Political Memes

Disabled person here. Thank you for letting us know that watching other people find joy in things like coffee, eating out, and going on vacations while we sit at home in pain and depression isn't a form of suffering.

I'm reminded of an incident in the aughts or early 2010s in which an intra-office correspondence from a right-wing think tank escaped into the public. One of the correspondents expressed distaste over disabled and welfare recipients having access to refrigerators.

As the history of Great Britain has shown us, it will always be tempting to trim the privileges of the poor and disabled, to punish them for their shortfalls in exploiting the capitalist system. In the meantime, the hardest workers, such as USMC front line riflemen and wait staff in diners scattered across the states, the hardest, cruelest work does not make one rich. As a note, the most costly crime in the United States is wage theft, and time theft is a myth dispelled by the ubiquity of bullshit jobs. We're being robbed by our own bosses who always want more of what they already have in excess of what they can use.

Really, we should intervene with billionaires the way we do drunkards and addicts.

And yet we also praise and worship private equity investors, who do nothing short of create sinkholes in our economy, but only after stripping companies down to their skeletons and leaving them with immense debt to go bankrupt. Mitch Romney managed such a firm before his political career, and he was the Republican candidate for President of the United States before the GOP was repurposed as Trump's instant army.

The merit or lack thereof that a given person shows doesn't come out of a vacuum. We shouldn't be relying on fate and kind bosses (or bad parenting and bad bosses and being the wrong color and the wrong religion etc.) to decide who gets to enjoy what luxury, yet some riflemen escape combat to end up disproportionately homeless, while grifters and financial hacks rent municipal areas for their wedding.

Ideally, we'd all eat the same, and be motivated to make sure the most squalid and most vile of eaters still dine with extravagance, knowing the least of us dines as well as we do, since it's not anyone's fault they were born ~~frail, or with avolition, or with blindness or with a foul temperament they cannot overcome~~ without the capital, the financial acumen and the sheer ruthlessness to make it in the late-stage capital world.

But I'd settle for a narrow wealth bandwidth, where the poorest of us has a thousandth, maybe of the richest of us.

We don't even get that. So fuck capitalism, and death to monarchists.

So disabled people should just eat gruel and have the minimum sufficient to survive?

Like, you need to think through what you're saying here

When you take a plane to your fun trip, you're polluting the planet for everybody else - so either we all have the right to have a fun trip, or nobody does.

They're also implying that employed, not disabled people somehow magically get those luxuries just for participating in capitalism

That is an incredibly ignorant and arrogant position to take.

People need more than just 4 walls and a meal. They need enrichment. They need laughter, They Need Joy, and new experiences.

and I have a sneaking suspicion that you'd suddenly stop thinking its out of touch ,and start demanding it as a necessity for your pursuit of happiness, when you're the one down and out, having smarmy cunts make denigrating comments every time you did some small personal act of self-care.

1. Coffee as a luxury is uh, pretty fucking far. Do you know how cheap store-brand coffee is? The only way you're dropping below that for the price of drinking is literal tap water - which, even in places where it's safe, often has a distinct taste (source: grew up in a town where the tap water tasted of iron - city said it was fine, but it instilled a reluctance to drink from the tap).

2. Lacking goods and services regarded as ordinary is a form of suffering - running water in a home is not a necessity either, but most would regard being without it as a form of suffering. Running water is a luxury - and one which we can easily provide.

3. Disabled folk are often receiving benefits on the basis of being disabled, ie that they cannot reasonably and consistently earn more than that in their lifetime. If your view is that disabled folk should lack luxuries entirely because they dared to be born disabled, that's fucked up.