From: gazit@duke.cs.duke.edu (Hillel Gazit)
Newsgroups: soc.men,alt.feminism
Subject: Re: Duck and Jive (was Re: Pre-Sex Contract)
Date: 25 Jan 93 18:27:29 GMT
Reply-To: gazit@cs.duke.edu (Hillel)
Followup-To: soc.men,alt.feminism
Organization: Nefolet shel nemushot (Fallout of Wimps)

In article <C19CED.6n7@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:

gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
> >You will also find that raising children is a lot of work.  

gazit@duke.cs.duke.edu (Hillel Gazit) writes:
| *IF* you do it right.
| 
| Like always, Gordon's implicit assumption (that the welfare mothers
| raise their kids in a good way) is the important one...

>I've observed several dozen -- probably several hundred
>welfare mothers, and I didn't notice any particular
>dereliction of duty.  I'm sure there are those who fail,
>but there are plenty at higher income levels who fail,
>too.  

The claim is that very few poor people go to the parents-teachers
meetings in schools, and that the flight of the middle class from the
public schools is bad for poor kids because(among other reasons) 
nobody really cares about the quality of the school anymore.

Do you think that those claims are not true?

Do you think that the US high infant mortality is all the work of the
evil US government and it has nothing to do with neglagance on the
part of the (usually single) parents?

>Parental failure may actually be greater at the
>higher income levels, because jobs, especially the low-
>paid jobs, can be very stressful.  

Still, many more poor kids choose the criminal way.
*I* see it as parental failure.

>In the story, though, I believe the assumption was that 
>the welfare queen there was doing it right, wasn't it?

She wanted to do it right, but she had to stretch the resources
of the commune for that.

gf:
> >Women with access to
> >contraception and abortion almost never have large numbers of
> >children; those who do are almost always in a patriarchal
> >situation -- e.g. various fundamentalist religious types who
> >believe that it's the Godly thing to do.  

hg:
| So how comes that liberals states like New York or Massachusetts
| have a much more serious welfare problem than more fundamentalist
| and religious states like those in the South East or in Utah?

>Liberal states pay the welfare, so naturally they collect
>people who need it, or make a practice of pretending to
>need it.  Many of them are from elsewhere.  

You create a state that collects welfare cases, while causing the
middle class to run to other states.  Either you will have to stop the
process or find ways to move the resources of other states to New York.

The only way to keep your system alive is by forcing people to pay
for it; I hope that you have some plan in cases too many of
the other people will have *enough* and an "I'll cut welfare!" 
president will be elected...

>As a matter of
>fact, there is a lot of poverty in the South, and possibly 
>a higher proportion of people on welfare, than in NYC.

Poverty is not just a state of wallet, it is also a state of mind.

In the South you don't have those amounts of crime, helplessness and
inaction.  People are poor, but they try (and they can find cheap
apartments with no shooting at nights).  

hg:
| Can't you see that the facts contradict your theory?

>Which facts?

The failure of the welfare system to improve the situation of poor
people, regardless of the huge amounts of money which were "invested."

gf:
> >In Ashmore's _dumb_ story, the fecund momma has none of this.
> >No support, no ideology.  

hg:
| 1) In Carole's story the woman who kept having children had 
|    some religious reasons.

>No, I meant her co-communards didn't seem to support her
>having lots of children.  

People in a commune may develop a very thick skin, even if the public
shows a lot of contempt toward them (almost every kibbutz has its
share of those).

hg:
| 2) It is true that quite a few women follow the patriarchal religions
|    that object to abortion, but there are also goddess based religions
|    that see child bearing/raising as a good thing...

>So where are all these big Goddess-inspired families?  

Don't you hear all those feminists who demand more and more money for
welfare mothers and demand women's *total* freedom with regard to
pregnancy, no matter what they want to do?

If those attitude will be The New Religion you will be able to
understand that the Catholic Church was not *that* bad after all...

gf:
> >It's _possible_ that a few such 
> >situations could arise, but they'd be socially insignificant,
> >not the gigantic problem Hillel makes them out to be.

hg:
| The problem is that y'all created a fool-proof environment for poor
| people, and in this environment a large number of people who take
| no responsibility are raised.

| The welfare queen is just one example, the people who burned down
| every store around their neighborhoods are another.

| Today 1/4 of the children in the U.S. are born to poverty; is this
| a gigantic problems by your criteria?  Is the problem of people who
| keep having children they can't support, and bill the government
| for them, has any significance?

>For instance, the assertion that New York City provides a
>"fool-proof environment" for poor people -- a truly
>astonishing perception of things.  

You *tried* to create a fool-proof environment, and it seemed to
work before the violence problem became so bad.  

My point is that *IF* you will manage to solve all other problems with
the welfare system (fat chance...) then biology 101 will doom it to
failure.  The fact that your system failed for zillion other reasons,
does not change this point.

>It's like you've been on Mars.  

What do you think that happens if you take a bunch of kids, who have 
never paid a real price for their stupidity and let them grow up?
They grow up stupid and they destroy each others' lives.

You can read "Lord of the flies" if you want an abstract example of
the problem, or you can look at the gangs if you want a real life
example, but the bottom line is that people who are not punished for
stupid acts grow up stupid.  Even if gangs and bullies destroy their
lives for no reason at all, they don't learn too much from that.

>However, it's beside the point in regard to Ashmore's
>story.  One of the essential points of the story is the
>image of the fast-breeding welfare queen, and the
>statistics and common sense don't support the fantasy.

1/4 of the kids today are born in poverty, and we see a third
generation of welfare moms who multiply before they learn to add.  

For time being the other 3/4 of the population can support all that, but
the balance is changing because the average welfare woman has more kids
than the average middle-class woman.

That was the problem that Carole pointed out.

> )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(

Hillel                                gazit@cs.duke.edu

"Uncritical support" is a contradiction in terms.  --  Joanna Russ
Newsgroups: soc.men,soc.women