One Toke Over The Line

There is this woman on my Facebook friends-list whose kid I dated in high school that is only on my friends-list by virtue of the fact that I know her IRL. In spite of the fact that she is about almost twice my age, she is liberal to the point of being borderline SJW. I’ve vented about her somewhat on my Tumblr already, so you can read the full backstory there, and I’ve removed her from my FB feed so that her posts don’t ruin my day, but every now and then my heart softens a little and and I check on her page to see how she’s doing…and every time, I get suckered into reading some sanctimonious liberal fuckery that I can debunk in a minute.

Finally, I broke down and decided to do the dick thing – I screencapped all of the worst offenders, and now I’m going to sound off on each one as to why it’s entirely wrong and unfounded.

(All names censored except for my own):

This right here sets the stage for what follows. Let’s just see how many “open-minded observations” she contributes her insight to…

Granted, this is a joke. Still, everyone’s idea of what constitutes as being an asshole is subjective, and then some.

Ebeneezer Scrooge notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure nobody openly objects to somebody wishing them a “happy holiday” unless they’re in a bad mood…as described by this post here:

(By the way, as I was capping these screens I noticed that she shares photos from that “ATTN:” page a lot. I peeked at it, and it looked like a bunch of mindless political nonsense.)

You know, I happened to be born on Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday, but in no way does me celebrating my birthday infringe on the glorious Liz Taylor’s special event. And in a country where you have the freedom to bitch about holiday semantics, chances are you also have freedom of religion. Just because you celebrate Yule or Hanukkah or Secular Tree-Decorating Day or whatever doesn’t mean that Christmas doesn’t also happen around the same time, just like the fact that I exist doesn’t mean Liz Taylor never existed. And for what it’s worth, Democrats can be Christians, too.

According to history, the indigenous people of the American continents emigrated from other parts of the world, same as good ol’ Whitey. I can’t account for the terrible things that happened to the Native Americans back in the day, seeing as I wasn’t there (trust me, I’d apologize for the counterculture if I could). However, I can speak for my own experiences, and I’ve spent my entire life around Mexicans who thought they were better than me because of the color of their skin, terrorized me and my family, stolen from me, and forced me out of my home – hell, it wasn’t until high school (or maybe even college) that I realized not all of them were like that. And those were just the Mexicans I’m biologically related to. So if you want to get into a pissing contest about immigrant usurpation, bring it on.

This one was so bad I had to comment on it myself (notice she didn’t respond). I see atheists in particular do this all the time – what was once the mere disbelief in any deity or higher power has now become the unofficial Church of Science vs. Religion. I particularly dislike the ones who try to preach the Bible verbatim to make some kind of counter-point without taking into account the context of said scripture – what they mistake for “hypocrisy” is actually a history of the early Jews, which documents the ways their laws and doctrine changed over time. Some denominations of Christianity believe in a continued revelation, meaning that through prophetic guidance their doctrine can be modified yet again if need be for salvation. And of course, if you say something like “science and religion aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive”to a militant atheist, they’ll generally lose their shit and start quoting Dawkins or whatever their version of “scripture” is, same as any fundamental theist when their own beliefs are challenged.

Seriously, though – just replace “Christians” with atheists, pagans, whites, blacks, gays, or any other demographic and the rest of the status reads exactly the same.

Personally, I don’t think Republicans or Democrats as a whole give a dry cat crap about where the United States ends up, just so long as the oligarchy gets their cut. Every time one side gets elected to office, the whole country gets fed up with them and wants the other side to win, then the other side wins and the cycle repeats. But considering that the last Democrats in the White House prior to Obama were Clinton and Carter, I wouldn’t be so smug.

First of all, never take anything a comedian says as a life lesson (people like to do that with George Carlin and Louis CK a lot). They’re just joking. Second, I’m pretty sure Margaret Thatcher was involved in more than just “intense negotiations”…

But if I’m divorced and I’ve cheated on both of my husbands, that gives me every right to talk about gay rights, right? All kidding aside, while this image is right in pointing out a very real hypocrisy, coming from her it’s the pot putting on blackface and calling the kettle racist (I didn’t make that one up, but I wish I did).

