Not to mention that the co-payment, depending on the drug and the insurance plan, can cost anywhere from $2 to $2000.

One of the other reasons that urban legends work as well as they do is because of the (under-appreciated) power of narrative. You can quote facts and figures at people all day, providing methodology and context out the ass and it will lose to a story nearly every time because that’s how we communicate. We talk to each other in metaphor and story all the time. And I think it’s hardwired into the human brain that we do that. Now we can beat stories by asking questions about them, like you say, but at best that’s a holding action, and there’s no guarantee that the message will hold. The best thing for us to do, I think, is come up with our own stories, our own true myths, let’s say, that focus on shared humanity rather than setting people against each other.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of these stories aren’t stories that anybody originally had heard had happened.  For the most part, we’re looking at “within my belief about what happens, this is an entirely plausable story” stories.  Meaning, like Reagan’s famous welfare queens in cadilacs, these aren’t things that anybody ever heard of or did any research to find out about.  It’s just that, in Conserva-World-View, this must happen all the time.

And, let’s be honest here.  Even we liberals can fall into the trap of not feeling the need to verify what must obviously be true.

I think the third prong - attacking the conclusion - is likely to be counter productive, because if the person telling hte story were not already convinced that what they’re advocating for should happen, they wouldn’t be telling it in the first place; there is no room for the benefit of the doubt in my mind for someone who tells a tale so transparently open to attack as a basis for policy recommendations (as opposed to someone just telling the sotry, which is a different thing).

In my experience what you end up exposing with that tactic is that yes, actually, that woman who’s too stupid to be well-educated and too lazy to be healthy (“insulin” being a dog whistle for “kebab guzzling fat arse” to this type of person) does deserve to die. And if her kids want a better life, they should work hard in shcool and not be traumatised by the horrors of the social care system. And if they in their turn end up becoming a burden to the taxpayer, well then, Galt to them. Let them die too.

There’s such a vertiginous lack of empathy at the bottom of many of these stories, sometimes I think trying to reason with the people who tell them is just an exercise in despair.

Well, I actually have no problem with people in BMWs geting free meds.  I doesn’t offend me b/c I think we should ALL have free meds.  Single Payer NOW!

As for BMW, one of my son’s preschool friend’s parents had a BMW b/c they were not American citizens.  She was from Venezuela, and he was from Germany.  The only car company that would check their international credit rating was BMW.  It was more expensive than they wanted, and they wouldn’t have chosen it otherwise, but it was the only new car they could finance.

I can also tell you the nightmare she went through trying to get an American driver’s license when her foreign one was expiring, b/c I actually knew these people.

What this really shows is Barbour’s lack of respect for the american car industry. At least Reagan had his welfare queens driving good honest american cars.

The hateful pathology is sort of interesting. In a lot of places the story that the economy was so bad that even people who had bought expensive cars a couple years earlier were now unable to afford the copayments for their medicines would be about how we have to do something to get the economy moving and improve employment numbers. But for a self-satisfied operator like Barbour it’s about punishing poor people for someone’s alleged misdeed.

Very helpful. I like how you broke it into specific tactics. Thanks for sharing it.

I just wish all of this would do some damned good.  The best I ever get is, “This is just too stressful for me to talk about.  We just need to agree to disagree.”  Well, at least it’s stressful for you.  I imagine that coming to the realization that your talking points are full of shit, and your views are hateful and destructive probably is stressful.  So hey, just shut down the conversation and go bathe in some Fox News until your worldview is reinforced.

I think that #3 is the one we need to focus on, because while we liberals don’t want to believe it, there are a not insignificant amount of people who cheat the system or simply accept more benefits than they actually need just because they can (which some people find unethical while others do not, but I think it is understandable to see it either way).

I find the BMW story to be very plausible, actually.  The most likely explanation is that that madicaid patient makes their living in an illicit industry like drug dealing or prostitution, where you make plenty of money (between cycles of going to jial, making you unemployable and forcing you vack into the same industry after your release) but there are not health insurance benefits and you can claim a zero income with the state, even though you may be flush with cash.  That’s not a friend of a friend story, I could give you the full name and address (I wouldn’t, obviously, but I just mean to emphasize that I am not making him up) of a drug dealer I know who drives luxury rental cars everywhere and has himself and his numorous children and their mothers on medicaid and other social programs.  It is infinitely understandable to me if certain taxpayers think that letting this guy get his prescriptions without a copay is not a good use of public funds that could be going to schools or infrasturucture or paying for rehab for the victims of the drug epedimic in poor communities, or EVEN if they just think that if that is where their tax money is going then they’d rather just keep it.  I don’t think it takes a terrible person to feel annoyed with the system being used this way.  I don’t think we liberals help ourselves by pretending that there are no abuses of the system or that they are vanishingly rare because it really is more common than we want to believe.

Speaking for myself and other liberals I know who work with people on social programs, there is a lot of disillusionment when you see the cheaters, but Amanda’s #3 above is what keeps us defending the system and I think that is where we should focus our argumant.  There are lots of people who need help and lots of children in the system and cutting off benefits to everyone just to stick it to the cheaters takes a level of vendictiveness and uncompassion that is usually beyone those of us with liberal values and should be beyond any decent person.

What fascinates me is that wingnuts cling to their Truthy Unverifyable Meme Just So Stories while reviling actual data gathering and compliations of information in front of their faces. 

That’s because special fairy tales that sound truthy can be constructed to “prove” just about anything, while facts and logic have a nasty habit of denying you that sort of moralistic satisfaction.

For them, its the representation of reality that matters - not reality itself.

A friend’s young relative made the extremely insightful comment that the Reichwing is engaged in a Communist-China style Cultural Revolution - a belief that going back to some mythological “old ways” will move us forward as a society.  Just like Chairman and Madam Mao.  They are being just like 1960s Chinese Communists in that way - pastoral romantic fantasies and bad opera and all!

This would be a good theme for another book, in a style similar to It’s a Jungle Out There.  I’d buy it.

Useful.  I also agree with Incertus, that since anecdote, while not being the plural of data, is so powerful, we need to counter with our own anecdotes.  Ones that showcase compassion, and show the right wing viewpoint up to be the heartless garbage that it really is.

I’ve got the Vietnam veteran who begs on the side of the highway near me, who is a great guy, smart, able to work, but unable to find work, and homeless.  He reads all the books he can get his hands on for free, and lives in a tent in the area between on and off-ramps by Rte 95 in Columbia, Maryland.  In the winter, when there’s 5 feet of snow(!), he sometimes pools the scant amount of money he gets with the other homeless couple that “lives” there, and they get a cheap motel room for the night at the scuzzy motel a mile down the road.  I chat to him when I see him, and I asked him how much money he gets from begging.  “About $3 a day” he told me.  He frequently goes without food for days at a time.  And I’m not saying this to bang my own drum, but I gave him $150 around Christmas time, because, fuck.  The man’s a veteran, and I work for a foundation that’s focused on treatment of injured veterans.

I wouldn’t care if he was mentally ill or scary, I’d still give him money, because the Republicans that were so willing to send him off to war are completely uninterested in him now that he needs help.  And before anyone says “see?  you gave him money!  Private Charity!”, Most passers-by in their cars don’t give him a damned thing, not even the change out of their ash tray.  He, and people like him, would gladly accept the 35 cents, but the Repubs have successfully convinced most people that the poor deserve to be poor, and you’re just encouraging them by giving the beggars money and food.

They’re people.  And people deserve not to starve in this fucking wealthy-ass country.

GumbyAnne, it is just as plausible or MORE plausible that they borrowed a wealthier relative’s car.

I own my parent’s house now that they are deceased, but my aunt, who is on SSI, still lives there and is minding the house while using my late model car.

I work with an anecdoter and I have developed some good ways to deal with it.  Since we’re scientists, it’s easy for me to say that a sample size of 1 isn’t very convincing and that one outlier doesn’t discredit the whole program.

But I’ll also try offering my own counter-anecdote, and eventually I will just start saying stuff that is obviously made-up, to show how ridiculous the whole form of argument it.  I also like the motto “I’ll see your anecdote and raise you one”.

I’ve also found it helpful in other contexts to just ask more and more specific details about the anecdote, although it doesn’t always work when my brain is slow and I don’t think of things to point out until after the conversation is over.

I’m starting to encounter rightists who consider Snopes an unreliable source, so citing them may or may not work.

Please note: My aunts healthcare costs are way too high for me to support her.  She NEEDS medicare and SSI.

If cheating and fraud are a problem, then find ways to flag it - cash cards used in casinos, etc. are likely fraud.  Investigate!  Someone driving a nice car - run the plate and see who owns it.  My bet is that it is someone like my aunt, who, because she doesn’t work due to disability, is housesitting for a friend or neighbor and using a car while she has access to one.

