A Question about Equality

[Unbeatable]

don't worry sweetie, I won't.

If you really believed in equality of outcomes you'd treat his posts with as much honor and respect as everyone else's.

I think she pretty much is.

 

[NotBuyingTheBsAnymore]

Equality of outcome? It kills innovation. It kills creativity. It kills the human spirit. To excel beyond that which they thought was their own limit is the life blood of living beings. Only the dead, Kim Jong-un and socialists give up on a lifetime of learning and challenge. Don't believe me? Live in Russia, N. Korea or any non-capitalist country for a short while. It won't be long before you smell the rigamortis setting in.

Capitalism brings about the best and worst in people. Communism, socialism and Marxism bring about dictatorships in which those that oppose the government are imprisoned or exterminated (N. Korea, former Soviet Union, Cuba). In these societies, only the political elite have any level of success and wealth. Know why? They steal it from the bright, young and productive and give it to themselves. They bypass your rights and transform them into their own wealth and prestige. Sounds familiar, right? If you thought feminists were bad - you really need to consider Kim Jong-un. Feminists and Kim Jong-un are one and the same. They both hope for equality of outcome.

The guy the feminists are talking about when they talk about 'equality of outcome' is Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton is the guy they maliciously throw in prison, under false rape charges, when he refuses to marry them. No sane man is going to marry women bent on betraying and imprisoning men. Those men are going to live very peaceful lives with zero influence by women.

Bill Clinton Man = Good sex throughout his life and escapes women's false rape charges, false sexual harassment charges and licks many a fine vagina. Held in high regard by the majority of women globally, including his own wife. No woman has the heart to imprison such a pussy pleasing man. He's a bad, bad...good, good man.

Equality of outcome kills women's chances of living lives free of misogynistic men. Why? You won't be able to out earn the schmuck and move offshore. In the coming decades, a lot of smart women are going to stay single, expat and screw younger, less fortunate men from various large penis countries. This is good. If you're a woman, this is what you want.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Didn't you read Harrison Bergeron in high school?

No.

When I was in high school, I had, well, a social life, friends and fun.

And reading Harrison Bergeron is pretty much the opposite of "fun."

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If you're a feminist, you're not going to read the below link because it exposes all of your lies and the ever deepening hypocrisy of your movement. If you're a feminist, the below link is the equivalent of throwing holy water on a vampire.

If you're a feminist, if you don't want your head sploding all over, skip the below link. If you're a rational person free of the cluster B personality disorders that define feminism, have at it. You'll understand just how full of BS feminists are:

http://bjsparky.deviantart.com/art/Feminist-Equality-Or-Feminist-Hypocrisy-517720674

I'm not a feminist.
Clicked the link.
tl;dr.... "Why can't feminists just be cool?"

 

[dismal]

No.

When I was in high school, I had, well, a social life, friends and fun.

And reading Harrison Bergeron is pretty much the opposite of "fun."

I suppose for people with an "equal outcomes" fetish.

But then since some people read it, people with an "equal outcomes" fetish would feel a need to read it too.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Why is equality of outcomes wrong?

Because inequality of outcome, like Jesus and NASCAR, is the American Dream. Everybody is secretly or not-so-secretly self-centered. We all want to win, to have more than those around us, to be better than those around us. We like equality of opportunity because what it really means is that in this game of winners and losers, we all have an equal chance of coming out on top. Not only does that provide hope; it also prevents the people who actually end up on top from feeling bad about those who are less fortunate, and it prevents the people working their way up the ladder from feeling bad about the people they've had to step on. Equal opportunity means we get to claim that we won fair and square and that the losers must therefore be inferior and therefore undeserving of our compassion or charity. Equality of outcome denies us all of that.

I'm thinking equity of outcomes is necessary for true equity of opportunity, though, especially at certain stages in a person's life. In schools in particular, you absolutely cannot claim those students all have equal opportunity to succeed if a huge number of them graduate without the skills they need to be competitive in the workforce. Without an equal outcome in stage 1, their opportunities in stage 2 are even more slanted.

