You know what’s really fucked up, think about how many poor people with eating disorders or problems with food
How many poor mothers skip meals to feed their children
How many poor children only eat one mea a day (like free lunch at school)
How many poor teens and young adults just don’t make enough to eat and start internalizing that they’re unworthy of food
How many poor people do you know who can’t afford healthier food
How many poor people don’t have enough time/money/gas/ability to cook fresh meal
How many poor people do you see starving on their breaks their lunches just to save food
Capitalism creates these problems and i have never seen a post on here talking about how we struggle with eating disorders and food insecurity under capitalism.
Yeah p much.
The two biggest factors contributing to my eating disorder were an incredibly low self esteem and the fact that I was broke as hell. Not eating for days on end became a habit, and then, when I could afford to eat, I’d binge my sorry heart out.
It calmed down for a bit when I had a few months of financial stability, I still binged but it wasn’t nearly as bad. But when I became broke again? Lo and behold, the disordered eating returns in full force. It’s getting a bit better now that I’m not homeless anymore but yeah, the money guilt is still pretty strong whenever I eat and it’ll probably be that way for a good long while.
My eating disorder was also very closely connected to my bad financial situation. Constantly feeling out of control about my financial situation meant that I tried to re-establish my sense of control by spending less and less on food. Counting cents in the exact same way that I was counting calories.
“So I ate 700 calories and spend 2.15 today? I bet I can push that to 500 calories and 1.80 tomorrow.”
And the re-enforcement from society was also double. I was being praised for being skinny AND praised for being so disciplined about money. I thought I was doing good because I was starving myself.
I wish I’d realized that my desire to have
perfect control over my weight and my desire to have perfect control
over my money were the same thing.
That society pushing me to be skinny and making me attach my selfworth to my weight was the same thing as society pushing me to be the most financially responsible person ever because if I was in debt I was a bad person, right? That I was counting calories and
counting cents to the point of self destruction and those two impulses
were the same thing. And I deserved help for both.
None of the high school videos about eating disorders warned me about this.
I did recover from my eating disorder without recovering from my compulsive non-spending-money, and ended up eating mostly bad food but enough calories.So it’s not like it was a 2 headed monster that I had to slay
together. But recovering from both would have helped. Every time I was
short on money, relapsing by cutting spending on food was tempting.
By now I know that a lot of other people have these same experiences or very similar ones, like compulsively spending too much money on high-calorie food to suppress financial anxiety and weight anxiety and then feeling shitty about themselves and comulsively spending again. Or cycles of binge-starve-binge-starve combining with ‘buy fancy stuff’-’don’t call the plumber it costs money’-’buy fancy stuff’-’don’t pay my health care bills’-’buy fancy stuff’.
listen up, goyim, because i’m gonna say this once and once only.
antisemitism is a form of oppression, but it relies on a different mindset. it is a different ballgame than ANY sort of prejudice you know. yknow why? because to antisemities, jews aren’t lesser (well, we are, but that’s not the important thing). we’re successful.
that’s the kicker.
antisemities WANT you to believe that jews are doing well, because if we’re doing well, we’re not REALLY being persecuted. it all goes back to the protocols of the elders of zion: the jews are taking over. the jews are a threat. therefore, if they’re a threat, it’s only right to kill them. it’s only right to ghettoize them. it’s only right to have exterminated 40% of the world’s jewish population in the 40s.
nevermind the fact that antisemitism makes up nearly 50% of all religious hate crimes in the us. nevermind the fact that jews make up less than 2% of the world’s population. nevermind the fact that jews, historically, have been scapegoated and killed and othered for literal millenia. i mean, who cares, because jews are rich and powerful, right?
don’t fall for it. don’t fall for the centuries-old claim that jews are just faking it. listen to us. support us.
and the next time you brush off antisemitism because ”oh, it’s not a big deal, jews are successful”, take a good hard look at yourself and realize that you’re spouting the same nazi propaganda that killed six million people.
Also because we aren’t successful…time for some fun data:
“Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, S.D. ― Dominique Amiotte, 17, always makes sure to keep a few extra tampons in her locker. It’s not much, but it’s enough to encourage at least some of her struggling friends to come to school when they have their periods.
About half of Amiotte’s girlfriends can’t afford tampons or sanitary pads. As a result, when they menstruate, they’ll skip school for as long as a week. This can lead them to fall behind in class, contributing to the already abysmal graduation rates on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There are no official records on how many of the young women at the reservation’s 13 schools have felt the consequences of this issue, but individuals we spoke to say it’s an inescapable part of everyday life.
