A Whiter Shade Of Pale
Susie featured this video recently and it reminded me of my reaction to the pictures of those arrested in the aftermath of the rioting in Britain. I haven’t seen anything that white since the last time I opened a new package of undershirts. Some of those people look like they belonged under a sheet at the medical examiner’s office.
So, British Prime Minister Cameron said the riots had nothing to do with poverty, but the Guardian, who didn’t buy the whitewashing of the hacking scandal, decided to check: England rioters: young, poor and unemployed
…
A Liverpool University urban planning lecturer, Alex Singleton, analysed the Guardian’s preliminary data by overlaying the addresses of defendants with the poverty indicators mapped by England’s Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which breaks the country into small geographical areas.He found that the majority of people who have appeared in court live in poor neighbourhoods, with 41% of suspects living in one of the top 10% of most deprived places in the country. The data also shows that 66% of neighbourhoods where the accused live got poorer between 2007 and 2010.
Singleton said: “Rioting is deplorable. However, if events such as this are to be mitigated in the future, the prevailing conditions and constraints affecting people living in areas must form part of the discussion. A ‘broken society’ happens somewhere, and geography matters.”
…
When I read the media coverage I was expecting to see people of color, not pasty white Anglo-Saxons doing the perp walk. The victims were generally people of color, which would indicate that they were in multi-ethic neighborhoods, but the people taken to court don’t seem to be – they are just poor.
There must have been some non-white rioters, but perhaps the police can’t locate them. To some people all non-whites look the same.
39 comments
This actually doesn’t surprise me too much. These are the same sort of folks who riot after football games, roughly the English equivalent of the Mossy Head redneck white trash stereotype (except without the banjos 😉 ). And they’ve taken it on the chin with the austerity fetish as hard as, or harder than, the minority communities, who, to put it bluntly, were never expecting much more anyhow from England, but these white spuds have the same sense of injured self-entitlement as Teabaggers and react by, well, not waving teabags, that’s for sure. If Hitler was around, they’d join his brownshirts in a Dixie minute, ’cause they’re angry that they’re f**ked, and they want to hurt someone or something, bad.
Meanwhile, you have the minority communities. And there’s violence there too, of course, but they’re second class citizens in England despite the racial equality laws that were supposed to fix that, and they know it — they know that if they get hauled into the police station they’re about as likely to walk out of it as a black civil rights activist arrested in Mississippi in 1956. So sure they’re doing crimes, but they’re being sneaky about it, unlike the white trash, who are like, “what are the cops gonna do to me? I’m *white*!”.
Maybe I’m reading too much into my brief encounters with the English lower classes. Or maybe not. But at least my explanation matches the observed facts, which is more than most of the explanations bandied about have managed.
– Badtux the Observant Penguin
Badtux, the next thing you do will be to mention that the majority of people enrolled in the ‘welfare programs’ in the US are rural white children, which, while true and well documented, doesn’t correspond to people’s beliefs and is just another example of the well-known liberal bias of facts.
Most minority communities deal with their own problems and avoid the police, which is why crime is so under-reported in minority areas.
Another interesting thing from the reporting is that the rioters outside of London didn’t trash their own communities, they went upscale with their mayhem. That is probably why the politicians decided they had better cut their holidays short and get back to work.
Yeah, there was a lot of similarity between the football riots and what happened. Hell, some British fans were banned from World Cup games in 2010 because of their reputation as trouble makers.
Without jobs they were an accident waiting to happen.
Ah, our favorite troll is back. BTW, don’t bother trying to post that tripe on my own blog again, you’re banned. As I pointed out there, the notion that the only people who were truly poor were those in the process of starving to death homeless was ludicrous. Possessing a second-hand television and second-hand clothes and worn-out discarded autos does not make one wealthy any more than possessing a stick picked up off the ground makes one wealthy, it just indicates how trickle-down actually works — by allowing the lower classes to pick through the trash of the wealthier classes, then magnanimously proclaiming that this means there is no poverty. Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud!
