Jerkface (any/all)

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It depends. Abandonment has a floor to how bad it’s gonna get. You die. Abuse has no floor, because they keep you alive.

You see a cute stray, I see ten thousand dead birds and a sundered ecological web.

It’s not a strawman, it’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum and you are not good at this. You’re obviously motivated by personal bugaboos that you are not willing to acknowledge or examine, and that avoidance is making you take irrational, hyperbolic positions.

“Stupid” is not a hypothesis, it’s a lack of one. It has zero predictive power. All you are really saying is that you don’t understand.

Why don’t you cite concrete examples so we can have a rational discussion instead of everyone just responding to the images in their own head?

How does “European nihilism” manifest in a way I can examine?

That’s so backwards. Your name is whatever you say your name is. What is written in a government database isn’t your name, it’s an opaque identifier.

I have to think that if it evolved this way, then probably there are not better ways, meaning perhaps there is a pathogen that occurs on downed leaves that is invisible and odourless. Or perhaps it just takes them out of the environment where they are at least minimally adapted to survive. Evolution is cruel but it’s not stupid, and if it seems stupid it probably just means I’m stupid.

Okay but as often as humans cover themselves in something highly flammable and then accidentally immolate? I bet we take the prize.

We can be convinced that literally anything is “normal.” We’re social animals and we live in a socially-constructed reality. It’s more important to our individual survival to agree with the group delusion than to be objectively correct. In the 80s and 90s it felt like people had started living in a reality constructed by TV commercials; if people didn’t do it in a TV commercial it was weird, and if people did it on TV then it was normal. I guess we probably get our cues elsewhere now but clearly we don’t get them from our evolutionary social sources and there is a lot of reality hacking going on.

Meanwhile, the proof of concept for societies with no state is what, a small group of guerillas in Mexico, with a low population of farmers in the mountains? The Paris commune that lasted like a week?

I’d rather cite the NGOs that actually do the work the state farms out in the modern era. As much as I hate this model and believe that the state “should” be directly employing those people if these are to be state responsibilities, the fact is that they just throw a small amount of money at them and then wash their hands of the situation. It’s small non-state organizations that are actually left to figure out how to fix things while not being empowered to do what needs to be done. Meanwhile the state holds all the levers that need to be pulled, and won’t pull them.

As a person living on ODSP (ie state disability income in Ontario) I feel qualified or at least entitled to hold the opinion that society’s current approach to supporting people who need help is horribly broken. I wonder if you have a romanticized view of the kind of help that people get, daydreaming about how things probably work elsewhere. State support of disability is universally “unreliable, inconsistent, and underfunded.” I certainly have no experience of anything else, nor have I spoken with anyone who does.

Human psychology harbours a deep, seemingly instinctive hatred of the poor and disabled, and it often manifests in the systems that are ostensibly meant to help us. No fixed address? You get half as much money to make sure you stay on the street. Live with a romantic partner? You get several hundred dollars less a month, because fuck you for trying to have anything normal people get to have. I know these examples are not universal, but this sort of paternalistic we’ll-help-but-we’ll-make-you-suffer-for-it-or-society-will-fall-apart philosophy is always blatantly on the surface of state services across North America.

You know how we use the police for all sorts of things that the police (ie the embodiment of the state’s monopoly on “legitimate violence” against its own citizens) fundamentally should not be used for? We should not be using the state for humanitarian concerns. For all the “for the people by the people” bullshit we get indoctrinated with, that’s not why states exist in the first place. Certainly not a colonialist state like the one I live in. A state does not have the capacity to be trustworthy, to have human relationships, to do good for humans. When we accomplish those things, we do it despite the state. Any love that a person has for something as capricious, inhuman, and amoral as a state will eventually be used against them.

It terrifies me to be dependent on a political entity that is currently ramping up culture war propaganda and scapegoating vulnerable people. The most powerful conservative politician in the country (pretending the PM isn’t conservative because it’s rhetorically helpful in this moment) recently dragged up the “welfare queen” trope: “There’s people who’ve been on Ontario Works—welfare, healthy people—for their whole lives, while these hardworking people are paying for them to sit on the couch and watch the Flintstones or the soap operas…”

Edit: You cannot live on Ontario Works. It is not even a pittance. It is half the pittance I get for being deemed unable to work, and less still if you have support in your life. Anyone who is collecting Ontario Works is miserable and if they had any other choice in the world, they would not be. Nearly everyone on OW IS disabled! OW on its own is not enough for a person to pay the rent, but if you are homeless, your payments are slashed in half yet again. It’s like it’s designed to offer false hope and then trap people.

The help one gets from the state will always come with conditions and indignities, and it will always be something to be given or taken away not because of a person’s need or worthiness but because it suits a politician’s career to give it or take it away in that moment. Everyone deserves better than this.

So you are suggesting everyone is crowding around to meet the new special needs student