don't take kids with problems unless the parents have money. If we don't have education, then what? Child labor is illegal. They would be like the millions of abandoned children in the USSR in the 1920's and 1930's wandering, lost and eventually a danger.
Not really. You are equating the reality of today's irresponsibility, which is encouraged and supported, with what would be true in an individualist system. Literally nobody would have a child unless they could afford it. Because the penalty would be meted out by reality: starvation and failure and death. The very few transgressions of common sense would be handled by charity and families.
Not really. You are equating the reality of today's irresponsibility, which is encouraged and supported, with what would be true in an individualist system. Literally nobody would have a child unless they could afford it. Because the penalty would be meted out by reality: starvation and failure and death. The very few transgressions of common sense would be handled by charity and families.
Agreed! Today's politicians enable and glamorize irresponsible breeding and parenting: with things like child tax credits, TANF (welfare) that's calculated per kid, and financial aid that prioritizes single motherhood over stable families. As a result, people keep having kids for all the wrong reasons, only to be unable to properly parent them later. So we end up with parents who change their baby's diapers on a McDonald's table and let their kids run around Sephora like Taz from Looney Tunes.
And after January 21, when the Dementia Patient assumes ownership of the White House, it's gonna get way, way worse!
I think that the vast majority of readers here know what collectivism means, and know what socialism means. So let's illustrate. Mask wearing is an individual response to the problem. The individual decides a rational approach to saving his own life and health by accessing data and taking individual action. A collectivist approach is allowing the State to close down society and kill people by means other than Covid, destroying their lives, their economics, and their mental health. Killing industries, economies, and human productivity.
I favor the individual solutions. Give us the data and let us decide. If people don't want to vaccinate, let them die. Their choice. We own our lives, not society. The individual comes before the collective. The State should be a minimal participant.
The one thing I've learned from the past year is how meaningless facts are. I don't dispute the importance of facts but I've witnessed too many abuses of facts by all people, selecting the facts they prefer to fit their narrative and ignoring the facts that didn't. Or not questioning the source of facts. Or treating conjecture and opinion as facts. The American media is particularly horrendous in spinning facts and rejecting inconvenient facts as fake only for it to be later repudiated.
It's come to the point that I'm automatically skeptical when I hear someone shriek "but the facts! Just look at the facts! Listen to the facts! Guided by facts!"
It's as of the old quote "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" has now become "Lies, damned lies, and facts."
I totally agree with this. The thing with science and even statistics is that they do have to be interpreted. You don't just look at a bunch of facts and numbers and they tell you something specific. A fact by itself tells you nothing meaningful.
I remember one government professor I had in college who was heavy into statistics, he wrote his own government book filled with charts, diagrams, scatterplots, tables, etc. On the first day of class he showed a simple graph that showed the more fire engines you have in a city, the more fires that city had. Then he asked, what's the conclusion? That statistic tells you absolutely nothing by itself, but there will still be people who say if we just cut the number of fire engines that means we'd have less fires. The point was that by themselves statistics and "facts" are meaningless without context and interpretation.
Debate is part of science and a group of scientists can all look at the same data and come away with different conclusions. Over time consensus is built and there are some clear takeaways from looking at certain data. I do agree the news media latches onto whatever garbage statistic or poll that will help push whatever narrative they want to push. The biggest problem is just ethics with data. You can look at a sea of data and just select the data that fits your narrative.
We do it in my job. We look at a couple of pieces of data, when there's literally hundreds of variables, and people try to come up with conclusions and then decide which direction we are going to take. Usually the boss already has a direction in mind, so I just keep my mouth shut. Sometimes I'll speak up and ask how do they know that particular statistic is what influenced this outcome when there's 10 other variables that could have had the same effect.
Its a balancing act and we have it theoretically in our mixed economy. In VA, it was recognized that there were some people who could not take care of themselves, and whom the charity system through the local parishes could not take care of. Hence, even in the bitter years leading up the Revolution, the Crown and the House of Burgess - which included such firebrands as Patrick Henry - agreed that there was a need for free mental health care and so what is now Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg was founded. It was for its time progressive and the physician and friend to many of the Founders, Dr. John de Sequeyra, was one of its medical directors and on the board.
But everyone is on the dole now, from govt. influenced mortgage rates, to tax credits, deprecations as well as more direct payments.
The vaccine should be first-come first-served. 30% of NYC health care workers are refusing the vaccine. Enough with bureaucracy wasting time deciding who is in what “phase†and who is more important than who. I don’t care about your race or your income or your job. Make the thing first-come first served. You sign up online, take a number, and get your vax. I’m ready to sign up right now.
I don't usually agree with you, but you maybe right about this.
At some point, when everyone who wants can be vaccinated, start allowing people who are vaccinated to go mask free. Also, reopen religious institutions (effectively closed in my area) only to vaccinated people. Ditto, perhaps, air and public transit.
