Stop me if this is a stupid question... but could THAT be what dark matter really is ? Could 95% of the mass of the universe be in tiny less-than-atomic-sized black holes ?
I'm not so sure you're right. It's already outlived every social network before it (by which I mean total lifespan from foundation to demise) - and it doesn't even seem to have peaked in users yet. Several attempts at competition have come and gone - twice from the mighty google (and one of those arguably had a better user-experience to start with) and still it remains the behemoth of most people's online experience.
There may be more to this than just a fad. I think part of it may be in their internal approach to running the company. They seem to seriously focus on being an awesome place to work who can get the best of the best coding minds. A friend of mine was a google engineer, she just left them for facebook - she actually took a paycut to do that (granted she was with google in Zurich which is the best paid development office in the WORLD - she would take a paycut for ANY other job). If you look at their job ads they include this choice line: "Most developers are used to weeks or months between writing code and it reaching production. At facebook, your code will be in production on the busiest website in the world within days."
Now doesn't that sound exciting ? Scary? Challenging ? The kind of thing that the true geniusses of our field love ? Maybe, just maybe, facebook is doing well because they offer a service their users find valuable, their customers benefit from (and I am well aware that those aren't the same people) and they give their technologists the creative free reign to make magic ?
I don't know if the mixture of Star Trek (post-scarcity society - by definition incapable of supporting a capitalist economy) with a capitalist symbol such as a corporation was a deliberate irony but either way - I lol'd.
>Do you consider those socialists to be socialists according to your definition?
Sometimes. Only when it happens in a democracy - where every individual had equal amounts of power to support or prevent those initiatives. The more democratic, the more socialist is becomes. In a libertarian socialism, it's perfectly compatible since the SAME people who are sacrificing some of their labour have CHOSEN to do so.
>I also do not see how an anarcho capitalist society can enforce a thing such as mandatory "free" healthcare/education. Who is collecting the dues, and how are they not a form of gov't?
I never said "mandatory" many anarco-capitalist see these are well served through voluntary charity - that is the same goal, it just doesn't need a government. Even without that, it can still happen, anarchisms are not devoid of law, just of government, the people make the laws by direct democratic votes - but they are still laws. Indeed the most common critisizm against anarchism is that it can devolve into a tyranny of the majority, this is why most anarchist favour massive decentralization - to keep the voting pools very small, exactly to reduce that risk.
>As long as the society treats men equally under the law, there is nothing preventing said laborer from enjoying the fruits of his labor as he sees fit.
No, in capitalism ONLY business owners see the fruits of their labour. Labour sold is not always sold at a loss (otherwise profit cannot exist). In true socialism, all businesses MUST be owned by ALL who work there, the management done by democratic vote rather than authority and the profits divided evenly. Some variations have incentive bonusses to encourage hard work (a greater share of the profits for those who work harder). That said - in theory this is quite possible in capitalism, it's that possibility which socialist libertarians are using to build our ideal systems within the current system. But they are at a major disadvantage. True cooperations aren't even LEGAL in many countries (Britain for one) as the law holds that somebody MUST take final responsibility and therefore MUST have final authority (though there are sufficient leeway that variations do exist in Britain), most countries also do not grant advantages like limited liability to cooperations. So the problem is - all men and all forms of business are NOT equal under the law.
>The philosophy of socialism that I have described is incompatible with capitalism (free markets), because it desires fairness in outcomes
There's a huge difference between free markets and capitalism. Don't conflate the terms. Socialism DEPENDS on free markets just like Capitalism does - but socialism is NEVER compatible with capitalism.
> in order to create this fairness, it must take the power of the state and use unfair laws to create "fair" outcomes.
Wrong. There are other ways. Again I refer you to socialist libertarianism - which has no state to speak off, nor any state power to use. State-socialism became quite successfull for a part of the 20th century, so everybody assumes it's the only kind. Which is quite sad since it's probably the LEAST effective and certainly the WORST kind. I am a socialist, and I despise the very IDEA of governments. If anything, I want LESS government than right libertarians want.
>if it were entirely voluntary, it could accomplish the entirety of its goals under capitalistic free markets False. Capitalism is FILLED with coercion. The vast majority of people MUST take ANY job they can get under ANY terms they can get it - and dare not ever question the authority of their bosses. If they disobey - they are fired, which is tantamount to starvation. That is coercion by the threat of death. The only things that make it slightly LESS coercive are socialist ideas like charity and wellfare - which can take a bit of the sting out of the capitalist coercion. Not enough to make it just or equitable or non-coercive. Just enough to keep the unemployed alive- which benefits the
Not long ago (just two generations ago) a person who hit puberty were expected to hold down a job and pay their own way - and get married.
The suggestion that today they cannot make a decision about their own bodies is completely idiotic and my dad just realized that.
Now my dad is a deeply faithful Christian, so you'll have to accept that in trying to explain his position I will use Christian terminology. That position was: "This is what God wants you to do, this is what he expects of you. But we are all sinners, which is not an excuse to sin without a care, but it does mean that sometimes - we all make mistakes. You might make a mistake on this count. The Bible says 'do not kill' but if my son gets in a bar-fight and hits somebody too hard and kills him I would still stand by him and visit him in prison. In the same way, if you make a mistake on THIS sin, then I will also stand by you - and at least help you to try and mitigate the consequences."
Anything else is not only unrealistic but also un-Christian. You cannot profess to be a Christian and then expect perfect compliance with the law of God since a fundamental principle of Christianity is that nobody is CAPABLE of following the law of God exactly - indeed that ALL people break ALL the laws ALL the time. That's what Christians need Jesus FOR. The only variation is one of degree. Christians TRY to obey the law out of grattitude for salvation but they do so KNOWING it's a lost cause. Expecting children to never break the law about sex before marriage - not EVER is silly.
And it's a thousand times more silly now. Until very recently keeping that law meant saving your virginity for a couple of years, maybe 5 for the spinsters - and staying married for life was a 20 year commitment (because life expectancy was 40 or less). Now kids are hitting puberty earlier than ever before, and the time after that before marriage is practical is as long as the marriages themselves used to be. That was NOT God's plan by any reasonable reading.
Then there is the potential consequences. One night of oops I went too far used to mean at worst that you got pregnant. Now it could KILL you. Jesus himself declared that the penalty for adultery should NOT be death, so how is teaching safe-sex not DIRECTLY in line with those teachings ?
>Point stands, you want the authority and it isn't a good thing when a school or anyone else tries to undermine it.
It is not undermining my authority to teach my children things I didn't teach them about things I didn't want them to know. It merely means I didn't do my JOB as a parent. It's the difference between condoning something and merely acknowledging it's existence. Parents who deny the existence of what they don't condone are bad parents. They are the only ones who think it "undermines their authority" when somebody else goes and tell their kids about the stuff they denied the existence off. I sure as hell don't condone shooting people, but I won't pretend to my kids that guns don't exist. I don't condone violence - but I am not stupid enough to imagine that if I refuse to teach them self-defence they will never be attacked.
