[ckaihatsu]

@ckaihatsu , there are still homeless people due to choice.

I am not even kidding.

I lived above a homeless shelter for two years -- the rule there was that any homeless person could stay there indefinitely if they did not drink alcohol and followed other basic rules. Of course, they would also provide emergency medical aid to the homeless. All of the homeless in the area were also well dressed -- they distributed fresh clothes to them, and you wuold see them weekly with big shopping bags full of food.

The issue was that those who stayed homeless would be seen drinking at the bus stop benches or in the subway stations, all gathered together, sharing limitless amounts of alcohol.

The same is true in Minneapolis -- the Homeless shelters are revolving doors. The rule is the same -- no drugs & alcohol, and you can come in, shower, wash your clothes or get new ones, and stay indefinitely if you are on the straight & narrow. Most come in for 24 to 48 hours to get clean, get good sleep, dry out, and then go back out to get drunk or booze.

The real tragedy is that some of these are mental cases, and nearly all who are not mental cases are so addicted to substances they have become helpless to help themselves. The thing is, both in Korea and America the laws exist which respect the individuals right to self-destruction.

I saw a recent case of a many of us in the Seoul area knew because he was a homeless man who covered his entire face in shoe polish so he appeared black. Finally, there was a news special that investigated this man... He is mentally disabled, and had a chronic skin rash. The shoe polish made it so that his face did not itch -- yet, it made the rash worse, making it necessary for him to apply more. The woman he was seen with frequently was his older sister, also mentally disabled. Both ran away from their home -- the girl because she hated her older brother (perhaps he abused her in some way, though this is unknown), and the younger followed.

We learned that that the man with the shoe polish face also lived at a Catholic home for the mentally disabled for years where he was known as Gabriel. He still absolutely loved the Priest that he was re-introduced to, yet he would not return to live there because he did not want to abandon his sister... Both parties also love their parents, who inssited they could move back into the home, but they refused this again. They preferred to live on the streets like this, and the only change that was made was that Gabriel was treated long enough to abandon the need to put shoe polish on his face.

It was honestly a touching story... and the amazing point was that the efforts of journalists, the government, their parents, and even the Catholic church could not get both of them to stay in their parents home, a government shelter, or a private charity's shelter, and no law exists which can compel adults to do so against their own will.

Thanks for sharing. From the *political* standpoint, the issue is that there is a consistent *percentage* of the population that is unintentionally unemployed and/or homeless. Is society paying for a real estate agent to visit homeless people wherever they are, to transport them to a vacant, available dwelling of their choice? No? Why not? Does society and/or government prefer people to live on the streets rather than in vacant housing? Does this have anything to do with *real estate* property values, perhaps?


---

He was being socially *fatalist* based on alleged hard-wired / biological *racial* and cultural qualities. He was alleging that people could never be socially and culturally cosmopolitan, due to ingrained differences of *race* / biology. That's *racist*.

It is interesting to suggest that people cannot actually be cosmopolitan. This could be the case --

Could it be the case that you're racist as well -- ?

it is a mere illusion. Cultures never actually fully break down on a large scale.

Social fatalism is also a fine enough position. I think the Left draws on this heavily as well: who would think that the average white Southern Baptist from a wealthy background and racist family could ever fully 'overcome' this? It's a common trope. Indeed, we are told by some people that whites have to continuously struggle to overcome their ingrained bias... and I am sure it would not be too difficult to find people who would treat white racism as hard-wired.

None of what you're saying here reinforces a position of 'social fatalism' -- you're actually arguing the *opposite*, that of individual *self-determination*, or free-will.

There are also implications that there are fundamental, hard-wired differnces between race in terms of behavoral patterns.

In the book, he discusses how genes “affect” and “dictate” behavior which then affects “collective decisions and actions” while also stating that it is “conceivable” that history, and what affects human decision-making and reactions, are also “affected by the genetic identity of the people involved” (Kiaris, 2012: 11). Kiaris argues that genetic differences between Easterners and Westerners are driven by “specific environmental conditions that apparently drove the selection of specific alleles in certain populations, which in turn developed particular cultural attitudes and norms” (Kiaris, 2012: 91).

NotPoliticallyCorrect.Me

Okay, please confirm, by affirmation, that this is the position you subscribe to.

There are studies that try to show this...

They talk about certain allele patterns and try to link them to the expressions of individualism and collectivism.

In particular, it was the G allele that was associated with greater sensitivity to rejection. Additionally, this group also assessed the relationship of the A118G polymorphism to neural response during an actual episode of rejection in which the participant was excluded from an online ball-tossing game (Cyberball) with two supposed others. Consistent with the findings using the trait measure of sensitivity to rejection, individuals carrying the G allele also had greater levels of neural response to this rejection episode within multiple brain areas known to be involved in the processing of physical pain (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula). Thus, according to both self-report and neural data, genetic variation in the µ-opioid receptor is associated with sensitivity to social rejection.

Check out the chart available there that shows the proportion of populations with the G allele -- Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, Finland, Norway, USA, England, canada, Italy, etc. all have individualistic cultures overall, and have G allele frequencies below .2. However, S. Korea, Japan, Thaialnd, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, etc., have greater gene allele frequencies, at around .3 up to .45 .5.

They also talk about the prevalence of MAOA-polymorphism -- high allele frequencies of the MAOA polymorphism would indicate greater individualism, and low expression would be less. Less than 20% of Swedes have low expression MAOA alleles, while nearly 65% of Japanese & Chinese have Low Expression MAOA Alleles, which correlates quite perfectly with the individualism-collectivism divide.

NCBI

Are you a genetic-determinist, then? ('Selfish gene'?)

This is pretty cutting edge stuff -- I am not sure that we can say any of it is set in stone.

But the idea is not absurd. There's a scientific basis to the idea of us inheriting psychological traits. If we have enough people in the same, shared gene pool comprising an ethnic group that creates a culture that have a certain psychological inclination, then we will see the whole culture of the group be more reflective of these psychological characteristics.

If in every four-person Japanese family, it is likely that at least 2 and very often 3 members have low expression MAOA alleles, then we can imagine that nearly every Japanese family will be far more inclined to accommodate the more collectivist features of this psychological profile... while Swedes will have the opposite effect: in the four person family where only it is likely that one or no people are collectivist inclined, there would be expected to be more individualism.

It's really stunning if it pans out.

May I ask how you view the nature-nurture mix of determination? 50/50 -- ? 75-25 -- ?

[blackjack21]

And the industrial and information revolutions? I'm not even sure that they are anything to be considered outside the larger revolution that they are branches of, along with the related Scientific revolution. Perhaps the West itself and it's Modernity is the Revolution, universally speaking, in which case my remarks on Nihilism are only partly right.

Well, I do think that the enlightenment and subsequent scientific and industrial revolutions played a huge role, but that does still argue for the notion that politics is downstream from culture.

Jesus, BJ, your own politics aren't *equipped* for this kind of social cause -- that of the dispossessed / marginalized / alienated / self-abusive, because you're oriented to the *nation* (entity), and the *economy* (monetarism). You yourself said that such marginalized people are a 'drain', which implies that nationalist society should take *precedence* over such economy-resource-draining individuals, meaning that they're a 'problem', in your eyes.