Barbour dearly misses the “good old days” when black people were systematically shut out of the social welfare programs in Mississippi and longs for a return to “traditional values” when only deserving white people received any kind of government assistance.

But that’s no excuse for other conservatives who would balk when asked question #3. What is their motivation for allowing people to die? Do the non-politicians who spout faux news talking points have an answer to that question? I ask because as a person of color, wingnuts almost never ever engage me in these types of conversations. In fact, the last conversation of this variety that I can remember vividly was almost eight years ago when a “reverse discrimination” case against the University of Michigan made it to the Supreme Court, and a wingnut argued that a friend of a friend was denied admission to UM in favor of a less deserving black candidate.

I don’t know which one is more plausible, Ms Kate, but certainly a pharmacy employee can’t know which explanation it is, so in that situation they ought to suspend judgement.

@GumbyAnne:  There have been studies done of welfare cheating, and the truth is, there isn’t that much, not compared to the overall number of people on public assistance of some sort or another.  Your drug dealer, with his girlfriends on soocial programs - do those women and children deserve to starve because the man in their lives is a criminal?  How do they pay for things when he’s in jail?

It’s a Republican strawman - the drug dealer with all his “babymammas” leeching off the system.  The women themselves are frequently very poor.  It’s the same thing with “they have stereos!  And cell phones!  and flat-screen TVs! eleventy!!” - when you’re poor, you can’t save up for the big things like a house, and a future, and schools in nice neighborhoods.  You’re stuck in the same shitty-ass apartment, wondering when he’ll be back, and how you’ll have to “pay” for that flat-screen when he gets out.

When my husband was a captain at the county jail, they closed the old building and built a new one.  When the local smug politicians were given a tour of the new jail, they had aneurysms at the fact that the inmates had cable TV - in colour, even!.  My husband had to explain that a) you don’t get TV reception through 3 feet of steel-reinforced concrete, and b) who the hell even sells black and white TVs any more?  Then came the argument that the inmates shouldn’t have TV at all (because you know, poor people and criminals should never have any pleasures in life, ever).  In this case, the TV was something that the officers needed, too - a happy population is a population not rioting, killing, or causing trouble (keep in mind too, that jail is pre-trial; no-one has been proved guilty at this point, so they aren’t all criminals). 

But the jail aside, the same attitude seems to infect republicans when it comes to poor people - they don’t deserve any nice things.  It never occurs to them (because they don’t want to think about it) that alll the nice things the rich have are completely out of reach for poor people, and needing public assistance doesn’t mean that the poor should be living in unheated cabins and wearing only sackcloth and ashes.  It comes right back to the idea that the poor should be punished for being poor - and the “cheats” are a convenient cover for deep-sixing any sense of obligation as a society to take care of the people whose low wages make it possible for the rich to get richer.  Use them up and throw them away seems to be the attitude.

I’m starting to encounter rightists who consider Snopes an unreliable source, so citing them may or may not work.

That’s because every time they shoot off another round of bullshit, they get Snopesed by a saner friend. If they have to choose between challenging their worldview or dismissing a source, well, the latter is way easier you betcha.

We really have to attack the root of this—their mindset that they aren’t suggesting enough (even slum darkness in 3rd world countries have cell phones and tvs—but somehow that’s too good for poor people in the us to have).

In my experience, poor people have the same kinds of cars that better off people have, just older. Older Hondas, older BMWs, older Mercedes. Plus, if you don’t see much point in saving, then a low monthly payment can give you a nicer car than you “should” have. But that sort of reasoning isn’t goon to help with right wingers—it’s all rooted in resentment. People on Medicaid in MS are REALLY poor—I’m not going to choose them as a target to pick on.

I’m all for using facts and logic to combat Reichwing nuttery.  I’d like to think that I’ve made some decent arguments around here in the process of combating the forces of authoritarian ignorance.  I find that using facts and logic to defend my beliefs and politics and attack the poor and unsupported arguments of the other side to be very helpful in developing a better understanding of why I believe what I believe.

But I do have to admit that it’s not at all clear to me that fighting these memes is: 1) effective, 2) beneficial, or 3) worth the time and the energy.

It’s obvious to anyone who has engaged in refuting these memes that the people propagating them are immune to facts and logic.  Most of them resent facts and logic, while claiming their bogus memes are The Truth and therefore automatically factual and logical.  It has been shown that the stronger the facts and logic used to attack their favored memes, the more tightly they cling to them.

So, who is it that benefits from strongly attacking a truthy-but-untruthful Reichwing meme?  What is gained?  Is it even possible to be “successful” doing this?  Why is it a good idea to continue to do so?...

In my experience what you end up exposing with that tactic is that yes, actually, that woman who’s too stupid to be well-educated and too lazy to be healthy (“insulin” being a dog whistle for “kebab guzzling fat arse” to this type of person) does deserve to die.

There’s incredible value in getting someone to say it.  It’s important to talk about the debate in terms of what’s really going on, which is why I put so much value in getting anti-choicers to admit that they just want to punish people for sex.

Gee, thanks, autocomplete for making a mess of my comment!

Suggesting = suffering
Darkness = ???

Should the taxpayers take on the further burdens all this creates?

I don’t imagine conservatives are impressed with this argument: the obvious rightist aswer is “no, those programs should also be eliminated.”

find the BMW story to be very plausible, actually.  The most likely explanation is that that madicaid patient makes their living in an illicit industry like drug dealing or prostitution, where you make plenty of money (between cycles of going to jial, making you unemployable and forcing you vack into the same industry after your release) but there are not health insurance benefits and you can claim a zero income with the state, even though you may be flush with cash.
Comment 10—GumbyAnne

Oh, yes, that’s way more probable than Amanda’s suggestion that here’s someone who bought a BMW and then lost their money.

There are people abusing the system—that’s almost certainly true for any system you care to name—but I’m not sure what akes it “the most likely explanation” in this case.

While I rarely encounter this kind of gibberish, I do have a very close friend who occasionally becomes pregnant with bizarre right-wing talking points, memes, bullshit. His dad’s right wing, his ever-so-friendly ex-boss is right wing, his hometown is right wing.

So, I’ll get e-mails and encounter weird/ offensive/ obviously false claims in our conversations. I find that, generally, the above are the same tactics I employ. And, like Amanda, I find them pretty effective. For example, my friend states, “The only reason the Democrats ever win is because of women and minorities. If they couldn’t vote, then there’d be no more Democrats.” This of course is shockingly offensive, and it made me want to de-friend. However, after interrogating him—especially using tactic number three (“Are you arguing that women should not be allowed to vote?” “You seem to be suggesting that we should disenfranchise over 50% of the population.” “You are assuming that the votes of women and minorities are somehow illegitimate.”)—his viewpoint was reversed.

This of course is a special case. I don’t think my old buddy is actually right wing: just less willing to examine the easily swallowed (for a white guy from a middle class house in an all white suburb with right wing parents) lies and bullshit that swarm everywhere around him.

I know Freakanomics has a bad rep on this blog because they went off the rail in their follow up book, but the first one had a pretty sober view of the myth of the rich drug dealer. The drug trade is like any corporation: you get a few really rich guys at the top and a whole lot of proles not making ends meet at the bottom (and this get further exaccerbated by the fact a lot of the low level dealers are consumers too).

Also, my experience with welfare recipients is that, unlike the myth they’re lazy do-nothings just waiting for the check to come in, a whole lot of them are out there taking some odd jobs… under the table because they can’t live off either the welfare check OR the job’s pay but they can legally only get one or the other. I would not be surprised if most of the ‘cheating’ statistics comes from there. Poverty is illegalized in this country (by which I mean Canada but I think we can agree this applies to the USA as well). Survival implies working against the law, and the major issue here is whether you’ll break the letter but follow the spirit or if you’re just going to go full-on asshole and break away with morality too and stab the others in the muck with you in the back.

@attack_laurel

“your drug dealer, with his girlfriends on soocial programs - do those women and children deserve to starve because the man in their lives is a criminal?  How do they pay for things when he’s in jail?”

For the answer to whether I think programs should be revoked and children left out in the cold, I would refer you to the rest of the comment you are replying to, where I clearly state that I believe in and defend social programs, and that it takes a mighty uncompassionate person to want to cut off benefits to deserving people over the cheaters that are also out there.

If cheating and fraud are a problem, then find ways to flag it - cash cards used in casinos, etc. are likely fraud.  Investigate!  Someone driving a nice car - run the plate and see who owns it.  My bet is that it is someone like my aunt, who, because she doesn’t work due to disability, is housesitting for a friend or neighbor and using a car while she has access to one.