Not even the President’s wife kisses his ass this hard. I voted for Obama in the 2012 election too, but damned if he didn’t take my vote and run it into the ground. Bank bailouts and Obamacare were meant to bring up the middle class, not to help outliers in the ass-crack of the ghetto survive. One of my best friends told me that thanks to Obamacare, her health insurance rates have gone up, and what the hell are people supposed to do when they don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford Obamacare? While the state of the nation is far from being Obama’s fault, he certainly isn’t helping the situation.

This is the post that finally made me snap. Minimum wage isn’t meant to be a living wage. Those who are using it as a living wage are generally applicable for government assistance – if not cash aid outright, then at least food stamps. You would think that a woman who has spent God knows how long on government assistance and takes issue with being stigmatized for it would know that – you know, like I somehow was aware of that. In fact, in order to qualify for government assistance in California, you have to be working a shit job that doesn’t pay enough to meet basic needs if you’re not in school, disabled, a breastfeeding mother, or some other asterisk on a form. If minimum wage goes up, all other wages have to increase, which will just result in more inflation.

But what is more likely to happen is that to make up for the cost, employers will overhire people at a maximum of two hours a week per employee so they won’t have to worry about benefits or any other technicality, same as they do now. Raising the minimum wage is treating the symptom, not curing the disease – if you really want these people to be paid fairly, start putting better business practice laws into place.

(Bonus fact: the current minimum wage varies from state to state depending on the cost of living.)

Clickbait yellow journalism aside, her commentary is inaccurate. When a child is born out of wedlock, the alleged father has to sign a Declaration of Paternity indicating that the child is legally his, but if he’s not there to do it by the time the hospital kicks his baby mama’s ass to the curb, the mother has to declare on the birth certificate that the child’s father is unknown…and Daddy has to go to court to get his name on there. At least, that’s how it works in California – in Texas, they probably just go the shotgun wedding route and avoid all that messy paternity paper nonsense.

I personally disagree with this statement because I was born a welfare baby and I’ve been the means to someone else’s end for most of my life – parents, foster parents, exes, the works. Things I should have learned from my parents I learned from the ex-husband who groomed me into becoming his trophy wife and eventually became my surrogate stepfather, or else numerous life failures that earned me criticism rather than guidance. I’ve found ways to survive and better my situation because I ignored the people on government assistance who told me it wasn’t possible. I’m not saying that all people on government assistance have that mindset, because they certainly don’t – what I’m condemning is the negative attitude that many people who spend their lives in poverty adopt as a defense mechanism for dealing with stigma. It’s been my experience that people who survive and climb out of the pit are more likely to look at other people this way – not because they’ve forgotten where they came from, but because they start to think “I did it, and you can do it too” while forgetting that not everyone has the same strengths (I myself fall into this trap). Obviously, there are ignorant trust fund babies who think that people on welfare are just receiving government handouts because they don’t want to work, but the world isn’t so black-and-white as saying “the rich hate us for being poor.”

And in typical SJW fashion, if somebody calls you out on your bullshit, become the victim:

Honestly…you claim you’re “open-minded,” you claim you can take criticism, and though you can dish it out, you can’t eat it when it’s served.

Okay, rant over. I think it’s finally out of my system this time.

Keeping It Real

There are a lot of reasons/excuses as to why people in low-income areas tend to be “kept down” or denied access to opportunities that a lot of people of higher socioeconomic statuses (SES) tend to have…one of the reasons that is not commonly addressed, however – and that I see demonstrated on a daily basis, having lived in low-income areas for pretty much my entire life – is that a lot of these people don’t know how to act in public. I am reminded of this every time some ghetto chick gets on the bus with six tons of shopping bags and insufficient transportation fare, is called out by the bus driver, and proceeds to bitch him/her out like a teenager rebelling against well-meaning parents, complete with profanity and sass.

