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This is what bugs me, though.
Its sort of easy for me to accept that there will ALWAYS be an underclass that we can only ever 'contain' and 'placate,' never fully integrate into society regardless of how much we spend. Accept that its a fixed cost and move on.
But then you see ostensibly functional people happily tearing off chunks for themselves, and the scope of the problem starts to seem larger, where the justifications for the behavior are more elaborate, and the political costs of intervening are much steeper.
Yeah, but I bring these up because they're not easily hateable. And yet I still find myself wanting to label them with the 'parasite' moniker because there's me, over here doing just about everything 'right' and getting rewarded with a portion of what I genuinely earned, with the potential for more to be taken later (one hopes not!), and then there's these guys, guiltlessly sucking up resources and clearly expecting no resistance or problems, and just generally living their life with much less stress than I.
A similar source of ragebait that you see on Caleb's channel: "disabled" veterans who are clearly very functional but have managed to find a sympathetic doctor who declares they have service-related injuries which mean they now get a check for life. Even if they never saw combat. Even if they were never in a combat-facing role. Are you man enough to call out veterans for welfare-queen behavior?
Likewise, I run into it in my professional life, "Retired" cops from New York, Chicago, other big cities, who qualify for Pensions from their home state (and pull certain tactics to maximize the payout), then move down to Florida (see my point about lack of income tax) to 'retire' while pulling part time gigs with local PDs for extra cash. Its one hell of a payout and there's clearly a known strategy for maximizing return on 'investment,' and who the hell would argue our brave boys in blue don't 'deserve' this special treatment? Not I.
Oh, firemen too.
We are culturally tuned to treat these 'heroes' with deference. Ignoring the fact that these jobs have gotten MUCH safer over the decades, and much cushier, and basically impossible to fire bad actors from said jobs.
Yep, my point when I stated "I've KNOWN how bad the Government money faucet was for the past 15 years." My political 'awakening' was tied up in realizing how much money was burned bailing out failed banks and pursuing pointless military debacles. Very impersonal, abstract harms.
There's a bit more emotional valence when you can see the face of the person soaking up the wealth, even if its a comparatively trivial amount.
I have a family friend, retired Statie. He's been retired my entire life. He just bought a Z06 Vette, which is a bitchin' ride, and I joked that I wanted right of first refusal on it in his will. He bought it essentially because he liked the sound, he doesn't even drive it over 50!, and because he has no kids and too much money and he's gonna die soon.
And he's been very open about working the pension system, and the way every State Trooper cooperates to do it. The pension system determines salary based on average of your highest three years, including overtime. So in every barracks they know when it's your years to salary max, and you pick up every possible hour of overtime, and guys coordinate to call out sick at convenient times to get you more overtime, and you get every special assignment to hunt a fugitive or handle an event or whatever, so you look at the salary numbers for these guys and there are always precisely three balloon years to max out their pension.
Relatedly my litmus test for a True Small Government believer is, how do you respond to the data showing NYC has way more firefighters than they need.
That's interesting. My state government's pension system doesn't include overtime in pension calculations. And it was increased from the highest three years to the highest five years in 2010.
Tbf this is what an 87 year old told me, not necessarily the current system, they might have reformed that trick out of the system by now. Though I've no doubt there are other tricks.
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The disabled vets thing on his channel always gets me. I certainly don't begrudge generous payouts to people who got seriously hurt fighting for their country, but there are people getting 3-4K per month who were helicopter repair techs in the military and auto repair techs now. That just seems bananas, and as he always mentions he has NEVER seen a vat come through his show who does not have 20K+ in disability so it doesn't seem like it is correlated to any actual metrics of desert.
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This reminds me of the (imo excellent) argument against student loan forgiveness. It's been stated here, but I've also seen it in other venues (my cousin was patiently trying to lay it out for people on FB for a while, God bless him for his patience). Johnny chose to skip college or go a far more affordable route for college, sacrificing four years of having fun partying with his peers, but gained the reward of not having student loan debt. Jimmy went to a nice school for four years and has a good time, but has to pay back those student loans the rest of his life. Except now Jimmy wants to get his loans bailed out at everyone's expense (including Johnny!), so he would get his short term reward and also Johnny's long term reward, without having to sacrifice anything. This is a terrible social policy to have, because the Johnnies of the world will (rightly) conclude that they are chumps for doing the right thing, and more and more people will mooch off the system until it all comes crashing down eventually.