As someone who taught in schools in the poorest areas of America both rural and urban and saw, first-hand, poverty and its dire effects upon children, I can only shake my head at the delusional ignorance of the right, which wants to write entire classes of people out of existence in Orwellian fashion including 20% of the children in America out of existence because said people are inconvenient. It is only one short step from writing them out of existence theoretically, to writing them out of existence in reality. Funny, I seem to recall a short German dictator who had that same idea… right-wingers never change, I guess, they just proclaim that the previous generation of right-wingers weren’t *really* right-wingers and go back to the same old, same old.
— Badtux the Pusillanimous-English-Twit-Baitin’ Penguin
The local homeless wear designer jeans and expensive sneakers/trainers because those are the cheapest things at the thrift stores. The designer stuff isn’t very well made and doesn’t last, even though it was extremely expensive when new.
They eat the cheap food because that’s what they can occasionally afford. The local school lunch program is the only food some local kids can count on getting, and some are given food packs for the weekend, so they don’t have to pick through the trash outside restaurants and supermarkets.
People in the US starve to death, but local officials hide that reality. The cops know because they find the bodies. Others die of exposure because they can’t keep the power on, and eat.
You can’t get any of the benefits if you don’t have a valid address, and the homeless don’t have a valid address.
If you don’t have a phone, you can’t apply for a job, much less get one.
There are alarm clocks at homeless encampments, because about a quarter of the homeless do have jobs, but the jobs don’t pay enough to rent a place to live.
Poverty is real and exists in the US and the UK. The only people who see it on a regular basis tend to be government employees, so people deny its existence.
BTW, the information was gathered from the records of the courts, and compared to the records of the UK government, which is Conservative the last time I checked. If you don’t like the results, take it up with Cameron.
Bryan, people don’t die of starvation or exposure here in America, they die of “natural causes”. Get with the program!
🙁 🙁 :(.
– Badtux the “Whitewash? You don’t say!” Penguin
Duff, you are truly retarded, in the clinical sense. Unlike most such, there is no hope for you, and most of the others understand reality far better than you do. You are one of those (such as the majority of the GOP) that are retarded sociopathic narcissists. Every time you comment, you prove it.
I choose to sleep outdoors multiple times per year and I’m not homeless, I’m just camping, does that mean homelessness does not exist? The density of the Duffer’s head is surpassed only the audacity of his assertions of facts that exist only in some imaginary universe of his own creation where, undoubtedly, unicorns are pink and cotton candy grows on trees.
– Badtux the Head-shakin’ Penguin
Mr. Duff, which Somali? There are very wealthy Somalis, like those champions of the libertarian/Rand view of the world that the West calls pirates.
As for the the Somali farmers who have been defeated by drought and the total lack of a government to assist them, they are poor, just like the Joad family that John Steinbeck wrote about in the Grapes of Wrath. Poverty has nothing to do with which nation state you live in, it is the lack of means to obtain the basics for survival – food, water, and shelter.
There is a qualitative difference between shopping at thrift stores because you want to, and shopping there because it is all you can afford.
You don’t see poverty in the UK because it would make you uncomfortable. Social blindness is quite a common affliction, a necessity, among conservatives.
Mr. Duffer, since you seem incapable of understanding simple English language words such as what Bryan just used, what exactly are you trying for, other than a master’s degree in assholery, which you have earned quite well thank you? Someone who is dying of exposure and starvation is poor, whether he gets officially toted up as dying of starvation in Somalia, or dying of “natural causes” here in the USA. As for the notion that our poor here in the USA should be grateful for the second-hand scraps that our ruling classes throw them and that said scraps mean they’re not poor, uhm… not sure what I can say about that.
BTW, Mr. Duff, the Joads owned a motor car because a motor car was cheaper than a horse, and without transportation on the Oklahoma prairie, you are dead (D E A D). Sort of like where you are without transportation in the 4th ward of Houston, since most residents don’t qualify for cash assistance no matter how poor they are, meaning that most residents must work two or three jobs in order to pay for the car they need in order to get to those jobs (since Houston has no effective mass transit system) plus pay rent on the crumbling shotgun shack they live in (since the backlog of housing voucher assistance applications is roughly ten years). The only assistance most of America’s poor get is Medicaid that they can’t afford to use (since they’d have to take off work and hourly workers don’t get paid unless they work) and food stamps that are ludicrously inadequate (we’ve challenged members of Congress several times to feed their family for a month on the amount of food assistance that our poor get, and not a single one has taken us up on the challenge — imagine that!). The net result is a community under significant stress where a single illness where a wage earner in the household is too sick to work for a while could result in loss of home or in people going hungry for days at a time, stress which typically exhibits itself as crime.
