Speaking of Drug War ... one of Britain’s top researchers was ousted from his advisory position because he didn’t advise the government in a way that supported its foregone conclusions expressed as scientifically unsupported policy.  To wit, Dr. Nutt was dismissed because he scientifically advised the government that it’s drug classifications were not founded in reality. 

yep.

I’m not even remotely shocked, and Willis’s explanation really shows why.  The drug war is about control of people’s private lives, but no one is willing to say that out loud.  Just like the abortion wars are about control of people’s private lives, but everyone pretends it’s about fetuses.  And since the official reasons for the drug war—-the crime, the addiction, the social chaos—-are not well addressed through law enforcement, these conflicts arise.

The moralizing over how people use food stamps is ridiculous.  People get judged as wasting food stamps on frivolities for spending a couple bucks on strawberries and get called fat lazy slobs for stocking up on cheap frozen pizzas.  They even get judged for when they shop. 

Silly entitled peasants thinking they deserve to eat.

Also explains the Catholic Church’s widely ignored teaching on birth control.  You only “deserve” not to be overrun with children you can’t afford to feed if you are willing avoid your dirty urges for 7-10 days a month, more if your husband isn’t down with surfing the red tide.  It’s so obviously a teaching born in resentment and even hatred of the laity who get to have sex while the clergy don’t (or more accurately, aren’t supposed to).

Willing TO avoid.  TO avoid.  Gah!

I think this ties-in nicely with your post about the rich begrudging people ipods and video games.  If they’re REALLY poor, then they wouldn’t have those things.  Since they’re poor, they don’t deserve those things.  If they did deserve those things, they wouldn’t be poor.

This was one of your better columns, Amanda.

One of the hypocrisies or contradictions that doesn’t get addressed as often as it should, even in liberal or feminist blogs, is how the racism/classism of the right and this desire to prevent pleasure work at cross purposes. Imagine being one of these righteous peepers: on one hand, making abortion shameful and nearly impossible for many means you get to punish the dirty sluts for having pleasure unmediated by corporate profit. But on the other hand, the lack of abortion or even contraception means more of those dirty black and poor babies. How precisely does one reconcile one’s cherished desire to eradicate the lower orders with the glow of pleasure one gets from policing their only source of fun?

Now for some conservatives, the ones more capable of complex thought, this is a win-win: they force the trash to have more babies, thus preventing them from raising any of those babies to compete with the conservatives’ own two carefully-planned children (and that abortion from college they don’t talk about, but was like totally justified). But for the tea partiers, it’s got to be real cognitive dissonance, inasmuch as they are capable of recognizing this.

The major abortion rights groups are totally worthless, though, because they continue to buy into the frame of abortion being “unfortunate” at best; whereas, if they marketed abortion as a good thing, you’d see strength of support for abortion rights rise rather precipitously after awhile.

That’s the killer thing.  Like strawberries, abortions for women who want them, if taken from a strictly pragmatic point of view, are a good thing to spend money on.  We know that those children are quite unlikely to have the advantages they need.  Sure, some will get lucky and be okay, but I trust that if a woman says now is not a good time, then she knows better than I do.  From a policy viewpoint, paying for abortion is a very good thing indeed.  It saves money, and two groups of people benefit with spending very little money: women and children, who both get a leg up. 

And that, I’d argue, is why conservatives hate it. The women most affected by abortion restrictions are those without a lot of resources to begin with, and therefore they and their children don’t “deserve” a leg up, in the conservative view.

Of course, to be clear, that middle class women will also be screwed by an abortion ban is no matter to conservatives.  Women as a class are considered second class, and therefore female pleasure is suspect in and of itself.  Same with gay people, which is why marriage is such a major issue.  I think conservatives get a viscerally angry idea at the idea of gay people having weddings that are fun and enjoying the exact same pleasure as straight people.  They want them to sneak off and have (they imagine) shameful “civil unions”.

A few months back, when my blog was still semi-active, I made a tongue-in-cheek post about how in our society you’re a leftist if you have the heretical idea that all people deserve to have food, shelter and the basic necessities of life, and a far leftist if you go further and think that people deserve good food, decent shelter and that not being bored out of your school or kept in ignorance is part of the necessities of life.

Same concept.

As anarcho-syndicalist Rudolph Rocker said, “There is nothing too good for the working class.” This bullshit has to stop.

I"m not saying I disagree with you, but I think there’s more exploitable dissonance to the point than you argue for. You could—or rather, someone could, because your previous statements on poverty &c;render you not the best messenger for this—argue that spending money on abortions now means less social spending down the road. You know as well as I do what it costs to keep a criminal in jail, or provide healthcare to someone who’s never been cared for, and so forth. There’s a lot of mileage in the service of liberal freedom of choice to be had in arguing that abortion is a good thing because it means less mess to clean up later, though of course the surface argument is odious.

Hmm. Maybe if I weren’t busy teaching my kid how to use crayons and recognize letters of the alphabet, I could set myself up as some kind of conservative gadfly, someone like Jesus’ General only more persuasive because not quite so obviously parodic.

It has to be noted though that for a subset of the culture warriors, all pleasure is suspect, cutting across all class lines (in fact that’s basically their problem with the ‘latte drinking liberal elite’). When you’re not working (as is your duty), making babies (idem) or sleeping (and just enough to have the energy to do the prior two activities), you only need one activity and it’s bible reading. If you’re having fun you’re doing the devil’s work.

They get recuperated in the class warrior’s struggle because it fits in pretty well, especially since they’re willing to let things slide as long as whoever failed to follow these simple rules ends up blaming the devil for leading them temporarily astray.

One is reminded (though this may be a slur on the historical Puritans) of Henry L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

I remember that back in the 1970s, when New York state was discussing legalizing abortion, there were full-page ads purchased in the NYTimes in which many famous women announced “I had an illegal abortion.”  I sometimes think it is time to repeat this tactic—if every woman who had an abortion was willing to give up her privacy and talk about it openly, it would not be a case of stopping “other” people from having abortions.  I am also frustrated that most media discussions with anti-abortion advocates don’t push them far enough—one of the few times I was impressed with Chris Matthews was when he kept asking one of these guys whether he wanted to put women in jail for having an abortion…

“Easily available chemical highs are the moral equivalent of welfare—-they undercut the official culture’s control of who gets rewarded for what.”

Total “lightbulb” moment. I haven’t ever seen the drug war summed up better. I used to always think the drug war was “give them drugs so they can be controlled and if they can’t, throw them in jail for possessing/selling drugs.” The above sentence is actually more correct.

Spot on Amanda.  Anything I could say other than that will only sully a very good essay.  Thanks.

Same with gay people, which is why marriage is such a major issue.  I think conservatives get a viscerally angry idea at the idea of gay people having weddings that are fun and enjoying the exact same pleasure as straight people.

This reminds me of a recent advice column I read (don’t remember which, sorry), in which Letterwriter moaned that he was generous/tolerant enough to invite some gay cousin and his partner to his kid’s wedding, but these guests had the nerve to actually get up and SLOW DANCE. With EACH OTHER. In PUBLIC. At somebody’s wedding. Where everybody else gets to slow dance. But not them! And wanted validation from the columnist to shun them for this infraction. So, yeah, I really think this nails the issue foursquare.

