Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

> Then, to the dismay of advocates and recipients alike, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the Democratic Party’s effort to make the expansion permanent, fearing, among other familiar concerns like the cost, that recipients would just buy drugs (the data shows that recipients spent the money on food, clothes, utilities, rent, and education).

This just in: when you give people who chronically lack resources some resources, they by and large use them to better their circumstances.

In other news, rain is wet and the sun will still be shining tomorrow.

So much of this is so clearly and evidentially and objectively based on the sheer, raging, burning hatred this country has for poor people. We will let a hundred struggling families starve if it means preventing one lazy bastard from getting food he didn't "earn."

Until we are ready to reckon with this pathological hatred of people who simply have less than us, we will never move forward as a society. The war on Poverty has nothing to do with fucking poverty, it is a war on poor people and it's the only one we've won lately.

In the USA (and UK) if you are poor you are considered a LOSER! Society in these two cultures is all about Winners and LOSERS. If you are not rich you are a LOSER. A LOSER is a pariah. Everybody loves Winners and hates Losers. If the game is rigged, then you lost because you didn't figure out how to manipulate it for your benefit. That makes you a loser.

This belief or philosophy or religion is also known as "Survival of the Fittest". Its a cult.

>If you are not rich you are a LOSER.

Should be 'If you are not trying to become rich you are a LOSER.' Not being rich only makes you a small l loser, which as we all know is what happens to a Winner who cannot support all of the deadweight of LOSERS cling to them and definitely not in no part due to the actions of the rich winners.

The belief in religion is called prosperity theology. I'm not sure this describes any philosophical definition of "survival of the fittest", as systemic issues rig "survival" towards people who already have the most resources, regardless of their fitness. This isn't a meritocracy.

I was looking at it as Survival of the fittest implying Winners and Losers. You are right that "prosperity theology" is essentially Evangelical Christianity in the USA.

Sorry to disagree, but I don't think it is hatred and it is not a war.

I think it is indifference mixed with selfishness and a collection of many little or perhaps not so little power grabs. One example might be that poor people can't rent a flat somewhere they can have a good life, because everybody else is already there and this is expressed in a rent poor people can't afford.

Another little power grab: Call a taxi when it is raining heavily, and you beckon strongly and the taxi is stopping for you and not for the handicapped woman because the taxi driver saw you first. When you are already sitting you suddenly see the woman outside and you realize that she needs the taxi more than you. It is sort of an effort to get out and tell the taxi driver that she was first. It is easier for you to just drive away.

It is war if people expressly try to hurt poor people. But I just don't think that the majority of well-off people are this evil. They are mostly indifferent, selfish and enjoy the benefits of the power grabs they do.

This said, I agree with you that many people in the USA are strongly indifferent and selfish and they justify this with saying that they live in a meritocracy and that everybody had the same chance to be successful, and if a poor person is not successful it's their own fault. But that's not hatred nor a war.

I understand what you’re saying, but I would suggest this is exactly the ‘banality of evil’ Hannah Arendt wrote about.

True. It's banally evil, but real war is just a lot worse.

The reason is seems fair to refer to it somewhat metaphorically as a war is this: you don't have to go back far in US (or human) history to find a time when the existence of poverty was view as a failure of the system. That is, poor people begging in the streets reflected on the economic and social systems, and reflected badly.

Somehow, as the US became rich enough and successful enough to end all of that, we switched the narrative. Today, poverty is a personal failure, the result of bad decision making, lax moral standards, lack of sufficient entrepeneurial spirit etc.

We've switched from "fighting poverty" to "fighting poor people who are fucking things up for the rest of us".

As with most things, we can blame Reagan and the political movement that shaped him. The aggression against people who need help has direct roots to Reagan's (in)famous welfare queen talking points, that were mirrored overseas with Thatcher and her ilk. This myth of these (not stated but implied to be) black women who were having all these children and cashing government checks to live a luxurious lifestyle. And like, yes, if you zoom out to the entire country, welfare fraud is a thing that occurs but the rate of it's occurrence is absurdly low, and moreover, the ones that do occur are far from living high on the hog off the public dole. There is NO evidence for any of that shit but it was all the conservatives banged on for for literal decades as they slashed the social safety nets to tatters and added more and more disgusting means testing and restrictions to what little benefits were left.

Right, this was sort of the point I made in another comment here.

