Pat Buchanan is the fucking man.

[Iccy (temp)]

Simply, i agree. I dont agree its the liberals fault, but what can you expect from pat.

I do agree that the welfare was hit right on the head. I didnt realize it till right now, but they DO have free medical, food, housing. I knew people abused it, but the result of its abuse never really hit me till right now.

Im all for helping people. Job training, limited fincaial and food help, but there has to be a balance to where people cant rely on the government to give them everything they need. It breeds lazy, stupid and helpless people. THe best character building moments have been the most painful and hard to over come and now cause of those im self sufficent to a degree i couldnt ever imagined myself.

To deprive people of those experiences is just plain unhealthy. As i believe we did see in part atleast, in NO

[mjrpes]

And NS:
It's clearly only the dark negro soul that is susceptible to riot fever.

LMFAO

[Nightshade]

One of the biggest problems we have in this country is the fact that MANY people think that the world owes them something.

The world in which our grandparents grew up is long fucking dead my friend.

edit: LOL @ negro soul

It's an issue of character, plain and simple. Are there things that will never be the same as they were in the '40s? Sure, and in a lot of ways we're better off for it. I contend that we need to reinstill a fucking work ethic in people and remove all this victimization bullshit.

[seremtan]

Full stop.

By Patrick J. Buchanan
© 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.

RANT

what a load of incoherent shit. so the decision to appoint an idiot as FEMA head and then slash levee maintenance budget by 44% undermines the ability of the govt to do its job, and an idiot like buchanan comes along and claims govt is fundamentally flawed. it's like cutting someone's legs off then blaming them because they can't walk.

there's this habit some western govts have gotten into, of undermining public institutions so they don't work properly, and then blaming the institutions when disaster hits. this then becomes an argument for more budget (i.e. tax) cuts, which further undermine those institutions so they underperform even worse. a very obvious ploy that buchanan buys hook line & sinker.

his attempt to somehow blame 'liberalism' for a handful of looters is just laughable. you might just easily, and more persuasively, blame a me-me-me culture where everyone is encouraged to think only of No1 for the same thing

and does this idiot even realise that half the federal budget goes on the military, and that the US has the most pathetic welfare system in the western world? does he realise that countries with far more developed welfare programs (such as in scandinavia) don't have the problems america has?

NS i can't believe you're buying this crap

[R00k]

It's an issue of character, plain and simple. Are there things that will never be the same as they were in the '40s? Sure, and in a lot of ways we're better off for it. I contend that we need to reinstill a fucking work ethic in people and remove all this victimization bullshit.

If you want to talk about things that have changed our society for the worse since our grandparents' days, I can start a pretty good list.

But saying social safety nets are the root cause of society's ills in our age is like the flying spaghetti monster saying that the decreasing number of pirates is the cause of global warming.

Well maybe that's a little extreme, but you get my meaning.

You don't think Prozac and tv and massive commercialization and 'mom-and-pops' being run out of business and a deteriorating education system and marketing towards children and the militarization of our economy have any bearing on the way people turn out today?

How about the way every thing in our society is now measured in dollar benefit?

Seriously. Just because the welfare abuse culture has a big negative influence on our society, doesn't mean it should be the next casualty of people trying to paint our problems in black and white, attacking symptoms of our great "decaying moral fiber."

[mjrpes]

[tnf]

I can attest to the fact that we do live in a culture of entitlement...I see it in a large percentage of students these days..but at the same time we always need to be conscious about looking back at the 'good old days' through rose colored glasses...everyone likes to talk about the family values folks had back in the "Leave it to Beaver" days, but conveniently ignore the fact that the black folks had their own drinking fountains...

[losCHUNK]

[img]twat.jpg[/img]

Somehow unbeknownst to even god him/herself, I thought instantaniously of a cross between that guy, and Pat Sharp from Fun House when I saw the thread title. I've never been so scared in my life

fun house lol, it was like a mongo fun run

but yer, i always like the way the dude on art attack was like

"and you do a nice sweeping line and here you have a lovely floating cloud"

then when you do it you get a lovely sinking shit

[o'dium]

Fun House was only good for the go-karts.

