Is poverty a moral failing...

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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by JimC » Thu May 25, 2017 1:12 am

That arsehole Carson would be right at home brutally running a Victorian era poorhouse...
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Svartalf » Thu May 25, 2017 2:31 am

who?
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by JimC » Thu May 25, 2017 2:38 am

Svartalf wrote:who?
From Brian's post immediately prior to mine:
In an interview released Wednesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that a "certain mindset" contributes to people living in poverty, pointing to habits and a "state of mind" that children take from their parents at a young age.
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Svartalf » Thu May 25, 2017 2:42 am

Oh, creating money is a mental power, interesting to know, how do I learn that trick?
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by pErvinalia » Thu May 25, 2017 3:13 am

Brian Peacock wrote:
In an interview released Wednesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that a "certain mindset" contributes to people living in poverty, pointing to habits and a "state of mind" that children take from their parents at a young age.

"I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they'll be right back up there," he said during an interview on SiriusXM Radio with Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... f8a1b96ae5
Hmm. This fact-free assertion doesn't really give the how-many-children-are-in-poverty-in-the-US much to be cheerful about, particularly as the budget is set to dismantle a great deal of the social safety net.
It's incredible that these clowns keep making statements like this. People like him should be the first to be swinging from the lampposts when the revolution comes...
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Hermit » Thu May 25, 2017 7:09 am

pErvin wrote:
Brian Peacock wrote:
In an interview released Wednesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that a "certain mindset" contributes to people living in poverty, pointing to habits and a "state of mind" that children take from their parents at a young age.

"I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they'll be right back up there," he said during an interview on SiriusXM Radio with Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... f8a1b96ae5
Hmm. This fact-free assertion doesn't really give the how-many-children-are-in-poverty-in-the-US much to be cheerful about, particularly as the budget is set to dismantle a great deal of the social safety net.
It's incredible that these clowns keep making statements like this. People like him should be the first to be swinging from the lampposts when the revolution comes...
Won't anybody think of the poor lampposts? And the expense of the rope?
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu May 25, 2017 11:28 am

"But for a noose a nation was lost..." :hehe:
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Forty Two » Thu May 25, 2017 1:08 pm

JimC wrote:That arsehole Carson would be right at home brutally running a Victorian era poorhouse...
Would that make him a poorhouse n....? :leave:
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Forty Two » Thu May 25, 2017 1:09 pm

JimC wrote:
Svartalf wrote:who?
From Brian's post immediately prior to mine:
In an interview released Wednesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that a "certain mindset" contributes to people living in poverty, pointing to habits and a "state of mind" that children take from their parents at a young age.
I would think that's an obviously true statement, although not the sole cause of poverty, the fact that children learn behaviors from their parents and culture from which they are steeped, including habits and states of mind, is certainly not a controversial point. Is it?

Last edited by Forty Two on Thu May 25, 2017 1:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar

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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Forty Two » Thu May 25, 2017 1:15 pm

Svartalf wrote:Oh, creating money is a mental power, interesting to know, how do I learn that trick?
To some degree, making it is.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar

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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu May 25, 2017 5:37 pm

Forty Two wrote:...
I would think that's an obviously true statement, although not the sole cause of poverty, the fact that children learn behaviors from their parents and culture from which they are steeped, including habits and states of mind, is certainly not a controversial point. Is it?
That point is not a very controversial one, even though most of us are capable of holding views and adopting habits and states of mind at odds with those of our parents and their generation, but that's not the point Carson's making, nor it is the one you're saying is obviously true, is it?
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Hermit » Thu May 25, 2017 8:50 pm

Forty Two wrote:
JimC wrote:
Svartalf wrote:who?
From Brian's post immediately prior to mine:
In an interview released Wednesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that a "certain mindset" contributes to people living in poverty, pointing to habits and a "state of mind" that children take from their parents at a young age.
I would think that's an obviously true statement, although not the sole cause of poverty, the fact that children learn behaviors from their parents and culture from which they are steeped, including habits and states of mind, is certainly not a controversial point. Is it?
That is not controversial. What is controversial is to place the chicken before the egg, so to speak.
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by JimC » Thu May 25, 2017 9:25 pm

There is little doubt that the experience of poverty and unemployment has a profound effect on the mental states of those involved, including children in such family situations. And part of the crippling effect is a form of apathy and depression. What Carson and his ilk do is to infer that such states of mind are evidence of moral failure, and that people in tough situations without such failings can do the whole American rags to riches fantasy with one hand tied behind their backs...

Any program to combat long term unemployment needs to recognise that systematic and sympathetic psychological help may be needed to break the mental chains that grinding poverty applies to many people.
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by Animavore » Wed Oct 18, 2017 12:54 pm

The lie that poverty is a moral failing was buried a century ago. Now it’s back.

If you know Alfred Doolittle only from Stanley Holloway’s infinitely lovable portrayal of him in My Fair Lady, you might not realise that he’s a bit of a monster. In George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, he arrives in high dudgeon at the home of Henry Higgins, who has, Doolittle assumes, taken control of his daughter Eliza for sexual purposes. He is not morally outraged – he just wants to be paid: “The girl belongs to me. You got her. Where do I come in?” Doolittle is a member of the most despised of all social classes: the undeserving poor. He has no desire to be reformed. But he asks – and answers – the most penetrating question: “What is middle-class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.”

In the second half of the play, though, the monster who was willing to sell his daughter for a fiver reappears in a silk hat and patent leather shoes. He is clean and elegant. He is getting married. He is now, as he bitterly complains, a paragon of that same middle-class morality. What has transformed him? Money. In an outrageous plot twist, Doolittle has inherited millions and he is now obliged to appear thoroughly respectable.

Pygmalion is not just about Eliza’s transformation from flower girl to apparent duchess. It’s about her father’s transformation from a disreputable chancer to the epitome of propriety. And in this morality tale is one of Bernard Shaw’s most important arguments: people are not poor because they are immoral; they’re immoral because they are poor. Or, to put it in the terms of today’s assumptions about poverty: the problem with the poor isn’t their “culture” or their want of character. It’s just that they don’t have enough money.

The warped logic of making the poor pay more | Barbara Ellen
Read more
By the time he died, in 1950, Bernard Shaw, as the most widely read socialist writer in the English-speaking world, had done as much as anyone to banish the fallacy that poverty is essentially a moral failing – and conversely that great riches are proof of moral worth. His most passionate concern was with poverty and its causes. He was haunted by the notorious Dublin slums of his childhood. As his spokesman Undershaft puts it in Major Barbara: “Poverty strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it.”

The question – why are the poor poor? – has a number of possible answers in the 21st century, just as it had in the late 19th. A Eurobarometer report in 2010 examined attitudes to poverty in the European Union. The most popular explanation among Europeans (47%) for why people live in poverty was injustice in society.
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Re: Is poverty a moral failing...

Post by pErvinalia » Wed Oct 18, 2017 12:57 pm

I don't think it ever went away. Most conservatives view it as such.
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