The archetypal experience of culture in the 1960s is very different than in 2020, few things have remained the same. — Judaka

Your position on 1960 vs. 2020 is just plain wrong, because:

You are missing the fact of cultural continuity.

The 'current' economy driving western civilization (be that French, Australian, or Finn) has been in force for at least the last 150 years--and longer. products change, corporate names are refreshed, companies merge, new factories are built for new technologies (transistors instead of tubes, then integrated circuits etched onto silicon, then...), management changes, consumer preferences change. Land barges with fins, then without fins; smaller cars vs. big cars; back to big cars; gas powered cars to electric cars.

Saks 5th Avenue was founded in 1860. It's still in business, but it is owned by the Hudsons Bay Company, which was founded in 1670. My favorite beer is Stella Artois, a Belgian pilsener; the brewery was founded in 1366. There are quite a few companies that have been in business for hundreds of years.

The language has not changed. New formal words and new slang has been added; other words have been dropped. Grammar remains the same. Pronunciation of words (accents) are by their nature always changing, but the meaning--however the word is spoken--changes very slowly, 999 times out of 1000. One might take a walk around the block; in 1960 the word was pronounced the way it is spelled. In some areas (like Detroit) the pronunciation is changing to something closer to 'bleck'.

While specieshood poses limits on what we can do (literally), social styles and moral norms change fairly rapidly, but not drastically. You might be less likely to be hanged for murder in 2020 than in 1960, but murder is about as frowned on now as then. Ditto for a lot of other crimes. The use of recreational drugs waxes and wanes over time, and for the most part you could get as high in 1960 as in 2020. Birth control which became widely available in the 1960s changed the sexual equation (to some extent), and that change is still in effect.

Life has changed more for women than heterosexual men; that is a significant change. Life for gay men has changed a great deal. Sex, however, has not changed; there are no new ways. What works in 2020 will work in 1960.

Changes come and go. Some people had groceries delivered to their homes in 1960. Later that became much less common; then it became more common again. Amazon may seem revolutionary, but in 1960 there were mail order catalogues from Sears, Wards, Spiegel. et al, selling a huge array of goods. At one time Sears even sold pre-fabricated houses; not mini-houses, full sized ones.

Maybe you spend too much time among your own age group. Get out more.

If you like to read, try something from the late 18th century--Boswell, for example. He was a lawyer, man about town, friend of Samuel Johnson. Better yet, try Samuel Pepys, 1633 1703. He was another man on the make, man about town. He kept a diary (in cypher) which now makes great reading. His daily comings and goings 300 years ago aren't all that much different than what a similar socially/sexually active guy might be doing now.

Here's a joke from 1960. It's a long, formulaic joke, but I am confident you will be able to understand all the words in it, and might even get the joke; you might even smile slightly.

A fisherman’s joke

The day after his wife disappeared in a kayaking accident, a Claddaghduff, an Irish man answered his door to find a grim-faced Constable & one waiting in the front yard. "We're sorry, Mr. O’ Flynn, but we have some information about your dear wife, Maureen" said one of the officers.

"Tell me! Did you find her?" Michael Patrick O’Flynn asked. The constables looked at each other and one said, "We have some bad news, some good news, and some really great news. Which would you like to hear first?

"Fearing the worst, Mr. O’ Flynn said, "Give me the bad news first." The constable said, "I'm sorry to tell you, sir, but early this morning we found your poor wife's body in the bay." "Lord sufferin' Jesus and Holy Mother of God!" exclaimed O’ Flynn. Swallowing hard, he asked,

"What could possibly be the good news?" The constable continued, "When we pulled the late, departed poor Maureen up, she had 12 of the best-looking Atlantic lobsters that you have ever seen clinging to her. Haven't seen lobsters like that since the 1960's, and we feel you are entitled to a share in the catch."

Stunned, Mr. O’ Flynn demanded, "Glory be to God, if that's the good news, then what's the really great news?

The constable replied, "We're gonna pull her up again tomorrow."

Cultural / Societal / Civilizational collapse could be defined as:

the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. — ssu

This definition fits the 'fall of the Roman Empire' fairly well. In 476 Odoacer rang down the curtain on the Roman Empire (according to many historians). It may have been this German fellow who sent the regalia of Roman office to Constantinople, recognizing that the western Roman government was defunct.

'Roman identity' didn't evaporate over night, of course; but it did begin to become less specific. The city of Rome was physically deteriorating, and if I remember, Ravenna, NE of Rome, was the occasion of government. The western provinces were undergoing their own transitions. The center did not hold, but the empire didn't descend into darkness--the dark ages.

In Britain, the Roman establishment left fairly quickly, and the empty property was abandoned. The native locals, by and large, did not move in and redecorate. For one thing, they were preoccupied by another aspect of the decline of the empire -- population movement. Two German groups moved to Britain (the Angles and Saxons) which accelerated the demise of the Gaelic culture. The Gaelic people (in England, anyway) weren't wiped out--they were gradually submerged into the AS / Viking population.