I have no problem with teaching your moral values, but teach responsible behavior AS WELL. Especially when the most basic principle of your moral belief system states that following those morals without mistakes is NOT humanly possible.
>If that definition were actually true, socialists wouldn't be in such love with things like free education and healthcare. In order for any such services to be provided for free, they must be paid for by someone; and the system of free benefits guarantee that the people who benefit have not put in equal effort; yet benefits are to be equal regardless.
But not ALL socialists support such initiatives. So they are not part of the concept of socialism. Many socialists do - but that's because they believe the over-all gain to society from free education and healthcare , and the increase in everybodies profits out of having them are far higher than what it costs. This is not technically socialism however, since there are even anarco-capitalist systems that include similar arrangements. Sometimes that logic is definitely correct as well. One example is public roads. The only country I know off that ever tried to have all roads built privately was the USA - they did away with it very soon (back in the 1920s) because it was an unmitigated disaster. Roads companies didn't take the most efficient path between two cities, because big businesses well OFF that path would pay them kickbacks to make sure the roads passed their business property. That meant every road user was subsidizing the cost of saving those businesses from relocating. If anything that's a worse cost on the economy than building roads out of tax money.
>Unequal efforts yielding equal outcomes means that someone's profit from their labor is being forcibly taken to benefit another.
Well, no system is perfect, socialism in the form advocated by the American left has a significant problem there, the same problem exists on a much bigger scale in capitalism though. Libertarian socialism on the other hand for example tries very hard to do away with the problem entirely by turning all enterprises into cooperations run by the people who work there, massively decentralizing all government and using direct-democracy to run a neighbourhood. That way the people who make the law (and set the tax rates) are the people who actually have to live with the consequences, and if those consequences aren't good - they can change it. Now some neighbourhoods will choose to tax-fund a school, others will choose to have their schools run as business cooperatives. Socialist Libertarians will never tell you which one is right because we believe there IS no right. What works in one community may not work the same way in another, that's why every community should have the power and freedom to decide their own priorities and find systems and solutions that work for THEM.
>People tend to think of free education and healthcare as the markers of a proper socialist society. Do you disagree with them?
Not people who actually studied philosophy. They are the markers of the modern-day left's VERSION of socialism. That is currently the largest socialist movement around but it is not the only one, it's not even the only ACTIVE one. This is partly a difference between terms-of-art and common-meaning of words but it's really more a case of associating elements of the currently-popular version of an idea with all versions of the idea even though they don't all share it. Until quite recently (on historical scales) socialist libertarians were a major force in politics even in the USA. The May Day uprisings in New York in 1895 were led by socialist libertarians who gave their lives to secure the 40-hour work-week for example. We honor them with a global holiday every year on the 1st of May. The vast majority of people don't remember what that holiday is about or the people who were unjustly executed (framed for murder) to make it happen. But people not knowing or remembering something doesn't mean it didn't happen.
>You're treating socialism as a purely economic philosophy. I disagree; it influences the political system as well, as it suggests what gov't is supposed to be doing.
Terms of art again. Socialism IS a purely economic philosophy. It
Would that be the same 50 million people that these CEO's previously refused to give coverage to on the grounds of pre-existing conditions ?
The old joke goes: "A bank is an institution that will loan you money provided you can prove you don't need to borrow it."
Apparently in America a health-insurance company is an institution that will cover the cost of healthcare provided you can prove you don't need any healthcare.
Neither of those scenarios would prove either of the things you propose. Nearly all the kids pass would prove the teacher cheated. Nearly all the kids fail would prove the test was above appropriate standards OR that the teacher sucked- but not determine which.
See real classrooms follow what statisticians call a "normal" distribution. If the teacher is good and the test is on standard you will always see the exact same end result (all other things being equal): 25% of students fail. 25% of students get over 75% The other 50% pass with average marks.
Any other distribution means something is wrong. More than 50% average and exceptional students ? Test was too easy or the teacher cheated. Less than that: test was too hard or the teacher incompetent.
Your version of the result cannot actually exist, but even if you adapt them to the variations from normal that I just cited then they still don't prove anything about the teacher - not until you can somehow independently prove that the level of the test was correct for the material.
>>...because they just don't make bigots like they used to.
>Not for lack of trying...
That's the purpose of this particular clause. Their getting annoyed by all those school teachings that make it harder to raise your kids to be as blinkered in their bigotry as you are.
> No, you may NOT take the car tonight. I don't care what you think, you aren't going to a sleepover at your girlfriend's house.
Well, as my dad used to say about my little sister and her first boyfriend when his father made a rule along those lines: "If they want to fuck no amount of rules about sleep-overs are going to stop them. All we've GOT is the trust that they will remember the things we taught them. If they then decide to do it anyway, then I would PREFER they do it in my house so I can at least stop them from doing it stupidly."
My dad is a strong proponent of abstinence-until-marriage but at least he isn't an idiot who thinks nobody ever makes a mistake even if they AGREE with his position (as my sister did). He taught abstinence, but he taught condoms AS WELL.
For the record, she was 14 at the time he said that.
>If you don't allow insurers to price their services based on pre-existing conditions then insurance will become a good deal for those with pre-existing conditions and a poor deal for those without pre-existing conditions.
Except that wasn't what they did, they explicitly refused to cover people with pre-existing conditions at all. Now that's a complete healthcare failure since it means the people who actually NEEDED coverage the most weren't eligible for it at all.
Actually that has been (sort of) tried, though not (as far as I know) in the USA. In South Africa there is a private medical aid (our term for medical insurance) called Discovery who has a program called Vitality. The vitality program does not directly affect premiums, but it gives financial incentives and rewards for certain healthy living practises. Specifically partnerships offerring free gym memberships (excercise is good). a 50% discount on movie tickets and cheaper hotel and air prices (watching movies and taking regular holidays both reduce stress - which is one of the most effective ways to reduce other health issues).
By doing this they managed to keep their membership healthier than average and for years were the cheapest medical insurer you could get as a result. Further steps impacted the premiums directly - for example if you haven't smoked in 6 months your premiums are quoted cheaper, running regular health-screenings at people's offices to help with early diagnosis of risk factors (early treatment is cheaper than later - and preventative care is cheaper than cures) and even going so far as to have certain schemes available only to people who live in coastal provinces (which are much cheaper for level of coverage) on the basis that statistically in South Africa people who live in coastal cities are significantly healthier (lower stress culture and a healthier, less polluted environment.
So while not entirely what you propose - the idea of tying insurance rates to risk factors in medical insurance (as it is done in other insurance types) is quite feasible. These days though Discovery is no longer cheap - even on the cheapest plans but it's not because their system failed, that happened because they managed to get all the biggest employers in the country to agree to "must sign-up" partnerships with them. Basically the employers get to do employer-co-funded insurance (for which there is a tax benefit so most large employers do that) at a rate that's much cheaper for the employer but only if they agree to demand that all staff ONLY insure with discovery. There was a law passed later which said if you already had insurance with one medical aid your employer cannot force you to change, but they can force any previously uninsured staff to join the plan they choose as a condition of your employment contract.
