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>as he posts picture with memegenerator watermark

Wow, Cave, you really are a cunt.

Wow, Caveson. Just.. wow. The sheer amount of arrogance in your post is absolutely astounding, you honestly think with a post like that I'm ever going to consider for even a fraction of a second confiding in you for anything, or be interested in discussing anything with you? All I can say is congratulations on your blind delusion, I'm sure all those child-less high-school and college graduates with full-time jobs that are still stuck in poverty would love to hear such an inspiring talk.

While most likely well-meaning, Caveson's posts come off as extremely arrogant because he makes a number of assumptions about my life and my family that he claims is from a position of understanding when he doesn't truly understand me or my family. The most egregious of that being the "my parents made almost all the right choices, your parents made almost all the wrong choices", trying to attribute the decisions my mother has made in order to simply keep a roof over our heads and food in the kitchen as "right" or "wrong" without actually understanding and knowing the events that led us to our present situation is insulting and arrogant. His comments comes off as ignorant and arrogant because it seems like he's just willfully ignoring the fact that the economic landscape of the US has changed significantly to the point where it's not that simple to just "work hard" to escape poverty. You can work hard 'till your heart gives out, but there are so many other outside factors beyond your control that will influence whether or not you'll actually be able to make a living for yourself. The article he cited was amazingly arrogant, and the author is just another old white man who honestly thinks that work and marriage are all you need to "join" the middle class. But at this point the damage is done and I'm not interested in keeping this topic afloat any longer. I'm off to go murder a bunch of things in various universes.

I'm disappointed, reading the responses I thought Cave's comment was going to be more like "If you make less than $100,000 per annum you should be thrown in the fucking electroshock chamber" or "I bottle the tears of poorfags and drink them with my caviar-encased filet mignon" instead of the extremely mild-mannered (and lame) "Most people can escape poverty if they really try and make good decisions, although some of course never can and I feel sympathy for those people." You can argue that he's clinging on to a relic of the past and that things have changed (which to a certain extent is true) but damn he's basically just being a well-meaning dad. And at any rate "You can escape poverty if you try" is monumentally better life advice than "Give up, you'll never make it."

Personally, I think that the current political framework of "liberty and equality" as opposed to "authority and duty" naturally leads to a form of ingrained sociopathy. The only question is which form it takes. More specifically, liberty and equality are incoherent notions on a grand political scale; absent an anarchy a government must always take some action which restricts someone's liberty (and even in an anarchy powerful thugs can do much the same thing), and perfect equality is neither obtainable nor desirable. But if you have those goals as your basis for your political thought you can't admit this, and thus must pretend that things which would seem to be unliberal or unequal actually are liberal and equal. Individuals will resolve the paradox by making unprincipled exceptions, but they will do so in different places. And when people who have made disagreeing unprincipled exceptions encounter each other, they will not be able to interact beyond calling the other a monster or an asshole. You can't have a pleasant conversation where you reason through positions that have buried logical inconsistencies, after all.

1 hour 14 minutes marker.