How does K-Lo’s situation fit into this?
It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.
Earlier this week, Walter Russell Mead highlighted disturbing research showing that the poor — far more than the rich — are disconnected from church and religion. While church attendance is dropping among all social classes, it’s falling off a cliff for the poorest and least-educated Americans. In other words, the deeper a person slides into poverty, the more they’re disconnected from the very values that can save them and their families.
The bottom line is that we need more free enterprise, and we need more virtue. Sadly, the Great Society and the sexual revolution have deprived us of both.
The Walter Russell Mead article he refers to is titled, I kid you not, “Inequality Grows As Poor, Ignorant Atheists Swamp US“. Yay Council On Foreign Relations.
I’d like to think things will change some day, I know in my heart that when the Chinese take over, their right-wing pundits will berate the poor for not knowing enough about Confucius.
BGinCHI
The splice that comma makes should tell you all you need to know about why the right neither understands capitalism nor virtue.
Rommie
Someone came to the wrong conclusion when they kept hearing people talking about “praying the poor away”
Team Evil strikes again.
Comrade Javamanphil
This is equivalent to looking at the team photo of any NBA team and concluding that to be tall you need to take up basketball.
j low
Does he mean “small business” $250k plus poor or public sector $60k wealthy?
Dollared
I seriously want to learn everything about this guy.
Then I want to publicly humiliate him. With his own writings.
That is all.
trollhattan
Good god, the hive mind is completely morally bankrupt, not to mention completely severed from reality.
Nice to know, however, that gradiatin’ from skewl and workin’ hard and goin’ to the warehouse ministries reg-lar like guarantees one will, nay, cannot be “poor.” I’m sure that will come as good news to the tens of millions of working poor.
Bastards.
Served
I literally gasped when I read the first sentence of this block quote.
artem1s
hmmm, depravity of hating the poor, not so much a problem in his world, I guess.
Ol Froth
Maybe the poor aren’t in church because they’re too busy working a dead-end job on Sunday?
Steve
I, too, have noticed that people who work hard their whole lives are very rarely unemployed. This insight is the key to everything!
jibeaux
Well, “the depravity of the poor” clears needs to be a category…
Yeah, it’s a real headscratcher why spending your entire life listening to how great it will be when you die is losing its appeal to people whose lives suck.
JGabriel
David French:
Has anyone checked to see if French plagiarized this from some 18th C. Tory backbencher?
.
lacp
I think this bozo has confused “rich people pray” with “rich people prey.”
JGabriel
David French:
… the less we want to worship that asshole who never answers our increasingly desperate prayers.
.
MikeJ
“Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy. Thus they were haughty and committed abominations before Me. Therefore I removed them when I saw it.”
Big Baby DougJ
@JGabriel:
K-Lo didn’t write it, I bring her up because she never married. She talks about that all the time, how she can’t find someone to marry.
I would never, ever mock someone for that…unless they edited on an online website that described unmarried people as “depraved”.
flukebucket
The church damn sure don’t want the fuckers. 10% of nothing is still nothing and what good is a member without a tithe?
Crashman
They’re letting people take money out of the collection plate these days? That’s news to me.
JGabriel
@Big Baby DougJ:
Thanks. Caught it and corrected it, but not quickly enough to escape notice.
.
ruemara
Has this jackhole ever gone into a real poor neighborhood? There’s a church every half a block and a bodega/liquor store inbetween. You ever go into a neighborhood where there isn’t a 1 mile radius between houses of worship, you’re in a shitty neighborhood. When you’re poor, there’s only work and the self medication of opiates, religion and tv to make you feel better. So from this person who’s lived in Washington Heights, traveled Oakland and LA, fuck you with a rusty chainsaw, you icevagina’d, shrivel-hearted, self-righteous, lunatic, sallow, evil, cunt.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Big Baby DougJ:
The reason why K-Lo isn’t married is because a she looks like the Pigman from Seinfeld.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Javamanphil:
Cause, effect, what’s the difference?
Hunter Gathers
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
That has nothing to do with it. She could have the looks of a supermodel, and she’d still be alone. She’s alone because she’s a shitbag of a human being.
wrb
@Comrade Javamanphil:
My favorite such is Herodotus’ conclusion that the track of the sun moves south to avoid the cold and rough ride found in the northern sky in winter.
