If they disagree with me on basic facts that can be easily verified, then yes, that DOES make someone stupid.
For instance, if you claim that it is daytime, and I claim that it is nighttime (assume that we are colocated in this scenario), and we then proceed to go outside and see that the sun is directly overhead, and then check a clock and see that it is 12:00 noon... and I then continued to emphatically declare that it is nighttime, then I would be stupid. Deeply, fundamentally stupid.
Similarly, someone who stubbornly asserts claims about universal healthcare that are easily disprovable (and have been disproven repeatedly), then they are stupid. Deeply, fundamentally stupid.
I'm guessing you're either religious or a neoconservative. To my knowledge, those are the principal groups that seem to cling to this belief that opinions are somehow relevant in determining the nature of reality. Unfortunately, it's not true. Only strictly subjective matters are subject to the idiocy of opinion. Most of reality is strictly a concrete, objective, independently verifiable phenomenon.
Try watching less Fox News. Your awareness of reality may already be dangerously undermined.
Stories like the ones above are the exception, not the rule...
Except in the US. In a private system, they ARE the rule. You've got three stories there -- but 18% of Americans have NO HEALTHCARE WHATSOEVER. They can't even get to the point of being exploited and gouged. They keep the waitlists short by not being on them.
I'll never understand how such hateful, inhuman monsters as yourself can exist. You'd rather have 18% of the people go without care, and another 20 or 30% go with substandard care, then face the HORRORS of a system where so few people receive poor care that when it happens it's newsworthy.
With any luck, you'll be downsized and get cancer on the same day, and you'll finally develop that special form of self-servint empathy that only a conservative fallen on hard times can have.
Healthcare is much, much cheaper than you seem believe.
30% of the costs of healthcare go to running the beauracracies of the insurance companies. In a socialized system only 3% of the money goes towards running the beauracracy.
Then you have the drugs, for which 70% of the cost goes to marketing. You'd know that, if you weren't so ignorant and stupid.
Try not being a GOP puppet. Thinking for yourself isn't nearly as hard as you might imagine.
This is my favourite though:
and people have such a sense of entitlement to all this work, and they're outraged that they can't have it on the cheap. Fancy that.
People feel they are entitled to NOT DIE. Fancy that!
Regarding Al-Qaeda, that comment was simply intended as humour. After all, doesn't the US government constantly blather about terrorists wanting to take away western freedoms?
Needless to say, I know that in many countries (including my own), people with security clearance are still permitted to travel freely without having to tell their parents... I mean government, where they are.
Finally, fascist dictatorship was precisely what I meant. The US uses propaganda extensively, uses war to stimulate the economy, has elections that are so corrupt as to be meaningless, and is becoming a police state. All four are traditional components of fascism.
In addition, to be quite honest, I don't feel the need to explain ANY of it to anyone who flashes a government ID at me.
Yeah, and I'm sure that will seem just great when you're in a secret detention facility somewhere.
Americans voted for Fascists, and now they act all surprised that they have a Fascist government. It's hard to believe that Americans could be so terrified of a few welfare programs (or even that most horrifying of all prospets -- voting outside the two-party system), that they would elect a bunch of guys whose platform included a war, enormous increases in the size of the government, massive national debt, and the razing of the economy.
Who do I have to report overseas travel to? Isn't it enough to inform the State Department that I travel? now I have to report my summer vacation plans to the school administration?
You have to report your travel plans to the State Department? What COUNTRY do you live in?! I mean, I've heard that the US is pretty much a Fascist dictatorship now, but I had no idea how bad it had gotten. Did Al Q'aida succeed in their plans to take away Americans' freedom, and I just missed the news?
Ultimately, it's a good thing that the FBI is protecting us. By monitoring students, we can make the USA so much like Iran that Islamic extremists will start supporting America, not fighting it.
Secret detention centers, an unaccountable police force, an excessively powerful and secretive security force, and a war-based economy. Hmm... what does that remind me of? And now, we have government harassment of students, as if they're the only ones who ever support terrorists (rather than the US government itself, which paid for the formation of most of these terrorist groups in the first place).
