Monday, January 9, 2017

Reform Ideas: Healthcare

On why the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is so unpopular with Republicans.


However, why it is unpopular with Republicans might be different from why it might be unpopular with Trump supporters, who are not always Republicans (Trump's greatest supporters were Democrats from small towns in the eastern US). 

During the presidential campaign, the BBC interviewed Trump supporters in order to better understand the Trump phenomenon. The BBC reporters claimed that the single most voiced grievance Trump supporters had was with Obamacare. They would claim that the Act forced them to buy health insurance, which pushed them into financial insolvency (they were previously uninsured but not financially troubled), or they told stories about local businesses that had to lay off workers because of increased health insurance costs. The BBC reporters did not look into these complaints any further. (I cannot now find that story.)

I've read subsequent stories about how people tend to be exceedingly vague when they complain about how they or others suffered financially under Obamacare. Underlying their wariness of Obamacare, there seems to be a general resentment of being required to purchase health coverage, despite its benefits.

One other interpretation is that Trump supporters, while jealously guarding their entitlement programs like social security, perceive other programs as "giveaways" to corrupt liberals.


Knoxville, Iowa — One recent morning, I sat near two young men at a coffee shop here whom I’ve known since they were little boys. Now about 18, they pushed away from the table, and one said: “Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.” The other nodded.
They’re hard workers. As a kid, one washed dishes, took orders and swept the floor at a restaurant. Every summer, the other picked sweet corn by hand at dawn for a farm stand and for grocery stores, and then went to work all day on his parents’ farm. Now one is a welder, and the other is in his first year at a state university on an academic scholarship. They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops, and they know that abortion and socialism are evil, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that Donald J. Trump will be good for America.

They are part of a growing movement in rural America that immerses many young people in a culture — not just conservative news outlets but also home and church environments — that emphasizes contemporary conservative values. It views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous.

Along with the work ethic, there is among conservatives a starkly different view of human nature -- that human beings are not born good, but must work hard to become good.
“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that.
“We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.”
He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”

Mr. Watts talked about the 2015 movie theater shooting in Lafayette, La., in which two people were killed. Mr. Watts said that Republicans knew that the gunman was a bad man, doing a bad thing. Democrats, he added, “would look for other causes — that the man was basically good, but that it was the guns, society or some other place where the blame lies and then they will want to control the guns, or something else — not the man.” Republicans, he said, don’t need to look anywhere else for the blame.

To some extent, this pessimistic attitudes reflects the "moral revolution" that was the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Earlier ancient societies -- the Romans, the ancient Greeks -- had ethical systems based on honor, but were devoid of moral considerations. The 'good life' for the Greeks in the "Iliad", for example, was the life of plunder (the more one plundered, the greater the honor one accrued). However, what conservatives may not perceive accurately is that liberal idealism likewise derives from Christian sentiments. Not all liberals are corrupt.

With this in mind, what might Trump's alternative to Obamacare look like?

It might be essentially identical to Obamacare, with a few cosmetic alterations.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/11/29/503762324/trump-picks-seema-verma-to-run-medicare-and-medicaid

Indiana's unique Medicaid expansion was designed to appeal to conservatives. HIP 2.0 asks covered people to make a small monthly payment to access health insurance. A missed payment can result in six-month lockout from insurance coverage. Those provisions aren't allowed under traditional Medicaid, but Indiana got a federal waiver to implement them.
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Sunday, January 8, 2017

Reform Ideas: Prisons

The philosophies behind reforming criminal sentencing are also the philosophical underpinnings of how prisons should be run.

Here are some of the main theories on what prison is for:



The Auburn system (also known as the New York System) is a penal method of the 19th century in which persons worked during the day in groups and were kept in solitary confinement at night, with enforced silence at all times. The silent system evolved during the 1820s at Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York, as an alternative to and modification of the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement, which it gradually replaced in the United States. Whigs favored this system because it promised to rehabilitate criminals by teaching them personal discipline and respect for work, property, and other people.

Among notable elements of the Auburn system were striped uniforms, lockstep, and silence.

