8 posts were merged into an existing topic: Category Creation!
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.
17 Likes
The concept of any vet who relies on VA services to be opposed to single-payer healthcare is weapons-grade ignorance.
11 Likes
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.
11 Likes
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.
9 Likes
FWIW, admins I was mostly being sarcastic. 
1 Like
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.
13 Likes
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.”
4 Likes
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.)
5 Likes
6 Likes
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
7 Likes
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.
13 Likes
Wow. Talk about an immodest proposal.
With this kind of thinking, can eugenics be far behind?
6 Likes
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.
4 Likes
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?
3 Likes
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?
11 Likes
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.
3 Likes
His problem is that he’s a shitlord radicalized by military service. I was talking to another relative about health insurance, and how I buy mine on the exchanges and I’ve been happy with my plan. My cousin butts in to tell me government should be out of healthcare. I asked him if he felt that way while Medicare was picking up his mom’s hospice, he told me that she deserved that care because he had served, and that if my husband wanted medical care, he should be a self-made man in the way he was.
@RAvery - they’re already there. My mother couldn’t bear children, so I’m adopted. That side of the family refused to visit her in the hospital when she had to have her hysterectomy. It was awful for her - at that time, all women’s health was in maternity wards. So she was surrounded by women becoming mothers in a way she desperately wanted to, but never would. They spent their lives shaming her and my dad for “taking in someone else’s kid,” and wanted my dad to leave my mom to father “real kids.” It’s so ingrained that even my strongly pro-life cousins have sunk tens of thousands of dollars (and countless embryos …) into IVF to avoid the shame of having a kid like me.
Christmas was a bleak affair when I was growing up.
Republicans are mad fucked up.
16 Likes
Wow.
It sounds like they read A Christmas Carol, but read it backwards. They’ve happily identified who is the “surplus population.”
7 Likes
A lot of people think this is how you’re supposed to grow up, for some reason.
17 Likes