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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!

What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?

The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?

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> You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?

I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.

I am skeptical when a politician who does not know my children claims to care about them.

To borrow an LLMism: It’s not cynicism, it’s the reality of history. We the people have been duped many times over. Caveat Emptor.

>I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.

Sure, but limited to "family and friends". Following that up with "who does not know my children" indicates you clearly view empathy as extending to merely one's personal relationships and you seemingly can't imagine caring for a stranger's child. I'll grant you cyncism is not the correct description of that worldview, but I stick by the general label of disturbing.

Sure the school board parents are politicians too, they care about kids, no disagreement.

If you’d stop straw-manning me for a moment you might notice you still misunderstand my point.

Politicians don’t care about your kids, they only care about your vote.

This level of cynicism is only possible if someone has never interacted with people on a local political level. Once again, it's more a reflection of your own worldview than an accurate reflection of all of humanity. There are some people who genuinely have empathy for others and want to do good. The way some of you refuse to believe that is truly disturbing.

There are some people who have genuine empathy for others and want to do good, and they aren't politicians. The only thing disturbing about this is you don't see it.

Once again, you can only say this if the idea of "politician" is some abtract concept that you can dehumanize. If you get involved in local politics, I guarantee you will meet someone who cares.

So you should just oppose everything any politician proposes?

You should be worried the politician is going to enslave people to make the food for the children.

I find it difficult to give some people on this site the benefit of the doubt when they say nonsense like this. How can you possibly believe that free hot lunches in schools leads to slavery? Like what is the literal chain of events that you imagine happening to lead from one to the other?

In the case of food stamps, that was the leverage by which social engineers destroyed the black family via incentives for single mothers — collapsing from 75% married (circa 1950s) to 25% married (modern).

The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.

Just so I'm clear here, you think half of Black moms have pushed their child's father away for the lucrative reward of food stamps? And that scenario was preplanned by some unnamed "social engineers"?

The sharecropping nature was intentional, ie, their vision of subservient people generating wealth for the state which it then distributed for their basic needs rather than those people owning property by which they could do for themselves.

That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UPxpKe4N8b8

Your narrative is embellished and does not correlate strongly with the data [1].

Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.

Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.

Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.

1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...

I’m actually talking about the period from 1950-1980 on the chart labeled: “Percentage of married men by race, 1950–2024”

You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)

This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.

But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.

So your criticism is wrong at two levels:

- you didn’t even discuss the correct time period

- you showed data consistent with my claim

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