I think the great advantage of UBI (from my own pro-capitalist point of view) is that entrepreneurial adventure is more likely to spontaneously develop.

If your basic income that keeps you alive and kicking comes without strings attached, then you can relax, and when you get bored with doing nothing, you are then free to gradually cobble together and tailor your own supplemental income as you fancy. You can save, you can incrementally take risks. And that's going to encourage people to fill in all sorts of economic micro-niches. — gurugeorge

Yes, I think that's why people like Friedman favored it, in addition to it being simpler and cheaper to administer.

it would be disastrous if it were just laid on top of the existing welfare system — gurugeorge

I agree. We can't afford both systems.

In some ways, the social service welfare system is an employment program, NOT for the recipients of services but for the employees who deliver and administer it. I'm not suggesting that people who work in these programs are parasitical drones who do nothing. Many of them are intelligent, hard-working, well educated professionals who take their work very seriously. The problem is that what many recipients of services need is... MORE MONEY and not more services.

I don't want to push that point too far, because there really are people who need social services above and beyond needing more money, and they would need social services even if they were rich.

My first job after college was in VISTA, the domestic peace corps, 1968. I worked at a job corps on the east coast. We had about 100 corpsmen and the budget for the place was roughly a million dollars. The corpsmen were there for about a year, costing $10,000 each, or roughly $70,000 in today's dollar value (using the Federal Reserve Chained CPI calculator).

It was a very good program with talented, hard-working staff. But fully remediating the deficiencies of the corpsmen would have taken several years -- maybe 4, or $280,000 in todays money, or $7000 a year for 40 years--about what a UBI would have given them.

The Job Corps staff were well paid; the facility made a nice contribution to the local economy. It was a very interesting place to work. But whether, on balance, it was worth it financially, I'm not certain.

It should be noted that media content -- social or a-social --was able to compel one of the senators who spoke in the hearing, Al Franken, to resign. So... clearly, media has some power, and if it can be manipulated by foreign powers, then foreign powers could influence political behavior in the United States, or any other country.

The greatest threat to democracy s not some troll farm in the basement of the Kremlin buying ads and posting fake content on Facebook and Twitter. The greatest threat is, naturally, within our borders, or within the borders of whichever democracy is failing politically.

IF one viewed the Trump election as a failure of democracy, then it is clear that Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton, the institutions of political parties, state election supervisors, the US. Congress, and the American people are responsible. I do not like Donald Trump. I think he is performing as badly as we nay-sayers thought he would. He isn't evil, he is simply not a competent, experienced politician occupying that most political job.

Since the problem is the American people and their institutions, none of the preventive measures you suggest would be appropriate.

Now, I don't have time to review all of the things that are wrong with politics as currently practiced, and you wouldn't want to sit there and read it all. I'll toss out a couple of flaws. Others can add to the list.

A, Very rich individuals are able to bend the political process to their liking by distributing large sums of money to the right places and individuals. Both political parties engage with the lobbyists, campaign bank rollers, and large donors, so there is no alternative, most of the time.

B. The two political parties do not offer a significant choice in personalities or policies, most of the time. One can vote for Twiddledee candidate or the Twidlidum person. Take your pick; Twidledee or Twidledum.

C. Neither party is especially responsive to the will of most Americans. The parties serve the interests of the funders.

Those are the sorts of threats that face democracies,

I got the impression that the purpose of this new Canadian law is to try to formalize transsexual's rights in legal terms of labor, housing, and other areas where bias is possible and that it was not the intent of the law to ban or control informal speech (as I get it). — Cavacava

That may be, but it does specifically mention hate propaganda, which draws a bead on speech.

Actually, I don't know exactly what laws govern free speech in Canada. In the US, the first amendment concerns what the government can and can not do:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Congress can make no law... but your employer can make rules, or you school (if private) can make rules, and one is stuck with those rules. Apparently the first amendment doesn't cover what private entities can do.

