Quote:Original post by LessBread

I'm confident it looks like torture some of the time: Police Torture in Chicago. Torture isn't only about the harm done to particular individuals, it's a way to intimidate entire populations. If they tortured John Doe, they'll torture you too, so change your mindset now or risk getting tortured next!

I don't think police brutality is particularly relevant to this discussion. This is something beyond the scope of the police. Organized intimidation campaigns are used to achieve specific political goals and to seize and maintain power. They are not effective tools for creating positive cultural attitudes that are self-sustaining.

Quote:
I'm confident that it looks like propaganda all of the time. When prominent citizens praise the country as a bastion of freedom on one hand, and on the other pretend to tell the adults that live in the country how to live their lives, the propaganda is rampant. Does the American way of life entail telling other people how to live their lives? For some people it does.

I think you're playing too much on this idea of telling other people how they should live their lives. You can live your life how you want to, but don't expect to be subsidized for irresponsible behavior. I'm talking more about making value judgments than ordering people how to live their lives. If you consider that "telling people how they should live their lives," then so be it.

Parents typically tell their children how they should live their lives, implicitly or explicitly. Society does, too, no matter how open and tolerant it is. The question is which messages are worth sending and which aren't.

Quote:
Collective identity is a vague term. I don't think it's a monolithic property. I think people - individuals - hold on to several collective identities at once and identify with a particular collective depending on the situation. For example, two people that go to the same church identify with that church during services on Sunday morning and cheer for different football teams Sunday afternoon. Collective identities overlap and affinities are fluid. Individuals rearrange the priorities they give to their various identifications. In as much as collective identity provides guidelines that people use to define success for themselves, it also provides them opportunities to use those guidelines to figuratively (and sometimes literally) attack people who hold different collective identities and different definitions of success. This would include the condemnation that because other groups (other collectives that individuals identify with) don't value the definition of success that you identify with, they don't value success. This brings us back to us versus them.

I agree but that doesn't really invalidate the idea of their being a collective identity centered around the notion of belonging to a society with particular values about work, social responsibility, and treatment of others.

Quote:
I don't think collective identity plays as strong a role as people fighting the culture war think it does.

I think it plays a tremendous role. The lack of shared identity causes a great deal of friction between different communities within the United States. Look at Southern California. It's like the third world in our own backyard, replete with not only class differences, but ethnic tribalism and conflict, and stunning contrasts between opulence and poverty.

Quote:Earlier in this thread I dropped a dozen links documenting the decline in the US middle class and the demise of social mobility during the last five years (link). It doesn't matter how much the individual values success if the system is arranged against him.

The system isn't totally arranged against the individual. The individual is better off in terms of real value than he was a century ago. The system is simply not yet in equilibrium; literally billions of people are climbing out of extreme poverty and competing directly with us. It's impossible to suggest there is a way to insulate ourselves from this forever. Values of self-reliance are present in cultures where the odds are stacked even less favorably against the individual, so I don't buy this argument that because the economy hasn't necessarily been on our side, we should invest in a government security net rather than a more robust cultural mindset. I think the opposite is called for.

Quote:
This is why I keep pointing to the problem of full employment. At it's theoretical best, a capitalist economy can not do better than a 2% unemployment rate. That means millions of people will always be out of work, no matter how much they value success. However, instead of addressing the deficiencies of the economic system, the tendency is to fault the unemployed for their failure, to assert that they lack jobs because they possess a character defect of some kind, or to take it as far as you have and to fault them for holding to a collective identity that clashes with some idealized dominant identity that itself is as much a construction as any other identity.

The people that are actually unemployable through no fault of their own should be provided for to some minimal extent. I won't disagree with that. I also think it's especially important to promote organizations outside of the government that pitch in, and to promote family involvement.

Quote:The principle scales, the practice doesn't. "It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."

I'm more interested in what's possible in practice than in principle (read theory.)

Quote:It seems that you think that putting social pressure on people who lack control over themselves (i.e. the powerless), will produce grand results, whereas there's no point in putting such pressure on people who have control over themselves and large portions of the economy (i.e. the powerful).

In a free, democratic, and open society, people are not as powerless as they sometimes like to think.

Quote:Chastising the powerless for lacking the power to change society and praising the powerful for not using their power to change society seems extremely counter-intuitive to me, and yet this belief dominates large portions of society. Baffling.