Big Baby DougJ
What’s weird about this is that they’re not complaining about illegal aliens and strapping young bucks, the study about decreased church attendance was only done for white people.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Comrade Javamanphil: Exactly. The poor are working on Sunday in order to avoid church, I guess.
Amanda in the South Bay
Wow, I soooo much want to kick David French’s ass. He’s nothing more than a cumstain on the dirty underwear of humanity.
BGinCHI
French has this going for him:
“A regular guest on talk radio programs, David has been interviewed on National Public Radio and by numerous hosts, including Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Prager, James Dobson, and Michael Reagan.”
From his bio here:
http://aclj.org/our-mission/staff
SensesFail
Take notes, everyone: You don’t need evidence or rhetoric when you start off with, “It is simply a fact”.
lonesomerobot
fixed.
bill
Wow, I guess we’ve gotten to the point where you can say any damn thing you want about poor people and get away with it. We didn’t used to be that way. You could despise them all you wanted, but you at least knew enough to keep your fucking trap shut. Shit, even my old man was cultured enough to only say “nigger” in his own house and not let anybody else hear it.
Culture of Truth
What kind of last name is “French”? It sure don’t sound American.
Tom Levenson
Oh MFG. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to start drinking absinthe and vicodin cocktails.
Arrrgh.
There is no hope left for that longed for KFMonkey trope of old-school Republicans. If this is William Buckley’s legacy, you know all you need to diagnose the terminal case that this GOP has become.
lonesomerobot
This just proves that god really is an asshole if this is who gets to speak for her.
Hunter Gathers
@Big Baby DougJ:
Ah, but it’s poor white people that they are bitching about. You see, according to conservative mythology, poor people are poor because they are morally and ethically weak. Morally weak people don’t pray to Prosperity Baby Jeebus. No morally upstanding white person would be caught dead being poor, so if they are poor,than they must be inferior. Just like strapping young bucks and the lazy messicans. That’s why religious conservatives are always bitching about the increasing secular nature of the country at large. It’s weird mixture of Randian and Christianist ideology, but it seems to be the language of the modern conservative movement.
PWL
Reminds me of that song from Gilded Age 1.0:
“Long-haired preachers come out each night,
try to tell us what’s wrong and what’s right,
When you ask then how ’bout something to eat.
they reply in voices so sweet:
‘There’ll be pie in the sky when you die,
There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.
Work and pray, live on hay,
There’ll be pie in the sky when you die….'”
Amazing that a hundred years later, we have some fool sounding like a fussy old Victorian parson, explaining that poverty is the poor’s own fault, because of their “depravity,” and explaining all they need to make everything better is more Jeebus.
Has the entire country stepped into the Wayback Machine, or something? We’ve gone back to the times of Jay Gould?
ppcli
@ruemara:
Ah, that’s a hidden bonus that the linked writer points out: the “study” that is supposed to justify this despicable and preposterous claim explicitly excludes black and Latino populations because (get ready for this): “black and Latino religiosity is less divided by education and income”. In other words, those populations are enormous counterexamples to the basic thesis.
I think I’ll put together a study showing that Republicans are all serial killers by excluding large populations for which “Republicanism is less directly associated with serial-killerdom”.
Napoleon
@Big Baby DougJ:
Interesting.
What do you think the chances are if you factor in non-white poor, primarily black and Hispanic that the effect disappears, or even is reversed?
Jennifer
Well, I’ve learned something today, which is that all those hotel maids and bank tellers and grocery clerks would make a lot more money if only they’d gotten masters degrees.
Who do these shits think would do the work, you know, the actual fucking WORK, that makes the world function if everyone somehow found a way to follow their breezy prescriptions for prosperity? So we all come up with the scratch to go to college. Hey, I’m sure that will pay off great for the college grads who end up collecting garbage.
These ripe fucks seem to believe in a fairytale land where everyone is a doctor or lawyer or engineer or, preferably, a banker or stockbroker, conveniently ignoring the fact that only a certain number of people are needed to fill those jobs. But acknowledging such undercuts the argument that the people who do the real work to make the world function should be paid shit wages to punish them for their lack of “foresight” to educate themselves for jobs in the non-existent economy in which everyone is a doctro, lawyer, engineer, banker or stockbroker.
