this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
1891 points (93.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
10790 readers
2652 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The more... favorable right wing points I've heard are more along the lines of "I've busted my ass for what little I have! How dare you ask me to pay to subsidize the lives of people who aren't trying to work?"
Completly ignoring the fact that better welfare programs should help them to not have to work so damn hard for so little in the first place. Or the fact that the welfare cliff and other various systemic problems make it that much harder to get out of that pit no matter how hard you're trying.
It's not even quite "fuck you, I got mine" because so many of them barely "got theirs" as is, which makes them even more protective. The ones that do have, have latched on to this idea of the entirely self made man, which ignores all the public welfare systems they used on their journey. Like schools, or roads. You can hardly exist in modern America without using multiple tax funded public works/welfare things every day.
Then you add in the hard spun rhetoric that taxes they already don't want being taken from them might be paying for things they personally disagree with and things get extra firey.
Meanwhile the richest people on earth have spent more money than is comprehendable on convincing people that going after rich peoples' money will just make everything more expensive for the normal folk.
But that would imply that they were currently leaving potential profits on the table. They're already charging absolutely as much as they can, and constantly trying to shift it higher. I'm sure they'd still fuck us on the way down, but we're never going to fix things unless we find some way to adequately tax the rich.
The "barely got mine and defending it" thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school "sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier."
When I wanted to get food stamps "sorry, you don't meet the qualifications on a technicality."
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn't use it "not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry."
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let's face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn't be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It's all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It's so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.
Like they weren't completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don't pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a 'well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder' mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.
I've been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I'm just hoping I'm not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I've spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that'd just make me middle class. I literally don't have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.