How politically correct to be so politically impolitic.
Useful idiots.
Your government at work.
What about enough to get an “A”, equivalent to yours?
Are you suggesting the government should increase their benefits? Many disabled live in Adult Congregate Living Facilities [ACLF]. ACLFs complicate the simple picture in my quotation above. They charge less. But are there enough ACLF beds in any given metropolitan area to house the disabled?
Bollocks. 
That would infer that creationists are more useful than idiots?
depending upon what is created
-Imp
Anyone that can stand on their feet for hours holding a sign up begging should be capable of at least light menial work.
Unless they’re mental. Care in the community its called over here, we don’t want to know or spend money on the Incorrigibly homeless so we throw some medication at them and dump them out in the environment see if we can evolve a new species of mad beggar. Thanks Maggie that sorted it. 
There was also a time when you had to have an address to get income support/jobseekers allowance, and of course you couldn’t get an address without income support. Another genius idea to create more incorrigibly homeless people by people no doubt as short sighted and intolerant as the idiots who wrote the OP. Luckily now you can get money provided you are prepared to prove you are looking for work, which doesn’t necessarily need an address immediately. It’s also much harder to fob off the dole squad than in the US, because they make you apply for jobs and cut you off if you make no effort to find the jobs they give you to apply for. Seems to me it would be better to reform social security than just pretend everyone is as lazy as you are in considering the issues. There will always be people prepared to dodge the system, that merely suggests the system needs revision if it is a money sink hole with no effect.
In the US 1 third of all homeless people suffer from some form of mental disorder, I heard. Not sure what it is over here.
I said menial labor. You do not have to have full mental capacity to hold a simple nontechnical job. Salvation army provides many jobs to people in such need as do other oganizations. If a person looks hard enough long enough they can find something to put food on their table that is a constructive. Standing on a corner selling pencils or sweeping or any of the other multitudes of menial jobs that people will pay something to have someone else do. If you are only partially physically or mentally handicapped there is work to be had if you ask and truly mean to work. If it only pays part of what you need then talk to charity organizations many help in many ways from education to paying bills. I do not know about other countries but here in the US if you want help you just have to ask not beg on the street , for the most part.
I would say that one bad part of our society is exconvicts do not have an easy time of finding jobs even menial ones. The US is hard on these people sadly and embarrassingly.
Depends on how serious your mental illness is. If you’ve ever known people suffering with schizophrenia you’ll know that the medication doesn’t always work and that’s assuming they are taking it which quite a few don’t because the side effects are so debilitating. For example you might have to take 12 or so different tablets a day, antipsychotics, antidepressants, drugs that stop the shaking side effects, and drugs to stop their side effects. This cocktail can often leave you what I call monged out, or stoned as a lemon. When my friend had the shakes he certainly couldn’t of worked even on basic manual labour, and when he stopped taking his meds he was Jesus, sounds like a cliché, but it wasn’t really that funny.
Depends of course, they could be drug dependant or physically disabled or whatever its impossible to sum people up as one homogenous group and it’s lazy to try.
I think that its hard on many more people than that. I remember talking to a guy who became homeless because he was kicked out of his house for smoking pot, he was 16. He ended up in London homeless and without any way of getting a job, it was only when someone raped and beat him up and almost killed him that he got put in touch with social services, before then to all intents and purposes he didn’t exist. It’s very easy to blame people but not everyone is a work shy loser; in this country it seems a lot of people who leave the army are becoming homeless for example. Many people slip through the cracks for many different reasons. It’s very easy to pretend that its all their fault all the time. But that is clearly nonsense. People leave home because of physical and sexual abuse, they can then be exploited by unscrupulous people and end up on drugs or in prostitution. Why not ask people that work regularly with homeless people if you want a realistic picture. Instead of listening to pathetic attempts at blaming all societies ills on liberals because it saves you the trouble of having to care, when its always the homeless losers fault? No one’s claiming people should be given a free ride, but just pretending its all simply a matter of their lazy attitude is ignorant, societies quite a festering shit pile when you are an outcast from it.
Dude, I am not saying all people are to blame, I have been specific pretty much about the ones that are to blame for their own. There are plenty that can’t work, that can’t hold a job or find one, but there are plenty that have problems that can.
Here in the US a single mother gets a certain amount of money for each child she has. If she has a Doctors excuse that she can’t hold a job she can then stay home birth kids and get more money from the government. Not all do this. A significant amount do. It sucks to see a woman using food stamps , dressed nicer than you , driving off in a nicer car than yours, buying expensive food and knowing she gets Government assistance but, you can’t because you make too much money and you are healthy. It kind of pisses you off just a tad.
Military people here are also falling through the cracks but, there are movements right now to stop such horrendous treatment to veterans. One problem i see with these newest and youngest veterans is that their training lacked in preparing them for war. Old military soldiers were put through hell in boot camp in order to prepare them for the atrocities of war. Mentally they were trained stronger. There were far less PTSS cases. Now due to political correctness the DIs have to be nicer and a heck of alot more civil. I presume its the same there?
Hey Sidhe - over-react much?
It was a joke.
One possible way of looking at social support systems can be not necessarily as a benefit to those who can’t or won’t get work, but as a benefit to the rest of society. If anyone has gone to a country where the social security system is weak or non existent, they will be pretty well acquainted with the endless dotting of beggars on streets. Of people picking fights with the public for no reason other than malicious entertainment, and just the general state of discord that unregulated poverty, self imposed or not, brings. Government funding to maintain the very lowest of standards of living for people at the very least minimizes the side effects of poverty, and tends to localize issues (i.e. ghettos/estates) so that it generally minimizes harm to the public.
