Talking to Republicans

[lydy]

I do that, sometimes.

There are two things that pretty consistently happen. The first is the story of the Welfare Cheat. The story is always roughly the same. They knew a person, a person they often identify as a friend. This person was receiving a full meal deal, housing, food, health insurance, day care, or whatever suite of support happens to strike the Republican as important. At the same time, the intrepid Republican was holding down a job, or two jobs, or three jobs, and struggling to make ends meet. But here they are, now, and they did it all themselves. And, you know, this isn't fair and something must be done. The thing that strikes me about these stories is that the Welfare Cheat appears only as a suite of benefits, and if they have a character trait, it is universally that of laziness. Now, I don't know. I haven't done a careful study of welfare. It seems extremely likely that there are people who are "abusing the system." But these stories always elide the context. They are missing the, you know, story part of the story. Why are these people in these situations? What do they think about their lives? What other options have they tried? How long have they been getting these benefits? Where did they come from, and where are they going? Do they have goals, even terribly mundane ones like visiting their grandmother in Wisconsin? It's not that I think that the Welfare Cheat is not a real person, but rather the Republican seems to not think of the Welfare Cheat as a real person. There's no way of knowing, from what they tell me, if this person has an invisible disability, a mental disorder, had a sudden case of hard luck, or what. They exist in space, eating benefits and excreting parables.

It makes me wonder, when I talk about being on food stamps, or CETA, or talk about others I know who have benefited from various social programs, if I too elide the details. Do I fail to contextualize and personalize the information? Do I, too, tell parables of the happy little tax payer that could? I hope that I don't, but when I talk about myself, I suspect I assume much of the context. I'm hoping that the Republican will look at me and process that I am a real human, and assume that the reason I ended up on Food Stamps was because of knowable, complicated, human reasons. I tend to stress that I got better. But am I just presenting myself as a parable? Am I, too, failing in the same ways? Are they assuming that I will understand a complicated context and so not including it? I don't really know.

The other thing that always happens is this. I ask what I think is the core question: if we don't help these people, what happens next? The answer I get most often is a variation on, "I shouldn't have to pay for their choices." Many years ago on Usenet I got into an argument with someone who didn't approve of Welfare payments to teen-aged unmarried mothers. I pointed out that whether or not you approved of how the young woman managed to get herself pregnant, once she had done so, there was a child. A child which she was completely unable to support. A child which we had the choice of helping take care of, now, or in twenty years, incarcerating at considerable cost. And the only answer he would give me was, "She shouldn't have gotten pregnant." Yes, well, even if I grant that, she is. So, what now? Where is our way forward? Even if you have some sort of bizarre, draconian plan for preventing young women from ever having sex of which you don't approve of in the future, right here and now, we have an infant. A child who will grow up, and whose mother is completely incapable of taking care of it without significant support from someone. And the answer? "She shouldn't have gotten pregnant."

Over and over again, I ask these people to look at the consequences of what they are saying. The current very popular bug-a-boo is the woman who has a baby a year and is on Welfare. I ask them to consider the possible problems of the State actually having a say in who gets to have babies. Or the State being allowed to declare someone an unfit parent by virtue of poverty. They won't go there. They say, "But I shouldn't have to pay." Never mind the mother, I say, what about these eight or twelve or 'leventy hundred kids. Does it make sense to make it impossible for them to eat and have a safe place to sleep, and be educated? If we accept that the mother is a complete shit, utterly hopeless, and will never be able to take care of the kids on her own, does that mean that we should also write off these innocent children? "But she's abusing the system," they respond.

"Oh, we need to do drug tests for Welfare," they tell me. "Ok, then," I answer. "What happens when a person fails. Are you actually prepared to let that person starve in the street?" They won't usually say yes, though I often think that is what they are thinking. This morning, my co-worker said, "They need to think about how important it is to them to stay alive."

Which makes me, I don't know, kind of despair fractally. When you're really poor, when you have had no opportunities, when you have had things never, ever work out, you lose the ability to think long term. Possibly you were never very good at it in the first place, which is why you ended up here, anyway. At the point where you have no particular expectation that the future will be better than the past, you stop worrying about survival on a long-term basis. Faced with a choice between a present pleasure and the possibility of something better down the road, you choose the present pleasure because your experience with life so far has convinced you that the possibility of better is in fact nothing more than a mirage, a vapor dream in the heat. When I was at the end of myself, impoverished and without food, I didn't really worry about surviving. I was too busy actually doing that to worry about it. I had no ability to plan. I had neither prospects nor expectations. The world was as it was, and the idea that it could be different was too big an idea to fit in my reduced circumstances.