I’ll tell you, I never have been able to understand why the Democrats won’t make and stick to a theme about how the GOP denigrates real work and the people who do it. Because it’s a feature of their every utterance and policy proposal, and it’s both arrogant and dismissive of the vast majority of people in this country. And yet they continue with it daily while it passes unremarked and the very people they denigrate and dismiss continue to vote for the fuckers.
Bulworth
Huh?
Here we go again with the welfare spending myths.
Kilkee
The depravity of the commentors at The Corner is breathtaking. They believe it all and then some.
Comrade Dread
Well, come on, it was obvious. Jesus did spend a lot of time talking about how it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the poor to enter heaven.
And that story about the layabout beggar Lazarus and the
Entrepreneur where Lazarus ends up in a welfare state where he’s given everything where the righteous rich man is reduced to begging for water, clearly tells of the dangers of a communist soshalist revolution and the overthrow and ill treatment of the bourgeois by a black president (to be born 2,000 years in the future.)
Jesus was truly a Republican and agreed with Ayn Rand.
Napoleon
@ppcli:
Better yet limit yourself to people who worked on Republican campaigns in the 68-78 period and lived/traveled/ worked in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Florida.
ppcli
@MikeJ: Ah, Ezekiel 16:49-50. One of my favorites. Strange how rarely right-wingers mention it, given how much they love talking about Sodom’s failings.
Also strange how that good, Bible-centred Regent University education that French was treated to didn’t expose him to this tidbit of God’s word.
harlana
@Big Baby DougJ: Yeh, as an unmarried person, I find that profoundly offensive. I can see the economic angle to the benefits of being married, but the implication is that it is morally wrong to be single.
And really, how are middle-class married people with children faring these days with layoffs and the economy being what it is now? Because these people want you to have lots and lots of babies. Ironically, too many children can put you in the poorhouse. Ain’t that something? Who knew.
God, these people are dumb as dirt.
ppcli
@Napoleon: Yep. Looks like a heterogeneous population to me….
OMIGOD! 100% of them are serial-killers.
reflectionephemeral
Thanks for linking our blog, Doug.
Among the many things that drives me up the wall about this evil French person is how baseless– devoid of any data whatsoever– his writing is. Do we have better or worse social mobility than other wealthy countries? Better or worse inequality than we did a generation ago? Do we care why?
Doesn’t matter– he has his fairy tale, and he’s sticking to it.
I learned about Social Darwininsm in history classes– can’t believe it’s now the official doctrine of one of our two major political parties.
jibeaux
If there’s one message Jesus really, really wanted to get across, of course, it’s that poverty is a result of the depravity of the poor.
ppcli
@Dollared: Y’know Dollared, I like the cut of your jib. Let’s form a club to pursue your passion.
harlana
btw, if i didn’t know better, i would say that was an Onion piece there, no lie, it’s just that awful
retr2327
“If an American works hard, completes their education, . . .
On the other hand, if HE fails to understand basic grammar, THEY will end up writing for National Review.
Ed Drone
We’re the idlers, we’re the skivers; we’re the undeserving poor —
See how prettily we curtsy and we bow?
See us stand with cap in hand again outside the rich man’s door,
For the new Victorian age is dawning now.
And we mind our manners as before, we watch our Q’s and P’s,
We’re grateful for the handouts and we always try to please,
And we will not raise our heads when they prefer us on our knees —
For we’re only idle, undeserving poor.
(c) Keith Marsten
Ed
piratedan
yeah I’m surprised that the poor haven’t been more forgiving of our religious brethren. After all, where’s the faith gone after watching the Catholic Church cover its ass over the issue of pedophile priests preying on their children? Then observing all of those morally superior legislators that they elected being brought down by their own internal demons. Shouldn’t their faith been able to sustain them while they were being walked out the doors of their companies and informed that their services were no longer needed? How many times did Jeebus personally extend their unemployment benefits? This is how you repay him? By turning your back on your faith after all that its done for you? Scandalous indeed…..why I was just saying to the Reverend while we were on the golf course @ the club that its a shame that this generation was so out of touch….
