Why do you hate the poor?

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
a reply to: ketsuko

Caveat Emptor is a cornerstone of the US. And obviously favors the more intelligent.

It does, but at what point do we stop taking care of people who are mentally handicapped? I get that someone with something like Down Syndrome should be taken care of compassionately. But, where's the point at which we can reasonably expect a person to be able to fend for themselves to a reasonable degree, and you know that at whatever that cut off is, the group just above it will come crying that it's cruel to have cut them off.

originally posted by: ketsuko

originally posted by: redhorse
a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Respectfully, I disagree. The world's rules don't tend to favor the intelligent, they tend to favor the unscrupulous. We have a system built by sociopaths for sociopaths which is why, when you get up to the upper echelons of any social construct you get an exponentially higher concentration of those sociopaths. A higher intelligence is not reflected, but a higher propensity to ping on all three sides of the dark triad certainly is.

Sorry, but that's simply not quite true.

It just makes us all feel better to think that instead of realizing that too many of us tend to make our own boneheaded choices that come back to bite us in the butt.

It isn't because I took that ill-advised loan and leveraged myself up to the eyeballs so badly that I was poorly equipped to handle a financial crisis ... it's because those loan people should've known better than to let me hang myself ... as if it's their responsibility to take care of your finances.

You are incorrect:

Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge.

Forbes

troubling research indicates that in the ranks of senior management, psychopathic behavior may be more common than we think – more prevalent in fact than the amount such seriously aberrant behavior occurs in the general population.

(Bold is mine)

Forbes again

I used Forbes because it is often considered a credible source for people that have been successful in business. There are many, many studies that dispute the myth that intelligence and success are correlated (although the Forbes article still takes that as a given necessary trait, and I disagree), and also studies which make a strong positive correlation between success and sociopathy and even psychopathy.

You make the argument that people are just trying to not be accountable for their choices and I would counter with the argument that the "specialness" that the successful like to believe themselves to possess is a myth. I know many wealthy people who have made poor choices: alcohol, drugs, mistresses, prostitutes, double dealing, embezzlement, illegal and immoral activity in general... In short, stupid decisions, but the consequences for them are considerably less severe than for someone who is poor. There is a double standard built into the fabric of our society and this is part of what promotes the prevalence of sociopaths in those upper echelons. A poor man's "stupid decision" that could render him a social pariah for the rest of his life is simply part of the a wealthy man's risk assessment because the consequences for him are probably not long term, let alone life altering.

It's okay to hate the poor for their bad and stupid decisions only because they can't fight back. On the flip side, we idolize the wealthy and successful when that success usually has more to do with luck and just plain nastiness than any superior moral trait that makes them more deserving. We all want to believe this because then, if we succeed we can consider ourselves superior, and the flip side of that is we also get to look down upon others as inferior. Very validating, but it's a lie. In fact, when you strip away the specifics, it is The Great Lie that is responsible for most human on human atrocities.

It's the media that we listen to that dictates how we think. Ergo, we're all brainwashed.

If you listen to talk radio, you will think that everyone who get's help from the government has 8 kids, smokes an ounce of pot everyday, 2 packs of cigarettes and is involved in a dozen petty crimes n a weekly basis.

When one of those stories pops up, you all say. "There you go! I knew it!" Not realizing that it's one incident and that most people getting help, deserve it and need it.

Take unemployment for example. You don't get that unless you were employed in the first place. Take social security. I've been paying into that for decades, forcibly, and I better get it back when I retire. That's not a hand out.

a reply to: ketsuko

I do not know.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
The worlds rules were made by smart people to take advantage of dumb people.

I find myself agreeing with a lot of what you're saying in this and your following posts, but I disagree with this statement. While those who are very successful are rarely dumb people, it's usually social skills that get a person to the very top of the ladder. The very bright and capable people end up being engineers, senior managers, and so on... they don't do bad for themselves in most cases but they also end up working to make other people rich. The best business owners (which is where you become wealthy) are the ones who are personable and fast talking. Dealmakers who make their customers and their partners happy essentially.

a reply to: ketsuko

It does, but at what point do we stop taking care of people who are mentally handicapped?

Do you think it would be easier to just get rid of them? Since they are such a drain on our society...

The stupid people that is - the ones too stupid, but not stupid enough to waste compassion on

And what is the cut off on compassion? At what point do we stop tolerating people who don't have enough?

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
The worlds rules were made by smart people to take advantage of dumb people.

I find myself agreeing with a lot of what you're saying in this and your following posts, but I disagree with this statement. While those who are very successful are rarely dumb people, it's usually social skills that get a person to the very top of the ladder. The very bright and capable people end up being engineers, senior managers, and so on... they don't do bad for themselves in most cases but they also end up working to make other people rich. The best business owners (which is where you become wealthy) are the ones who are personable and fast talking. Dealmakers who make their customers and their partners happy essentially.