[Nightshade]

his attempt to somehow blame 'liberalism' for a handful of looters is just laughable. you might just easily, and more persuasively, blame a me-me-me culture where everyone is encouraged to think only of No1 for the same thing

Look, I don't pretend to understand all of his rationale, but I do think that the pathetic welfare system in this country DOES encourage a "me-me-me" culture. I think that there are a lot of factors involved in the current state of the country, and that welfare is one of them. I see several of you making reference to welfare as a social safety net, but you're looking at the ideal, and not the reality. Welfare in this country sucks, it's not enough to get by on, it keeps people below the poverty line, and coupled with the cost of healthcare and childcare does absolutely nothing for most people. It's a fucking joke that sinply encourages people to do nothing and sit around feeling like the world owes them something.
This and misplaced feelings of victimization create(in part at least) the atmosphere that led to what happened in New Orleans.
People have made some very valid points in this thread about broken institutions and slashed budgets, rampant greed and the consumer culture. I'll concede that Buchanan's synopsis may be an oversimplification, but the bottom line is that poor people in this country have no incentive to get off their ass and go to work. That people make shitty choices in their lives and blame everyone else for them.
Pat may be simplifying things, but I think that he's hitting oneof the core issues that plague this country, abdication of personal responsibility.

[hate]

who cares

[Geebs]

his attempt to somehow blame 'liberalism' for a handful of looters is just laughable. you might just easily, and more persuasively, blame a me-me-me culture where everyone is encouraged to think only of No1 for the same thing

Look, I don't pretend to understand all of his rationale, but I do think that the pathetic welfare system in this country DOES encourage a "me-me-me" culture. I think that there are a lot of factors involved in the current state of the country, and that welfare is one of them. I see several of you making reference to welfare as a social safety net, but you're looking at the ideal, and not the reality. Welfare in this country sucks, it's not enough to get by on, it keeps people below the poverty line, and coupled with the cost of healthcare and childcare does absolutely nothing for most people. It's a fucking joke that sinply encourages people to do nothing and sit around feeling like the world owes them something.
This and misplaced feelings of victimization create(in part at least) the atmosphere that led to what happened in New Orleans.
People have made some very valid points in this thread about broken institutions and slashed budgets, rampant greed and the consumer culture. I'll concede that Buchanan's synopsis may be an oversimplification, but the bottom line is that poor people in this country have no incentive to get off their ass and go to work. That people make shitty choices in their lives and blame everyone else for them.
Pat may be simplifying things, but I think that he's hitting oneof the core issues that plague this country, abdication of personal responsibility.

It's ugly to see a guy who's never known want criticising other people for being poor.

[R00k]

Okay, not trying to sidestep here.

Abdication of personal responsibility very probably is the biggest problem with our society - I think I would agree with that.

But abdication of personal responsibility by people in charge is also what caused the welfare and other entitlement programs in this country to be what they have become in the first place. And those people in charge didn't abdicate personal responsibility because they lived on welfare; far from it.

I'm just saying that you can't blame entitlement programs for abdication of responsibility, and you can't blame lack of personal responsibility for what happened in New Orleans either.

You admitted that there were a lot of widely varied factors at play that are hurting our society. It's hard work to hunt down all those factors one at a time, and try to address the real causes of them objectively, but that's what has to be done. Fleeting epiphanies that seem to embody the truth simply because they feel right (or validate the way we feel) doesn't do any more real good than hacking off salamander tails.

I'm not trying to preach - at different times I've latched on to a few different "the thing that's wrong with our society"-isms. I can make a strong argument that urban sprawl, isolation and legislation from a thousand miles away to fix problems is the biggest problem facing our society. I can also make a pretty good argument that a pervasive, corporate mentality has destroyed most of the things that made this country great. But neither of those alone would really have done it. It's a hydra with a thousand heads, and not enough people in this country have the patience to talk or think about issues long and hard enough to make any headway. People act like they care, but they don't care enough to spend any of their own time on these things.