Getting enough of those deals put Discovery in a position where they rule most of the market without having to actually be priced competitively -they can charge more than the competition for much less coverage and still get customers who don't want to risk their jobs to save on premiums.
I'd take state-insurance systems like the British NHS over THAT mess to be honest.
That name was never actually accurate. The Nazi's were only socialist in the same way that the People's Republic of China is a Republic.
>Socialism is the political ideology that wants to manage everything for the "good" of society.
False. There are many forms of socialism, ranging from totalitarian forms to anarchist forms of and various in between. I define my own views as libertarian socialist (which is one step to the right of anarchist socialist). There are anarchist forms of communism as well (and communism != socialism). The best way to define socialism is to look at what these things have in common and there is only one single attribute they all share: the belief that the profit of productive labour must be owned by the performers of that labour.
Capitalism puts ownership in the hands of those who invest in labour, socialism puts it in the hands of those who DO the labour. That's the only true definition. Various forms have had different levels of success in actually achieving this aim (logical as they took radically different approaches to it), but that aim is the definition of socialism. To give an example the Spanish anarchists gave ownership of factories to the workers, told them they owned the profits but tried to convince them not to maximize those profits. That was a complete disaster. Most socialist libertarians would also have corporations replaced by worker-owned and democratically managed cooperations or mutualisms, but would WANT those cooperations to compete with each other in a free market for profit, getting the advantages of a free market without the disadvantages of capitalism.
Facism on the other hand is really just another name for corporatism. It's crony-capitalism (the kind right libertarians also oppose). The combination of state and capitalist power. Which really means that as the ultimate state-capitalism the USSR was much more fascist than communist.
>Such as removing Jews and other undesirables from society, for its own "good".
Utterly false. The economic philosophies of various brands of socialism are unrelated to and can exist independently of political or ideological positions such as racism. Removing the Jews was based on outright racism, of a very specific variety: create a common enemy and blame them for all the ills in your country. This gets you popular with your population, then turn them on that "enemy". The Nazis just ended up taking a very old strategy a bit further than most. The best modern-day equivalent would be how the republican party entertains the religious right's fear of gay-rights and promises to help fight the "great pink conspiracy". The greatest irony of all is that the things Hitler accused the Jewish culture off was really not true at all of the Jews in Germany. The rich Jewish banking families Hitler rallied against were all Sephardic Jews - who lived in the Latin countries (primarily Spain). The Jews of Germany were Askanasi, not Sephardis and unlike their distant cousins had been languishing in poverty for centuries before Hitler showed up. Rich elites wanting to control the world ? They were slum-living poor people ! But of course Hitler knew all too well that most Germans didn't know the difference between Sephardic and Askanasi.
>Look up the wiki page on Nazi-ism, and you'll note that they had "anti-Capitalist" tendencies - that's because they were a socialist ideology.
Anti-capitalism doesn't equal socialism. There are thousands of economic philosophies and only one of them is called "capitalism" supporting ANY of the others is anti-capitalism but the majority of those others aren't socialist in the LEAST. In fact, even among the philosophies that CALL themselves socialist only a handful actually ARE socialist.
>They also opposed Communism, but that's because they were National socialists, as opposed to international socialists.
Communism != Socialism, they are related but not identical and the differences are important.
I suppose the will of the people don't really matter when those people aren't Americans ?
Are you actually advocating that when foreign people want to get rid of dictators America should provide military aid to the dictators and prevent the civilians from gaining the civil liberties they are fighting for if the dictators have been good enough at kissing White-house pucker-holes ?
>If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they?
They did, every single precursor to the ipad both real and fictional had a used multiple (indeed most) of the same design elements - all the way back to the slabs used by the crew of the Enterprise on Star Trek:TNG. There is a lot of those elements in the original Palm as well (the only real difference is the hand-held form-factor and the scribe-pen).
The original Microsoft Tablet-PC's which predate the ipad by about 6 years had nearly all those elements in common too. They just didn't sell very well.
Reminds me of my childhood... hell I was less than 13 years old when I built a cross-bow-slingshot, I am quite proud thinking back of the very clever springed trigger mechanism I had designed in my head and made for it. A wooden T-bar with two eye-bolts on the edges, inner-tube bands with a leather socket and a notch to keep the stone.
It worked beautifully, though it was horribly inaccurate. But this may have something to do with the fact that I didn't invent an aiming mechanism of any sort for it. On the other hand it could shoot a pebble at least three times as far as the hand-held slingshot granddad had made me a few years earlier which inspired it.
>However Camping and Survival Skills, don't really make you a good leader. It just means you can fend for yourself better
Self-reliance is a critical component of leadership. If you cannot rely on yourself and don't have faith in your own abilities as an individual - you will never accept leadership (why would you want others to trust you if you don't trust yourself?) and if placed in that position you will not inspire confidence (people can instantly tell if a leader doesn't believe he can do the job).
Thousands of studies have confirmed what we've known for decades: your immune system cannot learn to deal with any microbes unless it is exposed to it.
In fact your own damn example proves the point: vaccines. Deliberate infection with a weakened form of a virus to assist the body in developing an immune response before it may have to face the full-blown version.
For bacterial infections this is doubly true. More-over a few years ago a study (there was a slashdot article about it) found that Staph actually fights off other infections when it's externally on the skin (it's the most common bacteria in 'dirt') merely getting dirty reduces your risk of other infections (staph INTERNALLY on the other hand is a dangerous infection and often requires treatment - on the other hand, if you have had a few small staph infections you greatly reduce the future intensity of such infections since your body has developed an immune response to it).
HIV is the exception to the rule - the body actually DOES have an immune response to it, and the antibodies it develops fights it back just like any other virus. The problem with HIV is it attacks white-blood cells which are a crucial component of the immune system - so even as your body is trying to fight it back it's ability to fight infections in general are worsened. Technically there is no such thing as an "AIDS" infection you can be immune to - AIDS is a condition caused by numerous possible things. The most common by far being the HIV virus but severe drug abuse for example can also cause AIDS. AIDS is simply an acquired (e.g. not born-with) immune deficiency. When you have AIDS - it's some other infection that kills you because you have no immune system to fight it off. If a bone-marrow transplant recipient (who has had his immune system killed off by radiation) gets in contact with any microbe he will develop full blown AIDS too.
So yes, eating a dirty hotdog, getting a little dirty etc. does make your immune system stronger. Using antibacterial soaps and that kind of crap makes it weaker - because you prevent your body from getting into contact with germs. Small contact, through the skin (a wonderful protective organ) is the bodies only way to develop an immune response early - the same one it will need if it gets a severe infection. Of course you also develop an immune response during a severe infection but the extra time for this to happen could mean you die before it's done (in the case of the diseases we vaccinate against: this is practically guaranteed), and not having had small infections greatly increase the risk that a somewhat larger infection will turn into a severe one before the body can react and learn to recognize and fight back the microbe in question.
