#and i just can't fucking afford it with as outrageous as rent is now

[transmulier]

Ah, it's that time again.

[asongoftearsandfandoms]

Here's the link to the article for anyone interested.

I have a couple of comments about this. In no particular order, and some I would love to say to him, others I would love to say to his supporters and people who think "Yeah! He showed those lazy good-for-nothings!".

Here are some facts if you didn't read it

He had to "quit" being homeless 10 months in because of his health. During the entire experiment, he says he was going to the doctor's often.

He went into this, like the title says, on purpose (meaning with intention and energy and his feet hitting the ground running)

He only made it to $64,000 - which is still an impressive amount to make in 10 months starting from zero, yes, but also not even a tenth of he claimed he would do

So here are some things I want to say about that.

Do you realize how fucking lucky you are? For so many parts of this, luck was a part of this. Can you imagine if, instead of finding the nice human that let you sleep in their RV, you found the not-so-nice human that mugged you or stole the little you had gotten?

You were able to go to the doctor? Often? Throughout the entire experiment? How? Did you have health insurance? How were you paying for that if you were homeless and "broke"? Did you pay for the doctor out of pocket? Was this in America? (I seriously didn't check what country he was doing this in).

The fucking privilege of just being able to quit? I'm like completely fucking gobsmacked I'm so angry about that. Knowing you have a fucking safety net to fall out of your "experiment" onto makes it so much easier to try shit that might not pan out. If it's do or die, and you know this is your entire life, and your longterm is bleak as fucking shit, you're not going to be a quirky little risk taking entrepreneur, you're going to find a job with better stability.

I will bet my left shoe that if he needed a ride to a doctor or needed something super desperate, he was able to call someone up and get help on the DL. whether he did or not, people can argue about, but undoubtedly he could have.

You *started* this with energy and purpose. Like an athlete waiting at a starting line for a gun to go off. People that are actually in poverty have been run ragged already, can barely force themselves forward, have no energy or gusto left.

This also means you started off with pretty decent mental health. That's a privilege in and of itself. Imagine if your skull's primary organ didn't function as well as it was supposed to? What if you needed medication that would help you function like a normal human being, and you didn't have access to it? What if your mental health had taken a much steeper dive than it probably did? (Which, let's face it, if you didn't have a way out of this, the hopelessness of everything probably would have fucked you up a bit).

Think about how hard this was on your physical health after 10 months, and now imagine you can't quit. There is no safety net or life to go back to. Imagine being however old you are, and you can't afford to go to the doctor, and you can't afford to miss work, and you're weak and in pain but you have to show the fuck up anyways to serve coffee to some elitist trash that thinks they're better than you because they're wearing a suit and you work for minimum wage and, "if you didn't want to be here, you'd just work harder". Think about how your health would be after foing this for 5 years, or 25 years, or 50 years. Imagine your family having horrible health concerns, and you couldn't go to them or be with them or help them, because you couldn't afford it. Imagine sustaining a severe injury that prevented you from working, and just like that all the money you saved got eaten up by rent and necessities and outrageous doctor bills no longer covered by employer-sponsored health insurance, and you were very quickly back out on the street, back at $0 (if not negative money; many people are desperate for food or to pay the bills or rack up medical debt or what-have-you and take out often predatory credit cards and are now in terrible debt).

I want you to think beyond the "wow, be nicer to people because that was harder than I thought it would be!". I want you to gaze into the hungry faces you charaded amongst, and I want you to know that the day you broke was 30 years ago for these people, and it's never really gotten better for them.

I want every fucking politician to be forced to live like this, for a year. Not in any way to prove that "oh look anyone can do it!", oh no. I want them to know, intimately, the struggle that their hungriest constituents live with every fucking moment. Just like I want every politician to need to be forced to use disability equipment for an entire month, exclusively, just so they can understand the accessibility issues that people with disabilities face.

Fuck you for thinking poverty could be your little joke experiment to stick it to those who just can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I'm glad your health got hit, I hope you understand better now.

Sorry, I had a lot of angry feelings about that. My rant is over, sorry everyone, you can all go home now. Actually no fuck you I'm not sorry, it should be said and I'm glad I fucking said it.

It's easy to think you'd be able to do something when you know that you'd never have to actually do it.

[impetusofadream]

Do you ever look at your life and just think "How the fuck did we get here?" Like this was NOT the plan, by any stretch of the imagination and even though you lived through every moment of it, you can't really pin point how you got from Point A to Point So Far Off the Rails We're Not Even on the Map Anymore.

I am 37 years old and I'm still living in the house my parents own. I pay them rent but I'm definitely not proud of this fact. I just somehow ended up as another idiot with a completely useless BFA in a town where I can't even afford a studio apartment on my slightly above local minimum wage income. (And our minimum wage is like $15. This is also not taking into account the fact my anxiety requires a door that locks to my bedroom).

I'm not sure I was ever capable of imagining my life past 30 as a teenager (I was too desperate to get away from how miserable the here and now was making me at the time.) But I always thought I'd be... more?

I definitely didn't picture myself alone, with barely a half dozen people I've dated over the last 20 years and none of them ever developing into an actual relationship. (To be fair to my younger self, she hadn't realized she was ace-spec yet.) Which yeah finding someone willing to accommodate potentially never having sex again... is exceeding difficult and emotionally draining. And honestly more often than not ends up feeling kind of degrading. Esp when your dating ocean is more like a small pond.