What's more, there's something to be said for the rules of the game being applied consistently: if you manage to seize an opportunity with the right preparations at the right time and make smart choices, you should be able to succeed; if some bigshot competitor comes along and arbitrarily squashes you and/or steals your startup business out from under you using some kind of elaborate financial trick you've never even heard of (and is only legal because your competitor spent eight million dollars lobbying for it) even the True Believers of the Free Market are likely to cry foul.

"There are three fundamental forces that govern all movement in the universe: Matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest."

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And reading Harrison Bergeron is pretty much the opposite of "fun."

I suppose for people with an "equal outcomes" fetish.

Or for people who don't enjoy reading self-righteous drivel disguised as speculative fiction. To be sure, Harrison Bergeron is more readable than, say, Atlas Shrugged (which I ALSO suffered through in High School), but only because it's ALOT shorter.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Why is equality of outcomes wrong?

Which outcomes in particular?

 

[dismal]

I suppose for people with an "equal outcomes" fetish.

Or for people who don't enjoy reading self-righteous drivel disguised as speculative fiction. To be sure, Harrison Bergeron is more readable than, say, Atlas Shrugged (which I ALSO suffered through in High School), but only because it's ALOT shorter.

Well then. We are sorry you were not amused. They could have taught you ALOT better in English.

Damn unequal outcomes

 

[NotBuyingTheBsAnymore]

Why is equality of outcomes wrong?

Which outcomes in particular?

The outcomes in which a divorced mother or single mother takes home the same valuable salary as a man working in any field. Women produce the babies. If the government wants us to continue making the babies, they had better be willing to pay the most valuable of salaries to women. Women make the future geniuses, right? Geniuses cost money, right? How much do women get paid per genius?

If you're a man - some woman carried you to term. When you ripened, she squeezed you from her loins. She gave you a shot at survival in the years following. Is that not worth at least one million dollars? Most women think so. That you don't think so means you need to be squeezed back into that place from which you'll never return.

There's only one way to resolve our differences. What way is that? Thermonuclear war. Men think ahead. Women had better build a much higher presence of front line troops. Women have never fought and died for their rights. They've always expected men to do that for them.

What's coming? The majority of men are going to go to war with the embarrassment we call the US Federal Government. I'm not talking about the non-veterans, non-inactive and non-active troops that guard our country today. The majority of the Federal work force is non-veteran. The majority of the Federal work force are the cowards that like sending lessor paid men to die for their rights. I'm talking about those that never served their countries a day in their lives that collect the highest paid salaries while simultaneously disparaging US service members and locking vets out of good jobs.

Women are more cruel than cruel. That a woman's only rational role is to spit out a child from a satanic womb for the purposes of injuring the world for all of eternity is the mark of my X wife, Deborah Kramer.

Debbie - You know I hate you to my very core. You can save several by admitting your incurable STDs, babe. May you rot, eternally, in hell.

 

[laughing dog]

It would be rude to read it now. You've gone to so much trouble to tell me not to read it, so I won't.

Well, that sure saves time.

Now we will resume the thread about EQUALITY OF OUTCOMES, already in progress

My last post was all about EQUALITY OF OUTCOMES. You can't see that because you're too afraid that your head will explode if you read the linked graphic in my last post. I don't blame you for your fear. Your fear is justified. Do not read the linked information in my last post.

Does anyone else misread this poster's name as NothingButtheBSAnymore?

 

[laughing dog]

Putting my two cents in on the OP. There is nothing wrong with equality of outcomes per se. How the equality is achieved makes the difference along with the specifics of the outcomes. For example, I don't think too many posters would disagree that equality for all before the law in a court is a good outcome when achieved by a fair and balanced process. Equality of opportunity in education is another example of an outcome that I think most people would agree with. Equality of incomes achieved through arbitrary and capricious transfers is not a good outcome.

 

[NobleSavage]

such as?

Didn't you read Harrison Bergeron in high school?

That was going to be my reply. The movie is quite a bit different, but watch it:

 

[EricK]

Putting my two cents in on the OP. There is nothing wrong with equality of outcomes per se. How the equality is achieved makes the difference along with the specifics of the outcomes. For example, I don't think too many posters would disagree that equality for all before the law in a court is a good outcome when achieved by a fair and balanced process. Equality of opportunity in education is another example of an outcome that I think most people would agree with. Equality of incomes achieved through arbitrary and capricious transfers is not a good outcome.

