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Benevolent Paternalism

[quote="ViolentPanda, post: 12752584, member: 2660
Ah, the last refuge of the incapable - infantilise the opposition, and then pretend you're more mature so that you can disengage with a shred of your imagined dignity intact! :D
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I had that opinion of you people long before I wrote that post. Before I joined this forum, in fact.
 
ViolentPanda said:
You know what I love? Watching someone froth at the mouth because they're not mature enough to accept being gainsaid. Fucking hilarious!!!
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Frothing at the mouth? Sorry to disappoint you, but I was perfectly calm when I wrote that. I'd planned to make those crude comments at least 24 hours earlier: it was just a question of waiting for the best moment to launch the attack.

And while we're at it, until recently I enjoyed debating with you because, unlike a lot of other contributors, you always expressed criticism without using such vulgar language as you have done in recent posts. I am disappointed that you have lowered your standards.
 
Ultimate said:
Frothing at the mouth? Sorry to disappoint you, but I was perfectly calm when I wrote that. I'd planned to make those crude comments at least 24 hours earlier: it was just a question of waiting for the best moment to launch the attack.

And while we're at it, until recently I enjoyed debating with you because, unlike a lot of other contributors, you always expressed criticism without using such vulgar language as you have done in recent posts. I am disappointed that you have lowered your standards.
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i am disappointed that you claim to have standards
 
Ultimate, please address the issues raised. You might also offer some support for your assertions. We've only been waiting for you to do that for six pages.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
Ultimate, please address the issues raised. You might also offer some support for your assertions. We've only been waiting for you to do that for six pages.
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I haven't seen much support for your assertions.

One question, just so I know where you're coming from politically. Are you a Marxist?
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
I used to work in a cop shop. I've seen what happens when a guy is sitting in an interrogation room and a cop decides to get friendly. It usually results in a prison sentence for the object of their affection.

(I've also seen cops do incredibly kind things for no reason other than they saw someone in need. Go figure.)
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As Dottie says, it's often not the person who goes in bad, but the institution (and the desire/need to conform) that leads them astray. I've said before that "closed" work cultures are the most easily corruptible, not least because a "them and us" mentality almost always evolves, not helped by the fact that politicians and the media forever emphasise law and order (and the maintenance thereof) and doing so reinforces the "thin blue line" worldview that many police officers have.
So you do get basically humane people doing "incredibly kind things", because it's part of their make-up as humans to be kind and/or altruistic, but given a forced choice between acting kindly or acting like a cop, the stick is taken up rather than the carrot.
 
DotCommunist said:
I don't believe any sane person goes into the job to be an arsehole, and while organisational culture might wear you down and bring out the evil, there is still a spark somewhere in some people. Within the confines they can try to be what they joined up for. Brave defender and good egg. But its an unwarranted cup of tea or a friendly word weighed against murder and suppression.
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It's basic psychology. An individual will almost always side with the in-group that they're a member of, when push comes to shove, be they coppers, politicians or anarchists.
 
Ultimate said:
Frothing at the mouth? Sorry to disappoint you, but I was perfectly calm when I wrote that. I'd planned to make those crude comments at least 24 hours earlier: it was just a question of waiting for the best moment to launch the attack.
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yes, of course you had! :facepalm:

Next time you try to pull off a blag like the above, bear in mind that any basic form of textual analysis is fairly revealing of emotional state.

And while we're at it, until recently I enjoyed debating with you because, unlike a lot of other contributors, you always expressed criticism without using such vulgar language as you have done in recent posts. I am disappointed that you have lowered your standards.
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Vulgar language occasionally has utility. Anyone who denies this is either (to use a vulgar phrase) a dick, or is using a pretended revulsion for vulgar language as an escape route fom an argument they're losing.
 
Ultimate said:
I haven't seen much support for your assertions.
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The standard practice on these boards is that if the OP makes assertions, they either back them up, or they get mocked. I suspect that people are playing "I'm not showing you mine, until you show me yours" with you.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
Not really.

Leadership should always originate from the people effected by decision-making. It should never be far from the people who have ultimate responsibility.

Leadership imposed from above, as it is in "benevolent paternalism", is inevitably tyrannical.
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I agree with the first part, but not the second. But the key word is 'should'. Yes, ideally it should, but if we want to maintain our high living standards we need a complicated organisational and managerial structure, which means some decisions have to be made by people further from the people affected (i.e. higher up the hierarchy) than would be ideal. Economy of scale, in management as well as production, is essential for high living standards, although I hasten to add that the current economic system is very wasteful with both material and human resources. But I'm not here to defend it.

