Ozone,

PA already answered it, but I can add this. And this truly isn’t personal. For example, John Lewis tried to use the “free stuff” criticism against Bernie too, which initially shocked me. So, it’s not about you. I’m directing this at politicians and public figures, etc.

Anyway, the “free stuff” argument in general is silly and juvenile. What it really means is “We don’t want the government to spend money on this, but we DO want it to spend money on that. And we’re going to label any spending we don’t like ‘free stuff,’ and we won’t call the stuff we do like that.”

One could just as easily call our trillion dollar military budget “free stuff.” Or the hundreds of billions spent on corporate welfare, etc. etc. The “free stuff” argument can be used in myriad ways, which means it shouldn’t be used at all.

We collect taxes and we spend those taxes on goods and services we decide we want or need. That’s where our focus should be, not on silly frames about what is or isn’t “free stuff.”

So, Bernie wants tuition-free public colleges, and he pays for this. Estimates actually show the costs at even less than his estimates, so it’s easily doable. It’s roughly 60 billion a year. If we can spend a trillion on the military, we can spend 60 billion to extend our “free” K-12 education system. IMO, this should include all training and lifetime learning at public schools, universities, training centers, etc. etc. . . . cradle to grave. The bang for the buck on lifetime education is incalculable, so why wouldn’t we want to do this and provide access to every single American?

(More on your next question later . . .)

Ozoneranger wrote:

Thanks. I look forward to the 2nd walk down the aisle.

Zooey, I just don’t see a one party state, like, say, Mexico’s old PRI. Our system has truly become a pendulum. I think both major parties recognize this. One party gets all the power (GOP in 2000, Dems in 08 and back again to the GOP in 2016) and muck things up so badly they get trounced in the mid-terms (06, 10). If Trump and the GOP screws the pooch on Obamacare, 18 will be a bloodbath and Trump will be truly alone. Back to governing by executive orders, which can be overturned by the next POTUS.

Wouldn’t that be a hoot…Obamacare, the mother of the Tea Party, becomes the chopping block on which the Elephant lays his head. That’s why just 60 days into the new Congress, the GOP is treading very lightly. The mids are less than two years away. Meanwhile, the Dems are doing everything they can to throw rocks into the Trump wheel.

It’s chaos, but I like it.

You probably don’t agree with me on this, but I see that pendulum moving from the center-right to the much further right, and it seems the Overton Window keeps moving more and more to the right of center with each new decade. Part of this is by design, IMO. As the Dems have now become the true “conservative” party, while the GOP is now the “radical” right party.

The Dems, when they gain power (basically) seem quite averse to taking the ball and running with it in the opposite direction. Instead, they sit on it and say “This is the new normal, and we won’t budge from here.” The GOP regains power and they run with it further to the right, aggressively. Then we get rinse and repeat when the Dems get their shot again. Basically, they accept most of what the GOP has done as the new normal, the new default, and then do their best to try to keep that in place . . .

It’s as if they’ve broken the laws of physics. There is no “equal and opposite reaction” when the Dems regain power. It’s more like a holding action, which is pretty stupid politically, and, in my view, deeply immoral.

Most people want “bold.” The Dems give them the fetal position. The GOP gives them boldly insane.

That’s no way to run a railroad.

nittany ram wrote:

Calling those people researchers is sort of a stretch. They aren’t really conducting research – not in the scientific sense at least. They have already decided Bigfoot/UFOs/Ghosts exist and are cherry picking evidence that fits that belief, although even then their ‘evidence’ is about as flimsy as it could be.

Besides, everyone knows Bigfoot/UFOs and their ilk were invented by the US government to distract us from the kaiju portal located in what is now known as Area 51.

Thing is, if we could coach ’em up, they’d make great defensive tackles. I mean, who’s gonna block them, right?

Zooey wrote:

I saw this, and it got me thinking about the other proposal (being tested in Finland or Denmark) if the universal basic income. Automation is going to create a big issue. A big unavoidable issue.