I know that a solid safety net will result in some freeloading. But when I trade off the negatives of the limited freeloading that I believe will occur against the massive benefits of a population that is healthy, fed, housed, secure ... there's just no contest. If I have to pay a tiny bit extra because a few people are scamming the system, I frankly don't care, and I certainly don't advocate for the destruction of the entire system because of it.

Yep, this boomer and silent gerontocracy is why we ended up with the biggest wealth transfer FROM younger generations to them.

It's also how we got DARE garbage, of bandying around drugs to 6th graders and saying "doooont useeee theseeee", combined with lies like 'smoking a marijuanas will lead to your death!". (Massive kudos to Erowid, for debunking so much of these lies.)

But it's unsurprising the biggest gerontocratic welfare program has old fucks with antiquated and completely garbage views of humans.

The most egregious thing the Boomers did is they watered down the anti-monopoly laws. That was Bill Clinton's regime. I could be wrong on that, maybe it was Ronald Reagan's regime. Either way it was the Boomers.

The enemy of the success of Capitalism is monopolies.

> The most egregious thing the Boomers did is they watered down the anti-monopoly laws. That was Bill Clinton's regime. I could be wrong on that, maybe it was Ronald Reagan's regime. Either way it was the Boomers.

Ronald Reagan was born in 1911, 35 years earlier than Bill Clinton, and turned 70 years old right after he took office in 1981.

I meant it was the Boomers who voted him in. I suppose I should've made that more obvious as many readers where quite young at the time of Reagan or weren't even born then at all.

And to be clear I was referring to Boomers voted for Clinton. My bad.

"The generation is often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_boomers

In the 1980 Presidential election, won by Reagan with 51% of the vote, the oldest Boomers were 34 years old, the youngest 16, and thus not even eligible to vote.

According to the linked document, Carter slightly won voters under 30, whereas Reagan won voters 30+ with 55%. It's unclear how exactly 30-44 broke down, but in any case the total of that whole group was only 31% of the voters, and the oldest Boomers were 34. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980

> And to be clear I was referring to Boomers voted for Clinton.

But you admitted that you don't even know whether Reagan or Clinton watered down anti-monopoly laws.

I know that Clinton watered down the anti-monopoly laws but wasn't sure if Reagan had watered down them considerably more than Clinton.

Why the confrontational tone? If you think I'm wrong couldn't you have stated so in a more gracious tone? Does all discourse on the internet where you don't like what the person is saying have to be hostile sounding in tone?

> Why the confrontational tone?

Your own original comment was confrontational and hostile: "The most egregious thing the Boomers did", "Either way it was the Boomers."

It's not even a question of what the Reagan and/or Clinton administrations did. The problem with your comment was the absurdity of throwing around the "Boomers" stereotype.

I think it's silly to blame everything on Boomers, a totally arbitrary slice of the population, who are in fact as demographically and politically diverse as any other age group. Moreover, it has now become commonplace for younger people to call everyone who is older them a "Boomer", regardless of whether that term is accurate, in a kind of willful ignorance.

No, not all Boomers are the same, and no, they don't control the world.

You're right, I was cavalier in my treatment of Boomers in my comment. I accept your criticism in that regard. Not all Boomers deserve blame. However, there was an embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy that coincided with their "assuming the mantle". Many of them bought into Milton Friedman (Chicago school) economics and have refused to acknowledge what a massive mistake it was.

> However, there was an embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy that coincided with their "assuming the mantle".

I dispute that Boomers ever assumed the mantle, as it were. They're a subset of the population. No generation has the mantle. Like I said, Boomers don't control the world.

Bill Clinton was the first Boomer President, so you might argue that they assumed the mantle then, but 1993 does not coincide with the embrace of laissez-faire economic philosophy. This occurred much earlier.

> Many of them bought into Milton Friedman (Chicago school) economics

Milton Friedman was born in 1912, a year after Reagan, and was an advisor to Reagan and to Margaret Thatcher, so I think it's quite a stretch to attribute this to Boomers. Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" was published in 1962, when the youngest Boomers weren't even born yet.

I wasn't intimating that Friedman was a boomer. I was getting at that Milton Friedman's Economic Philosophy was fully embraced by the Boomers. And Reagan and Thatcher were fully endorsed by the Boomer generation.

Boomers are the first generation in American History to hand their successive generations a lower standard of living.

And under Bill Clinton the Boomers certainly did assume the mantle. They certainly were in control in all facets of society. Also, Boomers revitalized Ayn Randism. She was dormant, a forgotten relic until they began to embrace her philosophy.

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