So the NDP isn't on the committee? That's surprising, since they've typically been the party that has been the most outspoken about strengthening copyright law in favour of industry.
Ironically, the conservatives used to be the only party that opposed the strengthening of copyright law. I guess they ditched that platform, just like the few other policies they had that weren't completely awful.
Then you haven't met any subsistence-level single parents. Not many people do, since they usually spend every last second of their time working, sleeping, or taking care of their kids.
Funny how you seem to think that the people that you meet on a daily basis are somehow a representative sample of society upon which to base judgements and condemnations of the poor.
Actually, the single parent I referred to in my post does have a computer with an internet connection. I suppose she could ditch that and invest the money. Of course, that's still basically the exact opposite of an investment since it would drastically reduce the chance's that her children would ever be able to do more than service-industry level shit-jobs. Saving that $360 a year would still only be $23,000 in 50 years, by which time she will have reached the typical life expectancy for women. Based on current inflation rates, getting rid of her internet connection will let her save enough money to pay for a single year's worth of tuition at a community college for her children WHEN THEY'RE 60 YEARS OLD.
Maybe you shouldn't judge people based on the fact that you personally know a few lazy people. That says more about who you associate with than it does about the realities of poverty in North American society.
It does indeed take $100 to invest... but in a savings account?! At 1% interest? That's less than inflation. That's the opposite of investment. That's losing money, in any realistic sense. But suppose someone DOES save that 1 cent you mentioned, does so every day, and invests it yearly in a savings account. In fifty years they'll have a staggering $23000 saved. That'll be some retirement.
I like how you use a teenager living at home as your example of financial success. Now consider this story: a single mom with two kids, who earns $1500 a month. She rents a two bedroom apartment for $1200, which is pretty cheap in the rental market hereabouts. A transit pass costs $65 (she needs to actually GET to work). That leaves her $235 a month to feed her family, buy clothes and shoes and whatnot for growing children, sundries, maybe a phone line so that she can actually take telephone calls from work letting her know when her shifts are.
But, by YOUR estimation, she's just a lazy idiot, and should try to do all of that on $135, and save $100 -- the teenager with no children and no bills can do it, so why can't she?!
One of my co-workers is in almost exactly this situation -- two kids, her husband is permanently disabled and in an institution, and she has no marketable skills. She's in the position where she has to squeeze every last penny just to make ends meet.
Attitude is everything. It's the cheapest thing that one can change that will have the biggest effect.
The number one reason that employers hire new people to replace old people with bad attitudes is that the new people have healthy attitudes.
I know it makes you feel better about yourself to believe that those who don't come out ahead in life are just lazy or have bad attitudes. My co-worker that I mentioned? She is one of the sweetest, hardest working people I've ever meet. When I was training her, I couldn't get anything done myself because she insisted on doing EVERYTHING. She's just a really driven, positive, hard-working girl who will do anything to keep her family housed, clothed, and fed. Yet it's irrelevant -- she's stuck at the subsistence level, and will never be able to rise above it (or at least not for 20 years when her kids leave home and she finally has time to go back to school or something).
You can't invest a good attitude. In most cases, all it means is the difference between subsistence and death (we've had to fire more than a few people in similarly bad situations who just wouldn't do the job).
Seriously -- a teenager living at home with a job that his family got for him? What the hell kind of stupid example is that?! Why not focus on real families that are actually out there trying to make it -- people facing REAL challenges. You were homeless because you're a moron: morons constitute just a small minority of the homeless. Drug addicts constitute another small majority. It turns out that the majority of homeless people have serious neurological and psychiatric problems -- not "bad attitudes".
Hell, a hateful psycho like you probably thinks that my coworker's husband -- the one with such severe brain-damage from a stroke that he can't even take care of himself -- just has a bad attitude, and if he would try harder he'd be out there making money and getting rich.
This guy was fairly specific -- he said "anyone" can. You seem to have the same overgeneralizing tendency as well -- you write "by and large, everyone", and then "they just have [to] quit being lazy".
Do you know what the incidence of schizophrenia is? Approximately 0.5%. That's 1 out of every 200 people, right there, who have a barrier to success that can easily be insurmountable. No amount of good attitude can help someone not be insane, or let them function in the face of the hideous side-effects of antipsychotic medications.