I personally think that, if we were a group of self-governing villages, then the villages could handle a lot of these things with the level of control and personal attention that they need. Which is why I support states' rights. But people's quest for power has slowly sapped decision-making power from lower levels, and it just keeps going higher and higher until we have a few hundred disconnected, uninformed people in Washington managing my kid's school. A typo in D.C. can cause nationwide suffering, but when it affects us locally, there is no door that you and I can get together and go beat on until the problem is fixed. And there is no way we can fix it ourselves without breaking the law.

I guess I'm rambing a little....

[Hannibal]

Look, I don't pretend to understand all of his rationale, but I do think that the pathetic welfare system in this country DOES encourage a "me-me-me" culture.

I think that there are a lot of factors involved in the current state of the country, and that welfare is one of them. .....It's a fucking joke that sinply encourages people to do nothing and sit around feeling like the world owes them something.

......but the bottom line is that poor people in this country have no incentive to get off their ass and go to work.

.....but I think that he's hitting oneof the core issues that plague this country, abdication of personal responsibility.

The vast majority of people who are poor (leaving out the elderly and children) work. It is simply a myth that there is this huge population of able bodied poor folk who sit around and drain the federal treasury with their laziness and lust for pork rinds. Believe it or not, most people in poverty don't tend to stay in poverty very long (the last stats I saw show that only 11% remained below the poverty line for 5 or more years). Most welfare programs are stop-gap measures that keep a shifting, mobile group of people from oblivion. There is no evidence (at least that I've seen) that these programs have created or act to sustain a permanent underclass of welching cunts who act as the nexus for our nation's moral decay.

I'd agree that we live in a me-me-me culture, but it doesn't follow that poor people are even remotely a driving force behind it.

[Nightshade]

his attempt to somehow blame 'liberalism' for a handful of looters is just laughable. you might just easily, and more persuasively, blame a me-me-me culture where everyone is encouraged to think only of No1 for the same thing

Look, I don't pretend to understand all of his rationale, but I do think that the pathetic welfare system in this country DOES encourage a "me-me-me" culture. I think that there are a lot of factors involved in the current state of the country, and that welfare is one of them. I see several of you making reference to welfare as a social safety net, but you're looking at the ideal, and not the reality. Welfare in this country sucks, it's not enough to get by on, it keeps people below the poverty line, and coupled with the cost of healthcare and childcare does absolutely nothing for most people. It's a fucking joke that sinply encourages people to do nothing and sit around feeling like the world owes them something.
This and misplaced feelings of victimization create(in part at least) the atmosphere that led to what happened in New Orleans.
People have made some very valid points in this thread about broken institutions and slashed budgets, rampant greed and the consumer culture. I'll concede that Buchanan's synopsis may be an oversimplification, but the bottom line is that poor people in this country have no incentive to get off their ass and go to work. That people make shitty choices in their lives and blame everyone else for them.
Pat may be simplifying things, but I think that he's hitting oneof the core issues that plague this country, abdication of personal responsibility.

It's ugly to see a guy who's never known want criticising other people for being poor.

I do hope you're not referring to me.

[Nightshade]

Look, I don't pretend to understand all of his rationale, but I do think that the pathetic welfare system in this country DOES encourage a "me-me-me" culture.

I think that there are a lot of factors involved in the current state of the country, and that welfare is one of them. .....It's a fucking joke that sinply encourages people to do nothing and sit around feeling like the world owes them something.

......but the bottom line is that poor people in this country have no incentive to get off their ass and go to work.

.....but I think that he's hitting oneof the core issues that plague this country, abdication of personal responsibility.

The vast majority of people who are poor (leaving out the elderly and children) work. It is simply a myth that there is this huge population of able bodied poor folk who sit around and drain the federal treasury with their laziness and lust for pork rinds. Believe it or not, most people in poverty don't tend to stay in poverty very long (the last stats I saw show that only 11% remained below the poverty line for 5 or more years). Most welfare programs are stop-gap measures that keep a shifting, mobile group of people from oblivion. There is no evidence (at least that I've seen) that these programs have created or act to sustain a permanent underclass of welching cunts who act as the nexus for our nation's moral decay.

I'd agree that we live in a me-me-me culture, but it doesn't follow that poor people are even remotely a driving force behind it.

Can you cite your sources, please? And I didn't say that poor people are the driving force behind the culture of entitlement, they're the result.