In reality, because fraud is so low, it’s usually not cost-efficient to deeply investigate anything other than blatant fraud.  It’s cheaper to let a tiny fraction of people get something they don’t need than to investigate them for it.  And this is where the conservative mindset is different.  They’d rather let 99 poor people starve than to see even one person gaming the system.  In the progressive mindset, it’s definitely worth it to help 99 people at the expense of letting one person go unpunished.

While I appreciate the necessity to maintain a healthy skepticism in the face of stories that do not ring true, I think you are completely off the rails here, Amanda.

First of all, Haley Barbour is an honorable man and would never tell a story that isn’t true, so I think we can, on that basis, assume the story to be true.

The problem here is that Barbour, poor man, is the product of a Mississippi education, so I think he can be forgiven for having misunderstood the story and drawn the wrong conclusions.  If that fellow in the BMW has plenty of money, then we can assume that the fellow in the BMW is a taxpaying citizen.  Well, why shouldn’t a wealthy taxpayer get to participate in programs he paid for?  The problem with Medicare isn’t that the BMW drivers are using it.  The problem is all those poor people who use it.  They didn’t pay for it, but they get the benefit of it.  What we have to do is rewrite the law so that only those who make above a certain income can get Medicare benefits.

I can’t believe you couldn’t see that.  You’re usually so smart.

I find a good response to the x, y and z is cheating the system is to say you can have a welfare system that is extremly limited that will help almost no one but will eliminate welfare fraud or a welfare system that helps a bunch of people but fraud is possible and then its really a question of how much you want to hobble society in the name of purity. At this point they can climb back in off the branch they’ve climbed out on or they can stay out there and saw it off.

“And this is where the conservative mindset is different.  They’d rather let 99 poor people starve than to see even one person gaming the system.  In the progressive mindset, it’s definitely worth it to help 99 people at the expense of letting one person go unpunished.”

QFT.  There’s only one moral stance there, and it ain’t the one that punishes many people for the fraud one.  If those who buy the conservative POV (who overwhelmingly claim to be “Christians”) actually followed the teachings of their Good Book, and especially the supposed “actual words” of their Christ, there is no question at all as to what the right thing to do might be…

The best I ever get is, “This is just too stressful for me to talk about.  We just need to agree to disagree.”

When I get this line, I start to dig in.  After all, what are you agreeing to disagree about?  The facts?  The conclusion?  The policy?  I point out that policy isn’t something that you can agree to disagree about.  One policy must be chosen over another.  Since they haven’t proven their point, then are they agreeing with your policy preferences while quietly believing what they want?  I mean, it’s possible for someone to say, “Okay, we won’t change Medicaid, but I elect to believe this irrelevant story.” 

When someone is stressed, it’s often interesting to ask them how stressful they imagine it must be to have to take medication you can’t afford.

That’s not a friend of a friend story, I could give you the full name and address (I wouldn’t, obviously, but I just mean to emphasize that I am not making him up) of a drug dealer I know who drives luxury rental cars everywhere and has himself and his numorous children and their mothers on medicaid and other social programs.

And I can give you the name and address of someone who lost her job after buying a used Mercedes and was in danger of bankruptcy.  That wipes it out, right? 

Like I said, adjust depending on circumstances.  There’s no one right answer.  Sometimes you can can shut down a lie swiftly, and sometimes you need to do all three, and sometimes only #3 applies.  Depends.  For instance, on global warming, sometimes just shutting down the lie is all you need.

This would be a good theme for another book, in a style similar to It’s a Jungle Out There. I’d buy it.

My second book, “Get Opinionated”, has quite a bit of stuff like this in it.

I think some people are down on this post because they think that anything short of completely changing someone’s mind is not worth doing.  That’s not true.  Especially arguing online, there are people lurking who read whose minds can be changed.  Also, you can plant seeds in the person you’re arguing with.  Also, you can shut them the fuck up, and that is also valuable, so they don’t spread their lies and bullshit.  There are many reasons that putting down a wingnut urban legend is valuable that fall short of de-wingnutting the person who spoke it.

Not to repeat myself, but Cris, like I said in the post, it depends.  Sometimes just swiftly shutting down bullshit is valuable to keep it from getting repeated.  Also, some wingnut beliefs fall apart on the facts alone.  Wingnuts agree that if global warming is real, we should do something about it.  So the conclusion is entirely dependent on the facts, and your best path is the facts.  In other situations, arguing on just values will get you down even a deeper rabbit hole.

For instance, say you get a wingnut urban legend in an email forward. What’s more valuable—-starting a long argument about value systems with the person that goes nowhere, or just hitting “Reply all” with evidence that this is not true?  In many cases, the Reply all option is better—-it will shame many people out of forwarding the lie.  If you argue just on values, you look like the asshole to those people, and they will forward it to spite you.  The goal is keeping the email from being forwarded, and fact-checking is the most effective strategy in that case.

I’m not down on the post.  I was just messin’ around.  I agree with you that this is the way to counter nonsense like the Barbour story, but I also agree that it is only worthwhile if you get a national news organ to do it’s job (doesn’t happen except on fake news shows) and ask for specifics or details about the BMW story.

I had an email exchange with a wingnut one time about something similar.  I told him that he seems to be bothered more than anything else by the notion that somebody got something for nothing rather than the notion that 40 million Americans live in poverty.  He told me I had it exactly right.

Also, Cris, the “both sides do it” thing is just tired, don’t you think?  Sure, both sides do “it”, whatever it is today.  But shouldn’t we grade on frequency and quality?  Do you really think there are equal amounts of bullshit, lies, myths, and email forwards from the left and the right?  If so, searching Snopes might be valuable, since they’re very non-partisan.  You’ll find that they’re in fact frustrated, because the vast majority of politicized urban legends are on the right, and they wish there were more from the left so they could be more balanced.

No worries, DBK.  I knew you were kidding. 

Amanda @38 & @24 should be read together.

I read somewhere that Bush’s 2000 election vaguely minority-friendly platitudes were not about getting minority votes, they were about convincing middle class people that Republicans weren’t the scary racists of the past. 

Denying the wingers the ability to base their arguments on anything other than “I think other people should suffer” is very important.

Ah, well, I never expect a short blog post to carry the weight of every possible objection, etc.  It would be too long. 

Agreed, wsn.

But the jail aside, the same attitude seems to infect republicans when it comes to poor people - they don’t deserve any nice things.

That reminds me when I saw a couple of my Facebook friends “Like” a page titled something along the lines of “If you can afford cigarettes and beer, then you don’t need food stamps.”  Sure, don’t focus on the self styled financial geniuses on Wall Street who helped tank the economy like Matt Taibbi described in Griftopia.  No, we have to worry about somebody who smokes a carton of cigarettes a week collecting food stamps.  It doesn’t seem to occur to these people that food stamp eligibility is based on income level

Catgirl @30:

It depends very much on which people you’re talking about punishing. As Amanda points out, one banker cheating is never considered reason to punish the other 99. Heck, 99 bankers cheating becomes “that’s the way the system works, we have to fix the laws to conform with customary business practice.”

I think that ultimately the “conservative” way is about class-based judgment rather than anything else. If someone is poor or black or queer or atheist (heaven forfend some kind of trifecta) then they’re a bad person, and any bad thing that happens to them is just what they had coming to them. Any bad actions by a member of the class reflect on that class. But If someone is a rich white christian, they’re basically good, and don’t deserve to have their lives ruined by some uncharacteristic bad action. Much less by people generalizing the bad actions of a few thousand other members of their class to suggest that their whole group is anything but special.

I hang around some forums dedicated to frugality online, and a LOT of the people around those forums (mostly from families making 40K or less a year) tend to be in the market for older, used high-end cars when looking for vehicles.  There’s the perception that Volvos, BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus (and sometimes Volkswagen) are first built to last, and second tend to have had previous owners which took care of them.

QFT.  My brother did something likes this (although he wasn’t poor at the time) and got a really great deal on a used Volvo that lasted a very long time.  I guess it’s scary for conservatives to think that some poor people might actually make wise money choices, because then they would have to admit that just maybe there are systemic problems that make people poor and it’s not just because they’re too stupid to use money wisely.

catgirl@49: You’re right. I’m pretty sure the whole reason that they jump to conclusions like that is their assumption that poor people by definition have poor judgement wrt money, otherwise they wouldn’t be poor, because Fuck You, That’s Why. We live in the best economic system EVAR and if you don’t have money that’s entirely your own damned fault.

yes yes yes. Usually I just ask why they havent reported the fraud they witness.
:I work with a population,  that needs these services desparately, (ex; abandoned children sometimes with children of their own, or other dependants. I know a mentally rertarded youngster whose ‘mom’ ran off leaving her with a baby and two young siblings and a dying 80 yr old. She is 18 and old enough to be ‘head’ of this family, but she is MR, she literally doesnt know what to do.) but occasionally I find someone trying to game the system. I turn them in. I know one young woman paying 900 dollars back to the state for lying on her housing form. Not that she has that money but she lied about her drug dealing boyfriend.
People do know you have to APPLY for benefits, right? The benefit fairy just doesnt come along and gift folks with money.
As for arguing with ass hats. Of course during the debate a person is going to try to save face. I myself have been argued into a rediculous cornor just cause I was stubborn. But later on, in the dark of night when they sometimes can’t sleep…they wonder if they really do believe that all in poverty should die. And they might change their minds. Or in trying to come up with ideas to beat your argument, sorta rearguing in thier heads. they get it suddenly. So yeah, it may feel like nothing was accomplished but some times I think seeds just take a while to sprout.

