Senate UN Special Rapporteur's report on poverty in the USA

No, they came from some rich white slave owners. They even signed it.

And "most"? I suppose it's not a secret, because you just made it up.

 

Unless you were named Job, in which case all bets were off when it came to divine rights or rather the bet was quite on, wasn't it?

I will grant you that Americans certainly believed the Good Book when it came to the sons of Ham, in which Americans got that one "right".

 

To be fair, the framers wanted to abolish slavery from the start, but the country was already too divided and was pretty fragile at that point.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-and-Slavery-1269536

As I pointed out, the US and that horrible little third world country known as The Rest of the World, differ on the origin of rights.

 

What you mean the demonstrably almost third world America with it's rights to kill vs rights to live and go to school safely?

Uh-huh

 

Here's some reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

And just to relate this back to the main topic:

When the U.S. itself is essentially interchangeable with God, and "patriotism" is an insistence on uncritical worship, it's pretty easy to imagine how everything wrong in the U.S. can just run rampant and reach catastrophic levels. Trying to "fix" any issues is ridiculous when a primary article of faith is that the country is divinely perfect a priori.

 

Yes, you are describing negative liberty espoused by the founders who had just, at least in their minds, thrown off the yoke of tyranny by a government. You can understand the context in which they were looking to limit government power in governors and executives. But, as the nineteenth century progressed and prosperity and democracy increased, more and more people realized that government wasn't just about what it couldn't do and the restraints placed upon it, but what it could do to protect those who were being left behind in a industrializing and expanding nation.

People could also see that many state government and even the central government were actively involved in keeping people away from participating as free people as pro-slavery forces dominated the first half of the nineteenth century in southern state government and the U.S. Presidency and Senate.

The idea of positive liberty where the government actively protected groups left behind gained traction. That is the world we still live in and we are better for it. Positive liberty helped expand the American franchise to more people and helped ensure, at least in theory, that as many people as possible could participate in republican government.

 

I think properly regulated capitalism is responsible for freeing more people than "positive" rights.

The point that the Founders had, and it's still true today, is that you have to be careful about how powerful you allow your government to be. Because one day it will be turned against you.

As an example: So many people here love calling the president of The United States a Nazi. They love talking about the abuses, real or imagined, of the federal government. All at the same time they want that government to severely regulate and in many cases confiscate the people's fire arms.

If they believe that the government is fascist, and it commits atrocities both at home an abroad, why would they advocate giving them our guns??

To them, the government has already been turned against us!

They want us to surrender our guns and health care to an evil entity?

Something isn't right.

 

Properly regulated capitalism is an example of what positive liberty makes possible. It is a recognition that there are limits to natural liberty whereby every individual is free to advance and prosper. What the nineteenth century revealed to many Americans is that there were very real limitations to that ideal. Positive liberty was necessary to end slavery and limit the powers of rapidly advancing capitalism. You and I both live in a world positive liberty made possible.

As to your example,they want to confiscate guns for the same reason they wanted to regulate factories, worker conditions, and public highways: public safety demands a limitation on unchecked natural liberty.

The whole Trump is a Nazi thing is beside the point. That is just silly name calling. The right did the same to Obama and W Bush. I think they're all just playing a game of party BS.

 

Yes we part ways because you basically decide you can't live in reality any more and that some florid wankery about "natural rights" is a more appealing alternative dimension and then you slip into a self-induced logic coma.

Just think about what you've said here. Your rights come from God (who doesn't exist, but that's another topic). So what? In a scenario of perfect hell, aka libertarian inspired anarchy, what good is your right to free speech or right to life if you've having your throat ripped out by a bear that you made angry by trying to shoot with a handgun? You might as well argue you have dormant superpowers, because both are equally as useless to you in that state.

Rights are legal instruments. Retrospectives on them, which attempt to elevate them into something more meaningful, is a very American perspective as you do this with your own history too. Take something banal and try and spin it into something romantic and divine. The reality though is more dreary - without the state you have no rights, and it's clearly seen based on the view of rights held outside the US vs inside the US. On all indices that count here, from general happiness to life expectancy to quality of life to freedom, the US lags behind. Which means this statement:

"The best system for protecting rights is the separation of powers we have in the United States."

Is one you've pulled from thin air, and not because there's a basis in fact for it - unless you'd like to cite why the separation of powers in the US is superior to the responsible system of government under Westminster, or the basic provisions in the Australian constitution @J-Rod? I think your claim needs substance.

Also I'm pretty sure nobody here is fooled by your refusal to address the specific points raised. Will you address them? I will requote the paragraph for you.

 

@J-Rod, you keep dodging this. Please don't.

 

None of this relates to poverty in the US. It's a smokescreen to shift the topic from one of manifestly and demonstrably poor performance by the US government relative to its peers globally. Conservatives would rather shift the narrative, it seems, to topics where the MURICAN WAY O' LIFE isn't under scrutiny by foreigners, with their higher standards of living, good governance, and appropriate economic rights.