People talk a lot about making Welfare so unpleasant that people will want to get off it. I don't think it usually works that way. I think that the more horrible you make it, the more grinding, the more scary, the more doors end up being shut. The less the people are able to think ahead, able to imagine a future that isn't as horrible as the past, the less likely people are going to be able to make good choices. People do not learn to make responsible choices by being put in a position where they have no choices to make. One of the wonderful things about Food Stamps, as opposed to government issued cheese and milk, is that the recipient gets to make choices. Gets to decide what to eat, how to spend that money. Some people make choices I wouldn't make. Sometimes those choices which look so terrible from the outside turn out to be in support of complex situations not easily discernible from the contents of their grocery carts. And sometimes, they are genuinely bad choices. But, you know, practice helps. People learn. And they learn best when they have incentives, but the stakes are not so high that their mind turns off in sheer self-defense.

In the end, I don't know why I try to talk to Republicans. It really doesn't feel like there's any communication going on. It is possible that I am completely missing what they are trying to tell me. But I keep on hearing it as, "You should have died in a gutter." I suspect they mean something at least slightly different. But, you know, maybe not.

Comments

[monkfan10.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people abuse the system, but people shouldn't be allowed to starve. Food Stamps is a good thing, especially for children. In fact, when there are children involved, I don't think there should be any argument made against Food Stamps or other kinds of welfare. People can have a few jobs, but a single mom also has to watch her children and pay for babysitters and whatnot. Mothers need help more than anyone, but not really for them, for the children.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

This is a genuine question: Why do you think that a "lot" of people abuse the system? What leads you to this conclusion?

The thing that strikes me is that I am not the face of Welfare, primarily because it worked and I am off of it. The face of Welfare is pretty consistently the face of the person who has found no other way forward.

Everybody I know, including me, knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone who "cheated" the system. Hell, technically _I_ cheated the system. I traded food for a convention membership and hotel room, one Minicon. More accurately, a bunch of friends chipped in together, each contributing what they could, so that we could go to Minicon. I happened to be able to provide ham sandwiches. But it wasn't technically legal. I also feel absolutely zero guilt.

But I don't actually have any hard facts about who uses what services, and what kinds of fraud actually exist. There are always occasional high-profile cases, but they are supremely uninteresting. Anecdote is not data.

[firecat]

You should be the face of Welfare, because how it worked for you is how Welfare is supposed to work.

[monkfan10.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just where I live, but I used to be homeless and therefore, know a lot of homeless people. Many of them get welfare checks that provide them with more money than I currently make at my job and they, therefore, could have a place and be doing better than I do. Yet, they choose to remain homeless and on the streets.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

And here we have a real, live example of what I was talking about. Welfare Cheat with no motivation. You say you knew these people. What was their story? Where did they come from? What were their experiences? In what way was living homeless preferable to them? And, too, exactly how did the system work? Is it possible that if they got a place, they were no longer eligible for the type of relief they were getting? I understand that there is often an extreme gap between the benefits one can get and the one achievable at a job which one can reasonably expect to get if one tries.

[monkfan10.livejournal.com]

I know a lot of people who have places, who get welfare, as well. It seems like many people here can just get it pretty easily.

Now, I can't get Food Stamps, though, because I work at McDonald's. I make "too much" money.

I don't get how any of it works, but I do think the people with kids and the people who really need it should have it. I'm just tired of seeing people drink it away out on the streets or do drugs with their monthly welfare checks and then lose their places, bouncing from here to there.

They eat at the shelter and a place that's like a day shelter and none of their check can go towards food and/or a place.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

But but but.... WHY? Who are these people? What is their story?

I used to know a girl. Lovely woman, kind, generous, smart. She was also a prostitute and a cocaine junkie. She'd had an incredibly hard life. Her daddy started raping her at the age of six. At the age of twelve, she escaped to a much better place, which was a boyfriend who put her out on the streets and beat her far less frequently than her daddy. During the time I knew, her, she decided to go into rehab for the cocaine habit. She did two out of a three week program, and left. She left because the program insisted, probably correctly, that the only way to really deal with her cocaine habit was to deal with her traumatic past. She refused. It had been too painful the first time through, no way was she going back to deal with all that shit. I'd like to say that this is not the choice that I would have made, but the truth is, I have no idea. I have only very vague inklings of exactly how bad things had been for her. It seems possible that if she had tried to cope with her past, she would have had to kill herself; it is possible that it was that bad for her.

