The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Some do for sure, and I agree there is no point in giving to somebody if they'll just get yet another beer from it, but generalizing like "all of them" isn't the right thing. Not to mention that a person who stands on the streets bagging for a few dollars to get his next shot actually is in even greater need for help. It's just sadly help that isn't as easy to provide as a bit of small change. What they need is more professional help, which, if at all, can be provided by a good social system of the state.

Or they could just get a job at a fast food restaurant.

If they can't get jobs then that means they have made decisions in their lives which is preventing them from getting jobs.

I bet 9/10 hobos are where they are because of drugs. Actually I don't even know how the other 1/10 would happen anyway.

How can you be so heartless.

you're basically stating that hell on earth is
A : Something that should exist.
B : Exist specifically in america.
C : Also something that americans should be able to manage to deserve.

if by hell you define endless torture there's no escape from except by death which isn't a desirable prospect either.

and I'm omitting the rest of the world in this analysis. granted you obviously think the same for the rest of the world if not worse.

This totally disregards why a person might be in the situation they are in. A person who sits on the street and just tries to get his next dose of some drug is not there by choice. In many cases these people have had nothing but bad things happen to them in their life.
Their life-story might start like this: "raised by already drug addicted parents who beat them up regularly, nobody really tried to push them to go to school regularly so they simply didn't".
Sure there are a bazillion variations, but the fact of the matter is that you as a person have only very very little power over how your life starts and even if the start was okay a lot of bad things can happen to you that totally throw you from your feet.
You overestimate the power of a single human to overcome issues that life can throw at them. It's not infinite. If you're born into the wrong circumstances you just will lose.
Yes sure some people also actively make just very stupid decisions, but even then you have to ask why they grew to be stupid enough to make those decisions.
The answer to that question can be as simple as "when they were 9 years old they fell from a tree and hit their head a bit too hard". There is very good evidence that an unfortunate thing like that can in fact really damage the brain, causing people to make the wrong decisions somewhere later in their life.

People alone are weak, they need a strong society that supports them. If you don't have that you get the strong (=mainly lucky) and the weak and the strong will blatantly abuse their power over the weak.

The what lol? I have no idea what this is about.

And this is where we diverge. It's survival of the fittest, always has been. And it's not a primitive ideal (I don't wish failure on anyone to be clear). That one guy who lost his arm in a car accident will get special care by the government which is fantastic. But that other guy who started using heroine and lost his job gets no mercy from me (and I don't care how bad his life has been, he's week for using drugs no matter what). It's up to him to create a second chance.

It's more of a problem with society. The people who got abused by their parents should have been put in a foster home. The people that were born with low IQs should naturally have a harder time in life (wouldn't be too bad though because low IQ people tend to support low IQ people - don't worry this isn't an insinuation about this thread as a whole...), but hey, happiness is relative. You know some millionaires hate life right?

I don't believe in a big government. I don't want to pay for other people's meals. I don't want to pay for someone's health care since he/she smokes too much. And I don't want anything to do with solving other people's problems if it affects my pay and life. I'll happily donate to charities etc when I am given the chance and have enough money. Does this make me and millions of other people selfish? Well, that's the part that makes me think it should be up to something else like a mass charity. Obviously, like I said before, the socioeconomic system is too imbalanced. I think just about everyone agrees with that. I'm not the person that wants to curve to stay like it is. But I don't want to be the one that pays for the changes.

PS. Bernie reminds me of the kid running for HS president that promises free things that he can't deliver on. And Donald Trump reminds me of that one super strict teacher in middle school who says he'll do bad things but in reality he's just doing it for long-term discipline.

That's very black and white. Survival of the fittest is nice and all in the animal kingdom, but that kind of stopped being a thing for humans in anything other than Mad Max movies and such. And who is to say what made them start using heroin. While illegal, heroin is easier to come by than some prescription painkillers in some places[1]. Maybe it's mental illnesses that started it. Or do you think people with PTSD should just walk it off and are just weak? How about schizophrenia, which is often found among the homeless[2]?

By the time it gets to the foster home phase, the damage has already been done. Or do you maybe suggest preemptively putting kids in foster homes? (Though, based on what?)

Funny that you mention the smoking. Because for the longest time, smoking was perfectly "safe". Effectively, the implication you are making is that anybody with a health problem is personally responsible for it.

Furthermore, if you are sick before you can even enter the job market, you are screwed since you can't really work. And if you can't really work, you won't get health insurance. So it's better to let that person just drift off into poverty and likely die of hunger as it often takes years before doctors can figure out the chronic diseases for example? Survival of the fittest, right?

And that is what taxes are for. They are to support your society, i.e. the community. That is, people support each other. I mean, why would you pay taxes for roads if you have a 4x4 off-road vehicle? Roads clearly make it easier for everybody. And it should be the same for hospitals. They support the community at large because if you catch sickness early, it doesn't linger on and get worse and more expensive.

I still don't quite understand this point. You are supporting Trump on the basis that he is probably not going to do all of those horrible things he said?

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/24/ame...ph_makes_it_official_were_a_nation_of_idiots/

There is always going to be a homeless group. I don't even know if it would be reduced by a more socialist government though. I've actually volunteered in a soup kitchen in Baltimore; it's basically a charity for food for homeless people. It was an interesting experience, and I think I learned that homeless people are decently happy (i explicitly remember most people laughing like it was some kind of huge party). Those are the things that should deal with homeless people, not tax payer money. A similar thing can be said about the majority of other poverty-stricken groups.