It's not so hard to understand is it? Your body is ONLY immune to two things: the diseases you gained a genetic immunity to from your parents (very, very, very few) and the microbes you have been in contact with.
In other words, if you don't get dirty, you get dead.
>I'm curious how limiting 9-year-old's access to pornography somehow triggers the downfall of democracy? I wasn't aware the operation of a free state was dependent on unfettered access to Two Girls One Cup.
It gets even more insidious than that - it becomes a tool for punishing youth for thinking and saying things that adults don't want them to say and think - so we end up branding 14 year old girls as sex offenders for life because they distributed naked pictures of a minor. The fact that she WAS the minor in the picture and she "distributed" it to her boyfriend via her cellphone doesn't get considered. She can never live near a school, she'll have issues with the government over her own children... she's punished for life, because she expressed something that adults don't want young people to express - her own sexuality.
That my friend is evil, very extremely evil - and the self-censorship that follows is the perfect destruction to any concept of a free society.
>>If you choose to ignore them, how does it make any difference if you learned them or not ?
>Are you advocating ignorance? I thought you were the one advocating exposure?
No, I'm asking you - since you say it's important to know them whether you agree with and follow them or not. I'm asking you to justify that position. I cannot see a logical reason why it's important to know something you don't believe in. I don't feel the need to know the intricacies of every religion in the world because I don't believe in them. I respect other people's right to believe in them - but to me if I am interested then I'm reading them as mythology - or as an interesting look into ancient people's thinking, but I don't feel it's important I do that, just interesting.
>It's in the plan. They are mixed-race Obama style, and they have friends with gay parents. I'm sure they will develop biases, but our goal is tolerance.
That's a good starting point - but you're also a person who called every sexual fetish you don't share "not normal". That's not tolerant.
>>but pretty much EVERYTHING else they can learn from a parent is NOT good.
>Strongly disagree - and I think you do as well. In your other posts, You misunderstood my argument. I am in favor of exposure - I'm not in favour of authoritative parenting. I think parents make horrible teachers - and teachers make horrible parents and neither should try to do the other ones job. Parents should be guides - exposure + guidance = good parenting in my book. But they shouldn't be teachers, they shouldn't set a curiculum of what should be learned and what should not. Life itself must be the curiculum - and parents the guides who help the children to make sense of what they experience.
I think modern parents are so obsessed with protecting children they've come around a vicious circle. They're so concerned with keeping children alive that they have no option left anymore to let children live.
My grandfather told me how - in his childhood - death was different from now. That was before strong pain meds like morphine. Most people died at home, in pain. When they were getting close to it, the entire family - of all ages - gathered around them, holding their hands and seeing them off. Watching somebody die in agony was a normal thing for any child who could walk. It was considered a duty to be there. He also said "back then - everybody was conscious until the last moment they weren't. There was no going to sleep under morphine and never waking up, and while what we've done since is much kinder to the dying, it's made us lose something incredibly valuable for the living."
That same grandfather was, at the age of 14, sent to be a cattleboy. Cattleboy back then meant that on Sunday night great grandma packed him a backpack with dried meat, rusks and 6 bullets - not one to spare, bullets were expensive. He'd ride out on Monday morning and take the cattle out into the fields - a full day by horse from the house and watch over them 24 hours a day for the whole week. To supplement his diet he would shoot an antelope each day (that's what the 6 bullets were for - he couldn't afford a second short) which he'd slaughter and cook over an open fire. Eat what can be eaten in one go, and leave the rest for the jackals - because there were no fridges. Thus he lived - sleeping under the stars - until Saturday when he returned home in time for Church on Sunday morning, and ready to get new bullets, rusks and dried meats for Monday morning. From the age of 14 - he basically took care of himself - and a big part of his job was keeping things like lions from eating the cattle. He killed a dozen by the time he was 15 (and each time he had to - that meant he had no extra food that day, since he had used the day's bullet for something else).
Sound rough ? His father had been a frontier trekker as a child. A childhood friend of a boy named Paul Kruger who would grow up to be the first president of our little republic. There's a well known tal
I'm sure the actual experience will change some of my views, but not as much as you think because I have actually raised kids. They just weren't my own. My brother is 9 years younger than me. Both my parents worked full time. From age 3 to 15 he was in my care for the majority of every day (here school is only in the mornings - so afternoons - I had to look after him).
I had a little sister even younger and I took care of her too. Now granted that wasn't full-on parenting. I didn't have to worry about budgets and such as well, but I was the one who had to put plasters on the ouchies. When they had nightmares, it was my bed they crawled into.
I would like to think I learned some things that way.
>Also, if you're still leaving "toys" out when your kids are teenagers, they'll start to hate you when they want to have their friends over
Like I said, I have no desire to teach my kids that conformity is anything but the most evil thing in the world. When they become teenagers they should believe that any friend who would judge them or laugh at them over such things isn't a friend worth having. They may still hate me for it anyway, too bad if they do, I still want them to grow up with that message. Somewhere along the way they'll have to learn that non-conformity is hard, it's VERY hard, I want them to learn and accept that - and also learn that it's worth the price. Besides, I think you're wrong, when I was a teenager my friends helped me break into dad's cupboard to borrow his porn collection and stare at their toys. I'll just spare my kids having to learn lockpicking skills to do that (I'm sure they'll pick those up elsewhere soon enough).
> Even when they're younger, if they want to have friends over for play dates, you'd best be cleaning up and getting dressed before their friends' moms come over to drop them off. When they are younger I imagine most of their friends will be the children of my friends. Well I don't hide the toys when my friends visit, they don't hide it when I visit them. They all agree with my beliefs - many of them were raised that way.
These things seem unimaginable to you Americans' with your conservative culture, but I live in the most liberal city in my country (which is not America). That kind of stuff just doesn't raise an eyebrow here. Most people don't notice the toys and porn lying around until somebody points it out to them.
> "damn, the old man was right. I look like a fucking IDIOT with all this shit on my body."
He's made that argument. Thing is, heavy metal is old enough that the first fans are over 50 now, I know a few such people. I don't think they look like idiots. In fact, I look at them and feel proud of the proof they carry that they never sold out. I would like to look like that one day.
Self-expression is by nature superficial and narcissistic, they are also an important component of freedom. If we cannot look the way we want, we cannot be the way we want.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop me if this is a stupid question... but could THAT be what dark matter really is ? Could 95% of the mass of the universe be in tiny less-than-atomic-sized black holes ?
>It will. It's just another fad after all.
I'm not so sure you're right. It's already outlived every social network before it (by which I mean total lifespan from foundation to demise) - and it doesn't even seem to have peaked in users yet.
Several attempts at competition have come and gone - twice from the mighty google (and one of those arguably had a better user-experience to start with) and still it remains the behemoth of most people's online experience.
