Should my white middle class friend who makes sub $14k in NYC apply for food stamps?

PARENTS, BRO.

LAZY

xpost

middle class parents

Um, if your friend doesn't have money to get food, then why not?

Oh, wait, I know, middle class parents. See today's most emailed story at NYT
The Bank of Mom and Dad

(b) At the same time, he/she should think about why he/she qualifies for / needs the benefit in the first place, and on the off chance that the reasons are easily correctable and have to do with his/her being work-avoidant or dependant or decadent or whatever, then I'd say he/she should feel ever so slightly guilty about getting the benefit and look into ways to get by on his/her own. But that's just a personal-ethics question about knowing the difference between when you're getting help you need and when you're just taking advantage or taking the easy way out.

You're going to deal with straight-up rudeness from grocery store workers and patrons after you get them too, (amount of scorn directly inverse to "niceness" of where you live) and I think when Jon made a point of "white middle class" I made the assumption that the person wasn't applying because of those types of reasons, but apparently they're totally irrelevant.

xpost to ally

see also: unemployment "orientation"

xpost stigma moreso in "nicer" areas, as I said. Most likely moreso in the suburbs actually than in the city itself.

xpost to hstencil

The question is more whether this person can justify it not on a class level but on a personal one -- like any guilt about it is probably going to be proportional to how much this person knows he/she could solve the problem him- or herself. If you know you're trying reasonably hard, you can feel good doing this sort of thing; if you know, deep down, that you're kind of copping out, not so much. Blah blah blah obvious obvious obvious.

-- Washable School Paste (evi...), April 20th, 2006. (sexyDancer) (later)

qft

Yeah, no. Trying to figure out the hundreds column in yr head because you're getting down to the cent isn't as much fun as it sounds like. Shockingly!

everybody i know (including me) who's gotten parental assistance hasn't actually gotten that much -- sometimes to cover a month's rent here and there, but nothing worthy of drudge sirens.

HENRY IS THAT U

your "otherwise you'd have one" statement was made in a off-putting way, but we know what you're getting at.

tearing down those posts OTM x1000

Clever. Yeah, fuck a few thousand years of medical research. Bad leg? Fuck an artifical one. Heart bad? Fuck a transplant. Can't have a kid? Fuck artificial insemination.

You can't argue people into adopting if that's not what they want. Part of what makes any society civil is allowing private concerns to remain private, even if it does cost $20 000. How's it hurting you (or Ally?)

Just that they're assholes, racist, eugenicist assholes. which is basically indefensible in its own right.

READING AND INTERPRETING ENGLISH WITH THE HELP OF CONTEXT FOR COLLEGE GRADUATES
A SEMINAR BY oh who the fuck would want to teach that

Wonder how many food stamps you can get for artificially having seven kids?

Also you don't need food stamps if you pop out a litter all at once, corporations and conservative America will send you millions of dollars (cash and goods) to bless your miracle and support your bad decisions, as already alluded to on the thread!

And yes, it does cut in every direction and I agree wholly with what remy is saying that the type of people who are putting up those creepy ads aren't really the type of people I'd want adopting either, if I was perfectly honest. I guess I was hoping for a world where those people just DIDN'T EXIST shocker.

But more importantly my thing to be annoyed by here is the general talk about "crypto-racist" baby-taste, because let's get real here: if every American who on some level preferred little white babies to little black ones didn't have children, then there wouldn't be any white people left within a couple generations. That stuff is ingrained way down deep beyond top-level race issues and just down into people's guts. Beyond which in this case it goes way deeper than that, into people's basic conceptions of kid-having and what it means, and life-long expectations of having kids that are a genetic reflection of your family line.

And beyond which if we want to get technical about it -- and it feels weird for me to offer this defense, but let's get real -- white people's reasons for wanting/adopting white kids are often much more informed by a bunch of banal practical concerns, like wanting kids who can pass as non-adopted (either for convenience or for their own psychology), or for dumb status-and-fashion stuff (get the expensive imported baby rather than the over-supplied poor kids from the next city), or to avoid the issues that having a black kid in particular can raise. (Seriously, I've known several black kids who were adopted into white families, and in the real world that means both parents and child have to deal with a whole lot of difficult, complicated identity issues -- stuff that's probably really healthy and worthwhile for them all to deal with, but stuff I can understand people shirking from the burden of taking on, because it's tough.)

But anyway that's in reference to the real world of this stuff, and when it comes to the sorts Ally's talking about -- usually wealthy people trying to pick-and-match kid-characteristics like they're at the Build-a-Bear workshop, and often betraying this sense of themselves as well-bred and desirous of Top-Quality Pure-White Thoroughbred Genetic Material -- well, that's just always creepy and depressing, especially when they get to the point of talking about, like, eye color.

I think I know Ally well enough to trust that she's kidding and goofing on specific types of people, but people who don't have a host of legitimate reasons to chafe that that particular joke.

It's not difficult to misunderstand anyone, known or unknown, when you ignore 60% of what they say.

2. I also used to work for a wealthy and very professionally driven law professor who at 44 was hell-bent on having her own first child(ren) with her new husband. They ended up paying a shit-ton of money for several rounds of IVF and finally had twin boys -- prematurely, and after a difficult pregnancy, but the babies were fine. This couple also hired a nanny immediately, and she returned to work at once. The woman was super-defensive about it: "It is NOT WEIRD to want to have a kid!" I don't know if they ever even considered adoption. It bugged me when people talked about her behind her back as if she were some kind of freak post-female creature ("I heard she had ...artificial insemination?...?"), and she did some interesting writing about legal and ethical questions arising from new reproductive technologies, but I still couldn't help thinking that for these people, having their own kids at such expense and difficulty and with so little change in their economic circumstances amounted on some level to acquiring lifestyle accessories not unlike the matching gold and forest-green Lexus SUVs that she and her husband drove. God forbid they should adopt any of the thousands and thousands of ALREADY EXTANT kids who are born into poverty and illness and really, really need people who can and will take care of them.

That's not misunderstanding Ally, that's just noticing that her joke -- like lots of jokes -- has an unkind implication that will be deeply unfunny to anyone who's ever really been hurt by the issue.

xpost-hee!

Can you understand why she might be defensive about someone questioning her right to reproduce? The urge to procreate is about the deepest instinct there is and saying someone is unworthy of having (biological) children is very close to saying that they shouldn't exist.

And while surely the way a child turns out depends in large part on how that child is raised, the genetic component is fairly powerful as well. Resemblance to one's offspring is also powerful in terms of natural selection, as it often motivates the resources and treatment the offspring receives. Resemblance to one's father can play a particularly important role. I'm not saying this is an enlightened impulse, but it is a natural, and I think understandable one.

Would I go to ridiculous lengths to have my own child when there are other babies available? I don't know. But I don't think it would make a terrible, racist person if I did. Just because a white woman undergoes fertility treatments etc. to have her own baby doesn't mean that she's thumbing her nose at all the poor minority babies in the world--she may be just as disclined towards a white baby that is not "hers."

Surely, it is noble and wonderful when people can adopt children instead, and be bigger than these impulses, and family can obviously be much more than blood and DNA--but I don't know that I'm willing to label people who can't easily transcend their desire for a "natural" baby as racist or selfish.

What's really sad is how long Aryan Brotherhood attack-dog breeders have to languish in prison before anyone adopts them. Everyone wants a cute little baby.

WHO KNEW WANNABE-EUGENICISM WAS GENETIC