Hard News: Just marketing to the base
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Dickens himself -- like H.G. Welles and Verne, to some extent, since you brought them up -- was unapologetically and blatantly a polemicist against what he saw as the evils and abuses of the day.
The historical and sociological record suggests that reality actually outdickensed Dickensed, by and large. But that doesn't make his accounts any less valid: artists can be chroniclers of their time, too, and a perfectly legitimate source of information about the reality that surrounded them. They cannot be taken in isolation, or uncritically - and who does, honestly? this idea that you have the monopoly on reason and balance is becoming a real pain in the arse, Craig - but in some cases they can be central to our understanding of an epoch. Certainly the case with Dickens, or Twain, or Zola, or Verga. Poring over other kinds of documents - be they newspaper reports, personal diaries, public records, none of them "objective" sources of information either - will help you contextualise his novels, verify the plausibility of their content. But there are plights that he described rather well, which is why we keep going back to that particular well.
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However, my assumption is/was that the majority of solo parents in that position need as much help as they can get, not an extra layer of everyday grief and hassle.
I know this always comes across as callous in cold hard pixels, but I'm just not the kind of utopian who thinks any government (and that includes one where John Key is sitting at the head of the Cabinet table) is going to eliminate "everyday grief and hassle." I'd love to live in that world, but it's not this one.
What really gets on my tits is this kind of shit from the reliably fatuous Bill Ralston:
Frankly, less than 4000 adhering to the government breast on a more or less permanent basis is extremely few.
God, isn't the view from Prego (well, you can't actually see Ponsonby Road through the wall but you know what I mean) fabulous? But, Rich, I guess we can honestly and honourably disagree on policy. I just hope neither of us actually think it's OK to leave anyone "adhering to the government breast on a more or less permanent basis". Unlike Mr Ralston (who I suspect has never spent a day on a benefit in his life -- and good on him), I didn't actually find that a very good place to be.
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I'm just not the kind of utopian who thinks any government (and that includes one where John Key is sitting at the head of the Cabinet table) is going to eliminate "everyday grief and hassle." I'd love to live in that world, but it's not this one.
No, neither do I. But they can do a lot to make the problem better or worse, and in many cases the grief and hassle that accumulate with certain policies is quite predictable, because similar policies in other times and places have caused much of exactly that.
Mind you, there's a section of the population that thinks that giving grief and hassle is a brilliant thing.
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"adhering to the government breast on a more or less permanent basis". Unlike Mr Ralston (who I suspect has never spent a day on a benefit in his life -- and good on him), I didn't actually find that a very good place to be.
While adhered to the government breast, Craig, were you raising children at the same time? Feeding, clothing, listening & talking, reading to them. getting them to school, bathed, entertained, entertaining their friends, shopping, playing games, caring for them when sick?
No, i thought not.
a historically and sociologically reliable document of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, as opposed to a vastly entertaining piece of melodramatic fiction.
Yeah, Dickens was all bull (!) - that's why so many Brits left in droves, 3 months in a stinking boat where you'd likely die of something scrofulous and revolting was preferable.
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While adhered to the government breast, Craig, were you raising children at the same time? [...] No, i thought not.
No, Kerry, but since I'm sterile and homosexual (not the same thing, in case there's any Family Party lurkers about) the odds of my having children are roughly non-existent. And since at the time I was a barely functional alcoholic getting sober and dealing with my mental health issues, that wasn't really a bad thing. I wasn't fit to own a pet mouse, let alone be responsible for a dependent human being.
And I don't actually it's OK to follow Ralston's lead, and say there's some tipping point where you throw human beings in the too hard basket, while patting yourself on the back about how fucking enlightened you are.
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there's some tipping point where you throw human beings in the too hard basket
Acknowledging that there will always be people in need of assistance is not 'throwing them into the too hard basket'. And there are, no matter how much we hound or scold them, always going to be at least a few people who will need permanent or semi-permanent help from us. Not everyone can successfully function in the world we've created. How well we help those people is a measure of our compassion and our success as a society. (She says, grandiosely. Heh.)
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Dickens took the novel-reading middle-classes of his time into worlds that they'd never experience first-hand. He deliberately set out to create an awareness of the vast social inequities of his time, and there's no denying that he succeeded. If he'd never moved beyond the gentle satire of Pickwick Papers it might be fair to equate the social impact of his work with a reactionary historical romance such as Gone With the Wind, but I find that a bit of a stretch.