Have you even heard of hypothyroid disorder? It's a fairly common glandular disorder, affecting around 1% of the population. Undiagnosed, people who have it seem really tired and lazy. No matter how much they want to work hard, they can't. Hard work is simply impossible for people with this condition. It's easily and effectively treated with thyroxine or synthroid, but it often goes undiagnosed, because it's so much easier to just condemn people as horrible lazy, immoral wretches.
It would never occur to judgemental assholes that -- just maybe -- the people they see as lazy, are actually suffering from problems that are more common and vastly more delibitating than anything that has ever graced their own perfect little lives.
So in our survey of diseases that can make productivity nearly impossible, we've already lost 1.5% of the population after considering just two disorders. Are you sure that "by and large, everyone... can... make something out of themselves"?
Overwhelming adversity is much more common than people like you would care to think. You just tell yourselves that it's fleetingly rare, since otherwise, your value system would seem unthinkably monstrous and unfeeling -- and Humans are nearly incapable of believing ANYTHING, no matter how obvious and well-supported by evidence, that would require them to rethink their value system. They're even less capable of believing anything that might give them a moral perogative to do things that are not in their own self-interest, like supporting social-programs or charities. That seems to be the trap that you are caught in. You can't acknowledge that the health and skills necessary to be fully productive are only held by -- at best -- a small majority of people.
Could it just... MAYBE... be that people who are lower class don't HAVE any money to save? And that people who are middle class can afford save, but can't afford to invest beyond maybe an RSP or something?
People themselves and the decisions they make are the biggest obstacle they have to overcome.
You see, this is just moronic. Go meet a low income single parent some time, look at how economically they live, and then try to tell me that it's their own fault for using their money to feed their children rather than investing it and letting their children starve.
There's an old chestnut about how it takes money to make money. You may have heard this before at some point. You can't save money if you need to spend 100% of your income and go into debt just to stave off death. You can't invest money if investment fees are so high that they would cost more than you expect to make back on interest... and of course, you need to have disposable income to begin with.
It's easy to give stupid advice when you HAVE the disposable income and wealth necessary to invest. But try living at the subsistence level, and let's see how much you manage to invest.
Our economic system naturally balances itself in such a way that a very sizable portion of the population can never afford to invest. If they could invest, they could become wealthy enough to stop working, and eventually there would be no one to do the grunt work. This creates a negative feedback loop which gradually impoverishes people until there are enough wage-slaves to keep the system functioning.
I have a high school education from a podunk school from a town of 3000 people. If I can do it, you have no excuses.
So if I were, hypothetically, a bling quadriplegic, the fact that you come from a small town and graduated from college would somehow imply that I could be every bit as successful as you?!
No offense, but your underabundance of schooling shows.
Maybe what you meant was "If you have exactly the same mental and physical characteristics as I do, then you have no excuses other than misfortune, happenstance, and tragedy". You see, THAT would sound less moronic.
I have too have a high school education and come from a town of 4000.
I can support several dozen of computers in my spare time, and keep them all virus and spyware free, despite only needing to perform maintenance once every few months. So, by your logic, EVERYONE should be able to keep their computer running smoothly, assemble new PCs from parts, troubleshoot system failures, etc. I mean, I can it -- people without my genetic predisposition towards intelligence and mechanical aptitude should be able to do so as well, right?
Or how about this one -- I have a high school education, and come from a town of 4000. Yet I can pass my science courses in college without studying or doing assignments. Therefore, EVERYONE should be able to pass undergraduate science courses without studying or doing assignments. If they don't have a natural, intuitive understanding of it, that's their own moral failure -- they shouldn't be such stupid, awful, lazy people.
Here's an idea: you happen to be a naturally healthy, energetic person with exactly the right kind of metabolism and circadian rhythm to function optimally in our system, and have never had any major problems in your life -- like having your spinal cord inconveniently severed, or a tumor just kind of showing up in your cerebellum, or discovering a genetic predisposition towards severe anxiety disorder, or insomnia so severe that you lose your job, or an underactive thyroid gland (which is indistinguishable from intense laziness without a blood test).