(I recall the columnist took the ‘there, there, it’ll be okay’ route instead of the ‘get over yourself, you moronic git’ route in response, fwiw.)

It seems like conservatism is based on the idea that if something is good for one group it must be bad for everyone else.  They also work very hard to make sure that people do in fact see the cost of what they view as irresponsible behavior.  Especially in the case of Marijuana the only way to make using it have a cost is to arrest the person, as they are probably not going to OD on it.

One is reminded (though this may be a slur on the historical Puritans) of Henry L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

I use a paraphrase of that to summarize the motivation of the teabaggers: The haunting fear that brown people might get something they want or need.

“The women most affected by abortion restrictions are those without a lot of resources to begin with, and therefore they and their children don’t “deserve” a leg up, in the conservative view.”

...after all, some of them might even get enough of a leg up that they can escape the prison of the proletariat!  And then how would you be able to tell the worthy from the unworthy?

It would be anarchy! 

(I watched the last half of My Fair Lady last night, which is completely premised on the classes being rigid and members being locked in their station…)

Speaking of proles, in 1984, sexual conduct for the proles was basically unrestricted, even to the point the government distributed porn just to keep them sated.  In contrast, Winston’s relationship with Julia was beyond the pale.  Even in Winston’s marriage-in-name-only sex was strictly for procreation, to make more Party Members whose faces could be stamped by a boot forever.

In a prescient passage, O’Brien says to Winston:
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

If IngSoc only had access to the Brave New World‘s Hatcheries…

And, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale is completely about ultimate sexual control, which, as expected, the most upper class men can and do circumvent.  Everything for the Patriarchy.

If you can control sexual desire and expression, you can control anything…

Easily available chemical highs are the moral equivalent of welfare—-they undercut the official culture’s control of who gets rewarded for what.

It’s all about economic (if not outright financial) transactions between “rational actors in the free marketplace” for conservatives. And the optimal outcome is zero-sum, preferably with the bulk of the benefit going to one party (the conservative, natch, blessed by the Sky Fairy or the Invisible Hand or ethnic background, etc.) and the bulk of the loss going to the other (the undeserving ingrate who should be thankful for the crumbs tossed his way).

(Looking at the high-school debate-club rhetoric of most conservatives, it becomes even more clear that winning, regardless of the merits of their argument, is the only thing that matters)

This is why, to give just one example, you can see the strange phenomenon of self-described “libertarian” MRAs opposing reproductive choice: because a woman having choice affects the “product” of the “economic transaction” with a man (who, y’know, bought her dinner or married her before they had sex, goddammit).

Control over others is a happy byproduct for these types, only insofar as they assume that they are and always will be on the winning side of any “transaction” by virtue of privilege.

#7 fegalund, Susan Carpenter McMillan!  The perfect archetype of the woman who has an abortion in college and then makes a living telling others they can’t have their own abortions.

What HAS happened to the dear girl?

Elizabeth51 @ 13, there was an “I Had and Abortion” campaign a few years ago, complete with buttons worn by women to put a literal face on the issue.  Some clueless right-wingers started wearing buttons that said, “I Had a Baby”, which inspired me to imagine buttons that said things like, “I Had Two Abortions, One Stillbirth and Two Live Births”.

Paying for abortion is, in conservative eyes, tantamount to agreeing that the underclasses deserve sexual pleasure.  And remember, sexual pleasure is the kind that all other pleasures get compared to.

I think that’s a bit of a stretch.  Paying for abortion, in conservative eyes, is tantamount to agreeing that the underclasses deserve medical benefits, period.  Abortion is marked as sacrosanct, because the social cons can scream “Baby Killer!” and pound the table.  But at the end of the day, no family wants an teenager daughter to get pregnant when she can’t afford to care for the child.  Abortion is supposed to be a luxury, but then so are root canals and acne treatments and colored cast bandages and chemotherapy.

The entire health care system is supposed to be reserved for those who “deserve it”.  And “deserving it” means being rich.  And since no one really thinks too hard about where their paychecks come from, we allow the latter relation to stand uncontested.

But I really don’t think the abortion restriction is tied up in sex nearly so much as it is tied up in rich-people-get-health-care-first.

Of course conservatives deny this, but their overwhelming anger at people who work hard and achieve despite being non-white or female (if they’re liberal, at least) belies this argument.

They simply tolerate successful non-white/female conservatives b/c it gives them cover from being called racist/sexist.  B/c being called racist or sexist is worse than actually being racist and sexist.

Additionally, all wanted pregnancies are perfectly healthy affairs.  No woman who actually wants a baby fails to produce a healthy infant.  No pregnancies threaten a woman’s life/health/fertility.

If a woman needs to terminate a pregnancy for health reasons, she should have purchased that slut-rider.  B/c no one is going to cover her until she’s septic or hemorrhaging—just b/c the baby is dead or dying doesn’t mean the mother’s life is actively at risk.  Why shouldn’t she carry a dead fetus until it becomes septic?  She should have known she would fail at her one womanly duty and purchased a rider if she wanted the option to end a pregnancy b/c an already dead fetus might—just might—become septic and kill her, too.

And have you seen how FAT poor people are?  They can’t possibly be hungry.  Why don’t they jog or exercise or something?  It’s not like they’re working real jobs.  If they just did the right things, then they’d deserve better than they get, but they’re lazy, so they should suffer.

Strawberries?  For food stamps?  Are you serious?  What a waste of tax money.

...after all, some of them might even get enough of a leg up that they can escape the prison of the proletariat!  And then how would you be able to tell the worthy from the unworthy?

The most pathetic part is that the Teabaggers believe they’re worthy, when the likes of Cheney and Bush wouldn’t bend down to spit on them, let alone allow such proles into the exalted ranks (known in other times and places as the aristocracy or some variation of the Inner Party).

But I really don’t think the abortion restriction is tied up in sex nearly so much as it is tied up in rich-people-get-health-care-first.

With the Teabagging peasants, at this point the two concepts are so tightly enmeshed that I doubt they make the distinction any more. Prosperity-Gospel Jeebus prefers rich people (and white people, and male people), so of course he’s gonna make sure they’re first in line—it’s just the way it should be.

When you’re not working (as is your duty), making babies (idem) or sleeping (and just enough to have the energy to do the prior two activities), you only need one activity and it’s bible reading. If you’re having fun you’re doing the devil’s work.

My cousin who was born and grew up in North Texas was told by her first husband that whatever she was reading besides the Bible or a newspaper was a “damn book”.  It’s also true that in many 19th Century American households, the injunction to rest on Sunday was interpreted to mean you couldn’t read, play games, play a musical instrument other than inside a church for a service, and was consequently a dreary day that children came to despise and hate.

From Bernard Shaws’ Pygmalion:

DOOLITTLE. Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the
same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.

Or, to put it another way, if you’re going to buy those strawberries, you should be forced to do it in front of people that will sneer at you for thinking you have a right.

