Although I still consider the write up to be very, very, kind. At some point, after enough of the union knows about it and gets involved to support, you have to say the union was involved.
Dark Matter: Similarly I can think of some union getting upset at lines being crossed and killing several dozen civilians just to make a point.
Mike Schilling: Is that something that happened, or a hypothetical.
96 to 98 dead (guests of the hotel count as civilians), 140 injured, root cause union thinking management plans to fire 60 union workers and replace them with non-union.
Wiki's write up is kind to the union btw, I've seen other write ups where other members of the union enabled it.
Correction, wiki does cover it: "he had urged hotel employees to make a "curtain" to shield him from view as he started the fire."
Mo: And yet it’s valid for Trump voters to be angry and feel put out because they perceive supposed elites at looking down at them and thinking they’re racist?
These would be the same elites who are lowering our growth rate while enriching themselves.
This is even though nearly all political violence is on the right
Expand on this please.
We're looking at a left wing terror group running around blowing things up which was cheered on by mainstream left. Similarly I can think of some union getting upset at lines being crossed and killing several dozen civilians just to make a point. And then we have the occasional riots by groups mainstream left needs to get elected.
That's a pretty high bar to exceed, much less exceed to the point where "nearly all political violence" is Right.
STEM is useful. So is history, economics, and political science.
I think we hold up STEM because it's always policed by Mother Nature.
If your side has a better lawyer, then you have an advantage, but both of them can be dimbulbs.
When it comes to things like engineering, there's a minimum level under which things don't happen correctly. The Bridge falls, the water is filled with lead, the software doesn't compile.
At some level, all these calls for more STEM are calls for smarter people (like we talk occasionally about sending everyone to college)... but majoring in STEM doesn't make someone smarter.
It might be the STEM degree now is what the college degree used to be, a signal.
The claim being made is that there is some sort of market shortage which is why we need gummint intervention in education to properly allocate educational resources.
The case for market failure is weak.
Having said that, brain drain is mostly a good thing for the US, we should be doing more of it. I don't see the point in having the best colleges, educating the world's smartest people, and then forcing them to leave.
Low unemployment means it's relatively easy to find a job.
High pay relative to the rest of the market suggests there's high demand relative to the supply.
RE: Glut
Lawyers have an unemployment rate of 15.5% (google).
The national unemployment rate for law graduates has grown for the sixth year in a row to a whopping 15.5 percent, according to a report by the National Association for Law Placement.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=unemployment%20rate%20for%20lawyers
Janitors have an unemployment rate of 6.9%, which in combo with their median income of $23k suggests both a glut and a lack of demand.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/janitor
there’s not much sign of large numbers of STEM jobs going unfilled in the US today.
Ranked by pay the STEMs are on top.
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/majors-that-pay-you-back/bachelors
Ranked by (lack of) unemployment the STEMs are still on the top.
http://www.straighterline.com/blog/which-college-majors-have-the-highest-and-lowest-employment-rates/
the University of Puget Sound ... a three-year suspension seems awfully hefty.
If I did anything slightly like this I'd be fired, for that matter our CEO would too. College seniors are roughly 22, so "adult rules" apply.
As for that list of 100(ish) incidents, 5% resulted in suspension or worse, much of the remaining weren't actionable. It's easy to think what they did was at the upper end of what the U deals with, and this wasn't the first offense.
Toni Airaksinen worries that social science book assignments are giving students a false sense of understanding of the underclass.
[quote from the article] Misfortune unrelentingly befalls the families, who are often portrayed as hapless victims of structural poverty with little responsibility for their personal situation.
Yes. None of this matches up with the various trainwreck relatives/friends I've observed over the years. Sometimes the gov steps in and enables, but that's a different problem.
It also doesn't match with the whole high school teachers' experience, i.e. a free education is offered, this could be an easy way to elevate yourself. By far the biggest problem the teacher faces is many (or most) of the students don't see any value in education.
It's not just ITT Tech that is failing the DoE's standards. It's also... Harvard? The article asks some good questions about whether we should be expecting more from our non-profit colleges, too. {via Saul}
Good article, I'd prefer more transparency as the solution. It's not at all shocking that some normal-school degrees carry a negative value.