Holy Mother Church, operating out of Rome in Western Europe, mounted and sustained a long effort to convert pagans to Christianity which was more or less successful. The collapse of Roman government and military, the movement of people, and the infusion of a vigorous new religion are all part of the collapse of western empire and the rise of Western Civilization. Languages changed too. Latin was localized, becoming Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, et al. Many of the former local languages (Gaulish, Frankish, etc.) ceased and desisted.

Other civilizations--in the Western Hemisphere, for instance--suffered a fast collapse after the Spanish/Portuguese/English conquests. Different than the Roman collapse, but collapsed, never the less.

Western European Civilization appears to be neither declining nor decaying. In some ways it has become the global civilization (industrialism, capitalism, centralized. managerial states, media, trade, et cetera). Has it peaked? Too early to tell. Will it now decline if it has peaked? IF it has peaked, then it has to either plateau or decline, because that's what the word "PEAK" requires.

What is cultural collapse? — Judaka

That is the question, isn't it.

We probably can't see it except through a long-range rear-view mirror.

Is our culture decaying? — ssu

Maybe, but how would we know? Is there some reliable measure of cultural health analogous to individual physical health--blood pressure, white blood cell count, the ratio between high density lipids (good) and low density lipids (bad), weight, etc.? In what year did "our culture" begin? What is "cultural decay"? Is decay different than change? Yada, yada, yada.

I suspect that a lot of people thought their culture was decaying even as it was gathering steam, ever since a novel method of knapping rocks into tools was introduced on March 5th, 70,258 BCE.

Go back or forward sixty years and there'll be no familiarity, you'll feel like a stranger in your own country. — Judaka

@Judaka, who is 20 something, thinks a changing culture becomes indecipherable over a 60 year span; maybe in less time than that.

My father died at 102 in 2007. He grew up farming with horses. He had fond memories of air shows where a plane was brought into town on a rail car and assembled. The pilot flew around, did some tricks, and then the plane was taken apart and moved to another small town. (The range of the planes was short.) A few years later (1927) Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, non stop. During his life radio, television, computers, jet passenger planes, men landing on the moon, distant planet fly-bys, organ transplants, and so on and so forth became commonplace.

Q: How did people communicate in 1960 without cell phones?
A: When they were away from home they could use pay phones, which back then were everywhere. 5¢ or 10¢ was all that it took to make a local call. Phone booths usually had a very thick white-page and a yellow-page phone directory, listing just about everybody in the city. If there was no phone book, directory assistance was free. The sound quality of the calls were almost always at least very good, but there were no apps. If you wanted to take pictures, you used a camera with a role of film in it. If you wanted to know how to get to some location, you looked at a printed map. If you wanted to know what was happening, you bought a newspaper.

Judaka: borrow a book from the library, or buy one to read on your phone--something like The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, published in1949. There is some slang you might not get, but I am confident that you will be able to understand 1949 English, and that the low-lifes depicted in 1949 Chicago will be comprehendible. Or try Incident At Owl Creek Bridge, a short story by Ambrose Bierce published in 1890. It's a great story and again I predict that you will be able to understand 1890 English.

Read more history. You might be surprised to discover that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both put their pants on one leg at a time. Life in ancient Egypt MIGHT be incomprehensible, but you'd be able to understand what people were doing in Boston in 1776.

But H/Gs practiced limited agriculture too, and so do everyday modern people in their gardens — darthbarracuda

H/Ging goes back maybe 200,000 years. What evidence have you heard of that they were gardening (or some sort of limited agriculture) that far back? And how do you define 'limited agriculture'?

H/G had to be very good observers of plant and animal life in order to successfully hunt and forage. They probably knew a thing or two about how plants and animals reproduce, and maybe they planted a nut every now and then. But so do squirrels, and we don't think of them as farmers.

Agriculture is by definition sedentary; how do you square the necessary travel of hunter gatherers with a settled lifestyle? Like H/Ging, agriculture demands skill and tools. l don't have any special knowledge about this; I just don't see H/G and agriculture very compatible.

The question of good faith lending, admissions, and awarding degrees is complex.

High school advisors should themselves be aware, and help students be aware that universities look out for their own interests first. Admission, even awarding scholarships, doesn't mean that a useful or remunerative degree and satisfying career is in the offing. Universities require solid enrollment figures for income first, and as a general justification or their raison d'être.

Education costs have been rising for a good 40 years, so it should not come as a surprise that degrees cost money.

Whether a degree was worth the money may not be obvious for several years (or more) after graduation. I have a bachelors degree in English and a graduate degree in educational psychology. The English degree had much less immediate job-getting value than the graduate degree, even though the BA was worth much more in terms of learning. In the longer run, the English major (and general education) was worth it many times over in personal value. (I graduated in 1968)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts what fields have expanding, stable, and declining job numbers. Honest advising should steer students who will need to earn their way in the world away from majors which lead to few jobs. As much as one might like dance, French poetry, or art there just aren't many jobs in those areas. If one is independently wealthy, majoring in underwater basket weaving (an old cliche from my student days) is as good a choice as any.