Linda
Coming out on the heels of a new report that says, unlike the olden times, the majority of people on food stamps live in working households, the irony alarm is wailing off the scale. Also, could the NRO explain why, according to the Pew Report some of the poorest Americans are evangelical Christians? I doubt it. Clearly, the depraved Christians would do a whole lot better if they became unaffiliated, or at least converted to Hinduism.
dj spellchecka
among whites [and only whites] frequency of church attendance is the number one way to determine which party gets a person’s vote. 80% of regular attendees vote gop, 80% of those who never attend vote democratic…
Brock
Setting aside Walter Russell Mead’s asinine drivel, it’s an interesting question why church attendance has dropped off more among low-education whites than high-education whites.
I hypothesize that since the rise of the “mega-church”, churches have increasingly become tax-exempt country clubs. (There’s one in Memphis known to locals as “Six Flags Over Jesus”.) You pay your dues via your tax-deductible tithe, and get access to nice recreational facilities which exclude undesirables. Poor people can’t afford to go to these churches, and smaller congregations are suffering from declining attendance and revenue as the rich migrate to the mega-churches.
The mega-church phenomenon is mainly found among white, non-hispanic, evangelicals … right? (Though I can think of one local, mostly black, mega-church.)
Comrade Dread
Look, wingnuts, if a poor man wants to be virtuous, rather than steal that loaf of bread or take a check from a government that steals the wealth of producers, that poor man should go to business school, get an MBA, and work hard to invent a scheme to lie and market millions of loans to unqualified borrowers bundle that crap into securities, spin it to gold through ratings agencies, and sell it via fraud to investors who trusted them and crashing the economy, while he makes millions off of the deal and retires accountability free to his own private compound.
It’s what the Founders had in mind when they wrote a little thing called the Constitution.
Violet
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
But they better be married, stay married, have ‘completed their education’ and be regular churchgoers. Otherwise they’re depraved.
harlana
@Jennifer:
I’ve been wondering the same thing for some time now, it’s baffling
schrodinger's cat
It is telling that this French person quotes a study that specifically focuses on white people and then generalizes it to all Americans. Its as though in his mind White and Christian=American.
Shorter French:
I iz in Ur NRO being a bigot.
Tonybrown74
@Big Baby DougJ:
Weird? No …
Disingenuous, hacktastic, classist, bigoted bullshit?
Most Ddefinitely.
quannlace
Not yet. but they’re trying their best to drag the rest of the country back to some ‘golden age.’ You know the good old days of child labor, back street abortions and when minorities knew their place.
themann1086
I’m pretty sure that education correlates with godlessness; I’m not clicking over, but my guess is that the “poor and uneducated” (and white, apparently) saw the biggest drops because they had more to lose. Idle speculation without data, of course, but it would be a standard right-wing lying with statistics tactic.
Steeplejack
Apropos of this, there is a great article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine called “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?” Researchers have found that our ability to make good decisions and use good judgment–our willpower–erodes with (over)use and leads to “decision fatigue.”
This leads to what David French felicitously calls “the depravity of the poor.”
(Emphasis added)
Montysano
@Brock:
As someone who regularly deals with mega-churches, I can confirm your suspicions. I’m amazed at the opulence of these buildings; they are, in the parlance of the construction biz, “gold plated”. Many of these churches now market themselves as places where people can hear a message of “comfort”, where they can be “uplifted”, which is simply code for “We’ll tell you that it’s OK to ignore the core message of Christ.”
I’m convinced that Jesus would be horrified at the stuff they buy from us, but it does not, however, stop us from cashing the checks.
Amanda in the South Bay
Ah Walter Russell Mead- my favorite professor with a BA.
ericblair
@Brock:
This also skews charity donation statistics, considering a fair number of tax-deductible charitable donations are used for multi-thousand dollar upgrades to the A/V system in the sanctuary and not, like, feeding the poor or researching diseases.
sjw
@Jennifer:
“I never have been able to understand why the Democrats won’t make and stick to a theme about how the GOP denigrates real work and the people who do it.”