God's followers want to give him credit for everything good that happens and no blame at all for anything bad. That's not very useful for rational evaluation.
IMHO a religion is largely on the hook for everything, good or bad, done in it's name. There are a few corner cases where the clearly crazy act in ways everyone else disavows and would prevent if possible, but that's not on the table at the moment.
There's little point in claiming a problem is "cultural but not religious" when the issue comes down to priests of God seeking power by inventing enemies and/or forcing conformity, and their followers then carrying out their orders.
So religion is fueling the Right to Life. It's fueling those Jews throwing rocks at women in the name of being Jewish. It's fueling both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian problem. It's fueling every act of terror prefaced by "alllah 'akbar".
Their respective religions are on the hook for each of them. Often religious problems have religious solutions so that's a good thing.
It's a bad thing to give a religion the ability to hurt/kill people without the bad press that comes with it. Think about how long the Catholic Church enabled their "problematic" priests.
You've gone from "we won't turn a blind eye to honor killings" to "there is no problem", apparently because inside the US, all cultures are supposed to be equal.
cases of any type of honor violence appear to be rare in comparison to other types of crime in the United States.
Adjust those numbers for percentage of population and they become scary high. The US is 1% Muslim (all types), and Muslims with that as a cultural background is less than 10% of that (I found figures claiming roughly 150k but that was from 2012).
The US as a whole had about 16k murders (including the drug war), adjusted for population and that 24-27 becomes something like 24k to 54k.
For example a Christian man who beats his son who comes out as gay, or his daughter who violates her chastity vow? We don’t call it a special name here in America, but it does happen, right?
Of course it happens. However you're suggesting a beating, somewhere in a country of 300 million people, is just as bad as two dozen honor killings in a population of roughly 150k. Or maybe you're suggesting any violence at all makes all subcultures equal?
What you're not doing is putting down numbers for anti-gay violence. Counting dead bodies would be best since that's extreme, hard to hide, and easy to count.
But are they more outlier than violent Muslims?
Count dead bodies and get back to me. For 2016 start with 50(ish) corpses in that Florida gay nightclub.
As if there is no difference between welcoming American Muslims to practice their faith, and turning a blind eye to honor killings.
In the US, we have 23-27 honor killings per year. It'd be nice to try to deal with them before dead bodies drop to the ground. At the moment we seem to be dealing with them as standard domestic violence, but there are differences we're mostly ignoring.
The frequent assertions I hear about Islam “having a problem” does this; it makes the practice of Islam a binary, an either /or question of the One True Faith.
By the standards of first world nations, Islam does have problems.
You trying to narrow that statement to a "binary" thing is an effort at political correctness. Next you'll be bringing up Christianity's bloody past to point out that all religions are imperfect and all people/cultures are fundamentally equal and equivalent.
Interestingly, most of these cultural attitudes are fairly recent (post XVIII century). Until then, Islam was a much open, tolerant society, which developed and introduced a fairly strong concept of multiculturalism more than a thousand years ago (what the Ottomans within still living memory called millet).
Sure, when Islam was the dominate force in it's section of the world, they were fine on top and benevolent by the standards of the time. However the standards of the time included slavery and mass illiteracy.
Just like there is no requirement in the Torah to throw stones at women that walk with bare arms, and it happens in contemporary Jerusalem all the time.
But there are requirements in Islam that it run the state (and wage wars on unbelievers). We want to gloss over that, just like we want to gloss over Christianity's anti-women's-rights aspects, but this is the aspect which is giving the modern world problems so maybe we shouldn't.
And if Bill Maher will come and say that Judaism is to blame for those stones, well, I’ll be happy to defend Judaism in his show too.
Are you suggesting that Islam isn't connected to Islamic terrorism, ISIS, Sharia law, and so forth?
Now, calling them deplorables will just make them dug their heels even more. Or so tells us Jaybird when he talks about Trump voters.
The word we need to understand here is "majority". Ben was making noises about empowering the moderates, which is a fine sounding phrase, but it's anti-democratic to empower the 5% against the 95%.
Lots of people want take their religion seriously, and to have their religion taken seriously, and the Priests certainly want that because God always wants what is good for the Priests.
