tik 🪀✨
ComradeCarter
Junior Chimp
Posts: 5,496
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« on: September 21, 2013, 08:27:58 AM » |
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« edited: September 21, 2013, 08:29:49 AM by Tik Only Posts While Inebriated »
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It's not necessarily a result of "stupid choices" to be a poor, dead0man. Perfectly intelligent people have chosen that sort of life for many reasons. Not most, but some. It's not easier to be poor. You become a master accountant and an expert in the system. Your social skills may become exceptional to stay afloat through relatives and friends and strangers. It's a different and more dynamic sort of job, being poor. Your comment, there, displays its own biases: all or most poor people have had plenty of opportunity and just chronically made stupid choices. It's surprisingly ignorant of the situations many people have grown up in, the mindset with which they become accustomed, the realities of their area, their limited scope to find said opportunities.
Poverty tends to beget poverty. The exceptions to this rule are all you would ever hear about. After all, that's the American dream. It's very easy for us to say someone growing up somewhere like where I grew up has plenty of opportunities if he or she just does A, B, or C, but it's ignoring that the reality of making those changes because of personal commitments is overwhelming or unthinkable. Say to the little poor brat who is getting a substandard education and whose parents cannot find reliable income that if only he flees the only place he knows and feels secure that he can have material success, and he'll still stay planted. It's human nature. Is this person making a "stupid choice" by choosing "limited opportunities?"
And, to answer the question posited, do I think the kind of bias I just described is morally equivalent to racism - of course not, for what others said. You can't hide your race, typically, throughout your entire life. Can you hide past poverty? Sure. Will people judge you on the fact that you used to be poor? Yeah, sure, but the "used to be" qualifier sets it apart easily.
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