Spicy Edde
@malwaretech @noonedanger I had a former coworker on LinkedIn expressing delight that laid off employees at big firms would now have to learn what it’s like to work somewhere that requires them to pay health deductibles.
Jan 25, 2023 at 8:58pmWeb
Show threadN01DJan 25, 2023

@spicyeddie @malwaretech I feel like that's a similar mindset to the people who get mad about student loan forgiveness because "I had to pay them, so should they!"

I want people to have a *better* life than I've had, I truly don't understand the mindset where people think that they've suffered so others should suffer as much or more.

Show threaddigital luciferaseJan 25, 2023

@noonedanger @spicyeddie @malwaretech

Dominant culture in America, however you choose to define it, has a major fault line running through it that many do not see. It's not racially or ethnically defined, it's not a matter of religion. It's a matter of the people on one side believing it's super important to keep your nose to the grindstone and always have a job and not to shirk work or responsibility as they see it, to bust your ass even when you're sick. The standard metaphor here is 'I'd scrub toilets for a living before I went on welfare'.

The other side is anyone who is content to take support from the government - someone who won't necessarily take any job, no matter how demeaning or awful, rather than take government assistance. People who will sit at home on the couch rather than spend every day knocking on doors trying to find a job. People who will accept government food subsidies and food stamps even though they have a little money in their pockets somehow.

The former group HATES the latter group. They resent the living shit out of the fact that someone somewhere ISN'T getting out of bed at the ass crack of dawn to go work their ass off at whatever job is available to them. They are infuriated when they go to the grocery store and see people with what they deem to be frivolous purchases in their cart which they pay for with government assistance. They don't even like it when someone claims workers compensation and stays home until their doctor clears them for work. The way they see things, all that's monstrously unfair and it all becomes a huge caricature in their head of greedy lazy worthless people sucking the government tit and the corrupt lib assholes who allow it all to happen. And it eats them day in and day out, often because their own jobs are also exploitative, and so they gotta build themselves up- not as suckers, but as right minded individuals.

In small town America this divide often runs deeper than racism, which is often based on an undercurrent of fear of the unknown.

Anyway the result is, any time someone gets ahead somehow without first busting their ass and 'paying their dues' people see that as somehow being unjust. And they hate it with the white hot fury of a collapsing star. They tug their dicks to the idea of cutting those people off from the 'government tit' and making them get up at 5 am and bust their ass all day, of running all the politicians out of town who will support any kind of welfare.

And that extends to the people who denied themselves stuff and lived in spartan fashion to pay off their student loans. They see the people who didn't do the same thing and who get some kind of forgiveness on those loans as a monstrous betrayal of all that is honest. Is it stupid and pathetic and even evil to think such thoughts? Yup. But they've got themselves so wrapped around the axle of not wanting to feel like a schmuck for 'doing it the right way' that they just can't help themselves. And as for the people who never went to college in the first place and hence never had a student loan? Well, they think ANYONE who went that way was taking a handout.