You keep accusing me of missing the point, but you and everyone else have completely misunderstood my original BP theory. I can forgive you for misunderstanding it, because I'm the first to admit it's a rather eccentric stance, and would probably be misunderstood by a lot of other people as well, but in a different way. For example, a firmly pro-capitalist person would object to it because it emphasises a state monopoly rather than a private enterprise competitive economy. That was really the point I wanted to debate - I think both have their pros and cons. I was going to talk about that later, because I didn't want my OP to be a long essay. But that intended part got completely lost because I underestimated how violently opposed people on this thread are to hierarchies of authority. I hope I am making myself clear.

To return to the first paragraph of this post, what I'm really saying (and have been saying for most of this thread) is that what you seem to want is hopelessly impractical. You can't have a perfect democracy - you can't, to use a well-known phrase, please all the people all the time. You say leadership imposed from above is inevitably tyranical. It might help if you were to explain exactly what you mean by tyranical. If you mean it involves making decisions that some people are opposed to, then yes, of course it is. But if you have a realistic alternative, I'd like to know what it is.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
He should also explain why he uses "leadership" and "authority" interchangeably. They are two different animals entirely.
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I agree that they don't mean the same thing. But don't forget there is also a difference between authority and power. Power is the ability to make people do what you want them to do; authority is the ability to make people obey you on their own accord because they recognise your right to tell them what to do. Therefore, it is not that far from leadership.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
He should also explain why he uses "leadership" and "authority" interchangeably. They are two different animals entirely.
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Very easily confused, though, I think. "Leadership" is a complex term for a bunch of things that needs deconstructing for an argument like this.
 
8ball said:
What does 'economy of scale in management' mean?
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It means one or more managers responsible for something big because that's cheaper than paying for lots of managers each managing something small. But this means the manager will have a lot of power. Not an ideal situation for the employees, but economically necessary if the business is to compete successfully.
 
Ultimate said:
It means one or more managers responsible for something big because that's cheaper than paying for lots of managers each managing something small. But this means the manager will have a lot of power. Not an ideal situation for the employees, but economically necessary if the business is to compete successfully.
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This doesn't make any sense at all. Even the workshy anarchists who have never run as much as a whelk stall will rip this argument to pieces.
 
Flawed logic. If anarchists will have reason to criticise it, then it does make sense. Otherwise, they'd be nothing for them to criticise.
 
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Ultimate said:
It means one or more managers responsible for something big because that's cheaper than paying for lots of managers each managing something small. But this means the manager will have a lot of power. Not an ideal situation for the employees, but economically necessary if the business is to compete successfully.
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This sounds like the old 'panopticon' way of running factories that was abandoned almost a century ago. I can't think of a single modern successful business that manages along these lines.
 
Ultimate said:
Flawed logic. If anarchists will have reason to criticise it, then it does make sense. Otherwise, they'd be nothing for them to criticise.
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Did you mean to have a colon after the second word - then at least the first sentence would make some kind of sense.
 
Ultimate said:
It means one or more managers responsible for something big because that's cheaper than paying for lots of managers each managing something small. But this means the manager will have a lot of power. Not an ideal situation for the employees, but economically necessary if the business is to compete successfully.
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The degree of "management" required depends entirely on the job being done/the good being manufactured. Some processes are simply not amenable to your "economies of scale", and attempts to apply them would be a false economy (i.e. short-term saving, long-term haarm to business/product).
What you've written is the sort of stuff MBAs with no actual experience of "management" or "business administration" come out with. Supervision isn't a unitary function transferable across projects. It has to fit to the requirements of the actual job.
 
Ultimate said:
Flawed logic. If anarchists will have reason to criticise it, then it does make sense. Otherwise, they'd be nothing for them to criticise.
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Which speaks loudly of your prejudices about anarchists, and about your narrowmindedness, but says little to actually support your contentions about economies of scale.
 
Silas Loom said:
This doesn't make any sense at all. Even the workshy anarchists who have never run as much as a whelk stall will rip this argument to pieces.
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I've always seen the military as a reasonable exemplar of (except at the very top) an effective minimalist management structure, insofar as you have many strata of "management", but each performs a vital role, with redundancies built in up- and down-stream. You can achieve some minor economy of scale, but it's usually at a cost to efficiency that's disproprtionately great when measured against purely financial savings.
It's a similar story with much of the "Whitehall" Civil Service, too. You can only pare a little before you start affecting function.

I can't actually think of that many businesses, outside of those who've bought into/been compelled to buy into "managerialism", that are staffed so inefficiently that these "economies of scale" Ultimate speaks of will make much of a difference. We already know that the "smaller state" austerity cuts made by the coalition have shown that unless you plan your cuts well, they'll have adverse effects on function/delivery.
 
8ball said:
This sounds like the old 'panopticon' way of running factories that was abandoned almost a century ago. I can't think of a single modern successful business that manages along these lines.
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If you operate a simple production process, it's possible - for example, if your factory produces wooden chair legs for the export "handmade furniture" market, then a simple management/oversight platform is all you need. As soon as your process becomes more complicated, oversight needs to be stratified.
 
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