#48 Paul—Amen!
And add to that that keeping their followers full of resentment based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, lack of deference to Jesus, etc. is how they got away with wrecking the economy and transferring the majority of the wealth to the rich in the first place. Even the Wisconsin battle has shown that the working class wingnuts are angry at the unions for having the nerve to get decent wages and benefits for their members. But they’re still not angry at those they deem deserving of their wealth like republican politicians and investment bankers.

I’ve grown increasingly fond of fabricating anecdotes which illustrate points (1), (2), or (3).

At this point, my go-to response is “I hear was a giant chicken!”  Then I go off on a rant on illegal chicken immigrants taking good American x.

Usually, it’s funny and/or stupid enough to get the point across while completely discrediting the anecdata.

Just had this happen in the local newspaper - rightwingnut claimed that whenever she was in a checkout line she saw people wearing fur/leather coats and using “food stamps” (actually a credit type card here).  These are wingnuts, and many will just lie, skipping the FOAF and claim personal observation.  Had fun pointing out that:

She must have been really close to that person to know
—that the card they were using WAS a food stamp card
—that the coat was real fur/leather
Then, that she could tell just by looking:
—that the coat in question hadn’t
—been a gift
—been inherited
—bought at a thrift shop
—bought when that person was employed
  —borrowed

And I have Amanda to thank for making me realize a lot of that - the cell phone flap about the guy in the food pantry line.

They absolutely do not want poor people, or criminals, or anybody but themselves, really, to have any pleasure.  Even the most basic pleasure of fucking.  The attacks on reproductive healthcare and even access or legality or such is the most pure evidence of that you can find.  Poor people are so unworthy that they don’t even deserve to fuck.

Poor people surely don’t deserve the pleasure of being able to read a book - attacks on education and libraries.  Or eat a decent meal - attacks on nutrition programs, food deserts and resistance to any effort to fix them, attacks on even nutritional information and education.  They don’t deserve the pleasure of living in a safe neighborhood, or getting treatment for illness or injury - they don’t even deserve life-saving emergency procedures if they happen to be pregnant brood mares.  The other 99.9% of us don’t even deserve the pleasure of working an honest, decent job for decent pay - going home at the end of the day feeling like we’ve done something worthwhile and with a little spending cash in our pockets.

Wingnuts agree that if global warming is real, we should do something about it.

Eh I only find this to be true ~40% of the time. An awful lot of people clinging to the “it’s a myth!” are doing so only as a cover—to themselves as much as to others—for their intense desire to do absolutely nothing about it. And then you have that cohort of people who actively want to destroy the earth so as to bring Jeebus back.

oh crap, should have read Amanda’s follow ups before posting - she covered all those. 

Just another follow up on the “reply all” - I don’t just post the url, because they won’t open it.  If at all possible, I try to post the entire relevant portion - really great when there’s a photo that disproves - when I was sent   “Obama put up Arabic symbol curtains”  photo of GWB in front of ECACT SAME curtains did wonders.  The free for all that ensued was pretty cool - especially when someone else pointed out how racist it was to promulgate such stuff, and what a bad example to set for kids - that it was OK to lie. 

However, I do have one observation.  Whenever ‘shaming” as a behavior modification strategy has been brought up in the past, it’s been shot down.  But now it’s being advocated - is there a difference in what the shaming is about, or who is being shamed, or…?

So, who is it that benefits from strongly attacking a truthy-but-untruthful Reichwing meme?  What is gained?  Is it even possible to be “successful” doing this?  Why is it a good idea to continue to do so?…

I meant to get to this earlier but Amanda@38 beat me to it… I get tired of railing against this nonsense all the time and frequently take breaks just to keep from breaking things in my office from frustration, but in my mind the major reason isn’t to convince some sociopathic asshat who’s just regurgitating the bile he heard on Rush yesterday. The point is to make an argument for all of the other people who are reading it who may not be convinced one way or the other, or who are basically decent but never hear the decency side of the argument presented.

I have lots of old friends and relatives in Atlanta and Texas who stereotypically are too busy taking care of their kids and paying the bills to really pay attention to the talking heads, but they’re immersed in the Faux News culture from having it constantly blaring in local businesses and restaurants and having their local friends repeating the nonsensical talking points they heard that day so they find themselves repeating it as well. I want to make sure that when they log into Facebook as they’re sitting down to watch Modern Family that they see there are compassionate people out there making the argument for civilized society (even if it’s from all the way across the country). Those are the people you’re really trying to convince.

This is reminding me of that fucking Facebook group - or poll, wev - that said “make drug tests mandatory for welfare recipients”.  I was so ashamed of how many members of my white, privileged, reichwing (but mostly alcoholic) middle-class family - NONE of whom have ever been in a situation where they needed assistance - piled with agreement and lots of exclamation points. 

I asked how is stripping sick and potentially desperate people of their possible ONE source of income going to help?  Wouldn’t they then be forced into further criminal activity?  Being an addict can kinda make keeping a job impossible. 

I got shouted down to shut up and accused of all sorts of horrible wrongs like “caring about those [racial slurs] and [ableist slurs]”.

And suddenly, I felt the need to clean up my “friends” list.

I was once a grocery store check out girl who has seen people in fur buying food with food stamps personally.  However, having actually TALKED to said person as well, I knew that the coat was the one thing inherited from a beloved grandmother that they hadn’t (yet) sold for bill money and she liked to wear it to church, which is where her grandmother wore it.

The audacity of that woman wearing something that once belonged to her grandmother and being poor at the same time!

In many cases, the Reply all option is better—-it will shame many people out of forwarding the lie.

Actually, in my experience the main result is that I don’t get sent those bullshit emails b/c they don’t like being embarassed in front of all their friends—but several of my family members have confirmed that they still get them and forward them to other people.

Eh I only find this to be true ~40% of the time. An awful lot of people clinging to the “it’s a myth!” are doing so only as a cover—to themselves as much as to others—for their intense desire to do absolutely nothing about it. And then you have that cohort of people who actively want to destroy the earth so as to bring Jeebus back.

Oh, I’ve run into idiots saying “It’s inevitable and the scientists say the effects will last for thousands of years, so why should we do anything?”

I gave an analogy of stamping on the brakes when you’re going to crash even if they won’t stop you crashing.  But I think in metaphor and analogy more than most people, and wingnuts have real problems with analogies.

“And then you have that cohort of people who actively want to destroy the earth so as to bring Jeebus back.”

Thus sayeth the Lord your God: When the last sporting utility vehicle is used to go to the place where the last tree dwells; and the last portion of spirits made from the mysterious black oil that comes from under the Earth’s soil is used to power the last chain-sawing machine, which shall be used to cut that tree from the Earth; and the wood of that last tree is used to make the last fire, which shall be used to prepare a meal of the last whale; only then will I return to assume My rightful place as your Savior.  Amen…

That’s not a friend of a friend story, I could give you the full name and address (I wouldn’t, obviously, but I just mean to emphasize that I am not making him up) of a drug dealer I know who drives luxury rental cars everywhere and has himself and his numorous children and their mothers on medicaid and other social programs. 
Comment #10: GumbyAnne on 03/03 at 11:56 AM

Apparently something similar is the case with Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, too.

The thing is, there are so many alternate explanations.  There’s a saying going around in emails that is something like:  any person you see may be going through some kind of hell.  Judging people on their outer circumstances is inhumane.

I like the idea of making our own stories.  I might spend some time doing that.

I’m starting to encounter rightists who consider Snopes an unreliable source, so citing them may or may not work.
Comment #16: Angelia Sparrow on 03/03 at 12:20 PM

I encounter myths with “verified by Snopes!”—and a link that goes to a Snopes page that says the story is not verified at all.

Just another follow up on the “reply all” - I don’t just post the url, because they won’t open it.  If at all possible, I try to post the entire relevant portion - really great when there’s a photo that disproves - when I was sent “Obama put up Arabic symbol curtains” photo of GWB in front of ECACT SAME curtains did wonders.  The free for all that ensued was pretty cool - especially when someone else pointed out how racist it was to promulgate such stuff, and what a bad example to set for kids - that it was OK to lie.
Comment #57: phylosopher on 03/03 at 02:56 PM

Snopes has copy and paste disabled.  Yes, you can get around it, but most people don’t know how.