There may be more to this than just a fad. I think part of it may be in their internal approach to running the company. They seem to seriously focus on being an awesome place to work who can get the best of the best coding minds. A friend of mine was a google engineer, she just left them for facebook - she actually took a paycut to do that (granted she was with google in Zurich which is the best paid development office in the WORLD - she would take a paycut for ANY other job).
If you look at their job ads they include this choice line: "Most developers are used to weeks or months between writing code and it reaching production. At facebook, your code will be in production on the busiest website in the world within days."
Now doesn't that sound exciting ? Scary? Challenging ? The kind of thing that the true geniusses of our field love ?
Maybe, just maybe, facebook is doing well because they offer a service their users find valuable, their customers benefit from (and I am well aware that those aren't the same people) and they give their technologists the creative free reign to make magic ?
>Samsung Galaxy Class Starship at T-Mobile
I don't know if the mixture of Star Trek (post-scarcity society - by definition incapable of supporting a capitalist economy) with a capitalist symbol such as a corporation was a deliberate irony but either way - I lol'd.
>Do you consider those socialists to be socialists according to your definition?
Sometimes. Only when it happens in a democracy - where every individual had equal amounts of power to support or prevent those initiatives. The more democratic, the more socialist is becomes. In a libertarian socialism, it's perfectly compatible since the SAME people who are sacrificing some of their labour have CHOSEN to do so.
>I also do not see how an anarcho capitalist society can enforce a thing such as mandatory "free" healthcare/education. Who is collecting the dues, and how are they not a form of gov't?
I never said "mandatory" many anarco-capitalist see these are well served through voluntary charity - that is the same goal, it just doesn't need a government. Even without that, it can still happen, anarchisms are not devoid of law, just of government, the people make the laws by direct democratic votes - but they are still laws. Indeed the most common critisizm against anarchism is that it can devolve into a tyranny of the majority, this is why most anarchist favour massive decentralization - to keep the voting pools very small, exactly to reduce that risk.
>As long as the society treats men equally under the law, there is nothing preventing said laborer from enjoying the fruits of his labor as he sees fit.
No, in capitalism ONLY business owners see the fruits of their labour. Labour sold is not always sold at a loss (otherwise profit cannot exist). In true socialism, all businesses MUST be owned by ALL who work there, the management done by democratic vote rather than authority and the profits divided evenly. Some variations have incentive bonusses to encourage hard work (a greater share of the profits for those who work harder).
That said - in theory this is quite possible in capitalism, it's that possibility which socialist libertarians are using to build our ideal systems within the current system. But they are at a major disadvantage. True cooperations aren't even LEGAL in many countries (Britain for one) as the law holds that somebody MUST take final responsibility and therefore MUST have final authority (though there are sufficient leeway that variations do exist in Britain), most countries also do not grant advantages like limited liability to cooperations. So the problem is - all men and all forms of business are NOT equal under the law.
>The philosophy of socialism that I have described is incompatible with capitalism (free markets), because it desires fairness in outcomes
There's a huge difference between free markets and capitalism. Don't conflate the terms. Socialism DEPENDS on free markets just like Capitalism does - but socialism is NEVER compatible with capitalism.
> in order to create this fairness, it must take the power of the state and use unfair laws to create "fair" outcomes.
Wrong. There are other ways. Again I refer you to socialist libertarianism - which has no state to speak off, nor any state power to use. State-socialism became quite successfull for a part of the 20th century, so everybody assumes it's the only kind. Which is quite sad since it's probably the LEAST effective and certainly the WORST kind.
I am a socialist, and I despise the very IDEA of governments. If anything, I want LESS government than right libertarians want.
>if it were entirely voluntary, it could accomplish the entirety of its goals under capitalistic free markets
False. Capitalism is FILLED with coercion. The vast majority of people MUST take ANY job they can get under ANY terms they can get it - and dare not ever question the authority of their bosses. If they disobey - they are fired, which is tantamount to starvation. That is coercion by the threat of death.
The only things that make it slightly LESS coercive are socialist ideas like charity and wellfare - which can take a bit of the sting out of the capitalist coercion. Not enough to make it just or equitable or non-coercive. Just enough to keep the unemployed alive- which benefits the
Not long ago (just two generations ago) a person who hit puberty were expected to hold down a job and pay their own way - and get married.
The suggestion that today they cannot make a decision about their own bodies is completely idiotic and my dad just realized that.
Now my dad is a deeply faithful Christian, so you'll have to accept that in trying to explain his position I will use Christian terminology.
That position was: "This is what God wants you to do, this is what he expects of you. But we are all sinners, which is not an excuse to sin without a care, but it does mean that sometimes - we all make mistakes. You might make a mistake on this count. The Bible says 'do not kill' but if my son gets in a bar-fight and hits somebody too hard and kills him I would still stand by him and visit him in prison. In the same way, if you make a mistake on THIS sin, then I will also stand by you - and at least help you to try and mitigate the consequences."
Anything else is not only unrealistic but also un-Christian. You cannot profess to be a Christian and then expect perfect compliance with the law of God since a fundamental principle of Christianity is that nobody is CAPABLE of following the law of God exactly - indeed that ALL people break ALL the laws ALL the time. That's what Christians need Jesus FOR.
The only variation is one of degree. Christians TRY to obey the law out of grattitude for salvation but they do so KNOWING it's a lost cause.
Expecting children to never break the law about sex before marriage - not EVER is silly.
And it's a thousand times more silly now. Until very recently keeping that law meant saving your virginity for a couple of years, maybe 5 for the spinsters - and staying married for life was a 20 year commitment (because life expectancy was 40 or less).
Now kids are hitting puberty earlier than ever before, and the time after that before marriage is practical is as long as the marriages themselves used to be. That was NOT God's plan by any reasonable reading.
Then there is the potential consequences. One night of oops I went too far used to mean at worst that you got pregnant. Now it could KILL you. Jesus himself declared that the penalty for adultery should NOT be death, so how is teaching safe-sex not DIRECTLY in line with those teachings ?
>Point stands, you want the authority and it isn't a good thing when a school or anyone else tries to undermine it.
It is not undermining my authority to teach my children things I didn't teach them about things I didn't want them to know. It merely means I didn't do my JOB as a parent. It's the difference between condoning something and merely acknowledging it's existence. Parents who deny the existence of what they don't condone are bad parents. They are the only ones who think it "undermines their authority" when somebody else goes and tell their kids about the stuff they denied the existence off.
I sure as hell don't condone shooting people, but I won't pretend to my kids that guns don't exist. I don't condone violence - but I am not stupid enough to imagine that if I refuse to teach them self-defence they will never be attacked.
I have no problem with teaching your moral values, but teach responsible behavior AS WELL. Especially when the most basic principle of your moral belief system states that following those morals without mistakes is NOT humanly possible.
>If that definition were actually true, socialists wouldn't be in such love with things like free education and healthcare. In order for any such services to be provided for free, they must be paid for by someone; and the system of free benefits guarantee that the people who benefit have not put in equal effort; yet benefits are to be equal regardless.
