Exactly. Individual rights are primary. The individual is the ultimate minority. That’s why you have to guarantee people stuff on a universal basis. We’re getting somewhere, Barry.
I have only heard the term “American exceptionalism” as used by right-wing globalists trying to convince post-fighting-age elements of the electorate that Vietnam and Iraq were reasonable strategic decisions rather than moral travesties, because U.S. children have a special responsibility to fight foreign wars.
Maybe you can explain to me why I should have more respect for people who use the term as a positive.
Congratulations—you’re chinese. This ‘all in service of the collective’ attitude is not American or White, period. We privilege freedom of choice at an individual level over the optimization of circumstances for the collective. Euthanizing the mentally disabled (Japan/Germany)? Flogging/mutilating children to scare peers into acceding to social norms (Iran/SaudiArabia)? Denying your own population the right to vote because they may approve something that runs counter to the interests of the state-directed corporate oligopoly, upon whose success the entire nation’s material well-being is premised (China)? That’s not us. We make sacrifices so that even the lowest among us can be guaranteed basic rights and dignities, because we see same as a good in and of itself. Get with the program.
Putnam has been researching for a long time, Nick… and he’s been disingenuous for longer. Link me to something specific?
I think that conflating culture with race is a big mistake, though. Not such a big mistake a few hundred years ago, perhaps, but after centuries of global European domination, the story is much more complicated.
I went to public school in central Florida. I had lots of black classmates, too. I’m still not an apartheidist, and neither are the vast, vast majority of Americans who interact with the black, brown, and yellow people of the world every day.
At the moment, the age of adulthood is 18. If the population votes to move it up or down, so be it. At the moment, education contains only a very modest sports/music component. If the electorate votes to change it, so be it. My proposal does not ‘forbid’ anything. The object is to raise the floor on educational opportunity and quality of life for children in this country. Keeping the ceiling low is not an end in and of itself.
Hierarchy cannot be eliminated. Some people are, in an agonizingly real sense, simply worse than others at everything, and these people will always suffer. But the least we can do is give them a puncher’s chance at beating the odds.