Hey limeys

[eumaas]

The hell? Is this true?
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.2647

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -bins.html

Under the Government scheme, members of "Shameless" families are given intensive 24-hour supervision to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals....

Around 2,000 families have gone through Family Intervention Projects, but ministers intend to increase its scope to 20,000 more in the next two years – each costing between £5,000 and £20,000.

[eumaas]

This shit is straight out of Orwell and Foucault.

[Dr. Medulla]

The UK is becoming insane with this crap. I read about a plan (in effect?) to have the schools use fingerprint readers to open doors. For security purposes, of course, ho ho. And all those kids' fingerprints would be on file forever and ever and ever …

[Flex]

Yikes.

[eumaas]

Yikes.

Looks like Orwell AND Huxley were right. Huxley in that it's more a therapeutic thrust than an ideological one. Foucault of course was obsessed by that, as you know better than me.

[Flex]

Yikes.

Looks like Orwell AND Huxley were right. Huxley in that it's more a therapeutic thrust than an ideological one. Foucault of course was obsessed by that, as you know better than me.

Foucault is, unfortunately for us, holding up quite well in terms of these areas of state analysis.

[nsc]

The hell? Is this true?
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.2647

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -bins.html

Under the Government scheme, members of "Shameless" families are given intensive 24-hour supervision to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals....

Around 2,000 families have gone through Family Intervention Projects, but ministers intend to increase its scope to 20,000 more in the next two years – each costing between £5,000 and £20,000.

you may never have attended a regular school (for whatever reason) but your parents/guardians at least made sure you were getting some kind of education (and judging from your photos - food in your belly). these kids have real fuckwits for parents and grandparents. a third generation of uneducated, unemployed and uninterested what would you suggest for saving the offspring?

when i was growing up a neighbour of ours won a glamorous granny competition she was a tidy wee woman in her fifties. the M.I.L.F.'s are now G.I.L.F.'s in their early thirties and dysfunctionality is a badge of honour that comes with extra state benefits.

[eumaas]

The hell? Is this true?
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.2647

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -bins.html

Under the Government scheme, members of "Shameless" families are given intensive 24-hour supervision to make sure children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals....

Around 2,000 families have gone through Family Intervention Projects, but ministers intend to increase its scope to 20,000 more in the next two years – each costing between £5,000 and £20,000.

you may never have attended a regular school (for whatever reason) but your parents/guardians at least made sure you were getting some kind of education (and judging from your photos - food in your belly). these kids have real fuckwits for parents and grandparents. a third generation of uneducated, unemployed and uninterested what would you suggest for saving the offspring?

I think it's a case of the state breaking people's legs and then offering them crutches. Imposing totalitarian discipline destroys a society; it does not save it. We have perfectly good case studies of the consequences of such excessive intervention. I would say roll back the intervention and let society reassert itself. People do not respond well at all to stringent controls. It devalues the individual, so why should the individual bother with life? Rolling back the state's extreme interventionism and seeking instead to strengthen community-level help and social mores seems like a better plan to me. I would invite Flex to offer more concrete proposals here as policy is more his thing than mine. I do not think that to monitor, discipline, and punish creates a healthy adult. Michel Foucault might be a bit dry for you, but he traced the history and logic of therapeutic intervention by the state.

when i was growing up a neighbour of ours won a glamorous granny competition she was a tidy wee woman in her fifties. the M.I.L.F.'s are now G.I.L.F.'s in their early thirties and dysfunctionality is a badge of honour that comes with extra state benefits.

I think that's the big failure of state welfare (the crutches in the analogy above) as opposed to non-statist welfare (called mutual aid). It incentivizes that sort of behavior and disincentivizes the alternative. I don't think that's entirely unintentional. Consider also that the state promotes barriers to entry for businesses (such as regulation of the taxi industry, where an individual could start a taxi business with just a vehicle and a cellphone). If someone wants to become an entrepreneur, he or she has to go through so many fucking hoops that you can't start with no money and get anywhere. There are exceptions, but by and large it's a matter of basic economics--the utility of the effort is outweighed by its disutility. That is, you lose more pursuing that than you gain. Why not stay on welfare if it makes life easier in the necessities? People will often look to their own welfare over the demands of ideology. That's just plain economic sense.