There are differences between Canada and the US: The US disallows double jeopardy, for instance, meaning that once one is acquitted of a crime, charges for the same crime can not be brought again. Unless it has been changed recently, Canada allows double jeopardy -- some people and organizations have been prosecuted several times on the same charge, but were acquitted, at least the first time.

The Peterson BBC interview was quite good, I enjoyed it. Apparently the issue is a bit larger than the case of a delicate snowflake vs. the hot stovetop of Jordan Peterson.

Canadian Senate Bill C-16, passed October 18, 2016

The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Peterson objects to any requirement that requested pronouns must be used, else risking liability under the hate crime legislation.

The term "Hate propaganda" makes me nervous, because "hate" and "propaganda" are not very precise terms, and can be variously interpreted by prosecution and defense, both. A person's public questioning of whether there is even such a thing as "transgender" could be considered hate speech. A refusal to use a particular pronoun (perhaps a neologism) could be interpreted as hate speech. Like a transgender persons might mash up she, her, he, him, and person and want to be called by the pronoun "shrimp". "Jerko said shrimp would attend."

Peterson doesn't want to be compelled to use "he, she, him, her, they, or shrimp" arbitrarily.

So Peterson's issue is more than a question of not offending people who claim to be transgendered, it is a question of liability to prosecution under hate speech law.

I often wonder what people 500, 2000, 5000 years ago did "know". Of course, a lot of what people know in any time is practical knowledge that works just fine. They may not have known where frogs came from 5,000 years ago, but then, they really didn't need to know, since the frogs took care of themselves.

People's heads have always been full of knowledge. Our heads (over the last few hundred years, for sure) have often been full of relatively useless knowledge. We have survival knowledge suitable to our time, but should things fall apart, we'd be up the crick. Of course, when things fell apart 5,000 years ago they were also up the crick (creek).

I really don't dislike anyone, although there are people I don't want to hang around with. — T Clark

I'm more like "I've never killed anybody, but there are obituaries that I very much enjoyed reading," Mark Twain? Clarence Darrow? (CD said, "I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

A positive scent gives one pleasure because the brain has nerves that are stimulated by scent and when it reaches that area of the brain the information networks into the amygdala and so one feels emotional — TimeLine

Scent and memory and often linked tightly together because of the way the nasal nerves connect into the brain--and ancient evolution plays a role in that. An odor can summon very specific memories, and visa versa. I can't think of any "fear/scent" combos, but a lot of scents (even noxious odors like carbon tetrachloride) summons very specific scenes -- like cleaning playback and recording heads on tape machines.

Individuals do have specific scents without perfume, made up of chemicals in sweat, affected by diet, affected by flora and fauna on the skin, how often they change clothes, whether they smoke or not (and what). Some people's bodies have a very pleasant scent, others not -- and it's not because of hygiene or disease, or any of that. They just do or they don't.

Do you consider yourself a Good person?

I consider my state a mixed bag: some good, a little bad. Most of the time the bad things were motivated by good intentions. That the bad-acts-which-were-well-intentioned didn't turn out very well is part of my bad understanding of the way the world works. Once in a while I have been cruel or dishonest quite deliberately. On the other hand, I have done and been good, too--just plain good. In being good I wasn't being heroically good. I felt confident and good about doing and being good, so I was.

Most of the time we, people including me, are indifferent -- being neither good nor bad. We are fulfilling the minimum expectations that are well within our operating capabilities. We aren't doing anything bad or good, because either one would require arousal from our zombie routine. We just chug along. We do not earn any points while being on cruise control.

Hitler may have seen goodness as a weakness. — Andrew4Handel

Hitler, and other Nazis, inverted some normal ideas of good and evil, so that "to be soft in time of war is weakness" and "to be cruel and remorseless in struggle is a strength". Killing the Jews was purifying the nation. Letting inferior people live contaminated the blood of the nation.

Christian virtue was viewed as a weakness, so was much of secular philosophy, and humanistic culture.

Of course, most Germans had enough to do just surviving the war -- not starving, not getting killed by the Gestapo, or killed by the allied bombing.

