That’s exactly why Jesus only preached to the CEOs and hedge fund managers.
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See, that’s the problem. Dignity is only attained without any help, whatsoever. Nevermind that the wealthy almost invariably inherit, fleece or outright steal to get that way. They truly feel they did it based on merit within a meritorious system.
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Of course you will, because there is literally no horrible thing the modern-day GOP could do that wouldn’t prompt you to make a false equivalency.
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Let me put it to you this way:
Clinton famously won the popular vote by 3 million but lost in the Electoral College. The Democrats 49 senators represent 40 million more people than the Republicans 51, and this in races that can’t be gerrymandered. California has 2 senators representing 40 million people while the Dakotas, who have a combined population of 1.6 million, get 4 senators. It’s estimated that Democrats have to outvote Republicans by 11 points just to break even and this gap is widening.
The election system in place now favors the white rural voter and it doesn’t matter if they’re dying off or leaving for the city. Their power is increasing even as more people are represented by and vote for Democrats.
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Well, no surprise to me.
Did anyone expect anything different from this sudden, unexpected burst of honesty?
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The irony is too thick - Alamosa Republicans hate poor people?
Alamosa is one of the poorest counties in the state. It’s a small farm community near the border with NM. The nearby San Luis valley is home to hundreds of farms highly dependent on migrant labor. The area is highly hispanic population and is majority democrat. This message is not likely to sway many voters.
Population: 9,671
Median Income: $28,167
Unemployment Rate: 9.7%
Poverty Rate: 39.6%
Alamosa, unfortunately, ranks as the poorest place in Colorado thanks to combination of low pay and and a lack of jobs.The city of 9,671 people averages the 1st lowest median household income in Colorado and the 1st highest poverty rate. At the very least, the cost of living ranks in the bottom 15% of place in the state, so things like housing are relatively affordable.
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And of course, the core problem of the post isn’t that it’s inappropriate and offensive - it’s that it’s completely irrational at its core. Dignity has nothing to do with money, because people choose to act with dignity. People don’t choose to be broke.
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Well, Trump loves the poorly educated.
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I understand being frustrated that the Democrats aren’t better than they are. But they also really are not equal in awfulness to the GOP.
The Democrats are not just as committed, and they are not committed to the exact same agenda.
And these differences matter. We can see those differences when we look at Obama and Trump, just as when we look at Bill Clinton and GWB.
Yes, Obama did many things I don’t agree with, including a lot of foreign action.
And, Trump has done worse of all of those things, in just a year in office.
All I’m saying is that we have to stay very clear on which is worse, so we can avoid what is worse. Being committed to the notion that “both sides are equally bad” is what got us the President we have right now.
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Wouldn’t it be amazing if the Republicans who blame the poor could adopt a “love the sinner , hate the sin” approach? Since, after all, poverty is a heck of a lot easier to alleviate (in many cases anyway) than the cases where they do chose to say such things. I’ll just keep quietly dreaming about a world where people actually believe the things they profess. Even when those things are horrible, the outcome would often be better than what we’ve got.
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Sure they do. Tell me the last 10 decisions you made, and I will tell you how I would have made them better than you. 
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It turns out that the poor are born that way. No use trying to cure them.
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Like gays?
(\sarc is my default setting)
Edit:
It seems exorcism can “cure” gays. Could it cure the poor?
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Now, if only there was a way to deduct kingdom of Heaven entitlements from welfare and social security benefits.
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I get (and agree!) with the sentiment that Democrats far too often fail to live up to their better ideals and enact policy too close to that espoused by Republicans.
But to pretend that “the Democrats are just as committed to the same pro-capitalist, neo-liberal agenda as the Republican party” is insane given the evidence of the last year and a half.
Case in point: I think HRC would pursued roughly the same policy goals that Obama did–i.e. center left-ish and probably less willing to embrace more progressive policies than I would like in a perfect world. BUT would her administration have gutted the EPA, the CFPB and the State Department? Hell no. Would it have passed the tax package that Trump’s administration pushed? Hell no. Would it have fostered the kind of anti-immigrant and white nationalist fervor that is going to haunt our nation for a generation (if we’re lucky)? Hell no.
False equivalence is intellectual laziness and knee-jerk sloganeering masquerading as thoughtfulness, and it’s toxic.