People have been saying that a positive *byproduct* of this COVID pandemic is that they've had to refocus on what *matters*, contrary to your incessant victim-blaming, nation-touting, financial-values-hailing line that would rather throw 'undesirables' under the bus than see any tremors affect the capitalist social hierarchy that you believe to be timeless 'human nature'.

I'm not suggesting capitalism and human nature are one and the same, but that capitalism's dynamism is adaptive to human nature. Humans are territorial and tribal in nature, as are other mammals. A nation state is just a large aggregation. In the context of modern society, our institutions are based on the nation-state and its power to charter corporations, partnerships, trusts, etc.

There's no 'we' in your version of social reality because you're *scapegoating* marginalized people the way the *Nazis* did.

I'm saying they aren't simply marginalized lumpenproletariat. They have issues that preclude them from exercising their agency in a manner similar to the other 80% of society. It's not just communists who pretend this isn't an issue. The neoliberals do it too. Do you know why nobody went to jail for the financial crisis? It was done by design. Their brain fart beginning in the 1990s--in addition to repealing Glass Steagel--was to assert that the real problem with poverty was a lack of access to credit. So they dropped lending standards and anyone with a pulse could get a mortgage. How did that end? Those sub-prime people lost their houses. That was bi-partisan. That was Bill Clinton and Republicans like Jack Kemp. You cannot succeed with egalitarian ideals in a universal sense when some people are basically doomed to fail.

Your rhetoric here is *very* similar to *fascist* thinking, in wanting to formally stratify *civil society*, instead of having government and economy *aid* those who have particular requirements due to being *marginalized*.

I'm saying that there are some assholes, like Jeff Bezos, who will buy Whole Foods and then cut the health benefits of part time workers to make things more "efficient." Right? I agree to a limited extent. However, the idea that "marginalized" people exist implies "marginalizers" who are victimizing people, and that is not always the case. Does Jeff Bezos make someone into a heroin addict, for example? No.

I frankly agree with de-criminalizing a lot of drug-usage crimes; however, I don't think anarchy in that sense is the answer either. Do you know why drugs became illegal? It's not because politicians didn't want you to have fun. It's because when studying the root cause of property crimes and violent crimes, they frequently found alcohol and drug addiction to be co-morbid factors. So they thought they could pass laws banning them, and thereby nip the violent and property crimes in the bud too. That "broken window" theory of policing actually does work, but it is harsh on people who weren't serious criminals. Sometimes you end up getting a serial offender, and suddenly the crime rate drops.

How do you create a fairer system? Maybe people should be incarcerated if they are homeless and on drugs--but not in a maximum security prison, but rather in a facility design to treat drug and alcohol dependence; and, with a court system that can enforce that they go for treatment, move to half-way houses or sober-living environments; and, that they not have a criminal record for such a thing so that it does not destroy their employability.

*My* understanding is that regular women often require the health care that includes terminating pregnancies, and that *that's* why abortions are performed.

Abortions are performed when it threatens the health of the woman. For example, ectopic pregnancy, bicornuate uterus, etc. can create problems. What I'm speaking to is a society that promotes recreational sex, and then promotes abortion to offset the economics of single parenthood, etc.

So what's the purported *significance* here?

Anti-social behavior can, in many cases, be mediated by programs designed to prevent child abuse as well as economic privation in formative years.

You're not even *mentioning* his policies, like tearing immigrant families apart, interning migrants in concentration camps, interning separated children in concentration camps, imposing warfare-like *sanctions* on other countries (the opposite of 'free trade'), along with the regular government subsidies to the already-rich (tax cuts), and the bailing out of the stock markets, to favor zombie companies.

Those are not "his" policies. The law mandates separation of illegal alien adults and children. Trump didn't write those laws or decide those court cases. He simply enforced the law.

So what do you make of this outcome? What's your conclusion?

1) AI is just revealing how some aspects of an analog brain works. 2) Because of that, you will always have some degree of prejudice and stereotyping, because that's how the brain works.

What do you think of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights?

On balance, it's okay. However, I think the Declaration of Independence and the universalist assertions of equality are outmoded and in some cases harmful. I would say the same thing about a lot of welfare policies--i.e., they address some material needs, but do not understand social needs, self-esteem, agency, etc. So with the best of intentions, they end up leaving people isolated, or aggregated with problematic people that cause them problems they didn't have before. That's my point in bringing up Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini-Green.

So now your concerns are about, what, *retail* solvency, and racial attitudes?

You're asserting that demography, psychography, etc. have no implications for politics and economics. Obviously, I'm disagreeing with you.

If you want a retail solvency scenario, take San Francisco refusing to prosecute shoplifters. WalMart then decides it's going to close its store in San Francisco. Why? They are stingy? Greedy? Mean to poor people who have to steal to get their needs met? No. The reason is that WalMart doesn't own the inventory on its shelves. WalMart runs vendor-managed inventory, where suppliers own the merchandise. They are also responsible for shrinkage. So when shrinkage rates go up in certain stores, suppliers refuse to supply to those stores. Suddenly, you have empty store shelves and the business craters.

American liberals would assume that stores would just raise prices and pass the cost on to wealthier consumers who don't steal. Yet, it doesn't often end like that. We no longer have her contributions here, but this is where Rei Murasame would then point out that it falls to Asian store owners to pick up that business, and then there is ethnic strife between Asian store owners and "marginalized" people who must shop at those stores and pay higher prices.

Yes, you're empirically accurate -- the American bourgeois Revolution was anti-monarchy and anti-colonialist, while a *proletarian* revolution would be anti-*bourgeoisie*, and pro-working-class.

In many respects, that revolution has come and gone. It never achieved any of the ideological aims, but workers did achieve higher wages, 8-hour work days, 5-day work weeks, worker's comp, disability, etc. However, the push for ever higher wages ultimately created the push for free trade--undermining those workers in the West. They are no longer "exploited" as would have been the term of art in the mid-20th Century, but rather "marginalized" as you now put it. In other words, unemployed.

What about your idealized 'free markets' -- ? Shouldn't such extend to the *labor markets* as well so that workers can cross national boundaries, for better *wages* for their labor?

I no more "idealize" free markets than highly regulated ones. However, when it comes to immigration, social and cultural cohesion play an important role.

And how's *military spending* working out, by comparison? Successful? Not so successful?

That really depends on the spending. Fighting wars in the Middle East has been a boondoggle in my opinion. However, military spending frequently involves countless technology innovations in the US. Drones, cell phones, microwaves, the internet, etc. are all technologies funded by the military.

Again you're just scapegoating / demonizing / blaming the *marginalized* who have no real power, while letting the *policy criminals* off-the-hook.

Frankly, I think Trump's presidency was largely about rejecting the neoliberal/neoconservative cabal and their curated acceptable political candidates. We're not going to get passed a lot of this stuff until we weaken their grip on power.

[Verv]

@ckaihatsu ,

Homelessness

Thanks for sharing. From the *political* standpoint, the issue is that there is a consistent *percentage* of the population that is unintentionally unemployed and/or homeless. Is society paying for a real estate agent to visit homeless people wherever they are, to transport them to a vacant, available dwelling of their choice? No? Why not? Does society and/or government prefer people to live on the streets rather than in vacant housing? Does this have anything to do with *real estate* property values, perhaps?

