Health and welfare

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Hi!

Your opinion breaks down at this point.

How are you going to get everyone to participate in a single social environment? By force? By offering free t-shirts? By giving them a living wage in exchange for their participation?

If all I ever type in such an environment is "Hi!" every few weeks, does that alone entitle me to a year's income? Does it entitle me to 10% of your yearly income?

People will tend to meet the minimum requirements in exchange for a living wage. If you give me a house, put clothes on my back and food on my table every day for the rest of my life, and all that I have to do is select a smiley each day to express my mood, then that is all that I am going to do...

The idea about cultivating concern from the start of school would entail a lot more than just expressing one's mood. It would educate people on the equal worth of all humans. The system in place by its tiered nature contradicts this truth of the equality of all people. So right there is a concrete start that doesn't force anyone to contribute some minimum but which immerses people in an environment in which it's impossible to see some others as lesser or their needs less important than their own, which is a huge part of the problem of the imbalance of society as it is. I used Facebook as one example of something that makes a significant difference in the way people view strangers. A stranger is no longer a stranger but a friend's friend's friend. Etc. It's not the solution to all the inequality in the world but it's pretty remarkable I would say. There are lots of other steps like that that could be taken that don't in any sense "tax" people but instead from the beginning of their involvement in the movement enrich their lives at the same time it enriches others'. You kind of have to cultivate this culture early though or else have it be a really appealing hard-not-to-join one.

I agree people who look out for themselves are successful. But so are many who look out for each other. I have two very specific American subcultures in mind and the first (mainstream) is more every-man-for-himself but the second emphasizes strongly the moral imperative to put others first in order to get back the same unconditional caring and kindness. Such subcultures do exist and it's not necessary for modern society to be a competitive "lone wolf" one.

Keep dreaming about your ideal Utopian society. I used to think the same way, but I've come to the realization the world doesn't work that way. The best that has been achieved is the Nordic model.

Imagine what such a world would be like, based on equality.

How does a society operate on equality operate?
Should we date people we find ugly the same as good looking people? Should we treat a good doctor the same as a lousy one? Should we admire a homeless person the same as a nobel laureate?

There's a good story in the book "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Krackauer. The people live in a dystopia where beautiful people are forced to wear ugly masks, and smart people have to get implants that scramble their thoughts so that they can't focus on things. The idea that "human beings are of equal worth" reminds me of that story. It's obvious people are not equal, some people are better than other people, we are only conditioned to say that "we are equal" out of political concerns, but it's not true.

Well there probably would be no true equality as everyone is different......but everyone who wishes for a system that is not so class defined is not suggesting people with a skill for instance be prevented from pursuing it and using it. At least I certainly do not support the idea of limiting someone from using their knowledge skills ect........what would that help?

Yeah. that's what I was going for, something less class-defined. I know there will never be a Perfectland so I certainly wasn't talking about dating equality or all the truly uncontrollable aspects of how people will treat other people. As Trossit said the Nordic countries have pretty good models. Of course it would work a bit differently in the U.S. with all its ethnic/racial diversity and still-persistent legacies of discrimination that still keep some six-year-olds being funnelled into lower "castes" based partly on the lack of education they received before reaching first grade due to poverty.

It is not to me obvious some people are better than others. Everyone has a unique irreplaceable strength profile and I've believed this wholemindedly always, for the logical reason that every weakness is its own strength. Every roadblack you run into is a reason for your mind/body to find an alternate route. Nobody, nobody, lives without depending on other people's strengths because people are social animals. For everything from food to spiritual fulfillment and everything in between rest of Maslow's hierarchy. People exchange both weakness and strengths. These strengths just need to be recognized and fostered rather than dismissed as not useful or not present. And the weaknesses need to be tended to the way we'd want our own weaknesses tended to, whether they show up as an inability to put others first and share a surplus or the inability to not put others first and seize opportunities for onself. Now this is getting back into the more untreatable territory but it is very possible to have a more caring society with greater awareness of the need to attend to each other and not leave people literally on the streets etc. It's a potential humans have that has to be grown through education of various kinds.

I think I understand what you mean. You mean it in a social context. That we ought to be more inclusive. We ought to recognize the strengths a person has and encourage those, as opposed to punishing people for not living up to some standard. I would agree with that. I think we ought to make a persons weaknesses irrelevent by finding something they can do which does not stress their weakness.

Though classes are useful when they are based on a person's merits. For instance there are tiers in education like math, those more proficient in math have classes with other kids who are as proficient, and those less proficient are put in more remedial classes. I think that is useful rather than bunching everyone together in a single class.