I would agree with you if there was enough vaccine to go around such that "everyone" could receive their jabs within a week or two. But unfortunately, due to manufacturing, storage and distribution requirements, there are only so many thousand doses available per day, and in a country with 330 million people (or if you want to take the larger view, almost 7 billion worldwide), it's going to take several months (probably the better part of a year) to cover everyone. So, you prioritize as it makes sense. I can wait, I'd rather "my" dose go to someone at higher risk of contracting or of dying from the disease.
Yeah, but.
It's the paperwork and requirements that have caused vaccine to have to be thrown away because the penalty of NOT following the ridiculous requirements caused people to not be eligible for the vaccine.
And now, California is starting to do the mass vaccination thing. Good for them.
I think that the vast majority of readers here know what collectivism means, and know what socialism means. So let's illustrate. Mask wearing is an individual response to the problem. The individual decides a rational approach to saving his own life and health by accessing data and taking individual action. A collectivist approach is allowing the State to close down society and kill people by means other than Covid, destroying their lives, their economics, and their mental health. Killing industries, economies, and human productivity.
I favor the individual solutions. Give us the data and let us decide. If people don't want to vaccinate, let them die. Their choice. We own our lives, not society. The individual comes before the collective. The State should be a minimal participant.
I know you favor "individual solutions". You said many times its about the only solution you can see to any problem.
The difficulty with issues like masking and social distancing is that viruses could care less about political ideology. If people aren't wearing masks they can spread coronavirus even to those people who are wearing masks. If mandates do not exist for mask wearing, I cannot shop in a grocery store for food with some reasonable degree of safety. If employees cannot be required to wear masks than I cannot even pick up my groceries without some concern about who has been handling them.
Mandates that require masks can cut down on the transmission of the virus and reduce cases of disease. That alone, is sufficient reason for them.
You also appear to misunderstand vaccination. One can vaccinate and still die from coronavirus simply because the vaccine (along with other vaccines) is not 100% efficacious. Pfizer's vaccine is 95% efficacious according to studies, but 95% is not 100%. Even if I vaccinate, a person who refuses to do so, can make me ill. I do favor at least mandating vaccines for people in high risk positions. I would include those who work in healthcare, those who work in care facilities, and those who work in schools.
That's not collectiveness or socialism. Its common sense tempered by a working knowledge of science.
I currently reside in Norway, which is also a country of strong individualists, but people here very much feel the government is theirs and have a lot more buy in on the decisions being made.
That is much more attainable in a small country with a homogenous population. Also, the self-identity of most countries, such a Norway, is cultural rather than creedal. There is a French culture and a Russian culture and so forth, which endure and persist as the various governments fall and new constitutions are written. In America it's exactly the reverse. What binds Americans, at least in theory, is fealty to the Constitution. We are united by a piece of paper, rather than a shared identity or sense of what "we" even means. That being so, the relationship between individuals and the government, will be fraught.
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Originally Posted by DXBtoFL
Then the other problem with facts is that facts do not have morals. Facts do not tell us what is right or wrong. Facts do not tell us we must shut down. It's public policy that does. So it's not clear what is meant when people claim to be guided by facts. The shutdowns lead to large scale job losses. That's a fact too. Was that right or wrong? Was having fewer people in hospitals better than greater job security and less economic loss? How do the facts tell us either way? They don't. It's policy that does.
You're quite right. Even if we do rigorous research and arrive at well-substantiated knowledge of what nature is doing, how to wield that knowledge is a matter of intuition, ethics, economics and politics, rather than science.
Here's a far-fetched but illustrative example. Suppose that malevolent aliens attack earth, and their technology overwhelms us. They offer peace, at the cost of say executing 50% of humanity, and enslaving the rest. Science tells us that we can't defeat these aliens. But the very same science still leaves us with our nuclear weapons intact. What to do? One option is to submit to the aliens. Another is to launch our own nuclear missiles against ourselves, thus self-annihilating humanity, denying the aliens their "prize". Does science inform our decision? No. Science only offers the tools.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marc Paolella
Not really. You are equating the reality of today's irresponsibility, which is encouraged and supported, with what would be true in an individualist system. Literally nobody would have a child unless they could afford it. Because the penalty would be meted out by reality: starvation and failure and death. The very few transgressions of common sense would be handled by charity and families.
Unfortunately in a truly individualist system we would have some harsh and unpleasant results. One is that if the full cost and effort of raising children would be left to the parents, then many (most?) intelligent people would refuse to have children. We would have a combination of "idiocracy" style reverse-evolution, and considerable suffering amongst the poorly-raised children, who do manage to get born.
Nature itself is harsh; evolution and all that. But is this condign with our ethical sensibilities as humans? In other words, must we have a suboptimal and potentially unfair situation, where the strong are taxed and saddled with a responsibility to provide for the weak, while amongst the weak, parasitism is enabled? I think that to some extent we must. To be sure, this is unfair, and to some degree outright stupid. But can we really countenance the alternative?
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