Similarly, people like you (rightly) feel like chumps for working hard to get ahead when we refuse to let people face the consequences of their bad decisions. I'm not saying you should join them, because I believe virtuous conduct to be intrinsically valuable, but neither could I really find it in my heart to be mad at you if you did join them. It's a raw deal, doing everything right and watching as those who didn't bother still get away with it.
In fairness, I think that isn't necessarily a prerequisite for time in the service to fuck you up in some way. One of my teammates at work was in the army, and has talked about how even just being on watch for the base can mess with your head because of the stress it causes to be hyper-alert like that. Then there's stuff like hearing damage from doing firearms training without ear protection (my understanding from him is that was a thing, which makes sense because in actual combat you don't have time to put in ear plugs so you have to experience it beforehand in a controlled situation), etc. I'm not saying the guys you are talking about deserve the benefits they are getting, because I don't watch the show and I am willing to assume from your description that they don't deserve the benefits. Just pointing out that not serving in combat shouldn't necessarily be a prerequisite here, as there can be legitimate claims even outside that situation.
This seems to imply large fractions of human history where everyone was psychiatrically disabled.
I dont think thats true. I forgot my ears the first time duck hunting, and I didnt even notice until it was time to reload.
I would not be surprised if that's true by modern standards.
I would also not be surprised if that wasn't the case because historical societies had rituals and other customs for dealing with stresses like this which we've forgotten.
Im not necessarily surprised either, but it would imply that trauma is something very different than people generally think.
People think that negative experiences somehow damage your mind and make it work worse. But while physical pain is a sign that your getting damaged, an experience cannot just damage you. How your mind reacts to things is generally up to your evolutionary optimiser with no real constraint besides complexity, and there is absolutely no reason to just work worse in reaction to something that happens to basically everyone. It might be an unfortunate sideeffect of a positive adaptation thats triggerd only rarely, or an "out of sample" type error, but it shouldnt be standard.
So on the conventional theory, healing/avoiding trauma is good because less damage is better, and getting less traumatised today is a lot like better nutrition today - but as per above, thats wrong. "Untraumatised" is instead an engineered mental state, like literacy, allowed for but not planned by human nature. This implies some very different things in how we should think about its benefits, potential downsides, and how to maintain it!
I do believe that to some extent the plight of the "traumatized" (Let's pick on first world child abuse or domestic violence survivors for an example.) is that they were simply left behind by life getting so much better for everyone else that they find themselves surrounded by people blissfully unable to relate to the idea that bad things happen (I'm wildly oversimplifying here, but you get the idea.). When then "engineered" (I think the shrinks call this "securely attached".) become somewhere between the majority to the vast majority depending on what social circles you're running in, it can perhaps be alienating for those stuck by circumstances in the old ways with a different way of looking at people and the world at large.
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Yes, absolutely.
It's also up a lot of other things! Like your attitude, like the sort of things you do after the things, and so many other things. Historians have speculated that maybe the reason WWII caused less PTSD in US soldiers than Vietnam was that there was a longer time returning home on ships to process things together and get mental distance from it. I think our postmodern society has lost a lot of helpful rituals like that.
I've read that argument by historians before, but I'd add this: The US simultaneously deployed a huge amount of soldiers in WWII while asking a relatively small number of them to do most of the actual fighting. Something like one in sixteen American soldiers saw serious combat during the war.
By contrast, the US deployed far fewer troops during the Vietnam War and asked those who did to do a lot more fighting. The USMC deployed and lost more Marines in WWII than in Vietnam, but those who did deploy to Vietnam suffered a higher casualty/fatality rate than their counterparts in WWII, with around 3% of those deployed Killed in Action in WWII vs. 5% in Vietnam.
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This (and the pension double dipping thing) are super crazy. I know of multiple people who are mid 30s, work full time as engineers or accountants, and pull in 30k extra income a year because of military disability benefits.
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