One Million (Preventable) Deaths Per Year

Sven,

I think the individualism you promote would have been very sensible in the 18th century, when the state of philosophical knowledge was as it was. The simple fact is that a lot of these individualist theories have been comprehensively discredited by reasoned arguments and detailed research. They simply don't hold. I don't buy into the environmental determinism of a few on this thread but they very much have a point and they're closer to reality than you are. I'll address some of your points.

Sven wrote:

In reality, many problems require a combination of systemic solutions and personal initiative.  If a society has poor roads and a virtually non-existent transportation infrastructure, even Herculean personal efforts will not result in a competitive economy.  If laws don't prohibit hiring and firing for discriminatory reasons, both society and the individuals effected by those discriminatory actions will suffer.

This for example is a completely false dichotomy. The example that immediately comes to mind is the 1960s USian civil rights act, which a lot of charlatan libertarians like to argue forced a behavioral system on innocent business owners by government fiat. It was nothing like that... it was the business owners forcing their backwards way of mind onto African Americans for hundreds of years. The nominal change that there was was not brought in "by government", but actually by the collective individual actions of millions of people who were actively fighting the system and bringing tremendous pressure on the Johnson administration.

Sven wrote:

You're failing in school?  Huh.  It must be that the school's fault.  The fact that you spend hours every day playing video games instead of cracking open your books couldn't possibly be the cause of your failure.  Instead, the school needs more money - that is "the solution"!!

Blaming video games is a nice populist theory but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There simply are better schools, better learning environments and better teachers and these make a tremendous difference. There's an excellent article in this month's The Atlantic which investigates 20 years of data that Teach for America has collected on the rrecent graduates it sends to inner city schools. They try and select for better teachers, and now they find that 44% of their teachers succeed in raising their students test scores by over 1.5 grade levels. If teachers didn't matter as you imply then that wouldn't be the case.

In all schools, there's a distribution of the amount of time kids spend on video games, as there is between schools as well. It's not the games. It's everything. Teachers, schools, home environment, etc.

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If anything, going after simple explanations like "video games" is not jut false, it's lazy. You're being frightened away from the underlying complexity of reality, because you don't want to think that hard and you might not like the answers.

Ego te absolvo

Closing for length