Its free at the endpoint for user. That's what the "free" means here. No one is pretending that resources for things like roads, police, firefighting, primary schooling and others come out of nothingness and don´t have any cost.
Exactly. What else are you going to call it, but free? That's literally the word for it.
Everybody understands that anything which is free is ultimately paid for by someone. And everybody understands that things provided for by the government come from taxes.
We don't need new words for basic concepts everyone already understands.
I hope you were right, but I strongly suspect you are mistaken.
Most people fail to understand:
- Social welfare programs come at the expense of reducing everyone’s income.
- The extent of the social welfare overspending is significant; we have long surpassed the point of helping those in dire need and are now funding numerous programs that, if fully understood in its long-term cost, would likely not be supported.
- The top 5% of income earners contribute 90% of the welfare programs and are not “the greedy rich.”
- The actual greedy rich do not have income and fund political campaigns, which is why politicians often conflate high-earners with the rich (to obscure the influence of interest groups)
What would be a more accurate term than “free”? Subsidized. It may not be as catchy, but it provides a more precise description.
What's your source for saying that most people fail to understand that social welfare programs come from taxes? The concept of where government money comes from is such an obvious fact, I don't understand how you can claim most people don't understand it. People go to work for a paycheck, they pay taxes, and they understand money doesn't grow on trees. This is adulting 101.
And no, "subsidized" means a portion of something is covered by someone else, but not necessarily all of it. E.g. a subsidized cafeteria at work may mean all the food is 50% of cost. Subsidized can mean fully subsidized, but that's a special case.
So subsidized is not more precise, it's actually much less precise. "Free" continues to be the accurate and correct term.
You're taking a right-wing political stance against current levels of social spending, which is your prerogative, but there's no need to change perfectly fine language to do so. Even if we called it the mouthful of "fully subsidized childchare", that's not going to make it any less popular.
What could possibly be my source for such a claim? Who is funding studies on this topic?
My source is my upbringing in Europe and my subsequent long-term residence in two other countries, which provided me with a unique perspective on people’s feelings and beliefs.
My source is my diverse life experiences, during which I actively engaged with people from all walks of life as much as I could. I am not making any claims about science or indulging in conspiracies. For such claims, I would require concrete evidence.
What I am saying is that a majority of the Europeans, particularly the youth, has become disconnected from the fundamental principle that to distribute wealth, you must generate it first.
You're seriously saying that the majority of Europeans don't understand that social services come from the taxes they pay?
That honestly sounds as plausible to me as saying the majority of Europeans thinkg 2+2=5.
Forgive me if I have a hard time believing you. Because I can definitely tell you Americans understand where their government spending comes from, and I have a hard time believing that Europeans are somehow less educated on this.
To be clear, I don’t believe it’s an “education” issue. I think it’s a “for too long removed from politics” problem.
For most Europeans, a tax is an unclear bill at the end of the month, leaving them feeling powerless to do anything about it.
One thing I learned from living in America is that people here are much more engaged in civic life and politics. The UK (which I also lived in) is perhaps the exception to this European rule.
You don't need to be involved in politics to understand that government spending comes from taxes.
I'm American but have spent a lot of time in Europe -- France, Spain, and Germany mostly. I have seen nothing to indicate that Europeans are ignorant of where government spending comes from. They seem just as smart as anyone else.
And national elections in Europe also seem like large news events, even if the campaign season is (thankfully) a whole lot shorter.
Fussing with language to make rightwing political points (i.e. lying) is the bread and butter of rightwing ideology. You don't say "I don't think governments should spend any money on social services or helping their citizens", because that makes you sound like a terrible person. So you look down your nose and say "Well, it's not really FREE, akshually! I am very smart." And then you prance around tooting your dog whistle.
Its not. For the US, energy use per capita has been trending downwards since 1979. For the developing worlds, increase in energy usage is tied to increasing living standards.
> For the US, energy use per capita has been trending downwards since 1979
It would be relevant if the US was completely isolated from the rest of the world. But guess what? The hardware you used to write this comment does not come from the US.
Not taking into account the energy that went into building and transporting your hardware where you are currently using is... well wrong.
> When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
> I'll never understand why China spent so much time and money finding the perfect remote karst for radio astronomy and then built a radio-loud amusement park around it.
Because it is a prestige project for Chinese government. Any science coming out of that is secondary to that.
Kissinger is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands people. They had families. They were real people who died.
Death doesn´t absolve someone from committing crimes against humanity. To claim that people should only talk about the good things person did is a serious case of decorum poisoning.
Nobody celebrates serial killers.
The "tiny hands" joke isn´t funny because Donald Trump has tiny hands, no one cares about that or if it is true.
The part that makes the joke funny, is its origins. In the 80s journalist was writing a story about Donald and mentioned his small hands in it. But Donald Trump is so insecure that even 10 years later he kept sending cut off pictures of himself from magazines to the author, with his hands circled with a marker, to prove that his hands werent small. The fact that the marker was gold coloured was a cherry on top.
The sheer stupidity of this entire thing is what makes the (though overplayed) joke funny.
Well, that explains it. Seems like US has a lot of these inside jokes that don't make sense to someone who only sees snippets of the whole historical timeline.
Seeing the origin stories in this thread I'd actually argue that "let's go Brandon" is not really a cheap joke. (I guess, really, that it's at least not as cheap as "tiny hands".) The "tiny hands" joke exists for the sole purpose of making fun of a particular politician and the "let's go Brandon" joke at least speaks to a certain bias in presenting information. It seems a lot like a reporter "misheard" "Fuck Joe Biden" as "let's go Brandon" because the reporter didn't want to report that people were chanting "Fuck Joe Biden".
