On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:49:37 -0800, Donn Messenheimer
wrote:

On 2/9/2012 10:30 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:02:02 -0800, Donn Messenheimer
wrote:

On 2/9/2012 9:17 AM, rangerssuck wrote:
On Feb 9, 11:14 am, Donn
wrote:
On 2/8/2012 8:07 PM, rangerssuck wrote:

Fer crissakes, you can walk around pretty much any suburban
neighborhood on garbage day and pick up perfectly serviceable TVs,
microwaves and computers for free. If you want to believe that there
are no poor people in America, fine. Go right ahead. But seriously,
John, you may want to take a walk through a homeless shelter some day.
Yeah, they're all livin' the high life there.

How about the families that are splitting a can of soup five ways and
calling it dinner? How about the people who are making a choice
between feeding their kids or buyng their medications? How about the
kids wearing hand me down clothes that are three sizes too large
because it was a choice between paying the rent or buying a pair of
pants at the salvation army?

This is a caricature. It doesn't even have the status of true
anecdotes, let alone an accurate description of a big problem.

I have met some of these people, right here in "affluent" Northern New
Jersey.

I'm sorry, I don't believe you. I don't believe you have met anyone who
has split a can of soup five ways and called it dinner. I don't believe
you have met people who have had to choose between food for their
children and medication.

And no, I'm not going to post their names, addresses and
pictures for your edification. I will, however, suggest that you spend
a little time outside your own comfort zone, and see what's going on
around you. Get some perspective.

Why don't you start from the perspective of telling the truth, rather
than taking extravagantly extremist and *untrue* political rhetoric and
treating it as evidence?

Why don't you grow up. Come to the Englewood, NJ Center for Food
Action, and I'll be glad to introduce you to some of those people.
They most certainly are not "anecdotes," nore are they "extremists" or
"untrue." You really need to turn off Fox "news" and get outside more.

I don't watch Fox News. Why does every leftist who encounters a view he
finds displeasing always reflexively make a snide comment about Fox
News? It's an /ad hominem/.

It's not ad hominem. It's a stereotype. Most stereotypes contain a
grain of truth, but you're right, they aren't fair and they aren't
even mostly accurate.

It is ad hominem. Leftists all assume that people who watch Fox are
stupid and willfully uninformed, so accusing me of watching Fox rather
than taking on the substance of my argument is ad hominem.

No, it's stereotyping, and sarcasm derived from it. It's an insult but
not ad hominem. An ad hominem argument would be one that said you're a
pervert, and therefore your argument is false.

If the implication is that watching Fox distracts you from seeing the
outside world, that's just a feeble and sarcastic argument., not ad
hominem. It's just misinformed, and, again, it's stereotyping. The
premise is wrong (as if he really meant it seriously) but the argument
itself is not ad hominem.

As good students of Aristotelian logic have been saying for years, ad
hominem probably is the most misused accusation on the Internet, along
with, perhaps, accusations of being a Nazi. g There are many
detailed explanations that distinguish ad hominem from sarcastic
insults, but I like this plain-language one:

http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html





So what do you watch? The Military Channel?ggg

I don't watch any news on TV. I read some newspapers, mostly on-line,
and The Economist news magazine.

The Military Channel doesn't have much news, anyway.



The simple fact is, poverty is not the problem leftists want to claim it
is. One of your fellow left-wing whiners has already said that only 4%
of the poor - who are 15.1% of the population, so we're talking about
0.6% of the total population - live in destitution.

I wouldn't call Plimpton a left-wing whiner. d8-)

It's you. You're the one misrepresenting the Heritage Foundation report
in a bizarre and unsuccessful /argumentum ad verecundiam/.

Nope. I just dug through the spin.

Here's the pictu Cato writes simplistic papers, most of which are
spun like a top. But not always. Heritage Foundation writes long,
detailed papers, which are much more subtle in their spin, but are
spun nonetheless.

American Enterprise Institute throws curves. It's hard to tell when
they're spun. From what I can tell, a significant percentage are not
spun at all.

Brookings is like AEI, but slightly to the left. And the think tank
for which my son is a researcher doesn't spin. d8-) They're
non-political, and basically just study what Congress contracts them
to study, no matter which side initiated the study.

The taxonomy of Washington think-tanks is diverse and multi-colored.
It's like tutti-frutti ice cream. Heritage is the fudge-ripple that
was left on the dipper.

But I would never argue against them because they are a righty
organization. I just know, from experience, that their reports on
politically charged social issues are almost invariably spun. So I
know with some confidence that a little analysis will uncover it.




But that IS ad hominem. Like most rightards, you've just done exactly
what you accused the other side of doing. Naughty, naughty....

Nope - no ad hominem.. I didn't say your argument....

