We need to fix things in our inner cities and in impoverished areas so that there are good jobs, and that conditions are good for people, which includes unemployment relief. Poverty leads to crime.

At the same time, people can make choices of their own, and if people make good choices they can overcome these bad conditions.

The problem is that Right Wingers often bring up personal responsibility as an excuse not to address the issues of our impoverished areas.

Bryant

They ruin the meaning of the words. There's lots of things I am conservative about but I never put it that way in public. Measure twice cut once. That's my conservatism. Not this radial destruction of government and safety net nonsense.

Republican personal responsibility blames a flipper baby for his birth defects. Put the blame on someone else and the corporations are free to pollute.

I think taking responsiblity is a good thing but the phrase is ruined by context same way I can no longer say my best fix is a final solution.

It's a deflection allowing the speaker to blame the victim for failing to overcome system-wide societal oppression.

e.g. the latest disater in Iraq

Operates within a web of impersonal forces and contingent factors. Presenting an individual's choices, and responsibility for outcomes, as though they occurred in a perfectly balanced and neutral setting, is a serious distortion.

Why even start the thing, then?

Secondly, my question was asked in good faith.
Thirdly, who made you the arbiter of threadom ?

By all means, continue....

Who doesn't like a polite salutation every now and again?

You, I guess...?

If you'd prefer a "Ma'am" just let the Big M know.

If you are responding to a poster named Clarice......would you use Sir?
As far as addressing me....please use Queen Clarice. This should suffice.

It somehow struck me as Clarence, which was my father in law's name....

I have been known to go to the knife a little early, and certainly seem to have done so here. I apologize.

Actually, I have been known to enjoy the old verbal thrust and parry myself.
Gotta ask though, did you have to look up Eurotophobia?

When I read your name, I picture Anthony Hopkins saying it to Jodi Foster.

I thought that's where you were going w/that. Often people choose a username to evoke an atmosphere--I was thinking "Silence of the Lambs."

You didn't identify your gender in your profile--that is, of course, your ABSOLUTE right, but anyone who doesn't do that (and some do it deliberately, so as to prevent people from having preconceived notions -- i.e. "You're a man, you can't understand," or "You women never had to deal with ...blah blah blah" stuff) runs the risk (or benefit, depending on attitude) of being mislabeled.

I find it to be a boring affectation that very often includes that poster calling me by the wrong pronoun, then acting surprised when called on it. Dozens of times this has happened, and each time the poster plays dumb 'I don't recall speaking to you in the past'. It is a lame excuse to call gay people 'ma'am' and this poster is not the only one on DU who plays those games.
I find that act to be cloying, demanding, selfish and rude.

So "Harrrumph!"

You've got fingers, you can type--correct the misapprehension, or don't.

I don't think the Magistrate is a gay-basher, in fact, I think she's pro-equality. I think that's kind of a lousy accusation to make about her, too. I've never seen her say a single thing that would lead me to believe she was anti-equality.

Nicely stated.

I certainly agree when it comes to issues like young black men in prison and poor children and families and any number of issues, but I think there are areas where taking personal responsibility, if not in a balanced and neutral setting, is the thing to do. I don't imagine, btw, that you're saying that isn't true.

You have to hold people personally responsible; you cannot run a society otherwise. But that it seems necessary should not be confused with taking it as right and just to do so. Quite often it is neither. And so people suffer consequences for 'choices' they were set up to make, and for the outcome of a roll with loaded dice.

So it seems disingenuous to complain about the lower classes' supposed lack of responsibility.

They claim they are personally responsible for the impersonal workings and contingent circumstances which put them in high station, or enabled and assisted them in rising; rather like a man who, not knowing or not believing he holds loaded dice, conceives himself to have quite the touch after rolling six sevens in a row. This imparts a feeling of being one of the elect, one who has been specially blessed, and it is a characteristic of the elect, of the saved, that the very virtue of their nature renders it impossible for them to do wrong, so that what might well be criminal and evil if done by a lesser being, is nothing one of the elect should be troubled over in the slightest. And certainly should not be really punished for.

it still gives the Upper Five Percent no real right to avoid any responsibilty for anything.

Of course, since the wealthy in this nation have bought out the judicial system, it is all a moot point.

A. I wasn't complaining.

B. Bernie Madoff

Excuses sometimes mitigate or even exculpate wrongdoing, but justice and responsibility are inextricably linked. If, for example, I were to maliciously throw a rock through my neighbor's window, then because I am the responsible party, justice would demand that I pay for the cost of replacing the window.

But your chosen example bears the relation to what is being discussed that a glow-stick bears to a bolt of lightning. It is the same weakness of argument which occurs when free-marketeers cite a star athlete's pay as an illustration of how rewards equal value in a market economy.

