The Glade 4.0

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01 ... ntroversy/



He raises a legitimate point but phrases it so badly. Remeber to biet he hand that fees, you, it keeps you from feeding yourself.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

His point is legitimate? He compared poor people to animals, and worried about them breeding if you fed them. They don't know any better? This guy's understanding of poverty hideously shallow.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Except that's not at all what he meant. Your understanding of his point is hideously shallow. His point is that when you start providing people's needs for them, they come to expect that and lose part or all of their desire to sustain themselves and lose the ability to manage their resources. They then pass that same mentality and lack of skill and self-discipline to their children.

Obviously their breeding isn't related to them being on the dole. Humans have a completely different life and breeding cycle from small mammals of the types commonly found begging at homes. Do you think this guy is unaware that cats, dogs, and other critters don't live as long as humans?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

While I understand his point, which DE has pretty much explained, Bauer an idiot and embarrassment. Not just because of this statement. He should have been forced to resign years ago.

It's exactly what he meant, DE, which is why he said it. The only reason he's trying to walk it back is because it got picked up by the media and it became a problem for him, politically. And why was it a problem? Because he expressed a disgusting sentiment and the public is generally a lot more reasonable than that.

edit - What "point" did he make, that you understand and appreciate? Helping the poor breeds poverty? You know, because people love to be in poverty...

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

He just **** outlined the point he made. Do you just choose not to read? His point is salient and can be generalized even simpler: people tend to take advantage of welfare programs whether they intend to or not. If children grow up in that enviroment, they will tend to be accustomed to such welfare and view it as an etitlement rather than a helping hand in a time of need.

People might not love being in poverty but they love handouts. You have to be **** insane to argue otherwise.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Except that it's not "exactly what he meant"; it's just you claiming it's that way because it's more convenient for you. He didn't express anything disgusting, he expressed the bald truth that putting people on the dole tends to keep them on the dole.



Pretty much. No, people don't "love" to be in poverty, but that has nothing to do with it. They also don't "love" to do the things that would get them out of poverty.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Monte,

Children of poor people are generally poor. This is not always the case, but generally true. By "allowing" poor people to breed, you increase the number of people on welfare in the current system. It's a legitimate statement, but not one that society is likely to embrace a correction for, from this angle. We need to get people employed so they are off welfare, we don't need the government worrying about who has kids and why.

You're discussing the other side of the equation.

In a system where you don't provide anything to people and they don't have the ability or desire to sustain themselves, what happens?

They suffer the consequences of their choices. Same as everyone else. Ability != desire ... in the case of ability, people tend to be sympathetic of their own accord.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I assume that by "you", you mean the Government - which creates a false dilemma, but just for fun, I'll submit that:

Those who don't have the desire to sustain themselves. Who the **** cares?
Those who don't have the ability? They're the one's that should be focused on to the exclusion of the former. I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "hand up not hand out"? Eliminate the hand outs and those who don't have the "desire" to sustain themselves are no longer a problem, and as the OP suggests, they stop propagating more like themselves. Its a win-win. Then, there's more to go around for those who are willing sustain themselves.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

If they don't have the desire to sustain themselves, their ability to do so is irrelevant. If they have no desire to do so, then there is no reason anyone else should provide them anything either.

If they DO have the desire to support themselves, that leads directly to gaining the ability to do so, and then the only reason to provide them anything is as a "bridge" to supporting themselves, or for those few unfortunates who never will be physically capable of supporting themselves and have no family to do so. Regardless, private charity should be bearing the brunt of the supporting in both this and the previous scenario.

If they have no ability or desire to support themselves, no one provides them anything, and they turn to crime, then they should be arrested and punished harshly and painfully until they gain new motivation. If they start organizing and engaging in violence because they aren't being supported, they should be crushed by the military as inssurectionists - without regard to minimizing casulaties.

Any other questions?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Dude, I do not remember inviting you to live in my head... OUT!