Credit and debt education must occur In high school. I think a lot of student borrows have a very poor understanding of just how difficult discharging a $30,000 loan can be, especially when they want to take on more debt for a car and a home. Never mind a $50,000 loan, or more.

College was affordable when I was a student (1960s) because the state subsidized education, making fees quite affordable even for students who were kind of poor. One could get a work-study job on campus which would go a long ways towards paying for fees, for instance. The states withdrew from higher education subsidy under increasing demands for tax reduction. The burden of cost was shifted from the collective to individual families.

Would that cabal be called "the aristocracy"? I think that is a bit too conspirational. Farming and cities emerging because of their utility (and necessity) is likely more closer to the truth. — ssu

Right. That's what I think, too. The theory floated in Against The Grain is interesting, but I don't see an aristocracy, an elite, or a state existing before there was the material basis to support that kind of expensive socio-political organization. It seems likely that people gradually drifted into settled agriculture because there were some advantages to that kind of lifestyle, compared to exclusive hunting and gathering.

Once there was a solid material foundation on which elites could build, they did. And in retrospect it my look like the elite seduced the people into farming. That idea is not only conspiratorial, how would the elite have known that there even was any potential, and how much, in farming?

The technology of production developed before any social consequences could exist.

Many of us 'old people' (past 70, at least) find that it is difficult to get rid of stuff--not just really good stuff, but junk too. It seems like anything that has been on the table or counter for more than a day has gained some sort of entitlement. So millions of us are fighting with accumulating paper that we don't desire, actually do not want, but can't get rid of.

That might look like "attachment" but it is really a problem of perspective.

Quite a few people became addicted quickly after their first encounter with alcohol, meth, cocaine, weed, heroin, or something else. They didn't so much desire these substances as their brains were so constituted to be a trap ready to close once the substance came along. Some people are biochemically prone to addiction. For some more complicated psychological reason, some people are prone to become overly attached to other people.

Granted, people can get addicted by patient effort; I liked the idea of smoking enough to keep at it until I was addicted. Stupid, but advertising and peer influence works. I haven't smoked for 25 years, but I still have the urge sometimes.

Then there is GREED--one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Some people desire more (gold; bitcoins; real estate; pounds or dollars or Euros or whatever measure o wealth is handy). Let's call greed an attachment to things of recognized value. That's a problem with real moral consequences which is (presumably) NOT a problem of brain chemistry (alcoholism), inability to decide what to throw out (old age), psychological dependency disorders or OCD, etc. People who collect bits of string and add it to their big ball are not sinning, even if they are greedy for more bits of string. They are just weird.

Many attachments are normal, desirable, necessary, and good, as long as they doesn't become a neurosis (like parents who are attached to the desire for a child to be a violin prodigy who isn't). We should be attached to our homeland, family, faith, alma mater (send a donation), local community, and so on--in reasonable proportion. People who are overly attached to the Green Bay Packers or Miami Dolphins are just tedious, not a moral problem.

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

We know now that hunter-gathering, swiddening, pastoralism and the like are comparatively easier and healthier lifestyles. — darthbarracuda

That's what I've read, too.

Agriculture requires a lot more intensive and extensive cooperative labor than hunting and gathering. The cycles of nature produced sufficient food for hunting and gathering. Both lifestyles require sharp intellectual skills, and the skills of finding appropriate foods in the wild must have prepared people to succeed at agriculture. They had to be skilled botanists to find food plants and avoid poisoning themselves.

The Western Hemisphere was settled around the time that agriculture arose. The Amerindian people identified several fairly unprepossessing plants like the primitive tomato, teosinte (maize), potato, and so on and developed them into strains which could sustain large populations. That was a bit tricky, because a lot of the food crops the Amerindians developed are in the nightshade family of plants which can be quite toxic (tobacco, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, pepper) because of the alkaloid solanine, which is toxic in high concentrations. This had to have taken quite a bit of time to accomplish (centuries, millennia). Primitive tomatoes were the size of currents. Seeing a corn cob in the teosinte grass was a tremendous leap of imagination. Further, crop growing diffused north and south where there were starkly different bands of climate.

I'm not sure when Amerindians developed the first urban / state societies; but smaller village settlements must have developed early on, since plant breeding wouldn't seem to go well with a highly mobile lifestyle.

Lure people into grain growing. Where did the state get the idea of agriculture from? — Brett

I collapsed my incomplete understanding of undigested ideas in a book I read part of a while ago. We lazy philosophers sometimes do that. Besides which, all that isn't my theory.

