The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

DURING the autumn of 18--, while on a tour through the extreme southern provinces of France, my route led me within a few miles of a certain Maison de Santé or private mad-house, about which I had heard much in Paris from my medical friends.

So begins the story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Can we at least all agree that North Korea is run by the patients at Maison de Santé?

From the Telegraph.co.uk
North Korea's entire squad was forced onto a stage at the People's Palace of Culture and subjected to criticism from Pak Myong-chol, the sports minister, as 400 government officials, students and journalists watched.
The players were subjected to a "grand debate" on July 2 because they failed in their "ideological struggle" to succeed in South Africa, Radio Free Asia and South Korean media reported.
The team's coach, Kim Jong-hun, was reportedly forced to become a builder and has been expelled from the Workers' Party of Korea.
The coach was punished for "betraying" Kim Jong-un - one of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il's sons and heir apparent.
The country, in its first World Cup since 1966, lost all three group games – including a 7-0 defeat to Portugal.
The broadcast of live games had been banned to avoid national embarrassment, but after the spirited 2-1 defeat to Brazil, state television made the Portugal game its first live sports broadcast ever.
Following ideological criticism, the players were then allegedly forced to blame the coach for their defeats.
Only two players avoided the inquisition - Japanese-born Jong Tae-se and An Yong-hak, who flew straight to Japan after the tournament.
However, media in South Korea said the players got off lightly by North Korean standards.
"In the past, North Korean athletes and coaches who performed badly were sent to prison camps," a South Korean intelligence source told the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.

I feel so badly for the poor (literally and figuratively) citizens of North Korea. Is there not anything the U.S. can do to put the patients back in their padded cells?

Context Is Everything

There are many translation engines on the web. You can input a phrase from any language and get a translation into any language. As long as the context of the phrase is not important, the translation will probably be ok. However, human language is not so simple. Computers cannot handle context and it would take a highly sophisticated software program that is capable of changing and learning to be able to handle context. Input the Japanese phrase "Watashi wa pai desu" and you get "I am a pie." This is a literal translation that does not take context into account. It would be an accidentally correct translation were the speaker playing the role of a pie in a play, but that is a rare context. The mostly likely context is ordering pie in a restaurant, i.e., "As for me, I'll have pie." All of us Worthams know a second language (a fact that I am very proud of), and we can all probably think of similar things in our respective second language (as well as English, for that matter).

However, context is not limited to single phrases. It applies to all forms of language and very likely to other forms of human behavior. The recent brouhaha over Shirley Sherrod is a good example. Ms. Sherrod talked about not giving her best efforts to a white farmer at time well before her career at the USDA. The video clip was thrown out on the Internet by a conservative blogger, and absolutely everyone took the bait, including news organizations, the USDA who fired Ms. Sherrod, the White House who pressure the USDA to do so, and the NAACP who denounced her. Later it was revealed that in the greater context of her speech, she was talking about her path to change away of racist sentiments. Now all of the above parties were eating crow, apologizing, and generally slinking away. As far as I know, the conservative blogger has not apologized, but the video had its intended effect, that is, to bait the NAACP because of its false accusations that the Tea Party is racist, and the NAACP bit hard on the bait.

The following may be a bit partisan, but this is exactly the kind of thing conservatives constantly suffer with. MoveOn.org, Media Matters, and often the MSM in general take conservatives out of context and beat them over the head with out-of-context statements. "Context for we, but not for thee" is the rule of the day for such organizations.

Context also applies to history. Mormons are often the butt of polygamy jokes, which grossly misconstrues the context of the time. Joseph Smith statements are listed line by line in anti-Mormon literature, all without context of language as well as the time period in which the statements were made. Photo-shopping and video-shopping are also types of context switching, i.e., insert a innocuous photo of a person into another photo to put the person in a different and often damning context. With new technology, video-shopping is a new danger. Watch out for it in upcoming elections and issues.