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

The problem is "desire" is a relative term. How much desire do they have to have before they deserve assistance? Remember that minimum wage laws are also basically a government handout. There are some people who would prefer to work, but not if the only job offered them is one of 16 hours of hard labor a day, 7 days a week, for three dollars an hour. The "no government handout" philosophy is based on making the bottom 10% of society live in a personal Hell so miserable it motivates the other 90% to work hard enough to not fall down there. Is that really what you want?

Minimum wage laws aren't a "government handout" they're a government mandate, and don't have anything to do with what we're talking about. All you're doing is trying to tack on the removal of minimum wage laws and overtime laws as somehow a "government handout" (which they aren't, regardless of their other merits because the government doesn't pay for them and they aren't a handout; you don't get minimum wage or work-week protections if you don't work) in order to pull numbers like 10% and 90% out of your ***.

Furthermore, if we weren't spending assloads of money we don't have on handouts plus destroying purchasing power with minimum wage laws, 3 dollars an hour would go a hell of a lot farther in the first place.

So, no, the "no handouts" philosophy is not based on any such thing, and yes, I do want people who won't take a job, even if the job sucks, in order to support themselves, to have it so **** bad that no one else wants to end up like that.

Moreover, jobs that suck so bad no one would take them would force the employer to pay more or make the job suck less.

This philosophy of "but some people will have it reeaaallly baaaad without handouts" is based on making it appear that the handouts would just disappear in a vaccuum where normal market forces wouldn't have an effect and there is no private charity.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If there are no handouts to those who do not "desire" to work, then the alternative to that super-shitty job is death by either starvation or execution. So the employer would not have any incentive to pay more than the minimum survival level. You do remember the Industrial Revolution, right? No government handouts, private charities existed......and millions of people had such jobs. Extremely long hours for **** pay in extremely dangerous conditions.

Demonstrate how the minimum wage in any way relates to welfare, safe working conditions laws, or workers comp.

It is a red herring and completely tangential to the topic at hand.

In fact, minimum wage laws only hurt the poor, not help them.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

That wasn't a fun fact.

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The Dude abides.

Good thing I didn't claim it was fun then, eh?

IN YOUR FACE!

That's TWICE today.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

That was not his point, DE. His point was to compare the homeless and the destitute to animals. His point illustrated his absolute willful ignorance on the topic of the causes of abject poverty, the reality of homelessness, and his own lack of human compassion.

That people would defend him is even more depressing.

People like to look at the poor and make themselves feel better by claiming that poverty is entirely the fault of the impoverished. It's a stupid, fool-headed ideology, and is in no way based in the way the real world works.

The vast majority of homeless people are severely mentally ill. They can't just "get a job" as folks like this guy must spit out at the "animals" he sees all around him.

The majority of homeless families fled their homes because of domestic abuse, in addition to mental illness, and got stuck on the streets because of inadequate support structures for such families. Once you are on the streets, the likelihood of ever getting off decreases substantially. It is nearly impossible to land a job when you have no home address. Businesses know the addresses of shelters. They watch for them. PO Boxes are also a red flag.

Desperation to feed yourself and/or your family, to keep them safe, will drive a parent to do anything, no matter how desperate. Many turn to prostitution because that's truly the only option they have. The shelters are poorly funded and dangerous, the churches can only handle so many people, and in the end, when all you have is your body, you sell it.

And when you sell it, you are inevitably drawn into that world, addiction is likely to be forced upon you (yes, forced. As in, drugs will be injected into your body weather you want to them to be or not, in order to better control you).

So, when someone refers to people like this as animals, it isn't a slip of the tongue. It isn't a poor choice of words. He knew damn well what he was saying, and all that it implied. That people on the board here agree with him just goes to show that his vicious, hateful opinions are shared by others too intellectually lazy or simply too hateful to look deeper into the root causes of poverty.

Apparently, Ayn Rand's simplistic, sociopathic views are just easier to accept whole-cloth.

It's easy to believe that everyone on the streets is there because they chose to be there. It's easy to ignore high unemployment or the dozens of other factors that contribute to poverty including the very capitalistic system we use as a basis for our economy. It's easy to ignore *our* part in homelessness, because we like to imagine we all live in our own individual bubble. Sadly, that is not the case.

