Steve, Shodan: kindly go start your own thread.
I think “harm” is the key point. It doesn’t harm your employer (or anyone) if you have green hair or wear blue jeans. That’s why I don’t think it equates it to the rest of your examples.
These all involve an attempt to offend, to affect another person. Yes, it’s free speech, but I would say it constitutes an aggressive act towards another person. I’m sort of equating it to my (simplistic) version of the difference between ethical and moral. You can’t be aggressively rude to another person because it’s unethical. You can’t have green hair because it’s immoral. Obviously, I am against basing rules on moral judgements.
Maybe, maybe not. Have we really tried to eradicate them? Society is still pretty young and very much governed by ideas inherited from tribal, religious ancestors. I think we can eventually move beyond that. Anyway, even if taboos can’t be entirely removed, we can at least reduce their number, or focus them on more reasonable things.
Why do you think slavery couldn’t have existed without government support? Slavery is illegal everywhere I know of, and yet it still exists in the world. The Southern states certainly seemed to think it should exist regardless of what the government said.
I was going to suggest the same thing to you. I’ve reread your original post 5 times and I don’t know what you’re trying to debate.
Life isn’t always fair because random circumstance makes it so. There are no guarantees.
Beyond the basic definition of the phrase lies the concept of “fairness” which is an arbitrary measurement of outcome.
No it doesn’t. As someone already said, the universe itself is indifferent to you. It’s <i>people</i> who are unfair. To point that out implies that (the universal) you is entitled to equity, not special treatment.
This idea of fairness ties in nicely with Matt Miller’s notion of luck. To summarize it - People don’t really have a choice of the situation that they are born into. You can’t chose your parents, their income or what community they live in, or the values that your family brought you up with. Combining the two ideas, you get a very dirty trick - blaming people and their inability to ‘suck it up’ for their own non-choices. Assuming similar abilities, one born into a poor family should have the same likelyhood of achieving success as someone born into a wealthy family, but that currently isn’t the case. Wealthy areas have better public schools, lower crime rates, etc etc. Government exists to level the playingfield, to achieve fairness, to ensure the liberties of some aren’t trampled by the wills of others. If a poor child recieves an inadequate education because of low property tax reciepts and a violent neighborhood, is it their fault? How do they suck that up? Maybe WE should be the ones sucking it up to reform an unfair, imbalanced system.
Government exists to protect the uneven field. Government is a play toy of the rich. It does not protect the poor but institutionalizes the unfair balance. It is not an accident that schools are worse in bad neighborhoods or that police are rougher on the poor. It is the system.
Schools are not worse in bad neighborhoods, the learning climate is. Children fail (generally) because their parents do not get envolved.
That would be “involved” not “envolved”- I hit Submit Reply instead of Preview Post.
That would by definition make schools worse. How do you change the learning environment without changing the schools?
No, that’s horse apples. The government is not the reason that schools in poor neighborhoods are worse, as Magiver points out. Nor are the police harder on poor neighborhoods because The Man is trying to keep the brothas down. Poorer neighborhoods often are higher-crime neighborhoods; thus the police are more wary because they are dealing with a worse level of stress and criminality.
This “power to the people” rap went out with the sixties.
Regards,
Shodan
School and crime problems do not have one cause, even one chief cause. If so, we’d probably have agreed on it long ago.
But I do think a little more fairness-based thinking would be beneficial. Anybody who seriously thinks that poorer communities deserve to get along with fewer resources because of some pseudo-moral or economic abstraction is as status quo as they come.
Fairness may be an arbitrary concept, but as long as it’s not carried to ludicrous extremes, it remains a pretty good model for humane outcomes.
Now then…
I’m sorry I was that impenetrable to you, then. I’ll try to phrase it as a formal proposition:
The idea that “life’s not fair” (or its equivalent) is often used in the service of fostering conformity or non-resistance to existing social, economic, or political conditions that benefit certain individuals or groups at the expense of others.
No, that by definition, would make home life worse. It has nothing to do with the school. Government intervention made this worse when 2 things happened: cross-town bussing and extended welfare benefits. Inner-city schools produced well-educated students until white-flight chased out parents who could afford to move. Long term welfare is a government sponsored enslavement of human aspirations. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy when 2nd generation children were born to parents (usually a single mother) who had no academic or social experience to pass on. Stupid is as stupid does and their isn’t a damn thing you can do about it without replacing bad parents with a functional role model. A great deal of damage is done to children due to improper care. The human mind requires a considerable amount of stimulation in the first year of a child’s life and that is often lost in multi-generation welfare families.
My employer believes it would harm our image in the public’s eye if we were to dress in jeans. He believes (and it’s not an uncommon view) that jeans look unprofessional, and I’m pretty sure he’d say the same about green hair.
