Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Suffering is part of human existence and is independent from poverty. Though extreme poverty can cause a different kid of physical suffering.

poverty as it is currently in the USA is not an inherent part of human nature. @Merrick says it well below.

Yes awesome quote

Very well put and I agree

This is sad to me. There are many reasons why one could end up on the streets. It’s not unique to America. That Sri Lankan friend is also a very lucky person despite his “rags to riches” story. A lot of things outside his control have gone his way for that story to be possible. The fact that he doesn’t see this and feel grateful and goes around pointing at American homeless people makes me feel a bit sick.

this starts coming down to a basic tenant of Liberslism. One which Obama tried to say once but expressed so poorly because he left out half of it. And then it got used against him.

“you did not build that by yourself” (the part in bold is what Obama left out and then everyone at Fox News jumped on it and were like “yes I built my business yada yada”. But not alone they didn’t. The richer you are, the more you have benefited from our country, culture, society and the general public. This is what conservatives don’t understand. And is a fundamental understanding driving liberal ideas and policy.

Similarly, homeless people did not wind up on the streets by themselves.

once again, we are interconnected and this fact is what makes conservatism dysfunctional.

There are many many legitimate reasons completely separate from “laziness” that can land someone on the street. Including mental illness. Including just bad luck. Once you are on the street is it near impossible to get back. Our system is set up to make it difficult. If you don’t understand this you need to meet more people in this position. Your Sri Lankan friend clearly has not learned valuable lessons from his past.

There’s a great book called “MAID” that an ex girlfriend of mine wrote about being poor and not being able to make ends meet despite working hard (as a maid). She lived in homeless shelters with a daughter for a time. She only got out of it by writing a book about it that became a best seller. Not everyone can do that. (FYI we were not in communication at this time [we are now] or I would have helped her. I was in college I don’t know what I would have done but something. But I didn’t know)

a very good book for your friend to read. Maybe he’d stop pointing fingers and judging.

No offense but wtf is with you constantly calling anything Liberal or Progressive “religious “. They are views. Liberalism is a way of thinking. It is more a philosophy not a religion. Your constant language like this makes you out to be very partisan and blind to your own belief system. Conservativatism (real conservatism not Trumpism or Fox Newsism or current neo conservatism) is the other side of a coin. That is all. The others in that list are much more religious as religions generally imply faith (with some exceptions that are mislabeled as religions) which is required to believe in Trumpism or Fox Newsism or current neo conservatism as they are all fabricated by Propaganda. Which is something definable and identifiable and not really up for debate. It is there. And before @purr1n asks me about “liberal propaganda” it does not exist which would take this way off topic to explain why this is true. You just have to look at style of communication with an open mind.

yes exactly.

no one here saying poverty is “just a fact we have to live with” (to be blunt) has yet written an argument addressing the fact that we give all kinds of handouts to the rich which could instead be invested in the poor. Which by the way is better for the economy because they spend all of it. Money circulating is good for the economy. The rich hoard their wealth which helps no one including themselves.

I’m not saying poverty can be eliminated and I am not arguing I’m favor of some kind of “classless” society. But we are way too rich a country to have the level of poverty we currently have. It is due to policies that actively siphon money from the poor and middle class and literally give it to the rich. These policies accomplish nothing positive and if we stopped doing this it would make a lot of lives better (not perfect or rich, but much better)

 

We are imperfect being living in an imperfect world, so an absence of suffering is highly unlikely, but you make it sound like some built-in (designed-in?) fact of life over and above that. No.

Otherwise, to almost everything else in your post: Yes!

 

Double Post

 

We also refuse to do things like tell lardasses to lose weight or die here. We pump them full of anti-diabetes drugs, give them all kinds of orthopaedic care and surgery, without fixing the cause of the health problems: obesity and diet. The insurance companies want to keep people alive, working, and paying them as much as possible for as long as possible. The government is just happy to keep them off the dole. Doctors don’t want to sell people they are weak and that the patient ultimately has fix their own problems if they are binge eating, smoking, drinking too much, doing drugs, jerking off all day, and not having kids until they’re 45.

Instead we’ve spent the last century handing out opiates, stimulants, and benzos like candy. America gives children speed instead of discipline.

American public education is becoming more rote and dumbed down. They’re not teaching logical thinking, mathematics, and how to critically read and write. Political ideologies are creeping in from all kinds of whack jobs. Anti-science, creationism, critical theory from ivory tower Marxist, ie Communist, philosophers who more conformist societies would mock or silence, and California was even trying to push Aztec mythology as equal to Christianity. Cortes didn’t have a hard time convincing thousands of other Indians to help him stamp out that civilization. Waging constant warfare to loot your neighbor’s resources and pulling out the hearts of the POWs by the thousands tends to not make you very popular. Next thing you know they’ll be pushing Pol Pot, who also left behind skull racks with thousands of victims.