People like you should be required to spend a year with schizophrenia before they can start dispensing their helpful "advice", so that they learn exactly how trivial the obstacles in their life were. The fun thing with schizophrenia is that even if you find a medication that works, it will probably cause hyperobesity, lethargy, and uncontrollable salivation. Good luck being successful when you have to choose between being completely insane and being a lazy fatass who drools on himself all day.
Besides -- even for healthy people, you're assuming that having lots of money is somehow the point. If people want to spend their money at Starbucks, how is that worse than saving up for a car? More than a few people will take the delicious stimulant over the metal coffin powered by exploding fossils.
I think he means "poor" compared to the multimillionares that this kind of thing is targetted at. The occasional dentist or doctor, that kind of thing.
Wouldn't that be biased? When the President says that the sky is green, and there's an article about it, should a summary be that the article claims that the president is lying? No, of course not. The president IS lying (or he's a goddam retard).
Ignoring reality and pretending that the delusions of the current US administration could be true is a much worse form of bias than the one you're imagining to exist here.
Partisan morons like yourself need to get over their infatuations with certain politicians and political groups. You can always spot them; you probably noticed a few of them yourself ten years ago -- the people who went around whining like spanked children everytime there was an article about the Clinton's supreme court hearings. "How can they be so judgemental and MEAN! Grrr! Clinton is a good guy! BIAS! BIAS! Ricky... wahhhh*" The best thing for them would have been to not idolize clinton in the first place, and to simply acknowledge that he was a pig-fucking con artist. So how does it feel to be in the same moronic position with the Bush administration? Get over them -- they're a bunch of corrupt moronic assholes and they have the collective scientific knowledge of a sack of mice.
Any subject on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree is either:
A matter of opinion, and thus disagreement is meaningless and it's impossible to be correct or incorrect in the first place. If you find yourself disagreeing with someone on matters of opinion, you're already in the idiot category and might as well be as big a dipshit as you can. If you're an idiot anyway, at least be an idiot whole-heartedely. Anyone who would sit around disagreeing about whether Mariah Carey needs to be imprisoned for her heinous aural crimes, or just soundly beaten for them, as if that's a matter of fact and not just a matter of subjective enjoyment, is inherently unreasonable.
Poorly understood by both sides, in which case both are actually just well-disguised idiots, and may as well slap each other around a bit, or commit genocide against each other's races, or something. That's what idiots do; and they've got to be themselves.
This just highlights the insanity of Christians. They believe that it is good and right for God to inflict an eternity of burning on ANYONE who doesn't believe. Most of them, at some level, are still sane enough to realize that burning someone at the stake isn't a warranted punishment for... say, jaywalking. Yet God will supposedly burn you FOREVER just for not believing he exists, despite the fact that he clearly went out of his way to make his existence seem ludicrously improbable.
A good, loving person wouldn't burn ANYONE for ANY reason. For Christians to believe that God is in the right to do so speaks volumes to how despicably vile they are.
Of course, by acknowledging that you may be an idiot, you demonstrate intelligence, giving you more reason to assume that you're already correct and therefore a) not an idiot, and b) entitled to give sterilization-grade wedgies to idiots.
However you frame it, we are all entitled to roundhouse-kick the people who disagree with us in the face.:p Think about it -- if you're correct, you'll probably cling to your views despite the occasional roundhouse-kick from idiots (who would probably roundhouse-kick you anyway, since that's the kind of thing that idiots are known for), whereas if you're incorrect, you might eventually have some sense beaten into you.
There *could* be more parts?! The fact that PT Barnum (and people like him) exist is PROOF that such parts of the brain exist.
You must be one of those people that believes in some magical soul floating around, letting us do things for no reason. Sorry, no. Our behaviour is dictated by a biomechanical brain. We do what we do because our brain makes us do it, and the reward system is ultimately what governs it.
Do you really doubt for a second that the pleasure centers of the brain don't light up in a scam-artist's head when he runs a successfull game of "cups"? Or that a wallstreet trader doesn't get a similar rush when he makes a cunning trade and wipes out the economy of a third-world nation? Or that George Bush doesn't get a little rush to the pleasure center of his admittedly chimp-like brain when he signs an execution order for a prisoner?
