Comments on: Fix on Fail I: Everyday Arguments for Pluralism, Multiculturalism and Diversity

By: Barry

Barry — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 12:43:11 +0000

Tim, it’s clear by now that Brexit was a very, very elite project, conducted by the Tories and some extremely wealthy media barons. For example, Murdoch confessed that he was for Brexit because he had more clout with the U.K. PM than with Brussels.

Most of the policies which impoverished many Britons were very elite policies, quite deliberately implemented by The Tories (with support from the neoliberal wing of Labour – i.e., the more elite wing). The consequences were then quite deliberately used by those same elites.

By: CarlD

CarlD — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 16:34:51 +0000

I really think you nailed this, and around the side of your larger points I’m struck by the analogies to teaching, where so often the approved diversities run afoul of the unapproved ones, and the costs of real people pluralism cause the ideologies of respect, celebration, and inclusion to collapse right when they could actually be doing some good.

By: Angus Lockyer

Angus Lockyer — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 07:33:43 +0000

Thanks for this Tim. On a sad morning in London it provides not just solace but hope.

By: Pat Bowne

Pat Bowne — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 23:52:44 +0000

I cannot tell you how much I love this article. Sometimes I’m ready to give up on progressive values entirely – not because I disagree with them, but because the arguments for them are so often undeveloped, blinkered, and in-groupy. I find myself thinking that if I really care about society’s underdogs, I should be more interested in their opinions than in those of people who routinely dismiss their perspectives.

As you say, more listening and more honesty. If a position cannot survive being discussed with the people it will affect, outside a fog of buzzwords and self-congratulation, it shouldn’t survive at all.

This blog is such a breath of fresh air! I look forward to the rest of this series.

By: jerry hamrick

jerry hamrick — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 22:02:22 +0000

The idea of “redistribution” grew out of the idea that gold was the commodity that gave value to our money. There was not enough to go around, so redistribution was necessary, or so it seemed. But FDR, realizing that fighting our way out of the Great Depression would require more money than our supply of gold would support, he, in 1933 and acting on his own initiative, took us off the gold standard. So, for more than 80 years we have had an infinite supply of money. We have more dollars than there are subatomic particles in the universe.

Now our task becomes how much money each citizen will need in order to avail himself of the resources, opportunities, rights, and protections that our new democracy and our new economic system will provide, and thereby enable him to build a long life that is worth living for himself and his loved ones. I have already computed this annual income so you won’t have to: it is $36,000 to each and every citizen from birth to death. Because this money, I call it the Social Security Lifetime Stipend (SSLS), will come from our unlimited supply of money and will be given to each citizen, we will be distributing, not redistributing. Equal distribution—how American is that?

And this brings us to the question I asked you several years ago: “What are the lessons of history?”

The answers are many and easy to see. You describe them in your posts all the time. The lessons of history are the myriad examples of man’s inhumanity to man. And the greatest lesson of all is that, even though we catalog them daily all over the world, we never learn from them. We should take such lessons and translate them into new systems that will remove the causes of these inhumane acts, and if we can’t do that we can at least minimize their effects.

But there is no cry from the people for new systems. Instead they demand that offending officials be replaced, and when the new ones are no better they repeat their demand. Bad systems will always produce bad results no matter who operates them.
We live in a world of ideologies and false hypothesis, and we are destroying our civilization and possibly our species.

Ideology: ideas or beliefs that are taught or believed to be true, but which are not supported by rational argument, and which give exact rules, directions, or instructions about how one should do something.

We need to live in a world of systems:

System: a process containing mechanical, biologic, and intellectual components that are brought together in rational ways, and which together operate on resources or relationships to produce results that are of benefit all humankind.

A new democracy can be rational, it can be fair, and it can be moral. The same is true of a new system of economics.

There are four fundamental questions that we must answer or meet our doom.
“Where do we stand?” “How did we get here?” You and others of your profession have the answers already.

“Where do we want to go?” We want to cure the ills you describe.

“How do we get there from here?”