Race is real and isn't determined by culture; it's inherent in the genetic makeup of a person.
— Bitter Crank

All of the evidence that I have seen says that that is false. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Will you please explain how you think white, black, asian, and aboriginal people get born? If race isn't biological, then something VERY MYSTERIOUS is going on. You know, when two asians have children, there is a much, much better than a 50/50 chance that the children will look like other asians. Same for whites, blacks, and aboriginals. Like it or not, the races are propagated by sex.

Now, you may not like the concept of race, but the distinctions between groups of people, whether they are races or not, are still transmitted through sexual reproduction.

Race and sex would be disconnected IF, as George Carlin said, two black parents could produce a child who had straight blond hair and blue eyes.

Social roles are parts in the screenplay called society. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

And we are in this screen play whether we jolly well like it or not, playing out our various defined roles, and just like characters on the screen, we can not walk out of the screen, we can not walk out of society.

Increasingly the latter are customers rather than patients — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Calling patients, clients, students, and so "consumers" is a piece of current bullshit lingo. It's a trend that comes out of business management schools, which says that schools, hospitals, social service agencies, and so on will perform better if things are run like a business. The approach is aided and abetted by (often) laudable moves to make institutions a little more accountable.

Should professors be teaching to suit the standards of their students? Well, I don't think so, but if students are going to rate teachers, and administrators are going to look at the ratings, then they will teach to make the students happy. A large proportion of college teachers are now adjuncts -- a nice work for "temporary". If they want to get hired for the next term, they had better have good ratings.

Colleges, hospitals, and social service agencies do the same thing they have always done; a change in language (health care consumer rather than patient) is likely to be a transient phenomenon.

What stereotype is the social role of consumer built on? What immediate environment is the social role of consumer derived from? None and none, respectively. Anybody with any traits and background can act in the social role of consumer. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

The "consumer" is an economic stereotype made possible and created by industrial society. "Consumer" started to become popular around 1900.

Prior to the deployment of various labor-reducing devices using electric motors, automobiles, and so forth, men and women devoted most of their time to producing. Men worked in production jobs (farm or factory, mostly) and women produced food, clothing, and some domestic goods at home. A woman often prepared food from a kitchen garden and used eggs from a backyard henhouse. Food was prepared from simple raw ingredients.

The industrialization of the home converted women from producers to consumers. One drove to a store and bought bread (didn't make it), canned fruit (didn't preserve it), meat (didn't kill it), and ready-made clothing (didn't sew it). The woman shopped for and "consumed" household goods, as well. Families consumed housing and transportation.

"Consumer" is now applied to everybody, even mentally retarded individuals who "consume" custodial care services, so the term has approached meaninglessness. But if you set aside these nonsensical uses, the term is still meaningful.

The economic role of consumption (by consumers) is a critically important element in the modern economy. Something close to 3/4 of the GDP is derived from the acts of buying stuff that define the role of consumer.

In many ways, being a "consumer" is a degraded role, a shrink wrapped stereotype.

We should at least try to name what it is that makes something beautiful. for instance:

What would make the scent of a rose "beautiful"?

A fresh scent common to outdoor plants
Intensity -- not overwhelming like lilac, but intense enough to be readily perceived
complexity -- combining sharp citrus and soft powder smells for instance, like lemon mixed with the odor of hollyhock
persistence -- lasting more than a few minutes after the rose has opened

It may be the case that the breeding required to achieve a certain color an shape will have resulted in the loss of scent. Is a bright pink, but odorless rose (or one that smells like damp newspaper) really beautiful?