“It makes me angry,” Amiotte told HuffPost unflinchingly while seated in an empty classroom at the Crazy Horse School, where there are 70 girls enrolled in middle or high school classes.”
Emergencies really do crop up more often for poor people. Necessities, like vacuum cleaners or phones or bedding or shoes, need replacement or repair more often when you only buy the cheapest possible option.
Poor people’s health tends to be compromised by cheap, unhealthy food; stress; being around lots of similarly-poor contagious sick people who can’t afford to stay home or get treatment; inadequate healthcare; and often, hazardous and/or demanding work conditions.
So we get sick more. On top of that, many people are poor specifically because of disability. All of that is expensive – even if you just allow your health to deteriorate, eventually you can’t work, which is – say it with me – expensive.
When you’re poor, even the cheapest (most temporary) solution for an emergency often breaks the bank. Unexpected expenses can be devastating. People who aren’t poor don’t realize that an urgent expense of thirty dollars can mean not eating for a week. Poor people who try to save find our savings slipping away as emergency after emergency happens.
I don’t think people who’ve never been poor realise what it’s like. It’s not that we’re terrible at budgeting, it’s that even the most perfect budget breaks under the weight of the basic maths: we do not have enough resources.
Cos we’re fucking poor.
People who aren’t poor also have different ideas of what an emergency constitutes. The AC breaking in the middle of summer isn’t an emergency when it’s in the budget to just go buy a new one the same afternoon without worrying about how it’ll affect your grocery money; having to take two days off from work because you’re running a bad fever isn’t an emergency when you have paid sick leave.
So it’s no wonder the well off people of the world don’t get it when a low income person is stressed over something breaking or a minor illness. I know people for whom a crashed car – as long as no one was hurt – would just be ‘damn it I liked that car and now I gotta borrow my wife’s’ and I know people for whom it would be ‘I can’t afford to have this fixed but I can’t get to work if I don’t get it fixed and I can’t get it fixed if I don’t go to work hahhaha time to indebt myself to family members who I desperately wish I didn’t even have to interact with because they’re the only ones who can give me rides or loan me money.’
Two very different worlds.
This makes abusive situations infinitely more difficult too.
Being poor is isolating as all shit, and you have very little power to choose who you do and don’t interact with. Quite often, in the midst of all these emergencies, the only people who’ll offer a hand up are abusers or toxic friends, and their help will carry invisible conditions, or be contingent on you never speaking up or “acting out” against mistreatment. And where are there any other options, what can you afford to do about it?
Sometimes even good friendships can turn sour and toxic if there’s a major difference in wealth between two or more people. As the poorer friend needs help more and more often and options shrink under the expense of being poor, it becomes scarier and scarier to speak up on the occasions when your better-off friend who helps you out inevitably fucks up and hurts you, like friends do.
It’s a power imbalance that will almost inevitably be abused. Poverty can actively breed toxic situations between friends and partners.
so it starts with predatory recruitment. military recruiters visit high schools and sometimes even middle schools to normalize the idea that joining the military is no different from going to college. almost none of those kids can actually join, but they try to sell them on it anyway with talk of how cool it’ll be and what a badass it’ll turn you into, and stuff like that. the army even has even put out three T-rated video games about army life since 2007, the most recent in 2015.
it gets even more intense in high school, when they start contacting kids directly. when you take the SAT and ACT, your information automatically gets sent to recruiters and they start sending you recruitment literature that blends in really well with the letters you’re getting from colleges suggesting you apply.
then, once people are old enough to actually join up, the recruitment pitch shifts to more tangible offers with little to no intention of ever following through. one of the biggest selling points is the G.I. Bill, but it comes with a whole host of terms and conditions that no one ever mentions, which often results in the benefits being mostly (or even completely) unusable for a lot of people, with just under half of servicemembers ending up using any of it at all.
they also recruit heavily based on the idea that your time in the military will translate into work experience and make it easier to find a job when you get out, but most military equivalents to civilian jobs deal with highly specialized equipment that makes the experience irrelevant, and you don’t get any certifications or equivalencies.
another big draw is Tricare, which is, quite simply, the best insurance in the world. What they don’t tell you is that your dependents get a shitty knockoff, and you also get kicked over to that shitty knockoff as soon as they determine that whatever’s wrong means you won’t be returning to active duty. they want to protect their investment as long as it can fight for them, but beyond that, you can go fuck yourself. and that’s to say nothing of the nightmare that is the VA, which is infamous for multiple-month wait times for even basic care, which is very often poor quality when you eventually do get it.
