211–220 of 344 posts
It's worth listening to this episode of Blocked and Reported on Jack Monroe: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-literally-u... tl;dr: She's not exactly honest about being poor.
How are we supposed to listen to that? It's behind a paywall.
It's obviously true what Jack says, and the people who espouse the right wing view of poverty being the fault of the poor often fall into this trap - make a stupid suggestion that indicates they know nothing about the issue. What's frustrating though is that the people making these stupid suggestions never actually engage with the clear and obvious shortcomings in their philosophy. They have taken a stupid position, it results in them making dumb comments, and when it's pointed out that what they're saying is dumb... they either just ignore or double down. It makes you wonder what on earth this person is doing in politics given their quite clear lack of interest in the real lived experience of the people she would wish to rule over.
Incredible writing. Reading this, I kept feeling a sense that something was missing. It wasn't until later in the blog that I hit me. "Where is her community?" To a 3rd world immigrant, the idea of being this isolated in your the country you were born in, feels unfathomable. Back home, It's common for kids to live with their parents until the kids are ready, often until age 25-30. Alternatively, people will stuff the…
> Before long, Monroe was using a food bank. “It had taken me four or five weeks to pluck up the courage to go. The first time, one of the women looked at me and I looked at her. She went to church with my mum. She said, ‘Your mum will be devastated.’ And I said, ‘You can’t tell anyone. You haven’t seen me.’ She said, ‘Your parents will help you,’ and I said, ‘They can’t know.’”
> That’s what I don’t understand, I say. Why didn’t you tell your parents when they were in a position to help? “Because … ” For once, she slows down. “I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had had a good job and I’d fucked it. I was embarrassed that I’d ended up not being able to provide for my son, and I was worried that if I told a soul, the walls would come crumbling down. Because my parents had fostered for most of my childhood, I’d grown up with this fear that if I ever had a child, he would be taken into care. That I would be an unfit mother. I’d grown up with almost 100 children revolving through my childhood home. So in my head, nearly every kid went into care because nearly every kid I came across was in the care system. I was terrified that if I told anyone, my son would be taken into care.”
So the shame itself was one of the biggest obstacles - compounded by the idea that poverty is evidence of personal inadequacy or moral weakness.
There is a problem with lack of community there: the feeling that really struggling means that you don't deserve help, because that's the message you get from your society. (And it certainly doesn't help that lack of money excludes you from all kinds of normal social activities, as she mentions in the article.)
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Genetics probably play the biggest role when it comes to natural abilities. Height, strength, explosiveness, body proportions, endurance.
This is inconsistent with the fact that average height has increased significantly over the last two centuries[1]. Our genes have not had time to change in that span, but our environment, including access to nutrients, has changed radically. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/human-height
Shorter than average are very rare in most sports except for some niche positions.
>> My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke >> 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. Well this doesn't sound like someone who is destitute and with no safety net whatsoever. What's so wrong living with your parents? For most of human history it was the normal thing to do. Parents will take care of kids and one of them will inherit the p…
Wanting to beg her parents to take care of her does not imply they would. Many people want things they cannot have.
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…
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
This is a great article. How it ended up on HN I don't know, but can somebody please start submitting more like this, and fewer techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail?
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Better at sports .. but I bet there's a fairly even distribution between people who have money and don't. > In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today. A lot of people already do.
And a lot of people would be very wrong. There’s a floor to survivability, below which you can’t keep yourself alive, but there is no ceiling. If everyone is above the floor, there’s no reason for concern about those looking for the ceiling. In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling. The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement abov…
There’s no question a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to pursue their niche passions and drives, based on a bad birth lottery ticket. There’s a lot of wasted potential in countries that reduce aperture of the early success funnels.
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I think the story highlights a problem irrespective of the messenger. Some people cannot help but judge and opine on other's behavior where they have no context, or any moral basis to render that judement. We do this all the time in private, but politicians, or public figures, use the same propensity to pass devastating and life hampering policies, or inflame public opinion against a group of people. All I'm really h…
The problem is that sometimes humility and compassion are not what's needed. Sometimes a person needs a kick in the pants. A close friend willing to tell you to stop impulse buying furniture, or get a fucking job, or get off your ass and work out. The tricky part is knowing when which tactic is called for.
Me neither.
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I don’t think the OP was saying that most people are the same, he was saying that most people have talent. In your sports analogy think about the kid who might be good at wrestling but terrible at track. And vice versa. The worry is that more affluent people sub-consciously see themselves as “better” in a universal way. That is not too different then European aristocracies used to see themselves.
I don't believe there is a special part of your brain that allows you to be good at say chess, but leaves you with no potential in football (soccer). Of course some people are naturally faster than others or have a higher endurance peak but anything that involves working with your mind comes down to working memory (incredibly important), long term memory and spatial reasoning. That's why you will often see people tal…