And I got to wondering if we really have advanced to the point where there is enough wealth and production in our society that with a different taxation/wealth distribution mechanism, where work will be increasingly “optional” rather than a ball and chain. The next 100 years are going to be the biggest revolution yet, I suppose.

We were there long ago. Keynes thought, back in the 1930s, we’d already be at 15-hour work-weeks by now. The only reason we aren’t is because we work to make a few people incredibly rich. Most of our day is spent doing that, unless we work in the public sector. In most jobs, workers produce enough to earn their day’s wages in their first few hours. All the rest goes toward executive overhead, profits, etc.

The math — for well over a century — has shown that if profit weren’t in the picture, and if we had at least close to egalitarian distribution of wages and access, everyone could live comfortably in the “middle class” range.

And, of course, if we could just break free of the fiction of capitalism, and substitute another, better (democratic, egalitarian) one, none of this would be a problem in any way, shape or form.

Money, especially, is a destructive fiction, and we’ve been brainwashed to believe that it must come from sales of things we produce. But why? Why not completely divorce, detach, sever the pool of funding from those sales? Why not invent a publicly owned and held pool of funding that we all have access to, instead of just the big banks, who then decide how to distribute it?

Sever all ties between sales revenues and our wages, taxes, funding, etc. etc. and we no longer have issues of debt, deficits, poverty, homelessness, hunger or scarcity.

It’s time to think waaaay outside the box — before it’s too late.

Authoritarians, yes. I’ve had many a discussion with self-proclaimed (right)libertarians who, almost without exceptions, immediately assume leftist beliefs are hyper-authoritarian, even “Stalinist.” Ironically, with zero exceptions, I’ve just never seen a right-winger score well on actual (Adorno’s) F-scale tests, or those based upon it like the political compass. Zero exceptions. We leftists pretty much max out on the anti-authoritarian scale. Righties tend to score in the totalitarian sectors, or no better than “centrist” on the issue.

http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

Another key? The way that magic R works is that they’ve “otherized” so many different groups of Americans, they believe they can trash them and still be eminently “patriotic” or “pro-American.” They really don’t see large portions of Americans as American at all. Only white Christian conservatives get that designation. That’s basically how they can reconcile this . . . including threats of secession, Russian hacking, etc. etc.

IOKIYAAR.

Maher’s fallen for the right-wing frame when it comes to “free speech.” And it’s bogus and filled with impossible contradictions.

It’s not a violation of someone’s “free speech” to bar them from speaking at a university. No one has a pre-ordained “right” to be chosen as a paid speaker in a public venue — on TV, on Radio, etc. etc. If it were a “right,” than everyone NOT chosen has had their rights violated. As in, all of us, minus the one person picked. It would, however, be a violation of said “right” if wherever that person went in public, he or she was silenced.

It’s a bit like saying, in a singing competition that starts out with thousands, that everyone who didn’t make it to the finale had their “free speech rights” violated.

Another angle on this, from the political right: When a few newspapers decided to dump George Will after his appalling columns on campus rape culture, “conservatives” screamed that his “free speech rights” had been violated. This was complete nonsense. He was syndicated at the time in something like 400 media outlets, and he lost a few. No one whose column appears in several hundred newspapers is being “silenced,” etc. etc.

And, of course, there’s the “free speech rights” of the people who protested Yiannopoulos. The political right is rather selective in how it divvies those rights out and about, and Maher shouldn’t aid and abet them.

Trying to boil this down a bit more:

Humans receive inputs inside and outside the home, obviously. Great, good, indifferent, bad and horrible, and all things in between. We’re impacted by all of it. It makes no sense to me that the inputs we receive at home would win out over everything else, so that the world outside the home doesn’t matter. That it just doesn’t matter if our economic system, for instance, teaches:

A) kill or be killed, compete to survive, dog eat dog

or

B) share knowledge and resources, work together for the common good, work cooperatively instead of competitively.

Fight endlessly over resources or figure out how to distribute them fairly and use them for the common good.