Notice that I said ghetto chick and not black chick – this may be news to the social justice retards on the internet, but white people live in the ghetto, too, and they tend to act the exact same way as their black counterparts in the same area. It’s not a race thing, it’s a regional thing – a lot of people don’t seem to understand that a large part of what makes “racial” issues a thing is dependent on where people of said demographic actually live. Take the Trayvon Martin case – people want to play the race card because he was shot by a “white” man (who is actually half-Hispanic, like me, but with his parental lineage reversed so that he happens to have a non-Hispanic surname) and because George Zimmerman damns his own case by not being the greatest person to walk the face of the Earth in the first place, but nobody talks about what they typical behaviors are of the races in that part of Florida. I myself don’t know, so I won’t attempt to pick a side on that issue, but I’ll illustrate my point with a regional example of my own (the Inland Empire of California): if I live in Downtown San Bernardino, where the only white people you see are generally on the backs of milk cartons, of course I’m gonna avoid other races like the plague. If I live in Hemet, where Neo-Nazis run rampant, I’m gonna want to blend in around people who are darker than me because if some cousin fucker in the police department wants to pick on somebody to meet his quota, he’s going for someone who looks as different from him as possible. Okay, maybe that’s a fairly cynical example, but the point is that you have to know your audience.

So back to my example of the woman on the bus…clearly, she doesn’t know her audience (in this case, the civil servant who holds the right to kick her ass right off the bus at any given moment). Maybe you can talk that way to your drunk/high next-door neighbor who falls through and breaks the only window of your run-down studio apartment from the outside (this happened to me once), but you can’t talk that way to everyone and expect them all to bend over and take it. If you try to “keep it real” in a job interview, you won’t get hired (barring affirmative action quotas, which have mostly been eliminated in U.S. workplaces by now, and cases of extreme nepotism). A real-life example of this happened to a close family member of my ex-husband, who lost custody of their child together because of her bad attitude in court. Granted, I don’t know all of the messy details, but when we’re talking about a custody case in a country where people are still convinced that courts favor the mother, and that said mother was underage when the child was born (which would make the baby daddy the bad guy by social justice standards), I think it’s safe to assume that Homegirl fucked up somehow, be it by slandering her ex or going after him for everything he owns (which amounted to less than two dimes to rub together).

Before the PC Police starts crawling up my ass about these offensive and “classist” statements I’ve made thus far (disregarding that I, too, live in these areas and am speaking from personal observations/experience), I should point out that not even middle- and upper-class America is immune to this trend in arrogance. In fact, you see this all the time with teenagers in those classes, particularly when it comes to find a part-time job for the first time. For as often as I encounter some airheaded teenage white girl at the cash register, playing with her iPhone and whining about working on the day before some non-national holiday, I don’t understand why people still have a problem with illegal immigrants “taking our jobs.” While I disagree with giving undocumented workers reaping government assistance and getting other rights typically reserved for underprivileged citizens, I can honestly say I have never met one that didn’t deserve their job (assuming I’ve encountered an actual illegal and not just a regular immigrant or person with a green card) because they tend to have better work ethics than the people they’re “stealing jobs” from. They act like they need their jobs because generally speaking, they do.

I think this also stems from differences in location, which contribute to the differences in SES. I’ve noticed that when someone who lives in a semi-decent area, regardless how much money they actually make, says that they’re going through “hard times” economically, they mean they can’t pay their cable bill that month. When I say the same thing, I mean something along the lines not being able to pay the rent. This has caused quite a bit of culture shock amongst the people I’ve dated, which probably adds to the reason why I was never able to get anyone to stick around until now – though the fact that I’m politically incorrect and insensitive probably doesn’t help either…hey, isn’t that what I’ve been saying this whole time?

TL;DR: There is a time and a place to “keep it real” with your attitude. Trying to get a job or receive assistance from somebody in a higher position than you is not one of them.