US Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage

[kandrathe]

That being said, I still find your views toward working and unemployed people as being "parasites" to be abhorrent, to say the least.

Um. My (sarcastic) comment was regarding Karl Marx mooching off Engels. Engels was rich because of his fathers capitalist endeavors. You mistakenly generalized my critique of Marx hipocrisy to all of the poor. There are those unworthy of our sympathy who are able to participate and don't, and those who are worthy of our sympathy who cannot participate.

Here it is again so you don't have to scroll back.

I guess in order to understand, I would need to be like Karl Marx, an unemployed parasite, mooching off Friedrich Engels Jr. who was supported by his fathers textile company.

In that context you were condemning that I'm too entrenched in my privilege to understand. I would say I am not privileged any more than any other typical healthy white male American with exceptional intelligence and skills. Through my efforts I earned some money, and it was all spent on living expenses. I'm just another cog in the machinery of the economy.

{relevant to thread topic}
I am "common". But, I am sympathetic to the discriminated "uncommon" , especially when that discrimination comes at the hands of State power. The State is an expression of the "common" majority will. Thus, with same sex marriage, the struggle and decades of dialog for equality has resulted in changes to the machinery itself. The "common" mindset has changed.

The questions then are; how do I feel about being a cog in this machine? Would MORE socialism help me or hurt me? And, regardless of my benefit, how do I regard the economic system I'm in? Answers: it's a grind I begrudgingly feel I must perform or my family suffers. There are no additional benefits unless I am disabled or get older. I've explained this before; I feel like we are trapped in a bowl where the sides get steep the closer you get to upper class. Any bump in your situation causes you to slide back down to poverty. In other words, our success is taxed, while catastrophes and set backs are most often wholly ours. Due to inherent boom/bust cycles, set backs are periodic and inevitable.

I don't begrudge the small percent of taxation that is used to help those who are willing below to climb. I'm fully supportive of the pittance of taxation used to support those disabled who are doomed to wallow at the bottom of the bowl. That leaves the parasites like Marx, who are comfortable sucking off the teat at the public trough. If Marx lived in our system today, maybe the four neglected children he allowed to starve to death would have survived. Social services would have intervened.

I resent entirely the bulk of taxation that is being lobbed up to the rim of the bowl. I resent the parasites regardless of the position in this analogy. They should be helping with the burden, and we should work to minimize that burden on all.