Real estate can be incredibly expensive. I think the cheapest I have ever seen outright sale of a small apartment in Seoul was 70-80,000 USD, which is so cheap as to produce suspicion that the building will be torn down scene with little compensation. I would say that for a single room with a bathroom that a single bachelor in their 20s would find acceptable, the lowest rent you would find would be $250 a month in a very bad location, $600 in a good one.

However, you can outright own a very humble home in the countryside for $30,000; the big issue is, though, that there are few jobs to be found.

So... How much would it cost to house 10,000 homeless people year round in the Seoul metro area at the smallest monthly rent cost? The raw numbers would put it at 2.5 million USD per month. I am sure they could get a deal, or come up with other projects, and lessen the price significantly, but considering that there are issues with food, clothing, and medical care not necessarily resolved by this, it might be fair to keep the number the same or even raise it.

The Seoul city budget is 40 trillion won ($35 Billion USD) (Jungang Daily). There are about 855 estimated homeless people in Seoul, 70% of which are 'long-term homeless' (having been homeless for more than three years).

As it stands, anyone is entitled to a monthly allowance of 250,000 Won -- enough to get a small, small place. Programs also exist which have placed the homeless in housing speifically. 490 Homeless were chosen in 2014, of which 430 continued the program. Of the 490, 192 got jobs, and 99 were able to become self-supporting (Yonhap). What a great success.

So, the money for these programs does exist, and the number of actual homeless is surprisingly small... It seems to be the case that whatever barriers that exist to eliminating homelessness have little to do with money, and more to do with the choices people are making. Of course, there can be more research, but I think it is the case that most homeless in Seoul have refused assistance and handouts because of mental issues or alcoholism, and, for whatever reason, the law has determined that they exercise enough free will to avoid being forced into care or homes against their will.

I am sure there are things that I would do differently. But I do not know what those things are. I would also venture to say that the situation in many parts of the developed world is the same.

None of what you're saying here reinforces a position of 'social fatalism' -- you're actually arguing the *opposite*, that of individual *self-determination*, or free-will.

In theology, I am a compatibalist. I am the same for non-theological stuff. I believe man has a free will, known to God, but also that the end result is something predestined. I also believe the free will is damaged in the fall... Just as such, the free will of the individual is damaged both by his own inability to fight temptation, and by the society that exerts peer pressure on him or attempts to brainwash him.

I hope that makes sense and can paint a larger picture in few words.

Okay, please confirm, by affirmation, that this is the position you subscribe to.

I am not an expert. But it seems perfectly rational.

I am not fully decided on this, but it seems rational that:

(1) Genetics effects the psychology of individuals;
(2) Gene pools of specific peoples will have different trends in their genes. Sometimes, the differences will be negligible, and other times, the groups will actually have genes that produce very different results in appearance and cognitive profiles.
(3) A culture in which 2/3 of people have socially sensitive genes will be inclined to be different from ones in which only a 1/3 or 1/5 of people do.

If someone asked me to 'pick which you think is right,' I would probably vote for this versus one that says that the cultures have no relation to genetic factors. I also think it is impossible to say culture is colored solely by genes. It obviously isn't.

But I reserve the right to change my mind, like all good people!

Are you a genetic-determinist, then? ('Selfish gene'?)

In a sense...

Let's take 100 alcoholics... All of them also have the genes that correlate with alcoholism, make them inclined to be drunkards, etc... Every one is a proven alcoholic...

I still think that it is entirely possible that even a majority of them can beat alcoholism without professional help. I can see a scenario where 100 out of 100 beat alcoholism with professional help.

But I will stand by the fact that if you make alcohol plentiful and cheap, every person with these genes is going to have a dilemma, and their strength of will will be tested.

May I ask how you view the nature-nurture mix of determination? 50/50 -- ? 75-25 -- ?

I think it can only be understood in very general terms as far as how it goes for a whole culture, right.

First, we should also know, there are primary traits, secondary traits, and tertiary traits.

Primary trait: "We are polite and conscious of our hosts."

Secondary trait: "We show that we appreciate the food they made us."

Tertiary trait: "We leave a small amount of food on the plate to show that the food was not only good, but in such a generous portion we could not eat it all."

The first two are connected; the third is simply one possible means of expressing the other two... There's a lot of layers, and it can be hard to see what they mean...

There is also the fact that there will still be "individualistic" or "collectivist" subcultures in these societies. Maybe they just behave differently.

There is punk music in Korea & Japan... Punk is highly individualistic, you could say it goes against the "collectivist" perspective and violently rejects it...

But I can also tell you that I am friends with a man with facial & hand tattoos that played in a grindcore band called "Christf***" that was always very carful to tell me that he does not hate good Christian -- just bad Christian. I've seen him do things that I've only seen GG Allin do... yet, he is very Korean in many other ways he expresses himself.

There are many less extreme examples that come to mind -- could it be that even that which appears to be transgressive, individualist, and against conformity in Korea can even consist of people who primarily interact with others still in a deferential and very collectivist way?

Is it even the case that Jinyong from Christf*** is still , in many ways, more conscious of others & inclined to be deferential than a popular British school girl who bullies fat girls & makes fun of people who aren't in on the latest trend? Maybe.

We might have to take steps further back out...

An individualist-inclined person in an individualist-culture might react differently than if he were in a collectivist-culture, and vice versa; they may compensate in ways or emphasize different aspects that allow them to navigate relationships differently...

I think it's hard to do a lot with this other than identify trends.

If you told me that Koreans also have proportionally more people with a gene that make them more cautious, I would not be surprised, and I could point to a lot of things in the society that indicate the culture is quite risk-adverse and will bend over backwards to try to guarantee a thing before actually doing it...

But you can think of a thousand exceptions. Yet, the trend persists, regardless of the fact that there are always going to be famous examples of people actively bucking them.

And what would it mean if a culture was collectivist... but it had influences that made it try to change from this? It would produce something that woudl not fit into a 50/50 or 70/30 sort of number...

It might have a series of collectivist cultural traits that act on the periphery of individualist values; it might have a facade of individualism and an actual collectivist core...

And the big problem is scale -- if you zoom too far in, there's never a collective; if you zoom too far out, the individual is always irrelevant ["If punks are all individualist, why do they all dress the same?!"]; if you zoom too far in, the collective is always irrelevant ["The only normal people that exist are the people you don't know!" ]

---

This topic is currently breaking my brain, so forgive me.

[annatar1914]

@blackjack21 , I know that maybe my critique of modernity can be tedious perhaps, but having responded, you said;

Well, I do think that the enlightenment and subsequent scientific and industrial revolutions played a huge role, but that does still argue for the notion that politics is downstream from culture.

Oh, I'm certain it is, and it could well be that maybe I've been ineptly trying to use some elements of modern ideologies as a critical bludgeon against modernity, that are themselves just extreme outliers of where some passionate modernists have gone totally ''rouge''. Communism is almost dead, Fascism still exists here and there as a general modern tendency, but cannot truly build anything lasting, leaving Liberalism as the whole modern political spectrum in the Western world.

Sure, President Trump is great, almost brilliant, as a living bit of performance art, and rattled a few cages that needed a good rattling, but he's ultimately just a beginning of a wave for the real barbarians that are coming after him.

The establishment used him as a firebreak, I'm thinking, or that was what was being signaled to them.

