Don’t feel too bad for Antinous. S/He was banning my comments in that thread ever since I tried to respond to his/her initial accusations that I was astroturfing at post 76. Antinous banned me too. I thought it was absurd that S/he expect me to make a certain number of posts in other threads just to prove his/her paranoid claims false and I said as much.

I’m pretty frustrated because I don’t think Antinous had any reason to believe that I was in the employ of some public relations firm. Antious really thought I was trying to create a false impression that people care about some issue that they don’t.(Thats what #76 says) That is just crazy. Whatever happened to the netiquet idea of “assume good faith”?

I’m incredibly frustrated.

It’s just very easy to become frustrated when the same infuriating arguments and denigrating claims are trotted out time-and-again by otherwise intelligent and decent people.

But I’m going to stop and back away before I start ranting, and let you continue with Brett if he chooses to do so: you’re usually more a diplomat than I.

Raven, I hear you. I believe Brett means well, but he has yet to learn that you can know a great deal about theory and nothing at all about life. Sympathy is hard.

Inserting individuals into convenient boxes. Check.
Overly simplistic explanations of serious social problems. Check.
Blaming the victims, not the system. Check.
No actual understanding of the nature of some system they believe should take care of the problem if the victims only used it. Check.

The poor nutrition is more associated with not making an effort to cook and living on takeaways and ready meals, which is also relatively expensive compared to cooking from scratch.

Throughout history, there have always been certain people who like to espouse great wisdom about some other group they are not a part of, such as the poor and homeless, never knowing members of that group might be among them even as they speak and are have become annoyed with their ignorance and patronizing stereotyping.

In short, you sound like a man from the 1950’s talking about how “them negroes need to just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and stop being all criminals if they want a fair shake”. And I don’t think that’s beyond the pale at all when we consider you are tar-brushing an entire group of people with a negative and unsupported (in fact, provably false) set of accusations regarding their behavior, choices, and nature.

For a more modern example, you are like one of the Men Who Explain Things. Class-based bigotry is no less reprehensible than race or gender-based bigotry, and like those should never receive a polite pass.

Your arguments rest on falsehoods: that the homeless are all (or even mostly) mentally ill addicts and the poor all (or mostly) buy greasy take-out food instead of cooking; as well as on a lack of understanding of how the benefit programs referred to function in the real world for real people as well as the actual availability and costs of public/government housing.

(Sorry, Will, but this sort of thing really burns my ass, and it always comes from the True Believers of some stripe who are willing to dismiss or whitewash the actual suffering of others in order to support and cheer some notion they hold dearer-than-God.)

The most amazing part, of course, is the lioness, completely wild, just walking up and letting them touch her. Friend of a friend is my friend!

If a person wishes to buy and another is willing to sell then I don’t think there is generally any good reason to prevent the trade. People buy what they choose to buy, if circumstances were different they might have different preferences but they follow whatever their current preferences are.

Actually the market is very good at providing some kinds of information through price signals. The lack of this information is what causes command economies to break down in the medium term as production and demand become uncoupled. In a free market pricing signals act to coordinate production and consumption and channel resources towards where they are most needed.

Markets function poorly (due to an effect called adverse selection) if sellers are substantially better informed than buyers (that is if sellers are more aware of the desirability of the product than buyers). They function perfectly well if the buyer is as well or better informed than the seller. The adverse selection effect results in sellers in various markets using various means of getting information to the buyer in a reliable form, joining a trade organisation for example or offering a generous no-question money-back guarantee.

I’ll give you one clue: People buy what they’re taught to buy. Capitalism has no incentive to educate buyers: the point of capitalism is simply profit, and by the logic of capitalism, if they’re buying what you’re selling, all’s good.

The lack of supermarkets within convenient reach of some residential areas is more a planning issue than anything else. The Supermarkets are rather good at providing cheap nutritious food (along with every other kind). Stop trying to protect the small local shops by blocking the supermarkets and prices will fall while quality and choice increases.

People buy what they prefer, this might not nutritionally be the best choice it is still their preference. For whatever reason price and nutrition is not the first concern of many relatively poor people, convenience is valued and they are prepared to pay extra for it. Having the funds to make this kind of choice is far beyond the means of most of the world’s population, by world standards the poor in the developed world are rich, they have an income well above the world average.

High profit margins tend to indicate a lack of competition, as otherwise a competitor could undercut the price levels and still make a profit. If there is demand for a product which is unavailable locally there is obvious scope for a shop to make a substantial profit providing it.

One significant difference between the US and UK benefit system is that the UK benefits are all paid in cash, rather than vouchers.

The other major reason is, of course, food banks and government programs like WIC. I don’t even want to guess how stable those are going to be with the continued inflation of food prices.