It puzzles me that someone would think it’s irrelevant, as long as life at home is a certain way. Especially if the goal is, in this case, to be compassionate, empathetic, etc. etc.

waterfield wrote:

zn wrote:

The problem is your “premise” (ie. peconception) is refuted by science.

You guys are making my so called “premise” far more complicated than it actually is.

“Hard wired” or not children need to be taught (parents, peers, education, etc) what they may or may not be “hard wired” to do. They are born not knowing how to access innate traits that separate them from other species. In a word they are not born selfless even though they may have the “capacity” to become so. It is my belief that a child that is taught compassion and empathy for others does not lose that character simply because of a corrupt society and a child that is not taught such character does not acquire it simply because of a more civilized society.

W,

Can you elaborate on the part in bold? First and second reading — for me — it appears you’re saying once a parent teaches X, it’s locked in and stays with that person forever, and their environment, their schooling, the economic system, its words and deeds, or the government and its words and deeds, can’t alter that. So that if you teach your kids compassion and empathy for others, that’s how that child will remain as they grow and develop. They’ll always be that way — even though, of course, while you’re teaching them X, they’re also experiencing Y, Z and myriad other inputs outside the home, etc. etc. . . . not to mention what happens after they leave the nest.

And the second part of that? It strikes me that you’ve imagined this parental teaching as occurring in a vacuum, so that the wider world outside the home has little to no impact, and the child is 100% shaped by parents and only parents. Heaven help us all if this is the case, because there are all kinds of horrible parents in the world, and we have countless examples of children being “saved” by teachers, social workers, the discovery of this or that philosophy, the arts, etc. etc. It also really surprises me that you don’t think it matters if “society” is good, just, fair or rotten. All that matters, apparently, is what the parents do.

If I have your take all wrong, please feel free to correct me. It wouldn’t be the first time.

;>)

W,

It’s immaterial whether or not I have kids. If we’re going to get anecdotal here, my mother got her Doctorate in Counseling. She went on to teach Doctoral students how to counsel, and then taught counselors how to counsel, etc. She went through endless psychological studies, wrote some herself, and was extremely intelligent and intuitive about the human condition before that. But when it came to her own kids, she knew she could never draw conclusions for all children based on just us. And she knew that parents see their own children through what can be a distorting lens of love. She also knew she could not say, “Well, my children did X, Y and Z, so this is how you should treat yours, or your students, etc. etc.”

W, it’s not relevant to the discussion that you have kids or grandkids or that others may not.

Beyond that, I emphasize the capitalist system when it comes to crushing the life out of innate generosity, compassion, empathy, etc. far more than our current form of government, though it helps do that too. I think the capitalist system (which our government promotes, protects, defends, goes to war for and bails out endlessly) is Number One when it comes to soul-crushing, with Organized Religion being Number Two and government Number Three (with case by case exceptions**) . . . .

**For certain individuals, minority groups and segments of society, the government is the number one soul-crusher.

waterfield wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

We are born with the ability to be compassionate, empathic, and empathetic

Of course we are born with the “capacity” . That is what differentiates us from other creatures. My point is we are not born “compassionate”. We learn -hopefully-how to become such with the tools we have been given at birth. And of course if we don’t learn from our parent(s) we are in a vacuum and then we succumb to societal pressures as to “values” be that in the form of governmental values, political values,peer values, whatever. In that respect you and I are likely in agreement. However, if our values are learned from our parents, it doesn’t matter what type of society we live in-we will be less tolerant of the ills caused upon the less fortunate-if in fact those are the values given to us by our parents.

A Ram illustration: My wife tells a story told to her by an engineer she used to work with when she worked on the Lunar Module project at TRW. He told her that he had season tickets to the Rams-Coliseum days. He would take his son-early Sunday game days-and drive through south central L.A.-only for the purpose of pointing out that even though they live in a nice home in Palos Verdes there were thousand of children less fortunate. He did that every Sunday so his son would understand. As I understand it his son is now a very bright lawyer for the ACLU.

As far as being sympathetic to the ills of society we learn it and no form of government-be it capitalism, socialism, communism, will ever teach us that. We either “learn” it or we don’t.

