[extropy-chat] Re: riots in France

[Jack Parkinson]

Damien Broderick swrote:
At 11:21 AM 11/10/2005 +0800, Jack Parkinson wrote:

>>Spoilt rich kids always praise their own benevolence when they hand out
>>their loose change. The hot news is: No one is ever delighted at earning 7
>>cents an hour. They want a house with a manicured lawn, a membership of
>>the golf club and an SUV. When they see someone like you buying and
>>enjoying these little luxuries with the money they have earned you - they
>>start thinking about torching cars and burning shops...

>Jack, the odd thing is that probably every Aussie on this list shares your
>basic perspective, while it remains bizarre and wrong-headed to most of the
>US extropes. Hard to say why that is; we are not *utterly* slaves of our
>nations' economics dogmas.

I can't claim to represent all Aussies. In fact I was born in England, but 
have spent less than half my life there. I've lived in England, Australia, 
France, India and China - but I do find the unrelentingly 
conservative/capitalist approach that admits of no possibility of 
alternatives just way too prevalent in many communications from the US. I'm 
not even saying that it is totally wrong. Just that, to me at least - it 
seems a one-eyed view of reality. Even when it is right - it lacks empathy 
and a balanced appreciation of the factors that might influence dissent.

>On the other hand, you're overstating your case just a tad. Rioters in
>France aren't living on 7 cents an hour, and I doubt many of them are
>earning the bourgeoisie their SUVs--it's exactly because there's no obvious
>route to decent work that they go crazy with rage. Their parents,
>generally, were imported as a dirt cheap labor pool--as many Europeans were
>to Oz in the 50s--and technological/ educational shifts, plus pervasive and
>fearful disdain from the haves, leave their kids with few prospects, even
>as they watch endless TV shows, movies and games that goad them with
>visions of wealth, ease, fun, and mayhem. My wife Barbara tells me DeSoto
>and Thomas Sowell have much to say on the cultural backgrounds to these
>topics, but the problems seem to me almost intractable by now.

You are quite right. The 7 cents argument is not applicable to the French 
situation, this notion of 'absolute minimum wages' began as a generalization 
on catalysts of social discontent world-wide. French legal minimum wages 
would not allow this situation to ever arise. However the French have other 
ways of excluding the underclass - the rioters are 'inexpulsables' people 
who cannot be legally deported from France - but also people who are not 
wanted except as a potential labor pool willing (desperate enough) to work 
for less than the legal wage. These are the guys who sell necklaces and 
other cheap jewelry around the tourist sites, and are the barmen, bellhops, 
cleaners, waiters and other drudge workers if they are lucky enough to be 
not actually unemployable - at which point they either surrender to apathy 
or become pimps, pushers, prostitutes or gangsters according to their 
potential. They are easily radicalized and manipulated entirely because they 
are without hope and have nothing to lose.

>Maybe dead-cheap molecular manufacture will end such strife, but I stand by 
>my
.gloomy prediction in THE SPIKE a decade or so back that what we'll see is a
>planet of Color Gang Wars and the like among those for whom life retains no
>discipline or meaning outside of arbitrary local status and violence.
Damien Broderick

Dead cheap molecular manufacturing could end such strife - in the right 
hands (that is - everyone's hands) But, if and when it arrives - it's 
deliberate restriction to a privileged few could also give us strife we 
never before considered even possible.
Unfortunately - I share your gloomy outlook.
Jack Parkinson