[Wolvenbear]

Thanks for sharing. From the *political* standpoint, the issue is that there is a consistent *percentage* of the population that is unintentionally unemployed and/or homeless. Is society paying for a real estate agent to visit homeless people wherever they are, to transport them to a vacant, available dwelling of their choice? No? Why not? Does society and/or government prefer people to live on the streets rather than in vacant housing? Does this have anything to do with *real estate* property values, perhaps?

Well, first, assuming that all homeless are unintentionally unemployed is a mistake. A lot of them are drug addicts or drunks, more have serious mental issues. Second, given that there are already agencies to help the homeless in every city where there is a shelter (all of which are subsidized by taxpayer dollars), there is no point to the services you are demanding. Finally, if you are unwilling to help yourself, the idea that society owes you is entirely backwards.

[annatar1914]

Well, first, assuming that all homeless are unintentionally unemployed is a mistake. A lot of them are drug addicts or drunks, more have serious mental issues. Second, given that there are already agencies to help the homeless in every city where there is a shelter (all of which are subsidized by taxpayer dollars), there is no point to the services you are demanding. Finally, if you are unwilling to help yourself, the idea that society owes you is entirely backwards.

@Wolvenbear ;

It's a universal natural right for all mankind, made in the image and likeness of God our Father, to be sheltered, fed, and clothed, especially more so if they are vulnerable for one reason or another. Anyone without a seared conscience knows this deep down. But blaming the victims of a Social Darwinist and Libertarian mentality in society certainly feels better to those who rationalize this problem away, doesn't it?

[ckaihatsu]

Jesus, BJ, your own politics aren't *equipped* for this kind of social cause -- that of the dispossessed / marginalized / alienated / self-abusive, because you're oriented to the *nation* (entity), and the *economy* (monetarism). You yourself said that such marginalized people are a 'drain', which implies that nationalist society should take *precedence* over such economy-resource-draining individuals, meaning that they're a 'problem', in your eyes.

People have been saying that a positive *byproduct* of this COVID pandemic is that they've had to refocus on what *matters*, contrary to your incessant victim-blaming, nation-touting, financial-values-hailing line that would rather throw 'undesirables' under the bus than see any tremors affect the capitalist social hierarchy that you believe to be timeless 'human nature'.

I'm not suggesting capitalism and human nature are one and the same, but that capitalism's dynamism is adaptive to human nature. Humans are territorial and tribal in nature, as are other mammals. A nation state is just a large aggregation. In the context of modern society, our institutions are based on the nation-state and its power to charter corporations, partnerships, trusts, etc.

Jumping around again -- avoiding the *politics*. You'd rather jump to *anthropology*.

Are you only *mentioning* the dispossessed, or do you actually want to *address* such, as a real social issue that needs addressing?


---

There's no 'we' in your version of social reality because you're *scapegoating* marginalized people the way the *Nazis* did.

I'm saying they aren't simply marginalized lumpenproletariat. They have issues that preclude them from exercising their agency in a manner similar to the other 80% of society. It's not just communists who pretend this isn't an issue. The neoliberals do it too. Do you know why nobody went to jail for the financial crisis? It was done by design. Their brain fart beginning in the 1990s--in addition to repealing Glass Steagel--was to assert that the real problem with poverty was a lack of access to credit. So they dropped lending standards and anyone with a pulse could get a mortgage. How did that end? Those sub-prime people lost their houses. That was bi-partisan. That was Bill Clinton and Republicans like Jack Kemp. You cannot succeed with egalitarian ideals in a universal sense when some people are basically doomed to fail.

I appreciate that you see the bipartisan system for what it is -- the plutocratic Republicrat bourgeoisie. Stick to that characterization.

However, you're still being too *dismissive* of marginalized people for reasons *outside of* how they're *treated* in society, particularly by the bipartisan consensus of governance / ruling.

If getting a home was as simple as getting a library card, and getting food was as simple as shopping at a grocery store, then we could entertain finer-point 'critiques' and Yelp reviews of this-or-that case study, but we're *nowhere near* there as things stand.

It's *inappropriate* for you to point to individual unsightliness as a *dodge* for the *overall* issues that affect *everyone*, namely health care, education, justice, finance, respectively, etc. You sound more like a *quitter* here than even wanting to acknowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the world will keep turning, and so these social issues need to be *addressed*.


---

Your rhetoric here is *very* similar to *fascist* thinking, in wanting to formally stratify *civil society*, instead of having government and economy *aid* those who have particular requirements due to being *marginalized*.

I'm saying that there are some assholes, like Jeff Bezos, who will buy Whole Foods and then cut the health benefits of part time workers to make things more "efficient." Right? I agree to a limited extent. However, the idea that "marginalized" people exist implies "marginalizers" who are victimizing people, and that is not always the case. Does Jeff Bezos make someone into a heroin addict, for example? No.

You're preferring to dwell on *symptoms*, though -- if people are having their *means of sustenance* cut, as with your part-time workers example there, isn't *that* the place where we should start?

Isn't *Bezos* a 'marginalizer' if he's cutting back employees' means of sustenance?

In the chain of cause-and-effect, maybe you should focus more on the *cause*.

I frankly agree with de-criminalizing a lot of drug-usage crimes; however, I don't think anarchy in that sense is the answer either.

'Anarchy' -- ? Are you just going to name-call, or can you *elaborate* on what your meaning *is* with that? Are people *adults*, or not? Why would adults flock to Flakka or Fentanyl, or whatever? Again, we have to look at causes and effects, and not just *effects*.

Do you know why drugs became illegal? It's not because politicians didn't want you to have fun. It's because when studying the root cause of property crimes and violent crimes, they frequently found alcohol and drug addiction to be co-morbid factors. So they thought they could pass laws banning them, and thereby nip the violent and property crimes in the bud too. That "broken window" theory of policing actually does work, but it is harsh on people who weren't serious criminals. Sometimes you end up getting a serial offender, and suddenly the crime rate drops.

Here's *my* understanding of the actual history of criminalization:

By using the mass media as his forum (receiving much support from yellow journalism publisher William Randolph Hearst), Anslinger propelled the anti-marijuana sentiment from state level to a national movement. He used what he called his "Gore Files" - a collection of quotes from police reports - to graphically depict offenses caused by drug users. They were written in the terse and concise language of a police report. His most infamous story in The American Magazine concerned Victor Licata who killed his family:[21]

An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home, they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze ... He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crimes. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said that he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called "muggles," a childish name for marijuana.[22]

The story is one of 200 violent crimes which were documented in Anslinger's "Gore Files" series.[21] Its since been proved that Licata murdered his family due to severe mental illness (which had been diagnosed early in his youth), and not because of cannabis use.[21] Researchers have now proved that Anslinger wrongly attributed 198 of the "Gore Files" stories to marijuana usage and the remaining "two cases could not be disproved, because no records existed concerning the crimes."[21] During the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act hearings, Anslinger rehashed the 1933 Licata killings while giving testimony to congress.[23]

In the 1930s Anslinger's articles often contained racist themes in his anti-marijuana campaign:[24]

Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.[25][26]

Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.[26]

Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.[27]


