The left puts effort into responsibility and care for community. Why do you think the right advocates for dismantling social services and the left champions them?
I'm not ignorant at all. I live in NYC (the largest "community" in the country) which has the largest, most systematically effective social services system in the country. It's one thing I appreciate most about the city, other than the subway.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing (or good things used to advance perverse incentives).
Too Much of a Good Thing: Methadone and "clean needle" clinics on 125th and Brooklyn under the guis of "harm reduction". The goal should be to reduce drug usage. Not make a shopping mall for dealers and zombies. Another is the total hands off approach of the mentally ill and aggressive homeless on the subways and on the streets.
Good Things Use To Advance Perverse Incentives: The entire homeless industrial complex in California, which does absolutely nothing but syphon money to these homeless "nonprofits". I lived in both San Jose and LA and frankly the situation was addressed in a maddeningly regressive fashion.
You sometimes have to ask yourself WHY someone is championing something. Very often it's not because of altruism.
The goal should be to reduce harm. The idea that drug use is axiomatically bad is an invention of the War On Drugs.
Criminalizing drug addiction increases harm. Treating it as a disease provably reduces harm. And, in fact, reduces drug use.
Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.
The goal should be to reduce drug use and end addiction. "Harm" is relative. There are functioning heroin addicts(either tar or hillbilly heroin) that some people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Hart) would say aren't "harming" anyone. It's still not something to societally encourage.
I also said nothing of criminalization of addicts. Seller's, sure.
> Methadone and clean needle clinics are pointed in the right direction, but they're not enough. They just happen to be all the people who got them put in place could manage.
This makes no sense. The halfass'd effort is worse than nothing at all.
Broadly speaking, the community-oriented left in places like the US support bureaucratic government welfare programs, while community-oriented conservatives support more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations. My preference runs toward the latter, for reasons best explained by John Carmack:
"more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations"
Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.
Most people live in towns, cities, states and nations, not communities. State and national governments cannot rely on the good of the neighbour. Larger, more equitable systems need to be put in place.
> Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.
Bureaucrats do this too. See the history of communism in Europe, or present state of communism in China. Centralized welfare is a centralized system of control in the hands of politicians.
If you don’t see the issue with “often religious” then nothing I say can change your mind! Religion as a moral compass is horrible! Religious communities are often the most toxic ones!
I am an atheist ex-Catholic. The big atheist-leftist crowd in my college town are intensely more violent, toxic, and racist than local Catholics or Lutherans. Lack of religious belief is no guarantee of kindness or rationality, nor is the presence of faith a strong signal of evil.
Behavior is a strong signal and I see more Christian harlots and swindlers than people practicing Christ’s philosophy. The left at least don’t pretend to be wholesome and righteous.
> I see more Christian harlots and swindlers than people practicing Christ’s philosophy
Perhaps "more people who claim/pretend to be Christian"? You can hardly call someone Christian if they're not following Jesus; it makes as much as calling someone an atheist just because they call themselves an atheist right before talking about how God exists.
I am Italian… raised catholic… my high school was owned and managed by the church… and I am an atheist as well! An I can tell you that in my country the problem are the believers not the atheists! The presence of faith implies you are willing to outsource your moral compass to what a bunch of primitive men belived to be right
When it comes to value systems that have stood the test of time and have well-understood failure modes vs. whatever hot new theory was cooked up on Twitter or Tumblr last week (the main vectors for recent moral changes in my country), I generally prefer the former.
You mean the value system that got us the dark ages, people burned at the stakes for “heresy” (or hanged, or many other form of death), silenced people because what they were saying was against what is written in a non particularly good fantasy novel (aka the Bible), caused all kind of toxic behaviours in families and communities if someone was not following stupid rules in the aforementioned book. And the alternative is not embracing every stupid trend appearing on the internet… ethics is a topic philosophers have been engaging for more than 2 millennia!
The left champions not working, rather than social care. In the UK it’s common to hear ‘I’m on benefits’ as an excuse in itself, rather than ‘I am disabled’ or ‘I am elderly’ or some other legitimate reason for receiving money.
I wonder what you hear then. To me it sounds like "I'm out of options". It makes me think of this aid program that gave people in really poor countries money instead of food. With money they could of course buy food, but also save to improve their life in general, for example by improving their housing, buying a goat, sending their children to school, etc.
Previously, they were just dependent on the food, medicines, and whatever was provided by the system and the situation rarely changed for the better.
I think it's similar, at least where I live. With a better support system, people seem to be less likely to get dependent on it. Seems like a good thing to do in the long run, even if you just think about it economically.
Unless, perhaps, you need a class of people that are in a sort of benefits bondage. I don't really want to think that this is by design though.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing (or good things used to advance perverse incentives).
Too Much of a Good Thing: Methadone and "clean needle" clinics on 125th and Brooklyn under the guis of "harm reduction". The goal should be to reduce drug usage. Not make a shopping mall for dealers and zombies. Another is the total hands off approach of the mentally ill and aggressive homeless on the subways and on the streets.
Good Things Use To Advance Perverse Incentives: The entire homeless industrial complex in California, which does absolutely nothing but syphon money to these homeless "nonprofits". I lived in both San Jose and LA and frankly the situation was addressed in a maddeningly regressive fashion.
You sometimes have to ask yourself WHY someone is championing something. Very often it's not because of altruism.