Josie
OMG, I hardly know where to begin. I just read this and haven’t read all the comments yet. This quote is so full of shit as to closely resemble a privy. I worked hard, finished school, married and stayed that way 30 years until widowed, finished putting my kids through school and am now poor. I guess my big mistake was letting my husband die. Gosh, how could I have been so lazy.
flukebucket
Jesus said, “The depraved you will always have with you”
Shinobi
Sometimes I wish I believed in God so I could believe that morons like this will someday suffer for their stupidity.
Villago Delenda Est
There is only one way to deal with assholes like this.
The tumbrel.
GregB
Paris Hilton, Rush Limbaugh and Ted Nugent were recently discussing how depraved and decadent these worthless poor Americans are becoming.
It’s shocking.
gnomedad
@Jennifer:
Good thing you left out “scientists”. Suck up to money; mock knowledge and expertise, that’s the ticket.
Matt
Apparently the 1% at the top have forgotten the lesson that goes all the way back to the First Secession of the Plebians; the alternative to “provide relief to the poor” isn’t “let them starve”, it’s “watch them loot and torch your house”.
There’s definitely “depravity” involved here, but I think they’ve mis-identified the location…
R. Porrofatto
It should surprise no one that David French is an ardent, orthodox Christian. I was raised Roman Catholic, which may not be orthodox enough for him, but as I recall Jesus didn’t once blame the poor for being poor. In fact, I seem to remember he had a lot of negative things to say about rich people.
Judas Escargot
@flukebucket:
“Blessed are the
poordepraved in spirit. For the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.”They can have it, frankly.
MomSense
Wait a minute. I thought we didn’t have any poor people because everybody has a refrigerator and a microwave.
Nemesis
I am now convinced. The poor are godless and the ever-declining middle class are lazy.
Hence, we are to be punished severely until the tax situation for the wealthy improves.
hackenbush
Wow. Ever since William F Buckley died, these guys have been speaking directly out of their asses. (I’d think they had been doing so beforehand as well … )
I’m surrounded by hard-working, honest people, who have done nothing more than play by society’s rules — and are somehow still poor. I’m thinking that this guy is being paid far too much for writing something with easily debunkable remnants of 18th century class warfare.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Brock:
If only somebody truly devout would come along and throw the money changers out of the MegaTemple. Of course it would probably be some smelly, long-haired, sandal-wearing weirdo who would be hunted down and taken into custody by security and nailed up as a warning to others.
Ruckus
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I was thinking shit stain
Xoebe
Holy fuck. The Right continues not only to confuse causation with correlation, they get it backwards when they try.
Seeing poverty as a moral failure is a central element of conservatism. Rather than try to eliminate the causes of poverty, oppressing the poor is morally correct, because the poor deserve it. The consequence of policies based on this world view is an increase in the number of poor people. Therefore, more oppression is required.
It’s the same line of thinking that has happened to the Republican and Tea Parties in the last few years. Every electoral loss means to them that their candidates weren’t conservative *enough*.
Ruckus
@SensesFail:
“It’s simply a fact” sounds very much like “This is no shit” and “Watch this y’all”
Heliopause
Not that this would ever penetrate the cranium of Mead, but let’s discuss some basic info.
The poor profess religion more than do the middle class or the rich. The poor are also less likely to attend church. Why this is so is an interesting sociological question, but some possible explanations readily come to mind.
The poor are less likely to profess atheism than other classes. The richer and more educated you are the less likely you are to profess a religion.
Obviously, Mead reached his conclusion and then worked backwards from there. The information that the poor profess religion more than do other classes is readily available but didn’t suit his thesis, therefore was ignored. Instead he falls back on church attendance = religiosity.
MomSense
@thatleftturninABQ
No, that smelly, devout, sandal-wearing guy would never make it to the MegaTemple because he would be stuck in a Maricopa County Jail.
...now I try to be amused
Charles Dickens is facepalming in his grave.
huckster
@R. Porrofatto:
and they killed him for it
dedc79
@Heliopause: I only got through 7 things that were wrong with French’s post, but I think your point that church attendance and religiosity are very different things is another good one.