Green hair is frowned upon in business because it identifies a person as belonging to a counter-culture, and right or wrong, people see counter-culture values as being anti-social. A lot of businesses wouldn’t want an image that they either support or endorse those values. They believe that a conservative appearance will make the employees seem more trustworthy.
Perhaps if everyone started accepting green hair, it would become acceptable in business, but you shouldn’t expect businesses (which have to be very careful of customer perception) to lead the way. In other words, you should start changing the world on your own time, not while you’re on the clock.
Fair enough.
Maybe “moral” and “ethical” aren’t really the right words. I’m thinking more along the lines of “taste.”
You can’t eliminate the deep-rooted yearning for status in the human species. It’s written into our very genetic code. We will always want to have something a little bit better than our neighbor has. We’ll always want to display our wealth in order to impress others.* We’ll always be territorial-- hell you can see it on a small scale with competing basketball teams. People get* fierce *over those thigns. We’ll always want to be warmed by the small, secret knowledge that we’re better than that guy because we have [this trait] and they don’t. We’ll always want “rejects” because we like to have someone to hate.
For that reason, we’ll never be able to rid ourselves of cultural taboos. I’m sure that some of our taboos you fully support, like the cultural prohibition of child molestation.
Taboos and other social rules are a way of stratifying people, and to end that, you’d have to completely eradicate the *notion *of social class, which I believe is utterly impossible. If monarchy/oligarchy is eliminated, the basis of class divisions becomes centrated on wealth. If we somehow managed to make everyone equally wealthy, we’d find something else to discriminate against, such as physical beauty, or intelligence. But we will find something.
- If you want to start a status-eradication campaign by ridding the earth of stupid logo-laden t-shirts, I’ll help.
OK, in that context there is a certain glass half empty/half full connotation to it. I was taught at an early age that the planet didn’t rotate around me and if I had a complaint I needed to re-evaluate my position from a higher point of view. As a child, most of those complaints fell into the “I don’t like it” category. Whether the situation existed for the benefits of “others” depends on your point of view of who the “others” are.
IOW, you were taught that your complaints basically weren’t worth dick. Probably whether they had to do with “the planet” or even just your world. And presumably you carry that principle into adulthood, and wish everybody did.
I still say there’s something in the individual other than just selfishness. I also think it’s a LOT easier to get away with selfishness if you are powerful enough not to have anybody in authority over you.
:eek: <lightbulb> Hey! I know! Let’s just define selfishness as powerlessness plus resistance! That way we can poopoo anyone’s righteous indignation when needed by framing it as somehow greedy and antisocial. The truly controlling person is the one who will not be controlled.
Think of the people who live life without regard to any authority or standards. 2 people come to mind: Howard Hughes and Michael Jackson. They both lost touch with reality and became their own worse enemy. Conformity isn’t any more evil than individualism is good. Both have their places in society.
Oh, please, government didn’t invent or maintain slavery, it was individual selfishness. Without the government, slavery would immediately reappear and become widespread.
That’s outright nonsense. Schools in rich neighborhoods have plenty of teachers and supplies, with up to date textbooks and everything. Schools in poor neighborhoods are falling apart, short on teachers and supplies, and lucky if they have obsolete textbooks for everyone that aren’t missing parts. Poor parents are typically working multiple jobs thanks to American wages stagnating and costs rising, so they can’t get involved the way the rich can, assuming they don’t hire someone to do it for them. Not to mention the basic message the poor learn; that there’s no point in even trying, there is no hope, and they’ll always be poor.
The view of those more powerful than you; you are describing the kind of propaganda designed to produce slaves and servants.
Damn straight, Der.
BTW, Magiver, I wasn’t exactly thinking about Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson. They come under the heading of psychopaths. I was thinking more about people like Dick Cheney, who can help start a war for lousy reasons, put his old company in the catbird seat to make money off it, and he’ll likely never pay for his misdeeds because he and guys like him write the rulebook.
That’s pure bullshit. My grandparents were poor by any measure of today’s standard of living. They worked multiple jobs and grew their own food. All their children made it through high school with a scholastic level of achievement that rivals modern colleges. I’d stand my fathers high school degree against my college degree any day of the week. What he learned, and taught to me, was the process of learning. They didn’t have squat at their schools except a chalkboard and books that would be ridiculed today because of their age. There wasn’t any “new math” because the “old math” worked just fine.
If anyone told me life was unfair it wasn’t an excuse to give up, it was meant to convey that I had to suck it up and work hard. I succeeded because of the educational efforts of my parents just as they did from their parents. Despite the fact that my immigrant grandparents could hardly speak English they managed to learn enough to tell their children that they had to do well in school… None of that involved money and all of it involved a wealth of parental skill. That’s the difference between success and failure.
I control my own destiny. Who has power over me in this respect?