This guy, and his line about animals and breeding, is scum. He's scum because he believes that he is better than the people on the streets. He believes he is more human. That his success, weather self earned, inherited, or stumbled into, is evidence that he is a superior being.

There but for the grace of luck goes he. And he refuses to see that. He refuses to see that he's one neural disconnect away from the very "beasts" he spits on with such venom and hate.

And in the end, so are you. You are all one step away from that condition. No matter how much you have saved, no matter how many toys you have collected, no matter how strong you think your job is, or how much you have done to shore up your life, at any time you could very easily be that guy on the streets. *No one* is immune. One illness, one bump to the head, one car accident, one IED when you are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan - and that's you there, on the street, talking to angels and begging for change.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I remember that the industrial revolution was just that.. an industrial revolution. It was a one-time event. We are't going to return to that era even if we repealed all of the various worker protection laws. Industry is at a completely different point now, and educated, skilled workers are far more necessary. Private charity is at a completely different point as well.

Moreover, refusing to give handouts does not in any way imply repeal of anti-trust, workplace-safety, worker's compensation, work-week limitation and overtime, or minimum wage laws (even though repealing minimum wage would be the best thing we could possibly do at this point).

All you're doing is moving the goalposts to create a false dilemma of shitty job vs death. As it is, automation can replace more and more workers anyhow and then there is no choice between job and death. Your poisition essentially amounts, once again, to "people should get free money so life doesn't have to suck", which creates the problem in the first place.

Maybe, if these people truely do have the desire to support themselves, instead of limiting their options to just "shitty job or death" they could have paid attention in school, gotten an education, and have the skills for more than one job or possibly to start their own buisness. You're inventing problems by tacitly eliminating options.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The opinion that you state so adamantly above is shown for its falsehood by this little tidbit:



You see, I believe it's your view of society is the one that is **** up; there are those of us who don't live in our own individual bubble. The mere fact that you arrogantly believe you can speak for those of us who live in worlds made up of our families and faith communities that act as a bulwark against the vagaries of life, is indicative of your hubris. You seem to have no answer for these issues because in your small world everyone turns to Mommy Government at the first sign of trouble, and that's the biggest factor you should account for in your screed against those who do for themselves rather than suck at the teat of Mommy Government.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Except that it wasn't, and you're taking his point excessivly literally in order to strawman him. So, once again, do you think he is unaware of the different life cycles of humans and stray mammals?



Oh well. I'm sure you'll get over it.



Except that it's exactly the way the world works, and you're just attributing your own motivations to others. The fact is you have no fact-based counter, just your own assertions and appeal to emotion, and it makes it easier to ignore reality if you demonize people who point it out.



We're talking about poor people in general, not the homeless, and neither was Bauer. He was talking about welfare dependancy, which is not in any way limited to the homeless. You're just fabricating **** about what he said and hoping no one notices.



Show your work. First it was "the majority are mentally ill" and now it's "the majority are victims of domestic abuse". I know exactly where this canard comes from. It comes from counting all the women at the shelter as "homeless" because they're not living at home with whoever was beating them... or wasn't beating them, since a good 20-30% are lying about it and may have been the abuser and relied on the predjudices the domestic violence system perpetuates to claim their victim was really their abuser. That person may or may not be male, much less their husband or boyfriend. Strangely, you won't find male victims of domestic violence included unless they actually live on the street.

This is how both homeless and DV advocates inflate their numbers in order to create a worse problem than really exists and scam more money out of the taxpayer.

Don't give me this **** about how buisnesses watch for shelter addresses either. There are job-finding services, temp agencies, and plenty of ways to get help getting a job.

In any case, it's all just moving the goalposts from "welfare recipients" to "the homeless", and as for the mentally ill, I've already pointed out that those unable to hold any kind of job are not the ones we're talking about.



What's your point? Aren't you also in favor of legalized prostitution?

Not going to a shelter because it's "poorly funded and dangerous" is a line of horseshit. It's there; if you don't use it you have no excuse.



Now you're just conflating what usually happens to a person imported to this country by means of human trafficking with an average street prostitute of American origin. No, it is not at all likely that such a person will have addiction forced on them. They may or may not have a pimp and even if they do he most likely won't be doing that because it A) costs him money and B) he doesn't need to.