The Spy Who Loved Me
When K-Lo mentioned marriage, I think she might have been putting it into the context of child rearing. At least I hope she was. Numerous studies have shown that having a child while unmarried, particularly if you are young, or unemployed, or have not yet completed your education, can have a huge impact on your future and your earning potential. It has also been shown, repeatedly, in various studies, that divorced women with children suffer more financially than do their ex-husbands.
Paul in KY
@Hunter Gathers: That might be hyperbole there. If she looked like a ‘supermodel’ I’m sure there’s somebody who would tap that.
demz taters
@MomSense: Or removed from his flight because he made the other passengers feel uneasy.
Thoughtcrime
Dépravés pauvres? Sounds tasty.
Jonathan Swift would modestly approve.
Dennis SGMM
What of those people did get an education, did get married, worked hard all of their lives and nonetheless find themselves poor because they lost their jobs two or three years ago and haven’t found employment since? Are they lacking in virtue?
One more thing; why do people who hold the same ideas as French also want to deprive same sex couples of the virtues of marriage?
Ben Cisco
@bill:
Clearly, the poor are the new “near.” And if they happen to be the old “near” too – twofer!
Senyordave
Lots of interesting, witty comments here but let’s cut to the chase.
David French is one evil motherfucker.
Thoughtcrime
The USA will soon become a nation with the majority living in poverty.
The Republican solution to this problem will be disenfranchisement based on wealth.
ericblair
@Dennis SGMM:
They must, because Conservatism Can’t Fail It Can Only Be Failed. The poor person may have done all of these things, but he is still poor, so there must be a serious lack of virtue somewhere where you can’t see it. Maybe he bought a steak at the grocery store once, when he should have just bought enough thin gruel to get himself through the workweek so he can work himself to death before he becomes a burden to his betters. You never know, these people are sneaky that way.
Bago
@Steeplejack: See also, heuristic, bias.
Mary Jane
@Shinobi:
Yes. If there really was a just and merciful god, I’d love to see the hypocrites’ faces when they realize they’re the Left Behind.
Pangloss
In the next version of the Bible, Free Market Jesus will not only throw the first stone, he’ll corner the throwable stone market by creating a cartel to control prices and distribution, thus obliterating the competition.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Needs moar drawings of drunken Irish immigrants.
Man. It isn’t enough that they have African-Americans, gays & lesbians, immigrants, women and Muslims to crap all over. The poor must receive their share of the shit shower.
@Comrade Dread: Heh. I was scrolling down to say that even though I am an Islahomoliberul, I have actually READ the Bible and no where does Jesus say “Screw the poor, they deserve to rot here and in Hell,” or “Blessed are the meek, provided they’re married, for they shall inherit the Earth.”
fuckwit
I think next this guy will come up with a modest proposal to solve the problem. It logically follows. Here it is:
Take all the poor people, round them up, and just shoot us.
No, wait wait wait. That won’t work. Who’s going to pay for the bullets? Bullets are expensive. That’d have to come out of the hard-working taxpayers pocket! We need a simpler solution.
Hmm. Let’s see. Poison maybe? No, how will you get the poor to drink the poison? You’d have to shoot some of them, and there we go back to wasting bullets.
Wait, wait, I got it. We can gas them! Round up the poor, and gas them!
No no, that won’t work. How will you get them into an enclosed space to gas them.
Ah, I got it. You can tell the poor that it’s a SHOWER. We poor people are filthy, we can all use a shower. So build a shower, round us poor folks into it, and gas us. End of problem.
No, wait, that won’t work. Where will they bury all the bodies? That’s millions of bodies! We don’t have enough landfill for that. We don’t want to bury them at sea, it’d pollute the ocean and the rich like seafood.
Hm.
I got it! We have an energy crisis, burn baby burn! We can BURN the bodies in a power plant! And then sell the energy to the government, and make a profit! Yes.
So, round up the poor, gas us all, then burn our bodies so as to provide profits to the energy corporations.
There’s the solution– one might even say it’s a final solution– to the problem of the poor.
(Sorry, I just had to go full Godwin on this).
