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Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.
What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.
Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.
This is why I always get the bare minimum insurance legally possible. Self-insuring is much simpler; I understand that I am on the hook for anything other than $10,000 worth of damage to other people's stuff, and act accordingly. If their insurance covers me when they total my car, great; if not, or if I am the one that crashes my car, I'll just have to buy another car. It helps that I have never owned a new or expensive car; all my cars have been 10+ years old and worth only a few thousands of dollars on the used market.
But most people are constitutionally incapable of saving money for some reason, so this is not an actionable plan for them.
Similarly, when my job offered me a bunch of different health insurance tiers, I deliberately picked the ones that would deduct the least from my paycheck, on the idea that I probably wouldn't be able to navigate the insurance bureaucracy anyway (I was right; my contract was not renewed, and I barely got a couple of primary visits before my benefits lapsed). I am aware of my own limitations and deliberately try to opt out of interacting with complicated systems whenever possible.
Which is also one of the reasons I have a prepaid phone instead of a monthly phone contract. It's so simple; account balance is near zero or time is expiring means I need to buy another card, same as I buy gas when the tank is empty. What could be simpler than that?
From the perspective of most people, insurance is just another name by which someone else should pay for you.
It always cracks me up when five-figure-earning somewhat or very online Westerners complain about things being too expensive when they just must live in high cost of living areas. That they must have furbabies who they spend thousands on each annually. Single mothers complaining about how it’s all so difficult and expensive, especially since men are too shitty to Step-Up.
If only there was some other option than to live in high cost of living areas if you don’t make much money and/or are low in human capital, some way to not have become a pet-owner or single mother…
There’s also the men who complain how expensive vidya is. The women who complain about how expensive makeup, nails, and regular new clothes are (expenses that the patriarchy forces upon them and that the government or someone else should pay for, or at least subsidize, of course).
Can't say I've ever heard/seen a man claim vidya ought to be subsidized. Or women asking for makeup and nail salons to be subsidized for that matter, though I've seen that patriarchy argument. The clothes thing is hilarious because women's clothes are so much cheaper than men's clothes for the same purpose, especially professional clothes, but they rarely talk about that.
I was joking about women wanting the government to pay for those things, but only partially. The "someone else" part was somewhat less joking.
There are quite a few women in spaces like /r/aitah who will argue that a husband/boyfriend WBTA if he doesn't agree with his wife/girlfriend's assertion that her makeup, nails, and clothes should be considered a valid part of the household budget like food, rent/mortgage, and utilities, especially if they each have equal-sized "fun" accounts alongside their household account. Equal pay for equal work isn't fair, because it's just so much more expensive being a woman if she has to pay for her own essential upkeep. A father WBTA if he's not as enthusiastic about paying for his teenage or young adult daughter's make-up and thotty outfits as he is for his teenage or young adult son's sports equipment :jordan_peterson_daughter_question.mp4:
The payment from someone else need not be direct/explicit. I recall a Lived Experience of mine reading an AskaManager letter or comment thread chain where the writer was complaining that her coworker was treating nail (or lash, I forget which, maybe it was both) appointments like medical ones, and would guiltlessly ditch work for hours for her appointments and then return like nothing happened.
There were many sympathetic comments for both the coworker and the OP; the coworker being the victim in having no choice but to use the workday for her nail/lash appointments, and the OP for having to cover for her (in the sense that women have always been the primary victims of women's vanity appointments). I doubt the comments would had been as sympathetic if OP was male (why do you care so much? Her appointments are none of your business, just be a decent person and cover for your coworker), or if the coworker was a man ditching work to play vidya for a few hours.
And thus, in the absence of "someone else," why not the government to fill the gap?
It is kind of a Chadette move to ditch work for your vanity appointments, though. "Leaving for my appointment now, I'll be back when I'm back, be thankful I'm deigning to let you plebs cover for me 💅"
I mean, I've seen feminists ranting about the pink tax- how much more women's hygiene costs. This is usually illustrated with how much more pink razors cost than mens'(reality unisex) razors, despite no functional difference. Never does it seem to occur to them that if there's really no functional difference(I don't know enough about women's razors to say if this is true) just treating the cheapest razor option as unisex is their best option. One suspects that they don't actually care.
There are a substantial number of women who just want you to know how much of the extra mile society(=women) expects from them.
In many countries feminists complain that tampons and pads are taxed at the regular (which is higher) VAT rate, instead of the special (which is lower) one, usually reserved for food and beverages. That toilet paper is also highly taxed doesn't stop their campaign.
When Texas repealed the sales tax on tampons(and sales tax on tampons is at least an actionable complaint, even if reasonable people can disagree with it, unlike most of the 'pink tax' discourse) it also repealed it on diapers, which is an interesting example of consistency on the issue- and not one demanded by feminists.
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