The rhetoric of the left? I have a theory, which may be erroneous, but it is my theory: the swiftest way to drown the voice of someone who is making too much sense, is to categorize that voice as “left/liberal/progressive…”.
I wonder if you realize how offensive it is to others that you continue to maintain that you alone “make too much sense.” Apparently you do not see much of yourself in the MSNBC commentators (pick any of them), whose attitude is We right, everybody else wrong; let’s label those who disagree with us as “unreasonable,” “lacking sense,” “irrational,” “bigoted,” “right wing,” “lacking compassion,” “selfish,” fill-in-the-blank. I also find it interesting that you have singled me out, out of all the posters here, for particular ridicule and misinterpretation, when reading my posts could only conclude that I am very much oriented to solutions and not to ideology. (
Precisely what the Pope said.) But what really irritates you (just as it does the MSNBC crew) is that
my solutions are different from yours. They are not the solutions of the establishment Left. Therefore, they must be discredited by any means necessary, including by false assumptions and false caricature.
I don’t need the “rhetoric of the left” because I have lived poverty in enough different places to speak from my experience. It is interesting to see you dismiss my observation that the poor have less freedom in their personal decision-making and immediately go on to explain why they have “less freedom in their personal decision-making”.
Again with the assumptions that you have some superior or unique position by virtue of “living with the poor” or working with the poor that others of us (
you assume) do not. How would you know whether I have lived with
and served the poor? Answer: you don’t. And with your false assumptions go the false “conclusions” based on those erroneous assumptions. You have no superior “inside knowledge,” let alone authority, than anyone else on this thread has.
Ideology is quite a different kettle of fish from experience.
I never mentioned ideology. You did. And your language corresponds in fact to the ideology of the extreme Left.
Your perceptions of what keeps a person poor are interesting and accurate, but far from complete.
What you read in my posts is not a dissertation, ma’am, on poverty, let alone on capitalism. Thus, my statements are not “complete” because this is not an online seminar class in poverty and capitalism. However, if one could infer anything from my posts
it is that I understand that the issue is complex and that this thread does not “completely” explore these relationships.
Most glaring is the omission of opportunity to make money.
Most glaring is your refusal to acknowledge that I have addressed opportunity in this thread.
It has become fashionable in some circles, to blame the poor for being poor.
It has become fashionable on this thread for **you **to ascribe to others statements they neither said nor implied. Not once have I blamed the poor for being poor. Quite the opposite So one of three things is operative:
(1) you have a problem understanding what I wrote
(2) you are deliberately mischaracterizing my positions because you want a target
(3) you are confusing my positions with those of other posters here.
So the contemporary ideology that seeks to consider human beings as collections of individuals, sinking and swimming on the strength of their individual efforts, is simply a caricature of reality.
Naturally, none of which I did. Possibility #3, above, is most glaringly apparent here, where you somehow, without rational connections, ascribe to me attitudes others have (perhaps some on this thread, most likely posters not even on this thread). None of what I have discussed relates even remotely to the quote of yours below. It’s the same old extreme Left tactics: categorize those who disagree with the Left Party Line: Big Government Good, Individual Effort Insuffcient, and Government is responsible for addressing comprehensively, on its own, every single minute component of poverty possible. When others disagree with this Party Line, accuse them of language and positions they never used or asserted, such as here:
the megaphone that preaches poverty as a personal failing, seems to be the same one that argues over what the meaning of “just”, “fair” and “living” are in relation to wages. Completely not a surprise.
Get your posters straight, and stop demonizing me. You’ve done this to others, on other threads. All it does is affect your credibility. Whenever I hear the group condemnations and artificial name-calling on MSNBC, I immediately tune out. (And why I almost never listen to their shows; it’s just polemics after polemics, categorizing people in extreme camps as Friend or Foe, based on nuanced positions others have, and them proceeding to engage in character assassination, shadow-boxing. Like here, it’s just an exercise in gross caricature in order to justify contempt for positions that are not radical enough for the “news” station.)