However, I do have one observation.  Whenever ‘shaming” as a behavior modification strategy has been brought up in the past, it’s been shot down.  But now it’s being advocated - is there a difference in what the shaming is about, or who is being shamed, or…?

You can shame and blame the person who wrote the story rather than the one sending it around.  “Looks like someone’s been lying to you, shame on them,” in other words.

This is reminding me of that fucking Facebook group - or poll, wev - that said “make drug tests mandatory for welfare recipients”.

I generally respond with “why not make drug tests mandatory for people who get tax benefits from claiming dependents or home ownership or medical expenses” since it’s pretty much the same thing.  How can they argue that they shouldn’t be drug tested if they have children and get a tax break out of it?  Shouldn’t people who take care of children be drug-free and shouldn’t we make them prove it?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much being outspoken in debates online has changed other people’s minds. I’ve received countless pm’s and emails over the years about people thanking me for opening their eyes on some subject. Some came from Pandagon readers in fact.

This is why you argue in public. There’s not much point to argue with wingnuts in your private message box because most of them don’t really care about getting to the truth. But in public you get all sorts of third parties watching on and they can certainly change their minds because they’re not invested in a given position.

More importantly, when people don’t argue and only one set of loudmouths are out there, it has a chilling effect in that some people think they’re abnormal for having certain positions when in fact many people share their opinions. Shattering the bubble some people live in is often valuable.

“Shouldn’t people who take care of children be drug-free and shouldn’t we make them prove it?”

Not that I think this, just poking at that assumption that poor people must be totally abstemious in every way.

“Just another follow up on the “reply all” - I don’t just post the url, because they won’t open it.”

I had to do this when I received a Youtube clip of some redneck song called “I won’t press 1 for english” (or something like that) frowarded from my mom. I “replied to all” with “This Land Is Your Land”. Since it is well known that I am a “Capital L Liberal” among my family & friends, I embedded the video instead of just pasting the link. Since it made it easier for them to watch it, I got a lot more positive replies.

Amanda, I get what you’re saying and in daily life I kind of practice it; mostly by speaking up and calling people out and that sort of thing. But it’s more because I can’t think of any other way to live with my concience, not because I find the “the lurkers will secretly agree with me” argument. In fact, like Geocrckr in #60, I find that reply-to-all with Snopes refutations gets me dropped off mailing lists, and attacked 1 to 1 as somebody who “doesn’t care about this serious issue”, or de friended on social netwroks and such like. I’m sure a case can be made for me just not using this tool kit in the “right” way, but I have no patience for tone arguments, so that gets me nowhere…

Oldfeminist - I like that reply.  It fits in nicely with another that I saw, basically that we should do the same for any getting a driver’s license.  Because, you know, someone driving a car high/drunk can do real physical harm to people. 

The response was, predictably, that such a suggestion intrudes on “good” people’s rights and how dare you. 

So, basically, helping someone in need who happens to have an addiction problem is BADBAD, but allowing a person with an addiction problem to get a license to operate a motor vehicle is totally fine - as long as they’re not poor, of course. Non-poor addicts should be allowed to be such in peace!  Or something. 

Funny how, once a restriction can be applied more generally and it then could encompass a wingnut, suddenly THEN its bad.

The idea of a medicaid recipient with a BMW is just an updated version of the welfare mom driving a cadillac.  I can’t imagine it’s about any specific person at all, and trying to find examples of reasons why someone would have a BMW and be on medicaid is a lot of effort to prove nothing to no one who has a problem with medicaid.  Well, a problem other than that it’s too hard to get on, which is my problem with it (I know too many people who’ve been denied and really need health care).

What Barbour wants you to believe—-that this is a rich person making payments on a brand new Beamer—-is far less likely, since you have to be making below a certain amount to qualify for Medicaid.

For some reason this never occurred to me. Maybe since Repubs don’t seem to have a problem with rich people or rich people who do criminal things. I always thought that it was a dig at lower middle class and poor people. The assumption being that they don’t deserve any help because they obviously can’t be trusted to handle their own finances. Plus, they’re stupid and lazy (on top of untrustworthy).

If you’ve ever bought a used car on credit, you’d know that the moment you drove it off the lot, you’ll never get enough money from selling it to cover your loan, until the loan is paid for.  At that point, you can either stop paying for it (and have a huge debt you have to fight) or sell it (and have a huge debt you have to fight).

The “drug test people on welfare” issue is one the dems are going to lose because bleeding heart liberal that I am, I can see the use for it. Anyone who lives in a high-welfare area is going to see the effects of meth and other drugs on the poor and the way the cyclical nature of welfare dependence creating multiple generations of people relying on government aid to survive. The left/right breakdown on the issue depends on whether or not you actually want to help people or just cut them loose and let them drown, but just about everyone I know in my lefty liberal enclave knows that the problem isn’t welfare recipients smoking weed: it’s welfare recipients using meth. Huge difference in impact to the community between those drugs.

The “well-dressed older couple shopping at Whole Foods with an EBT card” is a popular meme these days. I try to point out that losing your job does not mean you have to replace your wardrobe, and that older people have a hard time replacing their previous salaries even if they can get hired at all. (The market value of used clothes, furniture, etc. is quite small.)

As for BMW, one of my son’s preschool friend’s parents had a BMW b/c they were not American citizens.  She was from Venezuela, and he was from Germany.  The only car company that would check their international credit rating was BMW.  It was more expensive than they wanted, and they wouldn’t have chosen it otherwise, but it was the only new car they could finance.

And here I always wondered why it was the most popular car among H1-B holders and their families in the Bay Area.  I figured they were professionals and could afford it, and wanted a piece of luxury and safety - and generally wanted something more achievable than a house.

Hector B—but the the tax break value is huge, and you can only claim items in very good or better condition. So the “well-dressed older couple” thing doesn’t really hold water: when you could deduct over a grand from your taxes by cleaning out your closet so long as the clothes aren’t ripped or stained, there’s an incentive to do that.

As for shopping whole foods with an EBT card, that’s harder for me to square with because whole foods is such a ripoff. But I wonder how much of that meme is people using “whole foods” to describe any supermarket that has a good fresh produce section.

“So the “well-dressed older couple” thing doesn’t really hold water: when you could deduct over a grand from your taxes by cleaning out your closet so long as the clothes aren’t ripped or stained, there’s an incentive to do that.”

You’re confusing tax credit with tax deduction:  “A tax credit lowers your tax bill dollar for dollar. A deduction shaves money off your taxable income”  http://www.kiplinger.com/columns/ask/archive/2007/q0319.htm#ixzz1FZRyWV00

So, if you’re unemployed, your income is probably low enough that you’re not paying taxes anyway, so the deduction means nothing. 

And then are you supposed to give away all your clothes and then go naked?  Or now go to Wal*Mart and buy crap that won’t hold up, instead of the clothing that you already have, that already fits, that you don’t have to drive or bus or walk to get? 

You have to wear something.

So the “well-dressed older couple” thing doesn’t really hold water: when you could deduct over a grand from your taxes by cleaning out your closet so long as the clothes aren’t ripped or stained, there’s an incentive to do that.

Are you…being serious? Poor elderly people should not get to keep their own clothes, and should in fact walk around in rags (the ripped and stained things they can’t donate…). To get a break on taxes they probably barely need because if they have no income, shockingly they pay very little income tax. (The freeloaders!)

Yeah.

That’s not fucking disgusting or nothin’. Nope, not at all.

p.s. Also, you need nice clothes (or even more than one nice outfit!) to get (or work at) most jobs. Maybe they’re dressed nicely because they had interviews or because they work a part-time temp gig. Or maybe they just like dignity or something.

oldfeminist—I think you misinterpreted what I was saying, which, looking back at that trainwreck of a comment is understandable. I’m saying that people who aren’t in desperate straights are going to clean out their closets to get that fat tax deduction, which is going to result in a lot of ‘nice’ clothing in the second-hand shops where people who are in desperate straights are going to be able to pick them up for cheap. So yeah, you can’t hold water in the idea that people who are poor should dress shabbily.

Mighty ponygirl @74, please clarify. Are you saying that it is ok to test welfare recipients for drugs? What do you propose should be done if they test positive? Are we then supposed to cut off their benefits forcing them into an even deeper spiral? I agree that meth is a far worse drug than pot, but I cannot see the benefit of denying an addict basics like food. That is exactly the same thing as leaving them to die—what the wingnuts who thought up this inhumane idea want to do.

Love it gumbyanne!