Now, I should make it clear here that I have nothing morally against people seeking state aid. But the fact is, the state cartelizes industry and disincentivizes the alternative. Again, that's breaking your legs and offering you crutches. I don't blame the man who takes the crutches, I blame the man who breaks the legs.

[Flex]

I would invite Flex to offer more concrete proposals here as policy is more his thing than mine. I do not think that to monitor, discipline, and punish creates a healthy adult. Michel Foucault might be a bit dry for you, but he traced the history and logic of therapeutic intervention by the state.

I definitely second the reading of Foucault, or at least reading some stuff about him since the primary material can be pretty dense, and I'll throw in my two cents here.

Assuming we're on the topic of actions that could, at least hypothetically, be taken right now with no major changes in public attitude or laws or whatever, it seems like the state could be pushed towards a model that "rewards" individuals for good behavior instead of turning towards a compulsory, invasive system. This would look something like: if you're in one of these especially-bad-circumstance-families, putting your kids through school, providing for them, etc. can be rewarded with (for example, and probably the easiest incentive to implement) tax incentives or further resources being put at your disposal from the state (getting a state grant to buy your kids clothes if they stay enrolled and attending school, for example). Although this still requires some contact with the state, there are a couple of relative benefits here: 1) the onus is on the family to take advantage of government offers, nothing is compulsory, 2) while there's still a dubious carrot/stick approach here, it's at least not as openly authoritarian as the method currently being employed.

There are, like, a zillion complaints to be had with this approach but in terms of policy it's the somewhat more palatable of the two and has the benefit of being something we could actually envision being implemented, unlike some other more tasteful ideas that we won't realistically expect to see right now.

[Heston]

Nanny state running wild again.

Mind you, something needs to be done about the "Shameless" generation, but I don't think this is the answer. Nor is, as Flex suggested, financial incentives. They get enough of those for churning out babies with no intention of working.

[Flex]

Mind you, something needs to be done about the "Shameless" generation, but I don't think this is the answer. Nor is, as Flex suggested, financial incentives. They get enough of those for churning out babies with no intention of working.

Well, it sounds like they're receiving state "benefits" with no correlation towards improving their condition. Which is just another way for the state to, in Gene's terms, break people's legs.

The other option, of course, is for the state to just not get involved in any way. That would probably be more painful at first, but quite helpful in the long run.

What do you recommend happening?

[eumaas]

Nanny state running wild again.

Mind you, something needs to be done about the "Shameless" generation, but I don't think this is the answer. Nor is, as Flex suggested, financial incentives. They get enough of those for churning out babies with no intention of working.

But Flex's incentives would run in the counter direction. Obviously the current incentival system is thoroughly fucked up or the uh "shameless" generation wouldn't have happened. I don't think people just suddenly go bad for no reason. We're born into the world involved in the world. Whatever is a given during our development will shape us, and though we certainly have some freedom to act against it, we tend to internalize the incentival structure around us. Though it's more complicated than this, just think of operant conditioning and how one trains a dog. Punish good behavior and reward bad, and it's no surprise what you get.

[Dr. Medulla]

While not technologically as sophisticated and therefore not as obviously intrusive as contemporary Britain's actions, Canada's Indian policy, mainly past policy, demonstrates how rigid controls of a segment of the population only creates misery, dependence, and an institutionalized mentality. In the first half of the twentieth c., Canada's First Nations were restricted to reserves, all their ambitions filtered thru an Indian agent, their movements strictly controlled. The result was poverty and declining quality of life, not to mention erosion of traditions and cultural identity. Reserves have gradually been granted more autonomy, but still suffer the effects comparable to prisoners—limited ambition, looking at others as targets, and disconnect from the larger society. Nepotism is rampant on many Canadian reserves, where federal cash is controlled by the band council, which is made up of one family. The efforts to control Aboriginal peoples—much more stick than carrot—to make them abandon their traditional ways ended up creating a culture of dependency and neglect. It just doesn't work to penalize people more and more.

[Heston]

What do you recommend happening?

Mass extermination.

Or maybe all benefits they receive should be in token form, it's too easy to spend the baby's cash on booze and fags. Regular doctor's tests should tell whether a child is getting all its nutrients, any cases to the contrary should be acted upon.

[eumaas]

This is a piece about American healthcare by a law professor friend, but it seems at least tangentially related to this general question, so I thought I'd post it here:
http://c4ss.org/content/892
since it's about the sort of total rollback Flex mentioned.