We just disagree about most of this, W. I don’t think children need to be taught compassion at all. We can teach them how to direct and extend the compassion they’re already born with. But it doesn’t need to be “taught.” As long as we don’t screw them up with ugly messages that it’s “human nature” to be cruel to one another, that it’s a “dog eat dog world,” that everyone is out for themselves, there’s nothing for them to “learn” along those lines, other than to help refine and direct their compassion, empathy, etc. etc.

Expose them to as much of the world, as much of its diversity, as much of its art, etc. etc. as is humanly possible so their moral compasses are expanded . . .

One can quibble in a circular kind of way that we are naturally empathetic, compassionate and generous toward others perhaps because it makes us feel good to be just that — and studies show that it really does. It fires up the pleasure areas of our brains, big time. But that’s still a innate drive. That still means the drive is already there at birth, as are the wonderful chemical reactions. We inherit this, genetically, and as the article above shows, we share this with other primates.

And, to me, the kind of economic and governmental system in place is critical. That system can crush or empower our innate desires to be generous, kind, giving, caring, etc. etc. Some systems just flat out do better than others in promoting or suppressing these things. IMO, that’s just self-evident.

btw, Waterfield,

I’m not saying we’re wired only for compassion, empathy, etc. etc. We have conflicting wiring as well. But it is there, biologically, genetically.

Think of it in the same way Michelangelo thought of his art. He looked at a huge slab of rock and saw his finished piece of sculpture already inside that huge slab of rock. All he needed to do was to get to it.

We as a society just need to activate what is already inside us, when it comes to things like compassion, empathy, reciprocal altruism, etc — and not beat it out of our kids over time. It’s there, inside the rock. We’re all born with — with few exceptions — the golden rule inside us, naturally. But, IMO, our economic system, and the State that protects it, defends it, bails it out, goes to war for it, etc. makes it a thousand times more difficult to unlock our potential for compassion, empathy, etc. etc. Our economic system teaches the opposite, and the State supports this.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Billy_T.

waterfield wrote:

“advanced empathetic structures start to emerge around 4 or 5 years old. ”

You won’t get any argument from me there since that’s not my point. I too studied a lot of this stuff in both undergraduate and graduate school. While the brain “develops” the capacity to learn complex social matters such as compassion, etc it does not incorporate these values organically. That is learned behavior.

My point in all this is a rebuttal to Billy’s point that our society is at the root of our failures. I will give Billy this much: If there is no parental leadership in the formation of values then children will always become victims to societal narcissism. At that point You can overthrow our form of government and replace it with whatever but IMO there will be no change at all in terms of how we treat and respect people less fortunate than ourselves without and until we begin to teach our children what it truly means to be compassionate to other.

Billy is right. We live in a narcissistic society. But IMO its not because of our form of government but far more because that is how our children have either been taught or simply not taught.

I respect Billy and WV-these are the people that should be having children but unfortunately are not.

No, Waterfield. It’s innate. It’s organic. It’s built in. We are born with the ability to be compassionate, empathic, and empathetic — naturally. Study after study shows this.

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_compassionate_instinct

Excerpt:

Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive—a view which has its origins in Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.

The biological basis of compassion

First consider the recent study of the biological basis of compassion. If such a basis exists, we should be wired up, so to speak, to respond to others in need. Recent evidence supports this point convincingly. University of Wisconsin psychologist Jack Nitschke found in an experiment that when mothers looked at pictures of their babies, they not only reported feeling more compassionate love than when they saw other babies; they also demonstrated unique activity in a region of their brains associated with the positive emotions. Nitschke’s finding suggests that this region of the brain is attuned to the first objects of our compassion—our offspring.

But this compassionate instinct isn’t limited to parents’ brains. In a different set of studies, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University found that when subjects contemplated harm being done to others, a similar network of regions in their brains lit up. Our children and victims of violence—two very different subjects, yet united by the similar neurological reactions they provoke. This consistency strongly suggests that compassion isn’t simply a fickle or irrational emotion, but rather an innate human response embedded into the folds of our brains.

