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 #32 (permalink) Mon Jan 07, 2008 3:28 am American candidates |
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| Ralf wrote: |
| I’d love to see France solving their social unrest. It’d be nice to see societies grow up and implement effective educational schemes. And it’d be nice to be able to walk through banlieus at night knowing that it’s safe because all the kids will have to go to work in the morning. |
Hi Ralf,what did you strictly mean?
Edwin
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| #33 (permalink) Mon Jan 07, 2008 9:32 am American candidates |
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Torsten
I'll respond to your post (pg 2) on Tuesday. I'm using the iphone and it's tough to make a long post.
To answer part:
I consider personal giving/charity to encompass willful giving to an organization in hopes of helping people through the work of that org. To me the def'n is easier to discern by its antonym: contributions that are begotten by taxes -- contributions which the giver has no ability to decline.
Free enterprise must have some oversight/regulation.. Ijust want our wallets to be as free as possible. I'll try to answer more of your post tuesday. For I am overtired of the harvest I myself desired. zzzzzzzzzZ
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Prezbucky
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Fan Of Arabian Horses
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| #35 (permalink) Mon Jan 07, 2008 20:49 pm American candidates |
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| I'd be glad if Barack Obama become a president , because he worth it , and he's better than the others. And to be honest, i abhor Hilary ... |
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Tariqx
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| #36 (permalink) Mon Jan 07, 2008 21:03 pm American candidates |
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| edwin wrote: |
| Ralf wrote: |
| I’d love to see France solving their social unrest. It’d be nice to see societies grow up and implement effective educational schemes. And it’d be nice to be able to walk through banlieus at night knowing that it’s safe because all the kids will have to go to work in the morning. |
Hi Ralf,what did you strictly mean?
Edwin |
Hi Edwin,
Thanks for your question. What exactly did I mean? There has been quite a lot of turmoil in Parisian suburbs in the last couple of years. Predominantly quarters populated by ethnic minorities have started looting cars and shops and attacking police at night. About a year ago, the riots escalated into 100-1000 burning cars per night, and poorer districts of other towns (and even in neighbouring European countries) started imitating what happened in the so called "banlieus" of Paris.
There are two sides to the story. Of course it is simply wrong to loot and shoot and kill. No doubt about that. Nobody has the right to make random use of violence at the expense of innocent members of the public (citizens). And nobody has the right to attack executive forces (policemen). This is usually regulated by the judicial branch (law).
However, a country should provide a breeding ground for equality and democracy. That's the job of the legislature (government). In France, people with a darker skin or an address in a disreputable part of town find it harder to get into employment or better positions.
There are several conceivable solutions to the problem. Some support the idea of introducing stricter means to confront and punish those who disturb the peace. You could call it shock and awe policies. Sarkozy (the French president) promised to "nettoyer au karcher les banlieus" - to pressure wash the revolting suburbs. Others champion the idea of rooting out the cause of the problem. Those are in favour of enforcing laws and changes in society that bring about the necessary changes by pursuing medium-term strategies.
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 Ralf
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| #37 (permalink) Mon Jan 07, 2008 22:04 pm American candidates |
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| Ralf wrote: |
| There are two sides to the story. Of course it is simply wrong to loot and shoot and kill. No doubt about that. Nobody has the right to make random use of violence at the expense of innocent members of the public (citizens). And nobody has the right to attack executive forces (policemen). This is usually regulated by the judicial branch (law). |
It's been found in the United States that if you arrest anyone who does anything during the first 13 hours of a riot, you usually wind up with a lot of experienced criminals in your custody and virtually no ordinary citizens (even minority citizens). Rioting is caused by thugs, plain and simple, and ordinary people don't begin participating until after the first 36 hours of the violence. Besides, the biggest victims of that violence are almost always members of the same aggrieved minority. It's simply disrespectful of the poor and those with darker skin to think that violence is their natural reaction to their situation, because most of them do not engage in civil violence or approve of it. (I'm not saying you asserted this, by the way.)
| Ralf wrote: |
| However, a country should provide a breeding ground for equality and democracy. That's the job of the legislature (government). In France, people with a darker skin or an address in a disreputable part of town find it harder to get into employment or better positions. |
How do you propose to help them? It's already been demonstrated worldwide that racially based hiring quotas and other types of "affirmative action" help only those ethnic minority members who are already well-off and have the means, education and initiative to advance. Meanwhile, the rioting underclass stays stuck in the same stink hole it's always been in. They themselves make sure of it.
