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Thread: On conservatives and morality

  1. #91
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    There's absolutely no excuse for a healthy individual to not at least have a high school diploma (something that 20% of Americans over 29 don't have).
    Why is that, anyway?
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  2. #92
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    We defined success as being able to make a decent living. About 21% make under $20k, which seems like a decent threshold. I'm currently living on about $18k (gross), and not exactly suffering.
    Out of curiosity, does it matter that you are a young ascetic with no kids?
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  3. #93
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    Out of curiosity, does it matter that you are a young ascetic with no kids?
    Oh, please. You can take issue with Loki's other comments, but he's spot on about the relative ease of making ends meet on a graduate student stipend outside of a very expensive city. Hell, I managed a 10% savings rate on top of my normal lifestyle. He never claimed he could support a family on it (though I know people who've managed it with a wife and kid), but two people can easily pull in close to $40k a year, which is more than enough for a modest living. Things get more complicated when you get older and certain costs go up, but your income is likely to rise as well.

  4. #94
    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    Oh, please. You can take issue with Loki's other comments, but he's spot on about the relative ease of making ends meet on a graduate student stipend outside of a very expensive city. Hell, I managed a 10% savings rate on top of my normal lifestyle. He never claimed he could support a family on it (though I know people who've managed it with a wife and kid), but two people can easily pull in close to $40k a year, which is more than enough for a modest living. Things get more complicated when you get older and certain costs go up, but your income is likely to rise as well.
    And I managed to develop raging alcoholism funded by the state, and the grad stipend seems like a lot of money in comparison. I don't know what that has to do with anything, though.
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  5. #95
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    We defined success as being able to make a decent living. About 21% make under $20k, which seems like a decent threshold. I'm currently living on about $18k (gross), and not exactly suffering. Before you mention NYC, remember that most of America is more similar to where I live than to NYC.
    (I still object to the definition of success being used in this thread)

    I agree, it's possible for a single man to easily live off $18k, and have money for extras. I'd even say it could be stretched to support a child for a single parent - but that it would be a hell of a lot tighter and there would be no extras. I would not, however, qualify getting by as success using your definition of success.
    We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.

  6. #96
    Getting by could be used as the yard-stick for when things become rewards; anyone who can afford to smoke and drink alcohol cannot possibly be considered poor, or needy, because tobacco and alcohol are stimulants and thus have to be perceived as rewards.
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  7. #97
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    Out of curiosity, does it matter that you are a young ascetic with no kids?
    If you have a family, it wouldn't be too much to expect both adults to work, even if one is working part-time. Adding an extra person would only increase expenses by about $5-6k a year (mostly due to insurance). And as I implied, I could easily cut $3k off my expenses without really hurting my quality of life. I'm far from an ascetic by the way. I usually buy 4-5 different types of meat each week (most of which costs about $4 a pound). Also buy soda and juice every week, and eat out frequently. I don't blow a hundred bucks on booze each week, as some are prone to, but that's hardly a necessity.

    Quote Originally Posted by littlelolligagged View Post
    (I still object to the definition of success being used in this thread)

    I agree, it's possible for a single man to easily live off $18k, and have money for extras. I'd even say it could be stretched to support a child for a single parent - but that it would be a hell of a lot tighter and there would be no extras. I would not, however, qualify getting by as success using your definition of success.
    How many southerners do you know that would think that a person who earns $20k a year is a moral failure?
    Hope is the denial of reality

  8. #98
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    How many southerners do you know that would think that a person who earns $20k a year is a moral failure?
    I don't know anyone who equates "success" (or income, for that matter) with morality. They would, however, consider the person earning $20k a year collecting benefits from the government a moral failure. In my opinion, that often leads to people who should be getting help of some type not doing so, adding to the impression that the only people who accept any government benefits are lazy bums unwilling to work - the hard-working low-income people are unwilling to accept the shame associated with it.

    Now if they could spin the bottom-of-the-barrel wages into being the result of sexual deviancy or promiscuity...
    We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.

  9. #99
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    If you have a family, it wouldn't be too much to expect both adults to work, even if one is working part-time. Adding an extra person would only increase expenses by about $5-6k a year (mostly due to insurance). And as I implied, I could easily cut $3k off my expenses without really hurting my quality of life. I'm far from an ascetic by the way. I usually buy 4-5 different types of meat each week (most of which costs about $4 a pound). Also buy soda and juice every week, and eat out frequently. I don't blow a hundred bucks on booze each week, as some are prone to, but that's hardly a necessity.
    Just taking a position, just pointing out that grad students today are spoiled. You should try my 1990 stipend of 11,000 in a dense urban area, as opposed to ~28k, which is what I bet they're making in the same program now. People going to rural schools notoriously do FAR better than people going to urban schools, because cost of living is so much lower. U of I is a great deal that way, I'd bet.

