111–120 of 344 posts
"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."
This keeps happening to me. I read a feelgood story, visit the wiki page and then realize how muddy the water is: >> Monroe has been described as an "austerity celebrity". In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture." Granted most poor people do stupi…
That's one big paradox. Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools. Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times. Yet, my new social circle believe that I'm talented because of my…
“Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum.” This seems spoken as a cry of desperation, but outside of the anglosphere it would be quite normal. If I were living as desperately as this person seems to be, and with a child to take care of, my (elderly, im…
I feel like this is the dark side of the condition that isn’t talked about as much. If you have adhd, you are far more likely to wind up suicidal, in poverty, abusing drugs, etc. But these things occur on a spectrum. That is to say, far more of us still might not be in abject poverty, but the same tendencies and deficiencies hold us down and cause disproportionate suffering. It’s a constant struggle not to let it pull you even further down. You might not be in the suicide/poverty/drug abuse part of the statistic, but you might be working pretty hard not to be. It’s not a great way to exist, sometimes.
Although I own a nice home and have a good job now, I don’t think I’ll ever have a sense of security or safety, or even stop having the internal sense that I’m still living in poverty. It’s hard to shake that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a friend from a rough upbringing who called it, "poverty mindset". Eg you have a success in your life? Prepare to be shunned and thought of with disdain by your community.
And what do we call it when somebody loses status, and are shunned and thought of with disdain by their community?
tl;dr: She's not exactly honest about being poor.
"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."
> Choosing to use the powers vested in you by the constituencies you serve, to deprive those same constituents of light, heating, food and home security is a wilful and deliberate act. And it has to stop.
It’s abundantly clear that the whole passage was speaking to Rees-Mogg, calling her out for her Marie Antoinette ‘let them eat potatoes’.
This passage isn’t a generalism, is a specific response to the words of a former politician, a former Conservative MP and MEP for East Midlands.
To reduce the articles substance to a specially selected out of context quote such as OP highlighted seems disingenuous.
"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."
> But ignorance is a choice. Is that true for this case? Understanding the actual on-the-ground situation for all types of people and situations in the 10 largest countries will probably take up most of a normal human lifespan. And that's assuming they spend several hours a week, 50 weeks a year, learning. Understanding India and China alone to that level would probably take up 30-40 years. It seems literally impossi…
The ignorance is inevitable. The system that produces and enables this ignorance and that allows this ignorance to result in harm (by creating ignorant laws that create ignorant legal structures that ignorantly harm people the people who created the laws didn't understand) is the problem. You can guillotine the entire House of Lords but that wouldn't change anything other than the names and the number of dead aristocrats.
Humm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality bec…
It's pretty clear if you read the article, and even more explicit in the news paper articles in her photos. She was a single mother with zero family support. She couldn't just work odd or long hours (and was forced to leave her existing better paid job) because there was nobody to care for her young child.
The article didn't say that - are you relying on another source of information?
She mentions her family, but implies she wants to remain independent:
Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum. I won’t fold the corners down on your books, Dad.