The 'personal responsibility' hue and cry is raised over everything from poor health and lack of education to poverty itself, and culpability for violent or even property crimes is the least of the whole. I said people have to be held responsible, because social order demands it, even though it may often not be just or right to do so, and I stand by that. A great deal of wrong is done by necessity, and accepting this does not require me to like it.

"This is the best world possible. Everything it it is a necessary evil."

My only point is that justice often demands holding people responsible for what they do. (Perhaps you agree with that.)

Whether the consequences people bear for their actions amount to justice is a separate question. I am actually fairly hard-nosed on genuine crime. Show me a case where someone has a brutalized another human, taken all they had, and left them to die in a field or a shallow grave, and if there is no question he did it, and no question that he had competent counsel at trial, I will make no objection to his being put to death, and that regardless of any mitigating circumstances in background and upbringing adduced. But show me a case where a man has looted the life savings of hundreds or thousands of people, inflicting on them great misery and suffering, thrown them out of homes and out of work, with the predictable result of despairing suicides and sickness unto death before their natural time, and I see no reason he should not suffer the same penalty, nor will I call it justice that one does and the other does not.

Crimes, whether before the law, or before the decent conscience, are only one facet of the matter. The 'personal responsibility' cry is raised over a great many things, and it is generally employed to fend off recognition of social forces acting on individuals, and shaping the choices available to them, and the likelihood they will make a solid go of it in life. We do not all start off at anything like equal odds, and those who come in roses from seven for five make a very poor spectacle jeering at those who came up thorns from seven for one.

I wasn't talking only about punitive justice. In fact, my example was one of compensatory justice. And I agree with you that it is unjust when the wealthy banker who preys on the less fortunate is not held accountable for his actions. I also agree that both natural luck and social luck (not to mention racism and sexism) play a huge role in stacking the odds against some and in favor of others.

A pleasure to have made your acquaintance.

Essentially, Black and Hispanic kids are sent to prison for crimes that wealthy Anglo kids are not. All are personally irresponsible but only one one group largely gets away with minimum sentencing rape, murder and drug dealing.

Last in line, gets the least, doesn't have the benefit of decent education, doesn't live in safe neighborhoods, doesn't have parents with secure incomes, no access to top shelf nutrition, medical care, and academic and social enrichments, yet these kids are expected to compete on a "level playing field" after eighteen years of being shoved behind that prickly bush in the rose garden. Often, they give up well before they're out of high school because they see no benefit in attending an institution where very little learning happens. It's just not fair.

George Orwell nailed it.

My dad never speaks of "personal responsibility" not even when I was a kid, often in trouble.

But he was very insistent on "You broke it, you fix it."

If I, in some irrational teenage testosterone fueled rage, punched a hole in the wall, then I had to fix it as good as or better than new. If I didn't know how, he'd show me.

If I got a ticket parking or driving the family car, I had to pay it.

If I had an altercation with a teacher, I had to make peace. If I didn't know how, my dad showed me.

"Personal Responsibility" has become a phrase authoritarians use to deny their own social responsibilities and impose shame and guilt upon those people who are simply unfortunate or actively repressed.

If a mentally ill person is living on the streets it's not their "personal responsibility" to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job. If a kid had a crappy education, grew up in miserable circumstances, is a member of a community that is despised by a bigoted and powerful majority, what's the big surprise when they are dysfunctional in that society?

There are many practical solutions to the problems of our cruel society. Demanding "Personal Responsibility" is not one of them.

Let's just fix the stuff that is broken and not cast judgments.

Strip away all preconceived notions and double - speak, the term itself "Personal Responsibility"
is a GOOD thing, and a value that I think is sadly lacking all across the economic spectrum. Agreed?

Too easy to shed "responsibility."

"Fix what you broke" works much better.

To quote the fellow memorialized yesterday in another thread: "I was given this world, I didn't make it."

Responsibility without authority is a bad place indeed....

It ain't easy.

Less so if they happen to come from difficult circumstances.

Is it something that came from poor choices?

The parents made poor decisions.

But the more important point is the lack of social mobility in contemporary America. Things are set up so that most people can't advance up the socioeconomic ladder, much as they might like to.

people who have....because they made smart decsiions.

We'd all like to believe we're the master of our own fate, but much of our life circumstances we have little to no control over. Starting with the parents we're born to.

*Edit: I'm not accusing you personally of condemning anyone. That's what the right wing does, though - they blame poor people for being poor as if poverty were simply down to a character flaw or something.

A. I'm not condemning anyone.
B. We ARE masters of our own fate, it's accepting this premise that is difficult for people.

And of course we all have some control over our lives. But circumstance determines more about us than most of us would like to believe.

Isn't life about taking advantages of GOOD circumstances, and AVOIDING harmful ones?

It would be absurd to say we have any control over that in particular.