PurpleGirl
@ericblair: A few years ago there was a book which claimed that religious people gave more to charity. I argued with some colleagues that I thought the situation was that they gave to their own churches and not to general community charities. Giving for your pastor’s salary is not the same as giving to the community trust to feed people.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ben Cisco:
This is exactly what I can’t figure out about anyone < upper class that keeps voting Republican. Do they really think Republicans are talking about blacks or Hispanics when they are talking about "the others"? The language is vague precisely because the wealthy are talking about anyone not part of their club by birth.
Arclite
Because church and religion = virtue? BULLSHIT.
Let’s see:
– Spanish Inquisition
– The Crusades, and the wars to spread islam in general
– Uganda’s Kill the Gays legislation, and persecution of homosexuals by major religions throughout history
– Thirty Years War
– Destruction of native cultures through proselytizing
– The Final Solution, and persecution of Jews in general by other religions
– The Taiping rebellion
– Israeli-Arab conflicts
– Religious persecution and forced conversions generally
I realize that religions have done some good, such as widespread Christian opposition to slavery, and charitable works done world wide by various religions. But there are a lot of non religious people and groups who do these things too. And studies show that secular nations have lower crime rates than religious ones:
sherparick
Mr. French illustrates the truth in G.B. Shaw’s quote:
“Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.”
Since Mr. French may be a Christianist, but does not appear to be a Christian.
I always find it interesting that these so-called “literalists” in their belief in the Bible become so forgetful about the Bible’s very direct teaching on the duty to the poor and the wickedness of the wealthy and self-righteous. For instance, in Matthew, Chapter 6, verse 2, the Lord refers to them as “whitened sepulchres (tombs), filled with corruption on the inside. There are many others, of course in the New Testament, but also in hte Psalms, Wisdom, Isaiah, Daniel, etc.
Ah, National Review, dedicated to comforting the comfortable and affliciting the afflicted.
dedc79
Anyone else find it interesting that we’ve got a bunch of rightwing creationists who also seem to believe in social darwinism? I mean they basically would like the poor in this country to be left for dead and they’re not even pretending otherwise. Isn’t that what Rubio’s speech was about?
catclub
@ericblair: Donations to Harvard (investment fund with a university attached) are also considered ‘charitable’.
Linda Featheringill
Dear Walter Russell Mead:
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Linda.
And Rubio too. And Cantor. And . . . .
Judas Escargot
@fuckwit:
Ten liters of human body fat can produce almost 7 liters of biodiesel.
Don’t give them any ideas…
demz taters
@Thoughtcrime:
To be fair, if you de-romanticize history, this isn’t too far from what the founders envisioned. The document they wrote was much better than they were.
psycholinguist
I really wanted to throw up when I read this. You know, this piece of shit lives in Tennessee, where I live. If you drive up in these mountains, you will find thousands and thousands of people who are probably living on 5-6K a year, without clean water, no health care, often no electricity, and a unyielding faith in Jesus Christ almighty. I would really like to hear his inspiring story of how he moved from 3rd base to home pulling on his own bootstraps. I swear to god, I see this fucker in my neck of the woods, I will kick his ass up one side and down the fucking other.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@psycholinguist: I’m not in Tenn. so I can’t help. But I’d willingly provide an alibi.
Isn’t it odd that the same people who keep clutching their brow over
raceclass warfare seem bent on provoking it and are highly unlikely to survive such a conflict?It’s almost like they’re stupid, or suicidal, or both.
cleek
@Pangloss:
double-plus win.
Vicki
The study is more insidious than you think. They only studied white people. Because there is no difference in church attendance among minorities based on income. Yet the results will be used by conservatives to castigate the poor and in their minds the poor are minorities.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@Pangloss: The conservopedia is working on that. I’ve been skimming but here’s one apologia for the rich:
KJV – And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
CB – And I say again to you, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for an idle miser to enter into the kingdom of God.”
les
Fucking cause and effect, how does it work?
PIGL
There’s a lovely word for this kind of person, for their kind of thinking, and for the political transactions they seek:
wickedness
Would that
I believed inthere were a just God. It would almost be worth cutting a deal with hell myself so I could be on all they-all’s reception committee. That’d be me hovering just next to Beelzebub (stage left) in the shape of a giant hornet of a specially cruel and vengeful disposition.PIGL
@hackenbush: here’s a seldom remembered verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”
The master in his parlour,
the beggar at his gate;
God separated high from low,
and ordered their estate.