So that’s where the strawberries went.  Captain Queeg’s conundrum is solved at last.

I’ve always argued this—that is, always argued that the principle “evil” of both drug use and sexual liscence was that it distracted the poor from work—it was a way people could satisfy their desires that was not wholly channeled into consumerism.  Alcoholism and high class drug use are only thought of as problems when the alcoholic or the cocaine user *stop being workaholics* and let their addiction interfere with their class position and their duty to keep producing and consuming in the ordinary market.

If you look back at Colonial history you will see instantly that one of the most difficult things for any colonial power is organizing a pre-capitalist work force into a docile peasantry.  All the social and emotional and cultural activities that a society (American Indian, African, Inuit) that make that community happy and productive in their own terms generally have to be stomped out and replaced in order to force the natives into “productive” cash based market activities.  In the US this was done explicitly by transforming collective ownership of land and hunting rights into individual/patriarchal family modes of ownership. Elsewhere draconian taxation policies were used to force individuals out of subsistence/communal patterns of life and into production for the market.  Addictions to alcohol and drugs that didn’t interfere with that process were tolerated and even encouraged—look at SLORC in Burma? They run their entire slave economy using addicted labor and pay their workers in drugs.  Its only when addictions prevent the workers from showing up—as in victorian england, that a concerted push is made to move the worker away from his daily beer and into tea and sugar drinking. Check out Sidney Mintz’s brilliant Sweetness and Power for an account of that part of the history I’m describing.

aimai

“It seems like conservatism is based on the idea that if something is good for one group it must be bad for everyone else.”

Disagree, that would at least be be a rational position if they believed that
I agree with the main post,
Conservatisms main driving factor is Calvinist disaproval of the non-elect not suffering enough
see also the theology of “the family” on C street

Growing up in a small midwestern city in the 50’s and 60’s there was a real bias against the “poor”, it was not unusual to hear things like; “I don’t think you should hang around with X, he is from a poor family!” or “I see the Y’s have Christmas lights this year, wonder where they got the money for those?” or “Z is poor but at least she wears clean clothes!”

In my family, we got our asses kicked if we talked like that, my Grandfather was a County Judge and he knew the real reasons why many people were “poor”; alcohol, shitty jobs working for even shittier employers, health problems, the list is endless and being lazy and shiftless wasn’t in the top ten!

What jeff said.

The neo-calvinist ideology runs from top to bottom through modern conservatism. It fills the structures that built up the modern conservative movement, and it’s at the core of both the economic AND the religious conservative (and it’s why they can work together)

To put it simply, success is divinely ordained. Those that are successful, it’s because God has rewarded them by their faith to be successful. They are the chosen people. Those that aren’t chosen, they just need to “prove” their faith by praying harder, or doing more on the"chosen” issues, abortion and homosexuality. It could be argued that these “issues” are simply there to drain this energy, lest it go towards things like helping the poor, or things like that.

Thusly, those that are economically disadvantaged, it’s not enough that they “don’t win”, they have to actively be punished for losing, because if they’re not, then winning means less. Or something like that

My family has a history of poverty, and really, most of the time, is still just barely staying above it. But our grandparents and great-grandparents had very little; in my grandfather’s family, new shoes or even toothbrushes were luxuries when he was young.  He hunted for food to feed his siblings.

And when I was told these stories, it was always with a bit of shame from my family, that we had ever been *so* poor, and they often obsessed about money and things; new cars, new clothes, bigger houses, as a way of compensating for the memories of that time.  And also they passed judgement on the families who didn’t make it out, who weren’t as lucky.

I think at least some of the strength of the hatred for the poor that conservative voters have is because they fear becoming them, again, or that they technically are among their number. It’s about shame, and fear.  In other words, people fear the idea that their wealth is transitory, and so try to create a mythology that the only poor people are those who screwed up and were stupid or lazy. Unlike themselves. It’s kind of like victim-blaming in rape; if only stupid/slutty women get raped then you’re safe if you’re not stupid/slutty.

@ Elisabeth @ 13:

I recently “came out” to my readership that I was, in fact, one of those women who had had an abortion, and was not in fact miserably unhappy. I also spoke about the uncomfortable feelings I had directly after my abortion, because I thought I was supposed to feel all torn up about it, but I just couldn’t make myself feel that way.

What struck me most about my “comments” section was that many of these women, who I consider my friends, did not believe in “abortion as birth control” or “sluts” abusing their right to abortion, as they wrote, but they actually all came to offer me a written excuse. Some of my excuse notes ran several paragraphs in length. Many showed a great understanding of me as a person, and what had driven me to have an abortion (abusive partner; no money; still in school). And yet - THEY STILL DID NOT EXCUSE ABORTION IN ALL WOMEN. They failed to recognize that I had, in fact, used abortion as a second tier of birth control, and that this did not make me evil or insane. I was, and am, simply a human being who makes mistakes and sometimes even fails to learn from them.

While speaking out about your own experiences is powerful, it is not a panacea for the magical thinking that many people employ when they are talking about the rights of “OTHER people.”

I stick by my neo-aristocracy theory.

When you do not have reliable means of birth control and reproductive freedom, society grows bottom-heavy. Most people have children, children they can’t afford, children they can’t feed, children that can’t be properly educated. (The public school system relies on parental involvement. If parents are not able to properly raise and discipline their children, teachers spend their time acting as babysitters rather than instructors.)

Middle or even upper-middle bourgeois do not benefit from a bottom-heavy society: with enough wealth to make them targets but not enough wealth to offer high-quality protection, they will be the victims of most of the crime perpetrated by the Great Unwashed. They often run smaller enterprises that rely on a workforce that is at least mildly educated and reliable enough to leave in charge of the shop unsupervised. The bourgeois does not want a bottom-heavy society because it directly imperils their own livelihood as they have both everything to gain and everything to lose.

Really, the only people who should be “against” publicly-funded abortions are the people who stand to benefit the most from a massive, uneducated, impoverished labor pool: the aristocracy. They are the captains of industry—the ones who run the mines and own the manor homes.  They want a bottom-heavy society because they don’t require a degree of education or trustworthiness for their workers, they just need a set of hands. The truly exceptional might earn a spot changing their chamber pots and rubbing down their horses, but at the first sign of disobedience they’re out on the street, and it’s not hard to find a replacement from the throngs of grubby desperate proles.

Of course, in America, we never had an official aristocracy, but that doesn’t mean people can’t try to bring it about. The former slave-owning states have a pretty good template to return to. We have gated communities, offering a little slice of aristocracy at upper-middle class bourgeois prices.

When you combine that with the concept of the “American dream,” in which most people even at the bottom rung truly believe that they will be upwardly mobile and thus oppose tax increases for the rich, you have a system set up where everyone, even the middle-class bourgeois who stand the most risk if the proles start having babies without stopping, believe that by the time the neo-aristocracy comes about, they will certainly have “made it” all the way up to the aristocracy and they’ll be in a position to want cheap uneducated labor and won’t have to worry about the negative side effects.

Of course, they’ve completely forgotten the lessons of the 30’s, but you can’t expect the upwardly mobile to care about the lessons of history.