If he'd spent his talents strutting his Fine Mind or spilling his guts about his personal life on some 19th Century equivalent of the interwebz he'd most likely be forgotten today.
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If he'd spent his talents strutting his Fine Mind or spilling his guts about his personal life on some 19th Century equivalent of the interwebz he'd most likely be forgotten today.
*sits back and awaits the shit-fight*
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What should happen to the couple of hundred thousand people receiving a benefit? They should get work instead.
More people in the workforce means more employment positions.
It's fairly simple, really.
My first thought was: More people in the workforce does NOT mean more employment positions. It just means a cheaper workforce.
But then I realised I wasn't taking a holistic view - your logic is not only amazing but can be applied globally. What should happen to the couple of hundred thousand people starving in Africa? They should eat instead.
It's fairly simplistic. Really.
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Well said, Danielle.
Craig, my point is that raising children alone is a huge commitment and everything gets magnified in difficulty. What makes it unnecessarily hard is the general lack of respect for what single parents do. The fact you're scraping by financially, so you are always stressed about money is omnipresent. I think mothers and kids deserve a whole lot better - I hoped John Key might have had a bit more insight, is all. The day a politician actually says a whole lot of positive and affirmative things about single parents and is willing to back that up with policy is the day I'll vote for them.
BTW - there's also a mindset out there in schools, MoE, mental health services, that boys can't be raised to be great men without their fathers. Single mothers get blamed for any problems with sons - too soft, overprotective - and blamed for not facilitating boys' relationships with their fathers, courtesy of Celia Lashlie's influential book on raising boys. There is a distinct lack of mentoring for boy/teens - in my area there is none at all.
It's a case of failing to provide real, meaningful support and respect, then blaming those falling by the wayside for not making it.
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There is a distinct lack of mentoring for boy/teens - in my area there is none at all.
For those in Akld/Wgtn there is www.bigbuddy.org.nz
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The historical and sociological record suggests that reality actually outdickensed Dickensed, by and large.
Indeed. Dickens freely admitted his books were cleaned up enormously in order to make them suitable reading fodder for the Victorian middle classes. The reality would have made people too sick to read them. I recommend Engels for people who think it was fictionalised the other way, but then some people tend to jump up and down and yap 'commie!'.
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The reality would have made people too sick to read them.
The first part of The Ghost Map (a history of London's mid-19th century cholera outbreak and the people who worked out how to stop it) is particularly enlightening on the lives of the working classes in that city in the 1840s. Warning: not for the weak of stomach. Of course, if your current job is to go into sewers and pick out saleable rags from piles of shit (while constantly risking death by gas explosion), you might find it all a bit ho-hum.
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You're quoting Jesus now? Are you suggesting we legislate for morality? Are you really sure you want to swap this debate out into that arena?
This is a simple concept. If people are given benefits they are not taught that work is necessary. In order to defend the welfare state one must use the sympathy card, validating the expense for many because of the needs of a few.
Reality is that if there were no welfare there would be a great big new workforce available. Reality is that, regardless of state funded financial support, there are some people who will always need help. Those people should be and are supported because it is the right thing to do. Not because the government legislates so.
The reality is that an entire economy has been created around people who suggest they cannot work. Reality is that no matter what system we employ nothing cancels our responsibility toward protecting those in need.
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Grant, the only simple thing around here is you. Your "reality" may be faith-based but don't expect any non-Amerikans to buy into that.
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Good Goddess, Danielle. Dickens was a great novelist (though one who, in my view, was highly uneven and somewhat over-rated), but you might as well hold up Gone With The Wind as a historically and sociologically reliable document of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, as opposed to a vastly entertaining piece of melodramatic fiction.
Dickens may have written fiction, but was writing from personal experience - his family had been middle class but lost their money and the adults went to debtor's prison and Dickens at about 9 or 10. He was taken out of his boarding school and sent to work 12 hour days in a bottle factory. The descriptions of the terrible suffering that comes with poverty were from his own memory and the concept of the genteel little boy who falls of desperate times was autobiographical.
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Reality is that if there were no welfare there would be a great big new workforce available.
Are you suggesting we had no umemployment in NZ before the Unemployment Act of 1930? Or perhaps we had no starving old people before the first state pensions in 1893? Or that the rise in unemployment from 5,600 in August 1930 to 38,000 in March 1931 was caused by the passing of that Act? Is that why the economy didn't magic up the jobs to employ these people?