In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desire.

The brain, then, seems wired up to respond to others’ suffering—indeed, it makes us feel good when we can alleviate that suffering. But do other parts of the body also suggest a biological basis for compassion?

It’s interesting that in the 19th century most Russian evolutionists believed humans evolved/survived for far different reasons than the Western, vulgar Darwinists. The Russians thought we humans banded together, worked collectively to benefit each other, unified to fight against common threats against our survival, most of them coming from the natural world, not one another. We survived due to cooperative behavior. If we had been all about competition, we wouldn’t have made it.

The vision from the West is based far more on competition, and gives very little credit to cooperation.

Two recent books tripped the wires for me regarding this: Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Kristin Ross’s Communal Luxury. The latter actually talks directly about those Russian scientists, while the former makes the much broader case that humans evolved and survived because we banded together, cooperatively, and because we, unlike any other mammal before us, extended the range of cooperation due to the invention and acceptance of fiction.

I took from both accounts that the vulgar Darwinists were likely heavily influenced by the rise of capitalism itself, and read back far too much into our ancient past based on the competitive laws of motion inherent in the fairly new economic system for their day.

IMO, we in America and the West in general are victims of this false view of “human nature” being dominated by competition. Our 250,000 year history doesn’t support that view.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Billy_T.

ZN,

To me, it’s vital to remember that even in the midst of supposedly “just wars,” even the supposedly “good guys” commit war crimes and atrocities**. And I don’t limit that just to THE bomb, or the firebombing of Tokyo, though they, all by themselves, would have been more than enough to send the “losers” to the Hague. We “won,” and called all the post-war shots, so that wasn’t going to happen.

It’s also Dresden and countless other acts. And it’s not some kind of tit for tat thing that requires a “Well, their side was even more monstrous.”

The key test for me is basically Kantian in this case. Rawlsian as well. If you could blindfold the “judge,” and the judge has no way of knowing the country of origin for the perpetrator, or that ongoing score of tit for tat, would they call X a “war crime”? Would they call it a “crime against humanity”? Would they call it “evil” in the secular sense? And was it — and this only heightens the evil, IMO — necessary?

**The main reason this is important is to recognize that in ANY war these atrocities will happen. And happen. And happen. Which does the opposite of excuse them in the “Well, mommy, Joey did it too!!” sense. It exposes the lie of “the guys in white hats can do no wrong” idea, and reminds people of the horrific costs of every war. It reminds people that no one is “innocent” once the war begins. So if they want to claim “innocence,” they can’t go to war, period.

I didn’t know about the incredibly heroic efforts of the Munich Post before reading this article. Another excerpt:

At the very apex of the Beer Hall Putsch, a clash between his militia and Munich’s chief opposition newspaper, the Munich Post, may have changed the course of history, giving evidence that Hitler had the potential for a far more ambitious course of evil than anyone in Germany believed. Only the reporters who had been following Hitler seemed able to imagine it.

On the night of November 8, 1923, amid a clamorous political meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller, a huge echoey beer hall where political meetings were often held, Hitler stood up, fired a pistol into the air, and announced his militia had captured the three top leaders of southern Germany’s Bavarian province and handcuffed them in a back room in the beer hall. The next morning, he declared, his Stormtrooper militia would capture the capitol buildings and then head north to Berlin.

It didn’t happen. That morning there was a firefight on the bridge to the city center that ended with Hitler’s forces having failed to cross that bridge, Hitler flinging himself — or being flung — on the ground amid gunfire in ignominious defeat.

What caused his defeat? Some have suggested (myself among them) it was Hitler’s fateful decision to detach his elite private militia, the forerunner of the SS — the Stosstrupp Hitler — and send them on a mission to trash and pillage the offices of the Munich Post, the newspaper he called “the poison kitchen” (for the slanders about him they were allegedly cooking up).

Trash and pillage they did. I saw a faded newsprint photograph of the after-action damage to the Munich Post — desks and chairs smashed, papers strewn into a chaos of rubble, as if an explosion had gone off inside the building.