I mean, if Krugman gets any more depressing, his entire audience is going to go out and hang themselves. Probably why he made his own attempt at humor -- suggesting that a fake alien invasion be staged to unite everybody and get full employment.
Krugman is, of course, being sarcastic about the quality of our current leaders, who seem to be unable to respond to current economic problems like, oh, 1/5th of our children being raised in poverty or 1/5th of our population unemployed or underemployed, and instead engage in kabuki theatre of no import. He's implying that our so-called "leaders" are so stupid and so detached from reality that they'd actually believe the threat of alien invasion and react accordingly. What was hilarous was reading the right-wingers who thought Krugman was actually being serious. You have to read Krugman regularly to "get" his sense of humor, which is very, very dark. If Krugman was any more hangdog, young children would break into tears as he walked by, and dogs would howl in dismay at his passage.
It seems like at least half of Krugman's blog posts could be summarized with a GIF of him banging his head against the wall. There's this constant "Why am I surrounded by idiots?" tone. I know how he feels. Siiiiiiiigh!
-- Badtux the Krugman-watchin' Penguin
Ever a seeker after the truth based on facts, I wonder if you could provide Krugman's definition of poverty? Or even your own, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteI ask because I would venture hesitantly that true poverty in the United States does not exist. If you want the real thing, try Somalia. And then buy yourself a Thesaurus!
The truth does not lie but sure as hell causes a lot of people plenty of distress.
ReplyDeleteGood!
You've made a perfect dissection of reading Paul for the rest of his readers/followers.
ReplyDeleteKudos!
S
(head banging against wall - again!)
Mr. Asshole Duffer, you are a cad and a jerk. Fuck you.
ReplyDeleteYou want poverty? Here's poverty. A 9 year old boy that I taught in the 3rd Ward of Houston. Sweet kid. Very dirty, but you know how "those" people are, right, you racist fuck? His clothes didn't fit so well, actually. But then, his clothes came from the discards bin at the Salvation Army -- they were the clothes too badly worn / torn to sell at the thrift shop -- and there was no coin in the home to spend washing clothes despite the fact that his mother, bless her soul, left home at 6AM in the morning to work one of THREE jobs that she worked, and did not return home from her last job until after 10PM. Then stupid assholes like you whine that the street rather than his mother is raising him? So anyhow, most of the food he ate was the free breakfast and lunch at the school. Weekends were problematic, he often went hungry then, but hey, his mother should have worked four jobs and 25 hours a day instead of just three jobs and 16 hours a day, right?
Now, all of this certainly affected his school performance. After lunch he was useless, he kept falling asleep because he had eaten so much (we had no limit on how much food the children could get, they could get refills as long as they could eat it, because they were HUNGRY, goddamnit). Sometimes he fell asleep in the mornings too because he had a bad habit of waiting up for his mother to come home so he could hug her because he loved his mother. But hey, I'm sure fuckers like you will just say that's okay, he's just a nigger anyhow so what can we expect, yada yada.
I washed his coat once because I was just so sad seeing that dirty grubby thing come through my classroom door every day. The school office had a pile of winterwear that had been abandoned or donated, I found something for him to wear for a day, took the coat home, and brought it back clean the next day.
Oh yeah. Luckily he was healthy. One of his classmates, a bright little street urchin who was probably the smartest kid I ever taught anywhere at any school in terms of speed of learning and whose eventual fate was to be the gang leader of the black tar heroin trade in the neighborhood, was always snuffling because he had allergies and couldn't get medicine because his family could not afford the co-pays. But hey, that misery's okay, at least he wasn't starving to death like in Somalia, right?
The first child's name was Van. The second child's name was Mark. They have NAMES, asshole. They're PEOPLE. And that, asshole, is poverty for children in America. Not that it matters to you, of course, since as a lizard person you have no more compassion towards human beings than you'd have towards a meat pie.
No, don't bother replying to this with yet more uninformed pontification at the end of a stuffed British shirt, because I'll just delete it. Because in excusing this kind of misery with "well, others have it worse", you, sir, just proved you're yet another one of those cold-blooded conservative lizard people who has no more humanity than that turd that I just flushed down my toilet this morning, and I have no patience with your ilk. Go jerk off to pictures of dying children in Somalia, already. You know you want to. At least, you sure seem to enjoy inflicting suffering upon children, if my first-hand experience dealing with children being raised in poverty is any guide.
- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
David, people die from malnutrition in the United States, they die from exposure because they're homeless, they die from diseases and medical conditions that would be easily curable if they could afford a doctor, so please don't try to pretend that true poverty doesn't exist in this country.
ReplyDeleteYup, as long as America isn't the most miserable, dangerous, most poverty-stricken poisoned hell-hole on the face of the planet, Duff and his kind have much work to do.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger, I was a social worker for adults with mental illnesses. I saw so much poverty among that population that it broke my heart just to go to work in the morning. That is why I had to give it up actually.