[seremtan]

But abdication of personal responsibility by people in charge is also what caused the welfare and other entitlement programs in this country to be what they have become in the first place. And those people in charge didn't abdicate personal responsibility because they lived on welfare; far from it.

good point. the worst abdicaters of personal responsibility are the rich and powerful, not the poor, who are usually too powerless to have much responsibility for anything.

[Hannibal]

Can you cite your sources, please? And I didn't say that poor people are the driving force behind the culture of entitlement, they're the result.

The general stuff I said I consider to be common knowledge, which was probably a mistake on my part (the mythology of the poor is much more a part of the public discourse). If I find some time tonight, I'll link your ass up.

The coupling of poor folks and moral decay by Buchanan was more the target of my last comment, not your comments specifically.

[Geebs]

Look, I don't pretend to understand all of his rationale, but I do think that the pathetic welfare system in this country DOES encourage a "me-me-me" culture. I think that there are a lot of factors involved in the current state of the country, and that welfare is one of them. I see several of you making reference to welfare as a social safety net, but you're looking at the ideal, and not the reality. Welfare in this country sucks, it's not enough to get by on, it keeps people below the poverty line, and coupled with the cost of healthcare and childcare does absolutely nothing for most people. It's a fucking joke that sinply encourages people to do nothing and sit around feeling like the world owes them something.
This and misplaced feelings of victimization create(in part at least) the atmosphere that led to what happened in New Orleans.
People have made some very valid points in this thread about broken institutions and slashed budgets, rampant greed and the consumer culture. I'll concede that Buchanan's synopsis may be an oversimplification, but the bottom line is that poor people in this country have no incentive to get off their ass and go to work. That people make shitty choices in their lives and blame everyone else for them.
Pat may be simplifying things, but I think that he's hitting oneof the core issues that plague this country, abdication of personal responsibility.

It's ugly to see a guy who's never known want criticising other people for being poor.

I do hope you're not referring to me.

No, I was referring to Buchanan. He is the topic of the thread, after all...

[Nightshade]

Can you cite your sources, please? And I didn't say that poor people are the driving force behind the culture of entitlement, they're the result.

The general stuff I said I consider to be common knowledge, which was probably a mistake on my part (the mythology of the poor is much more a part of the public discourse). If I find some time tonight, I'll link your ass up.

The coupling of poor folks and moral decay by Buchanan was more the target of my last comment, not your comments specifically.

I found some stats on long-term welfare recipients, and they seem to uphold your statement. I still feel that welfare is a terribly flawed system in its current implementation, as it really doesn't provide enough for anyone to make a dramatic change in their lives.
I'm really having a hard time articulating why I think that Buchanan's comments are valid, but I'm also finding myself asking a lot of questions about the issue in general.
If many people do get off of welfare after a relatively short period, why is the number of families in poverty increasing every year? Why did all those folks in N.O. loot and rape as they did? Why did the Superdome turn into a scene of complete barbarism in such a short time?

[[FTF]Pyro]

And the two slut twins that showed some ass on occasion.......

[R00k]

NS, I remember in the Katrina thread, in the first days of things, you said yourself (and I agreed) that this kind of rioting and craziness could happen in any city in the world, put in those kind of dire circumstances.

Have you changed your mind about that? If you have, what made you change it?

[Nightshade]

I really don't know at this point. I've yet to find similar examples involving different demographics.
This leads me to other questions: Is this a race issue? A class issue? Would this happen in an ethnically diverse, affluent community? If not, why not?

[R00k]

I'm not so PC that I can't admit the examples of riots in the past here - Rodney King and such - and that there is a racial trend there.

At the same time, I've known loads of white people who would thorougly enjoy a couple weeks worth of anarchy, and would probably spend the time getting their 'free shit'.

I even had a friend of mine who said the first thing he would have done if he was in NO, was get a weapon, food and shelter, then start robbing stores as much as he could. I was like What the Fuck man?

Sure, after the Indonesian tsunami you didn't see people looting. But there wasn't a population making 5 bucks a day living a block away from $5,000 television sets, not to mention everything else they ever wanted.

I don't know either man, I just don't think it's that simple.

[[FTF]Pyro]

People are people.






Perception is another thing.