And lest you think that the criminals are the stupid ones in the inner cities of the U.S., the smartest kid I ever taught ended up running the black tar heroin trade in his neighborhood. See, the dumb kids, the jocks and such, they buy all that BS we teachers fed them about the USA being the land of opportunity, all they gotta do is work hard and they’ll get ahead, yada yada yada. But the smart kids, they look around and they see their parents doing everything we said to do, and their parents aren’t getting ahead, and their grandparents didn’t get ahead either when *they* did what we told them to do (work hard, study in school, yada yada), and they call bullshit and do anti-social things. And who can blame them, really, given that it IS bullshit, if you’re born poor here in the USA, there’s a greater than 50% chance that you’re going to die poor? And it’s even worse in Britain. So this kid looked around, saw that the education we were providing him was woefully inadequate to get him anywhere in our society, saw that the people around him who were doing what we said to do were getting nowhere, and he chose the most lucrative trade around that was open to him. And who am I to blame him for doing so?
– Badtux the Been-there Penguin
I rest my case. 🙄
Sadly, you are right of course Badtux. And it’s the same in most Countries, even here and the UK. I have actually *done the numbers* myself, and have discovered that I would actually be better off (and significantly so) committing a crime and going to prison for a few years, or longer, than existing on a pension as I am now. One simple example is dental. In prison, any and all dental work is free. None of it is covered by a pension. And dental work is damned expensive. There are many other examples also. And as for freedom… freedom costs money. If you have limited or no income, you are *free* to do what, exactly? *shrug*There was a report recently that showed that an increasing number of crimes are being committed for that reason, but also for some payback. Not all people are as stupid as Authorities and the elites (and the moron above) would like to believe, and many people will do whatever they have to to survive.
“How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread!”
In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
Anatole France.
*shrug*
OK, he is programmed to make the comparison because it is the new conservative talking point, i.e. first world poor are better off than third world poor because they have things, well things other than food, shelter and clean water, so they can’t be really poor.
I just did a Google check and it ’rounded up the usual suspects’. It isn’t a question, and there is no interest in an answer, it is just a talking point to hide reality.
Poor farmers in Texas shouldn’t complain about losing their land and livestock, because the drought in Texas isn’t as bad as the drought in Somalia.
Just more chaff to disguise what greedy, selfish, sociopathic cretins that conservatives are at their core.
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
or, a variant:
If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.
(Yeah… I’m on a quotation kick again. Wisdom doesn’t change over the years, people simply either ignore it, pretend it isn’t so, or fail to understand it. Anyway, I’m rereading some of the classics (Anatole France currently). So you can all suffer with me!) 😈
And who knows… it is possible that someone may learn something. Anything is possible, I am told. 😛 😉
Conservatives can’t even quote properly. One of there latest attempts was:
“If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.”
That was attributed to Winston Churchill. Of course, if you actually knew anything about Churchill’s career you would be suspicious, because he was a Conservative at 20, a Liberal at 40, and then went back to being a Conservative at the end.
Actually it is the translation of a quote by Georges Clemenceau, one of those brilliant conservatives who helped to screw up the world at the Versailles conference after World War I. The brain trust that sliced up the Ottoman Empire without any regard for ethnic groups, and provided the economic conditions in Germany that resulted in the rise of the Nazis.
Have at it, Kryten, as most of the people who drop by read, with a few notable exceptions.
Many quotations (words of wizdom) are often misquoted, or wrongly attributed to others who often misquote, or change the original to suit their own purposes. I try to find the original quotation and attribute it appropriately. Fact is, I use them because whilst I could use my own words and pretend they are are my own, I’d rather the credit goes to the original thinker, where that it possible. 🙂 France even has a quote for that (oft wrongly attributed to Bertrand Russel):
When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it.
