Comments

1
illegal, murderous wars of empire didn't do it. maybe starving children would be enough to get fat ass 'Murkins out in the streets. where they'll be quickly marginalized and dismissed.
2
Gawd, sometimes I just want to grab one of these privileged idiots, drag them into the real world and show them exactly why their notions of moral superiority aren't worth the ink/electrons upon which they're printed.

When a poor family is living on a few hundred $$ per month in SNAP allocations, plus the paltry pickings from their local food bank, the idea of providing their kids with a banana and bowl of cereal every day is, in point of fact, a luxury most of them would probably sacrifice a limb in order to achieve.

But once again, the typical Conservative response is that poverty is the equivalent of a moral failing; it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that more than half the wealth in this nation (let alone around the world) is held by a mere 2% of the population - and growing literally by the day - while the middle and lower-classes are being squeezed dry.

Nope, it's all the fault of those lazy, good-for-nothing parents, because they don't have the gumption, luck, or ancestry to be multi-millionaires.
3
@1,

Are you kidding? That didn't get them into the streets a hundred years ago; why would it do it today?
4
COMTE's answer @2 is really spot-on.
These conservatives are so completely disconnected from reality it boggles the mind.

They hear "government subsudized school lunch program" and their instant, knee-jerk reaction is "the parents must be no-good freeloaders who are too lazy to work and only want handouts." They don't even pause to consider if it's true or not... they know it's true simply by confirming it amongst themselves.

Un-fucking-believable.
5
I wonder how this come dumpster feels about sex education and a woman's right to choose?
6
Oh my god, I want to punch that bitch in the face right now.
8
@2 beat me to it. This kind of stuff makes me so angry, because the statements/sentiments misdrect people from the real issue, which is why do we have poverty in this country? The real criminal negligence is the status quo, which maintains such widespread economic disparity in this, the richest (and supposedly, most exceptional) country in the world. Things like universal healthcare, school-lunch programs, better public education (which requires resources), living wage, labor union protections, and a more progressive tax structure -- all these and more which could begin to better equip the parents of poor kids to better provide for them -- are opposed by both idealogues and outright confused people who refuse to see that poverty isn't simply an individualized situation. Keeping things the way they are, and not addressing them as a societal issue is the true class warfare, not taxing the rich while cutting taxes for the poor.
9
Heads-up, Cienna, the headline says "ALCU."
10
Have these comments gotten mixed up with the other thread about school lunches somehow?

The Aberdeen story points up an important feature of gay bullying: it's not just gays who are on the end of it. When you turn your back on gay bullying because you don't care about homosexuals, you're sentencing many, many straight kids to a life of hell as well.
11
The bullying that make the news is mainly outliers, cases of extreme bullying that end in suicide or major mental illness. What was far more common for most people in school, myself included, was being bullied a bit and bullying others a bit.

School is really the last time in life where you're thrown together with a random assortment of people, a place where you have to figure out how to deal with a crazy assortment of people. Even 100 years ago, most people spent their whole life and died with the same people they went to school with. Nowadays, though, life after high school is a process of sorting your world into people who are more and more like you—you choose a major in college, surrounded by people who share your passions and interests; you live in a part of the city where others share your values; you choose a partner who has a lot in common with you. When people lived and died in the same village, learning to get along with a wide range of types was an imperative. Perhaps putting 20-30 random children in a class is the wrong model for today's world.
12
Fnarf must be right. There's something wacky happening here, some kind of comment fusion. It makes @ 5 look like a nonsensical jerk.

Poor kid! I hope he isn’t crippled from his abuse in school. Sounds like he might have good parents though.

13
But without bullying, how will we propagate those values we hold dear but hurt people or seem worthless to them? And how will we prepare people to accept the bullying they will get from employers, government people, preachers, and citizens better than they (by, say, one order-of-magnitude of net worth and above)?

I

14
Hi, Gang. Yep, we had a comment snafu here in the web department, not Cienna's fault. Sorry about that. Carry on!
15
Now the bullying comments are on the banana blog. This is screwy.
16
This same type of guy is one that tries to keep comprehensive sex education out of our schools and family planning options expensive and spread out.
17
What she's really doing is retroactively punishing all those poor women for daring to have sex and get pregnant and then choosing to carry their pregnancies to term.

WTF does she really want?
18
I hate this woman so much right now. Apparently she has no understanding that, for some people, it's a choice between letting the schools feed their kids breakfast and being able to keep the lights on, or buying that cereal and banana, and having the power shut off. Not everyone has the money for both. Just because C***t O'Beirne has been fortunate enough in her life to never have had to make that decision does not give her the right to call those in that position negligent.

I have a challenge for you, Katie. You figure out how to house, feed, clothe, and provide medical care for 4 children on minimum wage in pretty much any of our nation's cities. Then come back and tell me how criminally negligent it is if you can't afford packaged cereals and out of season fruit every day. Come back and tell me how much better off your children are if they are so hungry in the mornings that they can't concentrate in class. I recommend Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed as a basic primer on the subject.

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