Officials also began implementing a classification system at Auburn in the wake of the riots, dividing inmates into three groups: (1) the worst, who were placed on constant solitary lockdown; (2) middling offenders, who were kept in solitary and worked in groups when well-behaved; and (3) the "least guilty and depraved," who were permitted to sleep in solitary and work in groups. Construction on a new solitary cell block for category (1) inmates ended in December 1821, after which these "hardened" offenders moved into their new home. Within a little over a year, however, five of these men had died of consumption, another forty-one were seriously ill, and several had gone insane. After visiting the prison and seeing the residents of the new cell block, Governor Joseph C. Yates was so appalled by their condition that he pardoned several of them outright.

What is fascinating is that the Auburn system seems virtually identical to the contemporary Japanese prison system. However, the Japanese system, while typically described as "harsh", is also recognized as devoid of abuse and violence. Also, there is a single-minded emphasis in the Japanese prison system on rehabilitation, but not in the sense in the West where rehabilitation implies creating a model of free civilian life within the prison.
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Monday, January 2, 2017

The Weird, Weird West (deliberate chaos)

Western culture is rather different from other cultures. 

Historically, there has been an embrace in the West of univerals like those found science and transcendent monotheistic religion (in contrast, Asian medicinal practices like acupuncture are pragmatic, with no effort made to lay real theoretical or explanatory basis, and religions like Shintoism are not seen to have universal appeal). Also, Europe was always a backwater compared to Asian societies in particular. The classic "great" civilizations were centered on a major city along a long river that fed an agricultural society that was governed by a great monarch who oversaw a vast bureaucracy and an elaborate priesthood that regulated a complex caste system. There was nothing like that in ancient Greece, nor even under the Roman Empire.
But what makes the West really odd by the standards of other societies is a kind of inner chaos, a disruptiveness that is deliberate. The ancient philosopher Heraklitos wrote that "War is the father of all things." It is almost as if this kind of dialectical ethos of productive conflict were buried beneath the mask of the official doctrines one finds in Western religion and science and philosophy.

 All societies seek to dampen social conflict; that is what a political system does. But in the West, the social order also sets aside one realm and carefully builds certain rules and parameters around it almost like those that exist for sports, and then actually promotes conflict and chaos within that sphere. In the Anglo-American world, that realm of enhanced chaos is the practical world of political economy. The worlds of business and democracy in the US in particular are very rough and tumble.

 There is really nothing like it in the world. Continental Europeans (even Canadians) find it distasteful. But in France and Germany, the intellectual and cultural sphere is a realm of free-ranging conflict. German artists seem to have a taste for the disturbing. The French have an intellectual culture of outrageous provocation (e.g., the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo). In France and Germany, this need to disturb seems to be almost a moral imperative. There might be hints of this in some American popular culture, like standup comedy, which feeds into some political satire on TV, like Jon Stewart, but even that is really in the overt political realm.
We can contrast this with Islam, a Western religion that exists primarily in non-Western parts of the world. Beneath the strict monotheistic orthodoxies that also exist in the West, there is no ferment. That is, while there are open conflicts between Islamic factions like Sunni and Shiite, there is no debate or dialog. The first universities arose in the Middle East and north Africa, and they were quick to adopt pagan philosophers like Aristotle. But like the Catholic Church's adoption of Aristotle, it was really an expansion of orthodoxy through annexation. In Western universities as far back as one thousand years ago, there were all kinds of open challenges to the orthodoxy (e.g., nominalism, Peter Abelard, etc.). In a Muslim society, one finds elaborate politeness instead of disputation. The desire for social harmony creates a kind of conservative cast to the society, it seems stuck in the past and nostalgic, not really vibrant or creative. 

