Comment by vdqtp3
5 hours ago
> half of the US is living in abject poverty
Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
5 hours ago
> half of the US is living in abject poverty
Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
If you’re only complaint is the word “abject”, I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour, in a part-time job that doesn’t guarantee week to week how many hours you’ll get.
That is a very common reality.
My room mates all lived on slightly above minimum wage with part time hours. They were not in abject poverty. They were just plain poor. They still had cars, phones, video games, food, water, shelter. They each had an ACA plan heavily subsidized and probably were eligible for other welfare but didn’t use it as far as I am aware.
If you remove the word abject, the argument is:
> half of the US is living in poverty
This statement is also false.
> I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour
That's the bottom quintile, not the bottom half. The Median household income is $83,730, which would be more like $41.50.
This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.
GP could have just said "poverty" and the vast majority of unconstructive discussion that has followed could have been avoided.
Instead they said "abject poverty" as an emotional emphasizer, and people rightly called them out.
Yep. A lot of such people use words in order to elicit the reaction a legitimate use of said words would get, because they don't want the usually more muted reaction/attention using the correct word would get.
It's not about being pointless, it's just plain wrong.
The median (not average) household income in the US is 80K USD. p25 is 40K. p10 is 20K. They're struggling, sure.
But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.
> But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.
But you could. There is no law of the universe that is going to stop you. Words are something randomly made up by humans.
> it's just plain wrong.
Again, words are completely made up, so it can't really be wrong in the traditional mathematical sense. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps. Of course that is dependent on how you've chosen to randomly make up "wrong".
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Have you looked up the definition of abject poverty? It is "the most severe and hopeless form of human deprivation". It's the subject of the conversation, how is that pointless?
While you are able to look up someone's definition of abject poverty, the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. It is unlikely you can look up his definition (before he replies to those who have asked for the definition in force).
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