If what you meant was that the poor couple bought their nice clothes at a thrift store, which had them thanks to tax-deductible donations by the wealthy…then yeah, that comment was one hell of a trainwreck.

oldfeminist—I think you misinterpreted what I was saying, which, looking back at that trainwreck of a comment is understandable. I’m saying that people who aren’t in desperate straights are going to clean out their closets to get that fat tax deduction, which is going to result in a lot of ‘nice’ clothing in the second-hand shops where people who are in desperate straights are going to be able to pick them up for cheap. So yeah, you can’t hold water in the idea that people who are poor should dress shabbily.
Comment #80: Mighty Ponygirl on 03/03 at 04:42 PM

You’re right, I misunderstood.  Apologies.

Snopes has copy and paste disabled.  Yes, you can get around it, but most people don’t know how.

For Mozilla Foxfire, it’s Edit—>Select All—>Copy

then Paste to put somewhere else.

Comment #30: catgirl on 03/03 at 12:52 PM

And this is where the conservative mindset is different.  They’d rather let 99 poor people starve than to see even one person gaming the system.  In the progressive mindset, it’s definitely worth it to help 99 people at the expense of letting one person go unpunished.

Yeah.

Comment #48: paul on 03/03 at 01:47 PM

I think that ultimately the “conservative” way is about class-based judgment rather than anything else. If someone is poor or black or queer or atheist (heaven forfend some kind of trifecta) then they’re a bad person, and any bad thing that happens to them is just what they had coming to them. Any bad actions by a member of the class reflect on that class. But If someone is a rich white christian, they’re basically good, and don’t deserve to have their lives ruined by some uncharacteristic bad action. Much less by people generalizing the bad actions of a few thousand other members of their class to suggest that their whole group is anything but special.

I remember once reading through a bunch of Ann Coulter columns to work out for myself what was different about her compared to other wingnut commentators, and basically, she’s one of the most remarkable examples of this sort of reasoning: “We are good, therefore, whatever we do is always good; they are bad, thus whatever they do is always bad.”  Yeah, instead of judging the goodness of evilness of persons based on their actions, they judge the evil or good of actions based on the persons who commit them.  If “we” invade Afghanistan, kill all the men and convert the women and children to Christianity, that is good because “we” did it; if Muslims do that to “us”, it’s bad because they did it to “us.”

Comment #55: libdevil on 03/03 at 02:38 PM

They absolutely do not want poor people, or criminals, or anybody but themselves, really, to have any pleasure.  Even the most basic pleasure of fucking.  The attacks on reproductive healthcare and even access or legality or such is the most pure evidence of that you can find.  Poor people are so unworthy that they don’t even deserve to fuck.

Well, often they do not want anybody to have any pleasure, including themselves—which doesn’t actually prevent them from compulsively indulging in pleasure secretly, which makes them secretly ashamed of themselves and angry, and that in turn further feeds their insistence that nobody ever have any fun…

Comment #65: oldfeminist on 03/03 at 03:59 PM

I encounter myths with “verified by Snopes!”—and a link that goes to a Snopes page that says the story is not verified at all.

Heh, that’s straight out of Advanced Trolling 101—deliberately making serious errors in an off-hand fashion.  There’s two possible effects on marks: (a) they don’t check the linked source to notice the contradiction, in which case they look like fools, (b) they check the linked source, notice that it contradicts the troll, and then go off the rails with anger at the troll.  (Who of course, is now forced to come up with a creative way to respond that the link does say what s/he originally said it does!)

The only way to win, of course, is not to feed the troll.

Usually I just ask why they havent reported the fraud they witness.

This too!  I felt this way when Christine O’Donnell claimed that she had seen child sacrifices.  Since she never reported them, then she’s either lying or morally repugnant, or both.

serious bette—which is why I said that the difference between liberal and conservative is the desire to help rather than to let drown.

I live in a town with a lot of welfare recipients. These are not people who have stumbled and need a hand while they get back on their feet: they are in it for life. A lot of them are addicted to meth, their kids are parents by the time they’re 15, and the cycle continues. The system isn’t working. We need better training, better childcare, better job opportunities, but we also need to help people if they’re addicted to a drug like meth or heroin or even prescriptions.

MPG: Sure but I don’t see how testing comes into it. Having resources to get poor people off destructive drugs is one thing, having welfare recipients mandatorily tested is another. What’s the benefit of the test? I could maybe see if it was very rigourously controlled to be anonymous, for statistics purpose (you can better tailor prevention programs if you know if they’re effective). I feel it has some problematic implications if not done *very* carefully though.

I can also see the benefit if you are advocating mandatory rehab for welfare recipients who fail, which i feel is abhorent (my experience with addicts is that mandatory rehab is worthless… it’s already hard enough for them to cut it off when they want to do it, when they have zero desire to do so except that the state is forcing them to do so so they can eat I can expect the results will be crap).

Mighty Ponygirl, what type of welfare lasts for generations?  TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), the standard form of cash welfare, only lasts up to 5 years depending on the state.  And that’s not per kid, that’s for life.  Food stamps also don’t last forever, and even if they did, one can’t survive solely on food stamps.  Social Security Disability is the only type of welfare that I know that lasts longer than a few years, but that’s not something you get on by having a kid at 15.  So what do the welfare recipients in your town do?

I agree that we need to help people if they’re addicted to drugs, but drug testing welfare recipients doesn’t give them help.  There’s very little help in the system for drug addicts.  Sometimes someone can find drug treatment in jail and get clean and stay clean, but most of the time they just get dropped off in their same old neighborhood with a criminal record blocking most jobs and they go back to the same.  Once we have a system in place that helps drug addicts then I’ll talk about drug testing welfare recipients or anyone else.

What BlackBloc said, that was the point I was trying to make. I agree with MPG about the need for increased services to addicts and their families to stop the cycle of addiction, but I know that ain’t gonna happen as long as republicans have a breath left in their sociopathic bodies. Therefore, I see no validity whatsoever in wasting money on drug tests for welfare recipients when that money would be much better spent on things that actually work and decrease poverty like contraception, improved health care, education, access to healthier food, etc., etc.

I felt this way when Christine O’Donnell claimed that she had seen child sacrifices.

Yes, urban legends are a conservatives-only problem.  Uh-huh.

It’s difficult to explain it artfully because you see the system failing, you see the misery that it’s causing, and the destruction it is doing to your community (not just to the people who are addicted, but their neglected children, and the crime that comes from people needing more cash to pay for their spiraling addiction). The answer is not “testing” as I said. It is job training, it is child care, it is job opportunities that pay a living wage, and yes, it’s drug testing. You can’t just implement one of those things and expect it to work at all, which is why I wouldn’t sign up for that facebook group even if I did belong to facebook—because they’re solution is just to yank benefits away from people who are addicted, rather than taking the time to resolve the issue. And while I recognize that people have to pay money for stuff they don’t “approve of” all the time, I think it’s a lot harder of a sell when you’re paying money into a broken system and the product of its broken-ness is breaking into your car or harassing your kids while they walk home from school.  But if someone like me could see the merits in “drug test people on welfare” even if my higher brain takes the time to think it through beyond “kick the drugged-up freeloaders to the curb,” then I can guarantee that it’s not an argument liberals can win to say we shouldn’t. Which was my point: not that we should immediately implement my policy.

My favorite is a story that circulates about a baby being born holding an IUD.

Could this really not happen? I heard this story, and the context in which I heard it was a discussion on a midwifery blog about various ways IUDs had come out with babies (in women who opted not to get it pulled when they become pregnant - leaving it in and taking it out both have certain risks). It wasn’t remotely some sort of anti-choice talking point. No one - out of a group that is pretty educated about reproductive health - challenged it or said it couldn’t happen. But if you get pregnant with an IUD, then it’s just kind of floating around in there, and babies do grab onto things that are floating around in there. It’s strikes me as unlikely but not impossible.

The question regarding drug-testing, with welfare/foodstamp/etc. recipients or, really, any other situation, is what will change when you find out someone is an addict/drunk/pothead? 

If it’s your job, they may fire you, or demand you go into a treatment program to get clean.  But if you’re already on the bottom rungs of society, there isn’t that much more to fall.

Will you kick them out of whatever welfare/foodstamp/etc. program they were in before? If you kick them out and they turn to dealing and robbery to stay alive, have you made any progress in ending the addiction problem? 

Do you give them the treatment they need?  If so, how do we shutdown the whiners at the top of the social ladder who don’t want to spend (what would be pocket change to them) to fix a problem that doesn’t necessarily affect them directly?  (...until their house is robbed to pay for somebody’s habit…)

Mighty Ponygirl:

The answer is not “testing” as I said. It is job training, it is child care, it is job opportunities that pay a living wage, and yes, it’s drug testing. You can’t just implement one of those things and expect it to work at all

Job opportunities solve the problem of lack of money, child care solves the problem of how to work and raise children, but drug testing doesn’t solve the problem of addiction.  What comes after the testing?  Jail?  Loss of benefits?  Forced rehab - which doesn’t always work if it’s being forced.  So how does testing fit into the solution?

