Words matter.
You aren’t writing an academic paper. Always use simple direct language.
- Help the poor
- Healthcare for everyone
- Good treatment at work.
Don’t use complex words.
Reagan’s smear campaign on welfare is still paying dividends
Why US americans are against welfare ? In europe most nations are pro welfare and pay appropriate taxes. Why are US americans against helping each other ?
Why are US americans against helping each other?
There is no simple answer to your question. Generally speaking, the US ethic is largely built on a foundation of rogue settlers who were encouraged to take what they wanted by force and duplicity. Whether it was the attempted (and ongoing) ethnic cleansing of the tribes, or total destruction of the environment, or massacring fauna to extinction, or the brutal subjugation of African people, early americans operated at a level of entitlement, ignorance, and the absolute belief in a zero-sum competition.
This mindset has been useful to the people in power, and it has been frequently stoked to manipulate a large minority of the population into a fearful and angry existence, effectively preventing a cultural shift that embraces social enlightenment. Even the US education system is designed to perpetuate the propaganda while preventing critical thinking skills and empathy.
Interestingly, even the most virulent USers, on an individual basis, exhibit selective social welfare tendencies, while still maintaining their cultural bigotries. To be fair, most US americans are in favor of social welfare. The rich in the US, who are in control, will always fight reform, because it isn’t profitable to them.
I’d bet if we started calling them “societal subscription fees” people would be much cooler with taxes.
Reminds me of how many people were really against Obamacare, but loved the Affordable Care Act.
That’s just associations’ war.
Complex words have more specific associations. Except specific associations are easier to change via propaganda than generic associations. And people love to pretend to be smart like I do, so use complex words when they can.
This rule shouldn’t be limited to outsiders. It should be used when talking to your own as well. Using compound concepts of simpler ones in discussion helps preserve understanding (and filter the kind of people not better than tankies).
Welfare isn’t assistance to the poor. Welfare Is specifically designed to degrade and humiliate the poor.
Anyone can be poor, but only they are on welfare.
Publishers note: They usually refers to African Americans, but can be used for any suspicious minorities.
its almost always used as negative connation against blacks, or unsavory demographics. while the people, white conservatives railing on these people are the biggest welfare queens.
don’t forget wall street and corporations. if you fuck up, congratulations now you’re homeless. if they fuck up, congratulations you’re gonna bail them out.
That actually follows from the traditional argument against possibility of welfare - if the state can do such help, it’ll first give it to closest to it, which are the people who need it the least.
But I think with direct democracy it’d be fine. At least some middle ground would be found between those voting for “free money” and those voting so that others wouldn’t get “free money”. Unlike now when depending on who you are it’s either always free money or always fuck you.
EDIT: In general radical political models are better thought through fundamentally. Real world ones work in arcane ways, usually not the ones publicly declared, and rely on lots of inertia to be functional. But both radical marxism (direct democracy and full on social involvement) and radical ancap (no common decisions at all, no common social involvement at all) lack such vulnerabilities. That’s unfortunately the reason people with real world power don’t need them. If you have real world power, you’d support the change that gives you more power or preserves what you have. So for a model to be plausible it needs to have vulnerabilities, to attract real-world support. Only disadvantaged people really want a perfect model, and they are not the ones deciding.
Hence another radical variant - radical agnosticism of political systems, try to always keep as variable and diverse mix as possible, so that power, advantage and disadvantage were more or less equally spread, allowing people to live maybe not in heaven, but not in hell too. Decision-making systems as mixed as possible, legal spaces as diverse as possible, and so on.
Don’t use the buzzwords Republicans have spent decades poisoning.
yup, including entitlements, Woke,etc.
Entitlements is a weird one. A person who wrongly believes they are entitled to money/power/respect is “entitled” in a derogatory sense. A person who has paid into the Social Security and Medicare programs for three or four decades is truly, genuinely, entitled to the payout of those programs.
And Republicans believing entitlement programs are bad, when so many of them are dependent on these programs to maintain a basic standard of living, is an astounding level of doublethink.
Psychological damage is present.
Nobody is immune to propaganda
Yup, I consider myself better than most at critical thinking, playing devil’s advocate, and identifying sources of propaganda. I’ll still find myself getting overly agitated and upset when I read five articles and posts within thirty minutes that all tell me why to be upset and who to be upset with.
As someone that works with the general public.
People are fucking dumb. Like not I’m not even kidding, there’s a skill gap to even get to a site like this…and not everyone has the ability to do it…I’m not even kidding. People are just stupid.
Yep. Never use a ten dollar word when a 50 cent one does the job better. The left wing needs to dump it’s highbrow (and cringe celebrity endorsements) and use the language of the common people in simple terms that cannot be demonised (or would sound insane to try).
Also, this is a prime example of how demonising words, especially buzzwords, is the strategy they use to make it lose all rationality with the public… the notion of being “woke” originally a good thing, welfare a good thing, etc…
They managed to make DEI a divisive word, I presume because they always used the abbreviation, because how else can you poison these words.
Sadly, more than 50% of Americans a grade school vocabulary. Imagine trying to convince a kid in grade 6 that helping the poor is not bad.
Ngl but most of the kids have no problems with helping other people.
Doesn’t work, they take the cheap words too. “Fake news” was originally used for right-wing propaganda. The only solution is education so that future generations are more aware of and resistant to dog whistles and doublespeak.
Just want to point out that this negative association is based on racist dog whistles like the, “welfare queen,” which were propagated by right-wingers to convince low-income whites to hate the programs designed to help them.
And I think theres a place to break that association, but .aybe candidates that are running to change our system dont need to be the ones to do it.
I would actually say that would he a great strategy in building working-class solidarity. Making poor whites realize that their declining standard of living isn’t caused by minorities accessing social programs but the ruling-class gutting the those programs is key to building a progressive coalition.
I get the critical comments here, but I think there’s a basic association of the word “welfare” with the CURRENT system of assistance which leaves too many people out. Democrats have made the current apparati too hard to qualify for with their means-testing. If they were sincere in working for the masses, they would push more universal programs, but at least on the national level, they are bought out by the same corporations as the Republicans.
Democrats have made the current apparati too hard to qualify for with their means-testing.
I kind of doubt that democrats are the ones who MADE it too hard, but they definitely are the ones that preserve it’s difficulty.
One of Clinton’s major accomplishments was working with Republicans to “reform” welfare.
Republicans wrote the bill, but a Democrat signed it.
The issue is entirely a media problem. Can you tell yet?
Did the study define the kinds of assistance at all or was it simply the choice of terms?
“Welfare” is defined and had a lot of baggage with it. Opinion about welfare can be wildly different individually and demographically.
“Assistance” isn’t defined, people can place their own restrictions on what that hypothetical assistance is, who gets it based on their own prejudices, needs, and ideology.
Nah, see, you’re falling into the trap. “Welfare” has baggage only because conservatives have attached baggage to it via their relentless propaganda campaigns. In practice, welfare is literally just assistance. In practice, the two words are synonymous. The fact that you perceive a difference in them is evidence that the conservative propaganda is working.
Kind of you to assume it was my baggage I was describing, and that I don’t understand the subject at hand.
Pleasure’s all mine, partner