    BTW, a recent survey of grad programs came out, and U of I PoliSci was ranked 11-20. Better than I thought, very good!

  10. #100
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    Should I start a thread on "liberals" and talk about the Black Panthers?
    If you want to discuss how they're a small subgroup of people who believe whatever your hypothesis is, I'm not one to stop you. I don't know how successful it'd be though. Unless you're going to discuss actual black panthers, like large predatory cat, not the group.

    We defined success as being able to make a decent living. About 21% make under $20k, which seems like a decent threshold. I'm currently living on about $18k (gross), and not exactly suffering. Before you mention NYC, remember that most of America is more similar to where I live than to NYC.
    So to you success is being able to live comfortably in one of the lowest income brackets? What was also argued was that since you're only making $18k (gross) that you shouldn't be eligible for any government benefits, and God help you if you buy booze, because if you fall on hard times don't expect any handouts because you wouldn't have so little money if you just worked harder, were more intelligent, and ambitious. Lewk has used this logic before to explain why people in your income bracket don't deserve things in general, whether they be government assistance or nice things you buy yourself like a TV, going out to eat, or booze, and people like Lewk are exactly what we're discussing.

    There's absolutely no excuse for a healthy individual to not at least have a high school diploma
    None at all?

    And dare I say, it's not unreasonable to expect people to have an associate degree (something that 2/3 of Americans don't have), seeing that one can get it at a community college for almost free, and do it while holding a full-time job.
    Really?

    That's a clear implication.
    Correlation does not equal causation. Just to boil this down here so we have something simple, if you were dealing with someone who is not successful, would you assume that they were unintelligent, lazy, etc. and look for justification of your feelings and focus on that, or would you be more likely to try and find out if anything else factored into their misfortune?

    We know that black people and men are more likely to commit crimes than white people or women. Do these facts bias your ability to accurately reflect on black people and men? It would only make sense to stereotype if the relevant correlations were something near 1.
    No, because I realize correlation does not equal causation, and I am capable of thinking about, analyzing, using logic, and rationalization to determine what factors might cause someone to commit crimes, and then be capable of understanding that people who possess these traits are more likely to commit crimes, then follow up with understanding why men and blacks might be more likely to possess these traits. This would result in a richer understanding of the relations between these ideas, however the group of people we are discussing are incapable or do not desire to do this, and thus would just assume that black people and men are more likely to commit criminal acts because they are black or a man.
    . . .

  11. #101
    Quote Originally Posted by ']['ear View Post
    Just taking a position, just pointing out that grad students today are spoiled. You should try my 1990 stipend of 11,000 in a dense urban area, as opposed to ~28k, which is what I bet they're making in the same program now. People going to rural schools notoriously do FAR better than people going to urban schools, because cost of living is so much lower. U of I is a great deal that way, I'd bet.

    BTW, a recent survey of grad programs came out, and U of I PoliSci was ranked 11-20. Better than I thought, very good!
    It varies by program. U of I has one of the higher stipends in the country relative to purchasing power. I recall reading that NYU gives its graduate students about $20k a year, which is probably the equivalent to $10-12k here. Schools in bigger cities tend to get a disproportionately high amount of applications, so it's not surprising they're stingy (i.e. it's much harder to get into UCLA than to get into here, despite the department here being ranked higher).

    I know that at least in the poli sci department, they're really pushing people to publish, and the top faculty set a pretty impressive example. People in some other programs get too comfortable after tenure, which isn't good for the program's ranking.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  12. #102
    Loki, what are you saying regarding your income, success and morality?

    Seems you're trying to say just because you can get by under $20K/year, everyone else ought to be able to do the same, without needing assistance or a subsidy. You left out the fact that your education is being subsidized in part by the state and its tax payers, most likely your health care costs, also. If you don't have a car (and its costs of fuel/insurance/maintenance) it's because your college town has subsidized public transit.