But I really don’t think the abortion restriction is tied up in sex nearly so much as it is tied up in rich-people-get-health-care-first.

The point of the post is this: The two are completely intertwined.  The moralizing justification for class warfare is that the underclass is undeserving, and that also explains the obsession with stomping out pleasure, at least pleasures that the rich and the poor alike can indulge.

How precisely does one reconcile one’s cherished desire to eradicate the lower orders with the glow of pleasure one gets from policing their only source of fun?

The thing is, they don’t actually want to eradicate the lower classes.  They want plenty of black people and poor white people around, to do the work of daily life.  They complain about “illegals” doing manual labor on farms, but they’re certainly not willing to do that work themselves.  They also need poor people to wait on their tables, cook their food, scrub their toilets, and pick up their trash.  They want poor people to have lots of babies so they’ll remain poor and do all these crappy jobs for even crappier pay.  As much as they may hate racial minorities, they’d hate to do their own dirty work even worse.  Most racists don’t actually want other races to disappear; they just want them to “keep them in their place”.

For a long time, I’ve realized that the main priority of conservatives is to make sure that people they deem “unworthy” get the punishment they deserve.

I’m sure I’ve shared this story before, but it fits in perfectly.  I’ve volunteered doing many things, including working at a soup kitchen.  When I tell people about this, more than one has said something like, “don’t you think that at least some of those people are scamming you and they don’t really need that food?”  While it is certainly possible that this has happened (although not very likely), I think it’s just ridiculous to use that an excuse to let 100 truly “deserving” people go hungry.  Call me crazy, but I think it’s just silly to let a bunch of people starve, just to make sure one or two don’t get a free plate of mediocre food that they don’t really deserve.  And that’s the difference between liberals and conservatives.  I’d rather help people who need it than punish people who deserve it.

And when I was told these stories, it was always with a bit of shame from my family, that we had ever been *so* poor, and they often obsessed about money and things; new cars, new clothes, bigger houses, as a way of compensating for the memories of that time.  And also they passed judgment on the families who didn’t make it out, who weren’t as lucky.

My family is the same way.  I’m only a couple of generations removed from destitute, although most of my generation have at least moved to working/lower middle class and are more or less doing alright (with a few doing much better than alright).  But, especially with my mom and her siblings, I do think that the attitude towards those less lucky and less well off is a way of convincing themselves that they won’t ever be back in the situation they grew up in, because they’re better than that.  Except that they’re not, they’re just extremely lucky.

Most racists don’t actually want other races to disappear; they just want them to “keep them in their place”.

Extensive, detailed histories of the era of lynchings certainly prove this.  The targets were often black people who owned land or businesses, and the white “accusers” often were the people who stole the land after the lynching.  There are a number of race riots throughout the South and Midwest where white people rose up because they perceived that their black neighbors were getting a leg up economically, and they ran them off their land and straight up took it.

It’s complicated.  In communities that perceived that black people could be kept economically downtrodden, they were more welcome than in places where they were perceived as upwardly mobile.  I suspect anger at illegal immigrants follows similar patterns.  People start freaking out when they grow aware how many immigrants are sending checks back home.  When racists stop perceiving a specific group as people who are barely surviving to people who are striving for a better future, they flip out.

Amanda, forgive me if you’ve mentioned it, but I wunna recommend Willis’s Don’t Think—Smile! Notes on a Decade of Denial for its elaborations (which are very much along the lines of BlacBloc’s) on the position you cite.  Notwithstanding her kinda conservative views on world affairs (she was strongly opposed to anti-Zionists and pro-Sandinistas, and thought hey, there’s a reasonable argument in favor of our saving the Iraqis from Saddam), Willis was fookin’ brilliant.  I’m so glad that you and the Pandagonians have begun to extend the conversation about conservative opposition to pleasure and anxiety about deserts.

They simply tolerate successful non-white/female conservatives b/c it gives them cover from being called racist/sexist.  B/c being called racist or sexist is worse than actually being racist and sexist.

Caren that reminded me of the (of course) all white former RNC chairmen having a field day with Michael Steele getting *gasp* PAID to speak at things! MY GOD! THE NERVE! *pearl clutching*
How DARE he use his position to gain personal wealth? Now don’t look behind the curtains everyone.

Of course conservatives deny this, but their overwhelming anger at people who work hard and achieve despite being non-white or female (if they’re liberal, at least) belies this argument.

Also add to the list of people they hate: liberal white males who come from an impoverished background and succeed (ex. Bill Clinton, that was at the root of their hatred for him). Or even, really, conservative white males from an impoverished background who get too uppity and try to take over the movement (this is why the GOP leadership and “movement” conservative pundits distrust Mike Huckabee even though he’s a right winger).

But I really don’t think the abortion restriction is tied up in sex nearly so much as it is tied up in rich-people-get-health-care-first.

What a shock that Zif the Dudebro doesn’t get it.

#42 Ben D, I don’t fully agree about the basis for the hatred of Clinton, there’s the fact that he was NEVER supposed to have been elected. We now know how much of states’ voting processes were hijacked by conservatives for some time. They did not expect Perot to so effectively siphon off 20% of the conservative vote and thus make it impossible to fake the voting results. I think first and foremost, they hated Clinton for having won without “deserving” it and they had lost control of the results.

LCforevah, Perot didn’t throw the election to Clinton, that’s a Republican myth. Perot voters would have split their votes had Perot not been in the race. Clinton still would have won, though by a smaller margin in the electoral college.

Analysis:  Perotís vote totals in themselves likely did not cause Clinton to win. Even if all of these states had shifted to Bush and none of Bushís victories had been reversed (as seems plausible, in fact, as Bush won by less than 5% only in states that a Republican in a close election could expect to carry, particularly before some of the partisan shifts that took place later in the 1990s ñ Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Dakota and Virginia), Clinton still would have won the electoral college vote by 281 to 257. But such a result obviously would have made the race a good deal closer.

Sorry, forgot the link!

http://archive.fairvote.org/plurality/perot.htm

No sex or drugs for you!

You can have rock ‘n roll if you finish your vegetables and rinse your plate in the sink.
Oh, and, you’re grounded!

I think this post (and so many of the commenters - ks most recently) is so spot on.  I come from these people - I’m upper-middle-middle class midwestern white suburban.  I’ve always been very conscious of the flip side of this Christofascists, that being these non-Jesus conservatives like my family who truly, passionately hate the idea of anyone getting something they don’t “deserve”.  My mother hated Obama not because of any of his beliefs or policies or even necessarily that he was black - he was “cocky”.  They’d rather see a thousand people suffer than one person “take advantage” - they can just sit in their paid-for, heated house and blithely tut-tut that it’s a shame that a few people have to ruin it for those who might really need it, but they’re not about to see their tax dollars going to people they feel are beneath them.

It’s really a poisoning point of view, and had I not been gay and artistically inclined I could easily have bought into it.  I found and kept an essay I’d written my senior of high school against affirmative action, where I argued how unfair it was for wealthy white kids to be losing out on opportunities to people who didn’t deserve them simply because they met a quota.  I firmly believed it, too, and didn’t see anything evil about it.  It’s practical.  I worked hard, why shouldn’t everyone be held to my standard?