I've never praised the powerful for neglecting their responsibilities to society. You're assuming that I believe the wealthy and powerful are already virtuous and that their mindset must be extended to everyone. That's not the case. Although the middle and upper classes tend to have better values than the lower classes, they are far from perfect.

Social pressure cannot be applied to underachievers without also being applied to everyone.

Quote:Sounds like you're giving a free pass to the people in charge today. What about their responsibilities?

Someone should hold them responsible. How about those people who are suffering as a result of incompetent and corrupt leadership? Am I to assume that they are simply too stupid to do anything about their situation? I think that would be condescending. I'll do what I can but if I don't see any effort on their part, I can't be blamed if my priorities start to shift towards my personal well-being. In a dog-eat-dog world, you can only fight for the underdog for so long before you have to turn the attention back on yourself.

What sort of vision of interdependence do you have that will lead to policies that make Johnny want to read a book instead of watching UFC?

This is a problem that is bigger than legislation alone can fix. It's becoming all the more dire now that we are exposed to global competition on a scale never before seen. Globalism is here and it's not going away.

Quote:
A dud candidate? Do you mind if I laugh at you? Dud candidates don't attract tens of thousands of people to listen to them speak.

Sure they do. None of those tens of thousands of people can tell me what Obama stands for other than empty bullshit rhetoric about change and hope (which has been the underlying theme of many campaigns; the difference now is that there is nothing substantial to fall back on except this obvious idea itself.)

McCain's a freaking moron. It's incredible that Obama can't pull a wider lead at this point. I'm already hearing people bitch and moan about the nefarious Karl Rove and the evil Republican propagandists. The fact of the matter is, Obama has made it too easy for them.

We'll see what the VP nominations bring. And the debates might be Obama's chance to really shine -- or falter (personally, I think when he isn't reading from a speech, he isn't a very good speaker.)

Quote:
The Republicans wish they had a dud candidate that could do that. Instead, they've got a truly dud candidate who struggles to attract hundreds of people to listen to him.

That's simply nobody wants to expend the energy to go see a re-animated corpse talk. But evidently, they're likely to vote for him. If that's not a burn for Obama, I don't know what is.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:Original post by LessBread
I'm confident it looks like torture some of the time: Police Torture in Chicago. Torture isn't only about the harm done to particular individuals, it's a way to intimidate entire populations. If they tortured John Doe, they'll torture you too, so change your mindset now or risk getting tortured next!

I don't think police brutality is particularly relevant to this discussion. This is something beyond the scope of the police. Organized intimidation campaigns are used to achieve specific political goals and to seize and maintain power. They are not effective tools for creating positive cultural attitudes that are self-sustaining.

Police brutality is part and parcel with telling people how to live their lives. It's a concrete expression of the attitudes that emerge from the effort to force subdominant groups to conform to the behavioral norms of the dominant group. Intimidation campaigns need not be organized for specific political goals, like suppressing voter turnout for example. Intimidation can be it's own goal, especially when the point is to perpetuate the marginal status of an out group. I agree that it's not an effective tool for creating positive and self-sustaining cultural attitudes, but it is effective for creating an atmosphere of demoralization and despair.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:
I'm confident that it looks like propaganda all of the time. When prominent citizens praise the country as a bastion of freedom on one hand, and on the other pretend to tell the adults that live in the country how to live their lives, the propaganda is rampant. Does the American way of life entail telling other people how to live their lives? For some people it does.

I think you're playing too much on this idea of telling other people how they should live their lives. You can live your life how you want to, but don't expect to be subsidized for irresponsible behavior. I'm talking more about making value judgments than ordering people how to live their lives. If you consider that "telling people how they should live their lives," then so be it.

Parents typically tell their children how they should live their lives, implicitly or explicitly. Society does, too, no matter how open and tolerant it is. The question is which messages are worth sending and which aren't.

