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I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

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Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, what would it take for you to change your mind and to start agreeing that contemporary crimes of deliberate starvation and exterminationist policies should be tried in an international court or tribunal? Nothing, because that's already my opinion. > What is it that makes the Holocaust so very special? The name. So this has been a trivial misunderstanding on terminology, and you kinda went full flak on me. Some…

To a lurker scanning this thread, this comes off as “I’m more interested in semantics and winning an argument than condemning abusive and antisocial behavior.”

What should i say instead?

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves. This is disrespectful to the intelligence of children. >we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up Not giving people free things is not a punishment. >as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry. Giving away free food is not the only way to achieve that. >Every decision that leads to hungry ch…

I'm not sure where to even begin with this, but a large part of why free school lunches exist is that there are many kids in abusive or simply desperately poor families who do not get fed properly, meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get. > Not giving people free things is not a punishment. This is absurd. Kids don't have money to purchase what they need, so parents have a duty to feed, clo…

>meaning that the school lunch may be the only decent meal they get

"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

By giving away food you are getting people stuck in a bad situation. Preventing a reconfiguration of people's lives. A kid could have figured out how to get 3 proper meals a day if they had to figure out how to get food themselves instead of sustaining themselves on a single daily handout.

>Kids don't have money to purchase what they need

Again you are underestimating the abilities of kids. They are capable of providing value to others and consequently receiving money or goods that they need.

>parents have a duty to feed, clothe, house etc them.

But this duty is not because their children don't have money. The duty is because they are family. I wouldn't expect a patent to take in every homeless person to their household because they don't have money to purchase what they need.

>Intentionally not providing children what they need, like food, is abuse, period.

I think it's more complex. Parents have power over children and using that power they can restrict what they do and make it impossible for them to acquire what they need. To me this restriction is what is abusive and it would apply to anyone else. If you locked anyone in a room and denied them water, that would be abuse.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#523

Am I missing something? My kids have to bring their own lunch to school. The school is for education and the parents' job is to feed them. And it gets even better: after 12/13 yo they grow self supporting capabilities, so as parent you only need to replenish the fridge.

Right, it's that simple, no morals involved nothing to see here please move along . How naive can you be?

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, in Texas (~2005), we weren't even allowed to leave the building to eat on the patio outside in high school. Something I thought a lot about when I moved to Mexico and saw kids leaving school at lunch to wander out and eat lunch together in the surrounding part of the city. Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and n…

> Meanwhile, in Texas (~2005), we weren't even allowed to leave the building to eat on the patio outside in high school. > Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh. Do you think it actually was or is the US just really strict about this?

Their experience is not universal as I also went to High School in Texas in the early 2000's and not only were we allowed to eat on school grounds, if you were old enough to have a license you could drive off campus for lunch as long as you were back before the next period.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#525
post #121
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that the positive externality is really hard to measure, and penny-pinching policies only care about what is easily measured, it's just another instance of the McNamara fallacy. As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recip…

You shouldn't have to measure the fact that feeding children does good, and you should push back against anybody who thinks you should (because they clearly don't want all children to eat, a strong signal of fucked up morality).

I absolutely agree, I cannot comprehend why there's even a discussion in the USA for not providing free hot meals for students. Running tabs, pestering parents, all of that sounds absurd for a very simple moral answer: yes, kids should have access to food in schools, no matter their wealth status. I don't even care about richer parents getting free food for their kids at school, all kids should be treated the same.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it such a weird take to call feeding children at school socialism with grave consequences but taxpayer funded mandatory education isn't.

1) Only a very few people are expected to be able (time and competency) to give a general education to their children, unlike feeding/housing. 2) Let's be real, it's not just socialism/charity, one of the major reasons for compulsory education is shaping malleable young minds (for good or bad, mind you).

And presumably you want them shaped in the best possible way, which is hardly possible if children are hungry or undernourished.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it such a weird take to call feeding children at school socialism with grave consequences but taxpayer funded mandatory education isn't.

1) Only a very few people are expected to be able (time and competency) to give a general education to their children, unlike feeding/housing. 2) Let's be real, it's not just socialism/charity, one of the major reasons for compulsory education is shaping malleable young minds (for good or bad, mind you).

1) If they don't have time or competency then surely they can pay for the services of someone who can. Most people don't have the time or competency to grow their own food but we still expect them to purchase their food from someone who can.

2) The state taking money from people by force in order to mandate the shaping of malleable young minds sounds like exactly the kind of grave consequences of socialism you fear.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#528
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, what would it take for you to change your mind and to start agreeing that contemporary crimes of deliberate starvation and exterminationist policies should be tried in an international court or tribunal? Nothing, because that's already my opinion. > What is it that makes the Holocaust so very special? The name. So this has been a trivial misunderstanding on terminology, and you kinda went full flak on me. Some…

That's akin to a straw man, as shown by the quotes above. You clearly claimed that contemporary genocidal processes are "highly inappropriate" to compare to the Holocaust. This in response to someone using the Nuremberg trials as a frame of reference for suggesting that contemporary exterminationist criminals should be held accountable. But it's great that you've changed your mind since then.

You are full of confidence while i am unhappy that my writings didn't rule out such an garbage interpretation.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm in favor of free school lunches for kids. But I'm very annoyed with the strawmanning in this thread. For example, it seems like a strawman to say that people who are against free school lunches "want kids to go hungry". Maybe they just believe that parents should be responsible rather than the state. If parents are responsible then the children of the parents who can't or won't provide will go hungry. That is a…

Look into the expression "perverse incentive". Maybe he doesn't want people so thoughtless they'd make children without being able to feed them to do so? Also, too many Americans blindly praising socialism without knowing its consequences in the deep end. It's not all rainbows and butterflies.

Yeah, I'm a socialist: I believe children shouldn't be hungry in the richest country the Earth has ever seen. Sue me. Your slippery slope fallacy is no excuse for you willingness to let children starve.

Your country is falling into fasicsm and there are still people like you going "feeding kids is literally communism". No wonder this country is going down, its citizens are incapable of the most basic compassion toward one another.

Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

#530
post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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this is ridiculous. I'm a socialist and I believe that people should have far more of life's necessities provided to them by the state; I think supermarkets should be nationalised; I think water and electricity should be free up to a limit. on the other hand, this "people disagree with me about something sensitive so they're unevolved and/or subhuman" lark is childish as fuck and completely hypocritical

people think things for a reason, and it's rarely because they're sociopaths or they're unevolved or they're stupid, and assuming that it is lazy and uncritical

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