At a time when "rightists" commonly complain about media bias, this exact sort of bias happens. Then people use it as a dog-whistle for calling out media bias; it's not surprising. As with all polarizing issues, it's best for every individual to consider their own bias. I have found that I frequently don't give a person's opinion a fair shake because I've already concluded that I disagree. Generally, I only do that when I'm not interested in learning.
Anyway, they may both be cheap jokes but this seems a bit like a false equivalence or otherwise misunderstands the argument being made.
Actually the "Let's Go Brandon" phrase has an interesting origin of a reporter trying to say the crowd was cheering for a Nascar driver named Brandon while they were clearly chanting "Fuck Joe Biden". So it became a euphemism for the actual phrase they were cheering and a callback towards that event that shows the media's biased coverage.
So yes, I think that phrase is a bit deeper than saying someone has tiny hands? over and over for a decade.
Sure I know the back story of the Brandon joke, I just don't see how that's any different from the tiny hands back story. Both started out from one otherwise unimportant interaction that happened to become popular and taken out of context.
I don't disagree that the tiny hands joke is old at this point, but really what is the difference when they both have some origin story and become a political meme aimed at a particular politician?
You make a fair point. He’s actually a very reasonable person with a nuanced yet coherent policy platform, but those darn lefties just can’t get over his hands. As you said, they don’t have anything else; there is absolutely no other criticism that these folks have for Trump.
You don’t want me to find it funny that you worship a guy sooo insecure about himself that he can’t get over a throw away comment made about his hands decades ago (the full quote was small fingered vulgarian and it was made nearly 40 years ago)? It’s either find it funny or sad - has nothing to do with political beliefs.
Support Trump or claim to want to elevate the level of political discourse and complain about repeated "petty" insults, I don't particularly care, but geez pick a lane dude.
To be fair, after the explanation, I see it as a reference to Trump's narcissism and insecurity, which could be understood as more than just a petty joke.
I think that if you're a public figure, people making fun of your physical traits is inevitable. There's a whole industry based on throwing cheap shots at celebrities, the yellow press. Ignoring them is the only rational response, because they feed off controversy - they're the journalist version of internet trolls.
The fact that a public figure would put so much effort into proving that they don't have small hands shows a comically non-proportional response to something they perceive as harmful to their public image. Such sensitivity could most plausibly be explained as a narcissistic injury - and considering Trump's general behavior (always talking how he's the best, the smartest, the most loved, etc.), it fits with the rest of the data.
Again, note that I'm European and my only interest in US politics is strictly one of entertainment. I actually like Trump, for reasons I won't explain here, as it's beyond the point. But I still think he's a narcissist.
I believe the "joke" is used far more than the few times he's addressed it. If anything, it's the people constantly saying it who are obsessed with Trump, not the other way around.
The media will stir up controversy anyway, you may as well reply and get your side in, otherwise they are dictating the conversation and truth.
And we're all narcissists... that's nature. It's such a pointless and empty statement.
> And we're all narcissists... that's nature. It's such a pointless and empty statement.
I strongly disagree. Narcissistic personality disorder is very much real - I have diagnosed family members, and the way their mind works is completely different from one of a "normal" person. I can't quite explain it, but if you experienced it, I believe you'd know the difference.
You believing that makes me think that you either haven't had to deal with a real narcissist in your life, or are a narcissist yourself. The former is more likely, but I don't know you, so I can't speak with certainty.
> There may be people with a bad case of it, I assume it's on a spectrum like many personality traits, but the term is heavily overused.
> I see it mainly used when someone doesn't agree with the other person's line of reasoning.
I agree, but that's not what you said. What you said was "And we're all narcissists... that's nature. It's such a pointless and empty statement", declaring that narcissism, as a category, doesn't exist.
> Just right now, my denial of it nearly had you diagnosing me with it.
I did not "diagnose" you with it because you disagree with me. The reason I said it's a possibility is because you said that narcissism doesn't exist and that everybody's a narcissist. Depressed people think everyone is depressed, paranoid people think their paranoia is just normal skepticism. Our human mind projects a lot of our own qualities onto others. From your denial of existence of narcissism, I could only conclude that you either don't have a precise representation of narcissism in your mind, or that you do have a precise representation of narcissism but project it onto others as a self-defense mechanism. If my assessment is not true, please tell me what could the third reason be - why else would someone deny existence of narcissism?
But, we see now that you don't think that narcissism isn't real, only that Trump is just a little bit narcissistic, so this whole comment is pointless.
Rarely anything about human condition is binary. Narcissism, like all other mental illnesses, is a spectrum, indeed.
> At what point do you think people "cross over" to meet a threshold of being a "narcissist"?
I am not a psychiatrist so this is just my opinion, but as a rough approximation, a person is a "narcissist" if their insistence on having superior status to others starts impacting both them and people around them - a person who constantly has to state how superior they are to others, as if they're trying to remind others of how good they are and not letting them keep it out of their mind, is who I would suspect to be a narcissist. Also a person who can't handle any criticism without immediately pointing out how good they are despite the criticism, or getting angry and putting down the person who gave them that criticism. I could come up with more examples, but I hope you see the pattern.
The main marker of narcissism is the inability to not be praised. It actually stems from deep insecurity - deep down, narcissists actually believe that they're inferior in some fundamental way, so the narcissism is actually a self-defense mechanism that helps them not be miserable. It's basically a compulsion, and compulsion cause irrational behavior. That's why the small hands incident made me think of that.
There isn't a threshold, because as you said, it's a spectrum, and defining a threshold would make it binary. But Trump, from my perspective, is deep in the narcissistic territory, far above any regular people I know in my life. As a performer, it helps him a lot - narcissists are usually very charismatic and sure of themselves, making them excellent performers. But that doesn't make him less of a narcissist.