 

And I'm sure we'll get an attack on the new deal, plus fresh suggestions the Special Rapporteur is biased from J-Rod (because when Mr44 did it, it was pretty great but we're due some more attempts to undermine the report).

Also let's look at these:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/NewsSearch.aspx?SID=Extreme_Poverty

US, China, Ghana, Brasil, Venezuela. These are all countries with massive economics rights issues. There's a general warning about disenfranchising LGBTQI+ persons globally; and a warning to Japan that their austerity cannot justify stripping the poor of a right to live with dignity.

Great company the US keeps here - which I think is proof J-Rod that you can just attack the rapporteur because America is the greatest and he's jealous.

 

Except that's exactly what happened. Read the source material that the author describes. You could be correct in that "income inequality and healthcare outcomes
do get a lot of study and the national and state level" and might have more than one dataset as a source. Except the author readily ignored them for this report. The author literally asked for like minded people to supply him with conclusions due to structural limitations and time constraints.

For example, look at the source cited for the author's major environmental pollution conclusion- "A look at environmental justice in the United States today,Huffington Post Blog, 20 January 2014. Available at www.huffingtonpost.com" The author didn't visit these communities, he relied on a Huffpro blog post of all things to support his conclusion. There was a time in the JCC Senate forum here where a blog post wouldn't even represent valid source material, let alone in a "report" supplied to the UN.

In another example of journalistic mind-bending, the author even references his own report to make a point contained in his report.- "Written submission to the Special Rapporteur from the Miami Workers Center and others on the feminization of poverty in Miami" I don't know of any peer reviewed journal that would accept a written report supplied by the author based on the same report being peer-reviewed. Do you realize how easy doctoral dissertations would be if the doctoral candidate could just reference their own dissertation to make a point in their dissertation? (ie "I proved my argument because I asked someone to agree with me and they did-agreement attached...") It's intellectually weak.

ES, R-K, it's not that the author of this report needs attacking, or that the details supplied within are so shocking that the US needs to be defensive, or anything of the sort. it's that this is simply a shotty report that uses invalid research methods. This report is nothing but a modern day Khrushchev-shoe that could be used to bang on the table at the UN for the benefit of those already inclined. No matter what one's beliefs are, everyone here is better than this.

 

No, they didn’t. Did you read the article you linked to?

 

But you're still not addressing the issue of inequality in the US; you're making a case for the paper to be struck aside on academic grounds. That's fine, none of us here are professors at an Oxbridge university so I think we can be lenient in our marking of the document.

Are you though going to comment on the observed inequality and poverty in the US, which is significantly worse than the rest of the OECD developed nations (or, for simplicity's sake, when compared with AUS/NZ/CAN/UK/EU average)? I mean the style of the report can be agreed as not up to the standard of a doctoral dissertation (and admittedly I'm struggling to remember where the UN's required to produce at this level...) but that doesn't change the other observable statistical points.

 

No, I'm just making the point that of course there is inequality in the US, of which there is inequality everywhere in the world. I think not being "lenient" in the marking of the document is precisely the point, because 1) this was presented to the UN, the supposed highest political body in the world so if anything, the academic ducks should be in a row.. but more importantly, 2) this paper isn't a solution based policy paper, its a lowest common denominator tabloid piece. I was honestly surprised that there wasn't a page 3 girl after the introduction. This report isn't without some value, it just isn't the "gotcha" document it thinks it is. I could see Assad holding up this report and proclaiming that things aren't so bad in Syria, completely missing the reality of the world today.

Or in other words, if all you see is the run down textile mills of Northern France, then you miss out on all the wonder that Paris holds, despite the fact that they are only 320km apart.

 

OK but you're ignoring the indices outside of this paper which nonetheless support its conclusions?

 

IE: He believes it so it is true.

However the result is the same: The government has all the guns. The people have none.

If America is an evil patriarchal society controlled by white men who suffer from toxic masculinity, then why do you believe that the evil patriarchal white men in charge should be the only ones with guns????

Your logic fails.

 

Will you please respond to the points I raised @J-Rod? Your refusal to is clearly a tacit admission you're wrong and the paper's right.

 

Let's take your paper at it's face value.

Who cares?

It doesn't matter because giving the government that much power and responsibility over our lives and welfare isn't a good idea. Even if the results are positive for a generation or two. The bill will come due. You will pay. Or more likely your children or grandchildren. They will live in chains of one form or another.

It's great that there are places people can choose to go and live if they want to take that chance. I'm not saying you shouldn't live under the yoke of government if you so choose. I'm just saying that I don't choose to and there should be (and is) a place where I can go and live how I believe even if you don't like it.

I'm not sure why you are so intent on destroying that choice. It's none of your business. Or the UN's. Why do they want our guns so badly? Why do they want us to give up our control over our own lives to our government so badly.

I'm saying that in America we won't give up that control so easily.

I've been poor in America. And I've seen poverty in Europe. All I'm saying is poverty in America is better than your poverty.

But hey, you get 4 more years to live!

On a dirt floor.

So there's that.

Great.