Talk or don’t talk, not interested in watching a video.
I wasn’t intentionally ignoring it. It’s more that I didn’t want to assume the mechanism. But you’re probably right – the government would have to be the entity to do this. We can’t rely on individuals to do the right thing themselves.
So I guess the root question is really which you think is the better goal – individual freedom or societal benefit. It’s true this country was founded on a huge boner for the former, but I think that’s led to the massive inequality we see today, and it’s why I argue we need to focus a little more on the latter.
I agree that it’s pretty much baked into the American psyche, but I think you might be assuming that “massive inequality” is a new thing. It’s not, and never has been. As long as there is society and civilization, there is inequality. King, warlord, dictator, emperor, parliament, republic, soviet, none have ever created true equality of man. While the soviets came close, it was an equality of misery, and even then the politburo and the ruling class lived much better lives than the proletariat. It’s no coincidence that Hugo Chavez’s daughter is amazingly rich in contradiction to her dad’s stated politics.
From looking around (I’m in around the tenth year of a history dive), I’m inclined to say that the US has actually come the closest to the radical egalitarian goal by creating a healthy and populous middle class. And without all of the guillotining or show trials of other attempts.
You see, that’s the problem. This country was not founded on individual freedom, and it did not protect individual freedom. Not then, not now, not ever. The pretense that it did is really unhelpful.
I have done so. To summarize: Racism and bigotry both exist today and have left left a legacy from their past existence. This current reality and the legacy creates an uneven playing field against which simplistic ideas like ‘everyone should be treated equally’ have no chance to succeed on their own. Something more is needed, else ‘equality’ just means that we continue the inequitable status quo.
Now, surely you’ve heard that before, and
either you don’t think it’s a reasonable argument (whether you agree with it or not), in which case you’re just a fool and should be treated as one; or
you know it’s a reasonable argument (even if you don’t agree with it), yet you chose to respond to it with this tendentious twaddle:
In that case, you’re far worse than a fool, and I can’t be bothered to take you with any seriousness at all.
Again you make assertions and ignore the mechanism by which you propose to “fix” things. Nor have you stated your assumed premise that they can be fixed. That’s why I can’t treat what you think is an argument as an argument. “This thing exists” is not an argument, it’s an assertion. “This thing exists” and “this is the reason” or “this is what should be done” is an argument. Arguments draw conclusions. I suspect you are avoiding defining your “something more” because it’s not going to be reasonable or defensible. Which is why I stated earlier that your position can’t help but result in societal upheval or genocide. It is simply not a good idea to tell someone that they are owed something simply because they were born.
That’s just dishonest.
I mean, take this for example. Why should you imagine anyone assumes inequality is new? Why should you think it interesting to point out that it isn’t? What’s the point of the observation?
Cholera isn’t new, either, but that doesn’t mean we should just accept it as our lot in life. Good grief.
Because you seem to think it can be easily fixed where every other human being before us failed.
This video is great. Thanks.
It isn’t. The country was founded on ‘individual freedom’ for white men, and a good deal less for everyone else. Any half-way educated 12-year-old should know that.
Well, we should help minorities get the education their parents were denied. Maybe help them get into schools that their parents were denied.
We should help them get the home loans and farm loans that their parents were denied (they by helping them accrue the wealth that they can give to their children, which their parents were denied). Maybe help them get business loans that their parents were denied?
Maybe, we should give them given them more lenient jail time, like you would a white kid, something more focused on getting them back into society. 3 months for rape might be a bit extreme, but how about you don’t throw them in jail for weed.
That’s a start. It’s not enough, but its a start.
How do you figure? Not trying to be obtuse or argumentative, but I’m honestly curious – and keep in mind that I’ve got an educated-but-not-overly-specialized understanding of US history.
(And while I’d accept that it’s not one of the guiding principles of the country’s founding – that can be chalked up to anything from legitimate rebellion from tyranny to opportunistic landowners – I think it absolutely is baked into US culture at this point).
Edit: you clarified sufficiently above.
I’ll echo Scott. Should we not try to fix things that are hard to fix?
Thank you. Some episodes are a bit silly, but I love the idea of evidence based humor shows, whether it’s the Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, Samantha Bee, or this.
The country was founded on individual freedom for the people that started it, who as mostly Englishmen, were indeed white men. Just as every other country was founded for the benefit of the people that started it for the reasons that they thought were important. Again, you treat the US as something apart from the entirety of human history so you can characterize it as fundamentally illegitimate.
There were apparently no women or people of color who ‘started’ this country, got it. Makes me wonder where the fucking second generation came from, though, and just who was picking all that damned cotton.
Edit: Using this rationale, then feudalism was based on individual freedom, because it protected the freedom of the lairds who founded it.
It is something apart from the rest of the world. We are the nation that says “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
We are a nation of immigrants. We are the city on the hill. We stand for more than any nation before us, because we started from a cause, not just protection or power or convenience! We started from a document that said “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” And although at one time it didn’t include minorities or women (although in some states, women did have the right to vote, like New Jersey) it does now!
Other nations follow our lead. Some do things better, some do things worse, but we set the original example, and we have that tradition to carry us followed, if we can stop be selfish bastards!
For the same reason you treat the symptoms of patient’s chronic disease. Deal with what can be dealt with.
It’s important to recognize when things can be fixed versus things that must be simply be dealt with as best you can. The reason for that being that resources (time, money, manpower, political will) are not infinite and may be better spent elsewhere resulting in greater benefit for more people. Agitating is cheap and easy, governing is expensive and requires tough choices.
There’s a phrase that I keep coming back to, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” There are multiple meanings there. On an individual level, it can mean you don’t try new things because you can’t master them immediately, or you spend too much time chasing that last 2 or 3 percent of “perfection” and end up with a lesser result than if you’d simply let it be done with when it was good. But on an interpersonal level, it can mean that the pursuit of what is perceived as perfection can destroy the good.
True purity is not possible, and people who devote their lives to the pursuit of purity can be dangerous (including to themselves, right Mr. Robespierre?). Again, the solution is usually to let go of those last few percentage points and settle for the “A” rather than the “A+” at the expense of other things like social tranquility, interpersonal relations, or preserving the tax base (random examples here). I’m always leery of people who believe in the perfectibility of man, or that some undesirable aspect of humans can finally be eliminated. It’s just not so, and the effort is usually more destructive than constructive.
Remember when we were talking about Riot Games and then one guy popped on out of nowhere are started with one time at band camp…
Is it weird to say “emphasis mine” when quoting myself?
Rick and Scott, I think you might be to the point where the discussion about equality would be better served in a dedicated thread.
Yet we can ‘deal’ with more than just assuming equality. We can mitigate the massive differences in family wealth that are largely a product of systemic racism by e.g. making college money available to poor minorities, or making loans available to poor minority families on favorable terms. We can deal with the legacy of underfunding education in poor minority neighborhoods by making spaces available for some of their kids in better schools and in universities. These are all things we can deal with, despite your rejection of them, and they are much more than just treating everyone ‘equally’ and thereby entrenching the status quo.