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Leaving aside the whole “we hate poor people” bit, what the fuck does “they think the dignity of man is above being poor” even mean? I can’t make sense out of it. It seems like gibberish. I can’t even figure out what they thought they were saying. “Being poor destroys your dignity, so hate the sinner, not the sin” is the best I can come up with as an interpretation.
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I get where you are coming from - you are, essentially, correct - but manipulation of representative power is not in and of itself necessarily evil. Remember that in practice strict democracy would mean that the five largest urban populations would control national elections, decreasing costs of propaganda and political image management, eliminating diversity of voter outlook and environment, disenfranchising all but urban voters and vastly elevating the political power of clerks over suppliers.
So (as a resident of a small state and a person who likes to eat food that doesn’t come from factories or slave labor) I consider the Republic a social good… after all, if your nation is dependent on wool production, maybe you don’t want to have fifty wolves and forty-nine sheep vote on the breakfast menu?
But, then again, while a socket wrench might be a good and desirable thing, I wouldn’t want one jammed into my eye. Tools can be abused. Voting systems should serve societal needs rather than being engineered purely for partisan dominance… not that I expect any party apparatchiks to agree.
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Others have already commented on the false equivalency in your statement. What upsets me (at the same time as liking a lot of what you’ve written here) is the conflation of “Democrats” and “The Democratic Party” with the party leadership. Any resemblance between the actions of the Democratic Party leadership and anything Republican is due to the hijacking of the party leadership. Rank-and-file Democrats are, in fact, progressives. Most Democrats across the country, whether we’re talking voters or lower-level party officials or state-level politicians, are progressives.
The rhetoric you use in a statement like this does more harm than good. As progressives, we’re better off taking back the party than tearing it down.
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I’m not talking about pre-emptive strikes or murder robots, those things are all side effects of the thing that I’m actually after which is the horrendous economic policies. None of the people mentioned questioned the reasoning that capitalism creates, and that reasoning includes things like coming up with ersatz justifications for pre-emptive strikes and killer robots. The real justification is to keep the military/industrial complex happy, and to maintain the US’ economic power.
The US Democratic party is less terrible than the US Republican party, but they are really only committed to being progressive when it is beneficial. When it comes down to the wire, US politicians–Republican or Democrat–reliably capitulate to the whims of big business. That’s the real problem. That’s why things don’t change. Nobody, or nearly nobody in American politics, has the chutzpah to say and mean, “most Americans have been reduced to a life of wage slavery and have zero prospects of that situation getting any better. This situation exists because the government has ignored its mandate for decades, electing instead to serve the whims of the few and powerful rather than the electorate. That stops now.”
Even if someone that “subversive” made it that far into American politics, once the message went national, they’d be immediately under fire from almost every conceivable direction, including from the direction of the people that idea would ultimately help because those people have been carefully trained to reject basically any proposal that smells like anything other than libertarian free markets and status quo.
I think the Trump situation is so extreme and so stupid, and the way he is transparently and inextricably tied to this kind of thinking is so obvious that people are starting to question the whole idea more than they have in recent decades, but we’ve still got a long way to go before much anything in the way of actual leftists reach meaningful national office. I think we’re at last starting to grow a base of people who understand that a big part of the reason why the economy is so broken and unfair is that a lot of people put a lot of effort, both individual and collective, to make it that way.
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Whoa whoa WHOA. Let’s be clear here, I’m not conflating Donald Trump himself with the overall policies of both major American political parties since the end of WWII. I’m talking about the problems that come from capitalism, a philosophy that both parties are firmly betrothed to.
Donald Trump is a member of the Republican party, but he’s a uniquely awful example of human beings in general. Trump wants to be a dictator, and thinks he is. A fair amount of the head-butting he has with other people within American politics stem from the fundamental misunderstanding he has about the office of the president–which is that the president is not a dictator and there are rules that he has to follow. Almost all of his conflicts follow the pattern where he thinks he can do whatever the hell he wants, he’s told that he can’t just do that because that’s not how democracy works, and then he throws a temper tantrum.
(Full disclosure: I’ve been a full-on socialist for about 15 years so we might just not be able to come to an agreement on certain things. For one, I think the entire investment banking system basically needs to be dismantled, and am frankly rather dubious of the concept of money. Money seems to end up becoming the tool by which morality itself is defined, and that’s deeply troubling to me as my primary goal is the continued peaceful existence of the human race.)
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