America's a rigged carnival game that rips off the poor to fatten the rich

[enso]

@popobawa4u

No, you didn’t say so directly. But one could surmise this interpretation when it is assumed that organizing one’s life around a symbolic system (money) brings educational advantages which somehow surpass those who don’t use it.[/quote]

You mean advantages like having a home or purchasing food in a system in which we are inculcated from birth in how to use?

That has nothing to do with what I was saying about education.

[quote] You accuse me of concentrating unduly upon willpower and effort, yet rather than focus upon the learnable techniques of problem solving, you start arguing for increased effort - the very position you criticised me of!

Learnable? Learnable from who? When? Where?

My point is that education and educating yourself are skills. They must be learned and modeled. If you have no one who teaches them to you or models them for you, you won’t know how to do it. It is the exceptional individual who can learn well without being taught or shown by anyone how to do it. Most people have teachers, which is part of why teaching, as a role, has been traditional for some people for thousands of years and we create institutions and groups to do this job.

A poor urban kid is unlikely to wake up one day and know how to teach himself a skill without anyone having shown him how or where to go to get the information. The data won’t just pop into his head unless he’s some genius inventing physics from first principles, for example.

@popobawa4u

I would argue that being disenfranchised by one specific system does not make people “poor”.[/quote]

No, having little or no access to means makes one poor. In our society, where money is a unit of exchange for things such as housing or food, not having money means not having these things, which is why there are government programs (limited as they are) to hand out money for these things…

If a person’s work is worth something, then this is the case whether they are hired by a company and paid money to do it, or not.

And if they have no food, shelter or clothing because they aren’t paid?

Direct cultural participation is the only meaningful “capital”. The discussion has gotten too circular for my liking, but the reason I introduced survivalism was as a counter-argument to the remarks of “financial success = survival”. The presumption that people need to allow themselves to be exploited in order to earn their right to survive. It is repugnant to me.

It is repugnant to me too but it is the reality we live in. Unless you’re living rent free in a squat on a neighbor’s internet connection while hunting and gathering your meals and water, you’re participating in this monetary system as well. I’ve asked you before whether you’ve never had a job or paid taxes. As I recall, you refused to answer.

[quote]Yes, poor urbanites have more of a future as subsistence farmers than they do as “people looking for work”. Why look for work when there is work to be done everywhere? Organizing this amongst ourselves is a way off of the carnival ride.

Where do they get the tools to do this farming? Where do they get the seeds? Where do they get the knowledge of how to grow the food? You think these things magically appear?

Hell, where do they get the land in an urban environment? If you say “use land not being used,” what happens when the owner recognized by our legal system shows up and takes “their” land back?

You can’t really think urban poor are going to magically have farming skills, knowledge, tools, and seed and just take over land and it will all somehow work, can you?

Why don’t you go do urban subsistance farming for the next year. You can only eat what you grow outside the system! 1…2…3…Go! Let us know how it works out and if your first crop comes in before you starve in a few weeks.