Clearly the State could not precede the idea of settling down and growing grain in place of the H/G way of life. People had to be settled in place before even the simplest state could form. There had to have been a period (measured in millennia) of transition where people gradually shifted from H/G to Ag. We had to learn how to do it; and besides grain ("man can not live by bread alone") we had to find the various vegetable crops to supply basic nutrition in a settled community no longer foraging over a large area.

Agriculture preceded cities, too. Jericho was established around 9,000 years ago. I think agriculture must have existed for a while in a less settled form.

I don't know much about Jericho 9500 years ago. Uruk dates back to a more recent 6,500 years ago give or take a little. Uruk was one of several city states that rose, controlled the surrounding territory, then subsided. It seems like Uruk would fit the idea of a State encouraging agriculture for purposes of taxation, but 6,500 years ago doesn't line up very well with the rise of crop growing.

Maybe the state of the first State was just a bunch of thugs who forced people to work harder and then walked off with the crop. Some people's children prefer the notion that people can't accomplish anything cooperatively without a gang of thieves rising in the ranks and taking over. We do seem to have a tendency to behave like that, but I wasn't there. Had I been, I would hope that I would have been one of the bitter and resentful peasants fanning the flames of discontent.

Against The Current — Bitter Crank

Against the Grain — darthbarracuda

Sorry about that. The frontal lobe proofreader app failed again. Against The Current is a lefty magazine I used to read. Against The Grain is the title I intended to write.

So to react to your original post, early agricultural states were not based on an anxiety about the future and risk-aversion. Complete dependence on agriculture increased the risk of starvation. There was no good reason for anyone working the fields to be doing that, apart from coercion by the state. — darthbarracuda

That might be the case. I wasn't there, but it seems quite possible that some sort of early cabal roped a bunch of dopes into farming.

Agriculture is a high risk activity for individuals, even if not for the larger population. If agriculture is sufficiently expansive, enough food will usually be produced (usually; not always). For the individual farmer, agriculture is a gamble. Too much and not enough rain, rain at the wrong time, air that is too hot, too cold, too dry, too windy, carries too many locusts, disease -- etc. can all ruin an individual farmer's crop and turn food into starvation.

Agriculture was probably harder work than hunting-gathering. Hunter-gatherers were generally fairly healthy and reasonably long-lived, so I have read. They were mobile. They could follow food. Agriculturalists were literally stuck in the ground.

Against The Current (book) suggests that agriculture was the invention of the earliest nascent state which saw in agriculture a way of extracting wealth from peons. Lure people into grain-growing and they would -- of necessity or force -- stay put and produce more food (wealth) than they themselves needed to live. The surplus could be traded by the elite for other stuff.

In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. [Wikipedia]

In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.[Wikipedia]

When it comes to social interactions, our sensory testimony can be especially unreliable, and we probably do not see social aspects of the world with clarity, validity, and reliability a good share of the time. There are numerous aspects of social interactions which are not readily observable; things like motivation, 300 different kinds of bias, conscious and not-conscious hopes and fears, and so forth. And that's true of ourselves observing ourselves. Sometimes it is not clear what our own motivation was (in say, quitting a good job) until quite some time later.

The hotness of water or the shape of a tree is more easily nailed down than what, exactly, is going on socially between people, or among a group of people. (Not always, of course; sometimes social interactions are as clear as boiling water.)

Since then Eustis does not allow men to see the world through his eyes, even in exchange for a lot of wine. — Olivier5

I'm not familiar with Eustis; but it's a good story (apropo). Thanks.

Yes, and indeed there are. It was a comment on this particular thread, and some of the gormless and jejune naive realism that's been on display here. — Wayfarer

Well, you're on your way to celebrate the holy day with family; Merry [or happy] Christmas.

But... "gormless" is a lovely word. I've only read it here.

adjective Chiefly British Informal.
lacking in vitality or intelligence; stupid, dull, or clumsy.

Mid 19th century, respelling of gaumless.

I have entertained the notion that the world as we experience may be, in truth, much different than we think it is. Perhaps we would be shocked to see it with sensory abilities we do not have. Perhaps the true perception of the world would show that it is phantasmagorical. [Something phantasmagoric features wild and shifting images, colorful patterns that are continually moving and changing. The Greek word phantasma, meaning "image," is the ancestor of phantasmagoric, a word you can use to describe anything so weird it doesn't seem real.]

The problem with that conclusion (for me, anyway) is that I still exist in the world I perceive and interact with. If the world is, in fact, quite unlike what we perceive, what difference can it make to me? If the solidity in the world I perceive is in truth fluid, well... it seems solid, and solid works.

Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, suggests what it would be like if the 'much different and true reality' should become perceptible:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

And if you don’t? — Olivier5

Then we have discussions like this one.