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Grant.
Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione. -
Grant.
Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.Is that how you say "screw you" in Latin?
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This is a simple concept. If people are given benefits they are not taught that work is necessary. In order to defend the welfare state one must use the sympathy card, validating the expense for many because of the needs of a few.
Bullshit, Grant, absolute and complete bollocks. In order to defend the welfare state, one needs to look at places (in geography and history) that didn't have a welfare provision, see what happened, and compare it with what happens in countries that DO have welfare. That's nothing to do with abstract sympathies and everything to do with solid facts like crime and disease rates.
If people are given benefits they are not taught that work is necessary.
So the reason about 90% of UEB recipients stay on it for less than a year is...?
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Let them get jobs sounds suspiciously like let them eat cake. Grant's arguments against the welfare state can be equally applied as arguments against charity.
It helps to have a basic understanding of economics. The reality is, is that the amount of work societies can perform is not constant. It depends on there being unmet needs and free resources to pay for those needs. Surprise surprise, when the amount of money floating around in the economy to pay for work decreases, the number of people able to exchange their labour for money decreases. See the unemployment rates in the early 1930s, mid 1960s, late 1980s and mid 2000s for data to back this argument up with. In the Depression, governments insisted on the unemployed undertaking relief work in return for the dole. In the absence of demand for real work, this involved a lot of digging holes and filling them in again. The problem with work for the dole schemes now is that the work is either similarly pointless, or risks competing with economic industries.
Work might be important (if so, why does so much work people do not attract any financial compensation?) but you can't solve there being labour that nobody wants to pay for by insisting that there's something wrong with the people trying to sell it.
And, dare I say it, this is about people being unavailable for paid labour because they're undertaking unpaid labour raising children. Making this possible for unexpectedly pregnant single women means that they may be less likely to opt for abortion.
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I guess we can honestly and honourably disagree on policy
Craig, if I didn't think that, I wouldn't go to the trouble of responding.
Love your work, blah blah blah, and have once or twice had cold water poured on my warm fuzzy preconceptions and assumptions in your unique manner.
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What should happen to the couple of hundred thousand people receiving a benefit? They should get work instead.
More people in the workforce means more employment positions.
You've got it all arse-about-face there Grant. "Employment positions" don't miraculously appear just because people need jobs. If I wave my notional magic wand and suddenly a million employable, willing workers appear before me I haven't, with the same wave of my notional wand, created a million new "employment positions". What I've done is added a million new job-seekers to the workforce, all of whom will be competing with a) those who were already in the workforce and looking for a job (either due to unemployment or due to a desire to leave their current employ), and b) each other. Not even John "Jesus of the Right" Key can change that basic reality.
The concept of structural unemployment isn't just an economists' trick to pull the wool over the eyes of those outside the cabal. It's actually impossible to achieve true full employment. There will always be people who are out of work. Some will be out of work by choice, either because they're taking a break between jobs (I spent three months holidaying one summer after leaving a particularly awful role, before signing up for temp work when I got down to $17 in my bank account) or because they work in a seasonal industry and can manage their money between seasons. Others will have lost their last job (fired or laid-off, it doesn't matter) and are in the process of finding a new job. Some will have been rendered incapable of doing their previous work (injury, illness, whatever) and are getting back into an employable state or are looking for a new line of work. Those are all valid reasons to be unemployed, but only some of them qualify as unemployed for statistical purposes - HLFS requires that a person be within the required age-range, and actively looking for a job, to be counted as unemployed. Only a very, very few of them will actually create a new position simply by reason of their existence. I've had that happen once, where my skills were desirable but there was no current vacancy so a new position was established. If they cannot find a position they remain unemployed, no matter how much they may wish to work. Structural unemployment doesn't just look at the "statistically unemployed", though, it looks at everyone who's able to work but currently isn't.
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It's actually impossible to achieve true full employment. There will always be people who are out of work.
I hate to harp on this, but even if it were theoretically possible to employ everybody, Bollard wouldn't let it happen. Politicians need the unemployed to have somebody other than themselves to blame for economic inefficiencies and social ills; employers need the unemployed to keep wages low.
In order to defend the welfare state, one needs to look at places (in geography and history) that didn't have a welfare provision
Or that do not have them in the present tense. Do many of us envy the US of A in that regard?
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*sits back and awaits the shit-fight*
I do find the idea of an online shit-fight about Dickens quite amusing. And also quite nice.
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