What makes a beautiful tree?

height; tallness is an aspect of beauty in trees; except specialties like bonsai or aged evergreens in dry alpine environments.
shape; some trees have a goblet shape, others a fan shape. Conifers are conical. ("Conifer refers to the cone seed, not the conical shape of the plant.)
color; green leaves in the summer, of course, but many shadings.
symmetry contributes much to beauty in trees, except bonsai and aged evergreens in dry alpine environments

Some trees, like the cottonwood, tend to sprawl, are asymmetrical, and have a ragged shape. They can grow tall. American elms are so popular because of their goblet shape, height, symmetry ,and foliage. Bass trees have the virtue of having beautifully scented blossoms which bees like, but in many ways are they not a beautiful tree. The branches tend to droop, the wood is brittle, they shed lots of different varieties of plant debris over the summer. They are not symmetrical.

The tibetan cherry tree deserves "beautiful!" solely on the basis of its shining, copper red, peeling bark. The shape, height, symmetry, and leaf color are not remarkable, but the bark gives this tree great beauty. It's a deciduous tree whose greatest appeal is during the winter.

I am usually dissatisfied with discussions of abstractions like beauty or beautiful.

Of course the reality behind the abstractions exist. We have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt "beauty". We each experienced qualia when we tasted the exquisitely delicious peach, smelled the beautiful rose, felt the rich, luxurious velvet, heard Beethoven's beautiful Moonlight Sonata, saw the beautiful huge moon rise over the city. We didn't experience the same qualia, however, and we can't compare the two to determine how different they might be. Still, we agree by convention that yes, the seemingly much enlarged yellowish moon rising above the horizon is "beautiful".

Certain things tend to receive the accolade of Beautiful! Flowers and sunsets, for example. Full moon risings. The sky when it is clear and we are far away from city lights. Mountains. Waterfalls. These things are beautiful, we expect them to be beautiful, and we can readily (and safely) agree that they are beautiful.

We are much less likely to award the prize of "beautiful!" to swamps, weeds, prunes, burlap, and freeways, even though these could be as beautiful as anything else. Our ideas about beauty are at least somewhat socially conditioned. We are at least somewhat primed to have certain kinds of experiences of beauty.

It's one thing to describe a woman's breasts as beautiful (it's been done quite often) but much rarer to hear a man's penis or testicles described as beautiful, even less to hear someone's asshole be awarded the prize of beauty.

A stone arched bridge is far more likely to be described as "beautiful" than a concrete freeway bridge, but perhaps that is convention intervening in our experience. Roses are by definition beautiful ("American Beauty" is a variety), but they often smell like nothing more than the wet paper they were wrapped up in during shipping. So much for qualia and roses.

So, he was beautiful. So, so beautiful.

Hitler, and the National Socialist Party, gained some support at the polls, and then seized power by subterfuge. Once the party gained power, it deployed the crude but effective methods of terror, intimidation, and force that it had been practicing. A very rigid system of information management was deployed on the German people, backed up by considerable resources of the Gestapo and other police systems.

Yes, Germans acquiesced, avoided seeing what was before their eyes, looked the other way, and kept their mouths shut about all sorts of bad things. That's what excellent crowd control can do.

If I were going to make things up, I'd go for something a bit more edgy.

No, broadcast speech doesn't contribute much to language development in young children. We are 'programmed' to learn it from parents, or parent stand-ins, like caregivers, siblings. Real, warm, close-by people who are in actual contact with us. It was thought that broadcast speech would homogenize language. It hasn't. Regional speech patterns continue to develop in various directions without regard to all of the broadcast speech we hear. That's because speech accents are learned on the playground, among parents, peers, teachers, and so forth. We don't pick up accents we hear in media.

There has been a long-standing debate on the economic efficacy of advertising. Whether advertising spending is a leading indicator, or a lagging indicator of economic activity,; whether the roughly $200 billion spent on advertising in 2016 was effective, and how, when, where, and why isn't altogether clear.

When people go into stores that sell a wide variety of stuff, (like Target, Best Buy, Sears, Macy's) they see all sorts of items that they may or may not have seen advertised at one time or another. Same thing for on-line stores. Advertising has some influence--some of which is quite long-run influence, like the satisfaction people expect to get from a particular brand (Levis, Budweiser, L'Oréal, Toyota, Wells Fargo, 3M, etc.) is partly an advertising, partly a product experience thing. Advertising can help launch a totally new product -- like Swiffer cleaning products. Hundreds of thousands of products are launched, promoted, and fail, heavily advertised or not. Other products seem to keep going decade after decade, and are the recipient of big ad dollars.