But not ALL socialists support such initiatives. So they are not part of the concept of socialism. Many socialists do - but that's because they believe the over-all gain to society from free education and healthcare , and the increase in everybodies profits out of having them are far higher than what it costs. This is not technically socialism however, since there are even anarco-capitalist systems that include similar arrangements.
Sometimes that logic is definitely correct as well. One example is public roads. The only country I know off that ever tried to have all roads built privately was the USA - they did away with it very soon (back in the 1920s) because it was an unmitigated disaster. Roads companies didn't take the most efficient path between two cities, because big businesses well OFF that path would pay them kickbacks to make sure the roads passed their business property.
That meant every road user was subsidizing the cost of saving those businesses from relocating. If anything that's a worse cost on the economy than building roads out of tax money.
>Unequal efforts yielding equal outcomes means that someone's profit from their labor is being forcibly taken to benefit another.
Well, no system is perfect, socialism in the form advocated by the American left has a significant problem there, the same problem exists on a much bigger scale in capitalism though. Libertarian socialism on the other hand for example tries very hard to do away with the problem entirely by turning all enterprises into cooperations run by the people who work there, massively decentralizing all government and using direct-democracy to run a neighbourhood. That way the people who make the law (and set the tax rates) are the people who actually have to live with the consequences, and if those consequences aren't good - they can change it.
Now some neighbourhoods will choose to tax-fund a school, others will choose to have their schools run as business cooperatives. Socialist Libertarians will never tell you which one is right because we believe there IS no right. What works in one community may not work the same way in another, that's why every community should have the power and freedom to decide their own priorities and find systems and solutions that work for THEM.
>People tend to think of free education and healthcare as the markers of a proper socialist society. Do you disagree with them?
Not people who actually studied philosophy. They are the markers of the modern-day left's VERSION of socialism. That is currently the largest socialist movement around but it is not the only one, it's not even the only ACTIVE one. This is partly a difference between terms-of-art and common-meaning of words but it's really more a case of associating elements of the currently-popular version of an idea with all versions of the idea even though they don't all share it.
Until quite recently (on historical scales) socialist libertarians were a major force in politics even in the USA. The May Day uprisings in New York in 1895 were led by socialist libertarians who gave their lives to secure the 40-hour work-week for example. We honor them with a global holiday every year on the 1st of May. The vast majority of people don't remember what that holiday is about or the people who were unjustly executed (framed for murder) to make it happen. But people not knowing or remembering something doesn't mean it didn't happen.
>You're treating socialism as a purely economic philosophy. I disagree; it influences the political system as well, as it suggests what gov't is supposed to be doing.
Terms of art again. Socialism IS a purely economic philosophy. It
Would that be the same 50 million people that these CEO's previously refused to give coverage to on the grounds of pre-existing conditions ?
The old joke goes: "A bank is an institution that will loan you money provided you can prove you don't need to borrow it."
Apparently in America a health-insurance company is an institution that will cover the cost of healthcare provided you can prove you don't need any healthcare.
Neither of those scenarios would prove either of the things you propose.
Nearly all the kids pass would prove the teacher cheated.
Nearly all the kids fail would prove the test was above appropriate standards OR that the teacher sucked- but not determine which.
See real classrooms follow what statisticians call a "normal" distribution. If the teacher is good and the test is on standard you will always see the exact same end result (all other things being equal):
25% of students fail.
25% of students get over 75%
The other 50% pass with average marks.
Any other distribution means something is wrong. More than 50% average and exceptional students ? Test was too easy or the teacher cheated.
Less than that: test was too hard or the teacher incompetent.
Your version of the result cannot actually exist, but even if you adapt them to the variations from normal that I just cited then they still don't prove anything about the teacher - not until you can somehow independently prove that the level of the test was correct for the material.
>>...because they just don't make bigots like they used to.
>Not for lack of trying...
That's the purpose of this particular clause. Their getting annoyed by all those school teachings that make it harder to raise your kids to be as blinkered in their bigotry as you are.
> No, you may NOT take the car tonight. I don't care what you think, you aren't going to a sleepover at your girlfriend's house.
Well, as my dad used to say about my little sister and her first boyfriend when his father made a rule along those lines: "If they want to fuck no amount of rules about sleep-overs are going to stop them. All we've GOT is the trust that they will remember the things we taught them. If they then decide to do it anyway, then I would PREFER they do it in my house so I can at least stop them from doing it stupidly."
My dad is a strong proponent of abstinence-until-marriage but at least he isn't an idiot who thinks nobody ever makes a mistake even if they AGREE with his position (as my sister did). He taught abstinence, but he taught condoms AS WELL.
For the record, she was 14 at the time he said that.
>If you don't allow insurers to price their services based on pre-existing conditions then insurance will become a good deal for those with pre-existing conditions and a poor deal for those without pre-existing conditions.
Except that wasn't what they did, they explicitly refused to cover people with pre-existing conditions at all. Now that's a complete healthcare failure since it means the people who actually NEEDED coverage the most weren't eligible for it at all.
Actually that has been (sort of) tried, though not (as far as I know) in the USA.
In South Africa there is a private medical aid (our term for medical insurance) called Discovery who has a program called Vitality.
The vitality program does not directly affect premiums, but it gives financial incentives and rewards for certain healthy living practises. Specifically partnerships offerring free gym memberships (excercise is good). a 50% discount on movie tickets and cheaper hotel and air prices (watching movies and taking regular holidays both reduce stress - which is one of the most effective ways to reduce other health issues).
By doing this they managed to keep their membership healthier than average and for years were the cheapest medical insurer you could get as a result. Further steps impacted the premiums directly - for example if you haven't smoked in 6 months your premiums are quoted cheaper, running regular health-screenings at people's offices to help with early diagnosis of risk factors (early treatment is cheaper than later - and preventative care is cheaper than cures) and even going so far as to have certain schemes available only to people who live in coastal provinces (which are much cheaper for level of coverage) on the basis that statistically in South Africa people who live in coastal cities are significantly healthier (lower stress culture and a healthier, less polluted environment.
So while not entirely what you propose - the idea of tying insurance rates to risk factors in medical insurance (as it is done in other insurance types) is quite feasible.
These days though Discovery is no longer cheap - even on the cheapest plans but it's not because their system failed, that happened because they managed to get all the biggest employers in the country to agree to "must sign-up" partnerships with them.
Basically the employers get to do employer-co-funded insurance (for which there is a tax benefit so most large employers do that) at a rate that's much cheaper for the employer but only if they agree to demand that all staff ONLY insure with discovery. There was a law passed later which said if you already had insurance with one medical aid your employer cannot force you to change, but they can force any previously uninsured staff to join the plan they choose as a condition of your employment contract.
Getting enough of those deals put Discovery in a position where they rule most of the market without having to actually be priced competitively -they can charge more than the competition for much less coverage and still get customers who don't want to risk their jobs to save on premiums.
