The Maelstrom of Violence

[pbrower2a]

(09-28-2017, 07:36 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-28-2017, 10:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-27-2017, 11:01 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-27-2017, 08:17 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-27-2017, 03:05 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The problem being, too many of the red and blue have similar doubts.

In welfare, there are victims and cheaters.  You’d like to think most would agree that both exist.  The proper thing to do is help the victims and frustrate the cheaters.  Alas, once you buy deeply into one of the two world views, you tend to see either victims or cheaters.

In Pbrower’s case, I’m seeing a victim, but there are more than enough cheaters.

On one side, there are those those who see lots of cheaters, few victims, who might be seen as cynical economically centered misers.  Then are those who see lots of victims, no cheaters, who can be seen as economically ignorant bleeding hearts who should know better.  It isn’t hard to find imbalance.

Then there are those who want to help those who need help, but spend their money wisely.  I'd prefer to be in that camp.

Do we want to force fit an individual into an ideal example of what is wrong with America?  I’m dubious that we want to juggle a guy’s reputation for a political ends.  Yet, that is where we are.

Welfare attracts all kinds of folks. A portion are lazy. A portion are complete idiots who are incapable of providing for themselves. A portion just don't give a shit about themselves, their kids and their quality of life in general. A portion actually need it (no other option) and are using it to get through a major setback (loss of a job, illness, divorce, death of a spouse, ect.) of some sort. A portion use/abuse the system because it's a relatively easy system to become accustomed to once you're in the system. Based on my real life knowledge and experience with welfare, the portion who need it/ use it as intended are the minority group. You're so-called liberal worldview is way too black (victims) and white (cheaters) for my taste. PB has issues (lots of issues). I have issues. I bet you (Mr. Cozy Blue) even have a few issues from time to time. Americans in general have their own issues to attend to or address on a regular basis. I don't view PB as a victim. He's to old to seriously view him/accept him as a victim.

In my case it will be disability. I have plenty of things wrong with me. But I can live cheap. The community in which I exist (it is not living!) is relatively cheap and safe. It is also an easy place in which to run out of experiences.

I took care of two dying parents with degenerative diseases in three years. Let's put it this way -- having seen my mother dying of Parkinsonism and my father dying of senile dementia. I have become poor in a country that treats the poor as objects of exploitation and abuse, people obliged to smile through their suffering. I wouldn't wish what I went through on anyone; that character-building experience has brought me personal ruin. I have contemplated suicide after I lost my life savings in trying to keep a house up in case of a miracle.

Unemployment, alimony, child support, and pensions are not welfare. Neither is disability. Issues?

Sure, I have talent. At 61, 'talent' is worthless.

Spending the rest of my life as a retail sales clerk in a community that I despise? That Kafkaesque prospect night as well be a prison term. Poverty in America is a prison.

Good hard-workin' folks like Classic Xer, who support this system accurately described as one "that treats the poor as objects of exploitation and abuse," call those who can not find work or can't work "lazy" and "idiots," but there are a fair number of such "lazy, idiotic" people, especially in a system that does not provide enough jobs (due to automation, free trade, and bosses that don't care and will fire people for little or no reason). Liberals don't look upon welfare recipients as either victims or cheaters; most are neither. Welfare is just a small item in the federal budget, and of varying sizes in state budgets, that provides a little bit of protection of the kind all of us might need. Many of us aren't even eligible for welfare in that case anyway. Time limits on welfare are abusive punishment, since depressions and recessions are frequent, job losses continual, and various kinds of suffering and disability can happen at any time on more than one occasion to any one of us. Finding a good job has never been easy, and calling people who can't find work "idiots" just blames the people for the troubles which the selfish bosses alone give us.