Anslinger targeted Billie Holiday for her 1939 song Strange Fruit, threatening her and instructing her to stop performing the song.[28] Targeting minorities, especially black Americans, with drug charges and harassment was part of Anslinger's strategy to justify the existence and budget of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger was considered "so racist that he was regarded as a crazy racist in the 1920s."[29] In his 1964 book, The Protectors, Anslinger included a chapter called "Jazz and Junk Don't Mix" about black jazz musicians Billie Holiday, whom he had handcuffed on her death bed due to suspicion of drug use and possession,[30]) and Charlie Parker, who both died after years of illegal heroin and alcohol abuse:

Jazz entertainers are neither fish nor fowl. They do not get the million-dollar protection Hollywood and Broadway can afford for their stars who have become addicted – and there are many more than will ever be revealed. Perhaps this is because jazz, once considered a decadent kind of music, has only token respectability. Jazz grew up next door to crime, so to speak. Clubs of dubious reputation were, for a long time, the only places where it could be heard. But the times bring changes, and as Billie Holiday was a victim of time and change, so too was Charlie Parker, a man whose music, like Billie's, is still widely imitated. Most musicians credit Parker among others as spearheading what is called modern jazz.[31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._ ... _(cannabis)_1930%E2%80%931937

---

How do you create a fairer system? Maybe people should be incarcerated if they are homeless and on drugs--but not in a maximum security prison, but rather in a facility design to treat drug and alcohol dependence; and, with a court system that can enforce that they go for treatment, move to half-way houses or sober-living environments; and, that they not have a criminal record for such a thing so that it does not destroy their employability.

Okay, so you're calling for the decriminalization of drug abuse -- how can they be employed, though, if they're incarcerated? Isn't incarceration the same thing as criminalization? And what about *social services* / health care for those who have dependency issues?


---

*My* understanding is that regular women often require the health care that includes terminating pregnancies, and that *that's* why abortions are performed.

Abortions are performed when it threatens the health of the woman. For example, ectopic pregnancy, bicornuate uterus, etc. can create problems. What I'm speaking to is a society that promotes recreational sex, and then promotes abortion to offset the economics of single parenthood, etc.

What's wrong with promoting recreational sex? Why shouldn't sex be recreational, consensual, and enjoyable?

If women feel they aren't ready to raise a child then why should they *have* one, *especially* if the economics for such aren't looking to work-out in the foreseeable future.

And who's in a better position to make the decision than the pregnant woman herself? There's a saying that 'The one who knows your situation best is you.'


---

Yet today, we know that in the US population, probably 1/3 of whites and 1/2 of blacks have a 3-repeat allele of monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), and that environmental factors in their youth have a significant impact on their behavior as adults. Marx didn't know a fucking thing about stuff like that.

So what's the purported *significance* here?

Anti-social behavior can, in many cases, be mediated by programs designed to prevent child abuse as well as economic privation in formative years.

What does this proposed social policy have to do with the *genetic* shit you initially brought-up -- ?


---

You're not even *mentioning* his policies, like tearing immigrant families apart, interning migrants in concentration camps, interning separated children in concentration camps, imposing warfare-like *sanctions* on other countries (the opposite of 'free trade'), along with the regular government subsidies to the already-rich (tax cuts), and the bailing out of the stock markets, to favor zombie companies.

Those are not "his" policies. The law mandates separation of illegal alien adults and children. Trump didn't write those laws or decide those court cases. He simply enforced the law.

Why did that particular practice, applied to immigrants, happen during his administration?

If such practices were the doing of *legislation* / Congress, then what laws instituted these practices?


---

Jumping to another context... Is AI racist and sexist? Did white software engineers deliberately encode racism and sexism into human resources AI systems? No. Yet, AI tends to have the same tendencies as a typical human with prejudices (e.g., Asians are good at math; women don't make great programmers, etc.).

So what do you make of this outcome? What's your conclusion?

1) AI is just revealing how some aspects of an analog brain works. 2) Because of that, you will always have some degree of prejudice and stereotyping, because that's how the brain works.

AIs aren't trained on the data from an individual's *brain*, though -- the data is *social statistics*, meaning from *many* individuals, so the emergent AI racist and sexist results reflect *social* practices on the whole.


---

What do you think of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights?

On balance, it's okay. However, I think the Declaration of Independence and the universalist assertions of equality are outmoded and in some cases harmful. I would say the same thing about a lot of welfare policies--i.e., they address some material needs, but do not understand social needs, self-esteem, agency, etc. So with the best of intentions, they end up leaving people isolated, or aggregated with problematic people that cause them problems they didn't have before. That's my point in bringing up Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini-Green.

I would call that 'warehousing', myself, or 'ghettoization', meaning that a certain minority population is treated like a separate *colony*, by *colonizers*, hence the term 'internal colonies' (of the U.S., etc.).

What do you think would be a *better* approach to populations who have historically suffered from institutional racism, sexism, etc., as in the public-housing instances you've cited? How can society do better than 'warehousing'?


---

That's cute. These very studies were created by social scientists for precisely political and economic analysis. Outside of the political, education and media establishments anyone else perpetually obsessed with such notions? Let's take a small economic analysis. African-Americans tend to have nappy hair, and as such tend to use different hair care products from whites and Asians. Are you suggesting that businesses haven't looked at the racial or ethnic differences of people and created products accordingly? Hair products for African Americans suffer from what retailers call "shrinkage," and prosecutors call "shoplifting." Some African Americans find it "racist" if those products are behind lock and key, but products intended for a white or Asian demographic are not so locked up. Are they racist? What about "Irish Spring" soap? Are they not targeting a demographic?

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Irish-Spring ... /878031662

jt0c-SkQuwg


C'mon now.

So now your concerns are about, what, *retail* solvency, and racial attitudes?

You're asserting that demography, psychography, etc. have no implications for politics and economics. Obviously, I'm disagreeing with you.

On what grounds? What do psychology and demographics have to do with politics and economics? Isn't the domain of psychology too *interpersonal*, and ground-level, to be applicable to political economy, and isn't demographics an *effect*, not a *cause*, in political economy?

If you want a retail solvency scenario, take San Francisco refusing to prosecute shoplifters. WalMart then decides it's going to close its store in San Francisco. Why? They are stingy? Greedy? Mean to poor people who have to steal to get their needs met? No. The reason is that WalMart doesn't own the inventory on its shelves. WalMart runs vendor-managed inventory, where suppliers own the merchandise. They are also responsible for shrinkage. So when shrinkage rates go up in certain stores, suppliers refuse to supply to those stores. Suddenly, you have empty store shelves and the business craters.

Good one. I laughed out loud. You *do* know that vendors are fucking *lined up* to get their shit on Walmart shelves, right? If one vendor should opt-out, for whatever reason, there are *thousands* behind that one, willing to put their wares on the shelves instead.

What's *funnier* is that you implied Walmart would be on the verge of *bankruptcy* due to shrinkage. What's Walmart's market cap again?

American liberals would assume that stores would just raise prices and pass the cost on to wealthier consumers who don't steal. Yet, it doesn't often end like that. We no longer have her contributions here, but this is where Rei Murasame would then point out that it falls to Asian store owners to pick up that business, and then there is ethnic strife between Asian store owners and "marginalized" people who must shop at those stores and pay higher prices.

Yup -- institutional racism in the private sector, or *ghettoization* and the premiums of the petty bourgeoisie, versus *corporate*-scale retailers, like Walmart.