We have LOTS of instincts. This research shows that altruism is one of them -- something that anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been claiming for decades. It's just nice to now have some physical proof.
Indeed. When you actually read the bible, it's clear that a serial child-rapist who believes in God will go to heaven, while the most charitable, loving, polite, generous atheist in the world will still go to hell. It's exactly the opposite of what sane people would describe as "moral".
That's why there is no such thing as a moral Christian. You can't follow that system of belief and still be a good person. You can't believe that the serial child-rapist is more deserving of reward in paradise than the selfless atheist, and simulataneously lay claim to an "elevated" system of ethics. A truly good person simply can't believe that a murderous war-monger like George Bush is going to heaven while a compassionate pacifist like Gandhi is in hell, simply because Bush sucked up to the right deity.
No one ever said that altruism didn't have limits. All "reward" behaviours have limits. You don't see many people spending 100% of their time eating, or fucking, or achieving things, or any of the other things that light up the reward centers of the brain.
Besides, your analogy has the answer contained within it. Being at home on Thanksgiving, you get to EAT -- and not just some orphanage-grade soup either. You get to eat turkey and stuffing and pie. You don't think that lights up the reward centers of the brain? And later that evening, you might get to have sex with your spouse, which also lights up the reward centers of the brain.
The fact that you don't want to think through these very obvious deductions suggests that you just don't WANT to see them, because this research threatens your GOP-inspired worldview. It's sad, really. But it's not really your fault; the Republican sub-species has never been able to deal with facts and logic. It's just who you are. I'd no sooner fault you for it than I'd fault someone for being disabled or for being short.
Isn't the desire to understand the world ALSO a primitive, basic drive? So a superior person would eschew science, reason, and logic as well. The drive to be advanced and superior is also an instinctive one, so a advanced person would deliberately eschew advancement.
It follows that the most advanced Humans are the American white-trash, who spend all their money on beer and wrestling pay-per-view, watch Fox News, and never leave the couch except to obtain more deep-fried veal-burgers and vote for the GOP (at least until you can vote for the GOP using a remote control or a $15 cell-phone). They resist all of their "primitive" instincts for advancement, ethics, knowledge, altruism, and personal growth.
My father, a reverend who performed a lot of weddings, always had this to say about marriage: that it's not about sharing 50%-50%, it's about sharing 100%-100%. Of course, he went through two divorces himself... whether that's a qualification or a disqualification for expertise on the subject is really up to you to decide.
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For instance, if you claim that it is daytime, and I claim that it is nighttime (assume that we are colocated in this scenario), and we then proceed to go outside and see that the sun is directly overhead, and then check a clock and see that it is 12:00 noon ... and I then continued to emphatically declare that it is nighttime, then I would be stupid. Deeply, fundamentally stupid.
Similarly, someone who stubbornly asserts claims about universal healthcare that are easily disprovable (and have been disproven repeatedly), then they are stupid. Deeply, fundamentally stupid.
I'm guessing you're either religious or a neoconservative. To my knowledge, those are the principal groups that seem to cling to this belief that opinions are somehow relevant in determining the nature of reality. Unfortunately, it's not true. Only strictly subjective matters are subject to the idiocy of opinion. Most of reality is strictly a concrete, objective, independently verifiable phenomenon.
Try watching less Fox News. Your awareness of reality may already be dangerously undermined.
Except in the US. In a private system, they ARE the rule. You've got three stories there -- but 18% of Americans have NO HEALTHCARE WHATSOEVER. They can't even get to the point of being exploited and gouged. They keep the waitlists short by not being on them.
I'll never understand how such hateful, inhuman monsters as yourself can exist. You'd rather have 18% of the people go without care, and another 20 or 30% go with substandard care, then face the HORRORS of a system where so few people receive poor care that when it happens it's newsworthy.
With any luck, you'll be downsized and get cancer on the same day, and you'll finally develop that special form of self-servint empathy that only a conservative fallen on hard times can have.
Try not being a GOP puppet. Thinking for yourself isn't nearly as hard as you might imagine.
This is my favourite though:
People feel they are entitled to NOT DIE. Fancy that!Goddam fucking idiot....
