tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post1059650815030374757..comments2024-03-17T11:05:22.464+00:00Comments on The Life And Opinions of Andrew Rilstone: The Last Talons of Weng-Chiang Essay Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger476125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-78278852212986260742021-05-17T13:22:28.480+01:002021-05-17T13:22:28.480+01:00Not I, but I never listen to any podcasts so that ...Not I, but I never listen to any podcasts so that doesn't give you much information.ghttps://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-50650229290846773922021-05-16T21:47:01.721+01:002021-05-16T21:47:01.721+01:00Has anyone listened to my podcast? Has anyone listened to my podcast? Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-65818652183698833272021-05-16T18:10:56.159+01:002021-05-16T18:10:56.159+01:00I've been a bad, bad planet!
You have indeed...I've been a bad, bad planet! <br /><br />You have indeed! You need to go to the woodshed and fetch my energy draining device! I am cosmic being of unusual tastes.<br /><br />Ooo, yes, drain me, devour me, consume my cosmic essence <br /><br />You love it really.<br /><br /><br />Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-60481483999560629072021-05-16T18:07:04.747+01:002021-05-16T18:07:04.747+01:00I could write something long about the problem I h...I could write something long about the problem I have with your mode of argument. But that didn't go well before. Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-1926941009017760832021-05-16T16:36:22.201+01:002021-05-16T16:36:22.201+01:00If Andrew had complained about those places being ...<i>If Andrew had complained about those places being "infested" with criminals, I would agree with your criticism.</i><br /><br />To be fair to Mr. Rilstone, I am <i>not</i> a big fan of criminals. Nor do I think anyone else should be.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-84386763240590229292021-05-16T16:32:56.167+01:002021-05-16T16:32:56.167+01:00I could, for example, easily construct a theory th...I could, for example, easily construct a theory that Lyndon Baines Johnson started the Great Society programs because he was an evil mastermind. He wanted to trap people into poverty to ensure they would continue to vote for his party. This even has a plausibility to it because Johnson <i>was</i> kind of evil. A former staunch segregationist, corrupt (he was fabulously wealthy and nobody is quite sure how he became so), vulgar, etc.<br /><br />But it just doesn't work. A mastermind, Lyndon Baines Johnson was not. In fact, it is nearly unquestionable to me that he <i>intended</i> his programs to do exactly what he said they'd do - to eliminate poverty and reduce government dependence. This, of course, they manifestly failed to do.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-57458108274483017112021-05-16T16:27:49.729+01:002021-05-16T16:27:49.729+01:00This is just a defense mechanism of course. If so...This is just a defense mechanism of course. If someone can accuse me of hating poor people, then he gives himself permission not to pay any attention to my arguments. It is very common. It isn't even mean-spirited exactly. Confirmation bias is a very serious problem in humans because psychologically we believe, when our beliefs are attacked, that <i>we</i> are being attacked.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-84949513404160383662021-05-16T11:20:25.587+01:002021-05-16T11:20:25.587+01:00A certain Old Testament professor always put the s...A certain Old Testament professor always put the same question on the end of term exam "List the Kings of Israel and Judah in parallel columns." One year, however, he asked a different question: "List the Major and Minor Prophets in parallel columns." One of the students wrote: "I am certainly not worthy to judge between those venerable gentlemen, so instead, here is a list of the Kings of Israel and Judah."<br />Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-56138728488185800652021-05-16T03:22:27.005+01:002021-05-16T03:22:27.005+01:00I take it the last comment is meant to suggest tha...I take it the last comment is meant to suggest that Andrew S's comment is dehumanizing? I don't see that it is; I think "herd" is <i>accusing governments of being dehumanizing</i> (which may or may not be a fair accusation, but is the sort of accusation we want people to be able to make, and I think this is a reasonable way to make it), and "infested" is comparing <i>drugs</i> and <i>crime</i>, not people, to vermin.<br /><br />If Andrew had complained about those places being "infested" with <i>criminals</i>, I would agree with your criticism. I think. But it turns out that "infested" applied to people <i>before</i> it applied to vermin; the oldest sense of "infest" is something like "attack" or "trouble" and in the oldest known uses it's people doing the attacking or troubling. (It was fairly quickly generalized to other nuisances such as diseases and unwelcome political opinions.) I'm not sure a word can really be said to be dehumanizing when it has always been applied to humans as well as to other things. (Is the fact that it's <i>also</i> applicable to rats and plagues problematic? Not obviously; it's not dehumanizing to say that someone is "large" merely because mountains and icebergs are also large.)ghttps://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-84995445511762069002021-05-16T01:01:51.853+01:002021-05-16T01:01:51.853+01:00*herd