    You can't really live the life of a university student on stipend, in a college town, and compare your costs of living to others. Or hold yourself up as the standard bearer on higher moral grounds. You're also viewing your education as future collateral, assuming it'll get you a better paying job in the future, so it's easier to bide time at $20K/year. Once you graduate and get that job, your costs of living will rise. Might need a car for transportation, or a suitable wardrobe, and have to buy your own health care. Not to mention socking away 10% minimum to save for retirement. Suddenly $35,000 or even $50,000 looks a lot different and doesn't go as far.

  13. #103
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Loki, what are you saying regarding your income, success and morality?

    Seems you're trying to say just because you can get by under $20K/year, everyone else ought to be able to do the same, without needing assistance or a subsidy. You left out the fact that your education is being subsidized in part by the state and its tax payers, most likely your health care costs, also. If you don't have a car (and its costs of fuel/insurance/maintenance) it's because your college town has subsidized public transit.

    You can't really live the life of a university student on stipend, in a college town, and compare your costs of living to others. Or hold yourself up as the standard bearer on higher moral grounds. You're also viewing your education as future collateral, assuming it'll get you a better paying job in the future, so it's easier to bide time at $20K/year. Once you graduate and get that job, your costs of living will rise. Might need a car for transportation, or a suitable wardrobe, and have to buy your own health care. Not to mention socking away 10% minimum to save for retirement. Suddenly $35,000 or even $50,000 looks a lot different and doesn't go as far.
    I avoid judging people. Then again, you don't come across too many different type of people in a college town.

    If my tuition waiver didn't count as a taxable income, I'd be able to save 10% of my income even on an $18k stipend. Sure, health insurance is subsidized and public transport is free, but A) many jobs subsidize health insurance, and B) most people don't have to spend $1-1.5k on college-related expenses each year, or spend $2k a year in airfare (I also spend well over a thousand on a vacation last year, and still came out in the green). My cost of living will rise because there's no sense in not getting things you want when you make more money. I could easily survive on this "salary" indefinitely.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  14. #104
    A) Many jobs do NOT subsidize health insurance. B) You also said most people could go to community college at no cost, which isn't really true. That might be the $1-2K in expenses they don't "need" to spend, like you don't "need" to spend money on vacations or flying.

    So you're back to square one---where you use yourself as an example of how easily others could live indefinitely on $20K/yr---oh, but don't call it "judging" other people.

  15. #105
    Quote Originally Posted by ']['ear View Post
    Just taking a position, just pointing out that grad students today are spoiled. You should try my 1990 stipend of 11,000 in a dense urban area, as opposed to ~28k, which is what I bet they're making in the same program now. People going to rural schools notoriously do FAR better than people going to urban schools, because cost of living is so much lower. U of I is a great deal that way, I'd bet.
    Stipends didn't used to be taxed; now they are (not to mention two decades of inflation; $11k in 1990 is about $18k in today's dollars). It took a few years, but the compensation caught up with the regulation (which is stupid; it just makes grants bigger, which leads to universities skimming more off in overhead - waste of research money). Also, $28k is pretty high even by engineering/science program standards. Thereabouts of $23-26k is more common.

  16. #106
    Our program is going up to 28K next year. Cost of living here is slightly more expensive that U of I, I'd guess, but nowhere near urban areas.

  17. #107
    On decision-making and morality:

    http://www.charlierose.com/view/inte...6?sponsor_id=1

    Long, about an hour, but quite good. Neuro-economics, etc.

    (Almost put this in another thread because I found it by accident, reading wsj.com about ambivalence. )

  18. #108
    And for the behavioral element in politics and voting:

    Americans have ample reason to be both angry and anxious. Seven in 10 have a close friend or relative who has lost a job; 28 percent have less than $500 in savings. Anxiety typically makes voters question or even abandon long-held convictions about, say, which party they identify with or which policies they support (deficit spending? tax cuts for the rich?), says political scientist George Marcus of Williams College. Anxiety also tends to nudge people to seek out information as a way of assuaging that unease (Social Security will be there when they retire; higher taxes on millionaires will not impede the recovery), which might suggest the Democrats have an opening to make their case.

    Except for one thing: because the recession had identifiable culprits rather than being just another turn of the business cycle, anxiety has morphed into anger. “Gut-level feelings of tremendous anxiety quickly turn into rage,” says psychology professor Drew Westen of Emory University and author of the 2007 book The Political Brain. “Men in particular don’t like feeling anxious, so they very quickly convert anxiety to anger at what made them anxious.” That anger is aimed at anyone perceived as failing to pull the country out of the recession—mostly Democrats, as the party in power. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 23 percent of voters say they’re angry; 54 percent are frustrated. Angry voters say they’ll support a Republican rather than a Democrat by a margin of 73 to 19. Similarly, a Quinnipiac University poll last week found that 33 percent of likely voters in Connecticut say they are “angry” with the federal government. They support GOP Senate candidate (and pro-wrestling tycoon) Linda McMahon 78 percent to 20 percent.