I'd take state-insurance systems like the British NHS over THAT mess to be honest.
>Nazi - National Socialist.
That name was never actually accurate. The Nazi's were only socialist in the same way that the People's Republic of China is a Republic.
>Socialism is the political ideology that wants to manage everything for the "good" of society.
False. There are many forms of socialism, ranging from totalitarian forms to anarchist forms of and various in between. I define my own views as libertarian socialist (which is one step to the right of anarchist socialist). There are anarchist forms of communism as well (and communism != socialism). The best way to define socialism is to look at what these things have in common and there is only one single attribute they all share: the belief that the profit of productive labour must be owned by the performers of that labour.
Capitalism puts ownership in the hands of those who invest in labour, socialism puts it in the hands of those who DO the labour. That's the only true definition. Various forms have had different levels of success in actually achieving this aim (logical as they took radically different approaches to it), but that aim is the definition of socialism.
To give an example the Spanish anarchists gave ownership of factories to the workers, told them they owned the profits but tried to convince them not to maximize those profits. That was a complete disaster. Most socialist libertarians would also have corporations replaced by worker-owned and democratically managed cooperations or mutualisms, but would WANT those cooperations to compete with each other in a free market for profit, getting the advantages of a free market without the disadvantages of capitalism.
Facism on the other hand is really just another name for corporatism. It's crony-capitalism (the kind right libertarians also oppose). The combination of state and capitalist power. Which really means that as the ultimate state-capitalism the USSR was much more fascist than communist.
>Such as removing Jews and other undesirables from society, for its own "good".
Utterly false. The economic philosophies of various brands of socialism are unrelated to and can exist independently of political or ideological positions such as racism. Removing the Jews was based on outright racism, of a very specific variety: create a common enemy and blame them for all the ills in your country. This gets you popular with your population, then turn them on that "enemy". The Nazis just ended up taking a very old strategy a bit further than most. The best modern-day equivalent would be how the republican party entertains the religious right's fear of gay-rights and promises to help fight the "great pink conspiracy".
The greatest irony of all is that the things Hitler accused the Jewish culture off was really not true at all of the Jews in Germany. The rich Jewish banking families Hitler rallied against were all Sephardic Jews - who lived in the Latin countries (primarily Spain). The Jews of Germany were Askanasi, not Sephardis and unlike their distant cousins had been languishing in poverty for centuries before Hitler showed up. Rich elites wanting to control the world ? They were slum-living poor people !
But of course Hitler knew all too well that most Germans didn't know the difference between Sephardic and Askanasi.
>Look up the wiki page on Nazi-ism, and you'll note that they had "anti-Capitalist" tendencies - that's because they were a socialist ideology.
Anti-capitalism doesn't equal socialism. There are thousands of economic philosophies and only one of them is called "capitalism" supporting ANY of the others is anti-capitalism but the majority of those others aren't socialist in the LEAST. In fact, even among the philosophies that CALL themselves socialist only a handful actually ARE socialist.
>They also opposed Communism, but that's because they were National socialists, as opposed to international socialists.
Communism != Socialism, they are related but not identical and the differences are important.
I suppose the will of the people don't really matter when those people aren't Americans ?
Are you actually advocating that when foreign people want to get rid of dictators America should provide military aid to the dictators and prevent the civilians from gaining the civil liberties they are fighting for if the dictators have been good enough at kissing White-house pucker-holes ?
>If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they?
They did, every single precursor to the ipad both real and fictional had a used multiple (indeed most) of the same design elements - all the way back to the slabs used by the crew of the Enterprise on Star Trek:TNG.
There is a lot of those elements in the original Palm as well (the only real difference is the hand-held form-factor and the scribe-pen).
The original Microsoft Tablet-PC's which predate the ipad by about 6 years had nearly all those elements in common too. They just didn't sell very well.
>And there's no comments section to concentrate the collective stupidity of mankind.
I thought that was what Fox News was for ?
Reminds me of my childhood... hell I was less than 13 years old when I built a cross-bow-slingshot, I am quite proud thinking back of the very clever springed trigger mechanism I had designed in my head and made for it. A wooden T-bar with two eye-bolts on the edges, inner-tube bands with a leather socket and a notch to keep the stone.
It worked beautifully, though it was horribly inaccurate. But this may have something to do with the fact that I didn't invent an aiming mechanism of any sort for it. On the other hand it could shoot a pebble at least three times as far as the hand-held slingshot granddad had made me a few years earlier which inspired it.
>However Camping and Survival Skills, don't really make you a good leader. It just means you can fend for yourself better
Self-reliance is a critical component of leadership. If you cannot rely on yourself and don't have faith in your own abilities as an individual - you will never accept leadership (why would you want others to trust you if you don't trust yourself?) and if placed in that position you will not inspire confidence (people can instantly tell if a leader doesn't believe he can do the job).
Thousands of studies have confirmed what we've known for decades: your immune system cannot learn to deal with any microbes unless it is exposed to it.
In fact your own damn example proves the point: vaccines. Deliberate infection with a weakened form of a virus to assist the body in developing an immune response before it may have to face the full-blown version.
For bacterial infections this is doubly true. More-over a few years ago a study (there was a slashdot article about it) found that Staph actually fights off other infections when it's externally on the skin (it's the most common bacteria in 'dirt') merely getting dirty reduces your risk of other infections (staph INTERNALLY on the other hand is a dangerous infection and often requires treatment - on the other hand, if you have had a few small staph infections you greatly reduce the future intensity of such infections since your body has developed an immune response to it).
HIV is the exception to the rule - the body actually DOES have an immune response to it, and the antibodies it develops fights it back just like any other virus. The problem with HIV is it attacks white-blood cells which are a crucial component of the immune system - so even as your body is trying to fight it back it's ability to fight infections in general are worsened.
Technically there is no such thing as an "AIDS" infection you can be immune to - AIDS is a condition caused by numerous possible things. The most common by far being the HIV virus but severe drug abuse for example can also cause AIDS. AIDS is simply an acquired (e.g. not born-with) immune deficiency. When you have AIDS - it's some other infection that kills you because you have no immune system to fight it off.
If a bone-marrow transplant recipient (who has had his immune system killed off by radiation) gets in contact with any microbe he will develop full blown AIDS too.
So yes, eating a dirty hotdog, getting a little dirty etc. does make your immune system stronger. Using antibacterial soaps and that kind of crap makes it weaker - because you prevent your body from getting into contact with germs. Small contact, through the skin (a wonderful protective organ) is the bodies only way to develop an immune response early - the same one it will need if it gets a severe infection.
Of course you also develop an immune response during a severe infection but the extra time for this to happen could mean you die before it's done (in the case of the diseases we vaccinate against: this is practically guaranteed), and not having had small infections greatly increase the risk that a somewhat larger infection will turn into a severe one before the body can react and learn to recognize and fight back the microbe in question.