We reach a consensus. I have poor vision; what my senses tell me about the world as it is will not be the same as someone with excellent vision. We compare notes and we find that there is significant overlap. I rarely see brightly colored birds; they all appear pretty much dark gray or black to me, unless they were eating at a feeder near a window. I've seen pictures, and people very enthusiastically report seeing such and such bird with brightly colored feathers. I've seen many pigeons, crows, starlings, chickens, wild ducks, and geese--and what I see of them fits with what people say about bluejays, cardinals, bluebirds, redwing blackbirds, goldfinches, and so on. We reach a consensus.

We have to learn to see the world as it is. Rock layers don't tell a story until one learns something about rocks--sediment, metamorphosis, uplift, folding, erosion, and so on. Same with all the different parts of the world as it is.

I conclude that nobody can see the world as it is. — Daemon

The-world-as-it-is can only be a human concept, in the end based on experience. The-world-as-it-is might not be accessible if we had no reliable, repeatable, valid sensory experience of the world. Because we have reliable, repeatable, valid sensory experience of the world, we can say we see the world as it is. Were sensory experience highly variable (such that some people perceived water as dry, fire as cool, thunder as a sucking sensation, and so on), we couldn't say the world is as we see it.

Just as a finite number of letters could conceivably be used to create an infinite number of sentences — NOS4A2

Are we sure about that? It seems like a finite set of letters could only produce a finite set of rearrangements (words, sentences). The number might be astronomically large, but still finite.

My understanding is quite finite, so...

My point is it seems like there are an infinite number of possible thoughts to we can think of, and that's not possible, given materialism. — RogueAI

How important to you is materialism's rightness or wrongness? How important the number of possible thoughts?

We "hold stock" in various theologies, philosophies, theories, experiences, etc. Our "portfolio" is how we interpret the world.

Settle on what works best for you. From my own experience, "settling" can be a very fraught problem, loaded with conflicts, especially when there may not be a "final answer" possible.

if materialism is true, there are only a finite number of possible thoughts — RogueAI

I'm OK with there being a finite number of possible thoughts, given that the finite number of possible thoughts is really very hugely huge. Unless you can actually count all the grains of sand in the world (a very hugely huge finite number) or all the variations possible for snow flakes (no two are alike, supposedly) then the world is not impoverished by a finite number of sand grains or snow flakes. Or possible thoughts.

And it isn't enriched by an infinite number of possible thoughts, sand grains, or snow flakes. Just one of my extremely finite opinions, of course.

I don't know whether there are an infinite number of thoughts. I don't know where to begin thinking about an infinite number of thoughts.

The brain contains about 100 billion neurons. Connective tissue doesn't count. If a thought requires combinations of neurons, then there are more combinations possible among one's neurons than there are atoms in the universe. So I have heard, anyway. Since many of the thoughts that people have now and have had in the past are and were unexpressed or expressed and lost to time, it would appear that you have an excellent chance of producing and/or coming across thoughts which you have never encountered before. Ditto for everybody else.

Enjoy.

But the brain is a biological organ with cells that die and are replaced by new cells each day. — magritte

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but dead brain cells are generally not replaced. So, Magritte, if you drink yourself into oblivion tonight, you may lose a few thousand neurons to alcohol poisoning, They won't be back.

It's a miracle we remember anything — magritte

Well, our days are full of slop that isn't worth remembering anyway, so there's that. The upside of that is that since our brain neurons last a lifetime, the vast majority of them are on the job for life.

That said, there is also the fact of neuroplasticity. The operation of the brain changes over time from before birth to the grave. Learning requires physical changes in connections between neurons. If one part of the brain is destroyed by accident or disease, other parts of the brain MIGHT be able to pick up that function; not overnight, but in time. For instance, if you lose vision in both eyes, the visual cortex can acquire the task of interpreting Braille from your fingers. People have lost an entire hemisphere, and eventually the remaining hemisphere adapted.

There are pieces of the brain that must be intact for us to function, even live. Tiny areas in the brain stem control critical, essential functions like respiration, heart beat, and so on.

Henry Gustav Molaison is one of the most important and studied human research subjects of all time. He revolutionized what we know about memory today because of the amnesia he developed after a lobotomy in 1953 to treat the severe epilepsy he developed after a head injury sustained earlier in life.

Molaison lost the ability to transfer new short-term memories to long-term memory. New memories ceased after the surgery, but the pre-surgical memories remained intact. He couldn't live independently, but his personality and cognitive functions were pretty much intact. He worked with one researcher for 50 years, but each day she had to introduce herself to him as a new person.

He could hold instructions in short-term memory and carry out learning tasks, but none of that endured longer than a couple of hours or so.

I understand the stigma of mental illness; the situation is certainly better now than it was say 50, 60, 70, and more years back. Indeed, I think for some problems it has evaporated. "Depression", for instance, seems to have become a euphamism for loneliness, alienation, acute and chronic boredom, hurt, humiliation, anger, and so on. It seems harder for people to say "I'm lonely" than to say I'm depressed" (mentally ill). It's progress (sort of) for mental illness, but a disaster for the suffering which is caused by (what we can call) a deteriorating society.

