Plato's Beard » 2010

Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn’t have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.

“The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity,” Karelis says. “My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty.”

The upshot of this for policy makers, Karelis believes, is that they don’t need to fret so much about the fragility of the work ethic among the poor. In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. David Ellwood, an economist and the dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has called this “the helping conundrum.” It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration’s welfare reform efforts.

But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. Simply giving the poor money with no strings attached, rather than using it, as federal and state governments do now, to try to encourage specific behaviors – food stamps to make sure money doesn’t get spent on drugs or non-necessities, education grants to encourage schooling, time limits on benefits to encourage recipients to look for work – would be just as effective, and with far less bureaucracy.

With apologies for the repost: this block of the article is more central than the one I posted before.

Plato's Beard » 2010 » June

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PZ Myers, a.k.a Pharyngula, is a biologist who has carved out a niche in the blogistan (absent strong presence from big daddy Dawkins) for forceful opinion typically aimed at religion and related oddities, under the rubric of “skepticism”. And when the fanbase demands red meat, PZ obliges, casting the net ever farther and wider to find new candidates for ridicule. This time around, the lucky winner is Jainism.

Wikipedia might tell you that:Post

Jainism is an ancient religion of India that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. Its philosophy and practice rely mainly on self-effort to progress the soul up the spiritual ladder to divine consciousness.

But that’s just too much silly talk for old PZ, who offers an alternative description:

a petrified clown turd of foolishness that convinces people that it’s OK to be a credulous git

Now, you might wonder how one might back up such a definition and thus avoid seeming an incredulous git, and PZ has an answer:

Prahlad Jani, an Indian “fakir” (a term PZ has perhaps borrowed from that other pioneer, Winston Churchill, who used it to describe Mahatma Gandhi). And Jani, it has been claimed, lives merely on air and sunshine. PZ will have none of this tomfoolery of Jainism, and closes the case thus: the person who tested Jani is a “deeply religious Jain”, the “obvious flaws” in whose testing have been identified by “Indian skeptics”. Hence, concludes PZ, Jains (assuming here that PZ is concluding/summarising the thesis at the top of his post) are “kooks, plain and simple”.

Now, if you study biology at University of Minnesota where you might be fortunate enough to partake of the wisdom of PZ, and further, if Logic 101 is not a prerequisite for your programme, you might wish to have PZ’s attempt at it (logic) broken down for you, so here goes:

Therefore:

Clearly PZ has inherited more than the beard from Aristotle!