The whole gay thing was the first big clue in the “I don’t think everything they’re telling me is right…” realization I gradually came to.  It really dehumanizes and devalues any experience other than what is considered the “norm”.  They genuinely don’t want health care for everyone - pay your own goddamn way.  Get a fucking job and keep it.  I did, why can’t you?  I’m miserable, you should be too.

I pathologically read the letters to the editor from my hometown paper online.  It’s scary - you get people complaining that there are too many hispanics at the high school their kids are forced to go to because of district boundaries, and why should their good white kids be “indoctrinated into the Spanish culture” (actual phrase from the letter) on a daily basis?  The school in question is about 10% non-white, of course.  My own aunt, who is a lovely person (to me, at least) recently got into a loud situation at the grocery store when she got frustrated that there were signs in Spanish.  This is America, she yelled!  Why should she have to look for the English sign?  It should be right there!

It’s a big struggle being someone who comes from that and had that worldview ingrained as natural from an early age, but who turned out to not fit into it at all.  I think it’s similar to what gay Christians struggle with, only in this case there’s no Jesus, just “what’s expected” and the fact that anyone who does not live up to it is simply sub-human.

Suet, letters to the editor (and even MORE so, comment threads on the websites) of local, small town to medium sized cities are just a beehive of wingnuttery. EVEN IN liberal places! I don’t know what it is. Older demographics? Are cranks more likely to still read newspapers? Ex. the comments on the website of my hometown paper are awful, just awful. Threads about how “welfare mothers should be sterilized!!” and how Obama is “shaking down whitey for his lunch money!”. This is true in just about every paper of a city under 500,000 that I’ve seen online.

Oh and even the weather stories, which should be non-political, have comments on them like “HAHA ITS COLD IN RICHMOND TODAY!!! GLOBAL WARMING IS FAKE!! SOCIALISM!!!”

Also add to the list of people they hate: liberal white males who come from an impoverished background and succeed (ex. Bill Clinton, that was at the root of their hatred for him). Or even, really, conservative white males from an impoverished background who get too uppity and try to take over the movement.

Oh yes, it’s a well-known aspect of the peasant mentality that they hate one of their own who’s risen above his (and their) station more than anyone else. To entitled proles like the Know-Nothings, he stands as living, breathing proof of their own failures and shortcomings, since he’s from exactly the same background as them. Liberal or conservative, he’ll be lambasted for being “uppity” and “not keeping it real” and “betraying his roots.”

Liberals have no defence from these accusations by the Teabagger variety, of course. The only way for a conservative to avoid this reaction from the Know-Nothings is to keep up the Lonesome Rhodes/Dubya “jes folks” act whenever he’s in the public eye (which can be an exhausting 24-7). But even then, GOP politics being what they are, cut-throat rivals are always waiting in the wings to expose some “sin” like eating French food or using a multi-syllable word.

This is America, she yelled!  Why should she have to look for the English sign?  It should be right there!

We were talking about something similar in the “War on Xmas” thread the other day—people getting upset because one aisle at the supermarket was decorated in blue and white (Hannukah) instead of green and red. The same thing applies here: she’s upset not because of the absence of English signs, but because the presence of the Spanish signs indicate that this society provides opportunities for people other than herself.

Speaking of the War on Xmas, military buffs might be interested in this breakdown of the campaign.

Okay, Ben, I used the 20% incorrectly, but given that the election results would have been a lot closer, that would have given Republicans the chance to steal the election by tampering. They hate Clinton because he won, and not as a Republican. If Clinton had been a career Republican, then his origins would have been can-do, pull-up-by-the-bootstraps stuff.

They hate Mike Huckabee because he really believes the religious shite, therefore he can’t really be one of them.

The small midwestern city I grew up in began experiencing “migrant Mexican families that stay year round” when I was in High School in the sixties. One brother and sister combo, think Salma Heyek and Antonia Banderas, in our school were semi accepted because she was a talented singer and he was an excellent football player. But, you could not date them! If you were an anglo boy or girl and went out with either of these kids you were dead meat socially. A friend of mine went out with the girl a few times when we were Jrs, he never got another date in High School! His parents were mortified, he was an outcast from then on! Didn’t matter that they were great kids, had nice families and that their parents worked hard, they were MEXICANS! We had a German DP family relocate when I was in grade school, their kids had it as rough as the Mexican kids and they were brought to town and assisted by the big Lutheran church that all the nice families belonged to. They were poor and they must be NAZIS! Didn’t make any difference that the kids and their parents who dissed the German kids were maybe two generations removed from the same status as the DPs!

Strawberries should only be consumed by the poor at the very moment that they are about to be consumed by tigers. - Zen Conservativism.

They’d rather see a thousand people suffer than one person “take advantage”

Yes!  It seems that they have this all-consuming, paranoid fear that someone, somewhere is always trying to take advantage of them!  It shows up everywhere, like the death panels and the war on Christmas.  Whenever one of my coworkers says the word “Christmas”, he has to make sure to complain that some vague, mysterious entity is trying to prevent him from saying it.

</blockquote> - they can just sit in their paid-for, heated house and blithely tut-tut that it’s a shame that a few people have to ruin it for those who might really need it, but they’re not about to see their tax dollars going to people they feel are beneath them. </blockquote>

I hate it when they say a few people ruin it for everyone else, because they are the ones ruining it for everyone!  They’re saying, “I’m not gonna bother helping you, but instead of blaming me, you should blame this random guy who doesn’t actually need help, because he’s forcing me to be selfish and not help anyone.”  Of course I’m not talking about your family specifically.

This is the kind of post which is why Pandagon is daily reading for me.  Thanks.

Control over others is a happy byproduct for these types, only insofar as they assume that they are and always will be on the winning side of any “transaction” by virtue of privilege.

This brings to mind male pundits (for example: Krauthammer) who find polygyny “intriguing,” but fail to consider that, in a polygynous culture, they could be among the men who never manage to marry.

And have you seen how FAT poor people are?  They can’t possibly be hungry.  Why don’t they jog or exercise or something?  It’s not like they’re working real jobs.  If they just did the right things, then they’d deserve better than they get, but they’re lazy, so they should suffer.

And here’s some of the reasons why fat people are hated so much.  It’s a class marker—demonstrating whether someone is a “worthy” rich or middle class person or an “unworthy” poor person.  It also supposedly demonstrates lack of self-control in the face of the pleasure of unwholesome food.  Fat shaming is neo-Puritanism.

being lazy and shiftless wasn’t in the top ten!

The only people I’ve known who could definitely be characterized as lazy and shiftless were middle class.  They were either marginally employed by choice or chronically unemployed and, in both cases, flagrantly sponged off family members, friends, and/or lovers.  If anything, it seems like poor people are less likely to do that simply because their family and friends don’t have the resources to support a layabout and will eventually lay down the law:  get a job or get out.

The same thing applies here: she’s upset not because of the absence of English signs, but because the presence of the Spanish signs indicate that this society provides opportunities for people other than herself.