I think I'm focusing on a soft spot in your argument. I think people should live their lives the way they want to and expect to be subsidized regardless of the level of responsibility for their behavior. If it's good enough for Wall Street, it's good enough for the ghetto. I rarely hear people who complain about the moral lapses of other people start off by complaining that the government is subsidizing irresponsible business practices. It's a huge double standard that ranks right up there with the soft treatment given white collar criminals. So long as society forgoes spanking those misbehaving children, chastising the underclass for misbehaving remains an exercise in rank hypocrisy and the criminal justice system becomes a tool for controlling surplus labor.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:
Collective identity is a vague term. I don't think it's a monolithic property. I think people - individuals - hold on to several collective identities at once and identify with a particular collective depending on the situation. For example, two people that go to the same church identify with that church during services on Sunday morning and cheer for different football teams Sunday afternoon. Collective identities overlap and affinities are fluid. Individuals rearrange the priorities they give to their various identifications. In as much as collective identity provides guidelines that people use to define success for themselves, it also provides them opportunities to use those guidelines to figuratively (and sometimes literally) attack people who hold different collective identities and different definitions of success. This would include the condemnation that because other groups (other collectives that individuals identify with) don't value the definition of success that you identify with, they don't value success. This brings us back to us versus them.

I agree but that doesn't really invalidate the idea of their being a collective identity centered around the notion of belonging to a society with particular values about work, social responsibility, and treatment of others.

It destroys the possibility that such identities can be used to typecast people, which is how that idea is used politically to sustain us versus them arguments.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:
I don't think collective identity plays as strong a role as people fighting the culture war think it does.

I think it plays a tremendous role. The lack of shared identity causes a great deal of friction between different communities within the United States. Look at Southern California. It's like the third world in our own backyard, replete with not only class differences, but ethnic tribalism and conflict, and stunning contrasts between opulence and poverty.

I think it plays a tremendous role for people fighting the culture war, but not so much for workaday people. Class differences, ethnic tribalism and conflict, and stunning contrasts between opulence and poverty describe the late 19th and early 20th centuries in place like New York. The United States survived the integration struggles of the past, it will survive them now, so long as people of good will out number people willing to fight the culture war in ruthless fashion. We need to focus on integration not alienation.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:Earlier in this thread I dropped a dozen links documenting the decline in the US middle class and the demise of social mobility during the last five years (link). It doesn't matter how much the individual values success if the system is arranged against him.

The system isn't totally arranged against the individual. The individual is better off in terms of real value than he was a century ago. The system is simply not yet in equilibrium; literally billions of people are climbing out of extreme poverty and competing directly with us. It's impossible to suggest there is a way to insulate ourselves from this forever. Values of self-reliance are present in cultures where the odds are stacked even less favorably against the individual, so I don't buy this argument that because the economy hasn't necessarily been on our side, we should invest in a government security net rather than a more robust cultural mindset. I think the opposite is called for.

The workaday individual in the United States is worse off compared with 30 years ago and that is the comparison that matters most. A comparison with a century ago might as well be a comparison with a thousand years ago. At any rate, I tend to favor materialism, so I think we should invest in programs that produce concrete improvements in living standards rather than in efforts to recast the minds of millions of people. That would amount to little more than an indoctrination campaign, which is about all that we've been getting from the Bush administration. I think that material improvements in people's lives will lead people to improve their mindset more or less on their own. The larger argument I'm making is that the economy is stacked against the individual by design. That's is the nature of capitalism in spite of ideological assertions to the contrary. Welfare is one method for mitigating this imbalance. Democracy is another.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:
This is why I keep pointing to the problem of full employment. At it's theoretical best, a capitalist economy can not do better than a 2% unemployment rate. That means millions of people will always be out of work, no matter how much they value success. However, instead of addressing the deficiencies of the economic system, the tendency is to fault the unemployed for their failure, to assert that they lack jobs because they possess a character defect of some kind, or to take it as far as you have and to fault them for holding to a collective identity that clashes with some idealized dominant identity that itself is as much a construction as any other identity.

The people that are actually unemployable through no fault of their own should be provided for to some minimal extent. I won't disagree with that. I also think it's especially important to promote organizations outside of the government that pitch in, and to promote family involvement.

I agree with you on NGO's. I don't think the state can accomplish everything.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:The principle scales, the practice doesn't. "It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."

I'm more interested in what's possible in practice than in principle (read theory.)

What you wrote above about changing mindsets does not suggest that.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:It seems that you think that putting social pressure on people who lack control over themselves (i.e. the powerless), will produce grand results, whereas there's no point in putting such pressure on people who have control over themselves and large portions of the economy (i.e. the powerful).