Or something like that.
ThatPirateGuy
Apparently this guy seems to think that Jesus will refill your gas tank for all fuel used to drive to and from church.
Tehanu
I’d be laughing if I weren’t crying over this. “Virtue” in his terms primarily means self-control: the ability to postpone gratification in pursuit of a long-term goal, i.e. getting out of poverty. But our system of “free” enterprise and our consumer economy are almost entirely based on advertising — the constant pressure not to postpone gratification, but to buy buy buy, right now, so you can get the gorgeous supermodel along with your can of beer and your snazzy new car and your delicious pizza! Yeah, let’s remove all restraints on our Galtian overlords’ ability to gild crap and sell it as gold — that’ll bring about the reign of virtue, all right!
gelfling545
@Shinobi: I have felt the same. It is entertaining in a mean sort of way to picture a last judgement with these people trying to explain themselves.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
This does partially explain their burning hatred of equal marriage rights*. Because through history gays have been doomed to lives of abject poverty by the fact they can’t get hitched. IT’S TRUE.
*Plus they’re scabarous dogs’ pizzles.
Hob
Charles Dickens, The Chimes, 1844:
‘You are going to be married, you say,’ pursued the Alderman. ‘Very unbecoming and indelicate in one of your sex! But never mind that. After you are married, you’ll quarrel with your husband and come to be a distressed wife. You may think not; but you will, because I tell you so. Now, I give you fair warning, that I have made up my mind to Put distressed wives Down. So, don’t be brought before me. You’ll have children – boys. Those boys will grow up bad, of course, and run wild in the streets, without shoes and stockings. Mind, my young friend! I’ll convict ’em summarily, every one, for I am determined to Put boys without shoes and stockings, Down. Perhaps your husband will die young (most likely) and leave you with a baby. Then you’ll be turned out of doors, and wander up and down the streets. Now, don’t wander near me, my dear, for I am resolved, to Put all wandering mothers Down. All young mothers, of all sorts and kinds, it’s my determination to Put Down. Don’t think to plead illness as an excuse with me; or babies as an excuse with me; for all sick persons and young children (I hope you know the church-service, but I’m afraid not) I am determined to Put Down. And if you attempt, desperately, and ungratefully, and impiously, and fraudulently attempt, to drown yourself, or hang yourself, I’ll have no pity for you, for I have made up my mind to Put all suicide Down! If there is one thing,’ said the Alderman, with his self-satisfied smile, ‘on which I can be said to have made up my mind more than on another, it is to Put suicide Down. So don’t try it on. That’s the phrase, isn’t it? Ha, ha! now we understand each other.’
risskia
@lacp:
This comment wins the intertubes.
The Populist
Kind of fucking hard to attend church when you need to work 2-3 fucking jobs to get by. Fuck these tards.
God I am so angry.
The Populist
Free Enterprise? Want more Free Enterprise right wing? Maybe then we should go back to regulated business and anti-trust laws. How can anybody start a fucking business when Wal Mart and Target can put you out of business in less time than you can say Free.
They are subsidized to the hilt. There are other types of businesses but they require capital. Who is going to loan this money out without gouging for the highest rate allowed?
Fuck this.
The Republic of Stupidity
And yet amazingly enough, some poor folks continue to vote Republican…
What was that set of numbers I was hearing all last week, something about the richest 400 controlling more wealth than the bottom 150 MILLION (of us…)
If only… if ONLY that 150 MILLION could ever get organized…
mclaren
This would seem to suggest that the ideal solution to our economic problems is to castrate all poor people. Or, if female, perform genital mutilation on ’em.
I’m surprised this hasn’t been suggested by a Republican candidate for president.
…Perhaps they’re saving it for the convention speech?
Glocksman
@Culture of Truth:
The sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial was Daniel French.
He was also a distant relation of mine on my Mother’s side, so I’d advise you to shut the fuck up.
Unless you’re being sarcastic, of course. :)
ed drone
@Judas Escargot:
Is that a version of “going [soylent] green?”
Ed
Fang
Full-circle addition: Confucius advocated helping the poor and those affected by disasters, and without a deity to back him up.