Yes, but to the Communist, “The People” means “the Proletariat”. Natural harmony exists only within economic classes. The looters and the lootees are of different classes, so their relationship can only be one of exploitation and antipathy. I maintain that in the Marxist analysis, looting is nothing other than the Proletariat taking the opportunity to recover the wealth stolen from them by their Capitalist Oppressors. Therefore, the Marxist should consider this looting inevitable and, indeed, desirable.
That’d be why I said “so-called”.
Which has precisely *what * to do with your original point or my rebuttal of it?
Real scientists also don’t base their models on TV news based in turn on sensational but possibly unrepresentative (but undoubtedly high rating) video footage, or unsubstantiated rumour. Nor do they base their generalist models on specific but unrepresentative incidents which personally loom large in their minds because they personally lost property in those incidents.
Who is this directed at? It came just after my post but that may or may not be relevant.
Fixed broken link.
Shagnasty
----- What was represented was not good science. Real scientists would not brush off major exceptions to their model. Instead, they would try to figure out why those exceptions exist and expand upon or revise their model. Instead, they discount multiple sources of evidence because their flawed models say that it couldn’t happen.
Ok, but I’m wary of taking bouncy articles by middle-brow journalists at face value. I wouldn’t assume that the inanity rests with the scholar, though I wouldn’t rule that out either. The Boston Globe is not the New York Times (ownership aside). Also what Princhester said.
Thank you for providing that insightful commentary regarding the OP. Amidst the others, yours shines like a beacon of light to guide it’s reader safely away from the treacherous shoals of ignorance. My mind cannot embrace the investment of time it took for you to compose such a brilliant and pellucid tome.
Allow me to recap:
Shagnasty claimed that a communist would predict no looting: “people won’t engage in those behaviors [looting] under most circumstances” (post #10).
I claimed that, on the contrary, the communist should anticipate looting once societal controls are removed: “But the communist doesn’t believe that people are like that naturally…” (post #11).
You countered that the communist expects people to be harmonious and respectful of each other once controls are removed: “academic socialist/communist/marxist/marxians tended to believe precisely that The People, when the rigid control of their Capitalist Oppressors is lifted, will need no strong state but will rather naturally help each other” (post #13).
My last post was intended to point out that the communist only claims that people are naturally harmonious with their fellow class-members, not to members of other classes: “Natural harmony exists only within economic classes. The looters and the lootees are of different classes, so their relationship can only be one of exploitation and antipathy.” (post #21). This is because communists identify personal interest with class interest. Violence between the classes, such as those of the looters and the lootees, is almost inevitable in the communist analysis.
Therefore, my original claim that the communist would expect looting, rather than join the sociologists in predicting its absence, still stands.
Granted, I have only had college-level SOC-101… but it seemed to me that their sole purpose was to prove that Sociology was a REAL science… not some alchemy thing… :rolleyes:
I understand what you are now saying. The problem is that your “recap” attempts to expunge from the record your crucial comment, namely:
My emphasis.
You didn’t say that communists would predict violence between classes at all. What you said was that communists believe that people are not naturally good and can only be made good through rigid control. You may have mispoken, but your original comment is still wrong.
To Shagnasty’s bizarre premise re sociology and communism–as I stated in my post.
Hey, anything i can do to help.
Anyone who starts from the premise that all sociologists are communists probably needs all the help he can get.
I’m just sorry it took you 24 hours of thumbing through your thesaurus to put your own brilliant post together.
At any rate, this isn’t a garden-variety natural disaster. Specifically, in this case most of the rich and middle class people got out of town. Generally the poor arn’t violent- partially because they believe their prospects are better if they behave (and hopefully advance in their job and get their bit of the American dream) than if they just go steal stuff.
But in this case, the poor had it pretty clearly explained that no matter what their lives were, no matter how good or bad they were, when push comes to shove, they are the ones that are going to be left to die.
Most natural disaster affect people a little more evenly, and don’t leave town in thehands of one angry group exclusively.