Anatole France didn’t even add the requirement that it be properly attributed. I suspect that he (wisely) assumed that honest people would do so, and others would not, regardless of any admonition of his. 😉 🙂
This one of his is one such that I had often thought myself, before I’d red his quotation, but he put’s it better than I, so I use his and attribute it. 🙂
It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.
from: The Revolt of the Angels (1914), Anatole France
I’ve come to realize that there is little, if any, wisdom I have learned through mu own experiences that is original, or hasn’t been stated before. The circumstances and times may be different, but wisdom cares about neither. And, AFAIK, that one is my own! Though it has probably been thought of and said by others before me). 😉 🙂
Mr. Duff apparently wishes to have fifty words for poor people the same way that Eskimos have fifty words for snow. Sorry, Duffer, you get the English language you have, not the English language you want. Poor is poor, regardless of your desire to do a Department of Truth to write the poor out of existence. Clue, Mr. Duffer: 1984 is *FICTION*, not a guide for organizing society. Just sayin’.
I’m curious — what do you call someone whose teeth are rotting out for lack of dental care, who lives in a tar-paper shack that is cold in winter and hot in summer, who spends every waking hour working to gather sustenance with no time for entertainment, rest, or relaxation, who last ate a fresh fruit or vegetable err never because they are not affordable by someone making minimum wage in the USA and there is no time to grow them because all time is taken up making sufficient money to pay the rent and pay for the third-hand used junker car needed to get to work so that rent can be paid, who is suffering from untreated high blood pressure and thus will die young because he cannot afford the medications to treat high blood pressure and is overweight from the cheap foods that are all that he can afford to purchase? What is your name for this person? “Rich”? Then what, praytell, is your word for Bill Gates?
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I find it intriguing when a neo-con quotes *semantics*. 🙂 Particularly when they have not the slightest idea what the word actually means. I have studied semantics, and General Semantics in particular.
Count Alfred Korzybski created General semantics as an educational discipline. Its basic premise is that the subject-predicate structure of natural language conditions humans to think and react in base, even primitive, false-to-facts patterns. General semantics was also conceived as an epistemological corrective method in science and in mathematics, as an aid to achieving agreement, unity and scientific progress necessary for scientific rigor.
Korzybski’s central goal was to attain a consciousness of abstracting, or an awareness of the map/territory distinction and of how information becomes distorted or deleted in the linguistic representations used. He considered irregular and intellectual understanding of these concepts insufficient and argued that full sanity can be achieved only when the consciousness of abstracting becomes constant and a matter of reflex.
Neo-con’s (in particular) see everything as very simplistic, as black-white. Probably because they can not truly comprehend anything beyond that simplistic level of complexity. These people seem to believe that the word is an exact definition of the thing it is supposed to define. As Korzybski said (and as some rather simple experiments can prove): “The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined”
A simplistic example is that I could state that “I have just eaten an orange.” Everyone reading that statement will have their own image of, their own smell of, their own tactile sense of, and most importantly perhaps, their own idea of the taste of that orange that I ate. And not one of those may accurately represent the orange that I actually ate. It is of course a trivial example. But if such a trivial example is so inadequate and imprecise, how can they hope to describe extremely complex processes in any accurate detail. But they believe, quite wrongly, that they can. And then wonder why things don’t ever match their simplistic beliefs or understanding. As Korzybski stated, language (in any form) can be used to describe the taste of an orange, but one cannot give the taste of the orange using language alone.
In his book, Science and Sanity (1933) Korzybski wrote:
The system by which the white race lives, suffers, ‘prospers’, starves, and dies today is not in a strict sense an Aristotelian system. Aristotle had far too much of the sense of actualities for that. It represents, however, a system formulated by those who, for nearly two thousand years since Aristotle, have controlled our knowledge and methods of orientations, and who, for purposes of their own, selected what today appears as the worst from Aristotle and the worst from Plato and, with their own additions, imposed this composite system upon us. In this they were greatly aided by the structure of language and psycho-logical habits, which from the primitive down to this very day have affected all of us consciously or unconsciously, and have introduced serious difficulties even in science and in mathematics.
