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Historically, one reason that US conservatives turned so heavily against public services is — narrowly & specifically — racism; or rather a willingness to share facilities with other white people but not with black people.
When they were told they had to desegregate town swimming pools and let the black kids learn to swim too, they shut down the swimming pools instead.
Yep a theater company in my town recently put on a play dramatizing the closing of the city’s pools. Instead of integrating they filled the pools frequented by white patrons with concrete and the one frequented by black patrons with garbage. It also touched on the fact that the lack of availability for safe public swimming locations has led to needless deaths of hundreds and hundreds of black people who opted to swim in fast moving creeks and waters connected to industrial facilities. All because racists were unwilling to share a body of water with someone with a different color of skin.
it’s not just racism. it’s classism too.
rich whites love public services that benefit them, but not when poor people get them too.
The UK remembers when Margaret Thatcher took their kindergarteners’ free milk. Shortly before she fucked up their parents’ not-free housing market.
The thing about the swimming-pool example is that “town leaders” (rich whites) were okay with poor whites using town pools, but freaked out at black people using them.
While this is true, I think it’s more of a symptom of the in-group expanding when it acquires an easier-to-distinguish bullying target. Excluding the Irish and Italians in the US was (generally) more difficult than looking for melanin or hair texture, and as they lost their accents many could blend right in before being noticed. And once you’re in, you’re much harder to dehumanise. These days a “no Irish” sign would be quickly laughed off or removed, but they were everywhere in the US once.
Same problem with excluding poorer whites of all varieties from pools, you might be able to do it by looking at clothing, but even that’s harder and there will be infiltrators to the niche in-group social sphere. The Great Gatsby infiltrating the ultra wealthy, and the kid from the wrong side of the tracks makes friends with less-poor kids at the community pool.
You can see it in England as well, the old-money Londoners will look down on another equally white English person for having an accent that indicates they’re from Manchester or Sussex. Or even worse, gasp Yorkshire! I’ve seen that happen to Bavarian and Saxon Germans too - people ashamed to speak because their accent identified them as out-group.
I’m glad this is slowly changing as more historically out-group people make it into in-group leadership positions, and people aren’t as shamed out of intercultural relationships. But I think that there will always be some arbitrary group of people who are considered to be the bottom of the social hierarchy. And those people will generally be the people who are most obviously different from the equally arbitrary ‘ideal’. Like people who rely on assistive technology, or people who are very overweight, or people with ‘bad’ teeth.
Maybe in the future it will be all humans if we’re conquered by an alien species who we can’t easily blend in with. We’ll all be inferior to the many-tentacled, who are clearly the superiorly limbed species.
I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I’m not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
The pool closures were a reaction of “I’m taking my ball and going home” that caught widespread attention and was easy to copycat for other small-town “elite” who resented being forced to treat out-group humans as in-group humans. It definitely a response to desegregation, which in itself is the deliberate barrier removal for a social out-group that is gaining widerspread acceptance. Which groups are the outgroup and ingroup change over locations and time, this time it could be roughly distilled to ‘white’ vs ‘black’.
Pool closures are definitely still inseparable entirely for the context of the time, the civil rights movement and ‘race relations’ and slavery and the US. But the same patterns play out all over the world regardless of why one group has power and the other doesn’t.
Small anecdote: one of my grandparents was concerned about my parents marriage. Because ‘mixed marriages don’t work’ (actual words). Both of my parents are visually the same ‘race’, their family heritages are separated by around 2000km / 1250mi. Almost nobody in the world would think they are somehow ‘different’ in any significant way, let alone incompatibly different. It’s really bizarre, but a hint of previous social expectations and how narrowly in-group and out-groups have been defined.
It’s also ableism! The wealthy and powerful often think that because they “succeeded”, everyone else who didn’t is less of a person than them and deserves their position in life. They frequently believe that everyone in life has the same opportunities and were just too “stupid” to take them. I have also seen this internalised - many people have said they’re “not smart enough” to be rich, which was always patently untrue. The truth is that growing up in richer families often leads to better health outcomes (less contaminated water, regular doctor access, better pregnancy education and maternal health, etc.).
