Banned Books on Religion in US Prisons

[d_rawk]

I'm not sure either! You lost me at 'gfdlks'.

Dammit, Mouse, I'm going to bed confused.

:confused:

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Note to self: I should take more time between posts before posting.

I think I just reacted, out of methodological instinct, maybe, against the idea of individualism as it was being thrown out there. There ain't no such thing in any pure form. We have to deal with messy things like agreement, consensus, compromise, and so on. Any system - e.g., the legal one at hand here - is stuck with that too.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

And yes, I'm going to bed too, but not half as confused as I'll be in the morning wondering why I didn't get as much sleep as I should have before going to work .

[Birdy]

By collectively I just mean the decisions that are acted on by the aggregate of our public consent / assent. That is, people don't make any noise about being interested in rehabilitation programs, and do tend to make noise about not wanting to fund the ne're-do-wells, so money doesn't get funneled in that direction.

That's just it. People don't make any noise. People who believe in the goodness of man and believe in rehabilitation sit back and eat the status quo off a fork because they just know what the other is thinking and they lose themselves in all of it's collectivity - "the way it is". Take it down to the raw bone and i think you'll find yourself with people who wish the system were different. How to backpeddle it all and get a person thinking not about funding, not about punishment, but rather in terms of forgiveness and being true to their principles is my stumbling block.

Edited September 13, 2007 by Guest

[Birdy]

Dr Evil,

Individualism is all we've got. Compromise is a tool used to express. Losing your individualism because of a compromise is the problem.

[d_rawk]

Ah, see, this is why I so often have to pause and say that we have so much in common, even if our trajectories so oft put us at odds.

We should meet sometime, we'd probably make fast friends. And also want to pull each other's hair out.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Birdy, I'm trying to resist the pull to reducing what you're arguing to a claim that individuals are perfect and don't need to adjust to other individuals because they're perfect too. Compromise, it seems to me, is that adjustment that people make to accommodate the realities of other people - the way, say, two people passing each other on the sidewalk will both move to avoid crashing into one another. That would seem to be a recognition, if anything, of others' individuality.

Imagine if everyone began from a position where they presumed that they might be wrong (apparently, though, according to that LA Times article, conservatives' brains don't allow that kind of neural processing ).

[phishtaper]

i say gouge their eyes out and get rid of all the books. prisoners dont need to read.

[Birdy]

Birdy, I'm trying to resist the pull to reducing what you're arguing to a claim that individuals are perfect and don't need to adjust to other individuals because they're perfect too. Compromise, it seems to me, is that adjustment that people make to accommodate the realities of other people - the way, say, two people passing each other on the sidewalk will both move to avoid crashing into one another. That would seem to be a recognition, if anything, of others' individuality.

I don’t claim that individuals are perfect, they are what they are. My claim is that through a series of compromises and agreements a status quo is formed and an individual’s ideas of what they can or cannot do get deflated and lost, ending up in an apathetic citizen who thinks that ‘they alone’ can’t create change, so why try? The longer a person holds preconceived notions of what the ‘collective’ societal thought may be, the least likely they’ll be to speak up.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Ah, ok - you're being Nietzschean . I'm all for that.