In the end, I think that people get to make choices. Even choices I don't approve of. Help, when it's real help, opens up doors, creates additional choices. But people still won't always make choices I approve of. Ok, then. But, if I want to help people, and possibly encourage them to make choices that I think are better, at very least choices that enhance their life expectancy, then I need to understand their context. I need to understand why they are making the choices they are currently making.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hear this a lot with Republican friends and relations as the Disability Cheat. "Look at what X is getting, and X is not really disabled!" comes up over and over again.

And...X is never somebody they know well. The guy who sat across from them at Christmas dinner? Of course he is genuinely disabled. Why, he's the reason we have this system! But someone's neighbor who doesn't look disabled...and who doesn't want to talk about what's wrong with them with a random near-stranger...clearly not really disabled.

People think this about me. I am relatively young and relatively thin. I once really upset someone quite close to me by referring to my Mary Sue Disability, because it doesn't make me break out in spots or get fat (or too thin to have breasts) or anything else unaesthetic. And my loved one got really upset with me for belittling the actual stuff I go through. But my point was, I do not look like everyone's image of a sick person. The only thing that is saving me from being a Disability Cheat story is that I am not on disability; our household income is high enough that I don't need it to get by (and have a very nice life and do worthwhile work and stuff). But I am pretty darn sure--in some cases because I've heard secondhand--that people who don't know me well are certain that this whole vertigo thing is nothing really, that I am making a big deal out of nothing, that I could do anything I wanted to if I really wanted to.

For some reason these people are not the ones who have to come running when they hear the series of thumps that indicates that Mris has fallen down the stairs again.

The problem is that once you have the exception in your mental system for People Like You Of Course I Don't Mean You, then any person you get to know--no matter how well you get to know them, no matter what your initial impression was--goes in that box. X used to be a Welfare Cheat, and now that they've gotten to know X, X is Of Course I Don't Mean You. The reason that meeting some of my gay friends actually helped with some of my older relatives is that they didn't have an exception box. There was no room for The Nice Gay People Not Like Those Others. If there had been, then no amount of meeting nice gay people would have helped, because the nebulous Those Others would still be out there.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

People Like You Of Course I Don't Mean You

AKA, "Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are..."

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

What you're asking for, is, effectively, for Batman to wake up one morning, go "I've been witlessly incompetent", and start putting Bruce Wayne's money and political muscle behind pollution controls (it's not just lead, but it certainly is lead, that leads to neurological maiming), better education, and an expanding economy. It'd do much, much more for Gotham's crime problem than punching people.

It's the moral system. The abstract Republican believes, like Batman, that if someone does something wrong, they must be punished. And, like Batman, it doesn't actually work.

You're arguing for the pragmatic utilitarian position of minimizing total harm. That's axiomatically wrong to the abstract Republican, because who is getting punished for their misdeeds? They'll do it again, of course they will, they need to be punished.

This is a whole lot of why it's such a tough argument to have; you're in the position of trying to get someone to admit they're an incompetent idiot, or that their objectives are to increase the suffering of others, and they know both of those things are very bad, the sort of thing a nice person doesn't admit to believing.

(And yes, of course they're saying you should have died in a gutter. And so should the teen single mothers and their infant child, because someone has to be punished. If someone isn't punished, we might get a compassionate egalitarian society, and without the enforced hierarchy, how would anyone know who they are?)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I think you may be right.

I'm always baffled about punishment. I mean, I got punished a _lot_ as a child. And what I learned was that punishment was great for instilling fear, but didn't seem to provide much incentive. It didn't really seem to help keep me on the straight and narrow. What did, consistently, was positive reinforcement. Being told I had done well, being complimented. I certainly failed to do things because I was afraid of being punished, but I didn't really _learn_ anything from that. And I committed other crimes, worthy of punishment, in part because I just didn't understand what was going on. I couldn't extrapolate from one behavior to another, to determine what was good and what was bad. I learned to do that much later, on my own, as an adult. So in the end, the idea that the world somehow needs more punishment always confuses me. I do not understand the mechanism whereby this is supposed to make the world a better place.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

The way it's supposed to work is that the fear is supposed to prevent you from doing the wrong thing, or the wrong thing again. The most succinct version I know of is the description of the Chinese philosophy of Legalism:

"Punishment produces force; force produces strength; strength produces awe; awe produces virtue. [Therefore], virtue comes from punishment"(Book of Lord Shang 210)

(There's a whole long digression that could go here about original sin, other philosophical responses to violent social breakdown, the model of mankind as miserably failed angels (as distinct from pretty good East African ground apes, specialized to co-operate in groups), and the long term consequences of generational fear of damnation, but I'm going to skip it.)