Neo-con’s as a general rule use a strictly binary logic (true/false) value system. But as most of us know, our existence is actually a many-valued logic system with as many truth-values as the particular situation merit’s.
History, and my own experience, has shown that arguing with people who only have a binary understanding of reality is an exercise in futility. One would have better luck describing color to a person born blind. 🙂 These people wear ignorance as a badge of pride, whilst at the same time, trying to convince everyone they know everything, especially “The way I see things, and the way things should be!” TM.
Nearly everything is derivative, Kryten. Knowledge is built from layers of what has gone before. You can’t understand Einstein if you don’t understand Newton. The instruments get better and more accurate, and many useless paths have been identified, but we are building on the thoughts and ideas of those who came before.
The need to keep repeating the lessons is straight forward – language changes over time, and the meaning needs to be stated and refreshed in the language of the current generation.
Mr. Duff, it is as much a talking point as that ludicrous claim about The Grapes of Wrath and the Soviet Union. The film was released in 1940, and the Soviet Union was otherwise engaged. If they wanted to talk about American poverty, they could have the Americans who went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to find work, talk about it. It was the era of Stalin, and people didn’t give opinions. The obvious Soviet reason for screening the film was to show the way workers were treated by the ‘Kulaks” of California, an internal Soviet conflict that most Westerners know nothing about.
For a car to be useful you have to have roads and petrol stations, and they were a very long time coming. The love of the automobile was not a common feature among Soviets. The peasants were not allowed to move freely under the Tsars or the Soviets, so the statement about the movie is pure projection, not reality.
Words have meaning, and the word “poor” applies in Somalia, Tottenham, and the Mississippi Delta. If you can’t obtain food, water, and shelter, you are poor.
The local government generally defines a ‘poverty level’ as being some amount of the local currency, but “poor” fits around the world, even areas without currency.
Badtux, he has been informed by the conservative directorate that this would be a totally ‘awesome’ argument and it isn’t working out for him because he has encountered people who actually know those who are poor. Hell, my Mother worked whenever she could, and my Dad always had something else going on the side, like building water skis and boats when we were stationed down here.
The chaff continues as the economy sinks under the weight of the ignorance of austerity. It is no consolation that many more people will come to a truly personal understanding of the meaning of ‘poor’.
Mr. Duff, what I describe is the conditions under which approximately 20% of children in the United States are being raised, people you have no personal experience with but who I know quite well on both a personal and professional level. You still have not answered my question: What is your word to describe their economic status, if “poor” is not the word you wish to use?
– Badtux the Baffled Penguin
Waldemar Hanasz has no credentials or credibility on what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, nor does his father. Poland is not the Soviet Union, they are different countries with different languages, even when both had Communist governments, in case no one has told you.
Hanasz has skill at chess, but not Soviet history, even with his connection to another node of the wingnut welfare system that is willing to publish his delusions.
Unlike you, I verify my links. If he was important in Soviet history I would have recognized his name. All I recognized about his name was that he was Polish.
Ahah. I found the Duffer’s intellectual ancestor:
“There is no poverty in America.”
– Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior, 1931
Dr. Wilbur said such a thing while food riots were taking place across the country. It appears right-wingers have a long history of denying, well, reality.
– Badtux the History Penguin
Well, the media was refusing to report the Depression as a national story, they treated it as a local issue, which is why so many people hit the road looking for places that weren’t affected, only to find that it was not just national, but worldwide,
I really object to getting our butts kicked and economy ruined by something as well=known and understood as the ‘paradox of thrift’.
When 70% of your GDP is dependent on consumer spending, you have to do everything you can to ensure that consumers have money to spend, and laying off government workers doesn’t accomplish that. All of the major countries are heading down the same path as the 1930s when that is obviously going to end in disaster.