    While anxious voters seek out many sources of information, angry ones “want to rally round their convictions,” says Marcus. “They’re not interested in objective information, but only in the kind that reinforces what they believe.” Democrats can therefore bombard talk shows and op-ed pages and blogs with studies showing that TARP prevented a financial implosion or that the health-care-reform law will save billions of dollars, but many of the voters they need to reach aren’t hearing it. “People have a great capacity to engage in what’s called motivated reasoning,” says political scientist Hank Jenkins-Smith of the University of Oklahoma. “If you have a strongly held belief with an emotional component, the brain defends information that reinforces those ‘priors’ and is skeptical of information that challenges them.” Voters who “know in their gut” that the country could save a bundle by cutting that holy trinity of waste, fraud, and abuse do not hear that the GOP’s “Pledge to America” wouldn’t come close to reducing what is projected to be a deficit of $1.9 trillion by 2035. Paradoxically, the more that issues are explained in neutral forums such as the news media, the more people’s beliefs are cemented. “People who hold these hard priors filter information to support their perceptions,” says Jenkins-Smith.

    'Mama Grizzlies' on the Female Candidates of 2010
    Two self-proclaimed "Mama Grizzlies," supporters of Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, discuss why more women like Angle and Sarah Palin should be elected to office.
    The Democrats are up against another psychological barrier as they try to persuade anxious voters that their policies prevented a depression. “It’s extremely hard to prove a counterfactual, let alone to get people to believe it,” says Jenkins-Smith. Arguing that if some action (the stimulus package) had not been taken then some consequence (a depression) would have occurred is thus a fool’s errand. It doesn’t even help that a consensus of experts endorses a particular view, such as that TARP prevented a complete financial meltdown. Americans’ historical resentment of “pointy-headed intellectuals” and other elites has been inflamed by the fact that the smartest minds on Wall Street caused this mess (and didn’t pay the consequences). For many angry voters, expert consensus on anything from climate change to economic policy is reason enough to reject it.
    more here http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/04/h...-election.html

  19. #109
    "In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 23 percent of voters say they’re angry"

    Funny, that's about Bush's approval rating when he left. And generally speaking the percentage of party die-hards who would continue to approve of a politician of their party even if he raped children. IMO 25% is roughly the percentage of True Believers in either party. So to ask who is angry and then note 73% are Republicat is meaningless. The opposite would have been true in, say, the worst part of Iraq war violence in 2006. It's pretty much a measure of partisanship.

  20. #110
    I thought it was interesting to put link A and B together. ie when emotions influence the decision-making process. The panel said studies have shown psychopaths lack emotions or compassion, and can appear utilitarian (like the economist, thinking only of the math of things), but it's really damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. I wonder if the opposite is true about decisions based on emotion (anxiety, anger, fear), not being able to frame the question well, or integrate information. Either an overwhelmed brain (like Parkinson's taking dopamine and becoming more emotional) or undeveloped prefrontal cortex. (Loved that term--Parliament of the Mind.) The Newsweek article seems to suggest there's something to that, and people seeking information to confirm what they already believe.

  21. #111
    Senior Member Flixy's Avatar
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    Americans have ample reason to be both angry and anxious. Seven in 10 have a close friend or relative who has lost a job; 28 percent have less than $500 in savings.
    I'm a student, and I already have more (though I do have student loans, but the interest is very low and I don't have to repay them for another 15 years or so, so I prefer some savings in case I need to spend a lot of money).

    It seems to me that quite often (definitely not always), financial problems are caused by own mistakes. It's not that uncommon that relatively poor people do have a fancy tv, car, or something like that. I was udner the impression that a mroe materialistic society defines you as successful if you have a nice car, tv, things like that. Doesn't matter if you are actually far into debt, and your house is crumbling behind the well kept facade, it's important to appear successful to the neighbours and friends, keeping up appearances.
    Keep on keepin' the beat alive!

  22. #112
    It seems to me that quite often (definitely not always), financial problems are caused by own mistakes.
    Truth.

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