Tag: Intellectual masturbation

Facepalm News-oids II

Who or what do I forgive now?

Sometimes it’s not people that are “stupid”, it’s the system that’s “stupid”.

  1. Accessibility of the right to die. Canada has its poverty and euthanasia policies organized  such that the right to die is more accesible than the right to proper health care and basic social services. 65 year-old retiree and resident of Medicine Hat AB, Les Landry acquired one of two doctor’s signatures needed for assisted suicide, on the basis that he is poor and will be unable to pay his debts and medical bills on his federal pension and old age security. He currently suffers from epilepsy originating from treatment for a hernia over a decade ago. He is in a motorized wheelchair. (14 Dec, translated from Spanish)
  2. Intellectual masturbation. In discussing hypotheticals of a court case, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown-Jackson offered an example of a mall Santa photographer who would be comfortable photographing white children but not children of other races, should do so anyway. But, Justice Samuel Alito countered, suggesting that a black Santa at the other end of the mall shouldn’t need to agree to be photographed with a kid wearing KKK robes. Alito’s hypothetical went viral this week. (5 Dec) And of course, a Jewish Santa shouldn’t have to agree to be photographed with … oh, never mind.
  3. The Eye of Apple is watching.  Two plaintiffs are filing a class-action lawsuit in California over the ease by which Apple AirTags can be used by abusive ex-partners as a stalking device and use them to aid in abuse and harassment. (6 Dec) Other cases are pending where Apple’s location technology is not accurate enough. In Colorado, retiree Ruby Johnson, age 77, saw police come to her door in an armoured vehicle with attack dogs and rifles. After a few hours of ransacking her home, it sunk in that they had the wrong house. The error was traced to inaccurate information on Apple’s Find My app. Johnson is suing the Colorado police. (5 Dec)

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The popularity of “Child Poverty”

Over the past decade or so, this human rights cause “flavour of the month” called “child poverty” has been in style as something to say and for human rights groups and politicians to champion. Before that, we only had “poverty”, until sometime in the late ’90s, when someone discovered “child poverty”, and now it’s all the rage, and everyone’s talking about it.

The nice thing, is that it made poverty go away. No one has poverty anymore. We only have child poverty now. Images of starving children living in squalor with no education, no running water and no Nintendo while their Ivy League fatcat parents live on caviar and crumpets served with china and silverware and playing World of Warcraft on their X-boxes. Down with fatcat parents!

Of course, that isn’t true, but that is the image it conjures up for me. I just want to ask: when we speak of “child poverty”, don’t we just mean “poverty”? Why do we need to separate the poverty of children from the poverty of the entire family they came from? Doesn’t fixing poverty for children mean fixing poverty for their families?

It also turns out, but you have to do some digging in Google to see it, that there are other kinds of poverty that are up and coming on the poverty hit parade. There is also “elderly poverty” and “working age poverty”. You know, children living high on the hog while the parents have to beg for scraps. I think that’s how it works … In addition, “working age poverty” can still mean children in some parts of the world.

These are not so popular, even though those in “working age poverty” are likely to be parents of children living in “child poverty”, whose grandparents live in “elderly poverty”. Indeed, poverty has become a complicated science. After all, you can’t just “redistribute wealth” because “socialism has failed”. It failed because no one in charge wanted it to succeed. At any rate, social safety nets are soooo ’70’s!

I don’t wish to make light of poverty. I believe all poverty is a social problem. I just don’t think it is advancing any cause to balkanize people in poverty into different factions as if they are in competition against each other for donations, government funding, or anything else of the sort. These new classifications are just rhetoric that make the problem seem more complicated than it is.

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