So we need to find a way to reach to them, and offer them a place in EPCOT where they will be free to do their thing on Fridays unmolested, and will be welcome to ethnic restaurants on Sundays, while making clear they have to stop forcing unwilling others to comply with their rules.
In other words, we need to give them a way to not take Islam so seriously. That's fine, and maybe just increasing income and access to technology will do that, but there are problems, and IMHO it's not racist to point that out. It's very possible that the people/Priests actually understand exactly what we're offering them, and simply reject it.
Overturning the big scientific paradigms takes a generation because the old generation which grew up knowing something needs to die off. Cultural paradigms may take longer.
In real life no one says that Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or the Hasidic Jews, must not change, and soon.
Google "Ben Affleck Angrily defends Islam on Bill Maher's show"
The idea that all cultures aren't created equal isn't present in parts of the left. If we're all equal then all cultures are equal, and criticism of other cultures is racism.
Ben really really wants to believe that Islam's problems with gays (etc) is limited to a few bad apples. He's defending Islam against the idea that there is a problem. Mainstream left-leaning media basically reported that Ben was doing good deeds and not that Ben was ignorant.
What Bill is pointing to is surveys saying VERY large majorities in some of these countries think the death penalty is appropriate for leaving Islam, and a bunch of other seriously anti-multicultural ideas.
I don't think gays in America cheer when gays are executed in Iran, but I do think there are large numbers of leftish-gays in America who don't know that happens, and who think Israel shooting terrorists is a much larger problem than whatever Iran is doing.
The idea that we can’t tolerate immigrants and a welfare state is contradicted by historical fact.
True. Immigrants typically come here to work and get rich.
On the other hand we have Israel's example of paying a subculture to not work resulting in the expansion of that subculture to problematic levels (I'm thinking of their massive numbers of torah-studiers).
We also have our own example of the expansion of the welfare state resulting in the enabling (and likely encouraging) of dysfunctional behavior. Paying people to not get married can result in them not getting married.
Different branches of my family ran into that with interesting differences. Each faced: Pregnant girl, could get married to boyfriend, or could collect more in state benefits if she doesn't.
In one tremendous social pressure was brought to bear to convince the couple to get married anyway. In the other... it wasn't, they didn't, and long term it didn't work out well.
Multiculturalism means different subcultures will have different outcomes from a one size fits all welfare solution.
However, later he mentions it'd take about $14k per person in Flint to rebuild the entire system.
Presumably that's a one time charge, not a "per year" thing. Assume a 50 year replacement cost and a family of four, and we're at a per year charge of $1120, which seems reasonably close to my water bill.
So his extra $8k a year seems to be saying we need to replace the entire water system every 7 years or so.
Mostly I agree with you. I've got minor quibbles, but they're minor. The number of people with unlimited contacts/money is vanishingly small. GWB wasn't a success without his Daddy, Trump is an ass all by himself.
I hardly need to point out that immigrants have a famously powerful work ethic and tightknit family structure.
Yes. That's a point I might make.
And I am not sure what the connection is between “multiculturalism” and “based on luck” inequality.
The point I'm making is the article was basing their tests on "bonus or downfall because of bad luck", but that, as a concept, is much more rejected in the US simply because of the reality here.
In a mono-cultural environment, selling "luck" as a big influence is pretty easy, that makes it much easier to support social transfers. There for but the grace of god go I.
In the US, most of your "luck" is "what is the culture of your parents"? That makes it a LOT harder to support social transfers. We could sub in the words "dysfunctional behavior" for "culture" and it'd pretty much mean the same thing. And worse, a dysfunctional culture is perpetuating across generations.
And we also get into "choice" here. If you choose to not learn how to read, or write, or do math, there are easily predictable outcomes which stem from that choice. Protecting people from "luck" is different from protecting people from themselves, even if they can point to their parents for what they were taught or not taught.
It's basically meaningless to point out that GWB had a money cannon helping him his entire life. Society doesn't do that for anyone, that a few parents can do it for their children is self correcting in the long run and pointless because it's so rare. I assume you're not suggesting we prevent parents from helping their children, and you're also not suggesting every child be treated as GWB.
Michael Jackson worked every day of his life starting when he was 9. He had lots of problems, but not lack of work ethic was not among them.
This is like saying: "Other than that Mrs Lincoln, How was the play?"