Hmm, you were posting your comment about the same time as I was posting my latest blog entry, where the last paragraph mentions the paradox of thrift and my contribution to it. Without inflation we’re fscked, but inflation cannot happen if people are instead hoarding their money because they fear for their jobs, or simply don’t have any money because they lost their jobs, because money quits circulating and disappears under mattresses instead. So in the end it’s all about jobs, but instead we get the followers of the Austerity Fairy claiming that application of the magical Wand of Austerity (after saying “bend over”) will somehow create jobs out of magical rainbow santorum fairy dust or something.
Or as one of the commenters on my blog puts it: “WASF.”
– Badtux the Economics Penguin
BTW, my thrift is not because I fear loss of jobs, but, rather, because I do the math and my money will be worth more later if I simply hold on to it rather than spend it, so I hold on to it. Which is great for my balance sheet, not so great for the economy…
– Badtux the Thrifty Pengui9n
Yeah, but the problem, as you are aware isn’t that just that individuals aren’t spending, but that the governments are also pulling back. People are making the right decision for their situation, which is why government needs to start generating some jobs through public works.
I had a great uncle who lost his farm in the Depression. He was producing milk and produce, but the people he normally sold to had no money, so the prices dropped. He had food to sell, but no buyers, so he didn’t have the cash for his mortgage.
In normal times he could have covered the entire mortgage by selling his dairy herd and falling back on truck farming, but no one had the money to buy the herd. He lost everything.
When he got back on his feet he bought everything with cash, and never borrowed money again. It took a long time, but he never had to worry about the effects of deflation.
Ask yourself who benefited from him losing the herd and losing the farm — probably the local rich guy — and you’ll understand why the rich love deflation and will do anything possible — including raising false warnings about inflation to force austerity on the part of governments — in order to cause deflation to happen. Because deflation is the most effective transferrer of wealth from ordinary people to the rich ever created, because the rich see their cash holdings rise in value and the cost of everything else decreasing in value, and when they’re sitting on literally *trillions* in cash or cash equivalents, that means they get to buy up the assets of the nation for pennies on the dollar.
Your uncle’s herd got sold at auction to someone who probably paid a few cents per head for the whole herd as the only bidder for it. Your uncle’s farm got repossessed by the bank and got sold at auction to a rich person who probably paid a few cents on the dollar for it. That’s the effect of deflation.
BTW, it’s basically impossible to buy a house for cash here in California unless you managed to win the dot-com lottery or are one of those rich people. Even a standard 3-bedroom suburban house sells for $400K. I don’t know about you, but I don’t happen to have $400K handy , and if I did, I wouldn’t spend it on a house, I’d be saving it for my retirement, which isn’t too many years ahead…
It appears that the Duffer has discovered a THESAURUS and found numerous synonyms for the word “poor” to use to describe the poor. Bravo, dear Duffer, bravo! Uhm, and that makes the poor non-poor… how?
I find it amusing that the Duffer makes these pronouncements from the other side of a very large pond about what life is like for 20% of the children in the United States without, you know, actually having any first-hand experience with the subject unlike folks like me (who taught poor children both in urban and rural areas) or Bryan (who lives in Fundistan and is surrounded by poor people). But I suppose the Duffer’s Party commissars have told him that only official Party doctrine is correct so even if he did have first-hand experience dealing with poor children, he’d believe Party doctrine rather than his lying eyes. So it goes. Just a reminder, Mr. Duffer: 1984 was *fiction*, not a guide, and attempting to re-write the English language to write 20% of American children out of it is both creepy and pathetic. Just sayin’!
You post an essay by an individual with no experience or credentials to make the claims he does and act like it is ‘holy writ’.
I have been translating for newly arrived immigrants from Russia for nearly two decades, and most of them complain about the need to have a car in the US. If you don’t live in or near a major city in Russia, you need a tracked vehicle, not a car, because the infrastructure doesn’t exist.
Poland has and had roads and cars, most of Russia doesn’t. It’s hard to miss what you’ve never had.
I have lived in Britain, which is why I knew there were 12 pence in a shilling, and why I said petrol instead of gas when discussing the problem of the statement.
I have been attacked by Libya when flying in the Med, which is why I have watched the Colonel.