From what I have read, there are two reasons why patients stop taking prescribed drugs (psychotropic and medical): The drugs don't work, so why continue taking them. The other reason is that they do work, the patient feels better, so stops taking them. It isn't just the deranged that do this. Lots of people stop taking prescriptions as soon as they feel better. For antibiotics, this can have lethal consequences (drug-resistant bacteria). But the same goes for other diseases. No gout for 3 months -- oh, I don't need to take this stuff anymore. Bang, gout is back.

Many people fail to fill prescriptions. They go to the doctor, get diagnosed, feel better now that they know what is the matter with them, and decide that they don't need the medication,

Maybe they don't. There is drug-over-prescription. At 74 I find myself on 6 medications -- 5 maintenance drugs for specific somatic problems which would once have been treated with surgery or not at all. I also take a maintenance anti-depressant. Except for the statin (about which I am unconvinced) I benefit from these meds. Some people, though, take more meds than they can keep track of, don't receive regular follow up, and have problems with drug reactions and interactions.

What is the entitlement of the poor to relief for rent and food and other basics? — tim wood

There is clearly way more than enough money in the United States to provide a fully adequate social service program. Unfortunately, most of the money--for all purposes--is in the hands of an indifferent oligarchy.

Still, even in an ideal situation, some people will become addicted to illicit drugs and their lives will deteriorate severely. Some people will develop paranoid disorders and elude care. Some people will end up without shelter for various reasons.

While acknowledging civil liberties, I see nothing civil about allowing people to literally live on the streets. Encampments of homeless people are an invitation to abuse by predatory groups like drug dealers, traffickers, other homeless people, and the like. No one's life is improved by homelessness.

I am leaning towards people being forced to accept care--but not a minimal raw kind of care akin to jailing them. Given adequate funding, decent housing and excellent social services can be welcoming, attractive, and effective. Yes, some people will not accept care willingly under any circumstances. I'm OK with involuntary hospitalization for people who are too mentally ill to care for themselves.

What do you mean by deinstitutionalization? — Enrique

If I may, @BitconnectCarlos, I can offer an explanation. Prior to the 1960s, and the availability of antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine, people with major mental illnesses (like manic-depression) were housed in residential custodial facilities--the big 'state hospitals'. The patients' health didn't improve much, therapy was either ineffective (psychoanalysis) or unavailable. Crude treatments like electroshock were standbys.

Along came the antipsychotics, and--finally--doctors had drugs that enabled people with many severe disorders to get along outside of the hospital. So... the old wards were emptied out. In time, the old buildings were torn down, and most of the state hospitals were closed permanently.

Once departed from the hospital, the patients were no longer anyone's concern. Many of the former patients were able to get their lives together, generally with the help of social services and family, and live pretty much normal lives. Compliant patients took their meds on time, kept doctors' appointments, and did a good job looking after themselves. Noncompliant patients started falling apart and ended up in a downward spirals that could end in immiseration, homelessness, or early death.

Without custodial institutions, social services, emergency rooms, and short-term psych wards supplied care. For these to be effective, adequate funding is required. Cut back funding, or over-burden the agencies, and once again patients with complex care needs end up in the worst possible situations.

Break-out psychosis is pretty traumatic for everyone concerned, especially the patient. Even now it can be difficult to quell psychosis, and some people do require padded cells, heavy medication, and locked wards until the chaos in their brains can be brought under control. When mentally ill patients are discharged without support, they will either be back in the hospital, be homeless, or be dead.

For the most part, it would seem that the main problem was the political risk-aversion of state and federal officials rather than the risk tolerance of the public that caused the most problems.

Granted, the stats do not tell a crystal clear story. Neither North nor South Dakota imposed many restrictions on their population. They Sturgis motorcycle rally in SD went on as planned, for instance -- pretty much a free for all. Not surprising, quite a few transmissions were traced to Sturgis. Nothing against motorcyclists. The NYT reported a big biomedical conference during the early stages of the pandemic may have resulted in 200,000 transmissions. Science types breathing on each other is about the same as motorcyclists breathing on each other.

Minnesota imposed state-wide restrictions over a long period of time, and Wisconsin didn't. The population of Minnesota and Wisconsin are pretty much the same demographic. Not much difference in outcomes. South Dakota imposed no state-wide restrictions and has managed to have higher rates per 100,000 than either Minnesota or Wisconsin, and that in a sparsely populated state covering a very large area. For some reason North Dakota got off with fewer cases.

South Dakota 74 cases per 100,000 (population 884,659)
North Dakota 48 cases per 100,000 (population 762,062)

Minnesota 57 cases per 100,000 (population 5.4 million)
Wisconsin 64 cases per 100,000 (population 5.8 million)

When states impose restrictions, positive Covid-19 tests, diagnosed cases, hospital admissions, and (eventually) deaths from Covid-19 all trend downward (not instantly of course).

