Is there something in the air that is affecting those with larger than average amygdalas?
Not too long ago we had the New Zealand First MP with the enticingly rhymable name displaying his ignorance and somehow managing to combine extreme pettiness and petty extremism. He got a bit of a drubbing as a result from both sides of the political spectrum. Things have gone very quiet on the Prosser front which is fortunate as there is only so much right wing smugness I can stomach.
And then there's Canterbury's very own Lorne Keuhn, correspondent extraordinaire and self-appointed PR man for the good old USofA, who regularly trots out his theory that poverty is the fault of the poor.
But of course it is. Just as we all know that the world is completely flat, we all know that if the overwhelming majority of the world’s population subsist in states of poverty, it is because they ‘lack intelligent focus’ on their lifestyle.
Kuehn entertained us with his theories after conducting a study in India as a result of which this alpaca farmer became an expert on absolute poverty as opposed to the relative poverty we see in NZ. He offers no explanation of, or solution to the former but proclaims grandly that child poverty in NZ is due to the parents lacking intelligent focus. Ie they are feckless and spend their perfectly adequate incomes on things like fags, booze and gambling.
In this he is supported by a majority of NZers. In the infamous Yahoo!NZ (such an apt name) on-line news poll, a question about whether welfare reforms were too harsh met with a 75% NO vote. You could almost smell the self-righteousness.
A disturbingly high proportion of Kiwis like bashing beneficiaries, aka 'bludgers'. It could become the national sport.
It is a peculiarly repulsive form of bullying. It's the same mindset that concludes an armed vigilante who decides to pursue an unarmed teenager against the express advice of the police, confronts him and then shoots him dead, is the victim. It's the same mindset that then slanders the dead teenager - making him the author of his own demise. And it's the same mindset that results in legislation which forces a judge to send a woman to prison for TWENTY years for NOT SHOOTING someone.
How can anyone not see the madness in that?
We live in a world teetering on the brink of global war and global ecological disaster. The asylum is under the complete control of the lunatics - for the most part, mad old men - aided and abetted by a bigger bunch of mad younger men - and increasingly - women.
- 1 billion children are deprived of one or more services essential to survival and development
- 148 million under 5s in developing regions are underweight for their age
- 101 million children are not attending primary school, with more girls than boys missing out
- 22 million infants are not protected from diseases by routine immunization
- 7.6 million children worldwide died before their 5th birthday in 2010
- 4 million newborns worldwide are dying in the first month of life
- 2 million children under 15 are living with HIV
- 500,000 women die each year from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth
And the USA spends a third of its VAST budget on its military. The world's economy is totally dependent on the new arms race; the US has exhausted its replacement 'enemy without' - Islamic terrorism (which if course it created and armed) - with its new 'enemy', China. The ruling elites in the US and its close allies created the arms race and continue to fuel it.
If there are any 'useless eaters' in this world it is the mad old men and their retinues who control and waste so much of the world's resources. It's beyond time to wake up to it and realise the role that the obscenely rich play in the creation and perpetuation of poverty instead of taking the easy, bullying, line of stereotyping and scapegoating the poor.
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