I have lived all over the world as a military dependent and then in the military, and have friends from all around the world that I still keep in touch with.
When I comment about Britain I use British sources. My sources on Libya are not exactly open-source, so I don’t make any major claims about the situation beyond the obvious implications of standard military procedures, or what is being reported openly.
As I live next to a major military installation and in a tourist area, there are a lot of foreign born people in the area.
They have opinions and views, but I don’t present them as anything that should be “framed and put on the wall”. as they have the same place in reliability as ‘some bloke in the pub’, just like the opinion of Hanasz.
Anyone who was more interested in a beat-up used Model T farm truck than the starvation death of Gramma Joad, is not exactly a poverty expert.
For shame. Grandma Joad died of natural causes, not starvation. At least, that’s what her death certificate said, and the government would never lie, right? 😈
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The movie only covers half of the novel and excludes all of the facts, figures, and ‘reporting’ that Steinbeck did about the real conditions that a family like the Joads faced.
The book annoyed enough people that there were investigations launched by government agencies … which then had to be buried because they showed that Steinbeck actually made things look better than they really were, especially regarding the Hoovervilles.
People claimed he was a communist, blithely unaware that he had written a novel, In Dubious Battle that is an indictment of the Communist Party in the US. He felt that people were being ill-served by everyone during the Depression, and he had first-hand knowledge of what was happening in California agriculture, as he lived most of his life in Silinas. He wrote about what he knew without regard to who got annoyed.
It was a very long time before Silinas would admit that he was one of theirs.
Ah, I see. Mr. Duff is using the logic of nigger-knocking as his argument. For those not familiar with that quaint old custom of the American South, that argument goes “You may be poor, but at least you’re not a nigger!” as an excuse that politicians used for a) not addressing the problems of the poor, and b) continuing repressive policies against African-Americans that insured that African-Americans would be even poorer than the poor white trash who were the majority of their constituencies. That is, by insuring that other people are even poorer (which BTW is what we did with Mexico — we destroyed their economy with NAFTA by flooding it with cheap government-subsidized corn that drove all their farmers out of business), you can avoid having to address the poverty of your own constituents.
I must applaud you, Mr. Duffer, for so vividly bringing back the memory of all those KKK rallies attended by Southern politicians ranting “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” as their excuse for not addressing poverty amongst Southern whites. You are in fine company there. Though I’m sure you haven’t the foggiest clue about what I’m talking about, just as you have no idea that your attempt to write 20% of the children of America out of existence is just another variation of that argument. Because that would require logic, and all you have is right-wing talking points handed down to you by your Party commissars, who have been nigger-knocking since nigger-knocking was cool (but nowadays have to cloak it in code words since dancing around burning crosses in the woods is now considered uncouth). Typical RWNJ, in other words.
This, BTW, is the point at which I start deleting your comments at my own blog, because repetition of your Party doctrinal documents becomes tedious after a while and your response — to double down on the stupid — becomes simply boring. Just in case you’re wondering :).
– Badtux the Bored Penguin
And just as an aside, yes, I know that Bill Clinton is the one who signed NAFTA, though it was passed by a Republican Congress because it had originally been negotiated by President George H.W. Bush. As Alan Greenspan put it, Bill Clinton was the best Republican president of the past 30 years.
More assumptions based on facts not in evidence. You have no way of knowing the age of the people I translated for, but it would be inconvenient if they lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and ’40s like a significant number of my instructors at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, so ‘obviously’ they didn’t in your universe.
You said that the piece should be framed and displayed, which rather indicates the weight you placed on it.
.Hanasz is not, and was not a Russian linguist and intelligence analyst with access to all of the classified documents available on the Soviet Union. I was. He didn’t read all of the major Soviet newspapers and magazines on a regular basis, I did. It was my specialty in the military.
I don’t claim to know everything their is to know about Soviet history, but reading all of the Soviet media has made me a world-class expert on spotting propaganda, and propaganda is the bulk of what your comments contain, Mr. Duff.
Ah, Badtux, we were writing at the same time. Well, I think Clinton lost his ‘crown’ to Obama, who is obviously a Reagan Republican, and not the more moderate Rockefeller Republican that Clinton was.
