Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Instant Message conversation, Tuesday, February 26, 2008

prino1 12:41
i need quick help if you have a second... i am having a hard time understanding the conservative view of things

regardless of how I feel

i need to be able to explain and understad why conservatives think people are to blame for poverty

on a micro- individual level

i just can't wrap my head around it

benjamin melançon 12:42
and how am i supposed to help? the only thing conservative about me is that i don't like old things being taken down

that's because your head has understood reality

prino1 12:42
cause I feel like institutions are to blame

benjamin melançon 12:42
and many conservative heads have not

prino1 12:42
which I know is liberal and I feel that individual people have a tough time of it because of their already marginalization

benjamin melançon 12:42
on the large scale there's no question you're right-- that's why billions of people born in the world live and die in poverty, and a few people live in wealth and relative luxury

prino1 12:43
but I have to support, in this paper, the conservative view as well

benjamin melançon 12:44
but on specific cases the conservative view is correct -- you can find individual instances of people who have made a big difference on their own

and from a radical perspective, for justice and just for disadvantaged people and groups to do better, we will need both-- the black person or the woman to do twice or ten times as well as a person with more advantages. W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington have had this debate...

I mean, anecdotally you can argue the conservative, personal characteristics point for two weeks straight

prino1 12:48
ah ha

yeah that's where I am I guess

benjamin melançon 12:48
but the great weight of evidence shows just how ludicrous it is to try to argue that all 5.9 billion people who haven't made it

prino1 12:51
haha

yes

benjamin melançon 12:51
just don't have the stellar personal characteristics of the several hundred million who 'have,' depending where you want to draw the line. So even on the anecdotal level, when you look at it, you almost always find where Bill Gates was born into the top 1%

prino1 12:51
how many poor people are conservative?

benjamin melançon 12:52
and of course the injustice of inequality is compounding, which is my main argument -- not least in the category of compounding interest, where wealth builds on wealth for doing *absolutely nothing* -- and people with stocks like me have this source of money because corporations can use this monopoly of money to extract extra money from everybody

witness Exxon-Mobil's profits

what could everyone have done with that money, that they had to pay out extra into the pockets of insanely wealthy people, in the U.S. and arab royalty?

prino1 12:53
it's really ridiculous

benjamin melançon 12:54
anyway, it's a small percentage of poor people who are conservative -- the more people who vote, the more poor people who vote, the more likely elections go to Democrats, not that they are very much on the justice bandwagon

prino1 12:54
i wonder how this paper will go... so far it's 6 pages liberal and 1/2 conservative

haha

democracy what have you become?

okay I must go write more... thanks so much!

benjamin melançon 12:55
BUT-- look at it from a practical perspective, what can you change? The system or the way you live your life?

prino1 12:55
TRUE!

benjamin melançon 12:58
so if you can make a synthesis between the liberal and the conservative views...

you will have something very powerful, that I would term radical, but you could term whatever you like

prino1 1:00
:-)

benjamin melançon 1:01
I look forward to the result!

prino1 1:01
thanks!