The proficient kids are more motivated, they want to learn more. If they are all put in the same class they might not learn as much as time is spent educating those who are slower at picking up the material. It encourages progress.

people should be treated as humans?

do you know that the human norm is not the same as the treatment that you would like to see lived out. Human is as human does. Not... Human is as what human can be but often isn't.... If this capitalist corporate structure is too confining for you, it might help you to move to a socialist country, start a farm eating local and whats in season, and live off the land.

Here's what I know. In my high school I was in the college-preparatory track and my schedule made it so I had to sit in the "regular" class for governemnt/politics halfway through the year and the teacher turned on C-SPAN on the TV in the room for these students 90% of the time then sat behind his desk and put his feet up whereas he actually taught our class stuff. I think everyone has the capacity to learn things at a high level, including math, and while the intent of separating people into tiers based on original ability so that no one gets dragged down or confused is well-intentioned some intensive effort needs to be made to catch people in the "lower tiers" up cause from being a student kindergarten through high school and also tutoring and babysitting for such students more recently I have seen that teachers think the kids who start out bringing less talent to an academic area are incapable of improvement and they don't make a true effort to catch them up using individualized methods and an "I am not giving up on you" attitude.

I do admire that there are now many more specialized public high schools that allow students with specialized strengths to function, ie art/drama schools or science/math schools or technology-based schools, Improvement is being made I can see but not enough.

How this ties into the original health care rant of mine... umm... I guess this school proposal was a tangent identifying ways to treat people's needs as all equally important which the health care system does not do. I could write about 100 pages on how they could improve intensive (inpatient/daylong outpatient) mental health care services simply by restructuring but I am too... unfocused to do so at the moment. And it would only be my opinion.

Last edited by purchase on 21 Aug 2011, 8:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

It's not that it's too confining for me, it's that it leaves many people lying on the streets of every city sleeping under newspapers. That's unequivocally a problem. Capitalist doesn't have to mean inhumane.

And why should everyone who dislikes the capitalist corporate structure just leave.

1. how can they afford to move to another country(I know I couldn't.)
2. why not try to creat positive changes in ones own country?
too much corporatocracy does not really help anyone, regardless of what some might think.

Capitalism does not leave many people on the streets of every city sleeping under newspaper. Capitalism has provided upward mobility for the masses, and we would have far more poor people without it. There are 3 million people in the US who are homeless. We are a country of 300,000,000 people. Just like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is an issue because the national and international left makes it so. Something that affects .01% of the population doesn't deserve the endless amount of attention that the media gives it, but the issue of unfairness, inequality, and lack of compassion (running counter to leftist values) makes it so. Western Europe has a quarter of a tenth of a percent less homeless people, so despite all of their socialist welfare programs, they are not much better then we are.

If every american, homeless or not were to give a dollar towards an end-homeless now program, that would be 300 million dollars, and amount to no change AT ALL! The city of San Francisco dumps 200 million dollars every year into fighting homelessess over the last 20 years and that hasn't amount to anything, if anything... the problem has only gotten worse.

a greyhound ticket to Mexico or Canada, your passport, a few items, and your first month's rent can be had a few month's of work and saving. Nothing is instant, so to build your it'll take time but in a decade or so, you can be married to a sweet canadian or mexican on a beautiful farm over looking the pacific or somewhere in Alberta. You'll have access to more government resources and enjoy fruitful bounty of your labor, eat what's in season (so that you are not supporting unfair international trade) and live a more sustainable lifestyle.

In the end, you don't care about you the individual living in a socialist way, as there are slightly more socialist capitalistic options available to you everywhere in the world. With the availability of so many socialistic capitalistic countries for you to choose from, your end-goal must be to make those of us who don't want to live like you... live like you by fundamentally transforming one historically exceptional nation into a more socialistic one. There is only one United States, and many socialist alternatives that you like to romanticize. Don't screw up my only option.

What needs to happen is that the people living the lowliest lives are not living like stray animals. There will always be some amount of inequality but it is possible to bring the lowest standard of living up to a livable standard. It doesn't matter how many people live like that, NO ONE should be living like that and to point out the MANY who do is not overblowing anything.

A very major contributing factor to homelessness is mental illness. So the health care system needs restructuring to make mental health as much of a priority as other kinds of health cause it is just as important. The health care system needs to be centralized somehow, and I say this not based on a vague socialist agenda but from firsthand having seen the complete mess that the health care system now is where you can walk into a hospital unable to speak and they have NO information on you, they know NOTHING about your medical needs and things you can't have and medical history, what's worked and hasn't, so you have to explain everything from scratch. And the "brain doctors" don't communicate with the "body doctors" unless you make the introduction which is ridiculous since one's brain is an organ and besides that mental health is not located only in the brain but in the entire body, as the nervous system and all the other systems are intertwined and affect one another. So here I'm only talking about restructurings that don't even get into the money issue yet, restructurings that would increase efficiency and success at making people healthy and happy greatly... I can't think straight enough to type more at the moment but yes.