I agree: without early and nationwide draconian measures, Covid-19 (an airborne disease) was bound to spread. But minimal measures in many states, and a late start everywhere, pretty much guaranteed a higher death toll and a higher percentage of the population becoming infected.

I have freeclimbed 250 foot chimneys (rock climbing narrow rock cracks without ropes), I have snowboarded in avalanche zones, and stood within petting distance of Wild grizzlies in rivers in Alaska. Most people will never see any of these things, let alone do them. I have driven at excess of 300kph. I ask not that others are mandated to do these things, but I have no interest in begin told I must stop because others are uncomfortable with them. — Book273

You have demonstrated a high level of "risk tolerance" and (apparently) have competently conducted high-risk activities and lived to tell about it. People vary in their capacity to tolerate potential harm from very risk-averse to very risk tolerant. I suspect this is less a learned attitude and more innate. It may be the case that neither the bold nor the cautious can claim personal credit for their approach.

I have a moderate level of risk tolerance; I do and have done some things that many other people would consider reckless. I don't consider myself irresponsible in the same way you do not (more or less--I don't know you, of course).

I do recognize that sometimes our risk tolerance is irrelevant. Public safety trumps risk tolerance, and I consider this acceptable because we can generally find venues to take risks where public safety is not compromised. You flirting with grizzlies doesn't harm public safety and a grizzly might enjoy devouring you, a win-win. Driving at very high speeds on an isolated road poses little public safety risk. Doing so on a heavily used freeway does pose a public safety risk.

Sometimes the risk to others isn't obvious. Should you deliberately ski in an avalanche zone, and it is known that you were in that area during an avalanche, you may put rescuers at risk--especially since responders don't have the option of saying "He took the risk, so let him die."

Public safety (or national purpose) trumps risk aversion too. I would guess most soldiers sent into battle would strongly prefer to be somewhere else. But public safety, or national purpose, trumps their personal cautiousness.

So, I think we need to balance our attitudes toward risk (tolerance or aversion) with the needs of the collective. What I mean is, find a way of enjoying risk that doesn't endanger others, and accept the consequences (like, if the grizzly overcomes its risk aversion and decides you would make a fine meal).

only very rare rulers in history — a Napoleon, a Stalin, a Reagan — were themselves the creators of the ideas they came up with — Rafaella Leon

What a bizarre claim!

Mills ... died in 1962 and did not have the opportunity to witness a phenomenon that he himself helped produce: the New Left itself became the power elite and lost all interest in “transparency.” — Rafaella Leon

The "New Left" would surely be shocked to discover that they were the power elite. Some members of the New Left may have occupied positions of power, but as a group, they surely are not the power elite.

"The Power Elite" -- the principal power elite members are drawn from the top ranks of wealth, business, the military, politics and academia. They make up the elite because they possess and they represent real, raw power. The rag tag New Left and its drive for civil and political rights, feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms has never had a victory that overly inconvenienced the power elite. The 'old guard' of the elites might prefer things the way they were before civil right, gay rights, and so on extracted some gains from the powers that be, but nothing has changed so much that the old guard and the new guard can't live with it.

Ask her, or him or something else -- whatever gender the person claims. It's not my place to decide that for that individual. I readily acknowledge that people may have anomalies which make them outliers as far as "normal for the species" is defined. It's up to them to cope with their anomalies as best they can,

What I don't have to do, and don't want to do, is elevate an anomaly to some sort of 'rare norm'. I was born with visual anomalies which have been difficult to deal with. I'd prefer to have normal vision, but I don't. Tough luck. I cope as well as I can. Your example may wish to be unambiguously male or female, but is not -- tough luck. I wish the person well. But a rare sex-chromosome anomaly doesn't add up to any sort of third sex.

Humans aren't defined as having two legs, and so that's a false analogy. — Michael

The species Homo sapiens is bipedal; that's not the only defining characteristic, bipedalism is one of many defining characteristics. Species have distinct characteristics, whether they be Scutigera coleoptrata or Pongo abelii. That's how we tell them apart. Defects don't define species, but they don't negate species membership either.

[PANGLOSS]
Pray classify
Pigeons and camels

[MAXIMILLIAN]
Pigeons can fly!

[PAQUETTE]
Camels are mammals!

et cetera, proving that this is the best of all possible worlds...

or turn myself into a pickle, I'd still identify as a man despite not having XY sex chromosomes. — Michael

I shall think of you the next time I bite into a pickle.

If to be male is to have genotype XY and to be female is to have genotype XX and if there are people who have neither genotype XY or genotype XX (and there are: see XYY syndrome and Triple X syndrome as examples) then either these people have no sex or there are more than two sexes. — Michael

By that analogy, if there are persons born without 1 or both legs, then one would say humans are not bipedal. Humans are sometimes born with abnormalities ranging from mild to severe.