Anyway, this is exactly what a Communist would predict. Communists believe there is a class revolution that bubbling up in the background, simply waiting for class divisions to become wide enough and the lower classes to become large enough to manifest itself.
even sven, I kind of disagree with you about the poor being non-violent, NOLA had one of the highest murder rates in the country, and I doubt it was the rich folks doing all that killing. Those poor areas were not exactly nice, safe places to live pre-Katrina.
However, you’re 100% right as to why it descended into anarchy. It’s one thing when you’re all hit pretty much the same. It’s something different when you are hit harder than everyone else, and seemingly abandoned to your own devices.
I’d call it as much a riot in response to abandonment as it was looting in response to a natural disaster.
True enough, but if New Orleans is anything like Baltimore, even in the poorest and most dangerous areas the vast majority of the violence and murder is probably committed by relatively few people, and the vast majority of people living in those neighbourhoods are just poor working stiffs doing their best to live their lives under very trying circumstances.
I agree with you and that is why I pitted the Boston Globe and the sociologists that they (mis)represented. They said it didn’t happen because their models said it wouldn’t happen. I don’t like the fact that one sociologist has been proven misrepresented and Boston Globe is glossing over the fact that Katrina in New Orleans was an exceptional disaster with exceptional circumstances. Recent experience (St, Croix USVI) showed that kind of outcome can and will happen in the U.S. if the conditions are right.
I don’t understand why the Globe would run a story full of armchair speculation that contradicts many, many sources of information with nothing else to go on. I also don’t understand why sociologists would glance at their experimental results, throw out the known exceptions that closely fit this one, and declare that it probably didn’t happen very much at all.
It is irksome to be accused of expunging the record by someone who has modified my statements to mean what they did not originally mean. You have replaced the “like that” in your quote of me by “[inherently good]”. The phrase “are like that” was a stand-in, but what it stood for was not “are inherently good”, nor should you have presumed that it did. A phrase such as “are like that” should generally be presumed to refer to the most recent candidate that appeared in the discourse preceding the phrase. In this case, it referred to the description given by Shagnasty in the quote that I placed immediately before the statement, which was, “won’t engage in those behaviors under most circumstances and all that.” That “those behaviors” refers to looting should be clear from the context of the thread. Therefore, the correct way to unpack my statement would have been
I hope that what I wrote and what I meant is now clear: The communist believes that in the absence of rigid controls, people will loot.
The point of all this, of course, is that however irritating the OP may find the predictions of the sociologists, these predictions are in fact anti-communist. It is his own expectations that are in line with communist ideology.
Princhester, on further reflection, I see that you have a point. My statement from post #11, as given, implies that the communist would expect looting during a natural disaster even in a “classless society.” I agree that that is not correct. The existence of class differences is important for the prediction of looting to apply, but, as you point it, I didn’t mention it explicitely in that post. I was taking it as implicit that the context of the disaster was like that which obtained in NO, where the communist would clearly see class distinctions.
No, I offered you a space of time to expand beyond your basic platform of insulting the poster, and true to form, you went nowhere. The only thumbing I’ve been doing is my nose, at you.
There was nowhere to go. A ridiculous generalization that that in the OP doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.
Remind me again why your opinion should matter to me.
Hoo wee. One little thread about sociology and you all go nuts. First, as far as the quality of sociology itself, and of sociologists, unfortunately very little can be said, as both vary widely between multiple extremes. Some sociologists conduct highly empirical work, and draw their conclusions only after analyzing a large body of data. Others are more on the theoretical side, and while some of these make sure that their theories are grounded in (what they can best determine to be) facts, others aren’t so careful. Some sociologists conduct their work with the goal of effecting some particular change in society, others don’t. In the words of one noted sociologist (who IIRC was actually talking about the sociology of science when he said this), “Anything goes.” Whether Enrico Quarantelli is of the empirical, theoretical, activist, or some other sort, I won’t pretend to know. But his statements, along with the apparent communism of a few professors, should not be taken as indicative of all of sociology.