Smoking was brought up because it's an example of something that seems personal but actually affects everyone. When someone gets lung cancer, other people end up paying for it (indirectly obviously). But that requires taxation and eventually higher and higher and higher taxation because we're always going to have dumb people thinking "i'm going to be just fine if i get lung cancer from smoking because i take lots of money from other people that worked hard for it." And it's never going to be as extreme as any of those examples. If it is that bad then we're living in some kind of alternate universe because that doesn't happen from my universe. I mean clearly that stuff shouldn't happen, that's pretty much what taxes are for.

Did I come across as someone who is against taxation?! Well I hope not. I'm only against the kind that pays for people's mistakes. As for how this would be segregated, I don't know.

Well, to be fair, I would be decently happy too if I got to be inside and get some decent food for a chance. Not sure if a single snapshot like that gives much insight. Here I seem them sitting outside on cardboard in -10°c temperatures, begging. I'm pretty sure they are not decently happy. But anyway, my point was that homelessness is a problem for society, especially the large number that are homeless due to mental illnesses and/or substance abuse. Therefore the solution should also come from society by providing shelters and medical support. Charity is a very fickle thing that depends a lot on the state of the economy.

I seriously doubt people think lung cancer is fine. The amount of suffering that goes with that disease is insane. Coughing blood, chained to oxygen tanks, chemotherapy, etc... It's really horrible. It's more likely that the smoker doesn't really believe that they will get cancer and is simply in denial. There is always a probability the smoker won't get cancer after all. And it's very addictive of course.

Well, taxes should improve society as a whole. I think we agree on that point. It's just that I seem to include helping the suffering and giving them the opportunity to get on their feet again as an improvement to society. And as an extra benefit, it also reduces the cost as a whole to society (less criminality, less costly emergency medical treatments).

Homelessness makes it very difficult to get jobs without a social service system in place.

Good luck going to an interview without having a shower.
Good luck creating/printing/sending a resume without access to technologies.
No bus fare? You're now forced to get jobs within walking distance, limiting your options further.

Even if it's somebodies choices that lead to homelessness instead of a fire, divorce, layoff, or anything else the person has little to no control over, the person shouldn't be screwed over for life. I've had friends become homeless because they were kicked out of their parents houses before they got steady work.

And I'd be interested in seeing the actual drug use statistics on homeless people. The most obnoxious people tend to be the most visible.

By survival of the fittest I'd be pretty fucked. I wear glasses, my eyes are certainly not the fittest by any means and if somebody had not come up with that glorious idea of glasses I'd not be able to have this discussion here without pushing my face into the screen.

So no thank you, as far as I am concerned survival of the fittest is a dead concept out of an archaic world long gone and the whole point of any human society is to get rid of it.

That is definitely not what I meant.

It is, you just don't realize the implications of your claims imho.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzN9wSaRvA86X3dpa2pYa21uN0U/view

I meant survival of the fittest in terms of psychology. You have no control over your eye sight. But everyone has control over doing hard drugs (regular smoking too). Another example is drunk driving. If someone creates a drunk driving accident they should receive medical attention only then get thrown in jail (luckily, this does happen to a degree).

Being born with a disorder is already taken care of by the government, naturally.


PS. Chris Christy endorses Trump as president.

Given that hard drugs and nicotine both evoke addiction, no, people don't have control over that.

Given that people can get addicted from parental abuse during pregnancy, or unwanted exposure, no, people don't even have control over the initial addiction.

Given that "survival of the fittest" as a Darwinian principle both favours a racist status quo ("well we're better than them, if they were meant to be better than us they would be") and literally murdering or otherwise invalidating the competition . . . these are not ways to live a non-sociopathic human life.

Survival means gets to live usually, so that's where the confusion probably comes from.
But I'm still confused. What exactly do you want to happen to the "unfit"?

Your strong believe in the human free will is nice, but I disgree. No you don't have generally full control over everything you do and in fact all your decisions might in the end just be the result of a very complex, but more or less deterministic "program" that runs in your brain. A persons psychological weakness isn't a reason to let them live in misery. It's an imperfection just like my eye sight and deserves the same treatment.
And in fact you can easily find research that suggests that psychological issues usually directly relate to physical issues of the brain. So why make any big difference between a less-than-ideal brain and a less-than-ideal eye?!

I also seem to remember reading about research where they could basically look at brain activity of a person and by that tell what decision the person would make on a problem, multiple seconds before the person had consciously decided. So a clear indicator that"free will" decisions are really just a result of some complex process in your brain that are not part of your conscious decisions. They're more likely to be controlled by hard wirings in your brain that were created starting the day you were born, based on whatever influences might have affected you.

Do I? Probably not completely, but at least some research suggests that maybe certain behavior, like starring at computer screens, doesn't help and I do that a lot.

I don't want anything to happen to them. I just don't want to pay for their smoking-induced lung cancer medical bills when I'm older. IT DOES HAPPEN in America through tax payer money and people are getting tired of it.

A similar phenomenon happens in college acceptance. Did you know that as part of making society equal, colleges are forced to skew their acceptance rates based on race and gender? That sounds GREAT! NO. College acceptance should be based on grades alone. And it's not. Luckily I don't have to worry about this any more.

How is this similar? Obamacare.


These examples probably are not connected to each other, but it's a common theme to think like this in America.

Ok, let me rephrase that a little bit. What exactly do you think will happen to the "unfit" in your idea of government?