Can confirm. Here in Canada, nobody works. We all sit at home and play video games instead. There's no industry, no shops, no hospitals. Only video games.

Or, what if their healthcare continued to be free so they wouldn't have an incentive to find a way to live on $700 month?

I know one of those young men playing video games, and he REALLY wants a job, but no matter how he works the math, the medication that keeps him alive costs more than what he'd make. So, his only choice is to budget around permanent poverty or die.

This is absurd, considering Mike Johnson doesn’t work for a living. None of these government officials do anything worthwhile but still get paid for it.

They targeted gamers.

Gamers.

We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.

We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.

Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.

Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.

Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.

That does make sense considering every other developed country has free healthcare and literally 100% of their young men spend every waking hour playing video games.

He has no idea what the medicare requirements are, does he?

...says guy who gets free healthcare and is paid by a public who he does nothing good for and billionaires who bribe him to hurt the public.

says some rich asshole who probably hasn't done real work a day in his life, likely living off dividends and bribe money

working where exactly? working on a farm that will pay you minimum wage, if that? oh OH I know working in the tech sector where it's now and has been for the past couple years an absolute nightmare to find a job in.

There are NO jobs out there that will pay for the current cost of living and the ones that COULD aren't hiring, and if anything, are laying people off. And yeah, these unemployed young men are TOTALLY playing videogames that now cost $80 a pop paid via a job they don't have.

Videogames are the cheapest and most durable form of entertainment, ideal qualities when you don't have a job and resources to keep you busy. This fucker wants people to never escape being in misery.

Translated: Adults 18 to 25 are using there parents healthcare and are not paying for the crappiest healthcare being offered at their first jobs.

So, they want to take away healthcare young men don’t have so they’ll get jobs that don’t exist. Sounds like a conservative plan.

Lmfao what free healthcare?

Free healthcare?

What free healthcare?

Young men have to jump through the most hoops to get state level health insurance.

I'm not concerned about some young videogamer getting free healthcare. I'm more concerned with the DOGE GOBLIN getting BILLIONS in government contracts to build rockets that blow up spectacularly, wasting a billion dollars with every explosion, just so he can quip "Just a scratch."

That's a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

I'm not worried about American citizens getting health care, I'm worried about Foreign Sociopathic Oligarchs getting BILLIONS in government contracts, paid for by taxes on the working class, while calling those same workers/taxpayers "parasites."

But where's the free healthcare?

The problem is that voters are so damn stupid that someone can make a statement like this without being interrogated.

Is this Free Healthcare in the room with us now, you miserable ghoul?

The argument is utterly stupid.

Ignoring that it is building on a fantasy reality for the moment. Even if you had free healthcare, and if only the financial costs of survival motivated people to get jobs, then the other costs of living, like for food and shelter, would still provide that motivation.

Man collecting handsome salary and amazing healthcare in exchange for betraying his entire country tries to shift the public focus onto people trying to make their lives less miserable with video games.

I don't accept the premise that working a job to make someone else rich is axiomatically good.

Many jobs make the world worse. I'd rather someone sit at home and play Tetris than build murder-drones, or work on some sort of AI powered stalking-ad company.

Many of the jobs are just bullshit. Another "AI" company? Another product manager with no real decision making power? A few billion dollars poured into "the metaverse"? Waste of time and resources.

That aside, most jobs make the owners rich while labor gets a few crumbs. You work all day making widgets. The boss pays you $10. They sell your widgets for $1000. That's a bum deal. But there's a thousand desperate people waiting to take your spot, plus union busters eager to betray labor and beat you up. Pay people the real value of their labor, and treat them with respect, and you'd likely get more people working.

Johnson is a heretical, hypocritical, piece of shit. No one should take him seriously. His church should -- wait, he's southern baptist? The "we're going to split off because we want slavery" sect? Not surprising. Those assholes suck.

Oh god they’ve been shitting on video games since pinball. Get some new lines bro

Anybody who has ever been unfortunate enough to have to apply for any of these healthcare or food stipend programs would know that it's not as easy as the government makes it seem. In fact, the amount of bureaucracy, means testing, and highly restrictive income limitations means that most people don't qualify period and people who do qualify have to spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to hear back from the government to know if they have been accepted or not, all the while hoping and praying they don't get sick and can manage their money long enough to continue feeding themselves.

Case in point, my fiance is out of work right now and actively seeking work. She applied for both MediCAL and SNAP and was denied for MediCAL because she had earned too much already that year to qualify and the SNAP benefits totaled out to $20/month in food stamps, based on historical income, which is insufficient even for the most frugal of individuals to make work. This is for someone currently earning $0/month and being almost entirely supported by me.

After a certain point, it becomes a massive drain on your time and resources that could be spent looking for a job, so you stop bothering with the system altogether because who wants to spend hours doing paperwork and submitting claims just to get enough spare change to buy a bulk bag of rice to feed yourself a struggle meal?

I don't want to hear shit about "handouts" from anybody. My fiance paid her taxes faithfully for years without ever having to rely on the program, so where are her benefits? She has undoubtedly paid more into the system than she will ever extract.

This is just the “violent video games make people violent” argument from the 90s and 00s. Fear mongering at its core.

Once again, we have lawmakers just making spurious if not outright false statements with no repercussions. When your words decide people's reality, you should be afraid of what you say. And I don't see that fear in legislators.

They just say whatever the fuck incorrect bullshit they wish, and walk it back at their leisure when the effect is already resolved in throughout news media. The world's gotten their soundclip, the base started foaming when they heard their whistles, and then the politican quietly amends "oh, I obviously didn't mean that." If more politicans shut the fuck up because they were scared of the repercussions of walking their statements back, then maybe there'd be more reporting on what they've done then the inflammatorily idiotic shit they spew every other day.

Another boomer fucking idiot saying idiot fucking boomer shit because idiot fucking boomers voted like boomer fucking idiots.

I'm disabled and can't afford a working computer to play video games, you rich motherfucker.

Says the asshole mooching off the gold standard free healthcare given to congressmen.

claims mouthpiece of the medical insurance industry

FTFY

What we can? How? I've been eating ramen and hemorrhaging savings paying for cobra

I can't wait to pay for groceries with my free healthcare.

When I was unemployed and playing video games while waiting for replies, I didn't qualify for any free healthcare and I needed some

I don't know what he's talking about

Rich people always think they pay for everyone. Wrong.

We are in the same society. A society with no hope is not a stable society.

What's an enormous brain he has, it's amazing that it fits in his itty bitty head.

So living in the UK which has free healthcare I can tell everybody that it's super easy to do this.

Obviously I don't have a job so I can't afford food, so I just starve myself until I nearly die, and then the NHS turn up and put me in one of those pokeball rehabilitation things and I'm good to go.