Welfare is the main scapegoat that impels people like Classic Xer (which includes perhaps 40% of America or more; he's not alone at all) to vote Republican and support the trickle-down theory, which says give breaks to the bosses instead of the people, and then the "job creater" bosses will provide jobs for us. Not only does trickle-down NOT trickle, but the reason that 40% of the good people like Classic Xer and Warren Dew support trickle-down economics, is because they blame welfare recipients and liberal politicians for their high taxes. But blaming welfare has nothing to do with their high taxes, which are not that high to begin with. The government wastes money on wars, weapons, and subsidies to the rich corporations, and by not taxing the wealthy enough-- due to the trickle-down theory.

There may be some welfare cheaters, but we are all victims in a sense; victims of the decision of the people to vote Republican. So a lot of us are responsible for the troubles we all experience living in this system. And that's not even to mention a campaign finance system instituted by Republican Supreme Court justices that favors the rich, gerrymandering that favors Republican legislators since 2010, and voter suppression now underway in many Republican-controlled states. Oh, and I almost forgot: an election system called the electoral college set up to protect slavery, and still doing that job by, among other things, putting into office without majority voter approval the only Republican presidents of the 21st century.

"Unemployment, alimony, child support, and pensions are not welfare. Neither is disability." And neither are social security and medicare, which recipients have paid for and which protect us all, not just a few cheaters. And there's medicaid and Obamacare subsidies; arguably that's welfare, but not welfare per se. And not if healthcare is in fact a right, as liberals proclaim. A right implied in the Declaration of Independence, which announces our right to life.

The veneration of work and the condemnation of those who don't work by conservatives may be obsolete, in an economy that does not provide work, and which could very well save labor for all of us by turning it over to machines, if the bosses were stripped of their current exclusively-given rights to their benefits. We are going to need to be less dogmatic about the economic system into which we are moving, and adapt to the new situation.

And another wrinkle in the conservative myth is veneration of the rich, as people who worked to get ahead and thus deserve their rewards, as opposed to most of us who may aspire to be rich, in the good old American dream, but are not. But the rich do not earn their rewards; that is the myth. The Reaganoid political and economic system we live under provides rewards for them, by allowing them to pay most workers a pittance while they rack up 300 times what their workers get through high salaries and financial games that ruin the economy for everyone but themselves, while meanwhile the workers are no longer protected by adequate minimum wages, low tariffs or declining unions and are often deprived of the education they needed in the first place.

How far do you have to travel to see/meet/bump into a welfare recipient of some sort/type these days? Welfare recipients are much more common then they were 30 years ago. Welfare recipients are also more expensive and more demanding than they were 30 years ago as well. Which group of welfare recipients would you like to discuss with me? I'm probably familiar with all of them. I should inform you that I grew up with the working class that was around while you were out doing blue Hippie shit. I was going school with there kids, playing sports with their kids, flirting with their daughters and competing with their sons. BTW, the majority of them including the American raised Mexicans and the working women are no longer Democratic voters.

You are dealing in stereotypes instead of reality. I know at least one welfare recipient (teenager who bore a couple cute cash cows). If welfare recipients are more expensive than they used to be, then so is about everything not in the cost-cutting curve of high-tech objects.  I have not sought out poor people, but I have seen them. Most of the poverty that I have seen recently is temporary bad luck or being 'working poor' -- doing real work but getting a travesty of a paycheck. 

I have never gone through a hippie phase. My casual clothing has been typical for a golf course. I was a virgin well into my twenties. I am ferociously anti-drug, as you can see from my posts when the topic comes up. But that is fairly typical of people with Asperger's. I can be the most judgmental a$$hole that you have ever met. But what excuse does anyone have for being an alcoholic or an addict?

Many of the working-class kids did not like me because I seemed like the "Little Professor" who paid attention to school books instead of cars. When I was in high school in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972 to 1974 I got along badly with the white low-achievers, but got along very well with Asian-Americans and people that I mistook for German-Americans because of their surnames (get it?). Surprising for someone who thought that he would come off as a hayseed?

Although white working-class people voted heavily for Trump, the majority of Mexican-Americans in the Twin Cities area , who are much more politically astute than under-educated white people, still vote heavily Democratic .