I knew a person back in the 1970s who had a chromosomal abnormality who went by the name 'Neither She He'. Neither She He was very short, bald (not by choice), and had some other anomalies in proportion, short legs, for instance. I don't remember what choice of clothing Neither She He made. I came across NSH at gay male community gatherings concerning violence and two murders in a cruise park.

So yes, I know there are people who are on the furthest end of the distribution of characteristics, or maybe they aren't even on it. They are exceptions which don't overturn the principle of 2 sexes--the way 1 arm or 1 leg -- or neither of both -- do not annul the principle of bipedalism.

IMHO, it's genotype, XX and XY. Granted, abnormal conditions can arise. These are rare cases--like 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 30,000 for XX male syndrome (>200 were reported in 2010). 1 in 100,000 is the frequency for for XY gonadal dysgenesis. <100 were diagnosed in 2018. Indeed, the disorders referenced concerns errors located in the expression of genes on the XX and Xy chromosomes. Other sexes or genders are not suggested in these abnormalities.

As far as I know, the typical person claiming to be transgender does not display any symptoms of the two syndromes which you mentioned. As far as I know, there are no physical markers for the vast majority of people claiming to be transgender.

Lacking a physical marker does nothing to undermine the claims. People feel the way they feel. There aren't any physical markers for homosexuality either--none that hold up to close scrutiny. anyway.

I'm curious about how people think the pronouns have been used historically because I think this can make it easier to think about how they could be used in the future. — McMo[u][/u]otch

Once upon a time, English (Old English or Anglo-Saxon) used masculine, feminine, and neuter gendered pronouns. Over time, English shed much of its complexity and became Middle English, an evolution of Old English with the addition of many French words (but not French grammar). In the renaissance period (1550 and forward, very roughly) English writers began creating a more complex vocabulary based on Latin and Greek roots. The more complex vocabulary fit into the still simplified grammar.

Early in this long process, masculine "he" became the default neuter pronoun, along with "it". You'd have to delve into Old English to find out more. (That is quite doable, but it would be enormously helpful if you were very interested in learning Old English.)

From what I read as a long since former English major, the use of "he, she, and it" has been stable since at least 1200.

It's one thing to add new terms to a language; that happens all the time. Changing the way a language handles gender, though, is a much much more loaded process, and is likely to be contested. Further, discussions are likely to be taken up between the Biology Department and English (or French, German, Spanish, etc.) Departments.

However much acceptance transgendered persons receive, there is very little biological evidence that there is such a thing. There are 2 sexes. Only 2, and they are fixed at conception.

Other departments in academia get involved. Psychology, Sociology, and Medicine, for instance. The idea that one can change one's gender in fact, not just in practice, is another highly contested idea.

Could it be evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mindset? — FrankGSterleJr

It could, indeed.

Competition will also determine the price. — Brett

Competition is a central feature of the capitalist market economy based on profit. The struggle is to buy raw materials at the lowest possible price, pay workers the least possible amount, sell at the highest possible price, and if at all possible, monopolize the market in [whatever it is a company makes] with the end being the largest possible profit.

In a capitalist economy everybody is competing against everybody else. It may be a very "exciting" system to operate in, but it tends to be very wasteful. A few people come out on top with a lot, and a lot of people end up on the bottom with little. Capitalism doesn't 'specify this result as a requirement' it is just the natural result of a total shake-down system.

Socialism (broadly defined) replaces the total shake down system of doing business with a cooperative, planned, non-competitive system. The phrase "cooperative, planned, non-competitive" might sound soft-headed and idyllic or paradisical, but it is actually hard headed, technologically sophisticated, and (very important) possible.

VALUE, PRICE, AND PROFIT by Karl Marx is a short, popular-oriented book which explains how the capitalist system operates. You can get it here--FREE. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/value-price-profit.pdf

So circling back to rephrase my original question: what are the people like who have benefited most from such a system? — Xtrix

In general? Hard to say. There are characteristics that may well apply to people who built fortunes up over time: highly motivated, focussed, maybe type A personalities; people who require large material rewards for their efforts. If they built a fortune they probably have insight into where opportunity is before it knocks on the door, or they recognize an opportunity when they see it. If they are good at it, they probably don't dither.

People who inherit a large amount of money may not resemble people who built up companies. They may or may not have entrepreneurial skills.

Are they the sort of person one would like to go drinking with? Quite likely--but don't let them get away without paying. But one impression I have of people with substantial wealth is that they tend to have their radar up for threats to their social, financial, political status quo. After all, their wealth may be threatened in the event of social turmoil, or they may at least be inconvenienced. If they feel entitled to deference, they won't take inconvenience lightly.

Just one smile at someone who's hurting could set events in motion that will roll out over the world and into the future for centuries. — frank

Apparently he also believes in smiling butterflies whose flapping wings cause an outbreak of lovely summer weather. An optimistic fellow. Smiling at the old woman lying in the street who just got run over by a bicycle will surely ripple out to the 24th century.