And this highlights an important semantic point which is often the root cause of differences of opinion. Events unfold unendingly, and we like to divide them into understandable narratives. But there are no fixed start points or end points. What you call an outcome, others will just see a stage on the way to the outcome. Is equality before the law an outcome of the legal process or a part of the legal process - with the outcome being the verdict, or perhaps the sentence, or perhaps the rehabilitation (or otherwise) of the offender? Is equality of opportunity in education an outcome or is it something which just gives everyone a fair chance to achieve the outcome they deserve?

 

[Barbarian]

It wrongs those who are more capable.

how?

Is this the 'prove me that the sky is blue' routine? Are you really pretending not to get that people with better abilities would, statistically speaking, achieve more and that you would have to apply or threaten violence to make it happen otherwise i.e. to equalize the outcome, and that such violence amounts to wrongdoing?

... although I had the misfortune to know enough communists around here before 1989 who thought exactly that. 'We represent the huge majority of natural born losers, and in the name of their combined envy forbid you to achieve success'.

 

[arkirk]

That depends upon what "Equality of Outcomes" means. Does it mean everyone gets the same results, without regard to effort? The only practical way to guarantee Equality of Outcome is to require very little and give very little.

In an ideal world, all children should finish school with acceptable grades. Some will be above average and some will be below average. If "acceptable" is "equality of outcomes", then the mission has been met. It's fair to demand every child receive whatever assistance needed to achieve acceptable. Some may need more help than others. This means there will be inequality of assistance, just as there is inequality of effort.

This leads to another problem. Resources are finite. Do we give good students extra assistance, to help them become really good students, or should these resources be spent on those who are the poorest performers? Is there some kind of accounting where we can measure input and output, and thus calculate some factor of efficiency? This kind of thing happens in schools all across the US. It's called "Gifted and Talented" programs. I was born a little two early to be gifted and talented, but both my younger sisters were G&T. They don't actually have any great gifts or talents. What they had was my mother, who filled out the forms. It's never been a secret that one of the greatest inputs to a child's education is their parent's interest. Every gifted and talented child has an interested parent. It's very likely every very good student also has an interested parent.

If the resources spent on Gifted and Talented programs were aimed at under achieving students, it might be money well spent. It could also be money wasted, although the appearance of waste might just be a bookkeeping trick.

This is a case of the means must justify the ends. How does one achieve equality of outcome, when there is no equality of any other measurable quantity.

My first reaction to your post was to agree with it and then I realized the context in which agreement with your post would have to lie. So I ask you these questions and frankly they are difficult and I don't pretend to have the answers. The first highlighted remark above represents a standard extractive view of humanity. There is assumed to be some sort of requirement placed on an individual to produce something society values. Take it from me, I hope you do, that this is a moving target. It is as if everybody who describes a system feels because they are describing it, they must be viewing it from the position of the boss. Thus we assume that by sort of test we can ascertain some measure of each individual's productive capabilities. To the social planner, this test would measure "productive positive qualities" and the assumption is that the aid the system must deliver to the lower scorers is wasted.
So you tend then to permanently assign the definition to the receivers of aid as intrinsically defective. This amounts to a grand assumption that we can recognize valuable qualities in others in a quantitative sense and score them as human beings.

The problem comes up with the fact that society advances because people are always deviating from the norm in various ways and just like evolution or natural selection produces more likely to survive and less likely to survive, our culture, if it recognizes this concept, it must also recognize the absolute need for the variation and diversity even though some variations may be less quantitatively productive than others in a given work system. I think part of a truly humane or humanistic system of economics would devote a great deal of its efforts to match individuals with employment or work or whatever that would be suitable to them and still beneficial though perhaps only marginally so.