Any comment on the Trump bailout / underwriting of small businesses -- ?

the creation of the Paycheck Protection Program that provides forgivable loans to small businesses with an initial $350 billion in funding (later increased to $669 billion by subsequent legislation),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act

---

Yes, you're empirically accurate -- the American bourgeois Revolution was anti-monarchy and anti-colonialist, while a *proletarian* revolution would be anti-*bourgeoisie*, and pro-working-class.

In many respects, that revolution has come and gone.

What year was it?

It never achieved any of the ideological aims, but workers did achieve higher wages, 8-hour work days, 5-day work weeks, worker's comp, disability, etc. However, the push for ever higher wages ultimately created the push for free trade--undermining those workers in the West. They are no longer "exploited"

Actually, they're *doubly* exploited, by the bosses, and then also by their "own" business-type trade unions who just collect union dues and play the middleman role between union members and the company.

as would have been the term of art in the mid-20th Century, but rather "marginalized" as you now put it. In other words, unemployed.

You can thank the capitalist labor market for that -- 'free markets' motivated industrial employers to relocate to Mexico, and then China.


---

What about your idealized 'free markets' -- ? Shouldn't such extend to the *labor markets* as well so that workers can cross national boundaries, for better *wages* for their labor?

I no more "idealize" free markets than highly regulated ones. However, when it comes to immigration, social and cultural cohesion play an important role.

You sound like a *politician*. Would you like to address the question?

Shouldn't workers be able to act in their own best economic interests and be able to cross *any* international borders, the way *capital* does every day, to find the best *labor markets* for their labor-power?


---

Harkening back to my high school Utopian Literature class (where we read Erich Fromm among others), we read modern counter arguments to modern liberalism too--notably, B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity."

We know from experience that some social services proved harmful--like mental hospitals performing lobotomies. We also know that well-intentioned high rise housing projects also tended to aggregate the lumpenproletariat along with the social problems that are endemic to many of them--violence, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. They had heating, cooling, running water, sewage, electric lights, etc. How did it work out? Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago for example? That's where notions like "social capital" came from, because the net effect of government help was to take the limited amount of physical capital people had in their less than ideal homes they owned and provided them with government housing they didn't own. It stripped them of agency while aggregating them with the violent, the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped, etc.

And how's *military spending* working out, by comparison? Successful? Not so successful?

What's *that* kind of social ecosystem look like, by comparison?

That really depends on the spending. Fighting wars in the Middle East has been a boondoggle in my opinion. However, military spending frequently involves countless technology innovations in the US. Drones, cell phones, microwaves, the internet, etc. are all technologies funded by the military.

You omitted the second line of mine there -- let me rephrase.

Government spending on the warehousing / ghettoization / colonization of an internal social-minority people can be compared to the economy of *military* spending, since both social 'ecosystems' are *non-productive*. Both are government *subsidies* for the sustaining of a population, and a population, respectively. The latter population happens to produce *military* hardware for the government -- I was asking about *their* particular experiences, if you can / would like to speak to that at all, in relation to the treatment of *blacks* by the government.


---

Yet, some people, such as violent criminals, need to be stripped of at least some agency. Many addicts too would benefit from a temporary loss of freedom to undergo detox programs and recovery and self-help communities. We know from plenty of studies from rat models to soldiers addicted to heroin what works, but we also know what doesn't work--letting people continue to behave in destructive ways. We also know that the prison system is reasonable for anti-social people, but not necessarily for addicts, the mentally handicapped or the mentally ill.

Wealth redistribution is not some magic panacea.

Again you're just scapegoating / demonizing / blaming the *marginalized* who have no real power, while letting the *policy criminals* off-the-hook.

Frankly, I think Trump's presidency was largely about rejecting the neoliberal/neoconservative cabal and their curated acceptable political candidates. We're not going to get passed a lot of this stuff until we weaken their grip on power.

Neoliberalism is synonymous with *austerity* (over social services spending) -- what has Trump done to counter the long-term trend of lessened, cut-back social spending, by government?

Why has Trump used economic *sanctions* against other countries, since such policies amount to *neoconservative*-type warfare -- ?

Why don't you back up your *rhetoric* with any supporting material?

[ckaihatsu]

Thanks for sharing. From the *political* standpoint, the issue is that there is a consistent *percentage* of the population that is unintentionally unemployed and/or homeless. Is society paying for a real estate agent to visit homeless people wherever they are, to transport them to a vacant, available dwelling of their choice? No? Why not? Does society and/or government prefer people to live on the streets rather than in vacant housing? Does this have anything to do with *real estate* property values, perhaps?

@ckaihatsu ,

Homelessness



Real estate can be incredibly expensive. I think the cheapest I have ever seen outright sale of a small apartment in Seoul was 70-80,000 USD, which is so cheap as to produce suspicion that the building will be torn down scene with little compensation. I would say that for a single room with a bathroom that a single bachelor in their 20s would find acceptable, the lowest rent you would find would be $250 a month in a very bad location, $600 in a good one.

However, you can outright own a very humble home in the countryside for $30,000; the big issue is, though, that there are few jobs to be found.

So... How much would it cost to house 10,000 homeless people year round in the Seoul metro area at the smallest monthly rent cost? The raw numbers would put it at 2.5 million USD per month. I am sure they could get a deal, or come up with other projects, and lessen the price significantly, but considering that there are issues with food, clothing, and medical care not necessarily resolved by this, it might be fair to keep the number the same or even raise it.

The Seoul city budget is 40 trillion won ($35 Billion USD) (Jungang Daily). There are about 855 estimated homeless people in Seoul, 70% of which are 'long-term homeless' (having been homeless for more than three years).

As it stands, anyone is entitled to a monthly allowance of 250,000 Won -- enough to get a small, small place. Programs also exist which have placed the homeless in housing speifically. 490 Homeless were chosen in 2014, of which 430 continued the program. Of the 490, 192 got jobs, and 99 were able to become self-supporting (Yonhap). What a great success.

So, the money for these programs does exist, and the number of actual homeless is surprisingly small... It seems to be the case that whatever barriers that exist to eliminating homelessness have little to do with money, and more to do with the choices people are making. Of course, there can be more research, but I think it is the case that most homeless in Seoul have refused assistance and handouts because of mental issues or alcoholism, and, for whatever reason, the law has determined that they exercise enough free will to avoid being forced into care or homes against their will.

I am sure there are things that I would do differently. But I do not know what those things are. I would also venture to say that the situation in many parts of the developed world is the same.

So your political position on an approach to homelessness is 'I don't know'.


---

In theology, I am a compatibalist. I am the same for non-theological stuff. I believe man has a free will, known to God, but also that the end result is something predestined.

Here's mine:


Worldview Diagram

Spoiler: show

I also believe the free will is damaged in the fall... Just as such, the free will of the individual is damaged both by his own inability to fight temptation, and by the society that exerts peer pressure on him or attempts to brainwash him.

I hope that makes sense and can paint a larger picture in few words.

---

There are also implications that there are fundamental, hard-wired differnces between race in terms of behavoral patterns.