ReplyDeleteI worked with a lot of people who came from solid middle class backgrounds who had good health insurance and everything. Then they started getting symptoms. At first, things were great. Their insurance covered their medications and they could control their illness and keep working at the jobs which gave them a decent middle class lifestyle. This would continue until they hit the lifetime maximum for mental health services on their policies. Then they would stop getting treatment and would almost always lose their jobs.
Then, the poverty would come and that is when I would meet them as my organization would get referrals from the local homeless shelter and the Psych ER. Even in the best of economic times, no one will hire someone who is mentally ill. People are scared of mental illness. Not that these people could get a job anyways. Getting a job would mean the loss of Medicaid and without that, they had no hope at all.
And so even though I live in one of the most affluent cities in my state and even though I was doing this job in the 1990's when our economy was booming, I still found myself working with people who were living in tent cities behind the grocery store. Why behind the grocery store? Because of the convenient dumpster diving!
So sure, these guys were rich when compared to many people in Somalia but in my book, if someone is living in a tent in Michigan in the wintertime and eating food from a trash can, they qualify as truly poor to me.
Well, the fake alien invasion idea goes back to the Report From Iron Mountain hoax document (1967), and IIRC it was also the plot for an episode of the original "Outer Limits" TV show ("The Architects of Fear", 1963).
ReplyDelete"it was also the plot for an episode of the original 'Outer Limits' TV show" - ltmurnau
ReplyDeleteAs Krugman acknowledged, though he said "Twilight Zone." You did watch the interview, didn't you, ltmurnau?
BadTux, the Duffer has recently crossed some sort of threshold from quasi-amusing trollish posts to outright cruelty in his comments. I don't know about you, but I believe human cruelty has no place in any comment thread. I am tired of attempting to educate the ineducable in matters of basic human sympathy. Is it perhaps time for you to ban him, as I did quite some time ago?
ReplyDeleteHe's semi-banned, Steve. As in, if I want a pinata to pound on regarding how cruel modern conservatives really are, I'll let one of his posts through. Otherwise... no.
ReplyDeleteNangleator, yeppers, if you aren't starving to death and dying of exposure right this moment, you're not poor as far as the right-wingers are concerned.
Nan, people don't die of starvation or exposure in America. They die of "natural causes". Or "heart failure". At least, that's what it says on their death certificate. The memorial to the homeless who have died on the streets here in the Silicon Valley has several hundred names on it now, and the effort to gather their names only started in 2008. Not one of their death certificates has the real cause of death on it -- generally exposure or starvation. Every single one of their death certificates says "natural causes" or "heart failure". Well, I guess their heart did fail to beat, when they froze to death or starved to death, but it's Orwellian the way that these causes of death are written out of the official record.
- Badtux the Not-so-snarky Penguin
Mind you, it doesn't hurt to give to an organization that's truly helping in Somalia (as opposed to preaching), as well as giving to your local food bank. And I don't mean sanctimoniously dropping a bag of canned goods in a bin by the grocery store door; give that money in CASH, the food bank has links much further up in the distribution chain, and can parlay that cash donation into four or five times what you can buy at the grocery store.
ReplyDeleteNow as to Somalia, I think Doctors Without Borders is there, and doing as much as anyone can do in such a lawless land.
So Tux, you have seen fit to respond to the pompous Pommy headuphisarse in the way that I thought proper weeks ago. I salute you for your forbearance, Tux. I'm more surly than snarky with that sort of twit. What a shame that there are so many people like him whose souls have been replaced by a dry, shriveled dog turd.
ReplyDeleteI've heard the "real poverty is Somalia or real disease is in Nicaragua" crap for years (substitute the currently popular countries depending on the time period).
ReplyDeleteI have seen and continue to see poverty in this country. It isn't always as dramatic as Bad's example. Sometimes it's as mundane as making a couple hundred dollars too much to qualify for Medicaid and having a child with chronic ear infections. The parents cannot afford the doctor's time AND the prescription. Antibiotics cost a fortune, you know. One could walk out of the pharmacy with a few buckets full of narcotics for what a 7 day course of antibiotics cost. Anyway, without those evil social programs like Medicaid, the child suffers recurring ear pain and finally suffers a noticeable loss of hearing. (True case.)
Anyway, in our current day and age, my thought (once the profanity is deleted) is ... give us a little while and perhaps we can present you with Somalia-like conditions in this country. Your response would be? Oh, don't tell me; I already know it will be a variation on that Social Darwinism horseshit.
So sad. So boring.
Jill
BTW, it is just my opinion that most of the suffering in African countries is directly related to governments not giving a damn about their people.