Repeatedly eluding this will not make you right
I couldn't have said it better myself.
If you insist that progress can be made without having a metric against which to evaluate progress... well, that's your prerogative. You're in good (or at least prominent) company; quite a lot of post-modernists would agree with you.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Opportunism is tactics. If you want to know the colour of a politician, look at what he has done in office - or, if he has never been elected before, at the company he keeps.
That most of the electorate is unwilling to take the time and effort required to evaluate their representatives on their merits, rather than on this week's opportunistic dog-and-pony show, is hardly something I consider progress. But hey, what do I know, I'm just another ideologue.
So the people are always to blame. Maybe we should evaluate their competence before voting.
What have you to say about Obama then? His record in the Senate is very left, his opinions are quite pragmatical/centre-left nuanced, his companionship is a bit bizarre. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Opportunism is pragmatic. If the left has it right, I'll apply this idea even if my political company is rightish.
How are you going to judge whether somebody "has it right" if you claim to have no coherent standard for evaluating it? Go by your gut? Go by what Conventional Wisdom tells you?
If there is proven inequality, it must be tackled, period. If women are discriminated even as they're fit for the job, that must be stopped, one way or another, by a law if needed. But not automatically, by quota laws, imposing parity no matter where and how.
There is a case to be made for quota laws, particularly in jobs where a great part of the qualifications can only be acquired by on-the-job training. In those cases, denying women access on account of lack of qualifications is self-perpetuating. As an aside, gender inequalities may very well be caused by structural imbalances rather than out-and-out discrimination, and quota laws can provide the necessary impetus to challenge those structural imbalances.
That being said, there is, of course, also a case against quotas, because they are wide-ranging, sweeping and very strong interventions in society. And strong interventions in society should be used sparingly and with considerable care. But that is not quite the case I hear you making...
If life conditions in prisons are indecent in terms of health, cleanness etc, this must be corrected and means must be provided by the state. This doesn't mean anyone should have his private room with colour satellite television though.
I should very much think that they have the right to a private room (the right to privacy is a pretty basic and inalienable human right, which is not revoked merely because you are imprisoned), and they certainly have a right to some contact with the outside world (since prolonged isolation is a form of torture). Whether that contact should take the form of internet access, TV, newspapers or some combination is, of course, a matter of some debate.
I'm slightly amused that you make a point of mentioning that the TV is in colour and via satellite, BTW... would B/W cable TV be more acceptable to you :-P
That is exactly the case I am making.
Otherwise, yeah, local channels on B/W TV sets would be a nice punishment (psychological torture, you will call it) :) You know, even keeping someone imprisoned is a restriction of the fundamental right to move freely and do whatever you please. It is very hard to bear psychologically, even if less so than downright isolation. A form of torture can be in certain cases your roommate. As a student, I remember my right to privacy was limited to my own bed and my own locker in that shared room.
And so on. Goes without saying that prison is inhumane, particularly since prisoners are not to blame: the society didn't listen to their griefs, and pushed them to crime. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
However, restricting their ability to follow developments outside the prison, crowding them together too closely to permit them privacy and isolating them completely from their families and friends are simply gratuitous vengeance for which there is little pragmatic justification in terms of rehabilitation or the safety of the rest of society.
No more ranting, Jake, or you'll do it all by yourself. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
My point was about giving an example of balanced take on a delicate subject.
An example of what you consider a balanced stance on a delicate subject.
But when you repeatedly couch your own subjective - and highly ideological - assessments in the language of objective observation of fact, you get called out on your bullshit. And that involves going into some of the details of how and why you are wrong.
You may protest that the pro-prisoner part didn't go far enough (and I might say that you're too leftwing, that's why, to which you'll reply I'm rightwing, duh, boring).
The fact that you are not sufficiently pro-prisoner (pro-prisoner? WTF kind of term is that? I'm pro-human rights, thank you very much!) is not my complaint. My complaint is that you blithely conflate areas of policy for which there is a utilitarian case to be debated and areas where there is no utilitarian case to be made. That's comparing apples to oranges.
Well you can call it utilitarian, yes. The case I am actually making about the death of ideologies, is that politics are becoming more and more utilitarian these days. The time of the grand principles and their even grander invocation is past, not because the society gives them up, but because there's no need to fight for their necesity anymore. That necessity has now become quite obvious, and the talk about a rational way of putting them into practice is little by little excluding politicians of the type of J-L Mélenchon (formely of the French PS), or other hard or extreme left. The same phenomenon, but from a different direction, will occur about the neoliberalism, libertarianism, or hard right. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
The moment I will start comparing what you consider a human-rights friendly cell, with the places many people, poorer and even not so much, live in, you'll realize that by that logic everybody is subject to an inhumane treatment.
That is rank nonsense. Try taking a look at a prison cell sometimes. Yeah, students living in dormitories have similar amounts of space and privacy to what's found in a single-occupant prison cell. But students don't have to spend their every waking hour in their dorm rooms either. And they get to choose their co-occupants, which is not entirely insignificant either.