Post Script: Another idea occurred to me this morning. If a person followed me around with a camera and took pictures at inopportune times, I could be portrayed as as an pot-bellied beer drinker. I have on numerous occasions had a bottle of beer in my hand.
Snapshot: Alan is pouring himself a beer!
Context: It is customary for the Japanese to poor each others drink. So my beer-drinking friend would pour my orange juice and I would pour his beer.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I reached into the refrigerator and grabbed a beer.
Snapshot: Alan has beer in his refrigerator and there is a strange woman in his kitchen! He is a beer-drinking womanizer!
Context: Yumi had some friends visit from Japan, and they like to have a beer before they go to bed. Hence the beer and the woman.
So photo-shopping may not be required. An accurate photograph can be misused.

Socialism, what is it?

It will be helpful to read by first post on socialism before reading this one.

Socialism has been defined by different dictionaries in different ways. In the past, it has been defined as a preamble to communism and sometimes as a synonym of communism. Soviet socialism was undeniably communist. Marxist socialism was communism before the term communism was coined. National socialism became Nazism. Democratic socialism is generally what we call socialism as it now exists throughout Europe (but no one today considers European socialism to be communism). Socialism in South America is often closer to some form of communism because of South America's jerky history of military rule and government control of wealth (however often without the wealth being redistributed to the needy).

But through most of it, the notion of socialism indicates transfer of money from some who have ample to those deemed to be needy for whatever reason(s). The reasons for this transfer of money usually is the result of compassion, the desire for a stable society, heightened notions of equality/human dignity, etc.

Today's America is already well along the socialist path. There are many American social programs that take taxpayers' money and administer it to others in some way or another. Some of the programs do not appear to be socialist in any way, yet they are by any definition. Some programs shock us because they give money/benefits to the seemingly (and perhaps very clearly) undeserving.

My hope for a continuing American socialism is based on the notion of shared responsibility for others who are in need (there is nothing original about this). If others are truly in need, most of us accept this notion. It is when we perceive that others who receive help from the government and who are undeserving, lazy, unwilling to work, unwise in their personal decisions, foolish with their money (or that of others) that our outrage surfaces.

I would like to see an American socialism that truly addresses needs for the unfortunate and needy with a minimum of abuse.

So I will begin discussing social programs with the hope of parsing out the details that are involved in the preceding paragraph (ie who is unfortunate, what are the abuses and remedies for them). Discussing social programs in a one-by-one approach will break it down to specifics we can discuss precisely without getting off track.

But first, your thoughts on what socialism is today interests me. After all, I cannot expect you to accept straight away what I have written above. But I do hope that you will see that we must not reduce socialism to some nebulous notion of nascent communism. (How's that for alliteration?)
It has become something else. If we don't call our efforts to care for the the needy some form of social program, what do we call these efforts? Many hate the word while using it to describe programs of which they approve (social security, [some and various] social services, socialized medicine (veterans' health care and Medicare are examples of this).

Regardless if you care to comment, my next post will address loopholes in the system that Nick and I encountered. It is important to close these loopholes as part of an effort to assure that American socialism would be superior to previous or current attempts at it by other societies.

Towards an American Socialism

The word 'socialist' has been used quite a bit recently in our nation as an epithet. Socialism is roundly criticized and the word often appears as one 'ism' in a series of other undesirable 'isms': communism, feminism, fascism, liberalism, etc. Creeping is an adjective often paired with it.
After all, wasn't the official name of Russia the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)?

Some time ago, perhaps a month, I mentioned in a post, in a response to Alan I believe, that I would be able to defend/believe in the notion of a socialism that was a uniquely American socialism. Uniquely American because I believe that America would be able to manipulate and administer basic principles of socialism better than most countries that had tried it or that are currently doing so. After all, the grand experiment of mankind governing mankind only continues...no country can yet claim perfection regardless of philosophy.

The thought of this promise has lingered with me. The notion of socialism in the recently modern world and in the current world is ill-defined. Others smarter than me have already written extensively on it, of course. But I have been thinking about it a lot. I have done some fascinating reading. I would like to toss my thoughts out there for two reasons. The first is that writing down my thoughts helps me think them through. The second is to learn from your thoughtful reactions.

I gave the title Towards an American Socialism to this post because I recognize that my thoughts on it will be evolve and because social programs in the US continue to evolve in a changing world.

Among my next posts will be some that will take on aspects of my thinking. Stay tuned and respond!