Regarding Al-Qaeda, that comment was simply intended as humour. After all, doesn't the US government constantly blather about terrorists wanting to take away western freedoms?
Needless to say, I know that in many countries (including my own), people with security clearance are still permitted to travel freely without having to tell their parents... I mean government, where they are.
Finally, fascist dictatorship was precisely what I meant. The US uses propaganda extensively, uses war to stimulate the economy, has elections that are so corrupt as to be meaningless, and is becoming a police state. All four are traditional components of fascism.
Americans voted for Fascists, and now they act all surprised that they have a Fascist government. It's hard to believe that Americans could be so terrified of a few welfare programs (or even that most horrifying of all prospets -- voting outside the two-party system), that they would elect a bunch of guys whose platform included a war, enormous increases in the size of the government, massive national debt, and the razing of the economy.
Secret detention centers, an unaccountable police force, an excessively powerful and secretive security force, and a war-based economy. Hmm... what does that remind me of? And now, we have government harassment of students, as if they're the only ones who ever support terrorists (rather than the US government itself, which paid for the formation of most of these terrorist groups in the first place).
Ironically, the conservatives used to be the only party that opposed the strengthening of copyright law. I guess they ditched that platform, just like the few other policies they had that weren't completely awful.
Funny how you seem to think that the people that you meet on a daily basis are somehow a representative sample of society upon which to base judgements and condemnations of the poor.
Actually, the single parent I referred to in my post does have a computer with an internet connection. I suppose she could ditch that and invest the money. Of course, that's still basically the exact opposite of an investment since it would drastically reduce the chance's that her children would ever be able to do more than service-industry level shit-jobs. Saving that $360 a year would still only be $23,000 in 50 years, by which time she will have reached the typical life expectancy for women. Based on current inflation rates, getting rid of her internet connection will let her save enough money to pay for a single year's worth of tuition at a community college for her children WHEN THEY'RE 60 YEARS OLD.
Maybe you shouldn't judge people based on the fact that you personally know a few lazy people. That says more about who you associate with than it does about the realities of poverty in North American society.
I like how you use a teenager living at home as your example of financial success. Now consider this story: a single mom with two kids, who earns $1500 a month. She rents a two bedroom apartment for $1200, which is pretty cheap in the rental market hereabouts. A transit pass costs $65 (she needs to actually GET to work). That leaves her $235 a month to feed her family, buy clothes and shoes and whatnot for growing children, sundries, maybe a phone line so that she can actually take telephone calls from work letting her know when her shifts are.
But, by YOUR estimation, she's just a lazy idiot, and should try to do all of that on $135, and save $100 -- the teenager with no children and no bills can do it, so why can't she?!
One of my co-workers is in almost exactly this situation -- two kids, her husband is permanently disabled and in an institution, and she has no marketable skills. She's in the position where she has to squeeze every last penny just to make ends meet.
I know it makes you feel better about yourself to believe that those who don't come out ahead in life are just lazy or have bad attitudes. My co-worker that I mentioned? She is one of the sweetest, hardest working people I've ever meet. When I was training her, I couldn't get anything done myself because she insisted on doing EVERYTHING. She's just a really driven, positive, hard-working girl who will do anything to keep her family housed, clothed, and fed. Yet it's irrelevant -- she's stuck at the subsistence level, and will never be able to rise above it (or at least not for 20 years when her kids leave home and she finally has time to go back to school or something).You can't invest a good attitude. In most cases, all it means is the difference between subsistence and death (we've had to fire more than a few people in similarly bad situations who just wouldn't do the job).
Seriously -- a teenager living at home with a job that his family got for him? What the hell kind of stupid example is that?! Why not focus on real families that are actually out there trying to make it -- people facing REAL challenges. You were homeless because you're a moron: morons constitute just a small minority of the homeless. Drug addicts constitute another small majority. It turns out that the majority of homeless people have serious neurological and psychiatric problems -- not "bad attitudes".
Hell, a hateful psycho like you probably thinks that my coworker's husband -- the one with such severe brain-damage from a stroke that he can't even take care of himself -- just has a bad attitude, and if he would try harder he'd be out there making money and getting rich.