once you’ve actually joined, a few things happen that the recruiter never mentioned. first and foremost, you’ve entered into a contract with the united states government, which means that any breach of that contract is a federal felony. in other words, everything in this post from here on out is 100% completely and totally unavoidable without utterly fucking up your life.
the second is that you are now subject to two entire sets of laws that, most likely, you had no idea existed until just now. lots of those laws are standard federal law that only applies to military personnel (title 10, mostly), but the rest are called the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). a lot of the ucmj is pretty straightforward stuff that you’d expect, like “it’s a crime to disobey orders” (Article 92) and the like, but there’s a ton of general conduct laws as well. for example Article 88 – Contempt Toward Officials, which says:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
in other words, if you’re an officer it is literally a crime to criticize the government, even in private and even if you’re not in uniform. more generally, though, all military personnel have their political activity severely restricted by a combination of articles 10, 2, and 18 of us code, DOD directives, and military regulations. from this article, here’s a list of some things that you’re not allowed to do if you’re in the military:
Participate in partisan political fundraising activities, rallies, conventions (including making speeches in the course thereof), management of campaigns, or debates, either on one’s own behalf or on that of another, without respect to uniform or inference or appearance of official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement. Participation includes more than mere attendance as a spectator.
Use official authority or influence to interfere with an election, affect the course or outcome of an election, solicit votes for a particular candidate or issue, or require or solicit political contributions from others.
Allow or cause to be published partisan political articles, letters, or endorsements signed or written by the member that solicits votes for or against a partisan political party, candidate, or cause. However, letters to the editor are allowed.
Serve in any official capacity with or be listed as a sponsor of a partisan political club.
Speak before a partisan political gathering, including any gathering that promotes a partisan political party, candidate, or cause.
Participate in any radio, television, or other program or group discussion as an advocate for or against a partisan political party, candidate, or cause.
Conduct a political opinion survey under the auspices of a partisan political club or group or distribute partisan political literature.
Perform clerical or other duties for a partisan political committee or candidate during a campaign, on an election day, or after an election day during the process of closing out a campaign.
Solicit or otherwise engage in fundraising activities in Federal offices or facilities, including military reservations, for any political cause or candidate.
March or ride in a partisan political parade.
Display a large political sign, banner, or poster (as distinguished from a bumper sticker) on a private vehicle.
Display a partisan political sign, poster, banner, or similar device visible to the public at one’s residence on a military installation, even if that residence is part of a privatized housing development.
Participate in any organized effort to provide voters with transportation to the polls if the effort is organized by or associated with a partisan political party, cause, or candidate.
Sell tickets for or otherwise actively promote partisan political dinners and similar fundraising events.
Attend partisan political events as an official representative of the Armed Forces, except as a member of a joint Armed Forces color guard at the opening ceremonies of the national conventions of the Republican, Democratic, or other political parties recognized by the Federal Elections Committee or as otherwise authorized by the Secretary concerned.
Make a campaign contribution to, or receive or solicit (on one’s own behalf) a campaign contribution from, any other member of the Armed Forces on active duty.
Any activity that may be reasonably viewed as directly or indirectly associating the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security (in the case of the Coast Guard) or any component of these Departments with a partisan political activity or is otherwise contrary to the spirit and intention of this Directive shall be avoided.
most of that list comes from DoD Directive 1344.10 (full text here) and while there’s plenty of stuff you can do, politically, but almost all of it requires you to be either anonymous or passive about it. so now it’s illegal for you to do anything substantial toward changing policy in any way, and possibly also to even so much as complain about the president or call congress incompetent.
so now that you’ve been properly restricted (and remember, the only way out of this without a felony is with a DD214 (discharge paperwork)) you’re put to work. on the surface, it seems like any other job, but there’s subtle differences. for one thing, literally every person who’s gotten more raises than you is your boss and you have to do whatever they tell you unless it conflicts with what someone who’s gotten even more raises than them already told you to do.
your orders can also be literally anything that’s not illegal. if your boss at starbucks tells you to always stand on one foot while you work the register, you might do it for like an hour or two, but then you’d stop bothering and if your boss got upset about it then that would be unreasonable. if your CO tells you to always say the pledge of allegiance in Farsi, then it’s your responsibility to learn how to say it in Farsi and always do so until that CO or someone above them give you permission to say it in english again, and if you don’t, that’s a crime.
what that means is that if you get assigned to recruitment duty, you can and will be ordered to look and sound excited about being in the military as you tell 13 year olds they should join up after high school, and you will legally have to do it.