I was just repeating what Plumper said. So he must be the lefty.

was wrong *because*
it was that of a left-wing extremist. It just so happens that it *is*
the argument of a lying left-wing extremist, but that's not why it's
wrong.

From what you've said above, it sounds like you agree with my
argument. And cut the "lying" crap. You're not astute enough to tell a
lie from the truth. And that IS ad hominem -- well deserved.



Even that is an
overstatement, because he was pretending that it is chronic destitution,
but it isn't - it's temporary for the vast majority of that already
minuscule minority.

Right. An average of 4 - 5 months per year. And that, on the average,
is every year. It's all temporary, of course...


You aren't seeing normal - mentally competent and generally able to work
- people at these food centers on a repeat basis. What you're seeing
there are people with severe mental defects and/or substance abuse
problems.

True, to an extent. If you add up substance abuse, mental illness,
physical disability (many of which are veterans -- 13% of the
homeless), domestic violence, and family disputes, you have a big lump
of them.

But still only a very small percentage of poor people, and so
necessarily an even smaller percentage of the total population.

Where did I say anything different? I even pointed out that the
numbers are very small as a percentage. Again, it sounds like you're
agreeing with me.

They
are not typical even for poor people....

Now, which definition of "poor people" are you using? Make yourself
clear.

, and anything conceivable done to
lift the majority of poor people out of poverty would leave most of this
highly unrepresentative minority of poor people right where they are.

Maybe. So what would you do with them?


The problem here is that the left are lying by misrepresentation. They
misrepresent this small, unrepresentative subset of poor people as
typical of poverty, and they are not.

I haven't heard much to the effect that they are representative. If
there is any noise out there about that, it's coming from the same
kind of disreputable extremists as the ones on the right.



When you leftists whine about "the poor", you're pretending
there are legions of able people who simply can't find work, or
sufficiently high paying work, to be able to care for themselves.
That's simply a lie.

Well, the number of those is large, too.

No, it isn't.

You're blowing smoke. Let's see your numbers.



Which study would you like to see?

Doesn't matter - you will misrepresent it.

Well, then, we're in kind of a quandary, eh?





As the Heritage Foundation report - the one your fellow leftist tried to
misrepresent - stated:

Liberals use the declining relative prices of many amenities to
argue that it is no big deal that poor households have air
conditioning, computers, cable TV, and wide-screen TV. They
contend, polemically, that even though most poor families may have
a house full of modern conveniences, the average poor family still
suffers from substantial deprivation in basic needs, such as food
and housing. In reality, this is just not true.

Although the mainstream media broadcast alarming stories about
widespread and severe hunger in the nation, in reality, most of
the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its
household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:

* 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were
never hungry at any time during the year because they could
not afford food.
* 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat.
* 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any
time in the prior year due to lack of money for food.

Other government surveys show that the average consumption of
protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and
middle-class children and is well above recommended norms in most
cases.

Television newscasts about poverty in America generally portray
the poor as homeless people or as a destitute family living in an
overcrowded, dilapidated trailer. In fact, however:

* Over the course of a year, 4 percent of poor persons become
temporarily homeless.
* Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or
trailers, 49.5 percent live in separate single-family houses
or townhouses, and 40 percent live in apartments.
* 42 percent of poor households actually own their own homes.
* Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than
two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
* The average poor American has more living space than the
typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom.
* The vast majority of the homes or apartments of the poor are
in good repair.

By their own reports, the average poor person had sufficient funds
to meet all essential needs and to obtain medical care for family
members throughout the year whenever needed.

http://www.heritage.org/research/rep...-americas-poor


The leftist caricature of poverty is so misleading as to be for all
intents and purposes a lie. You take what is in fact an extremely
unrepresentative sample, of people who clearly are not typical of the
poor, and call that the typical face of poverty. It's lying.

The lie is that I said they are representative. That's the noise
between your ears, not anything I said.


It doesn't appear that either side is looking very good on this issue.

Only the left - you and your comrades - are deliberately lying about it.



To imply that the 4% is all "temporary," when you're talking about 4 -
5 months/year, is kind of a crock, too.

You haven't demonstrated any "4 - 5 months/year". It's just not there
in what you cited.

Let me spell it out for you. Plimpton is having trouble with this,
too, so this is for both of you.

The studies show that roughly 1.5% of the poor are homeless on any
given night. They also show that 4% are at least temporarily homeless
in any given year.

If the percentage of the poor who are homeless at some time over the
course of a year is 4%, and 1.5% are homeless on any night, then that
1.5% must be homeless over and over again, because all of the homeless
over a year only amount to 4% of the poor population. In fact, the
AVERAGE period of homelessness for those people must be 1.5/4 times
the number of days in a year, or 137 days. That's between 4 and 5
months.

Are we together now?

--
Ed Huntress