In the book, he discusses how genes “affect” and “dictate” behavior which then affects “collective decisions and actions” while also stating that it is “conceivable” that history, and what affects human decision-making and reactions, are also “affected by the genetic identity of the people involved” (Kiaris, 2012: 11). Kiaris argues that genetic differences between Easterners and Westerners are driven by “specific environmental conditions that apparently drove the selection of specific alleles in certain populations, which in turn developed particular cultural attitudes and norms” (Kiaris, 2012: 91).

NotPoliticallyCorrect.Me

Okay, please confirm, by affirmation, that this is the position you subscribe to.

I am not an expert. But it seems perfectly rational.

I am not fully decided on this, but it seems rational that:

(1) Genetics effects the psychology of individuals;
(2) Gene pools of specific peoples will have different trends in their genes. Sometimes, the differences will be negligible, and other times, the groups will actually have genes that produce very different results in appearance and cognitive profiles.
(3) A culture in which 2/3 of people have socially sensitive genes will be inclined to be different from ones in which only a 1/3 or 1/5 of people do.

If someone asked me to 'pick which you think is right,' I would probably vote for this versus one that says that the cultures have no relation to genetic factors. I also think it is impossible to say culture is colored solely by genes. It obviously isn't.

But I reserve the right to change my mind, like all good people!

Are you a genetic-determinist, then? ('Selfish gene'?)

In a sense...

Let's take 100 alcoholics... All of them also have the genes that correlate with alcoholism, make them inclined to be drunkards, etc... Every one is a proven alcoholic...

I still think that it is entirely possible that even a majority of them can beat alcoholism without professional help. I can see a scenario where 100 out of 100 beat alcoholism with professional help.

But I will stand by the fact that if you make alcohol plentiful and cheap, every person with these genes is going to have a dilemma, and their strength of will will be tested.

May I ask how you view the nature-nurture mix of determination? 50/50 -- ? 75-25 -- ?

I think it can only be understood in very general terms as far as how it goes for a whole culture, right.

First, we should also know, there are primary traits, secondary traits, and tertiary traits.

Primary trait: "We are polite and conscious of our hosts."

Secondary trait: "We show that we appreciate the food they made us."

Tertiary trait: "We leave a small amount of food on the plate to show that the food was not only good, but in such a generous portion we could not eat it all."

The first two are connected; the third is simply one possible means of expressing the other two... There's a lot of layers, and it can be hard to see what they mean...

There is also the fact that there will still be "individualistic" or "collectivist" subcultures in these societies. Maybe they just behave differently.

There is punk music in Korea & Japan... Punk is highly individualistic, you could say it goes against the "collectivist" perspective and violently rejects it...

But I can also tell you that I am friends with a man with facial & hand tattoos that played in a grindcore band called "Christf***" that was always very carful to tell me that he does not hate good Christian -- just bad Christian. I've seen him do things that I've only seen GG Allin do... yet, he is very Korean in many other ways he expresses himself.

There are many less extreme examples that come to mind -- could it be that even that which appears to be transgressive, individualist, and against conformity in Korea can even consist of people who primarily interact with others still in a deferential and very collectivist way?

Is it even the case that Jinyong from Christf*** is still , in many ways, more conscious of others & inclined to be deferential than a popular British school girl who bullies fat girls & makes fun of people who aren't in on the latest trend? Maybe.

We might have to take steps further back out...

An individualist-inclined person in an individualist-culture might react differently than if he were in a collectivist-culture, and vice versa; they may compensate in ways or emphasize different aspects that allow them to navigate relationships differently...

I think it's hard to do a lot with this other than identify trends.

If you told me that Koreans also have proportionally more people with a gene that make them more cautious, I would not be surprised, and I could point to a lot of things in the society that indicate the culture is quite risk-adverse and will bend over backwards to try to guarantee a thing before actually doing it...

But you can think of a thousand exceptions. Yet, the trend persists, regardless of the fact that there are always going to be famous examples of people actively bucking them.

And what would it mean if a culture was collectivist... but it had influences that made it try to change from this? It would produce something that woudl not fit into a 50/50 or 70/30 sort of number...

It might have a series of collectivist cultural traits that act on the periphery of individualist values; it might have a facade of individualism and an actual collectivist core...

And the big problem is scale -- if you zoom too far in, there's never a collective; if you zoom too far out, the individual is always irrelevant ["If punks are all individualist, why do they all dress the same?!"]; if you zoom too far in, the collective is always irrelevant ["The only normal people that exist are the people you don't know!" ]

---

This topic is currently breaking my brain, so forgive me.

I, on the other hand, would tend to look at the *origins* of South Korea, and its culture, as a result of U.S. imperialism in Korea during the Cold War.

After the surrender of Japan, at the end of World War II, on 15 August 1945, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel into two zones of occupation. The Soviets administered the northern half and the Americans administered the southern half. In 1948, as a result of Cold War tensions, the occupation zones became two sovereign states. A socialist state was established in the north under the totalitarian leadership of Kim Il-sung and a capitalist state in the south under the authoritarian leadership of Syngman Rhee. Both governments of the two new Korean states claimed to be the sole legitimate government of all of Korea, and neither accepted the border as permanent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

[ckaihatsu]

Well, I do think that the enlightenment and subsequent scientific and industrial revolutions played a huge role, but that does still argue for the notion that politics is downstream from culture.

By *my* book I have 'politics' being *far* more deterministic than culture -- I have 'politics' as being defined-by / including 'economic trends', 'technology / technique', 'mode of production', and then 'class struggle' as the *most*-deterministic.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show

By this taxonomic yardstick I have 'regional culture' on the borderline between the meta-category of 'logistics', and the meta-category of 'politics'. So 'regional culture' could be thought of as a high-level 'logistics', meaning a certain *flavor* of how society does its thing, for any given area of the world.

'Culture', more broadly, could include anything *downward* from there, including the rest of 'logistics', and then all of 'lifestyle', too, which is more-individual and more *personal*, of course.

[ckaihatsu]

Well, first, assuming that all homeless are unintentionally unemployed is a mistake. A lot of them are drug addicts or drunks, more have serious mental issues. Second, given that there are already agencies to help the homeless in every city where there is a shelter (all of which are subsidized by taxpayer dollars), there is no point to the services you are demanding. Finally, if you are unwilling to help yourself, the idea that society owes you is entirely backwards.

I don't understand why you're *psychologizing* the issue of homelessness -- it's rather like *individualizing* the issue of *health care*, like this person has diabetes, while that one has Alzheimer's, etc.

What *prevails*, unfortunately, is that people *have no homes*. Why can't we *focus* on the issue itself instead of always *dramatizing* it with anecdotes?

If society was addressing this situation adequately there would be *no* people on the streets because they would all find a *better* alternative, readily-available. Maybe it's an in-home *chocolate* stand, for some, or *refrigeration*, for others -- but *something* could certainly be provided as a more-*desirable* alternative to being on the streets, so that people aren't on the streets. Does that make any sense?

I'm not a moralist, so I don't look at the issue in terms of who-deserves-housing, I look at it in terms of what-housing-is-vacant. If there's vacant housing -- and there *is* -- then it shouldn't be vacant because there are people on the street who could *make use of* that vacant housing.

[QatzelOk]

On this point itself I have to *disagree* -- the elites have been *wanting* a resumption of capitalist wealth accumulation, even to the point of risking workers' lives in the workplace.