and all of this is without even mentioning the missions. combat, and the act of killing another human being, are traumatizing even in the most ideal of situations. if someone breaks into your home to attack you and you push them back and something heavy falls on them and kills them, that’s still a traumatic experience for you. even legitimate wars for good reasons against enemies that really do need to be stopped are horrifying experiences for everyone involved.
but when the war is bullshit and most of the casualties are civilians and you know all this and aren’t even allowed to say anything about it, let alone do anything about it? that combines with combat to royally fuck a person up.
this is the part where everyone who’s read this far gets ready to jump down my throat about how the people being bombed are the real victims and not the people dropping the bombs, so let me remind you that this anon was in response to a post i made that started with the words “The US Military is […] evil” and that im not in any way trying to say that the troops get the worst of it, just that they are being used and abused by the system.
because remember, those troops have been groomed to be recruited since they were five years old and asked their parents why they got veterans day off from kindergarten, and have been pursued more and more actively all the way up through high school. the military lured them in, is chewing them up, and will spit them out when it’s done with them without giving one single fuck about them.
and no matter how you cut it, that describes a victim.
Important post. I’m reliably told that security clearances are also a gilded cage – to the extent that sometimes I’ve wondered whether Trump is picking people who can’t be cleared on purpose so they won’t be as thoroughly monitored.
Yeah, recruitment campaigns are actively aimed at kids from poor communities. Which often means disproportionately communities of color. They prey on the people that don’t have a hope for college or networking or any sort of leg into a career. They tell impoverished kids that the military is a future, it is a career, it’s on the go training with good pay and requires no experience. And if they ended up not liking it? Well now they have all this experience and the GI bill to fall back on when they’ve served out their contract, so win-win, right?
When you’re other option is a life of wage slave Hell, it’s a proposition even those with the most rigorous moral opposition have a hard time saying no to. Much like prison industrial system, the military industry is built on the backs of this country’s desperate and disenfranchised.
I agree with most of this, but I would argue that most of the restrictions on political activity come out of attempts to avoid a politicized military, and boy howdy do we not want a politicized military. (And it definitely sometimes acts politicized now, but it could be so much worse.)
“Because the true root cause of hunger is inequality, any method of boosting food production that deepens inequality will fail to reduce hunger. Conversely, only technologies that have positive effects on the distribution of wealth, income, and assets, that are pro-poor, can truly reduce hunger.”
A common fat-phobic belief is that fat people are fat because they overeat. A recent submission to @facebooksexism perfectly illustrates this stereotype and the harmful classist attitudes it perpetuates:
Like most fat-phobic beliefs, this stereotype is completely wrong.
It is well accepted in public health science that food insecurity – which is the lack of consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living – predicts higher body weight.
Limited resources and lack of access to nutritious, affordable foods. Heavily processed, low-nutrition foods are usually cheaper, but are more calorie dense and less satisfying to eat.
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating. Low income people often run out of money for necessities like food before their next paycheck arrives, resulting in extended periods of hunger and starvation followed by periods of compensatory eating when the paycheck arrives. Such eating patterns cause weight gain over time.
High levels of stress, anxiety, & depression, all of which cause physiological changes resulting in weight gain over time.
Limited access to health care. Many chronic health conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid dysfunction, and type II diabetes, cause weight gain when left untreated.
All of this means that systematic oppression causes people to be fat for reasons that are outside of their personal control, and that poor fat people are not lying when they report that they cannot afford to put food on the table. Stop spreading the harmful, oppressive, and fat-phobic belief that you can
judge a person’s nutrition or eating habits by the size of their body.
the idea that no one should donate money to individuals (whether online or offline) ever because there are some people who lie in order to receive donations has always struck me as rather cruel.
like, by all means check out a person before you give them money online — talk to them if this is an offline situation, gauge their sincerity — and decide for yourself whether or not they’re genuine. that’s good, you should do that. and if you would rather donate money or good to organizations rather than to individuals then that’s fine, too, that’s your right.
but coming from a person who has been on both sides of this (both poor as fuck and having to beg for help and still poor as fuck but having a bit of extra cash that I could afford to give to someone else without it severely impacting me for the week), i would always rather help a thousand people who didn’t actually need it than to turn away a single person who did – who i could have helped but didn’t because there are some people out there somewhere who try to take advantage of other people’s good will. i literally never want to get to a place in my life where i refuse to help anyone because of the possibility that someone i help might not need it at all or need it as much as they say they do.
