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Well, do you think that giving them as much as actually possible in our world with finite resources would be all fine and dandy? Somehow I didn't get that impression, and that makes the hyperbole a petty snipe irrelevant to the argument.
Actually possible still just rounds off to everything. Give me a limiting principle besides "Gosh, I'm a heckin' nice person and I don't understand why you are being so cruel."
Let me put it like this. You seem set on never ever buying nice scented candles. Indeed, you seem to think that scented candles are a plague upon mankind, no one should buy them, and their manufacturing should be banned.
And when I query you on why you dislike candles so much, you cry out: "oh, so I should spend $3600 a month on candles, should I? I should let my family starve because all I buy is candles? I should act as though I have an unlimited bank account to be spent on candles, is that it?!"
"Well, no," I reply. "I'm not asking you to spend everything you've got on candles, let alone more than you've got. I just find the extent of your opposition to candles worrying. It'd be one thing to say that, having limited resources, there are other things you'd rather spend your money on instead; but you remain unwilling to address why it would seem so outrageous to you for a person to purchase even a couple of candles; why you think the very act makes them the unknowing slaves of Big Candle."
"Then give me a cold hard figure!" you say again. "Tell me exactly how many candles you think I should make room in my budget for! Or there's no point in engaging with you"
This is where we are now. So please try to understand: I am not arguing for a particular policy on candle-buying, here. I am trying to get to the bottom of your absolute hostility to candles as a concept. I am chasing down a nagging feeling that maybe there's something odd about your nose that makes you find the smell of scented candles disgusting rather than pleasant and soothing. The amount of candles bought is not in question. I know you claim that it is, because you argue "my opposition to candles is just a perfectly rational wariness of the slippery slope where if I start buying one candle a year, pretty soon I'll be bankrupting myself with unlimited candle purchases", but this is not how someone with a normal reaction to the smell of candles - someone who recognized that all else being equal a scented candle is a nice thing to have - would think about that question at all, even one who ultimately decides against that particular expense in a given situation.
I think "wanting everyone on Earth, regardless of their personal characteristics, to have basic safety and comfort" is a normal human preference to have, similar to "scented candles smell nice", and that a person who is not a ghoul is interested in making room in their budget for getting us closer to that as a matter of course. I think leftists like me would be prepared to have all sorts of grown-up conversations about trade-offs and practicalities with people who share that basic desire to do good for its own sake as one of their values (not, I repeat, necessarily the only thing they value), but that this is rendered more difficult by the nagging suspicion that some of the people trying to work their way into those conversations on the pretense that they're talking about the practicalities of trading various goals against one another are, in fact, ghouls.
So TLDR: Asking for a limiting principle makes me a bad person, so you aren't going to give me one because bad people don't deserve answers.
No. I'm not giving you one because that's not the topic of this conversation. The topic of this conversation was confirming whether you are a ghoul, and, provided that you did indeed turn out to be a bona fide ghoul, trying to make you understand that this is unusual.
(It's by no means impossible or worthless to engage in political discussions with ghouls, nor to peacefully cohabit with ghouls. Ghouls certainly deserve to be happy like everybody else. But very bad things happen when ghoulishness is obfuscated to the extent that half the population start accepting policy agendas set by ghouls and taking only things ghouls value into account, without noticing the missing "benevolence" term in the calculations.)
You know what, my first comment was excessive, I apologize, but let me also clear some things up.
I don't want nobody to have candles. I want a candle too! But I've spend the last 40 years of my life paying for candles for other people, and bafflingly, have been unable to afford one myself.
Lets drop the candle metaphor for one minute.
I didn't become a home owner until damned near 40. I didn't qualify for any assistance, I had to go it the slow way, saving as much as I could. Savings that got diminished year after year to inflation because the government keeps driving up the national debt on wars and welfare. Meanwhile, the government also subsidized home buying for the needy more and more. Not for me, I can go fuck myself, but for everyone else. Driving prices further and further out of my reach.
One year I asked for, and got, a big honking raise, saved enough in a desperate push to put me over the finish line, and bought a home with a 75 minute (one way) commute.
I wanted my children to grow up in a community like I did, where effectively nobody is ever murdered. Unfortunately, in the name of being heckin' nice people and making sure everyone (except me) is happy, governments keep losing their damned minds and viewing it as some sort of moral imperative to keep insane violent felons on the streets as much as possible. Their happiness and my happiness is truly zero sum.
I wanted my children to get the same sort of education I did, with relatively good and safe schools. Unfortunately, in the name of being heckin' nice people, that went right out the window. We invited the entire third world, with gangs and drugs and the occasional dismemberment murder into our school districts whole sale. They are "sanctuaries" now. You couldn't pay me enough to subject my child to that environment. So I'm effectively taxed again finding alternative arrangements. It's causing me to have less children than I would like.
So here I am, deeply struggling to maintain a standard of living I grew up with, every public institutions inhospitable to me, every public good denied me, and then people tell me "Well, we should still give as much as is actually possible". Fuck, I've had enough stolen from me as is and you want more? How many more years of my life do I need to waste chasing a moving goalpost while others just get it handed to them? How many more children will I give up bringing into this world because so much has been taken from me and given to others than I can't afford them, while others just thoughtless pound them out and then ask me to support their kids? Like I wouldn't like kids of my own that will need support.
You can only call me a ghoul, because you have no idea how much has already been stolen.
This is a really heartfelt and genuine post, thank you for sharing it.
I largely align with what WandererintheWilderness has been saying on a high level, but I am going to be thinking about this post for the rest of my evening. You have made some excellent points. I'm a bit younger than you, and am experiencing many of the same struggles.
I can only give this advice, and this is buried deep enough, and so few people will see it, I'm going to drag out some real-ish numbers.
Last year I paid over $36,000 in taxes. I saved less than $8000 post taxes, and the government shutdown drove the company I worked for out of business. I have an offer on the table already, and maybe a better one coming soon, fingers crossed. So you know, I'll be alright. Just sayin' though.
Over the course of my life, because I've kept meticulous notes, I've saved about $165,000. That's about 20 years of post-tax savings. Some years were better, some years were terrible. My best year I saved about $32,000 (that was a mad dash year). My worst year I only saved about $2,500.
The year I bought my house, I put down nearly everything I had that wasn't in my 401k, brokerage or crypto. I think it was nearly half of everything I had liquid. It was probably the single scariest financial decision I ever made in my life.
That was almost 5 years ago now. I'm in my 40's now. My wife just turned 40. My accounts have done tremendously well. The balance barely reflects the amounts I mentioned up above. It's borderline "Fuck you" money. It also bares little resemblance to my income which continues to just barely cover my essentials, plus one emergency per year, plus a little net savings. I consider myself profoundly lucky I found not just one but two 10x or more investments. In another life I'd have 1/10th of what I actually do.
But we still lost out on our youth. We're having one last kid. That makes a grand total of two, and this last one is a squeaker. For years my heart broke that I aged out of having as many kids as I wanted, while I was struggling to achieve the material necessities I felt I needed to do right by them. I still don't have as many kids as I wanted, but I suppose two will have to suffice.
Reminder: A not-insignificant number of people browse this website with the "firehose" all-comments view, so security by obscurity is far from assured.
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