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Comment by cubancigar11 | Hacker News Reader

"I never wanted my problem to be someone else's by asking for charity or living on someone's couch for free," he said.

Brave. Men don't get anything for free anyway.

> Brave. Men don't get anything for free anyway.

Do you mean that male humans don't get anything for free, or do you mean that as in people? Because in certain societies (ahem large swathes of Europe) there are social safety nets in place to prevent precisely this type of thing from happening. Lose your job? You get a percentage of your old salary for a fixed number of months to allow you to transition to a new job.

But i'm not quite sure what you are trying to imply.

Not to mention that sunlight, air and water are pretty much free. Most fruits, vegetables and game are also free (though it requires some effort to take, you're not engaged in a traditional capital transaction with another owner), provided you don't hunt it to extinction. Then again, freezing to death in a snow storm is also free. There's lots of free to go around.

> Most fruits, vegetables and game are also free

if you owned the property you caught them on. Otherwise, no, i don't believe you are allowed to "live off the land" in these day and age.

You're not legally allowed to live off the land in many places, but no one is going to stop you either. Especially if you're not uprooting native plants or whatever. If you go into someone's garden and start eating their hostas then that might be a different story.

In some nations/states, you don't own any of the species that typically migrates on and off your land. So you don't own the deer in your forest, unless you have a deer-blocking fence running all the way around your property. You don't own migratory birds, ever. Fishing in a stream that flows across your borders? Better have a license.

That said, if you are inconspicuous in your harvest, and stay away from the rangers on public land, you are not likely to be caught poaching by landowners, especially if they are absentees that do not live on or visit the property.

So you aren't lawfully allowed to do it, but you could probably do it anyway without much consequence. Just like homelessness in the city, really, except much, much more difficult.

Lots of cities plant decorative fruit trees, and more rural area often has feral fruit. You're allowed to harvest fruit on public property (at least where I live). It's actually better if you do, the sidewalks can get nasty if the fruit is left to fall and rot.

https://fallingfruit.org/

In the neighborhood around my work we have cherries, plums, apples, blackberries and raspberries. By my house there's more cherries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries. There's tons of it everywhere in the summer and I rarely see anyone picking it.

Won't do you much good out of season, though.

I think that he is trying to imply that society imposes men the burden to endure things. We cannot complain nor show suffering. If we do so, we are discriminated.

I see this behavoiur a lot.

There is no way I can get away with it on HN, but in my mind, I call it Neoliberal Personality Disorder (not because it is a personality disorder, I mean it as a pun on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which in turn is a placeholder for itself plus related disorders). A set of soundbites and rationalizations that lead people to talk and behave (about and towards not directly present people) as if they were devoid of empathy, while considering the expression of suffering (especially suffering they are made in some way made indirectly and partially responsible for), as an affront in itself, and the only problem to be solved (or ignored). Certain ideas are so deeply ingrained that they don't even need to be articulated or seriously defended, and poking under the facade is met with aggression or silence (or flowery explanations of why it's pointless to communicate, shallow non-communication etc., which are the same thing in effect).

The problem isn't that corporations, political parties, fan clubs etc. aren't fully developed people, how could they, they're groups of people; it's that they in some weird way sometimes tend to "think" they are, and think their lack of empathy and unwillingness to self-criticize is strength, just like a damaged person might. How those then train and filter people reflects that, which creates feedback. Also note that I don't mean to say that "all corporations are X" or "all neoliberals think Y" - calling corporations or capitalism sociopathic is overused anyway, I know, but I really think there is something there, and just like personality disorders and related traits in humans, it's not black and white but rather on a spectrum.

Put differently and rephrasing what many people said before in the last 100 years, it's the pathology of a "system", not (just) that of the people in it. Though I wonder how long it takes to rub off, and where the lines blur, how it affects language which in turn affects thought and our ability to even see it. Take it as food for thought more than a claim, and sorry for rambling.

> it's the pathology of a "system", not (just) that of the people in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

> Brave. Men don't get anything for free anyway.

What? Did I travel back to 1940 and nobody told me? What's wrong with caring for everyone in society, whether they be man or woman or anything else?

I am just pointing out the fact. Unless you are ready to be degraded everywhere in your society called as a beggar, you are not going to get anything for free. I am pointing out the fact that men who don't complain are called grown-up. It is fact, just as the fact that you can exchange money for stuff. I have not pointed out any right or wrong.

And by free I mean free as in money, not free as in freedom. So free air and free water doesn't count. You can count free hygienic bottled water. And yes there are places where the alternative is sewage.

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