Thing is, people for whom fear is the strongest motivation are unable to do anything, it's not an effective functional state. There's also the problem that the fear of certain death isn't reliably enough to get people to avoid some things, such as sex. So punishment based systems are inevitably negative sum. (I'm pretty sure that's formally provable, but I'm not going to try to produce that here.)

Punishment is prescriptive, it's intended to force normative behaviour, the usual philosophical antecedent is fear of social collapse and widespread violence, and normative behaviour as an organizing principle can't cope with change. (So the actual political objective becomes "shut down anything making us confused about normal".)

So, anyway, punishment isn't supposed to make the world a better place; it's supposed to make the world a _safer_ place, it's a philosophical response to chronic fear, and it's important to remember that fear makes you stupid.

[snippy]

This, this right here. Another way of saying it is that if there is support available, that support changes the choices people make in ways the conservatives think are immoral and unethical. In other words, the exact reason liberals want support (to help people have a different range of choices in their lives) is the reason conservatives don't.

I have to admit that as a child of a welfare cheat who went hungry while my mother traded government support of all kinds for drugs and alcohol, left us kids alone all night to party (and left me alone all day at age 8 when I had chicken pox), and never took us to the doctor or dentist, I struggle greatly with the tension between my resentment at being mistreated by a parent who was abusing the system and my thinking process producing liberalism as the better option even so.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Do you have any sense for what changes in policy might have made your life easier? My own experience suggests that people determined to make bad choices will do that, anyhow. Trying to make sure that their kids get adequate support, even in the face of their bad decisions, is something I struggle with. I'd like to find better ways. Myself, I don't actually have big problems with someone deciding to drink their life away, provided they don't take someone with them. But you mom was not kind nor careful of you, and that is a big problem. But what would have helped? If the food support had been in the form of actual food, instead of food stamps, would you have eaten better? Would you have been better off if the authorities had shunted you into the foster system? Please understand, these are real questions. I have never been where you were, and I have no first hand knowledge. Most of what I do know are the parables that the left and the right like to tell, and I am very suspicious of them.

[snippy]

Some changes have already been made-free school breakfast would have helped, because some days free school lunch was the only meal us kids got, and 2 meals a day would have been better than 1. And at least some schools do offer breakfast now. When I was a kid I wanted to win the lottery and set up free cafeterias just for kids, open 24-7. When I got a little older and grew some compassion I realized kids need their parents to be fed too, but I am not smart enough to keep the bad parents out of the system. I still think cafeterias are a good idea-sometimes we lived places with no cooking facilities, or even if there was a hot plate we didn't have pots and pans and so forth.

We did get food at one point for a year or so, government surplus dried powdered milk, cheese, and shreddy nasty beef in cans. That helped because nobody would take it in trade for drugs, so we got to eat it. I think that was when I was 6 or 7, in the late 1960s. We moved a lot, sometimes 3 or 4 times in a year not counting the times we were dropped off with relatives, and programs were different from one place to another. One summer the place we lived had a free sack lunch in the nearest public park for the kids who got free lunch during the school year. That was really great! We needed it.

We divided our relatives in two basic classes: the ones who would grudgingly take us for a month each when our mother dropped us off so she could totally drop off the grid and the ones who happily came to pick us up once a month for a movie Saturday, dinner at their house, spend the night, and go to services with them on Sunday. Both kinds helped, differently. Years (like, 30 or so years) later I got an apology from one of the second category saying that if she'd known just how bad it was, she'd have taken us away from our mother. The thing is, bad parents tend to teach kids not to tell anyone, not to trust the cops or the "system" because they'd separate us all, and to a kid that's a pretty bad outcome.