It's awkward to call one family a "culture", but Mike's strengths AND his problems both came from how his parents raised him.
...Jackson acknowledged that his youth had been lonely and isolating.[37] His deep dissatisfaction with his appearance, his nightmares and chronic sleep problems, his tendency to remain hyper-compliant, especially with his father, and to remain childlike in adulthood are consistent with the effects of the maltreatment he endured as a child.[38] (wiki)
Like most people, his upbringing, which we can call "family", "culture", or "home environment" were HUGE influences on Jackson, and trying to attribute either his strengths or his flaws to "luck" seems problematic.
RE: GWBush
:Shrug: What you've said doesn't disagree with what I've said.
We're talking about large social trends, there's going to be *lots* of individual exceptions.
But on the whole education is an economic advantage in our society. And on the whole individuals from cultures which value education will do better.
Of course that's just one cultural impact, there's a *ton* of other cultural advantages and disadvantages. Gun violence is probably in there, ditto having kids outside of wedlock, and there are others.
[C6] Using Lafayette, Louisiana as an example, Charles Marohn explains the infrastructure trap and why your city has no money.
Not "explains", he simply "makes claims". He doesn't supply enough information for me to understand the math supposedly supporting his arguments and I find it deeply suspect.
He claimed: The median $150k family needs to pay $8k more, a year, in order to correctly fund infrastructure.
Public water is supposed to be cheaper & better than bottled water, ditto public sewer. Bottled water and a septic system would be FAR less than 8k but seem to be what he's worried about. The roads in my neighborhood aren't replaced every year and there's enough houses around that my share shouldn't be bad.
He claimed: We get a lot more in taxes from the poor than the rich but spend a lot more on infrastructure on the rich.
So one Bill Gates uses far more water/sewer/streets than hundreds of normal people and their taxes subsidize him? That's a claim which requires a ton of explanation and justification, but there's none.
I do think what he said about Flint later in the series made a lot of sense.
Data points A and B in contradiction to “its not just money”: George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.
The "born rich" grow up watching their parents so you're not going to separate culture from money there. Instead, look at people who actually do get their money purely by luck. Five years later, 70% of lottery winners are broke.
Both Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson were given hundreds of millions of dollars by society. Are we supposed to think that them running out of money was a matter of bad luck and not dysfunctional behavior?
In theory, in a mono-cultured environment hard luck corner cases are going to be the dominant story. In our multi-cultural environment, the bottom ranks of society are going to be filled by people whose cultures don't think much of education.
According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html
There are problems with trying to combine "multiculturalism" with the idea that "income differences are because of luck".
Make a list of success factors, and most of them come down to "picking good parents". That's not just money, it's also (mostly) things like married, not using drugs, valuing education, stepping in when the school system fails, etc.
Other ways to phrase those things are "middle class values", or "culture". This the US, you're certainly allowed to have other cultures, but it's nonsense to pretend that all values (or behavior) result in equal outcomes.
I look at inner city high poverty areas and I really *hope* we're looking at problems created by culture, because most of the alternatives are actually worse. I look at the behavior of some of my relatives over the years and think "strong social spending" is code for "enabling dysfunctional behavior".
With the Rwandan Genocide more than 10 years in the past, it seemed odd and off-putting for Obama to say we “would have to strongly consider and act”
Translated into English, what he meant was "Under my command, there's no way we would have stepped in, especially right after Black Hawk Down, but I can't say that because of how callose it'd sound".
I'm not saying that's the right move or wrong, but that's what he meant.
RE: Transformational President
He was given the chance, but if you want to drag the rest of the country along, your policies have to produce growth.
So the quickest way to increase GDP is to increase the number of young immigrants and to bring existing undocumented immigrants out of the grey market so that their labor can be captured by GDP statistics (and be properly taxed).
I think tax amnesty for overseas earnings probably is "quickest" but I accept your statement as reasonably truthful.
My solution for illegal immigration is to give the bulk of them green cards and call it a day. Making them legal has all sorts of advantages since the only reason we have problems with them is that they're illegal. There will be minor carve outs, the usual illegal things (other than existence) will still be illegal but whatever.
...there is no magic regulation which, when repealed, will unleash this burst of productivity growth.