That's what corporate media says. "The elites" want us to go back to work, and then stories about gyms and restaurants wanting to open. The elites means "gym owners" in this type of propaganda. The real elites don't own gyms - they own the media that tells you the stories they want you to hear.

I don't think you can provide evidence of a prevailing politician sentiment for full *lockdowns*, anywhere in the world, otherwise it would have happened by now, as medically advised, and we'd be rid of the virus by now.

The bad medical advise that our corporate news have been providing is as accurate as their pro-war propaganda always is. Covid-19 requires vaccines and contact-tracing the same way that Libya needed bombardment "to help people" in 2011.

I like your GDP chart above because it demonstrates money travel. Here is another chart that shows what money likes to do:


source

In the graph upper left, notice how the 1% increased their fortune exponentially just before the Depression hit. And it is the 1% who can see a Depression coming a mile away, and they can thus prepare for it by stealing all the wealth just before it happens.

Now, fast-forward to now.... Whatever wealth hasn't already been stolen through QE, stock buybacks, privatization and wars, is being drained by lockdowns, where large corporations remain open .... concentrating all the wealth in the economy in the hand of the already rich.... just before the whole thing crashes. The lifeboats will be carrying one half their capacity because the rich want to be really comfortable.

Another generation of crushed Joad families will either be wondering around starving, or permanently put to sleep by Pfizer. And surveilled like prisoners, guilty only of existing.

This is why we are locked down. It's all about stealing-for-the-rich, which is the real constitution of capital. It's what Western Democracy is made of.

[ckaihatsu]

That's what corporate media says. "The elites" want us to go back to work, and then stories about gyms and restaurants wanting to open. The elites means "gym owners" in this type of propaganda. The real elites don't own gyms - they own the media that tells you the stories they want you to hear.

Oh, okay, so you're saying that the corporate media has been trumpeting the *petty bourgeois* line as a front.

The bad medical advise that our corporate news have been providing is as accurate as their pro-war propaganda always is. Covid-19 requires vaccines and contact-tracing the same way that Libya needed bombardment "to help people" in 2011.

For the sake of clarification would you please state whether or not society should be in *full lockdown*, to get rid of COVID?

I like your GDP chart above because it demonstrates money travel. Here is another chart that shows what money likes to do:


source

Okay, good info, thanks.

In the graph upper left, notice how the 1%

*One-tenth* of one percent, that is.

increased their fortune exponentially just before the Depression hit. And it is the 1% who can see a Depression coming a mile away, and they can thus prepare for it by stealing all the wealth just before it happens.

Yes.

Now, fast-forward to now.... Whatever wealth hasn't already been stolen through QE, stock buybacks, privatization and wars, is being drained by lockdowns, where large corporations remain open .... concentrating all the wealth in the economy in the hand of the already rich.... just before the whole thing crashes. The lifeboats will be carrying one half their capacity because the rich want to be really comfortable.

Another generation of crushed Joad families will either be wondering around starving, or permanently put to sleep by Pfizer. And surveilled like prisoners, guilty only of existing.

This is why we are locked down. It's all about stealing-for-the-rich, which is the real constitution of capital. It's what Western Democracy is made of.

Okay, I can accept that this is the hyped crisis-of-the-decade, like 9-11 was for 2001, but could you elaborate on the 'endgame' -- ? Things can't just *stop*, so where would the rich *go*, exactly, after perpetrating this kind of genocide / sociocide?

The class divide is getting *so* stark, and everyday life is getting *so* abnormal that a social reckoning, based on class, looks and feels increasingly *obvious*. Here's the latest call from the WSWS, for example:


The coronavirus pandemic and the case for expropriating the financial oligarchy

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/1 ... s-d02.html

[QatzelOk]

Okay, I can accept that this is the hyped crisis-of-the-decade, like 9-11 was for 2001, but could you elaborate on the 'endgame' -- ? Things can't just *stop*, so where would the rich *go*, exactly, after perpetrating this kind of genocide / sociocide?

I don't know where they'll go this time.

They have already committed genocides and ethnic-cleansings in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and a few other "refuges" for capital.

Perhaps with modern tech, they won't have to go anywhere. Perhaps they can kill their own countrymen now without much pushback.... ?

[ckaihatsu]

I don't know where they'll go this time.

They have already committed genocides and ethnic-cleansings in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and a few other "refuges" for capital.

Perhaps with modern tech, they won't have to go anywhere. Perhaps they can kill their own countrymen now without much pushback.... ?

I guess I'm asking you to elaborate on what the world might look like in 5 years -- if the world social situation is so backward, balkanized, stark, and abnormal, then how would the *economy* function at all? *Would* it function? How would regular people get the things they need if money itself is no longer available due to economic disparities and economic breakdown?

You were indicating some kind of a 'breaking point' -- can you describe this further?

[QatzelOk]

I guess I'm asking you to elaborate on what the world might look like in 5 years...

This obviously depends on what humans do in the meantime.

Why are you asking a political debater to practice the art of fortune-telling?

You usually have much better methodology than this.

[ckaihatsu]

This obviously depends on what humans do in the meantime.

Why are you asking a political debater to practice the art of fortune-telling?

You usually have much better methodology than this.

It's because of this scenario-building of yours:

just before the whole thing crashes. The lifeboats will be carrying one half their capacity because the rich want to be really comfortable.

Another generation of crushed Joad families will either be wondering around starving, or permanently put to sleep by Pfizer. And surveilled like prisoners, guilty only of existing.

[QatzelOk]

It all depends on what the underclasses (like myself) do.

The lockdown makes it almost impossible for regular humans to organize.

And even if they did, what do ordinary humans know about anything anymore?

Dumb dogs are much easier to kill than wolves. Perhaps that's why humans were domesticated so thoroughly - to make them more disposable?

Western democracies are excellent at disposing of humans.

[ckaihatsu]

It all depends on what the underclasses (like myself) do.

The lockdown makes it almost impossible for regular humans to organize.

And even if they did, what do ordinary humans know about anything anymore?

Dumb dogs are much easier to kill than wolves. Perhaps that's why humans were domesticated so thoroughly - to make them more disposable?

Western democracies are excellent at disposing of humans.

Okay, thanks, and would you get to this past question of mine that you passed-over -- ?

For the sake of clarification would you please state whether or not society should be in *full lockdown*, to get rid of COVID?

[QatzelOk]

ckaihatsu wrote:

For the sake of clarification would you please state whether or not society should be in *full lockdown*, to get rid of COVID?

What does my answer to this question have to do with the theme of this thread?

The question is whether our current greed-motivated system of governance ("Western" "democracy") is fit for purpose. If that purpose is survival and the best life possible that is sustainable... they have not done that at all.

This is a long-term problem, so it is curious that you are stressing something so short-term. Why are you doing this? What is the significance of your querry here as it relates to the competence of Western governance?

[ckaihatsu]

What does my answer to this question have to do with the theme of this thread?

The question is whether our current greed-motivated system of governance ("Western" "democracy") is fit for purpose. If that purpose is survival and the best life possible that is sustainable... they have not done that at all.

This is a long-term problem, so it is curious that you are stressing something so short-term. Why are you doing this? What is the significance of your querry here as it relates to the competence of Western governance?

Sure, the question is somewhat off-topic, but it's certainly *topical*.

Don't worry about it if you're really not interested in responding to it.