Yeah, but we don’t have a category of “Bloody Obvious”.
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@LearnedCoward
@MalevolentPixy
Rather than a “war on poverty,” it’s more like a “war on the impoverished.”
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I had a bizarre interaction on another message board recently, in which several Trump fans were talking about how awesome his new budget is and how all of the naysaying is ‘fake news’. I asked how they could possibly be in favor of a budget that cuts nearly a trillion dollars from safety-net programs to feed the poor, including ones specifically to feed children, and everyone responded with “well, the money for defense has to come from someplace, and those people just want hand-outs, so it’s time to pull off the bandaid”.
So, yep. Poor people are clearly just lazy and should die quickly so we’ll have more money for bombs. Literally their belief.
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Funny thing is that many of those “freeloaders” are members of the very armed forces the bootstrappers claim to support. A lot of members in the lower ranks need SNAP and housing assistance to get by especially if they have families. Not to mention VA services.
People just really have no clue.
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The concept of any vet who relies on VA services to be opposed to single-payer healthcare is weapons-grade ignorance.
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I went looking for a nice image macro containing the words Service Guarantees Citizenship from Starship Troopers, which I found, but then also found this:
If one starts from the position that VA services have been earned, then it’s not hard to consider that the poor have earned nothing.
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The US version of socialism is special treatment for the people who design, build and deploy weapons. It is an anti-poverty program. Think of the nuclear physicists, chemists, metallurgists, computer scientists and manufacturing workers who, without that trillion dollar budget, would be on the street asking for handouts.
Instead of running companies designing consumer products which are undercutting and overtaking those of the US, like their Chinese equivalents.
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FWIW, admins I was mostly being sarcastic. 
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Scalzi has a pretty good rebuttal to this one as well (given his other writings on being poor, I pretty much expected it):
“State of mind” as a predictive factor of economic mobility is, bluntly, anecdotal bullshit, something to pull out of your ass while ignoring the mountains of evidence showing that economic mobility in the United States is becoming more difficult to come by. It’s not “state of mind” that’s the issue. It’s long-term systematic inequality, inequality that’s getting worse as we go along. Ignoring or eliding the latter and pinning poverty “to a large extent” on the former means you’re giving everyone and everything else that contributes to poverty in the United States — from racism to inertia to greed — a free pass.
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I’m reminded of a line from Pride and Prejudice, where Lady Catherine de Bourgh goes into the village to meet with the poor and “scold them into harmony and plenty.”
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Sorry the reproduction isn’t very good but perhaps worth mentioning this is the 200th anniversay of Jane Austen.
Jane Austen was a bit of an anarchist. Trollope wrote more explicitly about the exploitation of the poor (especially in The Warden) but the Austen irony does get directed now and then against the entitled rich.
(References in the picture: the motorcycle refers to Royal Enfield, that built bikes at Bradford on Avon, and the iron bollard just visible in the corner refers to Cockeys of Frome, an ironfounder who made a lot of street furniture but was involved in the early gas industry, which was why Frome had gas light by 1831, twenty years ahead of most of the country. The Frome gas company wasn’t taken over by that of Bath till the 20th century.)
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Of course no Republican (I refuse to even call them Conservative anymore, because conservative is about being cautious and I dunno… conserving while these assholes just want to tear everything apart and fight over the scraps) would read NYT, but
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My cousin told me my husband deserved for his cancer to kill him, because he hadn’t made it on his own the way my cousin had, so my husband shouldn’t be able to buy insurance through the ACA.
My cousin is a (non-combat) veteran of W’s Iraq War. The stupid. It burns.
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Wow. Talk about an immodest proposal.
With this kind of thinking, can eugenics be far behind?
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Yeah, but I have heard that opposition a lot while sitting in the waiting area of a VA hospitals. I’m surprised I haven’t hurt myself holding in the laughter at the irony of the spirited rejection of “socialized medicine” wherein a person’s healthcare is paid for by the government, while sitting in a facility that does provides just that.
I’ve heard that defense too, but, as @nungesser said above, I still find it to be just flat out ignorant. If this is the argument that one wishes to use, the surely the full concept of universal service from Starship Troopers must be available, correct? As I recall, if one wished to sign up for service, a position would be found regardless of circumstances. For some reason, the people that use that “it’s an earned thing” argument rarely want to follow the rest of that program, as apparently that’s even worse socialism somehow.
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The VA is supposed to be the dehumanising bureacracy that humanized the cyborg killers of the HMOs. Thing is, the VA can be shamed. Congress and private health killers cannot. Not effectively. Why is that?
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How the fuck would the conversation even get to that point?
I have never told anyone their significant other should die. Even thinking that would be absolutely abhorrent.
What the actual fuck is this person’s problem?
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Because they have the Secretary of the VA to shame and fire? If shit goes wrong congress has that middle man to point to and demand a resignation letter, and thus the voters are happy Something Was Done by next election cycle.
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