The fashion world as dialectical progress
Here is a BBC News article from 2016 August 12th on why the cover shot of the September issue of Vogue is so prestigious.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37059437/this-is-why-being-the-september-cover-star-of-us-vogue-is-still-important
In a nutshell, the September issue would broadcast to the great mass of American and European women the collections of the annual New York fashion week and all other elite fashion shows. Vogue did this from 1909 to the 1980s and 1990s, showing couture fashions from around the world. Women would read the September issue intensely, not so that they would know what clothes to buy, but what patterns to use to cut and sew their own clothes.
It is not like that any more. Vogue is famous today because the 2003 film "The Devil Wears Prada", starring famous movie actors, was made. In a sense, Vogue is no longer in vogue.
But there is the sense within the industry that the fashion world serves a societal purpose.
Editor-in-chief Anna Wintour speaks on episode one of the Vogue podcast about putting Naomi Campbell on the cover of her very first September issue in 1989.
"We have this meeting every month where we present the issue to the corporate floor and I remember all the men in suits being absolutely stunned that I would put a black woman on the front cover of the September issue of Vogue.
"So looking at this issue made me very proud of how far we've come, how much the world has changed and that question would just simply not arise today."

 The article thus concludes with Wintour asserting that the fashion world can contribute to social progress.
In this this profile with the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Lagerfeld is more explicit. He claims that if one looks at a photograph of a city from the early 1900s, one will see people moving through low-rise streets in horse-drawn carriages, and wearing formal suits and hats; a photograph of the same street in the 1950s will show people in cars amidst skyscrapers, but still wearing formal attire; a contemporary photo of the same street still has cars and skyscrapers, but the conventional formal wear has been swept aside for casual, individualistic attire.

 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/19/in-the-now

 There is a sense in the West of historical "progress", progress toward increased freedom and greater rationality in terms of science and technology, but also in terms of culture and the political system (democracy). This progress is driven though conflict and competition, and the attitude is that conflict should be embraced. But there is also a sense that this dynamic of conflict needs to be contained through rules and regulations. This kind of productive, civil conflict is associated with the term 'dialectic'.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

The fashion industry is exemplary of this sentiment. There is a sense that there is a "cutting edge" to progress, and that this cutting edge involves undermining -- aggressively -- the previous status quo (e.g., last year's fashions). One can find this attitude in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington DC and all over New York City -- even in the world of finance, with its glorification of nonsensical "innovations"

 This is a great break with tradition, and very recent. In traditional societies, there are no fashions, there are costumes which advertise one's tribe and clan, status, age, gender, and so forth. Even change and conflict are perceived as mere manifestations of eternal forces; in east Asian societies, these forces are benign and complementary (e.g, Yin and Yang), whereas in the western religious tradition these are incompatible polar opposites of good and evil. This is dualism.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism
Our own ingrained tendency to think in terms of progress might incline us to dismiss tradition and, with it, dualism. But dialectic and dualism are both equally established in the modern mind -- even in terms of progress. In fact, the loss of faith in progress in the 20th century in the aftermath of world wars, the Holocaust and the reappraisal of project of western colonialism fed into the existentialism of the 1950s, but, more optimistically, at the popular level it manifested itself in the 1960s with a flirtation with Asian philosophy and music. This is seen today as somehow being "progressive" and open minded. In fact, it might be that in the modern world, there has been a loss of faith in a notion of progress that maintains that there is a pre-established goal and outcome to world history, but there is still a fascination with and dedication to productive, dialectical conflict (e.g., checking out the latest iPhone). In our society today, as in the world of fashion, one finds both the desire to progress along the cutting edge, but also a mature and wistful sense that this is simply the passing time and tides of our lives that wax and wane with no clear direction or significance. Today's newspaper becomes tomorrow's garbage.

The 2016 model on the cover of Vogue reflects that ephemeral and meaningless side to fashion: It is none other than Kendall Jenner, daughter of Bruce Jenner and half-sister to Kim Kardashian. This is not the supermodel Naomi Campbell shattering racial taboos by making a cover; this is the world's luckiest affluent teenager surfing a dream modeling career in the wake of her sisters' flukish fame.

 But there is something else going on here. The "American Dream", it is said, has become the "California Dream" -- to become wealthy and famous with little to no effort or talent. The Kardashians reflect that moment in history. On the one hand, the spectacular success of the Kardashians seems to contradict any notion of progress -- progress conventionally understood as movement towards an inclusive and fair meritocracy, as opposed to inheritance. On the other hand, even more disturbingly, the Kardashians represent a cancerous mutation of the notion of progress.  Now progress means ordinary people winning the lottery, so to speak, and becoming celebrities -- people who are famous for being famous.