I like looking at advertising -- it's quite often more interesting material than the media in which it appears. But that isn't the same as being effective.

Thank you.

I grew up in a rural MN county that is still about 98% white. Sightings of colored people, as they were referenced at the time, or Negroes, were very rare. We had an exchange student from Uganda in 1962-63. That was about it. Jews weren't very common either, but there was more hostility towards Jews than blacks. MN was then quite antisemitic.

My first exposure to African Americans was in '68 when I joined VISTA and was suddenly immersed in AA / black culture and people. The shock of it all was living in a really big urban area more than living with blacks. But the first person I really insulted was a Jewish fellow. I didn't intend it, and I should have known better, but it takes a long time to get rid of one's worst bits of heritage.

While in Boston I grew a beard. Back in that rural county, beards were still a rarity, and one time in a cafe somebody asked me if their young boy could touch my beard--he had not seen one before. I was intending to be a bit exotic, so that was fine.

I've lived in Minneapolis/St. Paul for almost 50 years now, and over these years it has become much more "cosmopolitan" a term that used to be code for Jews and mixed ethnics. The city is racially diverse, but more ethnically diverse, with people from East Africa, West Africa, SE Asia, Russians, Indians, and so forth. In the meantime, the Swedish Institute and Sons of Norway are still going strong; the Finns are being very Nordic, learning Finnish, etc.

I have been avatar fidgeting. I gather you are not referencing the one that is now posted at 1:59, CST, 1/20/17.

It might have been Schopenhauer. I picked it up off a google collection. I have yet to read Schopenhauer (other than our schopenhauer1). It's on my list. Whether I get to it before I get to the grave is anybody's guess.

I had considered this one:

You seem to be on a "this isn't philosophy" kick. I agree with T Clark, you should start a thread on the issue of "what is not philosophy". Is "what is not philosophy" philosophy? Doesn't saying something is "not philosophical" make it a philosophical matter, like "What is" and "What is not"?

Let's not go overboard, here.

This sounds more like a sociology come politics mix rather than anything remotely philosophy? — celebritydiscodave

Paying people enough to live on is a matter of ethics. Isn't one of the topics in philosophy "the good life"? Do you think a good life can be better led in poverty than something better than poverty? How much do people need, want, deserve...?

Sounds like philosophy to me.

without UBI we can get these jobs done for a pittance, with UBI we're going to have to pay people more and improve their job satisfaction in order to get them done. — Pseudonym

And why would we not want to improve pay and job satisfaction? Millions of people devoting the better part of their waking hours to an unrewarding job (low pay, no satisfaction, and lots of stress) is a bad thing for the individual and society as a whole.

You are quite right that there would be knock-on costs above and beyond the pay out. The floor of acceptable pay and working conditions would rise, and should rise. Who can live working full time at the $7.25 minimum wage? That's about $15,000 a year, just $3000 above the federal poverty level for one person, and below the medicaid eligibility level, assuming the job was full time, which it probably isn't. Granted, people do eke out survival on wages that low, but in much of the country, and in most urban areas, it would be a grueling project.

Some states have minimum wage levels that are significantly higher than the federal level. Massachusetts and Washington have $11 MW. Some cities have set the minimum wage at $15, and some states are scheduled to reach $15 in a few years -- that's about $31,000 a year (if full time). There are, of course, places in the US where $31,000 is not enough to live well -- New York City, for instance, where rent for a small apartment can easily be more than $30,000 a year.

So, the UBI will affect the wage scale at the bottom. This will affect some industries much more than others, depending on what their pay structure is.

Most municipal and civil engineering workers are paid much more than a pittance to maintain the city: pick up garbage, maintain streets, keep the water and sewer working in good order, etc. A UBI would not come close to matching their wages and benefits.

