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Comment by heydenberk | Hacker News Reader

I think there are two related issues. First, the tenor of these articles betrays a general middle-to-upper-class bias in the media. For people who are poor, these stories are more traumatic than inspiring, which means that these are stories by rich people for rich people about poor people which don't take into account the actual lived experiences of poor people.

More importantly, though, these stories rarely criticize the systems that cause these horrors — America's broken healthcare system which revisits injuries upon the poor and sick, zoning and development practices that breed homelessness, cruel school lunch programs that punish poor kids for having poor parents.

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> ... these are stories by rich people for rich people about poor people which don't take into account the actual lived experiences of poor people.

I think the article means to take it a step further—these are stories by rich people for [mostly] rich people about poor people that build and reinforce a narrative and expectation that the context of the perseverance isn’t the real story. By crafting/telling/writing/broadcasting perseverance porn, media are objectifying and fetishizing perseverance in a manner that enables the audience to ignore the context and enjoy the “good stuff”—all while normalizing the horrific circumstances of each story. Perseverance is not only possible, it’s the goal! Meanwhile, viewers can sit back and blame those who didn’t persevere for their outcomes.

> The problem with perseverance porn is not the brave subjects of the articles, but the lack of any journalistic scrutiny examining the failings of society that placed them in such desperate circumstances to begin with.

> What these articles highlight so clearly is not only the grim, inhuman and unnecessary conditions so many Americans are forced to live under, but the degree to which mainstream corporate journalists have completely internalized them as unremarkable, inevitable facts of life, rather than the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies that have robbed Americans of dignity and basic human rights.

It's a bit disingenuous to criticize neoliberal policy without also criticizing the neoconservative policies that aggressively privatized and defunded the delivery of any social benefits -- thus ensuring a significant portion of the funding ended up on corporate balance sheets rather than to provide actual services to people.

Neoliberal policy may have built a house out of dry wood, but neoconservative policy lit the match.

The media regularly points out neoconservative flaws, but neoliberal flaws are either dismissed or attributed to Republicans.

Neoliberalism and neoconservativism are not two sides of the same coin. They’re wholly different things. Neoliberal policies are not liberal policies. It’s a 20th-century refreshing of 19th-century philosophy of the state’s role in economic affairs—called liberalism—which is engaged with from the right and left, attempting to push ideas on what the right balance is, while few are actually questioning liberalism itself. Neoconservativism is a primarily US right-wing dominated foreign policy stance that focuses on active use of the military and intervention worldwide to protect US hegemony and world power. Neoliberalism is taken for granted within neoconservativism, and isn’t questioned or engaged by it.

tl;dr — neoliberal and neoconservative are on totally different planes of existence in the world of political philosophy and policy; neoliberal doesn’t mean “new-style liberal (left-leaning) ideas”; neoconservativism is an American right-wing policy framework, it does not mean “conservative”, and it doesn’t engage the same arena of thought as neoliberalism does.

I was using this meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Current_usage

My specific concerns are regarding deregulation & privatization, as well as a lack of attention related to the consequences of the (relative) free flow of trade, people, and capital across national borders - these (potential downsides) are not discussed in the mainstream. Rather, it is typically reported that "free trade" is an undisputed good, and implies that anyone that disagrees must believe that economics is a zero sum game. (See how the MSM initially reported on Trump's complaints about China's trade practices, until something seemed to change behind the scenes and they all simultaneously got on the anti-China bandwagon).

You misunderstand the term neoliberal—it has nothing to do with the partisan right/left, liberal/conservative divide. It has absolutely nothing to do with neoconservativism. They’re apples and oranges and shouldn’t ever be brought up as being related. If you think otherwise, you have an awful lot to explain how the American conservative outlook on foreign policy and intervention in international affairs has anything at all to do with the neoliberal policies that the article is pointing the finger at.

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