The A.O.C. Squad of useless Democrats, A.O.C. Being the most partisan member of congress and probably just as anti-Semitic as Ilhan Omar, supports terrorist organizations that go on television telling people that God will love them for beheading Jews like a crazy medieval preacher starting a pogrom. She’s nothing more than a tankie Majorie Greene. Bernie Sanders wants to stop arms sales to Israel because fundamentalist terrorist organizations don’t give two shits about the well-being and safety of their own people.

Where I live, there were multiple protests with hundreds of people marching for Palestine demanding crazy things including for the right of return while spewing vile anti-Semitic shit. That will never happen. The Muslims countries in the Middle East kicked out three times more Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews than that and then tried and failed to wipe Israel off the map multiple times. Extremist Arab popular media and Iranian propaganda call for a second Holocaust. Yet the radical leftist squad of Democrats are supporting them. They probably love Stalin despite the pits filled with tens of thousands of people with bullet wounds in their skulls. Of course those will be “found” in China when Mao is finally ostracized when a new paramount leader needs to distance himself from the past.

 

Don't worry, more older Jewish Democrat voters that I know personally are slowly changing their alliances on who they are voting for in the future. They all say the GOP is like giving them a red carpet to come to their camp, which is why on a % more Jewish Voters in FL voted for the GOP this time round than in the past.

Of course pandering to me will never get me to vote for ya...but what do I know. Voting biggest not so secret secret is the pandering to the group of voters.

 

They, conservatives, do understand that. And this is why we have progressive taxation, agree, with many loopholes, but generally I don't object to being taxed more, much more in Canada, than people who make less. But what makes it objectionable is how this money is spent. Higher taxation can be spend on healthcare, infrastructure, income support, elderly care etc etc etc. Instead it is being spend on increasing dependency, directly or indirectly. That means either increasing self serving bureaucracy, or endless subsidies for programs and policies that can be demonstrated to fail miserably.
I fully agree to contributing to a safety net and wellbeing of my fellow citizens, does not mean that I want may money to be used to hire, otherwise unemployable, thousands of " inclusiveness and equity" commissars and spending it on other lofty caring/sharing bullshit. And that what is increasingly happening as the result of those "liberal" policies.
That what primarily sets people against taxes, not how much money is taken from them.

 

America treats the elderly like shit.

Our politicians hate to solve the problem and prevent it from happening again. They believe the solution to the problem is handouts. Eventually someone will take over and solve our problems for us in a brutal fashion that won’t be pretty. Handouts and subsidies are bread and circuses. How did Diocletian and Constantine solve the economic crises when price fixing and the dole failed? Serfdom.

 

Agreed. I don't have a problem with tax money being spent on things that better society, make us more productive, sustainable, or resolving root issues to societal problems, or any of the other "A LOT of things" that need reform in this country.

My problem is money being wasted on programs that are impractical, unsustainable, or things that are no longer useful. Unfortunately these things do not generally go away with representative govs with history showing that the "ultimatum" is always worse, if not much worse. See Diocletian and Constantine above - or we could pick other societies from all over the world. Insult to injury to both rich and poor, I feel like we spend a lot of money with little actual measurable benefit for the poor or those who legitimately need it and less benefit for the rich than if they did it their own way (legal/moral or not).

Other big problem is the money being used on things that are counter-productive to my (or any one persons) interests with no opt-out options and little real recourse due to the gov insisting on monopolies in some areas.

 

One thing. You can’t qualify pre-modern societies to the present like that. I was using that as an extreme solution to an economic problem that worked but maybe wasn’t the most pleasant experience. Thankfully Joe Biden can’t throw a tantrum and order everybody back to their jobs or starve to death. He can only strongly encourage them to do so and weight the incentives.

Representative democracies are at least more resilient to whimsical rulers. Yet autocracies have outlasted them. The left and the right have tried to cancel classics. One because marble statues of tan Mediterranean people are too white and the other because Plato and Virgil liked dudes in the wrong way. Al Sharpton both. Meanwhile Marcus Aurelius, the favorite of self-help and wellness movements, slept on the floor, was in favor of hitting your kids, praised submissive housewives, and called humans meatbags. He was more Red Foreman than Deeprak Chopra.

 

Should clarify - ultimatum was not necessarily a direct consequence. But due to long term excessive spending + mismanagement (which just takes different forms 2000 years ago vs today) leading to an eventual decline of an empire/nation/society... where the only way to save it is a really rough cleaning house event.

Maybe I should have used a different parallel - I've always looked at it like settling out of court for a result that's usually not ideal for either party but something you can get over. VS settling in court and both parties typically getting screwed with the lawyers being the real winners. We could "settle out of court" today with some real and practical reform but it's in the interests of our leaders to kick the can down the road until we "end up in court" one day.