There are many jobs that do not pay well, do not have good benefits, and have little or no security. Some of these are city, county, state, or federal government positions, but not many. Most of these are in the private sector. The temporary-work industry would be rather severely affected, I would think. So would child-care, retail, many non-unionized jobs, etc.

And it is completely culturally constructed and corresponds to no known biological reality. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Gender is not biology. Man and woman are not biology. Male and female are biology. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

What is your stake in the view that "race is culturally constructed" and that "gender is culturally constructed"?

Some people take this view as a strategy to free people from supposing that black youth are "naturally more violent" than white youth, or that "blacks have natural rhythm", rather than recognizing that "negroid people" came from Africa, and that whites with blond hair and blue eyes come from Northern Europe, and that Asians generally do not look like either Africans or Europeans.

There is a simpler (and I think a more truthful) way of de-linking race and culture: Race is real and isn't determined by culture; it's inherent in the genetic makeup of a person. Culture is also real, and is learned. There isn't a genetic link between race and culture. There are links of learning and environment, however, between race and culture. People tend to behave like those around them--that's cultural.

Maleness and femaleness are real and are biologically determined. Men are males, women are females. Both males or men, females or women, have certain sex-linked characteristics and traits, and both males or men and females or women learn an array of culturally specific roles in connection with their sex and gender.

All humans inherit tendencies to behave in various ways, and also learn behaviors in early life. Some of the behaviors are "stereotypes", a term applied to specific types of individuals or certain ways of behaving intended to represent the entire group of those individuals or behaviors as a whole. So, girls playing with dolls and boys with trucks are "stereotypes".

A "role" is culturally defined manner of behaving. "The stereotypical male role in a family is to provide financial support and leadership." A "role" may also be biological. The male "role" in reproduction is inseminating females. The female "role" in reproduction is bearing off-spring. The male may play the role of "family defender" because biologically he is bigger and stronger than the female (usually). The male may also play the role of care-giver, which is a role usually assigned in stereotypical fashion to females.

It's just an inconvenient fact of life that roles, stereotypes, biology, and culture are braided together. With some effort the specifics can be teased apart. We struggle to do this all the time. "Was so-and-so born with high intelligence (genes, biology, prenatal environment, etc.) or is so-and-so very successful as a result of obsessively hard work? Or in joke form, "If you're so smart, how come you are not rich?"

Old book covers: — Noble Dust

I like a good dust cover. What would you say the 'golden age' of book covers was? 1950s? 1960s?

When the Guaranteed Basic Income was last seriously considered (during the Nixon administration) robotics wasn't a big issue. Then proposals were dropped. Now, 40 years later, robotics are THE major reason for thinking about how people who are not completely redundant will live.

I don't think the US can really afford both GBI and the existing welfare systems. Besides, GBI shouldn't be so little that many people would still need welfare, or so much that no one would ever need income supplements. For instance, a single person might not be able to afford housing on the GBI. If for some reason they can't find work, they may find that their income is not enough to afford rent. As a result, public housing programs will still be needed. The same will go for some families, many elderly, and disabled individuals.

I'd expect there are methods to reduce the anxiety — Hanover

One of the problems of anxiety is that there are drugs which offer speedy, effective relief: benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan, and others; some people still rely on barbiturates. Then there's alcohol and various recreational drugs). They do a good job of suppressing anxiety, but people become acclimated to the drugs; gradually increased doses are needed and eventually they just don't work anymore. In the long run one has to find other solutions. In the long run we're all dead, as John Maynard Keynes observed.

Benzos also work for one's difficult-to-control anger and rage.

I'd rather be depressed than anxious. — Posty McPostface

They are both very attractive options so it's always a conundrum: Bleak despair or blazing terror?

Some people seem to experience only depression OR anxiety, but it seems like the two alternate, or combine for many people.