We need to figure out a comprehensive solution to help people who are addicted, and it’s not forced rehab.  It’s free rehab for those who seek it out, and solutions to make sure that if they need inpatient rehab they don’t lose their kids to foster care.  And yes, the solution needs help for people who can’t give up the addiction yet.  I was reading about a clinic in Toronto where addicts can go to get clean needles and get high without worrying about overdosing (because there are doctors there) and when they’re ready, they have rehab treatment there.  We need things like that here.  Because people are still people even if they have an addiction and even if they don’t want to give it up.

catgirl @30 - you’re 100% right.  Pretty much that exact argument came from the mouth of an uber conservative religious woman I used to work with in her argument against the public option in the healthcare bill.  She just kept saying variants of “it will be too easy for people to lie” etc etc.

When I asked if that was a reason to let honest people go without healthcare, suffer without medication or treatment, what about children, etc.  - I got a blank stare.  I could see the wheels turning, but then she started babbling about how her parents were totally taken care of on Medicare so what’s the problem.

Whenever ‘shaming” as a behavior modification strategy has been brought up in the past, it’s been shot down.  But now it’s being advocated - is there a difference in what the shaming is about, or who is being shamed, or…?

I like oldfeminist’s reply, but also, I think shame can be an appropriate feeling for someone who has done something wrong. Lying is wrong, promulgating misinformation that harms people is wrong, believing that it’s okay for poor people to suffer and die is wrong.

I object to the practice of attaching shame to non-wrong practices (like eating food that tastes good to us, or having active sex lives, or being fat) both because there’s no reason someone should suffer shame when they haven’t harmed anyone, but because people often tend to *know* when they haven’t harmed anyone and they resist feeling that shame and push back against it, which makes artificial shame as a behavior modification strategy not very effective.

Or you could skip past all that ooky rambling crap and think of it as embarrassment, not shame, with the target of getting assholes to shut the fuck up.

And Mighty Ponygirl, let me ask again.  What is the type of welfare that lasts generations?

While Mighty Ponygirl isn’t answering, I will.  The type of welfare that lasts for generations is the type that Bill Clinton killed in the 90s.  She is full of bullshit.

@serious_bette #18:

...a wingnut argued that a friend of a friend was denied admission to UM in favor of a less deserving black candidate.

Because the FOAF got a letter from the Admissions Committee saying, “Dear Applicant, we regret to inform you that your application for admission to UoM has been rejected in favor of a less deserving black candidate.”

WTF? How could the FOAF possibly know the specific reason he or she wasn’t admitted? They don’t tell you who took “your” place. It’s a ridiculous assertion on its face.

marle—I think that having both positive and negative incentives regarding drug use should be used. Incentives to stay off drugs by getting a bump in benefits and maybe an extension of benefits would be good, but it won’t happen. You’re never going to convince people in this country to do the hard thing with welfare and spend more money and radically update the structures in place that set people up to fail. Asking me to really explain and clarify my position on Welfare is sort of an exercise in futility, because I promise you that my plan will never be on any government official’s desk, because it’s too bleeding-heart. It will never be policy, it will never matter to one single person on this planet that I have thought about these things. The people who are going to win are the people who want a simple “drug test them and kick them off welfare if they fail” because they’re appealing to people’s simplistic impulses.

marle—at the federal level, yes. At the state level, not so much. I live in a state with a VERY generous social safety net.

What state gives welfare benefits indefinitely?  Also, addiction can’t be controlled by giving someone money.  It’s a physical need, and if someone feels they need to get high they’re not even going to be thinking about their check next month.

marle—it may be that I am seeing people on social security/disability and conflating that with welfare. It may be that they have been kicked off of welfare and are now making ends meet by selling drugs. In any event, it’s not a good situation.

You can’t control someone’s addiction by giving them money, but hopefully you could give them the incentive to go into treatment. I’m really not comfortable just writing people off. When it comes down to it, you can’t save people from themselves, but the system we have is not helping people much at all.

WTF? How could the FOAF possibly know the specific reason he or she wasn’t admitted? They don’t tell you who took “your” place. It’s a ridiculous assertion on its face.

i, The FOAF was rejected from UM.

ii, A black was accepted by UM.

There you go!

(Don’t question the unspoken assumption summed up in the term “less deserving” whatever you do, or you may insult the FOAF)

Social Security Disability is a little different than other forms of welfare.  It’s basically impossible to get on if you don’t have a serious problem.  I guess you can always exaggerate an injury, but even then it takes years to get on and tons of information from doctors, and in some situations I’ve seen, naming someone else to handle all your finances.  My husband’s family comes from a very poor area where they actually look at getting on disability as a good thing, but it’s not like his old neighborhood has tons of disability recipients because it’s just so hard to get on.

The main problem with disability is that you can’t try and see if you can work if you get better.  You work and you pretty much lose your benefits, including medicare (comes with disability) and you might not be able to work without the health insurance at all.  If we had a different model for disability other than disabled for life, then maybe some people could transition off of it or work part time with reduced benefits or even just medicare (or we could have universal health care).  But we don’t, so people stay on it for life because they can’t live without it.

If your neighbors are drug dealers and not on welfare, then you really can’t use them as examples for welfare reform.  Also, how do you know they’re not working legitimate jobs?  I work from home and I’m sure my neighbors think I’m a housewife (white and suburban) though I’m the breadwinner for the family.  Do you watch your neighbors all the time?  How do you know they don’t drive away in the morning in time for a 9-5 job that they’re not walking to walmart for the overnight shift or any one of a number of possibilities?

Back on the drug testing, people who are addicted to drugs can destroy their lives before even realizing what the hell they’re doing.  Cutting off welfare benefits, or offering more, is not going to stop them.  You need a much more comprehensive plan.  Once you have a comprehensive plan, then figure out what drug testing will do for it.  But drug testing by itself will help no one.

GumbyAnne, your drug dealing friend to the contrary, you’re mostly incorrect. A few high-rolling drug dealers might make enough to lease a luxury car (how did he pass the employment check, btw?) but most drug dealers make around eight bucks an hour. The real-life inner city is nothing like a rap video.

I am not an expert on welfare but a friend of mine used to be a welfare case worker in MN and apparently here there are rules about how many years you can receive benefits but there are special classifications for people that get them exceptions from that. The example I remember is that people would get exceptions if they had dependents but also a criminal history so full of repeat felonies that finding employment would be totally impossible. It is basically that the state talks tough but doesn’t have the heart to actually follow through.

@katydid, He doesn’t lease the car, he actually rents a variety of cars for short periods of time. And I am well aware that most people in the drug trade do not make much money. I am not claiming that his case represents the majority of Medicaid patients or the majority of drug dealers, just that people like that do exist and we damage our credibility when we base too much of our argument on “nobody/almost nobody on Medicaid could possibly be using it when that don’t need it” or we disregard the way those types of anecdotes have emotional power that works in conservatives favor. That’s why I advocate approach #3 in this particular argument because we can be realistic in acknowledging that fraud exists and defend the system at the same time.

The welfare reform that went in under Clinton left a lot of control to the states, but it does enforce some things, like a lifetime maximum of 5 years on welfare.  This is of course for cash assistance through the TANF program, not food stamps or medicaid or disability.  It is impossible to receive cash benefits for the majority of your adult life simply for being poor.  GumbyAnne, it’s possible that your state normally has limits of 2 years or so, and then exceptions for up to 5.  The states can’t give out welfare for longer than 5 years, and states can barely afford welfare as it is so they can’t afford to override the maximum if they wanted to try. 

As for people on medicaid who don’t need it, everyone needs health care.  Getting health care in America if your employer doesn’t provide it is almost always cost-prohibitive, so I will confidently say that EVERYONE on medicaid needs it.

But drug testing by itself will help no one.

Which I have categorically, and repeatedly, said I am not in favor of. I understand that the internet isn’t a great place to discuss nuance, but there was never any point where I said “if only we could drug test people on welfare, it would solve everything!”

You didn’t say that it would solve everything, but you didn’t really go into details about what would solve problems.  At first you just brought up drug testing, and then finally you expanded that to include increasing benefits for staying off drugs and/or decreasing/eliminating benefits for staying on them.  But that’s not enough to solve the problems.  Money incentives alone are not enough to get people off drugs, and the cost of testing everyone on welfare on a regular basis cannot be insignificant.  I’d rather my tax dollars go to the poor than more bureaucracy.

Chareth, my aunt has been on SSI for years, but since she had no prescription coverage for years and still has no dental coverage (even though brittle teeth are a side effect of her meds), the only way she could make ends meet for years was to live with my parents.  Her credit card debt alone eats her entire SSI check.

