“Gun ban” is kind of nebulous. If you believe that using guns to hurt others is wrong, and you use a gun to hurt someone, then yes, you were hypocritical.
Yeah, unlike many I actually read the last half of the same sentence.
It’s all stupid but I mean , there are degrees of stupidity and specific kinds of help
Give a man a fish/teach a man to fish and all that.
Where I find it most ridiculous is that if he was on food stamps the education was probably paid for ,which he fails to mention.
Kudos for making the effort to advance beyond that but to then turn around and say you shouldn’t return the favor because you had to put in effort is… Well ok maybe that’s the most ridiculous part.
Anyway, you must admit using only the first part is an attempt to exaggerate the stupidity even further.
I agree, the OP proposition is a largely false choice. Especially when realistically considering the tiny % of people who seriously think there should be no publicly funded benefits. It seems implicitly based on a view of say ‘Paul Ryan type’ conservatives as favoring zero govt social programs, as opposed to the reality that they favor sizing them within the willingness of the public to pay for them, tilted relatively modestly in the direction of reining in benefit growth rather than raising taxes. Whereas most people on the reasonable left favor the same basic idea, just with a different mix of how much to tax and spend. It was only during Obama’s admin that the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles committee recommended the issue be solved mainly by curtailing benefit growth, with some tax increases, though it didn’t go anywhere
US politics (the implicit topic) is still to a large degree ‘played between the 40 yard lines’, though there’s now more rhetorical extremism on substantive policy debates for its own sake. Which I believe is driven by the issues where partisans are really alienated from one another, which are cultural issues, not tax/spend issues per se. But it’s spilling over into substantive issues now, for example more people now at least for show proposing no social welfare state at all (though almost exclusively on the internet) and others competing to see how extremely high a top marginal tax rate they can propose (that one includes relatively extreme elected Democratic officials though).
For high 90’s% of people to the right of center there’s no issue in accepted X benefit when you believe its growth will have to be limited in the future by a change in the rules per the accepted process, or even if that particular benefit (say, tax credits on the purchase of expensive electric cars by well off people) should be eliminated in a general overhaul that would still be very, very far from eliminating all social welfare spending.
Already most of what had to be said has been said – I would comment that for some time now I have been tending to go :rolleyes: when people try to “play the hypocrisy card” on this and other issues as if it were a quick way to shut up the other side. As mentioned very often what you are really observing is simple inconsistency, or lack of self-awareness/ignorance of the facts or context (the “self made” man who used public benefits), or just plain old fashioned selfishness not based on any high philosophical principle. That is fair game to pointing at, but at least let’s accuse people of what they are actually doing.
First sentence I agree with. From there though seems to do pretty much what the first sentence says not to, moral condemnation (if not specifically ‘hypocrisy’) of anyone not favoring more social welfare spending (from wherever it happens to be).
A person can be opposed to increasing social welfare spending without being hypocritical if they operate within the existing system, without lacking self awareness, without being ignorant, without being plain old fashioned selfish. It doesn’t make their opinion one you have to agree with, but there’s no such categorical moral/factual inferiority implied by such an opinion.
And specifically, it’s not ‘selfless’ to propose as person A taking more tax money from person B to give to person C. Which is usually the situation of normal income people saying higher income people should pay more taxes. Sometimes it’s rich people saying they themselves should pay more, but also sometimes it’s people in group C saying other people should pay more for their benefits. There’s no monopoly on selfishness on either side of that debate. And IMO a lot of people on both sides are motivated by non-selfish factors. What will result in a better society overall? Some people really do not believe that more and more taxation and social spending would necessarily lead in that direction. I find it a blind spot of many left leaning people not to recognize that possibility. Either the possibility it actually would not, or at least the possibility that others sincerely believe it would not.
Because my point was, if either you or I consider someone to be operating from a willfully shortsighted or unrealistic premise, we should be able to say so, even strongly denounce it if we so feel, without gratuituously whipping out the “hypocrisy” card. If I believe someone is being selfish or lacking awareness, that should be what I claim and I should leave it open to rebuttal (as in fact you provide an example for) as opposed to go around saying “I call ‘HYPOCRISY’, game over I win!” as too many seem to think it works.