*infested*herd<br />*infestedAndrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-19304786962719645052021-05-15T00:27:41.158+01:002021-05-15T00:27:41.158+01:00But, hell, I'd be happy if governments just st...But, hell, I'd be happy if governments just stopped herding poor people into drug-infested, crime-infested public housing projects.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-21363826525717892712021-05-14T15:33:49.662+01:002021-05-14T15:33:49.662+01:00I worked retail management when I was in my 20s. ...I worked retail management when I was in my 20s. One of my best employees was a single mother. She wanted to work more, I wanted to give her more hours, but we couldn't because if she made too much money, she would lose her family's health insurance (which was superior to what we could offer). This is absurd, but it's what you come to expect from the U.S. government. (Come to think of it, the UBI basically just is a version of Friedman's Negative Income Tax.)Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-45797547382415795682021-05-14T15:16:15.121+01:002021-05-14T15:16:15.121+01:00Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are famously left-wi...Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are famously left-wing multi-billionaires. How much of their fortunes do they donate to the U.S. federal government? At a best guess, none. Because you're just pouring it down a rathole and everybody knows you're just pouring it down a rathole.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-55979756748462429172021-05-14T15:11:26.774+01:002021-05-14T15:11:26.774+01:00Part of the reason I want this is because bureaucr...Part of the reason I want this is because bureaucrats are valuable people and I want to free them up to work in the private economy where they could do some good. I understand that some national governments are more competent than the U.S. federal government. You have to live here to understand how unbelievably incompetent they are - at everything. We do have some state governments which are reasonably competent; I live in one and Utah's is almost famously competent (due probably to the Church of Latter-Day Saints). (Though Utah, as an ex-Wild West state, has one of the worst records for police shootings.)<br /><br />Is there any way to get there from here? Probably not. The bureaucracy is entrenched and will fight tooth and nail to keep itself entrenched.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-78255206337100456242021-05-14T15:01:18.256+01:002021-05-14T15:01:18.256+01:00You could, of course, abolish welfare so people ha...<i>You could, of course, abolish welfare so people had no choice but to work for punitively low wages - in effect, a form of serfdom.</i><br /><br />I think 84% of Americans are in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (an absolutely insane number). About the same percentage of economists are opposed. We have better ways of alleviating poverty - the Earned Income Tax Credit, which simply gives money to the working poor (though called a tax credit, it is "refundable," i.e. you can get back from it more than you ever paid in taxes and many, many people do) - is fairly effective and raises typically have bipartisan support. (The EITC was passed by a Democratic Congress in order to stop Nixon's Negative Income Tax, which was dreamt up by Milton Friedman, but the EITC and the Negative Income Tax are very similar.)<br /><br />I don't think anyone is opposed (or at least not much) to similar transfer payments such as Social Security Disability for those who can't work. I favor eliminating all the job training, housing, food support, and the thousand other welfare programs and simply giving poor people money and letting them figure out how to spend it. Even better would be replacing the whole thing with a UBI (Universal Basic Income) which everyone gets so we wouldn't have to worry about whether people are getting it fraudulently.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-70631427937717781492021-05-13T19:19:51.482+01:002021-05-13T19:19:51.482+01:00And obviously Thanos has a brother called Eros, wh...And obviously Thanos has a brother called Eros, which shows that Starlin had read his Freud, if nothing else. But clearly someone has to write dirty stories about a canonical Eternal with that name. <br /><br />Maybe we should agree that the comic book character is Thay-nos but the movie character is Thanne-os? Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-3436044349954049002021-05-12T20:27:58.634+01:002021-05-12T20:27:58.634+01:00Whatever about the shortcomings of the welfare sys...Whatever about the shortcomings of the welfare system, I’m not aware of any realistic alternative - the Roman Empire (not exactly a welfare state) had a ‘Bread & Circuses’ policy when it came to dealing with the large, mostly unemployed population in Rome. Feeding and entertaining your underclass is one way of neutralising any threat they might represent. <br /><br />You could, of course, abolish welfare so people had no choice but to work for punitively low wages - in effect, a form of serfdom. People would have just enough to pay the rent and to feed themselves. The problem is that you’re likely to get more and more civil unrest (look at what happened in pre-revolutionary France!) and to spend more and more money on policing, incarceration etc. This would be problematic in a country like the US especially, as it has the highest incarceration figures in the world (although it peaked in 2008) and the prison service already costs around 300 billion a year.Aonghus Fallonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11414643238115071988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-13217295257321315792021-05-12T19:01:46.249+01:002021-05-12T19:01:46.249+01:00Sprite presents as a teenage boy, but he is really...Sprite presents as a teenage boy, but he is really a thousand year old cosmic being, so there must be some element of consent when Ikaris spanks him. Andrew Rilstonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16934052271846235431noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-53284190383764072012021-05-12T17:34:49.477+01:002021-05-12T17:34:49.477+01:00Also, that modern welfare programs can't be ba...Also, that modern welfare programs <i>can't</i> be bad for poor people, as I believe, because they're so well-intentioned. Ergo, they must be great and people who oppose them simply oppose helping poor people.<br /><br />I also oppose the minimum wage (or at least an actual effective minimum wage). In the early 20th century, when minimum wage laws were first passed in the U.S., Progressive reformers were unabashed that the purpose of the minimum wage was to give white men raises and throw minorities into unemployment. <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0405-leonard-minimum-wage-20160405-story.html" rel="nofollow">See this op-ed.</a> Particularly, a federal minimum wage - in a huge country like the U.S. - has very disparate impacts on places with vastly different costs of living.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-47186362401788326112021-05-12T17:00:23.065+01:002021-05-12T17:00:23.065+01:00I have been informed, however, that I just hate po...I have been informed, however, that I just hate poor people (including, I assume, my late mother and all of my ancestors) and that all my supposed concern about poverty is just faking it.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-30745158252911830802021-05-12T16:56:15.501+01:002021-05-12T16:56:15.501+01:00Do I think that modern welfare programs rope crimi...Do I think that modern welfare programs rope criminals (who may or may not have started out poor) and other poor people into the same net? Yes I do.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-60438513618758567342021-05-12T16:50:55.672+01:002021-05-12T16:50:55.672+01:00Again, sorry about the formatting. I thought I ha...Again, sorry about the formatting. I thought I had eliminated all the carriage returns, but obviously not.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-80742522853682330642021-05-12T16:50:28.650+01:002021-05-12T16:50:28.650+01:00I have finally finished reading the entire JRF stu...I have finally finished reading the entire JRF study and it is excellent. I can't find anything there which I disagree with.<br /><br />"Changes in welfare have created traps that make escape from lifestyles in which offending and victimization are common difficult. Changes in housing have made it more difficult to<br />access affordable shelter, and have concentrated the risks of crime and victimisation into peripheral, public and rented housing enclaves, of concentrated poverty, segregation and<br />isolation. Changes in policing and CJS policy make it more difficult to avoid exacerbating children and young people’s putative criminal careers. Changes in labour markets towards<br />insecurity has weakened the offending reducing effects of long‐term employment.<br /><br />"These changes meant that those who are near to exhausting their criminal careers and who are on the road to recovery to ‘normal’ life can be thwarted in their desistance by a series of interminable obstacles placed in their way. These include the likelihood of them having lost shelter through imprisonment or having a criminal or drug using record. Then once again<br />denied access to good affordable public housing because this isn’t generally available. Thrown onto the private rented sector, more often than not faced by interminable complexities, gaps and delays in receiving meagre JSA, housing benefit, or family welfare payments. Faced with employment discrimination having a criminal record. As a consequence, criminal careers are unnecessarily prolonged and hardened because positive choices and legitimate routes out of criminality are difficult or simply not available."Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-72192031684059809012021-05-12T16:19:53.108+01:002021-05-12T16:19:53.108+01:00By the way, the "taming" of West Virgini...By the way, the "taming" of West Virginia and Kentucky is, historically speaking, pretty new. Those states were famous in the 19th century for the feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. (The Hatfields were fairly affluent and the McCoys were not impoverished, though they are generally considered lower middle class at the time.)Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9987513.post-5148109892756420642021-05-12T16:13:50.417+01:002021-05-12T16:13:50.417+01:00However, this relationship (poverty and distrust o...However, this relationship (poverty and distrust of police) isn't a <i>necessary</i> one and does not always occur. E.g. my examples of Alaska (a fairly wealthy state, worst crime in the country) and West Virginia or Kentucky (very poor states, but below average crime rates for the U.S.).<br /><br />I think this also makes sense of the economic <i>inequality</i> relationship. In highly unequal societies, poor people are much more likely to believe that the police are there simply to protect the wealthy. Sometimes this is false, but often it is true.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.com