I have to say that I really hate most automated phone systems that ask if you want Spanish.  They could do something fast and simple, like “For English, press 1,” “Para Espanol, press 2.”  But do they do that?  Noooo.  Instead they have a long ass invitation to press nine for Spanish, wasting my time and the time of the overwhelming majority of their customers.

catgirl @ 37:

For a long time, I’ve realized that the main priority of conservatives is to make sure that people they deem “unworthy” get the punishment they deserve.

I’m sure I’ve shared this story before, but it fits in perfectly.  I’ve volunteered doing many things, including working at a soup kitchen.  When I tell people about this, more than one has said something like, “don’t you think that at least some of those people are scamming you and they don’t really need that food?” While it is certainly possible that this has happened (although not very likely), I think it’s just ridiculous to use that an excuse to let 100 truly “deserving” people go hungry.  Call me crazy, but I think it’s just silly to let a bunch of people starve, just to make sure one or two don’t get a free plate of mediocre food that they don’t really deserve.  And that’s the difference between liberals and conservatives.  I’d rather help people who need it than punish people who deserve it.

This post got me thinking.

I was raised conservative. Dyed-in-the-wool, liberal-hating, classist conservative. I hate to admit it because I think so differently now, but at the same time, I don’t.

My parents were both very cynical people. They firmly believed that it was a waste of your resources to try and help others outside of “established channels”. This meant that while it was perfectly acceptable to donate to a charity, it wasn’t to just give a $5 bill to a homeless man on the street so he could buy himself a hot meal, because “he’d just go buy alcohol or drugs” with it. Similarly, volunteering at a soup kitchen was a waste of time, because it was just better to give your money to the soup kitchen and let them handle the actual work, because you had to earn your money. This is in contrast to the good Catholic values that were taught to me as a child, saying that it’s not only right to help the poor, it’s expected - because, to quote Matthew 25:45, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” 

Moving in with my present roommates and living in the situation I am in has dramatically changed my perception on these things. I live in a very poor community, a stark contrast to where I was as a child. I have become exactly that which conservatives hate - poor and lacking in resources, which, despite the fact that I hold a college degree, means that I must be either lazy, a degenerate, or somehow, a failure. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, I’m fairly certain there are a number of readers who are in the same situation - raised in relative wealth only to find themselves in crushing poverty once they get on their own.

I live near to a city with arguably the highest unemployment rate for a major metropolitan area in the country. I see people almost daily standing in freezing-cold winds and blowing snow at the edge of the exit ramp on the nearby interstate, clutching makeshift cardboard signs that read “HOMELESS - HUNGRY - PLEASE HELP” and yet, I find myself at a complete loss as to how to actually help these people. Some of it I rationalize by telling myself that I have almost no resources of my own and that I just can’t spare any money. This is, to an extent, true; my ability to help these people financially is virtually nil - I barely make enough money to pay my own bills at the end of the month. But nonetheless, I feel this huge pull to do something to help, but I am at a complete loss as to what.

To make matters worse, counteracting that desire to help is the old ingrained cynicism my parents instilled in me, saying horrible things like “Oh, if you give that person money, they’re just going to waste it.”

I don’t know how to fight it. :(

I am embarrassed to admit to my own duplicity, because it’s something I fight against constantly. I know it’s wrong, but there’s an ingrained tendency in me to want to revert back to those old “values” I was raised with and my decision-making ability becomes paralyzed. I’m frightened to take that step. My roommates call it “grumpy-old-man syndrome”.

I’m not sure what I can do, but I hope I’ll find a way to do something.

Ah, well. I’m sure this post counts as a threadjack in some ways, but I just wanted to say thank you to Catgirl for getting me thinking. Maybe it doesn’t mean much, but I’m glad for it.

33 “I recently “came out” to my readership that I was, in fact, one of those women who had had an abortion, and was not in fact miserably unhappy. I also spoke about the uncomfortable feelings I had directly after my abortion, because I thought I was supposed to feel all torn up about it, but I just couldn’t make myself feel that way. “

When my wife and I were first dating we had a “scare” when she was late and she took a morning after pill and even then I had this uncomfortable feeling of guilt. Stupid christian upbringing. Of course some of that guilty feeling happened while I was baked out of my mind listening to L’il Markey for kicks with my friends (L’il Markey being that creepy hillbilly who sings in a chipmunk voice about being a precious fetus named Andy whose mean mommy kills him in utero).

This is true in just about every paper of a city under 500,000 that I’ve seen online.

I second Ben D. on that.  My town’s newspaper letters and website comments are appalling, and it’s generally a pretty lefty-hippy place otherwise.  In fact, one of the first things my mom started doing when she joined her wingnutty church was starting writing letters to the editor.  She kept her politics pretty center, though, and wrote so much she eventually earned status as a quasi-opinion columnist.

50: “Oh and even the weather stories, which should be non-political, have comments on them like “HAHA ITS COLD IN RICHMOND TODAY!!! GLOBAL WARMING IS FAKE!! SOCIALISM!!!” “

Used to be one only needed to avoid religion and politics in polite conversation, but sports & weather were ok. Now you can’t talk about the weather anymore without some dingbat spouting off bullshit like this.  Sports is still ok, unless it’s golf (“fuckin uppity Tiger Woods should stop playing and let some white guys win for a change and OMG dark folks can’t keep their dick in their pants amirite?”) or football (“fuckin libruls won’t let Rush buy a football team”). Probably a few sports I’m missing but these are the ones everyone is bringing up at work as of late. People at work wonder why I’m so quiet sometimes.

What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.

While the observation about morality is spot on, I’m not sure that advocating the selling of daughters for discretionary money is entirely pro-feminist…

(besides, I don’t have any daughters)

Relevent to this discussion, I recommend this book..

When my wife and I were first dating we had a “scare” when she was late and she took a morning after pill and even then I had this uncomfortable feeling of guilt. Stupid christian upbringing.

Yeah.  I’m lying here on a couch arranging a morphine prescription, with daily antibiotics and ten minutes on crutches wearing me out, and I get apologetic and feel guilty for not going into work. I was bought up Catholic.

“Yeah.  I’m lying here on a couch arranging a morphine prescription, with daily antibiotics and ten minutes on crutches wearing me out, and I get apologetic and feel guilty for not going into work. I was bought up Catholic. “

My parents would send me in to school sick as a dog, to infect the rest of the kids, because it would make them feel bad. I was brought up Presbyterian - their advertising campaign could be “All the guilt of a Catholic Church, with half of the ritual!”

I don’t know what it is. Older demographics? Are cranks more likely to still read newspapers?

Cranks, by definition, are more likely to write letters.  They have nothing better to do.

I think they even have more calories than most fruit.

Actually, it’s the opposite. According to the USDA food nutrient database, an entire pound of strawberries only has 145 food calories (i.e., kilocalories). One pound of apples has 236 food calories, one pound of grapes has 304 food calories, and one pound of oranges has 213 calories.