Pretending that prison cells are comparable to the accommodation offered to the twentieth percentile (nevermind the median...) income/wealth in society in general is bald-faced denial of easily verifiable facts, which is neither conducive to a productive debate, nor to my blood pressure.
You're entitled to your own opinion. You're not entitled to your own facts.
And anyway, you're shifting the goalposts again. I never objected to single-occupant cells on principle. Not even students sleep in cots in group dormitories - when two of them share a bedroom, it's usually for rather more social reasons than lack of accommodation space.
Well you can call it utilitarian, yes. The case I am actually making about the death of ideologies, is that politics are becoming more and more utilitarian these days.
Utilitarianism is an ideology. Nobody disputes that - except, apparently, you. Not even the Enlightenment thinkers who proposed it would dispute that it's an ideological position.
But I'm not going to waste any more bandwidth correcting such basic omissions in your education, because that has so far been a waste of time. You can look up the history - and critiques - of utilitarianism on your own time. Wikipedia has an excellent page on it, I hear, from which to start.
Utilitarianism? Ah, but you see, I didn't speak about utilitarianism. I used the adjective utilitarian in a commonly accepted sense - that is, by people who are aware life is more than just semantics - or hairsplitting.
Utilitarianism is not what I described, just like real-politik or compromising isn't pragmatism. You not being able to discern this shows you actually don't know so much on what means what. You have it all wrong, Jake :) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
The point was that prisoners are there for a reason, which is hardly to feel comfortable and be distracted. I said that decent lodging should be balanced with scarcity implied by the situation. Balance, Jake.
Your own words, from two posts ago:
Your original statement:
You started out by stating - without attempting to make a case - that you thought prisoners ought to not have individual cells. That's a view one can hold. I happen to disagree, but hey, that's life.
You also stated, however, that by "looking at the facts without bias" this was not "indecent" conditions.
When challenged on the decency of parts of those conditions, you claimed that they were not indecent because a substantial fraction of the population lived in similar or worse conditions. Of course, that's not an argument against those conditions being indecent.
But even more importantly, when challenged on the factuality of this statement, you backpedaled to words to the effect of "well, maybe they're indecent for free people, but they're in prison, silly - different standards apply to people in prison."
So now you're reduced to claiming that "yeah, conditions in prisons are indecent, but the prisoners deserve it. So there!"
For all your talk about utilitarian pragmatism, when pushed to defend your points from first principles, you fall back on primitive retributive justice. Principles that are hardly particularly utilitarian or pragmatic - retributive justice incurs far greater costs on all involved - society, potential victims and the criminal than rehabilitary justice.
So apparently principle trumps pragmatism in the case of prisoners?
Ah, but you see, I didn't speak about utilitarianism. I used the adjective utilitarian in a commonly accepted sense - that is, by people who are aware life is more than just semantics - or hairsplitting.
Your own words, again:
The case I am actually making about the death of ideologies, is that politics are becoming more and more utilitarian these days.
I'll leave it to those less linguistically challenged than I apparently am to figure out which sense of "utilitarian" that this implies, and how precisely this conflicts with saying that politics have increasingly aligned with the principles of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is not what I described, just like real-politik or compromising isn't pragmatism.
You'll have to show me a definition of "pragmatic" that doesn't cover realpolitik and compromise.
And you can't fall back on what "common knowledge" says here, because if you go out and ask people at random "are realpolitik and compromise pragmatic approaches?" they'll overwhelmingly answer that they are. So here you have to be using it as a term of art. And then you have to provide a coherent definition. This game of "I'll let other people guess at what I think I mean by this" is one of little value and even less amusement.
The first quotation of me is about human rights, if you pay attention. You didn't challenge me on the decency part; you made it a matter of human rights, and I pointed out that turning everything in life a matter of human rights will lead no where; this is just a way for you the Revolutionary to make sure you'll always be able to claim the Establishment (led by those fatcats, no doubt) despises human rights .
This is how you twist one tiny word in a phrase and then make a huge case about it - and why I called you a vicious debater. I don't have time to correct each of your tiny errors of logic, let alone that I suspect them to be intentional, given the general revolutionary tone you chose to use.
Finally, the word "utilitarian" has two meanings (as you might well know; so I won't give any links - there). One is about caring about the usefulness rather than the pretty packaging. The other is related to the doctrine of utilitarianism. I used the term in its first signification, and while I might have put this clearly, it was you who deliberately picked the second one, in order to be able to send a arrow about my supposed need of "education". The doctrine goes much farther than the everyday life term of utilitarian.
Compromise can be pragmatic, as well as un-pragmatic, when the two parties involved strike a deal according to the balance of power between them and other factors but the best way for the given situation. Real-politik can be pragmatic, but can also be cynical. Rational pragmatism implies in my view a good dose of humanism and especially intellectual honesty - something you seem in utter want of. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
I meant balance between decent conditions, and the degree of comfort fitting their condition of prisoners - people paying their debt to the society for a wrong done (and not just "removed from society"). Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