because there is just….something distinctly uncomfortable about seeing people who are quick to criticize this “donation culture” and “e-begging” that happens online but who never say a word of criticism about what has driven people to have to do this in the first place. the fact that living expenses have only risen and risen while our minimum wage has stagnated and how so many of us are living on a week to week (or even day to day) basis where the slightest emergency, a broken down car or an unexpected illness, can literally ruin our lives and finances in one single swoop. all of this happening while rich people continue to get richer, continue to profit off of the exploitation and oppression of the poor, continue to build upon an impossible wealth that they will never be able to spend in a single lifetime – that their children and their children’s children will never be able to spend – because it is so very much.
criticism of “e-begging” is framed as being about greed—people being so greedy for money that they’ll beg random strangers for it—rather than the desperation that poor people live with every day, but it’s the desperation (and the visibility of it) that really pisses people off and drives their criticism. people like the poor to be invisible until we “make it” and we can be the rags to riches story they can tout out to other poor people to say “see? if only YOU worked hard, this could be you”, a way to ignore how difficult it really is to escape poverty because if they acknowledged that then they’d have to actually acknowledge that poor people aren’t poor because it’s their own fault.
with the way people asking for donations online has become common and normal, though, it’s much harder to ignore the poor. the same classism that makes people sneer at someone standing on the street with a cup held out for donations and ignore them because “they’ll probably spend it on liquor and crack” rears its head online as well because the fact is that people absolutely hate poor people who have the audacity to be poor around them, to ever draw attention to the fact that they are poor, and, even worse, to ask for help. the more desperate you are—the more dire your situation is, the more you’re willing to openly talk about it—the more they hate it and the more they criticize.
because poor people are supposed to be invisible, their poverty unnoticeable and easy to ignore, their existence and their struggles only brought to light when people more well-off than they are can use them to feel better about themselves, only helped when those same people can use their charity to brag about their own generosity. poor people are never supposed to ask for help except in the most contrite, down-trodden way possible but not so down-trodden that they make the people they’re asking for help uncomfortable with the realities of their poverty, and when they are helped they’re supposed to fall over themselves in gratitude and then go away – forgotten – to never bother their rich betters again. poor people asking for donations online (and offline) blows those expectations out of the water—suddenly they are visible, their poverty is visible, their struggles are visible, and considering that poverty is not a situation that can be cured through one donation post (unless you’re extremely lucky but most people aren’t), the poor people asking for donations don’t go away. they give updates on their situation, they ask for more donations, what was first a need for rent becomes a need to pay a light bill which becomes a need for money to pay for food — a situation that is normal, daily, routine for poor people but which rubs others the wrong way because they can’t grasp that poverty is an ongoing struggle not simply a single emergency that can be easily cured and then everything is right as rain.
and the entire “donation culture” online just absolutely galls people, particularly rich people, because it spits in the face of everything they want poor people to be (which is basically: as easy for them to ignore as possible) and so they criticize it, criticize people who ask for donations, and urge people not to donate at all because someone somewhere is probably lying about why they need the money (the same justification they use for ignoring the homeless on the street – “some of them are homeless because they’re drunks, it’s their own fault, some of them don’t deserve my help so none of them get my help”).
meanwhile, however, they never criticize the systems that are in place that continue to contribute to mass poverty, they never criticize the systems of capitalism which are run on the blood of workers that are used and used until they are no longer useful, they never criticize rich people who accumulate billions upon billions of dollars and are willing to let people die so they can get just a single penny more—so much money that it could solve all the poverty in the world, multiple times over, and yet it sits rotting away in bank accounts never to be touched because greed is more worthwhile quality to fund rather than compassion and basic humanity.
they never criticize any of that, because it is so much easier to look down on people who have the nerve to ask strangers for help with their basic living expenses than it is to look down on the classism and capitalism that put them in that situation in the first place. because, to them, the former is more worthy of scorn and shame than the latter.
The current poverty measure was established in the 1960s and is now widely acknowledged to be flawed.2 It was based on research indicating that families spent about one-third of their incomes on food – the official poverty level was set by multiplying food costs by three. Since then, the figures have been updated annually for inflation but have otherwise remained unchanged.
[…]
Food now comprises only one-seventh of an average family’s expenses, while the costs of housing, child care, health care, and transportation have grown disproportionately. Thus, the poverty level does not reflect the true cost of supporting a family. In addition, the current poverty measure is a national standard that does not adjust for the substantial variation in the cost of living from state to state and between urban and rural areas.
“Across the country, families typically need an income of at least twice the official poverty level to meet basic needs. In high-cost cities such as New York, it may take an income of over three times the poverty level to make ends meet, whereas in some rural areas, the figure may be under double the poverty level.”
And in today’s world, I fear there is little incentive to update the calculations.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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