Something that occurs to me is, if you’ve got a life that’s not got much luxury in it, if you live mostly on McDonalds and frozen pizzas, strawberries are going to taste really damn good.  Whereas if you have strawberries and other fruits as part of your diet every week, they aren’t quite so special.

And I wonder if part of this conservative hate-fest over the poor having pleasure in their lives has to do with subconscious recognition that those poor people are going to get more enjoyment out of those strawberries than THEY ever could?

Everything’s magnified when it’s a rare treat; everything’s diminished when it’s an everyday thing.  It can’t be helped.  So a poor person eating strawberries, or a gay couple celebrating their wedding, or the long-suffering working-class parents of ten going on the first family vacation they’ve ever had?  They are getting something, in terms of experience, that the epicurian couple with the gourmet kitchen or the straight divorcees on their second/third marriage or the upper-middle-class suburbanite two-kid family who’s been to Disneyland five times, is not gonna have access to no matter how hard they look for it—-because it’s a function of deprivation, and they’re not willing to do it themselves, and where do these welfare queens and unskilled workers and f*gs get off being made happier by less?

Some time ago I wondered if the rage at the poor for having cell phones had anything to do with lifestyle creep and the way middle-class/upper-class people seem to spend lots of money on often-marginal and easily-ignored status-marker stuff (a big new house in the suburbs, new $40-grand cars instead of $20-grand new or $12-grand 2-3-year-used, drapes and fine china and stylish washer-dryers and granite countertops and so forth) and get pissed when there’s little money left over for things they actually define as luxuries, maybe no more than that Wal-mart cashier who saved up for an iPod Nano while eating Ramen every day.  They’re making more money, they think; shouldn’t they get LOTS more luxury than these poor people?

Well, maybe they are, and they just don’t call it luxury.

“She was describing how she got glares from people in the supermarket for having items as innocuous as strawberries in her cart. ”

I know this is true because i have seen cons on the net talk like this.  One guy, screename Tarzan (no kidding) once fumed for an entire thread about some “fat piece of shit single mother” (of course she must have been single because you see, she was fat) buying, actually I forgot what the hell she bought that drove him nuts. 

But it’s so hard to believe.  I have never once noticed someone using foodstamps simply because I don’t look at how other people are paying.  I am busy unloading my cart and I just don’t notice.  Unless of course, they pay by check.  Now that is something that will get my attention. In an “oh fuck, they’re paying by check” way.  Because it means a longer wait.  But today, most everyone pays with a debit card, and I think the new food stamps comes on some kind of card doesn’t it?  You’d have to be one real pathetic fuck to be checking that out.  If I saw someone staring at my credit card like that, I’d have a problem with it and would most likely say so.

“Some time ago I wondered if the rage at the poor for having cell phones had anything to do with lifestyle creep and the way middle-class/upper-class people seem to spend lots of money on often-marginal and easily-ignored status-marker stuff”

It’s so weird.  About ten years ago now, I worked with a woman whose daughter was on the partner track at Ernest and Young.  And I had this shitty little copywriting job back then, but I loved it.  I didn’t make much though.  Anyway, my bf bought me a coach bag for xmas, and I knew it had cost 238 dollars.  So this woman tells me, ohhhhhh, my daughter, Janet, bought that same bag.  He paid 350 dollars for that.  Curious n ow, I handed it to her and asked, are you sure it’s the same one?  And she said she was absolutely sure.  Janet was so insecure and needful of status markers (every week it was, ohhh Janet bought a Pashmina, ohhh Janet bought this, or that), that she lied to her own mother about how much her handbag cost. 

And then one day, her mother tells me that Janet had been furious when she went to the Red Door for a facial and saw her secretary there!  After all, Janet had only recently been able to go herself, how was it her sect could afford to go? 

Man was it hard for me not to tell this woman to shut up about Janet.  Anyway, people are very strange that way, you’re right.

Strawberries should only be consumed by the poor at the very moment that they are about to be consumed by tigers. - Zen Conservativism.

Pronoun trouble: are the strawberries or the poor people about to be consumed by tigers? And don’t be a smartass and tell me it’s part of the Zen koan thing, ‘cos I know it’s not.

Funny, didn’t Jesus once have a parable about entitlement?

Nah, couldn’t be. Christian Fundies don’t have any real use for Jesus anyway.

I guess that conservatives would be really pissed if they knew that our local farmers’ market not only accepts food stamps, they give people a discount for using them. (Afaik city-affiliated farmers markets pretty much everywhere accept food stamps, not just because it helps poor non-farmers eat a much less unhealthy diet, but also because it’s a straightforward way of helping farmers, which is where the program came from in the first place.)

This is also a facet of that weird utter-lack-of-a-reaction that “pro-lifers” have to America’s horrific infant mortality rate.

Babies who don’t make it out of the NICU tend to be poor. (Assuming they’re even in a place with a NICU; Native Americans have especially bad infant mortality rates, apparently due to the lack of decent healthcare on reservations.)

Unfortunately for them, “Pro-lifers”—who you’d think would at least pretend to look out for neonates—tend to come from the part of the population who think first-rate health care given to the poor is like those food-stamp strawberries: it’s simply not something the poor deserve, certainly not something they’re entitled to; it should only be available to them as heavy-handed charity, so they’ll be properly (grovellingly) grateful for it—even when the poor healthcare recipient is too young to deserve or be grateful for anything.

Molly:

I think that’s not quite right. A lot of babies who don’t make it out of the NICU aren’t poor, but rather pregnancies where you’re kinda amazed they made it long enough to get into the NICU in the first place. The poor babies who get into the NICU (and often don’t make it out, or don’t survive that long after getting out) are somewhat more likely to be ones who in a country where poor women aren’t untouchables would either have been healthy and delivered close to term or never been conceived/carried past the first trimester.

So the “pro-lifers” are willing not only to have that horrific mortality rate but the huge financial and other costs of trying (whether successful or not) to get way preterm or otherwise compromised infants to survive, rather than letting poor women have decent medical care. It’s like you were willing to pay a squad of security guards a million dollars an hour to make sure poor women didn’t buy strawberries.

I was at a dinner once where a radiation oncologist was talking about the part of her job where she calls up patients to negotiate how they are going to pay their cancer treatment bills that they have fallen behind on. She talked about how appalling it was that so many of these people expressed a desire to be able to continue paying their cable TV bill while working out a payment plan for their chemo and radiation. Such an attitude of entitlement, she complained. Sick people, dying people, wanting to get cancer meds AND be able to watch TV. Cake and eat it? Those unappreciative fuckers, she said as she ate a nice dinner in her nice house with nice furnishings while her nice one child (genetically chosen from a sperm bank list) sat by her side, wearing his nice clothes and clutching his nice copy of “Goodnight, Moon.”

What a complete and utter bitch.

Paul - Speaking of countries where poor women aren’t untouchables, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report this week had this item about America’s preterm births versus Europe’s.  It shows pretty much what you’d expect about those awful people and their awful socialized medicine and their awful born-at-term children. (1)

(1) Although what the hell is going on in Austria?

Austria has (for europe) some weird right-wing catholic stuff going on, which is not a good combination with teutonic anything, but I’d be more interested in seeing just who (ethnically etc) is having those preterm infants before pontificating more….

