Draglide12 wrote:I need to get off the internet. I keep getting this sensation that I want to go on a mass shooting spree trying to discuss things on the Nationstates forums. Then again, we are talking about a forum so filled with logical fallacies, idiots, and ad-homonym attacks that it's top stickied thread is a set of links to suicide hotlines and resources for the depressed.
Was discussing "poverty" in the U.S. Morons didn't like it when I suggested it was nonexistent. Fucking idiots need to be sent to the third world for a bit so they can learn what poor really means.
I stopped playing Nationstates because it was boring. You should too.
Poverty does exist in the United States. It's not as extreme, but poverty doesn't have to be an absolute idea, it's a relative concept as well. Anyone who lives below the standard of living of a given area by necessity (not by choice) is poor relative to that region.
Someone with a small house, crappy beater car for a daily driver (or no car at all, for that matter), low wages, and few savings is generally considered poor by United States standards. In an absolute sense, anyone without running water, motorized transportation, or a stable means of maintaining their physical health (by proper nutrition, medicines, and sanitation) is universally considered impoverished.
But saying that poverty "doesn't exist" in the United States is a fallacy. Just because someone has it worse does not mean that the person who's slightly better off has nothing to complain about. Their experience is made no less valid if they aren't absolutely poor, and their experience is made no
more valid if they
are.
I wouldn't call them "fucking idiots" next time, because they were more or less correct.