Prostitutes who are not human trafficking victims and are addicted are generally addicted because they chose to start taking drugs.



Except that you don't have the foggiest idea what causes poverty. It is not getting beaten up or mental illness, and your dishonest attempt to shift the goalposts from poverty and welfare in general to the homless, the mentally ill, and prostitutes illustrates that perfectly. What causes poverty is unwillingness to do what's necessary, whether that's going to school, giving up cigarettes to have an extra $60 a week, or not working for the drug dealer beause it means not having to work at McDonalds and being able to get more bling.



Apparently it's easier to just strawman people's views than deal with them. I've never read anything by her and have no intention of doing so.



We don't have a part in homelessness. There is no "our part". It is not the fault of some "capitalist system" and the issue is not just "people on the streets".

As for people choosing to be there, huge numbers DO CHOOSE TO BE THERE. They get set up with jobs and a place to live, and less than a year later.. back on the street. When asked why, it was "just too many rules" or "I didn't want to be away from my husband 8 hours a day" or some nonsense.

You don't know the first damn thing about poverty, homelessness, crime, prostitution, or how to help them. You think having been poor, or having been exposed to people like that gives you knowledge. It no more informs you than having a crack habit gives you an idea of what to do about the drug problem. All it does is feed the endless demands for money and the attempts to pass the blame onto others for being successful.

It doesn't. You've taken the line of bullshit these people and their overly-emotional advocates feed hook line and sinker. It no more gives you understanding



You evidently believe you can read minds. You also evidently think that his view that he's done more and achieved more somehow translates to a "superior being" which is just strawman horseshit.



Of course he is. I'm sure your massive experience in neurology gives you the ability to say that.



Except that no, it is not that precarious. Most of us are not "one step" away from it.

All this "one this, one that" ignores the fact that for most of us here it would take a series of serious failures in several areas of life without time to recover between them to end up like that. One IED blast does not send veterans onto the street, one illness does not send most people here there, or any of the other hogwash examples. That is why people plan ahead for such things; if it didn't work no one would do it. You're just fearmongering and appealing to emotion.

More importantly, no one has said nothing should be done for those who cannot do any useful work because of physical inability or complete mental deficiency. Those people, however, are not the majority of the poor or even the majority of the homeless.

The vast majority of the poor, not just the homeless, are people who don't make any attempt to get a better job than working at the IHOP. School was a drag and stupid, and why do I need to go? Now they're adults, and anything that would require actual effort is rejected because it would take time away from their social life, their sex life, their boyfriend/girlfriend, or they can't smoke there, or whatever imagined reason keeps them from making some **** effort.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The massive import of illegal immigrants to skirt minimum wage laws for manual unskilled labor jobs indicates otherwise. I worked for a company that employed illegal (ok I don't 100% know for sure they were illegal, but it was pretty obvious) immigrants. They worked over 90 hours a week and did not get minimum wage, and this was when minimum wage was still $5.75.



Except anti-trust, work hour limitation, overtime, and minimum wage have pretty much the same effect as handouts. They require people on the bottom to work less to make a livable income at the expense of those making more than them. Minimum wage might be a net negative as it erodes everyone'e spending power for the benefit of a minor few, but it's not a loss for those who actually have their wages go up.



Except it's not a false dilemma. If there are no handouts, no job = death. There's no third option. If you don't get a handout and you have no income, how do you survive? I'm not sure how automation enters into this other than increasing the chance that these people will end up unemployed, or have to work even more hours for even less pay so they can beat the efficiency of the latest machine. And yes, "people should get a handout so life doesn't have to suck" is basically the stance. This is the United States, we should not have people living in sub-Saharan Africa-level squalor, barely surviving.



I'm not eliminating options, I'm just aware if the fact that no matter what you will still get people in this position. Tell this to the guy whose parents taught them that school was for sellouts to "the man" or what the **** ever, and taught them no skills but crime and drug use then dumped them on their *** at age 18. Your position is essentially that these people are worthless and we should find a hole to shove them in to "decrease the surplus population."