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4/03/2009

Survival of the fittest, what persons deserve freedom, and what persons get it?


Is it true that it should be (are) the most adaptable (flexible) who survives best? And the less that have most problems surviving?


If we should examine people in higher positions, earning more money then the average, what would we find? That they are the most flexible or adaptable, more than most of those under them? Or can they be very inflexible, no especially adaptive, rigid, stiff? (Do many of them have more means hiding this too?)


But it’s not impossible that many of them want to believe that they are superior and deserve their position and wealth?


Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, is about blaming the one who is a failure, who don’t succeed! With your success or failure you have proved if you are as good as other people or less good! If you deserve a decent living or not!


Strikes me once again; empathy is said to be one of several risk factors for burnout according to science.


Thought about inconsequence (arrogance, cynicism) in rhetoric (in politics, on the net in debates there etc.), an inconsequence making you totally confused and thus unfortunately entirely mute. Who is the stupid here? It must be me (primary defense?).


Neoliberals have told me that if nobody wants my product: my piano-playing, piano teacher work, then those things has to die. If nobody is willing to pay me for those things, goodbye with it.


But if a neoliberal try to sell his products or services as an own manufacturer with little or no success, then the failing success has with something else to do then with the need for or quality of his product, something it had in my case though. It’s nothing wrong with their product or what they want to sell (compared with my “product”), but the fault lays somewhere else, on taxes, the society, the government.


How is it with the logical thinking?


When the power has succeeded to make us, the grassroots, fight they have succeeded! People won’t see the ruling class or what they are doing if the grassroots are fighting between themselves. Forces try to make us believe that we have the same chance as those wealthy. Playing on the false hope defense.


The “weak” can die or something? Who are loyal with them? Loyal with the losers?


The wealthiest, richest and with most power join in groups of lots a different kinds to support each other (and most of those are men too), they organize themselves in closed and (often) secret groups. Loyal to each other?


But who are loyal to us. How do we, the grassroots, deal with this? By trying to be awaken to things, not let the power divide and rule! Who are going to protect the weak groups in society? (who are the weak and where does he weakness comes from?).


From where comes limitless needs? Can those ever become filled?


In the blogposting “Political mathematics” you can read that demands on cars, TVs and cell phones have decreased in the global financial crisis paths. The need for school education, glaucoma and cataract surgery and changing diapers are on the other hand unchanged from losses of demands on the market. But the government doesn’t think it can afford looking so those needs are covered- we have a crisis for God’s sake! The message from the secretary in charge is that we have to prioritize.


But the truth is that the government has prioritized differently for how the money shall become spent. New and more an more gloomy prognoses are published almost weekly about how drastic the cuts that will become forced on the general welfare. The needed money is almost exactly the money the tax cuts are for work! This means that 30 000 people will lose their jobs. 30 000 persons whose jobs are needed everyday, everywhere in the country. They are at risk of losing their jobs because the government doesn’t think if can afford them!


The Left party, as the envious bores they are (as the blog owner calls herself and her friends), has initiated an investigation how the tax cuts for work are divided among people in different income groups. Just to check if it really is the low and middle wage earners who are the most benefited by those tax cuts.


If it is like that, something the government readily claims, there is some sort of demand stimulus in the reform that at least isn’t totally crazy in a recession.


But it isn’t like this.


As a matter of fact more than 52 percent of the tax cuts for work go to the highest paid third part. They don’t need to increase their consumption. They will in all likelihood not do this to any significant degree. People on these income levels save the money they get over and the money neither lead to jobs nor to tax revenues.


The lowest paid on the contrary are made do with 8 percent of the tax cuts total value.


The 15 billion Swedish Crowns it’s about here could have become used better. A billion could have one to the lowest paid. While 14 billions needed for keeping the staff in the health care, child care and school could have gone exactly to those things.


It should, in contrast to using them to even more increase the already highly paid peoples’ space for savings, have become used to keeping the unemployment down and the employment up – something that actually should have been highly prioritized given the general state on the labor market.


This would in turn have held 30 000 publicly employed peoples’ consumption up and kept the economy going. Instead they are at risk of becoming thrown out into the low income slough on a really lousy dole or being forced to change account from the municipality town’s wage office to the social welfare office.