Traditional liberties versus contemporary freedom

On why Singapore banned chewing gum.


It was once everywhere in Singapore. Now it is nowhere.


Let's compare Singapore with another major city, Paris. 

The streets and sidewalks of Paris smell like urine. 

This can be a major shock to tourists visiting Paris, especially Japanese tourists. 


Paris syndrome (French: Syndrome de Paris, Japanese: パリ症候群, Pari shōkōgun) is a transient psychological disorder exhibited by some individuals when visiting or vacationing to Paris, as a result of extreme shock resulting from their finding out that Paris is not what they had expected it to be. It is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.[1] Similar syndromes include Jerusalem syndrome and Stendhal syndrome. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock. It is particularly noted among Japanese travelers.

Paris is a hostile, rude, disgusting, dangerous city that is seen from afar as the "City of Light".

Nothing like that in Singapore. It was once common for the residents of Singapore to urinate in public and spit everywhere. Within a generation, this behavior was transformed.


It is often said that "Singapore is a police state", and that only through harsh, meticulous, all-pervasive policing can Singapore remain so orderly.

But this is a police state that upholds the rule of law and liberty that it inherited from the British empire. Singapore is the embodiment of liberty.


It might be crucial here to distinguish between liberty and freedom.


Liberty and freedom are distinct, as well. As the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has observed, liberty implies a system of rules, a ''network of restraint and order,'' hence the word's close association with political life. Freedom has a more general meaning, which ranges from an opposition to slavery to the absence of psychological or personal encumbrances (no one would describe liberty as another name for nothing left to lose).

This is from a historical review that Pitkin published in The Journal of Political Theory back in the 1980s. She was engaged in a pragmatic, linguistic turn away from utilizing abstract terms in philosophy toward studying how they have actually developed historically in society. 

The distinction between liberty and freedom seems similar to the distinction between 'civilization' versus 'culture'. Civilization usually refers to the outward, material, institutional, formal, legal aspects of society (associated with British and American ideals), and 'culture' originally referred to the inward, spiritual aspiration of individuals and nations (associated with Germans ideals, and very Protestant in its introversion). 

The American Revolution was all about liberty. There was little talk of freedom in American political culture until the 1930s. The term 'liberty' is so narrow in its reference to a political-legal system of restraints that protects individuals that the term 'freedom' had to be appropriated from its more generalized origins. From there on, the word freedom was appropriated across the political spectrum and eclipsed liberty. It also becomes central to the self-indulgent mentality of a consumer society and to the language of the advertising industry.


Now, back to the old thesis that the Western tradition is unique (weird) in that it encourages civilized conflict - dialectic - as a central value, whereas establishing harmony is the focus for pretty much all other societies. This thesis also holds that this creation of conflict is tightly constrained and regulated, and that this conflict is recognized as potentially dangerous. Also, this generation of conflict is seen as productive, and there is a pragmatic attitude toward it. 

Liberty would be a kind of perfect example of the regulating system that permits civilized conflict within its framework. 

But freedom in its original meaning as an absence of personal encumbrances would also be a perfect example of that when it refers to the development of culture as the individual's struggle toward inward spiritual growth ('kultur', in German).

But the adoption of the term freedom as it is now understood - as a lack of regulation - breaks with the Western tradition. There is something complacently anarchistic about the current American conception of freedom. The western notion of dialectic as civilized conflict that needs to be regulated is replaced with a notion of freedom that is naturalistic, a given. Rather than a dialectic as a conflictive process that is productive, there is something self-indulgent about the new understanding of freedom; there is something fun about freedom, so it exists as an end in itself. Freedom becomes self-righteous and self-regarding, and is understood as a naturally given right (as opposed to liberty as a system of restraint that is artificially constructed in the political realm, and is quite delicate).

What kind of person would become a national leader in a society like this?

A comedic self-parody of intensely self-righteous, self-indulgent narcissism. 

Of course, this is Donald Trump. But it is also the Clintons. 