 

Both of these perspectives are true at the same time.

Our hypothetical Sri Lankan put in crazy work after getting off his plane (after likely working quite hard to find a way stateside in the first place). Immigrants in my generation arrived with $200 and… that’s it. Now he’s on the streets of LA and gets to start hustling. Sure, it’s a complicated story — you maybe apply for welfare if you have legal status, if you figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy (and speak enough English — if you don’t, hit the books). Maybe your community helps you get a job driving a cab. Maybe, if you have higher education in your home country, you drive that cab while you figure out how to translate your education into something accredited by US employers (likely another degree earned at night, paid for… who knows how). Eventually, maybe the Sri Lankan builds a business, or translates his degree in physics into a job at Los Alamos. Did he build his career in a vacuum? Of course not. He doesn’t claim that he did, either. But he does claim that if he didn’t do the bulk of the work, he’d have had a lot less.

But! The Sri Lankan almost certainly hasn’t run into heroin or schizophrenia before. Didn’t used to be a thing you noticed in immigrant communities (maybe opiates are more common these days, I don’t know). He’s worked hard his whole life, and suddenly he sees people who — from his perspective — have had everything handed to them by an accident of birth. That blue passport these people are entitled to, with all its privileges, is something people kill for in the home country. And he sees them squandering it by lying around on the street next to a pile of used needles.

He’s also almost certainly being unfair to Americans in general. The homeless percentage of the population is small. Most Americans work pretty hard. But their visibility in the wealthiest cities is definitely a thing, and the nature of homelessness in LA (or the West Coast in general) is such that the mild climate attracts large concentrations. But it’s also an intractable problem.

The point is — you really have to take people’s life backgrounds into account before you can conclude that someone is ungrateful to the system. And the hypothetical Sri Lankan probably should read up on homelessness and schizophrenia, and how there isn’t much treatment to be had for the poor, and how someone suffering from it might have a hard time holding down even a low-end job.

In a debate where one side says “I worked hard!” and the other says “You were lucky!”, it’s approximately never that black-and-white.

 

Pipe Tobacco is amazing for the thinking mind. I read with my Pipe and buying a lot of Tins of Tobacco for aging.

Still a bad habit....

 

I should repeat before saying more that I like and respect @purr1n and @crenca none of my statements were meant to be personal but just points for discussion. I don’t meet many genuine conservatives so it’s often interesting to hear your perspectives and write counter perspectives.

I worked on Obama’s campaign in 2008 (yes I drank the koolaid) and met A LOT of right wingers who were just pumped full of propaganda. But I know you two have your heads on straight.

 

I've lost track of the story of this Sri Lankan, and even got confused as to whether he is real or hypothetical, but likely, assuming he is a Tamil Sri Lankan, that he was not only an immigrant but a refugee. Likely he left behind dead friends and family, and likely he is no stranger to the stress and mental toil that such experience causes. Depending on generation, it is also possible that this Sri Lankan was educated and successful, but lost and left everything behind. And that he rebuilt a career from scratch in the new country. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers...

 

So if you do not meet many genuine conservatives who exactly you have in mind when you express your opinion about conservatives in general? And I do not mean sarcastic or adversarial. You are most likely among very few people honest enough to admit it.

 

What’s a “genuine conservative”? Someone who doesn’t toe the political line set forth by leading American left-of-center media outlets, but also somehow doesn’t match the caricature they portray of people who do not toe that line?

 

The problem is that both sides are radicalized but we really only hear about qanon or maga as destabilizing forces. CNN and MSNBC are as deep into propaganda for their base as Fox News ever was and the media in general has helped to shift the Overton window so far to the left that Marxist ideology is promoted in the military academies.

I liked Obama but he was more of a moderate than Biden, or at least had the strength to stand up to the more radical elements of his party. I’m still kinda mad that he squandered the chance to implement real health care reform (single payer, though really it needs to be tied into consumption like a VAT) and thought his foreign policy was kind of a disaster, especially with regard to the Middle East and China.

 

It's funny to look back at how thoroughly and for a large part successfully Obama was painted as a radical (and attacked with conspiracy theories around his heritage and ideology), despite him being a moderate pretty much through and through, while Biden has signaled a more progressive direction early in his presidency but polls are showing he's perceived as more of a moderate than Obama and attacks trying to paint Biden as a dangerous radical seem to largely be falling flat. Part of that is probably the political climate and the current COVID/Trump hangover, things are even more polarized on both sides so the more progressive Democrats to the left of Biden are giving him some cover as "the voice of reason" and the "fringe" (though maybe not so fringe?) elements on the right are eating up some press with election conspiracies and other Qanon stuff, but I can't help but think that him being a boring old white guy who doesn't really say much is driving perceptions too.