No disagreement there. Even before mankind invented economy, cults of personality likely were able to sway tribal opinion in their favor.

In fact, i'd even go so far as to say that sociopathy and psychopathy exist in a spectrum within humanity, with us naturally selecting for those traits in many cases, and those traits existing to some degree in almost all of us. Even the most morose among us can be extremely manipulative in cunning ways.

originally posted by: Spiramirabilis
a reply to: ketsuko

It does, but at what point do we stop taking care of people who are mentally handicapped?

Do you think it would be easier to just get rid of them? Since they are such a drain on our society...

The stupid people that is - the ones too stupid to waste compassion on

And what is the cut off on compassion? At what point do we stop tolerating people who don't have enough?

At what point do you allow Caveat Emptor to stand as a cultural expecation? Do you not, and instead try to nerf coat to protect the shallow end of the IQ pool?

Its one thing to protect our people who are disadvantaged clinically. But what of the people who managed to make it past puberty without a diagnosis, and are thus not acknowledged as disadvantaged (clinical MR requires diagnosis before the age of 18, otherwise it will have an "NOS" status in whatever clinical grouping it lands in).

Should none of us be allowed a hot shower because of protections put in place when someone who's MR mortally scalded themselves?

originally posted by: ketsuko
Sorry, but that's simply not quite true.

It just makes us all feel better to think that instead of realizing that too many of us tend to make our own boneheaded choices that come back to bite us in the butt.

It isn't because I took that ill-advised loan and leveraged myself up to the eyeballs so badly that I was poorly equipped to handle a financial crisis ... it's because those loan people should've known better than to let me hang myself ... as if it's their responsibility to take care of your finances.

How far do we take that? The government is right now seriously looking at repealing regulations that prevent financial advisors from lying to their customers, abandoning fiduciary responsibility. And what's worse is that these types of decisions are rarely noticable until decades into the future when the damage is already done and making the person whole again is impossible.

Do we want a society where we can't trust or verify that our financial advisors are working in our interests? Is that a world you feel comfortable trusting your retirement to? How about pension funds? The logic for loans is pretty similar. Should a lending institution be allowed to make a risky loan? How about insurance on the loans? Do we want a world where banks can make a bad loan and then take out an insurance bet assuming the loan is going to fail? They get to roll that failure premium into the loan, profit on the loan, charge someone more who can't afford more in the first place, and collect on the loan if/when it fails. All at the expense of the consumer. This type of practice is predatory and doesn't do society any good.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Gawd Tex - how big a conversation do you want? :-)

I'm going to go back and steal a bit you wrote in an earlier post:

The worlds rules were made by smart people to take advantage of dumb people. Thus, poor people don't tend to be poor because they are brilliant. And im not calling poor people dumb (i used that term out of covenience, not accuracy). What I am saying is that poor people tend to exhibit behaviors that help keep them poor: poor impulse control, unable to delay gratification, poisoned logic, etc.

I posted some stuff earlier in this thread about how poverty itself can cripple your thinking and decision making abilities. This doesn't have to be about IQ (though I get what you're saying, and there is that too). Maybe it's not taboo to ridicule intelligence in some settings - but in others (like this one) nobody wants to say some things out loud

I like how you put it because it's not about moralizing, it's more about why this is the way it is. Frankly - smart people have financial advisors, accountants and the like because it's easy to make mistakes. They have them because they can afford them. Success makes it easier to be successful and impoverishment makes every single choice you make critical. I once read an article that I'll never be able to fish out of the soup now about how making one wrong decision when you're poor can set you up for a trail of ever bigger failures. You wouldn't even be able to use your intelligence because there would be no way of correcting the situation without money. So - maybe it's less about IQ than we want it to be for the sake of argument

It gets down to society - and how much we care about people who for whatever reason need assistance. That could be any of us if conditions change, but I think some people are unwilling to admit that. How important is it for each of us as individuals to take care of those we know need help. Personally (and I mean this - this is how I've always seen it) some people were hurt at some point in their lives and it's all about protecting their sense of self. It costs them too much emotionally to give, so they construct elaborate explanations for why they shouldn't have to care

There are people who take advantage of individual's and society's good nature - but what percentage is that really? So - we have an elaborate set of safeguards set up to protect us against those few people? Do we not help the needy (or the less intelligent - if we insist that this is why they're needy) because some of them will never be self sufficient? Do we not spend the money because some people are dishonest? I don't get that - it's like people would rather see children foraging off garbage heaps - and then blame that on stupidity - and let it go

Aren't we people? Don't we care about this? Should only the strong (or smart) survive? It's easy to tell where I'm at - am I a sap?