Think of your visit to Detroit and a disreputable neighborhood there. You saw lots of dark-skinned people who do very little productive and claim to have no opportunity. They are still like this after more than a century and a half of free education for all, and half a century of racial quotas and preference programs in hiring. At most companies now, if they even look at your color, it's to push you to the front of the line. Most people of their race are not poor, and increasing numbers of them are very prosperous. So why do you think people like this are still stuck at the bottom? Did watching them give you any idea?
Not only that, but large numbers of people from Africa are moving to the US, getting good educations and prospering. This has become conspicuous enough that many underclass African-Americans are now hostile to African immigrants. Basically, the Africans are demonstrating that racism isn't minorities' biggest problem in the US, and it's taking the poor people's excuse away.
I saw an interesting commentary in the news one time. There had just been large murderous riots in the Middle East and Europe over some issue or other. Conspicuously, the country where Arabs did not riot was the United States, despite their large numbers here. The writer proposed a reason: The Arabs in the US are busy and don't have any time to riot! In the West, the countries that saw the biggest riots were also the biggest welfare states. In those places, oppressive tax policies take money that could be used productively away from businesses and hardworking citizens, and in turn give it to a lot of people so that they can stay home. This creates a leisure class with nothing to do but sit around and get angry, and then they riot. |
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Jamie (K)
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| #38 (permalink) Mon Jan 07, 2008 23:47 pm American candidates |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: |
| It's been found in the United States that if you arrest anyone who does anything during the first 13 hours of a riot, you usually wind up with a lot of experienced criminals in your custody and virtually no ordinary citizens (even minority citizens). Rioting is caused by thugs, plain and simple, and ordinary people don't begin participating until after the first 36 hours of the violence. Besides, the biggest victims of that violence are almost always members of the same aggrieved minority. |
I agree.
| Jamie (K) wrote: |
| How do you propose to help them? It's already been demonstrated worldwide that racially based hiring quotas and other types of "affirmative action" help only those ethnic minority members who are already well-off and have the means, education and initiative to advance. Meanwhile, the rioting underclass stays stuck in the same stink hole it's always been in. They themselves make sure of it. |
Hiring quotas don't do much, that's right. It all starts at school. There are schools for rich whit kids, for middle class kids and for poor kids. In continental Europe, poor kids are principally formed by ethnic minorities. Quotas here would help. It's clear that poor kids from a socially inferior background get caught in a bottomless pit sooner than others. I'm pretty sure that 6 tough kids in a class of 30 pupils will have better chances to avoid going to the bad.
| Jamie (K) wrote: |
| Think of your visit to Detroit and a disreputable neighborhood there. You saw lots of dark-skinned people who do very little productive and claim to have no opportunity. They are still like this after more than a century and a half of free education for all, and half a century of racial quotas and preference programs in hiring. At most companies now, if they even look at your color, it's to push you to the front of the line. Most people of their race are not poor, and increasing numbers of them are very prosperous. So why do you think people like this are still stuck at the bottom? Did watching them give you any idea? |
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought black people still had to sit in the back of American buses until the mid 1970s. Society needs some time to change. Look at Britain, you still find social unrest there (even though British society as a whole seems pretty much in chime with itself).
| Jamie (K) wrote: |
| There had just been large murderous riots in the Middle East and Europe over some issue or other. Conspicuously, the country where Arabs did not riot was the United States, despite their large numbers here. The writer proposed a reason: The Arabs in the US are busy and don't have any time to riot! |
Arabs or Mexicans or Romanians or Latvian people earn more than $1-5 (or Euro) an hour for working at a car wash or packing bags in a supermarket. It is true that work clears the street of beggars, and unfortunately we will probably never achieve fair sharing of means. Unfortunately. Deploying capital in a just manner is not possible.