Mitochondrion as metaphor 

It is the perfect metaphor for the role of dialectic in Western society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion
The mitochondrion (plural mitochondria) is a double membrane-bound organelle found in all eukaryotic organisms, although some cells in some organisms may lack them (e.g. red blood cells). A number of organisms have reduced or transformed their mitochondria into other structures.
Mitochondria generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), used as a source of chemical energy.
In addition to supplying cellular energy, mitochondria are involved in other tasks, such as signaling, cellular differentiation, and cell death, as well as maintaining control of the cell cycle and cell growth.
The consensus is that mitochondria originated as a bacterium without thick walls (prokaryote) that somehow wound up inside an organism with a thick membrane and organelles like a nucleus (eukaryote); this is the origin of all complex life.
There are two hypotheses about the origin of mitochondria: endosymbiotic and autogenous. The endosymbiotic hypothesis suggests that mitochondria were originally prokaryotic cells, capable of implementing oxidative mechanisms that were not possible for eukaryotic cells; they became endosymbionts living inside the eukaryote.[25] In the autogenous hypothesis, mitochondria were born by splitting off a portion of DNA from the nucleus of the eukaryotic cell at the time of divergence with the prokaryotes; this DNA portion would have been enclosed by membranes, which could not be crossed by proteins. Since mitochondria have many features in common with bacteria, the endosymbiotic hypothesis is more widely accepted.
Likewise, the dialectic is like an organ that exist in carefully proscribed places within Western societies. For example, the spirit of dialectic thrives within the realm of politics (democracy) or the realm of the economy (capitalism) in the United States, or in the political and cultural realms in France, or in the cultural realm in Germany (Kultur). 

 [[[Deleuze & Guartari 

Heraklitus

Heraklitus was among the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece, and whose work emphasizes the dialectical nature of reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
Heraclitus was famous for his insistence on ever-present change as being the fundamental essence of the universe, as stated in the famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same river twice"[6] (see panta rhei, below). This position was complemented by his stark commitment to a unity of opposites in the world, stating that "the path up and down are one and the same". Through these doctrines Heraclitus characterized all existing entities by pairs of contrary properties, whereby no entity may ever occupy a single state at a single time. This, along with his cryptic utterance that "all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos" (literally, "word", "reason", or "account") has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
One insight into Heraklitus might be found in his distinction between "seasons" and the "transient" in terms of time.

 The seasons are marked by opposition (winter, summer), but are part of a regular cycle in which they provide a kind of framework -- the Logos. In contrast, particular events that happen within those seasons are transient and impermanent.

 His most famous saying -- typically translated today as "No one steps into the same river twice" -- might be better understood in the sense of the river remaining the same as a general framework, but its particulars being transformed continually.
ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.Potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin, hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei "Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers."
His political philosophy was rather pessimistic, even misanthropic. But there is something interesting about his attitude toward the laws, which he defends as a bulwark against chaos.
Diogenes relates that Heraclitus had a poor opinion of human affairs.[8] He believed that Hesiod and Pythagoras lacked understanding though learned[16] and that Homer and Archilochus deserved to be beaten.[17] Laws needed to be defended as though they were city walls.[18] Timon is said to have called him a "mob-reviler." Heraclitus hated the Athenians and his fellow Ephesians, wishing the latter wealth in punishment for their wicked ways.[19] Says Diogenes: "Finally, he became a hater of his kind (misanthrope) and wandered the mountains ... making his diet of grass and herbs."
The law is a kind of Logos or civilized framework within which a certain chaotic activity may occur without overwhelming society with the forces of anarchy.

 [[[[gnosticism

Dialectic, Dualism, Organic, Atomism, and Monism

 [[['methodological research orientations', Sciabarra
[[[Durkheim on solidarity
[[[Japan, yakuza, radical organic solidarity for insiders
[[[Catholic vs. Protestant, Jung argues that southern Europe is culturally and psychologically more inclusive of pagan elements, northern Europe was exclusive in this way
[[["diversity": static (organic) solidarity vs. urban individualism (dynamic) diversity
[[[Japan also has radical 'mechanical solidarity' (homogeneity, similarity)
[[[the two types of solidarity are not mutually exclusive
[[[urban life in the US has neither form of solidarity; but this is a very creative but alienating environment; the Top Five corporations in the US are creative dynamos, a corporate creativity that is seemingly unique to the US.




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