But we can try to have more responsibility than our parents had. It's the beauty of
a free society.

Compare someone who grows up white and wealthy to a powerful family, to someone who grows up a person of color and poor to a single parent having trouble maintaing a home. They have some control over their future, but the first person started on third base and will have an easier time getting to home plate. To say we are masters of our own fate is to ignore that we don't control everything we started with. We only control where we go from there, and even that journey is easier for some people than others because of forces outside of our control.

The reason people respond poorly to the "personal responsibility" statements is because the assumption behind it is that anyone can succeed if they take responsibility for themselves, and also that how much we take responsibility for ourselves is directly related to how successful we are. If you were raised in foster care, you're going to have a very difficult time becoming a success no matter how much you are responsible for your person. And if you are born to a CEO of a large corporation or to a high ranking government official, you are pretty likely to succeed even if you aren't all that responsible.

"You are responsible for your own actions?" It's easier to throw cliched bromides out than it is to address the REAL problem. It's like the "Emperor with no clothes" Everyone realizes the problems but are afraid to address them. I'm trying to pop that bubble of silence.

Exactly my point. Reducing everything to individual choice paints a false picture of how our society really functions.

What or who else should be responsible for our actions?

But our lives are also shaped by circumstances beyond our control.

It's not either/or.

Although lack of smart means that luck doesn't do you any good.

--got creamed in the bursting bubble. All kinds of dumb rode the upward tide during the recovery. Smart just improves the odds somewhat.

will override luck every time. Plus I like to believe that you make your own luck
by making wise decisions. Lord knows I've had my share of dumb ones.

So why doesn't common sense prevent severe economic downturns? Wise decisions don't mean shit when the economy is collapsing around you. Terminal perkiness is pretty disgusting to people who live in the real world.

It was directly responsible for inflating the real estate bubble leading to the 2007 collapse.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6642954-bright-sided-how-the-relentless-promotion-of-positive-thinking-has-unde

“Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America


“What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America


“At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

and realizing that this was a short expose on Ms. E's ideology, I understand and recognize her kind. You see, there are certain people ie: essayists, news writers, philosophers etc. whose soul purpose in life is
to suck the joy and optimism from everything and everyone around them. I call them "energy vampires"
They don't want optimists, they don't want heroes. Happy people are self sufficient and have no use for
this type. So on they drone ..doom...dismay...angst...until they reduce their readership to nothing more than milk-sops. They lure their prey with soothing platitudes.....all words of beneficent understanding.
"It's not your fault......it's the way of life....there's nothing you can do to change it...it's inevitable..
no use trying to change it....." Once they get their suckers into you, you are reduced to nothing more than a mindless beast. No thanks.

--bubblemania. There is no such thing as fighting back effectively unless you have a clue about reality. I'll just bet you got so much joy from bidding up prices in the housing bubble.

And proceed to diss her?

How is it possible to have been a liberal for years without being familiar with Ehrenreich? Someone would need to live in a bubble to be unfamiliar with her work, most especially Nickle and Dimed, which looked at the problems for women in minimum wage jobs.

Personally, to read your "understanding" of her entirely discredits you in my opinion.

Honestly.

as a female, I find women who chirp about personal responsibility and prisons, with no knowledge, apparently, of the use of prisons as a new form of Jim Crow (i.e. racist laws grounded in nothing but racism itself) an embarrassment to women.

I would assume you have little to no knowledge of much of anything based upon your posts.

You can assume that one person's moderate is another person's conservative. The things you have posted here tag you as a social conservative, not moderate or liberal, fwiw.

With your other post here talking about charity in various states that links it to religious conservatism - do you look at how much of that charity actually goes to people in need and how much is going to institutions that, again, don't necessarily target those in need, but build mega churches, etc?

You have to wonder why those "charitable" states have such draconian sentencing laws, why they have the most illiterate, both scientific and written word, populations, why they have the worst rates of teen pregnancies... and the reason for this is their religious right wing voters. Utah doesn't fit this model, even tho the Mormons hold preposterous beliefs, but the church has set up a system of socialism for its members, and it is a very insular mono-culture.

I'm calm, btw, when I tell you that people who make statements like yours are repellent.

To discuss your problems with someone else. I am always here for you. Peace

She points merely points out that relentless urging to "look on the bright side" is actually damaging. It is NOT about doom and angst. If you actually read the piece, you would know that. So-called optimists are actually highly unrealistic people.

Doesn't mean I have to be one too.

Just because you are put in a bad situation doesn't mean you have to make the same mistakes. It makes you more likely to, and yes the responsibility to fight the bad example is hard, but it's possible. I've never hit the people close to me, I don't go out of my way to belittle and degrade them. I don't lash out at them in anger. Yes I work at it every day. Yes there are days when it's hard. But I'd rather fight that fight every day than live up to the example I got.