This is like saying that since every grain of sand is individually fine, it's impossible to suffocate if buried alive.
I look at the tax code in all it's inhuman complexity and think there are economic distortions.
I look at the various companies openly fleeing the country via inversion and connect that to gov policy. Tax rates high enough to cause this also say things about where a company chooses to invest.
I look at vast corporate bureaucracies which only exist to deal with the government's vast bureaucracy and think that overhead needs to be paid.
I look at various rules and results (the one-epi-pen-on-the-market being the current standout example) and see regulatory capture and deliberate use of the gov to further corporate interests at the expense of the public.
You can add in immigration policy and an inefficient HC system but both of those also come down to gov disfunction (there's a few others we'll skip).
I absolutely think we're taking hits to our GNP growth rate because of all this nonsense. Claiming otherwise is basically saying the tax code doesn't cause distortions, there's no problem with one epi-pen and so forth.
The problem, however, with blaming the ACA is that the US healthcare system was already incredibly inefficient in 2007.
The ACA was mostly about expanding access, not about making HC more efficient.
If we're trying to make the healthcare system more efficient we can try for more markets, or slap another layer of gov bureaucracy on it.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Status 451: Days of Rage”
Although I still consider the write up to be very, very, kind. At some point, after enough of the union knows about it and gets involved to support, you have to say the union was involved.
"
96 to 98 dead (guests of the hotel count as civilians), 140 injured, root cause union thinking management plans to fire 60 union workers and replace them with non-union.
Wiki's write up is kind to the union btw, I've seen other write ups where other members of the union enabled it.
Correction, wiki does cover it: "he had urged hotel employees to make a "curtain" to shield him from view as he started the fire."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arson
On “Morning Ed: Science {2017.01.25.W}”
These would be the same elites who are lowering our growth rate while enriching themselves.
Most things make sense if you follow the money.
On “Status 451: Days of Rage”
Expand on this please.
We're looking at a left wing terror group running around blowing things up which was cheered on by mainstream left. Similarly I can think of some union getting upset at lines being crossed and killing several dozen civilians just to make a point. And then we have the occasional riots by groups mainstream left needs to get elected.
That's a pretty high bar to exceed, much less exceed to the point where "nearly all political violence" is Right.
On “Morning Ed: Education {2017.01.23.M}”
The arts and humanities are basically Democrat plantations. Starving them punishes them for current and previous transgressions.
STEM on the other hand is what you use to build hotels and is more neutral.
"
I think we hold up STEM because it's always policed by Mother Nature.
If your side has a better lawyer, then you have an advantage, but both of them can be dimbulbs.
When it comes to things like engineering, there's a minimum level under which things don't happen correctly. The Bridge falls, the water is filled with lead, the software doesn't compile.
At some level, all these calls for more STEM are calls for smarter people (like we talk occasionally about sending everyone to college)... but majoring in STEM doesn't make someone smarter.
It might be the STEM degree now is what the college degree used to be, a signal.
"
The case for market failure is weak.
Having said that, brain drain is mostly a good thing for the US, we should be doing more of it. I don't see the point in having the best colleges, educating the world's smartest people, and then forcing them to leave.
"
Low unemployment means it's relatively easy to find a job.
High pay relative to the rest of the market suggests there's high demand relative to the supply.
RE: Glut
Lawyers have an unemployment rate of 15.5% (google).
The national unemployment rate for law graduates has grown for the sixth year in a row to a whopping 15.5 percent, according to a report by the National Association for Law Placement.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=unemployment%20rate%20for%20lawyers
Janitors have an unemployment rate of 6.9%, which in combo with their median income of $23k suggests both a glut and a lack of demand.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/janitor
"
Ranked by pay the STEMs are on top.
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/majors-that-pay-you-back/bachelors
Ranked by (lack of) unemployment the STEMs are still on the top.
http://www.straighterline.com/blog/which-college-majors-have-the-highest-and-lowest-employment-rates/
This is suggestive.
"
If I did anything slightly like this I'd be fired, for that matter our CEO would too. College seniors are roughly 22, so "adult rules" apply.
As for that list of 100(ish) incidents, 5% resulted in suspension or worse, much of the remaining weren't actionable. It's easy to think what they did was at the upper end of what the U deals with, and this wasn't the first offense.
