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Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
The alternative is the empathetic part of the brain continuing along in pain from the knowledge that humans no different from itself are living in abject poverty and destitution. It could cry out, "Why do you do nothing for your fellow man?" - but it would be simply silenced by the retort "They are not my fellow men." This dovetails nicely with some of the alt-right "empathy is weakness" messaging that's been floating around.
But maybe it's more along the lines of prosperity gospel, "I deserve this because I am special / chosen / of higher genetic quality": a defense mechanism against self-doubt that the only thing separating you from such a life are a coin tosses of fate. It would be crippling to spend every day contending with the possibility of living that way due to random chance, and so it's better to destimulate the brain and rationalize it away with a convenient belief system.
Not that it's been solicited, but my take is that the world changed too fast for India, and India grew too fast for how the world has changed. I see a similar story in the favelas in South America. Some peoples had the joy of riding the wave of modernization like surfers, and others were hit in the face by the break - like a Maxim gun nest firing on charging Ndebele warriors. To your main point, could the sociopolitical structures that Hinduism built play a role in India having not been prepared for modernization?
I mean, maybe. But my entire life has been living in a boomer project of trying to uplift these communities... to no impact what so ever. Build them critical infrastructure and they destroy it. Give them free resources and they just have as many kids as it takes to reduce them to their prior squalor. At the end of the day, they live like that because they choose to live like that. At least in so far as any of us choose to live any particular way while struggling with the human condition. It just seems that the human condition they struggle against seems to be on the extreme tail and at a horrifying scale.
A society that is 1-2% horrifying unreformable anti-civilization monsters might be able to get away with putting them up in nice abodes, letting them have a terrifying number of children, and generally dealing with the disproportionate drain on society this minority creates. When that rises to the level of a voting block of a country, it gets into "I don't fucking know man, it's literally impossible to accommodate them all, they're gonna drag us all down with them!"
How is this different from general misanthropy?
I could also define my own measure of utility for a person a declare anyone under a certain threshold as "dragging us down". My measure wouldn't be by skin color, of course, so it would be a lot harder to implement punitive measures for anyone below that threshold. E.g. I could say that all obese people have an extreme negative impact on the public welfare, but that doesn't trigger our tribal primate brains so no one is out there blackbagging obese citizens to alliteratively-named concentration camps.
Who said anything about concentration camps? All most people want is to be left alone. Stop taking my money to provide for them, leave them to their own devices, stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity, and the problem, if it doesn't go away on it's own, will at least develop some sort of homeostatic boundaries.
But if we insist on having a welfare state... well... then we need to pretty aggressively determine who deserves to be a part of it.
FWIW, democracies are always susceptible to growing dependant underclasses that only exist to vote for "more gibs". It's a self-reinforcing tendency, and much more stable than any anti-welfare or anti-voter-generating tendencies.
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I was referring to Alligator Alcatraz, and how much of the most public support is brazenly transparent about how the current push against immigration is about race and genetics - and not just illegal immigration, but immigration of all types.
This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion, and what keeps you feeling this way?
I personally don't think that many people create much value for society. Big David Graeber fan over here. Furthermore, I think a lot of people who think they create value for society are in the best case simply leeches on the public welfare, and in the worst case actively harming society. I see eye-to-eye with many of the posts on Hacker News lamenting that an entire generation of our greatest engineers were gobbled up by big tech in order to serve hypertargeted advertisements - with a sprinkling of all the negative externalities that the attention economy creates.
It's funny, actually, as I think some of the work that (illegal) immigrants do create the most directly positive value for society, like harvesting fruits and vegetables and building and improving housing stock.
I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.
I don’t understand this common argument. Without welfare, wouldn’t the employees be more desperate, enabling walmart to pay them far less?
And to look at the problem from the other side: let's say Bernie decides that the state guarantees a minimum standard of living to everyone, regardless or work status, and raise that to equal or higher than whatever walmart pays : as a consequence, no one works at walmart anymore and the state pays everyone a walmart salary. It's a gigantic loss for the state. What I mean is, it's actually walmart who helps the state give money to people so they have an acceptable living standard (which is the responsibility of the state, according to leftists), not the other way around.
I think the argument is basically feudal. The employer is basically considered a liege lord to its employees, owing them some minimum standard in living. If the king (government) has to step in and provide additional largesse directly, that's a failure on the lord's part.
I don’t know, bit anachronistic, and they don’t bring up this ‘liege solidarity’ anywhere else.
My theory is that employees think they produce a lot of value, at least equivalent to their wages + welfare (+ a share of ‘unfair’ walmart profits, which they reluctantly grant those bloodsucking capitalists), and that this sum is stable and independent of other actors, and prices. They equate the value they provide with the effort they put in, which is usually a lot, because low-wage jobs really are tedious and unrewarding.
So they think that without the welfare, they’d just get more wages. The idea that someone's work might only be worth 5$/h just will not compute.
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Taxes
Shit like this..
Yes.
I don't know what to say. I have a visceral disgust reaction towards people who can't even support themselves. Taking my money to give to them, no matter how round about it is, just adds insult to injury.
Sometimes I think of the wisdom of say, giving out free food on Thanksgiving versus all year round. If the food is a one day thing where you get to enjoy a nice meal with some dignity, awesome. If it's a stipend that lets you indulge in the dangerous delusion that you're actually taking care of yourself, or capable to producing dependents, well that's another thing entirely.
But then you started circling the idea of bullshit jobs too, and how much work is actually productive. One man's blue sky research is another man's wasteful spending. Sometimes you get Xerox PARC or Bell Lab's Idea Factory, and sometimes you get whatever the fuck this is, NSFW btw. I might have a bullshit job. I might not. Gun to my head I might just be a bit player on the outskirts of an industry that may or may not generate some ecosystem of products that makes the world marginally better to live in. If I'm lucky. What can I say?
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