And the needs for the tasks the employed in the municipality are doing won’t disappear as said before.

So it will probably become the fired assistant nurses, children’s nurses, the teachers and home helps that have to step in and take care of their old tasks unemployed when the local governments service can’t afford it or haven’t time for it.


Why is the government doing this bizarre prioritizing? Have they misjudged the situation? Have they failed?

Hardly. This IS the bourgeoisie policy. This thesis the blog owner has developed together with another woman in an article linked here.


This is what Naomi Klein calls the prerequisites for Shock therapy?? A real or an caused crisis, where people in shock have nothing to put against.


But information is shock resistant as Klein also writes.


From another article "Bourgeoisie strategy": The refusal to intervene from the right government’s side isn’t due to lack of wisdom, but a logical consequence of the bourgeoisie political agenda.


The support for a commonly financed welfare is strong in the Swedish people. Too strong for the bourgeoisie parties to win sympathies on open talk of cuts and privatizations. But the right’s political agenda, that more and more of social security, nursing and care shall become financed privately hasn’t changed, only its rhetoric.


The bourgeoisie government has already made deteriorations in unemployment, health care and parental benefits.


At the same time many of the authorities which are the citizens’ immediate meeting with the welfare systems, as the employment offices and the regional social insurance office have gotten powerfully reduced subsidies and become reorganized from the bottom. The new, harder rules to get those benefits are hard to understand both for the citizens and the employed, people have to wait unreasonably long for payments and the staff is pressed to their utmost.


It’s natural that such a development leads to an increase in dissatisfaction and distrust against the common welfare systems. The ones that have opportunities will seek themselves to supplementing, private insurances to compensate for the deficiencies in the common systems. This is encouraged by the right government. The strategy is to create support for a gradually liquidation of the loyal, tax financed welfare systems through sabotaging them.


Warning bells are working full steam about an approaching welfare crisis and economists as well as local politicians are appealing to the government to intervene. But the secretary in charge says the municipalities have to prioritize. En clair this means that the government encourage to cuts in the school, child care, health care and geriatric care. At the same time as the safety systems and the authorities administering them are undermined; the government intend to let the school and health care collapse.


That the right government uses the economical crisis with the aim of carrying through a fervently coveted system shift becomes more and more obvious.


Local politicians, no matter what party, have the ungrateful job to cut the already hardly harassed welfare sector.


The government wash their hands and instead concentrates on creating laws and decrees favoring private alternatives for all our welfare. Thus the ring is raked for private health care companies and insurance companies taking over where the public have “failed.”


Instead of trying to get support for its privatization politics, through arguing, the government is prepared to sacrifice not only citizens health care but also the possibility for the staff in the welfare sector to carry their work through.


The government’s passivity under the ongoing recession isn’t about ignorance about what to do. What sort of visions does a government have that cut the taxes with 100 billion Swedish Crowns and encourages the local politicians to prioritize among sick, old and children? In fact it’s high time that the right government tells the Swedish people what it wants to carry through and they should become forced to argue for this.


So true!


I dislike this government from deep, deep in my heart.

4/05/2008

Phenomena in the society today...

I read a blogposting yesterday by a woman, Jenny W. (in her thirties I think, and married to a white man with whom she has a small son? So she isn't very old and is also married to or living with a white man!) which triggered this blogposting and many thoughts - and emotions. A blogposting with the heading (my amateur-translation) “Mohohohahah… Why (I have such difficulties with) white guys?”

She starts it with (my quick amateur-translation):

”OK, the freak-society IS here. I.e., the society where you laugh at other peoples’ ill health and sufferings, or with other words everything the Jackass-programmes have shown a longer time.

In the Jackass-programmes [I haven’t seen them, and didn’t know about them earlier. Their home-site?] young white men with impregnable [ointaliga] bodies have chopped, cut, burnt and tormented themselves in a sort of reality-slapstick/gladiator-plays-TV, which have been unassailable [oantastliga, not allowed to question] because the young men have themselves chosen to expose themselves for this. But the indisputable development of events [odiskutabel händelseutveckling] which lies in the pipeline for these sorts of programme-ideas are though a grave pushing of boundaries, where pain and bodily injuries are made to humour, which then imperceptibly [omärkligt] but implacably [obönhörligt] are made 'funny' in circumstances where people have chosen not to get hurt. But, hehe, isn’t it quite fun hey… Look when that CP-guy is sort of tripping over [snavar]… hehe, it’s mean, but, sorry folks, that’s who I am.”