Yes. None of this matches up with the various trainwreck relatives/friends I've observed over the years. Sometimes the gov steps in and enables, but that's a different problem.
It also doesn't match with the whole high school teachers' experience, i.e. a free education is offered, this could be an easy way to elevate yourself. By far the biggest problem the teacher faces is many (or most) of the students don't see any value in education.
Good article, I'd prefer more transparency as the solution. It's not at all shocking that some normal-school degrees carry a negative value.
On “Morning Ed: World {2017.01.19.Th}”
@j_a @chip-daniels
God's followers want to give him credit for everything good that happens and no blame at all for anything bad. That's not very useful for rational evaluation.
IMHO a religion is largely on the hook for everything, good or bad, done in it's name. There are a few corner cases where the clearly crazy act in ways everyone else disavows and would prevent if possible, but that's not on the table at the moment.
There's little point in claiming a problem is "cultural but not religious" when the issue comes down to priests of God seeking power by inventing enemies and/or forcing conformity, and their followers then carrying out their orders.
So religion is fueling the Right to Life. It's fueling those Jews throwing rocks at women in the name of being Jewish. It's fueling both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian problem. It's fueling every act of terror prefaced by "alllah 'akbar".
Their respective religions are on the hook for each of them. Often religious problems have religious solutions so that's a good thing.
It's a bad thing to give a religion the ability to hurt/kill people without the bad press that comes with it. Think about how long the Catholic Church enabled their "problematic" priests.
"
You've gone from "we won't turn a blind eye to honor killings" to "there is no problem", apparently because inside the US, all cultures are supposed to be equal.
Adjust those numbers for percentage of population and they become scary high. The US is 1% Muslim (all types), and Muslims with that as a cultural background is less than 10% of that (I found figures claiming roughly 150k but that was from 2012).
The US as a whole had about 16k murders (including the drug war), adjusted for population and that 24-27 becomes something like 24k to 54k.
Of course it happens. However you're suggesting a beating, somewhere in a country of 300 million people, is just as bad as two dozen honor killings in a population of roughly 150k. Or maybe you're suggesting any violence at all makes all subcultures equal?
What you're not doing is putting down numbers for anti-gay violence. Counting dead bodies would be best since that's extreme, hard to hide, and easy to count.
Count dead bodies and get back to me. For 2016 start with 50(ish) corpses in that Florida gay nightclub.
"
In the US, we have 23-27 honor killings per year. It'd be nice to try to deal with them before dead bodies drop to the ground. At the moment we seem to be dealing with them as standard domestic violence, but there are differences we're mostly ignoring.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/11/10/honor-killing-in-us-justice-department-mulls-guidelines-as-grim-toll-rises.html
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bjs/grants/248879.pdf
By the standards of first world nations, Islam does have problems.
You trying to narrow that statement to a "binary" thing is an effort at political correctness. Next you'll be bringing up Christianity's bloody past to point out that all religions are imperfect and all people/cultures are fundamentally equal and equivalent.
"
Sure, when Islam was the dominate force in it's section of the world, they were fine on top and benevolent by the standards of the time. However the standards of the time included slavery and mass illiteracy.
But there are requirements in Islam that it run the state (and wage wars on unbelievers). We want to gloss over that, just like we want to gloss over Christianity's anti-women's-rights aspects, but this is the aspect which is giving the modern world problems so maybe we shouldn't.
Are you suggesting that Islam isn't connected to Islamic terrorism, ISIS, Sharia law, and so forth?
The word we need to understand here is "majority". Ben was making noises about empowering the moderates, which is a fine sounding phrase, but it's anti-democratic to empower the 5% against the 95%.
Lots of people want take their religion seriously, and to have their religion taken seriously, and the Priests certainly want that because God always wants what is good for the Priests.
In other words, we need to give them a way to not take Islam so seriously. That's fine, and maybe just increasing income and access to technology will do that, but there are problems, and IMHO it's not racist to point that out. It's very possible that the people/Priests actually understand exactly what we're offering them, and simply reject it.
Overturning the big scientific paradigms takes a generation because the old generation which grew up knowing something needs to die off. Cultural paradigms may take longer.