In a free, democratic, and open society, people are not as powerless as they sometimes like to think.

True, but recognizing their power does not mean that their power equals that of the people who control large portions of the economy.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:Chastising the powerless for lacking the power to change society and praising the powerful for not using their power to change society seems extremely counter-intuitive to me, and yet this belief dominates large portions of society. Baffling.

I've never praised the powerful for neglecting their responsibilities to society. You're assuming that I believe the wealthy and powerful are already virtuous and that their mindset must be extended to everyone. That's not the case. Although the middle and upper classes tend to have better values than the lower classes, they are far from perfect.

Social pressure cannot be applied to underachievers without also being applied to everyone.

In my experience, many people willing to tell other people how to live their lives point to the wealthy and powerful as models to be emulated. It seems to me that overachievers would be immune to pressure applied to everyone but actually intended for underachievers.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:Sounds like you're giving a free pass to the people in charge today. What about their responsibilities?

Someone should hold them responsible. How about those people who are suffering as a result of incompetent and corrupt leadership? Am I to assume that they are simply too stupid to do anything about their situation? I think that would be condescending. I'll do what I can but if I don't see any effort on their part, I can't be blamed if my priorities start to shift towards my personal well-being. In a dog-eat-dog world, you can only fight for the underdog for so long before you have to turn the attention back on yourself.

Some are too stupid. Some are too tired. In a dog-eat-dog world, be more weary of the junk yard dog than the underdog.

Quote:Original post by trzy
What sort of vision of interdependence do you have that will lead to policies that make Johnny want to read a book instead of watching UFC?

This is a problem that is bigger than legislation alone can fix. It's becoming all the more dire now that we are exposed to global competition on a scale never before seen. Globalism is here and it's not going away.

Why do you think that policies can make Johnny want to do anything? Why does Johnny prefer watching UFC to reading? What policies contribute to that? I think that affordable child care would be a good place to start. Living wages would be another, so that a single mom need not work multiple jobs to make ends meet so that she has time to spend with her children. Globalism is not an excuse to abolish the welfare state, but using it that way will certainly reduce living standards in the US to undeveloped levels. Europe appears capable of maintaining the welfare state despite globalism.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:
A dud candidate? Do you mind if I laugh at you? Dud candidates don't attract tens of thousands of people to listen to them speak.

Sure they do. None of those tens of thousands of people can tell me what Obama stands for other than empty bullshit rhetoric about change and hope (which has been the underlying theme of many campaigns; the difference now is that there is nothing substantial to fall back on except this obvious idea itself.)

Democrats said the same things about Ronald Reagan in 1980. In our Coke v. Pepsi politics, Obama represents change from 8 years of Bush. That's the dominant theme this cycle.

Quote:Original post by trzy
McCain's a freaking moron. It's incredible that Obama can't pull a wider lead at this point. I'm already hearing people bitch and moan about the nefarious Karl Rove and the evil Republican propagandists. The fact of the matter is, Obama has made it too easy for them.

Perhaps Obama doesn't want to peak too soon and suffer a media fatigue backlash in November when it counts. The complaints about Karl Rove etc. is that they are campaigning by telling lies about Obama. You can't fault Obama for that. You can fault him for not fighting back with the same ferocity, but then again his campaign has been avoiding actions that might make him look like an angry black man.

Quote:Original post by trzy
We'll see what the VP nominations bring. And the debates might be Obama's chance to really shine -- or falter (personally, I think when he isn't reading from a speech, he isn't a very good speaker.)

It won't be Obama/Edwards. I agree that Obama isn't as strong in debates but I think he will best McCain in the debates. There are so many ways to get McCain angry, I wonder if Obama will try them on him.

Quote:Original post by trzy

Quote:
The Republicans wish they had a dud candidate that could do that. Instead, they've got a truly dud candidate who struggles to attract hundreds of people to listen to him.

That's simply nobody wants to expend the energy to go see a re-animated corpse talk. But evidently, they're likely to vote for him. If that's not a burn for Obama, I don't know what is.

Or they'll be likely to stay home. For the Republicans ballot propositions and down ballot contests may constitute this year's reason for voting. When the identities of this year's swing states become clear, check out the other issues on their ballots. Will those issue be urgent enough to bring Republicans to the polls?