My mother wasn't always awful, it was unpredictable, and I think when she was least able to care for us or wanted to party all the time without responsibility, she dropped us off with a relative for a while, once as long as 6 months (they passed us around, 1 month with the paternal grandparents, 2 months with our dad--he hired a sitter, he was in the air force, and 3 months with the maternal grandmother, all in different states and so different schools of course). I don't know that foster care would be better; we don't seem, as a society, to manage foster care very well, and kids get dumped out with almost no resources when they age out.

What helped me the most was reading, but that's not going to work for everybody. And of course as soon as I could babysit, I started buying food for my sibs; in the 5th grade I started buying cheap candy and selling it for triple price at school, so we could have dinner and eat on the weekends.

What about some kind of once-a-month weekend camp, with happy people and lots of food and things to do, and everything supplied, even pajamas? My mother sent me to outdoor school with no change of clothes or pjs, just what was on my back. I was so embarrassed, age 12 and no clean clothes or even a toothbrush. And a sample of some kind of normal life, with meals together and mild teaching of rules about community and responsibility toward each other, and cooperative activities.

The newish program whereby parents can drop off an infant in a safe place, like a fire station--I wonder if there's any way to extrapolate that to older kids. I'm out of ideas, this is stirring up a bunch of bad feelings and I'm going to go use my "get happy" list. Also I've had 2 skull surgeries in the last 5 months and still have a bit of cognitive deficit, I might be able to think better in 6 months when I've finished healing.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for this. I am thinking about it. As we both know, this is a hard problem. I know that in the city I live in, Minneapolis, there has been a movement to make sure that "school lunches" are available during the summer break, which seems incredibly sensible. If the family can't afford to feed the kid during the school year, why would it be different in the summer. Open cafeterias where anyone could eat is a project I would be fine with. I personally see no practical reason to means-test. One of the important things to remember about means-testing is that it costs money. And every dollar making sure some "undeserving" person doesn't get something is a dollar you are not able to give a "deserving" person.

[snippy]

Well, I don't admit this often in public but what I really think is the best, most economical, and most effective solution is a guaranteed minimum income combined with free public cafeterias for children only. And a considerable tax raise, both by eliminating the maximum income that is Social Security taxable and by raising corporate and personal taxes. I say this as a libertarian-leaning traditional liberal who is more convinced by outcomes than ideology.

Some of Niven's stories basically said "let the addicts use, and overdose, and think of it as evolution in action." But people can change. They don't always, but often enough that I want them to have the choices.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

All of this discussion leads me to think that Republicans should be barred from owning dogs. Or having children. Because yeah, positive reinforcement. That's what works. Praise. Love. Rewards for doing the right thing. Going straight to punishment just produces fearful neurotics.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

You're right. Negative reinforcement doesn't tell a dog what you _want_ it to do. Rewarding good behavior is what a dog needs to learn how to be good.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Rewarding good behavior is what anything with a central nervous system needs to learn how to be good.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I don't think they think you should have died in a gutter. They think that all those nameless, faceless people who aren't Real People Like You(TM) should die in gutters as a punishment for their sins, because they must have sinned somehow, or why would they be hungry? There really is a deep Christian/American tradition that says that wealth=virtue and poverty=sin. There's also a desperate, desperate fear that they somehow have to be protected by their virtue or these things could happen to them.

So you stand up and say "These things happened to me. They could happen to you," and you are automatically turning their ears off.

This is why moral appeals, even as beautifully articulated as yours, don't usually make change. (in my opinion)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Actually, sometimes I think they think I should die in a gutter as punishment for their own sins. Sometimes, I think that they want to sacrifice a portion of the population to the scary volcano god, that if this bad thing happens to someone else, it can't happen to them. As if there was a finite amount of misery to hand out, and all they have to do is dodge it.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

*not disagreeing*

[elsewhereangel.livejournal.com]

What amazes is me is how (I think due to my neutral WASPalicious face) people will flat out say these things to my face. People who know all too much about my financial situation will nevertheless make the argument that only White land-owning men should have the vote. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I remember having a dinner table conversation with some folks from the local Chamber of Commerce in a small Nevada town, about the real estate bubble. I particularly remember one woman who was adamant that the fault for the whole fiasco lay entirely with the people who were losing their homes. They should have known they could not afford them. "Not even when their bankers lied to them and encouraged them to take the loans?" No. They should have known. "Even when the people who were supposedly experts in loan affordability committed fraud and broke the law?" Nope. They should have known. They are the ones to blame. No blame accrues to law-breaking lenders.

