Jane, you’re disappoint[ing] me!
Jane Galt lets her libertarian drop for a minute and displays some oh-woah-is-me–so-white–and-middle-class-and-guilty:
http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009588….
…when I was at the market checking out my groceries. I started to wonder: what is this “EBT” thing that’s on all the supermarket checkout card machines? So I asked the checkout woman. She stared at me.
“That’s for food stamps,” she said, finally. She was black. I am so white that sometimes, in the early morning, I blind myself in the bathroom mirror. I have never felt like such a dumb, privileged middle class white girl in my life. Ever…
Yeah, dumb, privileged middle class white Jane Galt stayed in school, graduated, didn’t get pregant, didn’t yell at her bosses for “dissin’ her”, and thus, quickly ended up in the middle class…where she generates sufficient wealth to allow her to pay for her groceries herself, as opposed to making bad choices, generating minimal value, and being a net drain on the productivity of others.
“Dumb, privileged, white” ?
Give up the leftist guilt, Jane; it doesn’t suit you.
Related:
Interesting comment in the thread:
http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009588….
Food stamp trivia:
In Missouri you can buy drinks from gas station soda fountans with food stamps— as long as you don’t put the straw in before purchase.
The straw, you see, means it’s just a drink. Strawless they might be taking it home for storage. Or something like that.
Yay, government bureaucrats!
Also, Jane links to
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/20…
What’s making you fat now? Food stamps.
The argument goes something like this: Low-income people are more likely to be overweight than wealthier Americans. Low-income people are often on food stamps. Therefore, we should re-vamp the foodstamp program because clearly federal food relief leads to obesity. Also, poor people today (read: uppity Negroes) feel entitled to things like food, unlike the humble poor of yesteryear (read: white people, as evidenced by the examples used by the conservative authors - the characters in “Cinderella Man” and “Angela’s Ashes”), who knew enough to be humiliated by their economic situation…
The amusing thing is that when the poster goes way overboard trying to exaggerate the Republican stance on things, she gets about halfway to my position.
Except for the word “uppity” – that’s not really my kind of phrase.
I do agree that a larger percentage of the poor used to have the good sense to be embarrassed by the bad behaviors that got them into their predicaments (e.g.: in _Angela’s Ashes_, where the father chooses alcoholism and then abandonment over doing his duty, the family is rightfully ashamed of what a piece of crap he is).
If embarrassment wasn’t a useful tool to get us to change our behaviors for the better, we wouldn’t have evolved it.
UPDATE: fixed the typo-ed / missing three letters in the subject line.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:35 am
[...] But it’s not Jane’s post that’s of primary interest to me (not to say that Jane’s post isn’t interesting — it is — and Jane is definitely an intelligent woman whose thoughts are worth reading, even if we don’t see eye to eye on everything). It’s this post from TJICistan that caught my eye. TJIC also links back to my food stamps/obesity post, quoting this paragraph: What’s making you fat now? Food stamps. [...]
January 13th, 2007 at 10:50 am
[...] Jill (one of the authors at Feministe) then mentions a trackback to her food stamp post, from dispatches from TJICistan. [...]
January 13th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Have you bothered to read the second post that tracks back here? It’s so devoid of substance that it’s actually quite funny. The entirety of her “argument” boils down to:
1) You’re an idiot, because there’s a grammatical error in your post title (zing!)
2) A paragraph in which you give two specific examples where you’ve supported advancement based on merit rather than race, and then assert your support of race-blind policies in government, boils down to “I’m not a racist, I’ve got black friends!” (uh, no it doesn’t, Marti – there is no mention that either the black engineer or Condoleeze Rice are his friends, and it certainly can’t be true that every black person in federal, state, and local government is)
3) “So, to all you Negros, GET A JOB!… because TJICISTAN says so!” Amusing that she makes a fuss over your grammatical error, and then misspells a word as simple as ‘negroes’. But anyway, what does race have to do with anything – correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it your belief that everyone should get a job rather than go on the dole?
Becawse Ideots Heva Blaugs Two? Yes, Marti, it seems they do.
January 13th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I did – I almost left a comment at it but caught myself in time. ;-)
Also weird: the quoted bit from TJIC’s post isn’t text, but a screencap. WTF?
September 8th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
I’d say it’s similar to when someone sent me a contract by email as a jpeg, rather than a pdf. Don’t understand the rules (course, I still don’t know how to do that quoting thing where the quotes are indented and in grey).
I’d also say that I wouldn’t feel guilty about finding out something was “food stamps”, because I’M PAYING FOR THEM.
Much the way health insurance “Gateway” means that I’m paying for that, too.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Miriam, use the blockquote tag: in front of the text you’re quoting, put “”; after the text you’re quoting, do the same thing, but with “/blockquote” between the angle brackets.
September 10th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Ach. Afraid that was going to happen. The things you put before and after the word “blockquote” vanished because they look like HTML. Before the tag, put a “less-than” sign; after it, close the tag with a “greater-than” sign.