I don't know if any of that is an answer to your questions - or if what you asked was meant to be more rhetorical. Should we make the world safe for people who don't always know how to navigate this world? If the only answer to that is: no- sink or swim - then I'm out. I have no conversation left for that kind of world. Especially when we're willing to spend money on other things

Then there are people who turn their back on success and instead find quality of life.

Which can really bite you in the ass if your situation changes. I chose art at a certain point in my life (which I love) - but there have been times when I wish I had chosen lawyer

Wanna see something interesting?

Hans Rosling: New insights on poverty

Poverty maintains poverty - and the rest of the world makes it about who deserves what

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
Caveat Emptor is a cornerstone of the US. And obviously favors the more intelligent.

This is a cornerstone of capitalism. Capitalism is all about competition and having the most successful product. In it's pure form where the customer has perfect access to information, this means the best product is the most successful product. But, as much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, we don't live under a system of capitalism that exists in the pure sense, by which I mean free of corruption with honest markets rather than a system that's mixed with some other ism.

Under our system, the most competitive product is the most successful, and often times rather than product quality it comes down to marketing and peer pressure. Let me give some examples: A couple years ago Intel had a mass exodus of engineers because AMD was starting to take significant chunks of the CPU market. In order to combat the fact that AMD was offering the same quality at a lower price, Intel cut their R&D budget in half and diverted it all to marketing to make their processors more sexy. In another example, Steve Jobs took the smartphone concept, which previously involved convenient flip phones that were durable, compact, and cheap... threw a fragile glass screen on them, reshaped them into a brick, quintipuled the price, and convinced people they were an improvement and trendy. Marketing works, and the point of marketing is to obfusicate the facts. It's all about lying to the customer, and convincing the customer to buy your product regardless of if it's the best product for them.

At times this system even encourages companies to make a less than optimal product, there's a good movie on youtube about planned obsolesence (I think it's called "The Lightbulb Conspiracy"). In it they use the lightbulb example of a technology that we could easily engineer to be less wasteful and less expensive, but doing so goes against corporate interests. In another example they use nylon which was intentionally engineered to be a weak material rather than the very strong material it's capable of being, because nylon wearing out would lead to increased sales.

Finally, one aspect of our society that I think many don't understand when it comes to Caveat Emptor is how it impacts the poor. Most people in society can afford to buy something, and if they don't like it they can switch brands. But the poor live on tight budgets, a routine purchase for the middle class can often reflect a year+ of saving for the poor. They cannot shop around and buy products until they find one they like, it's a pure gamble as to whether you'll be satisified by your purchase or not.

The War on Stupid People - American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.

Many people who have benefited from the current system like to tell themselves that they’re working hard to help the unintelligent become intelligent. This is a marvelous goal, and decades of research have shown that it’s achievable through two approaches: dramatically reducing poverty, and getting young children who are at risk of poor academic performance into intensive early-education programs. The strength of the link between poverty and struggling in school is as close to ironclad as social science gets. Still, there’s little point in discussing alleviating poverty as a solution, because our government and society are not seriously considering any initiatives capable of making a significant dent in the numbers or conditions of the poor.

For what it's worth

a reply to: redhorse

Something your article touched on that I think bears repeating is their quote about teaching negotiation. This actually goes into a subject I've been wanting to make a thread about for awhile, but I don't think I have the thought well developed enough yet. I'm of the opinion that while more math, reading, science, critical thinking, and all the rest in schools would be great, there's two critical subjects missing from schools currently: Personal finance and negotiation.

I remember having a personal finance class in school, but that was an exception and not the norm (it was also an elective) because I went to a really good school. I think that we would have a lot fewer debt problems if society understood debt, the costs of interest, savings, and basic investment. In my opinion this should be a mandatory class for everyone.

The other class that I believe should be mandatory, even if it meant making room for it by cutting something like math (and I feel very strongly that we need more math, not less) is a class on negotiation. Wage negotiation, contracts, the idea of leverage and bargaining position, how to say no, and so on. I could be wrong on this, but it's my belief that the single best way we could empower workers and reduce wage gaps is by teaching them to negotiate better deals for themselves. Better yet, it's something easily taught because it's applicable to all disciplines and is simply a good general life skill to have. It doesn't matter if you're a truck driver or a rocket scientist, in both cases the single highest value conversation you will ever have in your life is salary negotiation. It only makes sense to me that we should teach it.

a reply to: Spiramirabilis

Is this the article you refer to?

www.theguardian.com...

If not, Im sure you've read it. Powerful, powerful stuff.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to.