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Google "Ben Affleck Angrily defends Islam on Bill Maher's show"
The idea that all cultures aren't created equal isn't present in parts of the left. If we're all equal then all cultures are equal, and criticism of other cultures is racism.
Ben really really wants to believe that Islam's problems with gays (etc) is limited to a few bad apples. He's defending Islam against the idea that there is a problem. Mainstream left-leaning media basically reported that Ben was doing good deeds and not that Ben was ignorant.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/showbiz/tv/affleck-maher-islam-real-time/
What Bill is pointing to is surveys saying VERY large majorities in some of these countries think the death penalty is appropriate for leaving Islam, and a bunch of other seriously anti-multicultural ideas.
I don't think gays in America cheer when gays are executed in Iran, but I do think there are large numbers of leftish-gays in America who don't know that happens, and who think Israel shooting terrorists is a much larger problem than whatever Iran is doing.
"
True. Immigrants typically come here to work and get rich.
On the other hand we have Israel's example of paying a subculture to not work resulting in the expansion of that subculture to problematic levels (I'm thinking of their massive numbers of torah-studiers).
We also have our own example of the expansion of the welfare state resulting in the enabling (and likely encouraging) of dysfunctional behavior. Paying people to not get married can result in them not getting married.
Different branches of my family ran into that with interesting differences. Each faced: Pregnant girl, could get married to boyfriend, or could collect more in state benefits if she doesn't.
In one tremendous social pressure was brought to bear to convince the couple to get married anyway. In the other... it wasn't, they didn't, and long term it didn't work out well.
Multiculturalism means different subcultures will have different outcomes from a one size fits all welfare solution.
On “Linky Friday: It’s Been Good Knowing You”
A fair counter to my bottled water statement.
However, later he mentions it'd take about $14k per person in Flint to rebuild the entire system.
Presumably that's a one time charge, not a "per year" thing. Assume a 50 year replacement cost and a family of four, and we're at a per year charge of $1120, which seems reasonably close to my water bill.
So his extra $8k a year seems to be saying we need to replace the entire water system every 7 years or so.
On “Morning Ed: World {2017.01.19.Th}”
Mostly I agree with you. I've got minor quibbles, but they're minor. The number of people with unlimited contacts/money is vanishingly small. GWB wasn't a success without his Daddy, Trump is an ass all by himself.
Yes. That's a point I might make.
The point I'm making is the article was basing their tests on "bonus or downfall because of bad luck", but that, as a concept, is much more rejected in the US simply because of the reality here.
In a mono-cultural environment, selling "luck" as a big influence is pretty easy, that makes it much easier to support social transfers. There for but the grace of god go I.
In the US, most of your "luck" is "what is the culture of your parents"? That makes it a LOT harder to support social transfers. We could sub in the words "dysfunctional behavior" for "culture" and it'd pretty much mean the same thing. And worse, a dysfunctional culture is perpetuating across generations.
And we also get into "choice" here. If you choose to not learn how to read, or write, or do math, there are easily predictable outcomes which stem from that choice. Protecting people from "luck" is different from protecting people from themselves, even if they can point to their parents for what they were taught or not taught.
It's basically meaningless to point out that GWB had a money cannon helping him his entire life. Society doesn't do that for anyone, that a few parents can do it for their children is self correcting in the long run and pointless because it's so rare. I assume you're not suggesting we prevent parents from helping their children, and you're also not suggesting every child be treated as GWB.
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This is like saying: "Other than that Mrs Lincoln, How was the play?"
It's awkward to call one family a "culture", but Mike's strengths AND his problems both came from how his parents raised him.
...Jackson acknowledged that his youth had been lonely and isolating.[37] His deep dissatisfaction with his appearance, his nightmares and chronic sleep problems, his tendency to remain hyper-compliant, especially with his father, and to remain childlike in adulthood are consistent with the effects of the maltreatment he endured as a child.[38] (wiki)
Like most people, his upbringing, which we can call "family", "culture", or "home environment" were HUGE influences on Jackson, and trying to attribute either his strengths or his flaws to "luck" seems problematic.
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RE: GWBush
:Shrug: What you've said doesn't disagree with what I've said.
We're talking about large social trends, there's going to be *lots* of individual exceptions.