That gnawing loneliness that underlined honestly 90% of my life past about age 6, I didn't expect that well of pain to keep overflowing instead of finally being capped. Unexpected, but unsurprisingly it just get worse when all your friends start getting married and having kids and you realize that everyone else has at least one person who outrages you on thier priority list. The universe suddenly materializes as this massive cunt for not having the grace to make you aro on top of ace so you could at least wrinkle your nose at the entire concept of nonplatonic relationships.

But no, that bitch made you a MASSIVE sap, which when compounded with your deeply touch starved upbringing means you DESPERATELY crave intimacy... but you live in a world where a large percentage of society believes that kind of intimacy only comes from romantic/sexual relationships past a certain age.

So you find your 37 year old self awake at 2 in the morning in the same room that she used to sob into a Minnie Mouse pillow to about being bullied by the popular kids, now quietly crying into a capybara squishmallow because it's the only thing that doesn't complain about 5 seconds in your life about being held onto; Wondering to yourself, "how did I get here?"

.

.

.

and wondering if maybe you really are broken and deficient in some way everyone else can perceive except you.

[johnnytortuga]

Let's just address these one at a time.

Medicare-for-all: For decades we've seen and heard about the failings of the Medicare system. Medicare is not "free" healthcare; you can certainly ask my mother, who is dealing with lung cancer, if you don't believe that. Medicare is the most basic "healthcare" the government can provide, due to costs, funding, and increased life expectancy and, as such, will see a rationing of care, decreasing numbers of medical staff (due to low wages), and longer waiting times to see doctors.

Free higher education/loan pardons: "Free" education is not an incentive to acquire a "good" education. The ever increasing numbers of high school graduates that are required to take basic English, Mathematics, etc... courses, just to be ready to enter college should give anyone on that bandwagon pause. The government sponsored "free" education these children have already been subjected to is a joke. Further nationalizing our education system will just make college the next four years of high school. The colleges these children attend will be the closest to their homes because school housing and dormitories will be the first things cut, to save costs. Rents around college campuses will increase or, a much lower quality of tenant will begin renting in these neighborhoods. Students will have fewer and fewer elective classes and degree options because government will do studies to taylor classes to societies needs and limit the numbers of class openings and degree fields students can enroll in. Late enrollees will have to pick the classes that remain. "Government efficiency" will dictate the education you receive.

End wars in the Middle East: Agreed. But, you do realize that Joe was vice president when we bombed a bunch of "new" countries for "no good reason", right? Getting him to change his mind on that front might be tough...

End the war on drugs: I'm just going to use a typical Leftist argument here (mostly used against gun advocates)... "people obviously can't use them responsibly so, the best thing to do is ban them!"... or maybe just registering drugs and drug users?... for their own safety?... for "the children"?... I mean, if it saves even ONE life, right??...

Now, the rest of the gibberish....

End Citizens United: Explanation: Curtail free speech for "rich" people, corporations, and groups of people I don't agree with.

Secure the right for safe and affordable abortions: The only "right" you have to take another life, is if your own life is overtly threatened by another's actions. Every woman I have known, who had health issues that would be complicated by a pregnancy, either made sure they didn't get pregnant, or carried the child to term. Admittedly, i know very few OB/GYN's but, the few i do, have never advocated for the mother to abort. Just come out and say that you don't want to be held responsible for fucking some loser after a night of appletinis with your besties. And, God forbid, be required to take money from your own pocket to do it with....

End voter suppression and gerrymandering: The last case that the Supreme Court decided, in regards to gerrymandering, was brought by Maryland democrats, to affirm THEIR right to do it. The Supreme Court agreed and barred federal judges to hear cases regarding state voting districts. "Voter suppression" isn't a thing. Except in elections that Leftists feel they have the right to win. No one is stopping people from voting, except Democrats.

Fighting the climate crisis MUST BE #1 priority: Why, other than your mistaken interpretation of what "climate change" actually is and what actually drives it, should we subject ourselves to third world living conditions to fix something that we have no real control over? Most Leftists don't have the degree of knowledge it takes to fix a toilet but, now they're all climatologists. It would be much more difficult to dismiss the outrageous claims of impending doom if it hadn't been happening for the last century and, if ANY, SINGLE ONE of those predictions, based on "the science", had actually occurred.

End systemic racism: I find it funny that white Leftists are always talking about the need to let minorities and their communities flourish while they simultaneously say that minorities can't do that without the help of White Leftists. White Leftists have this ridiculous idea that minorities are all nearly destitute, uneducated, and too dumb to even use the internet. While the news media does a lot of damage, when they do their "on the scene" reporting, white Leftists begin believing that ALL minority neighborhoods and families are represented by those people that the vultures in the press use for ratings and "clicks". They're the first to tell a minority member of society that, their skin color keeps them from achieving their goals... skin color keeps them from jobs... and the whole time, they defend bringing people across our borders, to PICK FUCKING CROPS for pennies on the dollar. White Leftists LOVE giving menial jobs to minorities, thinking they've done them a great kindness. The only difference is that they stopped calling them the same racist epithets they used to use.