This Jenny has read about the reactions to the hacking of a home-site of epileptics in USA in (young men’s) blogs here. A hacking which has caused epileptic attacks in some users and attacks of laughter in others (I didn’t know about this earlier either, which certainly is no loss actually!!). She suspects that what has been entirely destroyed (my free interpretation) in these young white men’s world order is the distinction between what one can laugh at and what one allow oneself to laugh at.

I am thinking of a lot of other phenomena in society.

Contempt for weakness…

What are they laughing at actually? Are they laughing off what they themselves have had to stand? But this is no excuse at all for their later behaviour.

And people are scorned, scoffed at for writing as they are writing, even if they aren't harming anyone and not forcing anyone to read what they have written…

Humiliation-TV...

See Bob Scharf’s essay on Reality-TV from the psychohistory-list.

And our current government has fired the highest boss for the Swedish Public Employment Service or AMS in Swedish Bo Bylund all of a sudden. With no real motivation. Quite authoritarian. The critic is hard from the trade-union’s part it stands in the paper today.

“An incredibly bad personnel-politics”

they say. And a woman in the trade-union wants an investigation/inquest of the conditions for the employment for governments’ offices, how they look, and how one do when the employees (highest up?) become “liquidated”.

Yes, what sort of tendencies are there in society today? Many boundaries are pushed everywhere? And quite authoritarian behaviours are allowed (not least in politicians, knowing "our best" for "Our own good" see Mller's "For Your Own Good - Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence", in our current government not least, but also in our former prime-minister Göran Persson. Yes, where are the roots lying)?

See a female leader-writer about the affair with Bo Bylund in the leader "Arbetsförmedlingen söker ny chef" this morning.

Additional thoughts: what sort of models are our politicians? Quite arrogantly (mis)using their power?

The leader-writer in the link above ends her leader with thinking that the (political) opposition has a great responsibility in creating an offensive opposition-politics in this case (how unemployed are treated, and the demands on them as they have become and are here today) and be clear in how the safety-systems shall look in the future. I agree.

But as it looks now we have to get used to that the right are demolishing and pulling down more and more of the Sweden which is known in the world (??): security/safety for all.

No, I didn’t vote for the current government (and I will never vote for these parties)…

Read: “Why People Don’t Trust Free Markets. The new science of evolutionary economics offers an explanation for capitalism scepticism” by Michael Shermer (also see here about him). It ends as follows:

“The strongest reason for skepticism of capitalism, however, is a myth commonly found in objections to both the theory of evolution and free market economics, and that is that they are based on the presumption that animals and humans are inherently selfish, and that the economy is like Tennyson’s memorable description of nature: ‘red in tooth and claw.’ After Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer immortalized natural selection in the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' one of the most misleading descriptions in the history of science and one that has been embraced by social Darwinists ever since, applying it inappropriately to racial theory, national politics, and economic doctrines. Even Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, reinforced what he called this ‘gladiatorial’ view of life in a series of essays, describing nature ‘whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.’

If biological evolution in nature, and market capitalism in society, were really founded on and sustained by nothing more than a winner-take-all strategy, life on earth would have been snuffed out hundreds of millions of years ago and market capitalism would have collapsed centuries ago. This is, in fact, why WorldCom and Enron type disasters still make headlines. If they didn’t — if such corporate catastrophes caused by egregious ethical lapses were so common that they were not even worth covering on the nightly news — free market capitalism would implode. Instead it thrives, but just as eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, so too must it be for free markets, since both are inextricably bound together.

It stands for instance about Shermer at the Swedish site of wikipedia:

"Shermer har skrivit flera böcker som försöker förklara den allestädes närvarande tron på irrationella eller obevisade fenomen. 'Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time' handlar om flera udda idéer och grupper, inklusive kulter /.../. Han har ägnat hela böcker åt förintelseförnekelse ('Denying History,' skriven tillsammans med Alex Grobman), och tron på Gud ('How We Believe')."