But on the whole education is an economic advantage in our society. And on the whole individuals from cultures which value education will do better.
Of course that's just one cultural impact, there's a *ton* of other cultural advantages and disadvantages. Gun violence is probably in there, ditto having kids outside of wedlock, and there are others.
On “Linky Friday: It’s Been Good Knowing You”
Not "explains", he simply "makes claims". He doesn't supply enough information for me to understand the math supposedly supporting his arguments and I find it deeply suspect.
He claimed: The median $150k family needs to pay $8k more, a year, in order to correctly fund infrastructure.
Public water is supposed to be cheaper & better than bottled water, ditto public sewer. Bottled water and a septic system would be FAR less than 8k but seem to be what he's worried about. The roads in my neighborhood aren't replaced every year and there's enough houses around that my share shouldn't be bad.
He claimed: We get a lot more in taxes from the poor than the rich but spend a lot more on infrastructure on the rich.
So one Bill Gates uses far more water/sewer/streets than hundreds of normal people and their taxes subsidize him? That's a claim which requires a ton of explanation and justification, but there's none.
I do think what he said about Flint later in the series made a lot of sense.
On “Morning Ed: World {2017.01.19.Th}”
The "born rich" grow up watching their parents so you're not going to separate culture from money there. Instead, look at people who actually do get their money purely by luck. Five years later, 70% of lottery winners are broke.
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/01/why_do_70_percent_of_lottery_w.html
Both Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson were given hundreds of millions of dollars by society. Are we supposed to think that them running out of money was a matter of bad luck and not dysfunctional behavior?
In theory, in a mono-cultured environment hard luck corner cases are going to be the dominant story. In our multi-cultural environment, the bottom ranks of society are going to be filled by people whose cultures don't think much of education.
According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html
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There are problems with trying to combine "multiculturalism" with the idea that "income differences are because of luck".
Make a list of success factors, and most of them come down to "picking good parents". That's not just money, it's also (mostly) things like married, not using drugs, valuing education, stepping in when the school system fails, etc.
Other ways to phrase those things are "middle class values", or "culture". This the US, you're certainly allowed to have other cultures, but it's nonsense to pretend that all values (or behavior) result in equal outcomes.
I look at inner city high poverty areas and I really *hope* we're looking at problems created by culture, because most of the alternatives are actually worse. I look at the behavior of some of my relatives over the years and think "strong social spending" is code for "enabling dysfunctional behavior".
On “So Long, President Obama”
Very well written and insightful...
Translated into English, what he meant was "Under my command, there's no way we would have stepped in, especially right after Black Hawk Down, but I can't say that because of how callose it'd sound".
I'm not saying that's the right move or wrong, but that's what he meant.
RE: Transformational President
He was given the chance, but if you want to drag the rest of the country along, your policies have to produce growth.
On “Liberals are Smug”
I think tax amnesty for overseas earnings probably is "quickest" but I accept your statement as reasonably truthful.
My solution for illegal immigration is to give the bulk of them green cards and call it a day. Making them legal has all sorts of advantages since the only reason we have problems with them is that they're illegal. There will be minor carve outs, the usual illegal things (other than existence) will still be illegal but whatever.
This is like saying that since every grain of sand is individually fine, it's impossible to suffocate if buried alive.
I look at the tax code in all it's inhuman complexity and think there are economic distortions.
I look at the various companies openly fleeing the country via inversion and connect that to gov policy. Tax rates high enough to cause this also say things about where a company chooses to invest.
I look at vast corporate bureaucracies which only exist to deal with the government's vast bureaucracy and think that overhead needs to be paid.
I look at various rules and results (the one-epi-pen-on-the-market being the current standout example) and see regulatory capture and deliberate use of the gov to further corporate interests at the expense of the public.
You can add in immigration policy and an inefficient HC system but both of those also come down to gov disfunction (there's a few others we'll skip).
I absolutely think we're taking hits to our GNP growth rate because of all this nonsense. Claiming otherwise is basically saying the tax code doesn't cause distortions, there's no problem with one epi-pen and so forth.
The ACA was mostly about expanding access, not about making HC more efficient.
If we're trying to make the healthcare system more efficient we can try for more markets, or slap another layer of gov bureaucracy on it.
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