Sometimes Prosperity Theology kicks in too, with the premise that God rewards those he loves most. The corollary being that poor people must be somehow sinful and hence deserved their circumstances.
And then, when the poor are malnourished and contaminated with lead and chemicals dumped in their water supply and can’t perform to anywhere near their potential had they been born to a rich parent… well. That’s just evidence they were right about them all along
The common problem is the unwillingness to share. Our power structures reward a lack of empathy with money.
While I think ableism is an issue, I don’t see you describing that. What I see you describing white supremacy, because that is what created and reinforced inherited wealth. Add on the Property Theology (which I’ve been told has origins in Calvinism) and it helps solidify race and class hierarchies.
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This is literally the opposite of that.
It’s ridiculous how the school lunches debate got turned on its head
Poor kids already get free lunch, nationwide.
This is literally a debate about using public money to fund free lunches for kids whose parents can afford it.
I haven’t formed an opinion myself, I can see both sides of the issue. But there are SO MANY uninformed people jesus. Usually we (leftists) are the smart ones.
But that is communism!! - some conservative mother or whatever who doesn’t have school-aged kids.
Wait till conservatives learn about how stuff like roads, highways, firefighting, and public schools are funded.
Libertarians know that is why they want to make all roads toll roads.
The fact this is even a radical idea shows how far down the debate pervert rabbit hole this country has gone. People are willing to argue against even the most basic additions to the public trust that other countries who became democratic long after the United States had solved decades ago.
I’m going to get even more radical. Give everyone lunch. Economies of scale make it even cheaper per person and the health benefits lead to the oh-so-coveted increased productivity.
Just think of all the damage it could cause if someone was given a life necessity without
having been born into a non-poor familyearning it though!I can’t come up with any ways it would be bad either but maybe we can all work together and figure some out.
“That billionaire worked hard to be the only person able to afford the best nutrition, education, healthcare and network. How dare you trivialise their efforts by just handing out rewards to everyone! The deservedly poor are just going to get all uppity!”
I think this has generally been the criticism. They feel it is a devaluation of their work to provide resources for or share them with others. The damage to them is from the increased competition for their tenuous social/financial status when they have a fairer fight.
You can see it even in the social media posts about “why do people flipping burgers deserve a slightly more liveable minimum wage when I had to sell my left kidney to buy my MBA!”.
I appreciate the question was rhetorical, I just thought it was a good moment to discuss prosocial and antisocial motivations and how they manifest.
I appreciate you letting in some light on a common counterargument. The whole “devil’s advocate” thing doesn’t always go over well (can be used as a cover for contrarian JAQassery) but it’s useful when done right.
I love Governor Whitmer. She is really kicking ass.
Being hungry as a child is a great experience to motivate kids to do well in school so they never have to experience it as an adult. Also, we should make sure they’re hungry from K-12. What amazing entrepreneurs they’ll become!
/s
Let them eat bootstraps!
The MN DFL really hit it out of the park this session with bills like this that help basically everyone
it’s easy to say “let’s feed the kids!”, and it’s not a bad opinion to have - but I was curious when I looked at the bill mentioned in the article - added all up, its between $8 and $12 per child per day.
cursory searches indicate that there’s ~55.4 million children, K - 12, attending school in 2023. if that estimate is accurate, that’s $443,200,000 to $664,800,000 per day.
the number of days in a school year varies by State - between 160 and 180 - this means that for a “school year” the cost of feeding the children is between $70,912,000,000 - $79,776,000,000 (160 days) to $106,368,000,000 - $119,664,000,000 (180 days)
so, between $70.9 billion and $119.6 billion, every year. not really surprised that the bill is getting no traction in Congress.
Exactly. “Feed all the children” is nice until you have to pay for it. This debate is about allocating money to fund lunches for kids whose parents can afford it already.
I’m not saying I’m against it. I’m saying we should take a sober look at it. Not “WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN” clickbait bullshit.
