Controversial Political Opinions

[JasonBlack]

(03-24-2022, 11:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Lazy, wasteful, intemperate, incompetent, and (I need not load more adjectives) people deserve to be poor. People poor despite a good work ethic and high character are either just getting started in life or face a system that wastes its rewards.

yes. the goal of any social or legal policy is to make sure the people who act right get rewards, and the ones who don't get punishments.

Quote:A good work ethic is a consequence of hope and not out of fear of the Exploiter.

It can be either, but the former is certainly preferable. I'm seeing a reemergence of a spirit of don't-kick-people-when-they're-down decency on the right which is encouraging and doesn't actually cost anything in the first place (I credit a combination of the quiet, usually unnoticed compassion of Gen X and more community-minded millennials criticizing the questionable social implementation of a viewpoint they may otherwise agree with economically).

Quote:A system that rewards rentiers at the expense of everyone else (which is how our economic system has trended in recent decades) will make a work ethic ineffective. I could make the case that speculative booms especially foster such a trend, and that the best possible end to a speculative boom is an economic meltdown that stops the flow of 'easy money'. Ideally people start shoestring businesses for the lack of any viable alternatives (that was much of the recovery from the 1929-1932 meltdown) or a government that resorts to public investment to take the place of crony capitalism. Corruption and monopolization create poverty and despair.

my solution to this a system of bottom-up rather than top-down stimulus: give grant money to entrepreneurs so that they can create more jobs and competition, bring people closer to a sense of community and culture and foster greater individualism all at the same time.

Quote:Attempts of make sweeping generalizations about either rich or poor people are intellectually lazy. If anything, it's the middle class that tends to be more homogeneous and conformist, while the people at either end vary to a far greater degree in terms of intelligence, character, personality and life circumstances.

y'all boomers really had a point with this one during the last 2T. unfortunately, gutless sterility quickly reemerged as a mainstay of the middle class.

Quote:I concur about middle-class conformity. It smoked until smoking became unacceptable.It was racist when racism was fashionable; it was anti-gay when the media called gays "perverts".

Yuuuuuuuuuup. many of them now have the gall to call me "homophobic" over the most innocuous comments when they were legitimately homo phobic and bullied gay people just 15 years ago. Never underestimate capacity of the middle class for spineless values shifting and cognitive dissonance. It's a trend that predates any living generation.

Quote:Most people fall into categories by ethnicity, education, religion, handicap (if any), criminal proclivity (if any), generation, sexuality, region, and class (largely as occupational grouping). Much personal identity derives from one or more of those categories.

Exactly, but still many bemoan being "put in a box" when other people are, in fact, just being honest about the box that person has already put themselves into. I've found many of the people most vocal about "how dare you stereotype me!" are actually the most shallow, the most insecure and the most tied to 1 or 2 facets of their identity which they had no say in deciding (it's a little different if you tie your identity to, say, being an entrepreneur, since that is the result of a conscious choice and an indication of one's actual values).