Eventually I just stopped.

I think part of the underlying pathology there isn't just the sense of injustice if no one is punished, it's the dread fear of being a dupe, a patsy, of being taken advantage of by someone getting more than they 'should' from the system. I'm not sure why that's so terrifying, but it seems to be.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

I heavily suspect that what really lies behind the stereotype of the Welfare Cheat is a secret fantasy that these conservatives have, but would be too ashamed to try to act on, and like many fantasies doesn't lose its power even with some knowledge of its lack of realism. Instead, they've got a self-pity jones, and won't kick it even if the bitterness that's a side effect of that particular drug becomes overwhelming.

[kayshapero]

That and Urban Legends are devilishly hard to get RID of once they get established.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

"You can't reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into."
Being logical with someone who has invented moral justifications for their emotional biases is a waste of air.

I've discovered that I really agree with a number of the standard wingnut points, but from the other side of the mirror. One regular trope is intense resistance toward anything resembling self-examination or increasing self-knowledge. Their "opinions" often aren't opinions, but expressions of personality traits.
If they don't know, and don't want to know, what their brain and glands are doing, I don't know any way to induce the knowledge.
One of the most dramatic "tells" is switching between pragmatism and moralism. "I don't want this baby to starve." "But she shouldn't have gotten pregnant!"

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

One of the anti-welfare tropes is that rather than getting any help like welfare, single mothers, especially teens, should give their children up for adoption, presumably by some good (white) (Christian) family. This is a horrible idea; no one should be expected to put their children with strangers, who may or not be decent people.

[firecat]

single mothers, especially teens, should give their children up for adoption, presumably by some good (white) (Christian) family.

But only if the children are white.

[saoba.livejournal.com]

I've heard it argued that it shouldn't be restricted to single mothers, that people on public assistance should lose custody of their children automatically.

[snippy]

In the mid 1950s, my mother got pregnant at 16, and her mother forced her to have an abortion or be kicked out on the streets.

After a short, disastrous marriage when she was 19 (they separated in under 6 weeks), my mother found out she was pregnant. Never told the father, and this time her mother made her give the baby up for adoption or again, be kicked out on the streets.

Families used to enforce this ethical choice. I think it's hilarious and horrific at the same time that now the conservatives (who are supposedly the party of smaller government) want the government to enforce it on families that no longer think it's appropriate to treat someone you love that way.

[vass]

With the drug test thing, even if I thought that people who take drugs should die in a gutter (which I don't) and even if I didn't think drug testing everyone receiving government support was an unacceptable violation of human rights (which I do)... even holding my nose and temporarily accepting these disgusting premises, it doesn't work. It's been tried. You have to retest everyone regularly, the ones who tested negative to make sure they don't start, and the ones who tested positive to see if this time they test negative and are eligible for help. And that is super super expensive. Whatever money they might have recouped from not paying drug users (which, again, morally despicable to let them starve anyway) would be long, long eaten up by the cost of the testing.

I don't get how someone can think "I shouldn't have to pay for that" about making sure children don't go hungry, but be perfectly happy to pay much more money for re-testing everyone on a monthly basis to make sure they don't take the drugs most of them didn't pay in the first place.

Or rather, I do get it, but I don't like it. They would actually rather pay for useless, violating, punitive tests than to pay to feed the hungry.

[saoba.livejournal.com]

No, they really do mean you should have died in a gutter. They think poverty is a character flaw.

I just deleted a screen of ranting about the First Righteous Cult Of Good People and their deeply held belief that Poor People Are Bad And They Should feel Bad. Your dying in a gutter is a feature not a bug in their system. I once had a person tell me he was proud of making sure no one took advantage of the system, and that he didn't understand why some of his co-workers burned out. "All you have to do is tell them no. The default is no. Qualifying should be the exception." Denying people benefits was patriotic.

I pointed out he knew people who had been on food stamps, whose kids he'd played with, who would have gone hungry. Was it worth refusing to help them just in case someone else might cheat? Was he willing to look them in the eye and say he'd rather they starved than risk some entirely theoretical person getting away with the princely sum of $75 a month? He didn't even hesitate.

spit*

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Some people apparently just don't have it in their mental, emotional, whatever, ability to take even a single step beyond their current position on an issue. They establish their beliefs, and the world must be like that. No contrary evidence gets through. It appears that they literally cannot absorb anything that doesn't match their worldview.