It's not so hard to understand is it? Your body is ONLY immune to two things: the diseases you gained a genetic immunity to from your parents (very, very, very few) and the microbes you have been in contact with.
In other words, if you don't get dirty, you get dead.
>I'm curious how limiting 9-year-old's access to pornography somehow triggers the downfall of democracy? I wasn't aware the operation of a free state was dependent on unfettered access to Two Girls One Cup.
Freedom of speech is a vital component of democracy. Freedom of speech is about defending unpopular speech - popular speech don't need to be defended.
If you don't teach your children from a young age that they have a right to express their opinions -even the unpopular ones - and a duty to defend that right for others, then most of them will never really learn that lesson.
More-over the desire to restrict what expression children can see (for the purpose of controlling what they think) is the single most effective bludgeon by which governments and corporations can and have managed to restrict what adults can see, hear, read and think.
From the believe that children cannot handle hearing about sex, comes laws to prevent adults from talking about it. There's a reason "think of the children" is a cliché.
It gets even more insidious than that - it becomes a tool for punishing youth for thinking and saying things that adults don't want them to say and think - so we end up branding 14 year old girls as sex offenders for life because they distributed naked pictures of a minor. The fact that she WAS the minor in the picture and she "distributed" it to her boyfriend via her cellphone doesn't get considered.
She can never live near a school, she'll have issues with the government over her own children... she's punished for life, because she expressed something that adults don't want young people to express - her own sexuality.
That my friend is evil, very extremely evil - and the self-censorship that follows is the perfect destruction to any concept of a free society.
> And, the females with whom I am intimate
The what you are what with ? Oh... I get it. Good one, you almost had me for a second there.
>>If you choose to ignore them, how does it make any difference if you learned them or not ?
>Are you advocating ignorance? I thought you were the one advocating exposure?
No, I'm asking you - since you say it's important to know them whether you agree with and follow them or not. I'm asking you to justify that position. I cannot see a logical reason why it's important to know something you don't believe in. I don't feel the need to know the intricacies of every religion in the world because I don't believe in them. I respect other people's right to believe in them - but to me if I am interested then I'm reading them as mythology - or as an interesting look into ancient people's thinking, but I don't feel it's important I do that, just interesting.
>It's in the plan. They are mixed-race Obama style, and they have friends with gay parents. I'm sure they will develop biases, but our goal is tolerance.
That's a good starting point - but you're also a person who called every sexual fetish you don't share "not normal". That's not tolerant.
>>but pretty much EVERYTHING else they can learn from a parent is NOT good.
>Strongly disagree - and I think you do as well. In your other posts,
You misunderstood my argument. I am in favor of exposure - I'm not in favour of authoritative parenting. I think parents make horrible teachers - and teachers make horrible parents and neither should try to do the other ones job. Parents should be guides - exposure + guidance = good parenting in my book. But they shouldn't be teachers, they shouldn't set a curiculum of what should be learned and what should not. Life itself must be the curiculum - and parents the guides who help the children to make sense of what they experience.
I think modern parents are so obsessed with protecting children they've come around a vicious circle. They're so concerned with keeping children alive that they have no option left anymore to let children live.
My grandfather told me how - in his childhood - death was different from now. That was before strong pain meds like morphine. Most people died at home, in pain. When they were getting close to it, the entire family - of all ages - gathered around them, holding their hands and seeing them off. Watching somebody die in agony was a normal thing for any child who could walk. It was considered a duty to be there. He also said "back then - everybody was conscious until the last moment they weren't. There was no going to sleep under morphine and never waking up, and while what we've done since is much kinder to the dying, it's made us lose something incredibly valuable for the living."
That same grandfather was, at the age of 14, sent to be a cattleboy. Cattleboy back then meant that on Sunday night great grandma packed him a backpack with dried meat, rusks and 6 bullets - not one to spare, bullets were expensive. He'd ride out on Monday morning and take the cattle out into the fields - a full day by horse from the house and watch over them 24 hours a day for the whole week. To supplement his diet he would shoot an antelope each day (that's what the 6 bullets were for - he couldn't afford a second short) which he'd slaughter and cook over an open fire. Eat what can be eaten in one go, and leave the rest for the jackals - because there were no fridges.
Thus he lived - sleeping under the stars - until Saturday when he returned home in time for Church on Sunday morning, and ready to get new bullets, rusks and dried meats for Monday morning. From the age of 14 - he basically took care of himself - and a big part of his job was keeping things like lions from eating the cattle. He killed a dozen by the time he was 15 (and each time he had to - that meant he had no extra food that day, since he had used the day's bullet for something else).
Sound rough ? His father had been a frontier trekker as a child. A childhood friend of a boy named Paul Kruger who would grow up to be the first president of our little republic. There's a well known tal
I'm sure the actual experience will change some of my views, but not as much as you think because I have actually raised kids. They just weren't my own. My brother is 9 years younger than me. Both my parents worked full time. From age 3 to 15 he was in my care for the majority of every day (here school is only in the mornings - so afternoons - I had to look after him).
I had a little sister even younger and I took care of her too. Now granted that wasn't full-on parenting. I didn't have to worry about budgets and such as well, but I was the one who had to put plasters on the ouchies. When they had nightmares, it was my bed they crawled into.
I would like to think I learned some things that way.
>Also, if you're still leaving "toys" out when your kids are teenagers, they'll start to hate you when they want to have their friends over
Like I said, I have no desire to teach my kids that conformity is anything but the most evil thing in the world. When they become teenagers they should believe that any friend who would judge them or laugh at them over such things isn't a friend worth having. They may still hate me for it anyway, too bad if they do, I still want them to grow up with that message. Somewhere along the way they'll have to learn that non-conformity is hard, it's VERY hard, I want them to learn and accept that - and also learn that it's worth the price.
Besides, I think you're wrong, when I was a teenager my friends helped me break into dad's cupboard to borrow his porn collection and stare at their toys. I'll just spare my kids having to learn lockpicking skills to do that (I'm sure they'll pick those up elsewhere soon enough).
> Even when they're younger, if they want to have friends over for play dates, you'd best be cleaning up and getting dressed before their friends' moms come over to drop them off.
When they are younger I imagine most of their friends will be the children of my friends. Well I don't hide the toys when my friends visit, they don't hide it when I visit them. They all agree with my beliefs - many of them were raised that way.
These things seem unimaginable to you Americans' with your conservative culture, but I live in the most liberal city in my country (which is not America). That kind of stuff just doesn't raise an eyebrow here. Most people don't notice the toys and porn lying around until somebody points it out to them.
> "damn, the old man was right. I look like a fucking IDIOT with all this shit on my body."
He's made that argument. Thing is, heavy metal is old enough that the first fans are over 50 now, I know a few such people. I don't think they look like idiots. In fact, I look at them and feel proud of the proof they carry that they never sold out.
I would like to look like that one day.
Self-expression is by nature superficial and narcissistic, they are also an important component of freedom. If we cannot look the way we want, we cannot be the way we want.