Again, my point wasn’t that I had some magic solution.

My point was that if a bleeding heart like me could still see the value in the theory (even if I couldn’t condone the practice as it would be implemented in our current culture), it’s a lost argument.

chingona : In order for a baby to be born holding an IUD, it’s either have to get inside the amniotic sack with them, or they’d have to grab a handful of amniotic membrane with the IUD on the other side. Possible, but not really that likely.

Or grab it after the membranes rupture.

I definitely agree that it’s pretty unlikely.

However ... I found a snopes message board thread on this topic and one of the official snopesters said that SHE was born holding her mom’s IUD. FWIW.

I am a long time lurker, and am the child of a (then) 15-year old welfare recipient who would have failed the drug tests.  An argument to extend benefits as a reward for passing a drug test means that you will literally decide to let drug users starve after a certain amount of time.  The ‘worthy’ poor people are rewarded by generously being allowed to eat longer under a plan like that.

It’s really weird to read people writing about the situation as an intellectual case study.  I am glad that some people never had to actually experience it so that they’d have to think about it for real.  (Not being sarcastic.)

But the ‘magic solution’ is just to feed everybody.  I think it’s not that complicated.  Maybe it’s not so obvious from the outside, if you would have higher taxes if everyone was fed?  Then maybe it seems reasonable to decide that the people who pass their drug tests can get an extra treat for being good and obedient and doing poverty right.  There’s probably an attraction in the power of being the one who gets to judge and to hand out the treats.  Because if you could bludgeon someone into living their life *right* under threat of death, isn’t that best?  The alternative is accepting that some people are going to live their life *wrong* and feeding them anyway.

GumbyAnne: in general, the state has the heart to carry through.  No matter what your friend said.

I am not claiming that his case represents the majority of Medicaid patients or the majority of drug dealers, just that people like that do exist and we damage our credibility when we base too much of our argument on “nobody/almost nobody on Medicaid could possibly be using it when that don’t need it” or we disregard the way those types of anecdotes have emotional power that works in conservatives favor.

Why do you offer a confirmatory stereotypical anecdote, then, instead of one with equal emotional power but far more legitimacy and commonality? For example, my friend Angela, who was on welfare for a few years while her kids were growing up and has consistently received state social aid in other forms. She did that because her ex-husband was an abusive asshole who never paid his child support and one of her daughters had a genetic condition that deteriorated over time, sometimes needing constant care. She drove a shitty car (when she had one), lived in a section 8 apartment, and scrounged for groceries and worked minimum wage jobs like she was forced to to keep her benefits.  She also played by the rules, never did drugs or drank, took advantage of the educational opportunities that were offered, got a nursing degree. Now she’s got a god job and doesn’t have to rely on the state anymore, and her kids are going to college. There you go - a heartwarming, emotional anecdote that shows how good welfare and other social safety nets can be to some people and for society on the whole, instead of confirming the tired old welfare queen stereotype.

And also? Renting a car, even a luxury car, is not medicaid fraud. It might not be the best use of limited funds, but it’s not fraud by any stretch. If fiscal irresponsibility were a crime, we’d have to imprison the entire middle class, most of whom have spent the last 30 years living increasingly beyond their means.

On the topic of babies born with IUDs, why does it matter?  Does it just really creep out pro-lifers or something?

I have to believe that if you get pregnant and you still have your IUD in, the doctors would do something to get it out (pre-natal surgery or whatevs). I’m sure during the early part of pregnancy it’s not as critical but in the last trimester things get pretty cramped in that womb and having a piece of plastic poking into the side of the fetus can’t be good for it.

But more to your question, I think that anti-choicers have imbued the fetus with such angry, self-preserving consciousness (from the billboards where the fetus implores “mommy, don’t!” and their oft-heard declaration of “what would YOU think if YOU were aborted!”) that they’ll look at a baby emerging from a womb clutching an IUD as a rebuke from the newborn to its mother: “I’m on to you woman. You didn’t really want me, but here I am. And god dammit I’m going to be magical, and here’s your fucking birth control back, BITCH. Lot of good it did you!”

MP, they just take it out - it’s not really a surgery. The issue is that taking it out carries an increased risk of miscarriage, and some women decide they’d rather not risk it. Leaving it in carries an increased risk of infection, so depending on how the woman feels about the various risks and how she feels about continuing the pregnancy, she may or may not have it taken out.  Doctors tend to vary, as well, in how they feel about the various risks, and hence in what recommendations they make.

When it stays in, it usually comes out with the placenta.

Here’s a link with a picture: http://navelgazingmidwife.squarespace.com/navelgazing-midwife-blog/2010/4/8/iud-in-a-placenta.html

That’s also the thread where I read the story about a baby being born holding the IUD - the poster claimed her husband was born that way. As you can see from the context, it’s more of a “How crazy is that?” story than some sort of right-wing talking point, which probably why I don’t have much invested in debunking it. To me, that women get pregnant on the IUD is about as remarkable as the fact that women get pregnant on the pill. Hell, I once met a woman who got pregnant 8 years after having her tubes tied. So what?

That it would be outside the amniotic sac (which I didn’t think of, but is, of course, absolutely correct) would make it a lot less likely that the baby would grab it, but the sac can break a day or two before a baby is born, so I think it wouldn’t be totally impossible. I wonder, though, if most of the stories are more of a joke (made when the IUD comes out with the baby, but not necessarily IN ITS HAND) that gets taken too literally.

chin—that’s what I thought—if you did anything to remove it cervically, it would probably increase the risk of miscarriage, so I figured going in surgically might be safer in that regard.

The anti-choicers really latch onto the “baby is holding the IUD.” It’s not enough to have the IUD coming out with the placenta, the fetus has to interract with the IUD as a means of shaming the mother for trying to prevent such an obvious miracle.

Hmm ... I’m not an expert, but I’ve never heard of them going in surgically, and I think cutting into the uterus is also something they’d want to avoid in pregnancy. The only cases I’ve heard of surgery are when the IUD is embedded in the uterine wall, and those surgeries were done AFTER the woman miscarried because going in during the pregnancy was seen as too risky (again, not an expert here - most of these come from message boards I read while researching the IUD, as I’m the only person I know in RL who has one and I’ve never had so much as a scare with mine).

As for anti-choicers, I can see them interpreting it that way, but that’s pretty dumb. Which I guess is the point of this whole post and thread, but still, pretty dumb.

On the topic of welfare fraud, I once saw a young candidate for the US House, at the event where he first announced his candidacy, totally flummoxed by an unfriendly confronting him with a just-so story of welfare cheats. He stammered, he was like “well well we have to prevent that but…” It was so disappointing. I wish he had been prepared for it with exactly the toolbox you describe here.
Comment 47—Cris

A politician may well feel being upfront like that is secondary to not looking dismissive of voters’ concerns, however tinfoil-hat or transparently bullshit those concerns are, and I suspect a lot believe it’s their job to do what the voters want, not tell the voters they’re wrong. Not everyone is Barney Frank.

Usually I just ask why they havent reported the fraud they witness.
Comment 51—Shiloruh

“I did, but it’s a drop in the bucket”/“Why should I, the socialist Obama-ist authorities would ignore me, they’d probably put me in jail, you’re not allowed to complain about black people anymore.”

Thus sayeth the Lord your God: When the last sporting utility vehicle is used to go to the place where the last tree dwells; and the last portion of spirits made from the mysterious black oil that comes from under the Earth’s soil is used to power the last chain-sawing machine, which shall be used to cut that tree from the Earth; and the wood of that last tree is used to make the last fire, which shall be used to prepare a meal of the last whale; only then will I return to assume My rightful place as your Savior.
Comment 62—MikeEss

What if we don’t run out of all these things at the same time?

trying to find examples of reasons why someone would have a BMW and be on medicaid is a lot of effort to prove nothing to no one who has a problem with medicaid.  Well, a problem other than that it’s too hard to get on, which is my problem with it (I know too many people who’ve been denied and really need health care).
Comment 71—marle

And stories like this are the reason. The voters believe there’s aid going to people who don’t really need it, so the agencies have to strengthen the safeguards against people getting it who don’t need it, which makes it difficult for people who do need it to even apply, and maks it likely they’ll be rejected when they do.

Heh. And I’m someone who every social worker I’ve spoken with agrees *should* be on SSDI…if I only had the work credits. To the point where when I had my interview, the social worker asked for not only the dollar amount for last year on my w-2, but the cents (the tiny amount that it was—a bit of temp work between flares).

She poked and prodded my entire work history, which isn’t much, sighed, and moved me on to SSI. She was apologetic. Apparently I was just short. If only my ex had allowed me to work a few more hours before the fibro got bad, before he added to my PTSD, hadn’t pushed me to have kids right away…