Millie:

Also: in what country is it a good use of a radiation oncologist’s time to be working out payment plans with impoverished patients. Even if she were a thoroughly compassionate, empathetic person in the first place, the cognitive dissonance involved in hounding people for money so that you can continue trying to save their lives would have to bring up some kind of craziness.

Ben D., it’s not just the websites of newspapers based in small to mid-sized cities. Boston.com has a contingent of regular trolls who hijack most threads, including the weather ones, to spew Limbot talking points. HURP DURP, ITS SNOWING, GUESS THAT ALGOR WARNT RIGHT AFTER ALL!! Plus lots of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, you name it, it’s there. I’ve seen similar behavior on Philly.com and on other big-city news sites.

Despite all that, some of them still manage to astound me with their reactionary blatherings. On a recent article about “freegans,” one of the worst ones basically stated that dumpster divers were screwing up capitalism because they were cutting out all the “middle men.” What the fuck do you say in response to something like that?

AnglScarlett: Totally agree. I never pay attention to how other people pay for stuff…unless they’re the types who stand there, thumb up the butt, until the cashier announces the total, and then they dig in their bag or whatever for 5 minutes looking for the checkbook. (One woman did this after we’d been standing in line for 20 minutes. My tongue had some pretty deep toothmarks in it afterward.) But if they’re not holding other people up, I could care less how they pay. Not my business.

Pronoun trouble: are the strawberries or the poor people about to be consumed by tigers? And don’t be a smartass and tell me it’s part of the Zen koan thing, ‘cos I know it’s not.

LOL, I guess that depends on your perspective. If you’re a poor conservative, you’re rescuing the strawberries from the tiger. If you’re a rich conservative, the tiger is punishment for the poor person’s consumption of the illicit strawberry.

NiP—

Damn I had some hope for the bigger cities but I should have known better. After all even the Burlington, Vermont paper that I’ve read online, from Vermont, the biggest DFH state in the entire Union is chock full ‘o wingnuts. At least there’s some comic value in them as they’re always threatening to move to Alabama or Georgia just like some liberals always threaten to go to Canada!

Back quite a ways: they don’t just want a free transaction, it has to involve money, and selling sex is wrong.

In a sane viewpoint starting from that same libertarian point, “I’ll give you an orgasm and you’ll give me one” would be as reasonable an arrangement as “I’ll give you some wheat if you’ll drive me to town” or an actual cash transaction for food, transport, etc. Instead, they define selling sex as wrong, and any interchange that isn’t monetized as either wrong or unimportant. There is no room there for sexual pleasure either as mutual interchange or as a gift. Certainly not as a gift someone (of any gender) might give a woman.

You know, it’s more basic than Puritanism or the regulation of sex. This is pure hominid behavior, especially from white males—He must be one-up, and additionally, you must be one-down. It’s about arranging for dominance within the tribe, or nowadays, within the society the male finds himself in.

On some gut level, there is behind the dogged attempt of regulating women’s sexuality the knowledge that if women have complete sovereignty, are able to completely be in charge of their own contraception, sexuality, behavior and bodies that men lose dominance in society on a fundamental level.

This is why the obsession with what happens in other people’s bedrooms. It’s a front for the really big things males, read conservatives, fear they will lose.

Years ago on 60 Minutes, the infamous Cardinal Mahony of the LA archdiocese was being interviewed on population, immigration and birth control. He openly admitted that the Pope couldn’t tell Italian women when to have children. Jeez, Italian universal healthcare, full access to contraception and abortion… no wonder the conservamenz are fighting US healthcare reform tooth and nail.

The only people I’ve known who could definitely be characterized as lazy and shiftless were middle class.  They were either marginally employed by choice or chronically unemployed and, in both cases, flagrantly sponged off family members, friends, and/or lovers.  If anything, it seems like poor people are less likely to do that simply because their family and friends don’t have the resources to support a layabout and will eventually lay down the law:  get a job or get out.

Middle and upper-class.  During my time in undergrad and grad school, I’ve came across many trust fund babies with Ivy/Ivy-level undergrad/grad degrees in their 50’s and 60’s who stopped working after 1-3 years/never had to work from the time they graduated school because their trust funds were enough to set them for life.  One particular standout was one dude in his 60’s who graduated from an Ivy law school decades ago who stopped working after 1 year and spends his days attending parties, public academic seminars, charity events, and art/music exhibitions while living off of his trust. 

Did I mention there are plenty of upper/upper-middle class college aged/twenty/thirty-somethings who do the same thing while living in fancy condos in NYC neighborhoods like Chelsea, the Village, Williamsburg, etc….either living off of their trusts and/or continuing to “live independently”* while their parents/families subsidize all their expenses. 

* This is quoted because despite the fact they’re still being fully subsidized by family money, they’ve often had the gall to trashtalk anyone who needs public assistance and/or young adults who needed to move back with the parents for economic or family/social reasons….even when the latter group may effectively be far more independent when finances or other factors are accounted for.  This is doubly ironic for those who are still college undergrads who are doing so on the dime of their parents/family.

@#82:
About the Globe letter writers at Boston.com: Absolutely true.  It seems to be a major social outlet for some of the regulars to argue back and forth.  It’s sort of facinating in a sick sort of way.

And no, abortion is no more a good thing than open heart surgery or cancer treatment, felagund.  A hell of a lot better than the posible alternative, but not an unadulterated good.  It is a good thing to have available, but like all medical procedures, not needing one is the real good (say truly perfect birth control; ah, for a perfect world…) because even the best of them have risks it would be better not to face.

But it’s so hard to believe.  I have never once noticed someone using foodstamps simply because I don’t look at how other people are paying.

This is easier now than I think it was 10 or 20 years ago.  I remember my mom had some choice opinions about food stamp recipients, which basically boiled down to it being a pain in the ass to be behind them in line: for starters, there were actual stamps, and you had to sort your purchases accordingly, then argue with the cashier about what was covered and what wasn’t.  It offered plenty of opportunity for your more well-to-do neighbors to scope out the purchases and stand around stewing for awhile.  There were also some really bizarre rules about what was and wasn’t covered.  And heaven forbid you actually have any purchases not covered by the program - what the hell were taxpayers giving you perfectly good money for rice and milk if you were just going to use your real money for RC cola or Hydrox cookies. 

Now my state has special food stamp debit cards, and computers can do the thinking and sorting for you.  Plus I think you can get almost anything that even remotely counts as food - my friend is able to get soda and processed foods with his, whereas it used to be you could only get things like bread and dry beans.  Now they’ve simplified everything so much I’m not even sure they use the “Food stamp OK!” stickers in grocery stores anymore.  I think there might be a WIC tag still around.  So now you don’t get to sit there for 15 minutes while a poor person argues about whether or not taco shells are an acceptable purchase, but in return those slacker, lazy poor people can buy name-brand cola and frozen pizzas as easily as if they were using a regular debit card.  If you’re not paying attention, you hardly know who to judge for what anymore.  Personally, I prefer the new way.

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