[Chris] No, you did not. You read that there is a higher median income in the US, something that really doesn't say anything about what I'm talking about. Here is just a wiki site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_US#Other_international_compariso ns But it really isn't a controversial thing to point out that a lot of people in the US live in conditions fit for a third world country. [Krimel] It's fun to try but you are wasting you time. What Platt, Craig and Ham do is called the fundamental attribution error (FAE). Here is a classic example: "What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." -Ronald Raygun What this does is say that when others mess up it is because they are defective. But when I mess up I am a victim of circumstance; situations have conspired against me. Bill Gates is successful _because_ he is ambitious and smart. Joe Gratesleeper is not successful _because_ he is stupid and lazy. There is a kind of cosmic justice being played out in life and asking society to step in and interfere is somehow wrong. We can ignore the circumstances in Joe's life that lead him into poverty and hopelessness because we know that whatever those circumstances were, we would have risen above them and he is just getting what he deserves in a karmic sense. This is especially tragic when it is applied to children who are held personally accountable for having been born to parents who don't care, don't have resources or are mentally or physically ill. It is the child's duty to rise above whatever conditions they are born into and if they can't; well it's their fault and again justice is served. All the Randian Raygun puffery about the immoral use of government force revolves around this faith in cosmic justice and the FAE. Obviously, it has its appeal and Raygun, like Satan had the personal charm to sell it. The result has been a generation of people who believe that government is evil and that big money interests are justified in doing whatever it takes to succeed. You cite statistics and simplistic folk like the Gipper and his fans just write that off as effete intellectuals lying with numbers. You look at poverty, Platt wants to look at wealth. Any attempt to look below the surface is just liberal brain washing. If academia is fraught with liberals it couldn't be that people who actually think things through arrive at liberal conclusions. Rather it must be a plot to hold conservatives at bay. The agenda must be political not intellectual. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