Some people are anxious about their material things, but I think it's just as likely that one will be anxious about immaterial things like love, status, friendship, being isolated, and such. Our immaterial possessions are harder to guard than our tangible goods. A fire alarm, sprinkler system, termite poisons, and the like can protect the dry goods, but how do you protect love, status, belonging, friendship, peace, self-regard, esteem, and so on?

I don't think so, unenlightened.

What is it about the various county, state, federal, or provincial prisons that isn't intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive? So, I'm sure the big, well muscled type A personality might do OK in a prison where the inmates have the upper hand. He would do the intimidating, humiliating acts in a hostile, degrading way. The not-so-well muscled, heterosexual, not-so-A-type personality are not going to fare so well, never mind the effeminate gay guy. Then there are the prisons where the guards have the upper hand which is what many assume always goes on in prison, except that it's not. Guards can provide the intimidating, humiliating conditions in a hostile degrading way, even better.

Some inmates who are very vulnerable (like the slight, effeminate gay guy or transsexual) often end up in "protective custody" which is fairly often indistinguishable from solitary confinement.

I'll grant that not everyone comes out of prison with the maximally negative possible experience.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? — unenlightened

Imprisonment is intended to be “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive”. EDIT: and rape isn't a requirement for prison to meet that description. Perhaps your experience wasn't that way, but it squares with many people's experience. So... who is being obtuse? BTW, I don't think it should be very very bad; it just is, in many countries.

The article says that "she was placed in an atmosphere that was “intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive”. Hmmm, sounds like the standard experience of anyone being in prison.

how are we going to get all the less desirable jobs done? Who on earth would opt to clean sewers just to get a bit of extra spending money? — Pseudonym

It's not a job that appeals to me, but surprisingly, the job gets done. Question: Why do people work for civil engineering companies and municipal agencies that deal with sewers? Answer: The rewards are high enough. Or, as they say in civil engineering offices, "Your shit is our bread and butter." There are companies that do nothing but deal with sewers and sewage treatment plants up close and personal

As late as the victorian period there was a substantial demand in London (and elsewhere) for people to manually scoop out the pits beneath outhouses and haul the crap away. The job was paid twice: first, a fee for the cleaning, second the sale of the human manure to farmers for fertilizer. It was most definitely NOT a high status job. In western society, a certain amount of status accrues to technically sophisticated jobs. We don't have very many people scooping out feces from pits, but we do have people applying technical tools to keeping the sewers open and working.

Urban explorers like to go down into big sewers -- the ones that are big enough to stand up-right walk around in. There are numerous risks, some of them mortal: drowning, severe injury, and disease. Sewer workers are vaccinated against all sorts of diseases, urban explorers are not. Still, most urban explorers (and civil engineering workers) survive their time in sewers without much calamity.

Status and adequate pay will get the jobs done now, where as in the victorian period, the attraction was mostly pecuniary, and maybe not much career choice.

we'd have to ask if hate is genetically conditioned — Metaphysician Undercover

That could very well be the case.

We might be genetically conditioned to be sensitive to "in-group" and "out-group" distinctions--in-group ones being favored. The capacity to feel hatred might be genetically supported, and hatred is one way to defend the in-group from the out-group. Or putting it differently, we feel antipathy towards out-groups.

I say might be; even though I suspect a lot of behavior IS genetically supported, it is difficult to prove the case. But if we are genetically inclined to distinguish between in-group and out-group, we also seem quite capable of embracing people who belong to out-groups and to expel in-group members who violate some norm.

It seems like you got it backwards. Hate speech doesn't incite hatred, it stems from hatred. Hate is first and hate speech is an effect of one's hatred. — Harry Hindu

Yes, hate speech is motivated by hatred, but the question is, "Where does hatred come from?" You say, "What one hate's is usually the result of ignorance". Ignorance plays an important role in human affairs, but in itself doesn't cause hatred. I am ignorant of many of the world's people--I have almost no knowledge about Mongolians, Albanians, Uzbeks, or Argentinians, but ignorance of these peoples hasn't led to hatred. I am ignorant of Bahai, Zoroastrians, and Shinto, but I do not harbor hatred about or toward them.