| Jamie (K) wrote: |
| In the West, the countries that saw the biggest riots were also the biggest welfare states. In those places, oppressive tax policies take money that could be used productively away from businesses and hardworking citizens, and in turn give it to a lot of people so that they can stay home. This creates a leisure class with nothing to do but sit around and get angry, and then they riot. |
I'm not too sure about the countries seeing the biggest riots being the biggest welfare states, but I agree to your apposite argument concerning the correlation between jobs, boredom and violence. People on the dole get bored, discontent and angry. Now that Ireland has literally no unemployment, it is feels much safer to walk through shabby alleys, particularly at night. There are simply less scumbags around.
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| #39 (permalink) Tue Jan 08, 2008 1:15 am American candidates |
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TD, thanks for the help with the avatar!
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Prezbucky
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| #40 (permalink) Tue Jan 08, 2008 3:28 am American candidates |
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| Ralf wrote: |
| Jamie (K) wrote: |
| How do you propose to help them? It's already been demonstrated worldwide that racially based hiring quotas and other types of "affirmative action" help only those ethnic minority members who are already well-off and have the means, education and initiative to advance. Meanwhile, the rioting underclass stays stuck in the same stink hole it's always been in. They themselves make sure of it. |
Hiring quotas don't do much, that's right. It all starts at school. There are schools for rich whit kids, for middle class kids and for poor kids. In continental Europe, poor kids are principally formed by ethnic minorities. Quotas here would help. It's clear that poor kids from a socially inferior background get caught in a bottomless pit sooner than others. I'm pretty sure that 6 tough kids in a class of 30 pupils will have better chances to avoid going to the bad. |
What usually happens is that the 6 tough kids will disrupt the class so much that the teacher will have trouble teaching, and the rest of the kids will get a worse education, and some of the regular kids will really go bad.
| Ralf wrote: |
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought black people still had to sit in the back of American buses until the mid 1970s. |
Those freakish Jim Crow "separate but equal" laws only applied in the Southern former slave states, and not in the North or West, so blacks in Detroit, while suffering some discrimination, as everywhere, had the right to sit wherever they wanted to on the bus, use the same bathrooms, etc. The laws were overturned by the US Supreme Court in the mid-1950s, so after that they didn't apply anywhere in the US. In any case, the large northern cities were much different from the South, because blacks who wanted to could find plenty of good-paying factory jobs, and they could get some of the best public education in the country -- those who took advantage of this did well.
| Ralf wrote: |
| Arabs or Mexicans or Romanians or Latvian people earn more than $1-5 (or Euro) an hour for working at a car wash or packing bags in a supermarket. |
Right! AT THE BEGINNING! When their English is good and they have gained other skills, they move on to something better. That's how it works here, anyway.
I see it in my neighborhood supermarket. You had mostly Americans working as cashiers, and the baggers and sweepers were Albanians of all ages. In a couple years, the Albanians spoke English and they were running the place, and another wave of Albanians came in. Other ones had by this time gotten some vocational or professional qualification and moved on. Now the Albanians hire Bengalis as baggers and sweepers, but most of them won't go to management there, because they're taking English classes at college so that they can get qualified for something.
| Ralf wrote: |
| I'm not too sure about the countries seeing the biggest riots being the biggest welfare states, |
France, Denmark, etc.
| Ralf wrote: |
| but I agree to your apposite argument concerning the correlation between jobs, boredom and violence. People on the dole get bored, discontent and angry. |
Read Theodore Dalrymple's book "Life at the Bottom". He saw the life of the British lower classes in great detail every day for decades, and he demonstrates that the pathologies have nothing to do with class, race and nationality, but with the opportunity to be idle for generations.
| Ralf wrote: |
| Now that Ireland has literally no unemployment, it is feels much safer to walk through shabby alleys, particularly at night. There are simply less scumbags around. |
Somehow I never thought of Ireland as a dangerous place. |
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