We in the western world seem to frown on frugality though frugality is almost always environmentally responsible. Some of us feel that life ought to be hard and work should be long and arduous and only slightly rewarded. Why we have this thought about work is that somehow in this extractive theory of governance, somebody is expecting to make a profit through their own brilliance. Our society has reached a degree of industrialization where many of the traditional work functions of human beings are being replaced by mechanical and electronic devices. We can argue about how well we mind our machinery, but the simple fact is that as we become more capable of machine delivered production, the need for men and women to slave at work actually should decline. We are not frugal with our substrate and habitually as a society destroy ecosystems that guarantee diversity. We do the same thing to portions of our population we have failed to come to satisfactory terms with. That is because we all imagine ourselves to be the boss. Just saying doesn't the philosophy tend to dictate not just that a person works to please the boss, but that his production must have a certain physical dimension and that dimension is great enough too allow a profit for the boss, otherwise, the low quality human beings can just go away. It is kind of like killing people without using a gun. We call that poverty.

The degree of disengagement of a system from the "lesser" members of society is directly proportional to the limitations on the understanding of the planners. Everybody should be active and employed or at least doing something that keeps them healthy and happy with their work. I feel our current system seems to produce unemployed who are expected to buy their retraining and sometimes their initial training with private funds they do not have. The student loan fiasco shows us how utterly divorced from the needs of the people of this country our institutions of higher learning are.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Why is equality of outcomes wrong?

Which outcomes in particular?

Well, according to Derec, as but one example, the justice meted out in the family courts with regards to divorce.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

how?

Is this the 'prove me that the sky is blue' routine? Are you really pretending not to get that people with better abilities would, statistically speaking, achieve more and that you would have to apply or threaten violence to make it happen otherwise i.e. to equalize the outcome, and that such violence amounts to wrongdoing?

... although I had the misfortune to know enough communists around here before 1989 who thought exactly that. 'We represent the huge majority of natural born losers, and in the name of their combined envy forbid you to achieve success'.

I am asking you how equality of outcomes harms the more capable. If I am shooting a film and I am paying background actors $100 for eight hours work. 100 BAs show up at eight o'clock in the am. As me shoot, throughout the day I find I need more people so I am adding people all through the day, some only an hour before the end of shooting. at the end of the day I handout pay packets to everyone and everyone gets $100. Those first 100 are professional actors, trained and experienced, the rest are amateurs. Who if anyone did I harm?

 

[dismal]

Is this the 'prove me that the sky is blue' routine? Are you really pretending not to get that people with better abilities would, statistically speaking, achieve more and that you would have to apply or threaten violence to make it happen otherwise i.e. to equalize the outcome, and that such violence amounts to wrongdoing?

... although I had the misfortune to know enough communists around here before 1989 who thought exactly that. 'We represent the huge majority of natural born losers, and in the name of their combined envy forbid you to achieve success'.

I am asking you how equality of outcomes harms the more capable. If I am shooting a film and I am paying background actors $100 for eight hours work. 100 BAs show up at eight o'clock in the am. As me shoot, throughout the day I find I need more people so I am adding people all through the day, some only an hour before the end of shooting. at the end of the day I handout pay packets to everyone and everyone gets $100. Those first 100 are professional actors, trained and experienced, the rest are amateurs. Who if anyone did I harm?

That's equality of outcomes? Some people made $100 per hour, some people made $12.50.

And what if one of the actors loses an arm on set during shooting? Do you take an arm from all the others to equalize the outcomes?

Maybe you need to define what you mean because this may be another one of those non-dictionary definition threads.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I am asking you how equality of outcomes harms the more capable. If I am shooting a film and I am paying background actors $100 for eight hours work. 100 BAs show up at eight o'clock in the am. As me shoot, throughout the day I find I need more people so I am adding people all through the day, some only an hour before the end of shooting. at the end of the day I handout pay packets to everyone and everyone gets $100. Those first 100 are professional actors, trained and experienced, the rest are amateurs. Who if anyone did I harm?

That's equality of outcomes? Some people made $100 per hour, some people made $12.50.

And what if one of the actors loses an arm on set during shooting? Do you take an arm from all the others to equalize the outcomes?

Maybe you need to define what you mean because this may be another one of those non-dictionary definition threads.

Nice try but FAIL.


who did i harm? That is the question.

This, btw, is pretty much standard operating procedure in the business. If every actor used had showed up at eight and only worked an hour, they still would have all gotten $100.