Imaginos1892 wrote:Why should those that can't be bothered to get off their dead asses and work, or haven't figured out how to run their own lives successfully, be allowed to run the country? Laziness and failure are not qualifications.
Interesting. Why, exactly, do you think that these people who "can't be bothered to get off their dead asses and work, or haven't figured out how to run their own lives successfully" make up the majority of the population?
Do you have data showing that this supposition is true of any society currently existing?
The argument you're making here is "if these people are allowed to vote, decent people like me will be the losers", something that would only be true if you are actually in the minority. So, out with it: Why do you think you are in the minority here, Imaginos?
That would be like forcing companies to hire people that can't do the jobs, or keep them on when they've proven they can't do the jobs…oh, wait, you're in favor of that, aren't you?
Again, interesting why you'd make such an assumption. Why is that?
(Oh, I know: it's because you think I am following some stereotype you have in your head about what a liberal, or in my case, a socialist, thinks like. Little hint here: You're wrong. Unless, of course, you can point out to me a post where I've actually argued for something like this; good luck finding one.)
You just can't accept that anybody should be responsible for their own success or failure. Nobody ever fails because of their own laziness or bad judgement, but because they're unfairly put down by some unspecified 'racists' or 'rich people' and are 'entitled' to take money from people who worked hard to earn it.
Again, a lot of assumptions you're making here about me and what I think about things with no actual basis in anything I have ever said here or in other venues.
Lots of people fail because they're lazy or because they make poor decisions. I'd wager that there's no real difference between rich people and poor people in terms of the ratio of bad to good decisions they make; there is, however, a marked difference in outcomes. A rich person makes a mistake, and usually nothing much will come of it; not unless that mistake is egregious enough that society feels he has to be brought low pour encourager les autres. When a poor person makes the same mistake, the consequences are, inevitably, much more dire: If someone with a solid financial basis loses their job, they'll likely not be as distressed as someone who's living paycheck to paycheck would be.
The system you're living in, this whole thing we call capitalism, is a thin veneer over feudalism and slavery. There's equality, in theory at least; there's no laws that say that certain positions are only open to those of a specific lineage, there's no laws or traditions forbidding the daughter of a farmer from become CEO of a tech company. The dream you believe in, that with enough hard work and skill and perseverance and endurance, anyone can be anything, is very nice and comforting, isn't it?
And, if you look at yourself, is this dream just a dream? No, of course not, you yourself are a shining example. You too got where you are now by putting in the hours, doing the work, and being a good little drone (even if only until you've gotten good enough at what you do to strike out on your own, emboldened by the respect you've earned and the contacts you've made). At least, I think that's the story you're telling yourself about you, that's your narrative.
Never mind the circumstances of your birth, who your parents were, where you grew up and what chances you had during your school years. None of that matters in this grand narrative of yours; all of it, everything you've accomplished you've accomplished because you, Imaginos, are the shaper of your destiny. There was no random chance there, and indeed, as far as you're concerned, anyone could do what you did.
But is that true?
In my opinion, no. There are so many variables in our lives that all too often, we take things for granted that really aren't. If your parents were moderately well-off, if they themselves know the value of education, then chances are good that you're going to be heading to better schools than someone who's born to less fortunate circumstances. If you're going to better schools, chances are, you're going to receive better education, better opportunities after school, than someone less fortunate.
You'll notice that, in this paragraph, I haven't actually talked about the personal qualities of this hypothetical well-off and this other hypothetical poor person. If we assume both people to be equally capable, equally driven to succeed in this system you have convinced yourself is the best possible option, who will end up in a better position?
And when that poor person, unable to achieve their dreams of affluence because they didn't have people around them capable of nurturing their talents and putting them to use, makes a bad decision that puts them into a downward spiral, who is to blame?
Is it really the poor person's fault that they never got the same career accelerators that the rich person did?
Of course, this is a maximalist interpretation: The poor person does have responsibility for what they do, and they must answer for anything they've done, just as the rich person does.
But is it really justifiable for people who are better off to only and exclusively lay the blame for what happened at the feet of the person at the end of a chain of circumstances? Is it completely insane to think that maybe there's been a fundamental, systemic flaw in how this played out?
Personally, I think that while fixing and addressing personal issues is good and proper, we (as a society) can't afford to ignore the possibility that the systems and traditions we've established aren't flawless. We can't afford to delude ourselves into thinking that just because we've been able to come to a good spot in our lives, anyone else can too.
Now, let me get back to the last statement of yours in the quoteblock above.
You say, "Nobody ever fails because of their own laziness or bad judgement, but because they're unfairly put down by some unspecified 'racists' or 'rich people' and are 'entitled' to take money from people who worked hard to earn it."
You... do not seem to know how taxes work. The way you're putting it here is that the recipients of government aid are "'entitled' to take money from people who worked hard to earn it", as if every time you pay taxes there's a line of poor people just waiting to grab your money from you.
You're feeling personally assaulted by this. The idea that there's people out there who might not work as hard as you do and yet receive so much more attention from the government makes you angry, if only a little bit. You feel robbed, cheated by the fact that, you earn less now because some bullshit finance sector moron who just drove his bank into the ground now essentially gets a billion dollar paycheck and early retirement. You feel personally insulted by the fact that some CEO gets to buy his third yacht just because he managed to get some shitty Pentagon contract to build some gold-plated hammers.
Except, no, you don't feel any of those things. As a good capitalist, you applaud these people for their skill in maneuvering in and around the system.
No, what you feel is righteous anger at a system that spends most of its money on "social security" and "health care", two things you are (at least, in your own mind) never
really going to need, because you got it good, don't you? No government handouts for you, no sirree, you've made enough money to insure yourself against any calamity, and since anyone could've done what you did, anyone reliant on the government must be a wastrel, yes, a no-good parasite sucking away your taxes, taxes that you never wanted to pay and if you did have to pay, should have gone to something really useful. Like a huge-ass wall so that you don't have to see poor people anymore. Or a fancy fighter jet. Or some gold-plated hammers. Or, more realistically, roads that don't suck.
What I am calling you out for is, essentially, your unwillingness to look beyond your preconceptions of what a poor person is, where poverty comes from, and how it expresses itself. I'm sure that, if you look hard enough, you will eventually find people who fit your stereotype. If your daytime TV is anything like ours, I'm reasonably sure that there's a cavalcade of shows that are, for lack of a better term, misery porn: Shows that show people who are even worse off than whatever the airing station thinks its core demographic in that timeslot is, with plenty of tut-tutting about the moral failings of the persons portraited.
But that, at least in my experience as a poor person who clawed himself out of a pit of mental issues and bad decisions to a decent job at a good company with a career path and everything, isn't an accurate representation of reality.
Well, I was never 'entitled' to anything. I worked, improved myself, got better jobs, made myself useful to society. Why should what I worked for be taken, and handed to indolent irresponsible losers that have chosen to be useless? Why should they be allowed to run the country I helped build?
I'll let this last paragraph stand mostly uncommented (as I've done most of the commenting in the giant wall of text above), but I feel like I must apologize: I did not realize that the "Imaginos1892" account was not run by a single person, but literally millions of people from over 3 centuries of human history. "I helped build this country" sounds so good, doesn't it? Are you willing to take responsibility for what you built too? Or would you, if called upon it, retreat and say "No, it's not
my fault that the US has an appaling Gini coefficient. I didn't have anything to do with
that."
Also, if your country shouldn't be run by "indolent, irresponsible losers that have chosen to be useless", why did you (presumably, correct me if I'm wrong) vote for Trump and the GOP?
