Edward Green wrote:
I was just trying to compose a reply to Mark Fergerson here when the
thread disappeared from Google. Do they have legions of college
student censors deleting inappropriate material, or do they just
hiccup?
I wouldn't know; I use a paid ISP's (Cox, obviously)
newsserver and I can see the whole thread. You're using
(presumably) free Google groups? You often get what you pay for.
Anyway, here is the reply:
Anyway, here is an answer:
Mark Fergerson <nunya@biz.ness> wrote in message news:<3FD02462.30905@biz.ness>...
Uncle Al wrote:
You get the future in which you invest. Investing in losers gets you
diversity, affirmative action, equal opportunity, and a whole culture
worshipping garbage. Garbage then arrives and everybody is
surprised. Drive through Mexico and view untold numbers of squatters
plastering the hillsides. You tell Uncle Al how they don't have the
free time to gather all their scattered trash into sanitary garbage
middens like paleolithic barely-humans.
They do, but they have negative motivation. Remember that
Mexico's fundamental culture is still Feudalism, for all its
Socialist posturing. You cannot do _anything_ in Mexico
without paying mordida, often several times to different
layers of feudal lords. Of course they call themselves
patrons, police, or politicians, but the result is the same.
Thank you, Mark, for once again enlarging my horizon. I hadn't heard
of the mordida. The same word in the same sense translates exactly in
English, merely not so endemically.
Yup, in many small American communities that happens,
until it hits the Nightly News, anyway.
The poor are not poor because they lack money. A multi-million dollar
lottery winner is back in the slums within a couple of years. Hugely
rich minorities in sports and entertainment routinely declare
Midas-scale bankruptcies. Money didn't do them any good at all. They
were and are unchangeable damaged goods.
Uncle Al, as usual is both wide and dead on of the mark. Hmm... pun
not consciously intended. His lottery winner burning through millions
to no effect (but does he have a reference, or is this as well
supported as his famous flush-toilets on the sub-continent canard?) is
the flip side of a Donald Trump, whose net worth may have formally
reached zero after some debacle but could be counted on by all to
continue acculumating value at the same mean rate, making up his
losses. Al's infantile need to be outrageous and provocative at all
times however undermines the truth in his rant. He blames the
stupidity of systems on those stuck in their lowest rungs.
Last things first; "stupid" systems are based on the
stupidity (actually, lack of two true essentials; courage,
and the education to apply it at critical junctures) of
everyone not at the top. I mean, would any sane person
_want_ to be a serf if they understood how the many
alternatives could be achieved? Of course not, which is why
educating the "lower classes" was a hanging (or worse) crime
for so very long. Nowadays, the underclasses are taught that
it's _good_ to be serfs. What do you want to bet that the
phrase "Ignorance is Bliss" wasn't coined by a poor man?
A Trump can get dirt-poor any number of times because he
knows how to recover; he's used to being rich.
As for lottery zillionaires going broke quickly, do you
remember the extremely un-PC phrase "***** rich"? It BTW
had nothing to do with race; it applied equally to anyone
used to being poor who received a large influx of capital
and would then ***** it away on booze or whatever instead of
investing it. A friend of mine said it thus: "Poor People
Have Poor Ways".
Finding actual statistics on "lottery losers" is pretty
hard. Google combinations of the obvious terms and see what
you get. The best I could do was a report that the
Massachussetts Attorney General Tom Reilly is coming out
with a book claiming 50% of lottery winners go bankrupt.
Since he oversees his state's lottery I guess he has access
to accurate statistics.
That's in America; in Mexico they are "enlarged" to
Feudal Lord status because they have the necessary; money,
which brings the power to extract more.
You see, in Mexico (as well as the rest of the "Third
World") there are _no property rights_. You cannot obtain a
deed to your home because no infrastructure exists for the
process.
Surely in Mexico there is at least formal home ownership?
See, "formal" means everybody agrees that you own
something. How do you get everyone to agree but by having in
place a process of documentation? Absent that you have to
have more bullets than other claimants for a given piece of
turf. Recall all the flap about poor South Americans being
driven off their "ancestral" family farms so Del Monte et al
can take over? That can only happen when the government has
the power (bullets) to enforce their bought patronage.
Without a deed, you cannot sell your home for a
profit if you improve it. Hence you have no motivation to do
so; in fact if you try you are charged mordida for making
the attempt.
Intelligence is the great soft weapon. Learn how to sell instead of
how to be used. Your betters are in air conditioned offices with
tax-free everything, not digging latrines like you are.
First you need an environment with positive motivation;
that's why I react badly when someone tells me we must
respect and welcome the introduction of "Mexican Culture"
into America.
"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone ... every country but
his own".
The multi-culturalist; I've got him on the list!
I'd gladly allow unlimited immigration of
Mexicans _who totally renounce their heritage_.
I'd say the same of America's ghetto culture: unfortunately, it's
already here; and, in another of Uncle Al's unspeakable truths, a
culture we publicly funded and encouraged through the welfare state:
generations of fatherless youths with weak mothers enabled to run wild
in the streets. When humans live in harsh anarchy, the same tribal
culture always emerges from our genome; in prisons, in schools, on the
streets -- the Lord of the Flies.
Why do you think the Liberal Left violently opposes
Republicans when the latter try to get persons of color (who
happen to be Conservative) into high office? Because they
are living proof that it's feasible to get out of the ghetto
by hard work.
The Lord of the Flies can only rule in an environment
knee-deep in *****.
Feudalism is the adaptation of tribalism to groups too large to be
controlled by a single chieftain, hence, the default societal
organization from which deliberate experiments in equality are the
exception rather than the rule.
Why is that though? Because of two competing memes: The
Strong Are The Only Ones Fit To Rule But The Local Warlord
Will Let Me Screw My Neighbor A Lot If I Let The Warlord
Screw Me A Little, vs. I Don't Want To Be Screwed At All.
Throughout history Feudalism was seen as a "happy medium"
whereby screwing and being screwed was spread out so that
nobody (except those at the bottom, who had nobody to screw)
suffered unbearably. But every once in a while you get
things like The Terror, which shows Warlords and
Bottom-dwellers alike that the least can indeed rule if they
figure out the two lessons I mentioned above.
Ain't life fun?
Mark L. Fergerson
.