The first time i read that, my heart broke. With misty eyes I remembered how hard it was to be broke all the time. Raising 2 kids on 2 minimum wage jobs was hard as hell.

I also remember how i ended the cycle: i enrolled my wife in LVN school and when she got out I went and tried to put my brains to work in a call center. Worked out well for us both. My niece, on the other hand, can't even get started because of her inability to navigate the minefield of paperwork needed to get into school when you're too poor to pay for it. Bad enough that she gets dejected at the amount of mental effort it takes to do with paperwork with one of us helping. She's not stupid. But she's not bright, either.

If you are a bright person, you will find a way. No business will let an intelligent person languish in entry level when they can use them to make more money in management (as an example).

My mom....when she had cancer she had no insurance. She still got her treatment started that same day, because we had enough wherewithall to start jumping through all the hurdles immediately. People who are able to navigate paperwork don't die from lack of cancer treatment. Even though its a fairly popular meme in the healthcare debate.

RE: your assertion that poverty affects IQ...yes. 100% agree. Both through epigenetic impact as well as environmental pollutants. No doubt in my mind growing up in the lead rich environment (and aluminum rich environment) of inner city america has an impact on peoples overall cognitive skill. Same with far rural/unregulated america.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I posted it - I think yesterday :-)

It's shown up all over the internet, and she got a lot of attention - and I think a blog out of that piece if I'm not mistaken. She's a good writer

It's not the one I was thinking of - the one I mentioned is more academic. It explains just exactly how being poor leaves you no margin for error. None

But, yeah - that one got to me too. About the rest of your post - you're so right. Being broke can break your spirit. Not having the right tools can make it impossible to navigate your way out

Bad enough that she gets dejected at the amount of mental effort it takes to do with paperwork with one of us helping. She's not stupid. But she's not bright, either.

Reading skills are different for different people too. Paperwork, and the language used in legal documents can be impossible for some people

Happy to hear about your mom - and you back in the day with your young family getting where you obviously got :-)

originally posted by: jjkenobi
I hate the poor because I was poor. Grew up in poverty. Worked two jobs in high school, worked my way through college, and now I'm not poor. There's no secret to it. You just have motivation and work hard. I know what it takes because I did it. I can see most of the "poor" around me live comfortably, try to scam the system as much as possible, and don't want to work. My taxes pay for that.

I think you're confusing people hating the waste of their hard earned tax dollars going to people who don't want to work. I don't hate any actual people. But I hate the generic population that I know doesn't want to work and gets my tax money to sit around and be lazy.

EXACTLY!!!

I too grew up poor. Poor as dirt.

Single mom, Dad never gave us any decent child support. ($100 a month, and he made $55k a year)

I fought and fought to get to where I am, which is comfortable, but still paycheck to paycheck.

Most of all, I have pride in what I've done to get here. Pride in myself for striving to be better than what I was, pride in my Mom for doing the same.

Again, there are exceptions, and people do get into a place where they are poor and need help. TO GET OUT OF IT.

Layoffs, closings, disabilities, etc. But the goal should always be to move forward, not stay put.

Not to revel in it, and keep taking the free money and never working.

I do NOT have any sympathy whatsoever for those that choose, YES CHOOSE, to stay poor.

Drive. You either have it, or you're poor. Period.

a reply to: Spiramirabilis

Ill look it up for my "after 10pm reading" tonight. Im sick of far east neolithic history and need a change.

originally posted by: Spiramirabilis
a reply to: ketsuko

It does, but at what point do we stop taking care of people who are mentally handicapped?

Do you think it would be easier to just get rid of them? Since they are such a drain on our society...

The stupid people that is - the ones too stupid, but not stupid enough to waste compassion on

And what is the cut off on compassion? At what point do we stop tolerating people who don't have enough?

No.

More like at some point we have to declare people fit to care for themselves and like it or not that means there is a minimum competency level for that expectation just like there is a set age of majority.

I do believe most gripes here are about welfare fraud, rather than welfare.

I don't think welfare should be cut and I do think the government should handle it.
Because they will pass it out in a more neutral way.

Religious groups will show favor and also attempt to use this to build their tribes and power. This is why religion should NOT be taxed either - tax them and they'll demand even MORE power.

If you're opposed to "Liberals" passing out welfare, trust me - you'll be none too happy when it's the Muslims or Scientologists passing it out.

a reply to: wantsome


After giving your post some thought, I have reached the conclusion that people mostly don't hate the poor, they fear poverty and to them on some subconscious level they realize that they could be poor at some point through some misfortune. So their fear transforms to disdain and anger. Some (but certainly not all) wealthier people hate the poor because its a way to dehumanize them and justify their exploitation. Because they are "stupid" or "lazy", they deserve their lot in life and deserve to be exploited.