There are certain facile explanations for prejudices, like homophobia. The theory is that some people fear that they might be homosexual themselves, and project this fear as hatred onto people they suspect to be homosexual. This is probably a relatively uncommon phenomena. Ignorance = hatred is another one.

The 5 year time frame was in the 1970s. There have been a few murders of gay men since, but they did not have the same effect as the earlier ones. After the advent of AIDS, community focus shifted to a much different kind of threat (sexually transmitted disease which, at the time, was often fatal).

Chicago wasn't the scene of any sort of gay sex panic, but it was the setting of a race panic. Chicago had always been racially segregated in housing but in the 1950s the shape (not the fact) of housing segregation changed. There are several books about post WWII housing policy drove very turbulent change. Two excellent books on the subject: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein is about how the Federal Housing Administration (beginning in the 1930s) instituted a formal, written policy requiring racial segregation as part of the federal home-loan guarantees which spurred (and shaped) bank lending. Another good book on the topic is Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America by Beryl Satter recounts Satter's father's efforts to defend black families against fraud and abuse (related to housing) in Lawndale. (Hereand here are reviews of the book in the NYT from 2009).

So, how has your family's views on race played out over time in your life? You don't evince prejudicial racial talk, ideas, and so on.

Isolated violent events can be interpreted as representative of general attitudes.

Over the course of 5 years Minneapolis and St. Paul witnessed several extremely violent attacks on gay men resulting in their deaths. The handful of violent deaths occurred against a steady hum of anti-gay sentiment expressed in public, and more common incidents of harassment and arrests for consensual behavior. At the same time, there was rising gay visibility, activism, and acceptance. The gay community was for the first time, in a position to mount a strong response to both background discrimination and the crudely violent murders.

Leading gay activists interpreted the murders as the proverbial "tip of the ice berg". The activist argument was that murder was simply the logical expression of background hatred. Therefore, the community was in imminent peril, and a total mobilization of resources was required.

Organizing the community was a good thing; there were numerous benefits. However, making the community safer probably wasn't a result. The murders were extreme outlier events, not related to what most people thought, or were not remotely likely to do about gay men.

I do not believe that the social role of "white" exists. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Of course the social role of "white" exists; and "black" and "gay" and all others. Stereotypes and social roles exist because we are not all one big cultural frappe, the same everywhere. Cultural groups are just unique enough to be noticeable. So, what is the "white" social role? Among other things, it's a distinctive kind of language (depending on geography); it's certain kinds of food and clothing preferences; it's a way of relating to institutions (like the police or government officials) that is a bit different than other people's; it's a generally practiced style of self-presentation. Han Chinese, Nigerians, Argentinians, Ugandans, Indonesians, Zimbabweans, Russians, Peruvians, French, Italians, Swedish, Canadians... pick a group, any group, and there will be a certain style of "XYZ" culture which will be unique to a particular time and place.

to protest against this, and are destroying local businesses that have absolutely nothing to do with the public political debacle. — rickyk95

When orderly protests become riots, property damage will often result and the damage is not always completely misdirected.

For instance, in various American inner city situations where protest turned to riot and mayhem, local businesses were torched. Quite often the business have been small retail operations. How could these small businessmen have anything to do with racial injustice? Isn't that government's failure?

Maybe. But it's also possible that the local rioters know the local businessmen had been ripping them off for years, selling shoddy goods for prices higher than respectable goods in better neighborhoods. Or perhaps the local businessmen never employed locals in their businesses. Or perhaps the local businesses were rude and insulting to their 'captive clientele.

Even if locals know that the businessmen are hostile, destroying the businesses still might not be sensible. There are numerous empty lots in cities where riots occurred, sometimes 40 or 50 years ago, and businesses were burnt down, never to be rebuilt. A shabby area can become Desolation Row after a riot, and it might take decades for investors of any kind to consider the area safe again.

how I know if I am or am not playing this "white" role well... — WISDOMfromPO-MO

If you don't know, then you're not.