Too Little Too Late 5: This Is What It Sounds Like When Dopes Lie

 Foolishly, I got into an argument with a reactionary on the internet today (where else?) about the Tory policy of not feeding kids over the Winter.

It is very difficult to argue with people like this. The problem isn't that they are wrong, they are. It's that they are locked into a worldview and are logically consistent within it. The issue is the worldview itself; the one that says, for example, if parents can't afford a cheap loaf of Lidl bread and some Blue Stripe value beans, then their kids' hunger isn't the government's problem. Tough love yo.

Or, again for example, they should sell all the expensive white goods they (no doubt) own (regardless of how they acquired them). Pick a cliche, basically.

These tropes are flung at you like chaff. They are distractions to avoid addressing the fundamental premise of a system that's incapable of meeting the material needs of children during a pandemic (and not just a pandemic of course). These people don't want to deal with the fundamental problem. Just like the Tories they wish to preserve that system and thus find ways to victim blame. 

But those people, the ones who spend their welfare on expensive white goods (never mind they might have owned them prior to making a claim) or refuse to buy the cheapest food imaginable (and the assumption that surely even the hungriest kid can be afforded baked beans on toast for ever meal, forever), aren't the focus. It's the ones that are in genuine, material, poverty. So the argument becomes a kind of straw man: an argument made against people that aren't the subject of the proposition. Again, distraction.

Besides white goods are cheap (at least that's the idea, in reality most claimants can't afford these things, even though some of them like computers and phones are now necessary). They depreciate. You'll get next to nothing for them. In the end the reactionary is forcibly depriving someone for no real gaim, but I guess they think that character building. A strange idea that people just aren't entitled to nice things as a working class. It's revealing and sad.

In fact, for many, it isn't that they can't afford value range food, which we know is (relatively) super cheap. It's that that's all they can afford and it isn't sufficient. The argument isn't that kids aren't eating anything (though in many cases that is so), it's that they are not getting adequate nutrition.

Unfortunately trying to persuade right wingers who have gulped down years of anti-benefit rheotic is nigh on impossible online. They are entrenched, surrounded by reinforcing propaganda daily. Presonal responsibility is so alluring - who doesn't want to believe in oneself? Who doesn't want to believe that life's problems can be solved by a generous tug on the old bootstraps? But life isn't that simple; these are systemic problems. Blaming the victim just enables the state, the Tories, to abrogate their responsibility. That is the sad irony of this kind of thinking. If you don't want excuses then don't offer them on behalf of the most powerful agents in the social pyramid scheme starving kids are forced to exist in. 

All made worse by the online environment and the presence of the narrative of 'woke' culture that enables the reactionary to readily dismiss criticism without even consideration. "Oh, you're a socialist" they will howl, thus avoiding addressing the issue or the critique offered, and again kids starve.

Just

Feed

Kids