I recently witnessed an interaction about this.
Cashier at a supermarket is complaining about the previous customer buying “Luxury items” with the social credit card.
Mind you, those luxury items where not booze or expensive skin care products… No, there were not-the-cheapest brand of orange juice and milk.
The cashier reasoning was that if he can’t afford those things, poor people shouldn’t either.
So as you can see, they’d rather be angry with a mom buying decent food for their kids rather than asking themselves why everyone is getting poorer.
And yes, said customer was high on the color grading.
If they can get us squabbling amongst ourselves then we can’t concentrate our iron on them. It’s all part of their plan.
It’s very important to some people because that single mom is colored and the world just doesn’t make sense if we let something halfway decent happen to them.
Here’s the thing. Why should others struggle less than I did? That’s not fair. These programs are rife with abuse, I just cannot provide any data that supports the rampant fraud that I speak of. In fact, I’ve never seen fraud at all—I just believe what the angry white man says on television!
These are real things I’ve heard from those that work in the same factory as I do. They have no idea that they are the useful idiots.
Not to downplay how frustrating that must be, seriously, I live in a regressive area as well. It genuinely sucks.
What i find works moderately well is to describe programs in ways that benefit those people directly. Meet them where they are willing to be; selfish.
Don’t mention the other people, focus on how it could help them and their family and friends.
If you can’t fix selfish, which in this economy you probably can’t, fix framing. Make it all about how much they win from social programs that “they pay for and don’t get any of”. Thats getting easier to do with healthcare and UBI, as things get worse and the top few benefit, and they apply to everyone. Don’t mention that it helps other people at all. Thats’s a negative to them, just tell them how much less they will be paying, how much their family will benefit with that extra money.
There is absolutely nothing that can be said to these dullards.
They straight up say that minimum wage jobs are only for teenagers, and if adults are in those roles, well, it’s their fault. “Just get a better job”.
Now I rub it in their face’s of how shitty their views are. They stopped bringing it up when I’m in the room. I’m good with that.
The abuse is usually a store charging against your benefits when you are not in the store and ultimately not getting the things that your benefits paid for… Walmart is by far the biggest welfare fraudster
There are plenty of people in this country that would rather die than watch someone get something they need to survive. It’s actually the strongest lever of power over Republicans other than what is directly happening to them personally right now. This is why they’ll inevitably always end up like Gollum, confused as the lava kills them, and also why they should be shamed instead of leveled with.
people in this country that would rather die than watch someone get something they need to survive.
Wish they would, then. Leave us to clean up the mess, we can handle the hard work they clearly can’t (or they’d be better people… self work is work!).
For some it’s something they can grow out of, but an environment to foster that change isn’t the one we currently have. They’re also the type who would scoff at therapy, so not much chance there. I personally don’t think they should be allowed to vote without showing a capacity for empathy more than 2 steps removed from themselves.
There’s some broken nonsense in conservative world views.
Perhaps chief among them (no pun intended) is the idea that hierarchy is good and natural and inevitable. Flowing from that there’s the idea that different rules apply to different people. And the famous “in groups to protect, out groups to bind” thing.
So things like welfare are abhorrent to them. That’s messing with the hierarchy! Some people need to be down in the gutter. Without the underclass, then everything falls apart and all their auffering was for nothing, and their sense of self can’t handle that.
I worked at a grocery store. They sold chicken fingers that they bought frozen and cooked in store. They had to put some aside to cool down so they could sell them to EBT customers.
and yes its to distract the epstein files, thats why trump has to come up with new ways everyday to fill the news with gaffes.
I’d say 13 is low but that’s for how many senators they bought not the age of their last sexual partners: That’s usually lower.
We really don’t like weird people. In fact, the bible (both OT and NT) has an awful lot of commandments and parables about how it’s wrong to turn away the foreigner (or assault them). This is to say, the problem to instinctively throw rocks at strangers has been around for a while.
I’m not an evolutionary biology expert, but keeping tribes of humans separated into small groups (of a hundred or so) is an effective way to keep plagues from spreading across the globe like COVID-19 did and wiping out large chunks of the population. If one tribe is killed off by the black death then the other tribes remain.
And so we may have some way-old instincts to consider oddballs as dangerous. An accent, or the wrong color skin, or strange customs, or swearing to the wrong god all are signs that someone is a direct threat to you and your tribe. A long time ago it really was a matter of life and death.
In the last few thousand years livestock made us more rugged, and in the last couple of centuries, post-germ-theory disease control works as a rockin’ substitute (when we budget for it). But we haven’t had time to evolve, and still have the pre-history programming that weird people are dangerous.
And the very rich can hire think-tanks full of psychologists and marketers to spin propaganda to utilize this prejudice to distract people away from their abuses of power, also to quash any notions of systems other than unregulated capitalism, also to encourage the notion that rich people earned their riches and deserve to rule the rest of us plebes.
Actually, that’s a big deal. Way more money goes into psychology to control people and keep them vaping and glued to social media than ever went to treating mental illness or just providing therapy for the middle class. Billionaires these days have access to literal mass mind control.
I know this isn’t the issue, and I am fully in favor of expanding social safety nets including food stamps, not reducing them…
That said, I find no conceptual issue with limiting the kinds of items food stamps can be used for to actual food. No one needs soda or candy bars or whatever other processed, practically poisonous crap we eat. We’d all be better off if we didn’t. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit tax-dollar funded food assistance programs to actual food items.
If you disagree, tell me why.
I disagree because I think it’s morally wrong to limit someone’s choices based on your own ideals simply because they’re poor. You also never know what someone is going through and comfort foods can be really beneficial to mental health. If the problem is you don’t want people to spend money on things that are unhealthy then that battle should be fought for everyone through education reform and easier access to healthy foods, not by further restricting what little autonomy poor people have
Where does the limit sit? It’s not so simple, especially in the US, to define what has too much sugar or is too processed as to limit what people are allowed to buy on food stamps.
Furthermore its reducing agency of people, basically trying to make people think their lack of a job is their own fault and because of that they must eat what the government thinks they deserve. I just think that could start to have negative psychological impacts on some peoples self worth.