Do you know what the incidence of schizophrenia is? Approximately 0.5%. That's 1 out of every 200 people, right there, who have a barrier to success that can easily be insurmountable. No amount of good attitude can help someone not be insane, or let them function in the face of the hideous side-effects of antipsychotic medications.
Have you even heard of hypothyroid disorder? It's a fairly common glandular disorder, affecting around 1% of the population. Undiagnosed, people who have it seem really tired and lazy. No matter how much they want to work hard, they can't. Hard work is simply impossible for people with this condition. It's easily and effectively treated with thyroxine or synthroid, but it often goes undiagnosed, because it's so much easier to just condemn people as horrible lazy, immoral wretches.
It would never occur to judgemental assholes that -- just maybe -- the people they see as lazy, are actually suffering from problems that are more common and vastly more delibitating than anything that has ever graced their own perfect little lives.
So in our survey of diseases that can make productivity nearly impossible, we've already lost 1.5% of the population after considering just two disorders. Are you sure that "by and large, everyone ... can ... make something out of themselves"?
Overwhelming adversity is much more common than people like you would care to think. You just tell yourselves that it's fleetingly rare, since otherwise, your value system would seem unthinkably monstrous and unfeeling -- and Humans are nearly incapable of believing ANYTHING, no matter how obvious and well-supported by evidence, that would require them to rethink their value system. They're even less capable of believing anything that might give them a moral perogative to do things that are not in their own self-interest, like supporting social-programs or charities. That seems to be the trap that you are caught in. You can't acknowledge that the health and skills necessary to be fully productive are only held by -- at best -- a small majority of people.
There's an old chestnut about how it takes money to make money. You may have heard this before at some point. You can't save money if you need to spend 100% of your income and go into debt just to stave off death. You can't invest money if investment fees are so high that they would cost more than you expect to make back on interest ... and of course, you need to have disposable income to begin with.
It's easy to give stupid advice when you HAVE the disposable income and wealth necessary to invest. But try living at the subsistence level, and let's see how much you manage to invest.
Our economic system naturally balances itself in such a way that a very sizable portion of the population can never afford to invest. If they could invest, they could become wealthy enough to stop working, and eventually there would be no one to do the grunt work. This creates a negative feedback loop which gradually impoverishes people until there are enough wage-slaves to keep the system functioning.
No offense, but your underabundance of schooling shows.
Maybe what you meant was "If you have exactly the same mental and physical characteristics as I do, then you have no excuses other than misfortune, happenstance, and tragedy". You see, THAT would sound less moronic.
I have too have a high school education and come from a town of 4000.
I can support several dozen of computers in my spare time, and keep them all virus and spyware free, despite only needing to perform maintenance once every few months. So, by your logic, EVERYONE should be able to keep their computer running smoothly, assemble new PCs from parts, troubleshoot system failures, etc. I mean, I can it -- people without my genetic predisposition towards intelligence and mechanical aptitude should be able to do so as well, right?
Or how about this one -- I have a high school education, and come from a town of 4000. Yet I can pass my science courses in college without studying or doing assignments. Therefore, EVERYONE should be able to pass undergraduate science courses without studying or doing assignments. If they don't have a natural, intuitive understanding of it, that's their own moral failure -- they shouldn't be such stupid, awful, lazy people.
Here's an idea: you happen to be a naturally healthy, energetic person with exactly the right kind of metabolism and circadian rhythm to function optimally in our system, and have never had any major problems in your life -- like having your spinal cord inconveniently severed, or a tumor just kind of showing up in your cerebellum, or discovering a genetic predisposition towards severe anxiety disorder, or insomnia so severe that you lose your job, or an underactive thyroid gland (which is indistinguishable from intense laziness without a blood test).
People like you should be required to spend a year with schizophrenia before they can start dispensing their helpful "advice", so that they learn exactly how trivial the obstacles in their life were. The fun thing with schizophrenia is that even if you find a medication that works, it will probably cause hyperobesity, lethargy, and uncontrollable salivation. Good luck being successful when you have to choose between being completely insane and being a lazy fatass who drools on himself all day.