Oh, Mr. Duff, what is this crap about people fighting to get across the border? The American side of the southern border is more peaceful than it has been in years with the crime rates down in all of the major border cities.
Mexico has a lot of violence, pretty much a replay of the Prohibition era violence that the US saw in the 1920s and 30s, because of the ‘War on Drugs’, but that has nothing to do with people coming North to find work. They have already figured out that there is no work in El Norte, so they are staying south, with many undocumented workers in the US heading home to be poor among their family and friends.
It is easy to track the trend by following the money transfers to Mexico and Central America. They have tanked because of the economy. It isn’t just the size of the transfers, which were never large, but the number of transfers which corresponds to the number of undocumented.
‘Border violence’ was never more than Republican propaganda to deflect attention from the damage they had done to the US economy under the Hedgemony.
Ah yes, doubling down on the stupid and resorting to slandering the source of data rather than addressing the data. Always the last resort of the RWNJ after his talking points have been thoroughly rebutted by date — “the data isn’t the data!” screams the RWNJ. “Unicorns ARE pink and cotton candy DOES grow on trees in my universe!” screams the RWNJ. Not much to do at that point except point and laugh at how the moron changes the subject whenever the data doesn’t match his precious Party talking points.
– Badtux the Point-and-laugh Penguin
Sorry to disappoint you Mr Duff, but I was with NSA which correctly evaluated the situation in the Soviet Union, as did GCHQ, but were ignored by the politicians, Reagan and Thatcher, who needed an existential threat to justify their stupid policies. You can’t waste billions on defense and run up the deficit if there is nothing to defend against. The politicians blamed it on intel to avoid responsibility for what they did.
Reagan actually kept the Soviet Union in power beyond its natural collapse with all of the threats and posturing, which resulted in the collapse being much more sudden and worse than it would have been if everyone had just ignored them.
Mr. Duff, you keep looking for a definition of poverty that suits your purposes. There are 46 million US citizens on food stamps, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, without that government program they would be in danger of starving. The program is no different in purpose that the Oxfam effort in Somalia – to prevent starvation.
Have you ever looked at the infant mortality rate in the US? We are third world on that rate, ranked 34th in the world, and you don’t think we have disease?
The homelessness in the US is well documented, and many who are not considered homelessness live in conditions that are normally seen in the third world.
And I might add that there are over 50 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid, or 17% of the U.S. population. The requirements for Medicaid are quite strict — one cannot have more than $2000 in TOTAL family assets here in California (yes, that includes the television and automobile that the Duffer rants about), and single males are completely ineligible no matter how poor, meaning that if anything this figure understates poverty in America. But apparently inadequate charity care (which is what Medicaid is) means you’re not poor, in the universe where the Duffer exists, where the unicorns poop rainbows and cotton candy grows on trees no doubt.
— Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Our new governor has just moved Florida Medicaid into a ‘Managing not to care’ system that accepts a flat rate from the state to not do anything, and the only way single people have any access is if they already receive money through Social Security. That way the system acts as a ‘medi-gap’ policy, with the Feds picking up almost all of the costs.
There is a phenomenon known as a Medicaid divorce in Florida, where a couple with a seriously ill child will divorce so that the now single mother can obtain Medicaid to take care of the child. This is known as ‘family values’.
And of course Medicaid cuts have killed people nationwide by refusing treatment to those who cannot afford health insurance if the treatment is more expensive than the oligarchs feel like paying for, but those people aren’t dying due to lack of health care, if you listen to the Duffer. They’re dying of “natural causes”, I’m sure :twisted:.
The truly absurd part are the cuts in services that are going to force people into more expensive institutional settings, or to use emergency rooms, because Medicaid won’t pay for the in-house services.
The best news we have had around here is that my Mother’s pulmonologist is opening a 24/7 walk-in clinic locally, so you don’t have to go to the witch doctors at the ’emergency room’. That change should really reduce local medical costs. Working people will actually be able to get some medical help without mortgaging their future to HCA.
“Just Die” would seem to the real message underlying these cuts.