Besides -- even for healthy people, you're assuming that having lots of money is somehow the point. If people want to spend their money at Starbucks, how is that worse than saving up for a car? More than a few people will take the delicious stimulant over the metal coffin powered by exploding fossils.
I think he means "poor" compared to the multimillionares that this kind of thing is targetted at. The occasional dentist or doctor, that kind of thing.
Ignoring reality and pretending that the delusions of the current US administration could be true is a much worse form of bias than the one you're imagining to exist here.
Partisan morons like yourself need to get over their infatuations with certain politicians and political groups. You can always spot them; you probably noticed a few of them yourself ten years ago -- the people who went around whining like spanked children everytime there was an article about the Clinton's supreme court hearings. "How can they be so judgemental and MEAN! Grrr! Clinton is a good guy! BIAS! BIAS! Ricky... wahhhh *" The best thing for them would have been to not idolize clinton in the first place, and to simply acknowledge that he was a pig-fucking con artist. So how does it feel to be in the same moronic position with the Bush administration? Get over them -- they're a bunch of corrupt moronic assholes and they have the collective scientific knowledge of a sack of mice.
* Reference to "I Love Lucy".
A good, loving person wouldn't burn ANYONE for ANY reason. For Christians to believe that God is in the right to do so speaks volumes to how despicably vile they are.
However you frame it, we are all entitled to roundhouse-kick the people who disagree with us in the face. :p Think about it -- if you're correct, you'll probably cling to your views despite the occasional roundhouse-kick from idiots (who would probably roundhouse-kick you anyway, since that's the kind of thing that idiots are known for), whereas if you're incorrect, you might eventually have some sense beaten into you.
Well, you could always anthropomorphize something or just imagine up a few associates.
You must be one of those people that believes in some magical soul floating around, letting us do things for no reason. Sorry, no. Our behaviour is dictated by a biomechanical brain. We do what we do because our brain makes us do it, and the reward system is ultimately what governs it.
Do you really doubt for a second that the pleasure centers of the brain don't light up in a scam-artist's head when he runs a successfull game of "cups"? Or that a wallstreet trader doesn't get a similar rush when he makes a cunning trade and wipes out the economy of a third-world nation? Or that George Bush doesn't get a little rush to the pleasure center of his admittedly chimp-like brain when he signs an execution order for a prisoner?
We have LOTS of instincts. This research shows that altruism is one of them -- something that anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been claiming for decades. It's just nice to now have some physical proof.
That's why there is no such thing as a moral Christian. You can't follow that system of belief and still be a good person. You can't believe that the serial child-rapist is more deserving of reward in paradise than the selfless atheist, and simulataneously lay claim to an "elevated" system of ethics. A truly good person simply can't believe that a murderous war-monger like George Bush is going to heaven while a compassionate pacifist like Gandhi is in hell, simply because Bush sucked up to the right deity.
Wasn't there an episode of the Dilbert animated series on that very subject?
Besides, your analogy has the answer contained within it. Being at home on Thanksgiving, you get to EAT -- and not just some orphanage-grade soup either. You get to eat turkey and stuffing and pie. You don't think that lights up the reward centers of the brain? And later that evening, you might get to have sex with your spouse, which also lights up the reward centers of the brain.
The fact that you don't want to think through these very obvious deductions suggests that you just don't WANT to see them, because this research threatens your GOP-inspired worldview. It's sad, really. But it's not really your fault; the Republican sub-species has never been able to deal with facts and logic. It's just who you are. I'd no sooner fault you for it than I'd fault someone for being disabled or for being short.
It follows that the most advanced Humans are the American white-trash, who spend all their money on beer and wrestling pay-per-view, watch Fox News, and never leave the couch except to obtain more deep-fried veal-burgers and vote for the GOP (at least until you can vote for the GOP using a remote control or a $15 cell-phone). They resist all of their "primitive" instincts for advancement, ethics, knowledge, altruism, and personal growth.
My father, a reverend who performed a lot of weddings, always had this to say about marriage: that it's not about sharing 50%-50%, it's about sharing 100%-100%. Of course, he went through two divorces himself... whether that's a qualification or a disqualification for expertise on the subject is really up to you to decide.