There’s going to be people with legitimate issues for why they can’t work, and those who simply abuse the system for any number of reasons. Very possibly more of the latter, but that’s a fact of large societies, and I don’t see how saying that they ‘should’ work is anything like a meaningful or practical proposal.
One of the reasons that the mentally ill make up such a large percentage of the homeless is the liberal policy of closing mental institutions, back in the '80’s. The thinking was that, since they had not committed a crime, their freedom shouldn’t be taken away.
This was not a conservative policy.
My mother ran a “social hour” for outpatients of the local mental health clinic, for some twenty years. Some were people who were previously in institutions. They were freed as part of the enlightened liberal policy I described above. The ones who stayed at the group homes showed up at the social every Wednesday night. The ones who ran away did not.
The clinic was right across the street from the house I grew up in. It could hold a patient for twenty-four hours. The patients escaped with some regularity. After a while, they would also regularly come to our house. The lights were always on, and we tended to stay up late. We’d give them popcorn and watch TV with them until the cops showed up to take them back (we could not - it was a law).
Even mental patients don’t seem to like being wards of the state. They run away. Liberal policies have encouraged that. We can argue the right and wrong of it, but it’s a liberal policy.
Just for the record, because of my mother, I have known many mentally ill people, talked to many social workers, and come from the most liberal state in the US. I have literally given the shirt off my back (okay, I’ve donated clothing) to some of these people.
This is not a black and white issue. Some of these people would do most any odd job to make a little extra money. Some would not. They were all mentally ill.
Oh of course now its a joke in poor taste, that makes it so much less offensive and less bigoted.
Whatever, hilarious as usual, perhaps chalk up more people you have humiliated that can’t really fight back. Does all your humour revolve around demeaning others, or is that just imp and you? Maybe next time you should advertise the OP was all in fun so that the people you are belittling don’t get the wrong idea and just think you are being twats, because lets face it it’s not like you moved it to the rant section so that people knew it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Lame. I’m positively stoked I don’t get this type of “humour”. You can keep it. =D>
Twas Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher over here, The wicked witch of the East. So definitely conservative. Whoever you want to blame right wing or ultra right wing, it certainly wasn’t very clever and smacks more of saving a few bucks.
The problem here, Sidhe, is that the joke does not indict every homeless person. Certainly not the way you indict everyone who might think it’s funny. It is lazy to generalise.
Who thought it was funny? It’s retarded, didn’t everyone kind of get that at least?
I only abused people who find this sort of ridiculous mockery thing big and clever. Presumably we now know that’s you. In which case if you insist on it being big and clever I stand by my assessment after the fact. Perhaps cripples should be next, now that would be hilarious wouldn’t it.
We get it you find this sort of thing funny. Some of us don’t find it funny so next time put it where it belongs in the mindless bilge section so we know not to take it seriously. Is making crass jokes basically what passes for social science these days? No then why is it here in the first place, and why did the rest end up in the rant section and not this one? Was imp deliberately trolling this thread too?
I thought that it was pretty funny. The joke is just a joke. If the joke had said, “Discluding mentally handicapped people who are handicapped to such a degree that they are unable to perform even menial tasks,” then the joke would not have been funny. Not because the joke would disclude such people, but because that’s way too much unnecessary crap slowing down the build-up to the punch line.
I don’t think it is that clever. It’s a decent joke, I chuckled. If it was extremely clever, I would have laughed uproariously.
Chad Daniels covered fat people, not necessarily cripples, though. He was talking about if you want to solve the problem of handicapped parking for people that are so fat they qualify for a handicap sticker, then what you need to do is give them a sticker and special spots at the bottom of a large hill about a half mile from their destination. That way, when they cease to be morbidly obese, they can park in a regular spot, problem solved.
I’m paraphrasing, but it was hilarious.
Why should it be in the mindless bilge section when the joke is essentially social commentary?
From a technical standpoint, by the way, I don’t think one can really troll one’s own thread.
Pav - funny post.
Can’t wait for you to get reviewed, now.
I dunno. I thought it was a decent joke. Yeah, with societal overtones.
The thing of it is, is that it could just as well be mocking Republicans as homeless people. Which is why it’s not offensive.
Think about it, Sidhe.
Maybe the joke was made up by a liberal.
I thought it sucked, but then its a matter of opinion. I think the problem is partly impenetent, since he never advertises whether its a joke or not we have to assume everything he says is a joke, that merely leaves the decision to laugh with him or at him up in the air. Of course part of the problem is also this season makes me angry, but I think impenetents posts are just generally lazy all round and would no doubt have reacted as if it was offensive regardless. No effort and no thought, which I presume was not the norm back in the day, at least I hope so. If it’s not 3 lines of meaningless prose it’s a cut and paste job with no point of view. Frankly he just shouldn’t post the same drivel so often and save us all the 1 second thought it takes to appreciate his “humour”. I know for a fact I’m not alone in thinking his 1 track record style of nonsense is wearing a little thin.
Is it too much to ask for a smilie, or to put such frivolous things in an appropriate area of the forum instead of cluttering up serious areas? Apparently it is. I did ask him to move it and when he didn’t I assumed I was meant to take it seriously, who knew, it’s not American humour so it must just be Republicans that find this stuff funny. Fair enough, it’s not my cup of crap. Knock yourself out.
If it’s meant to make you feel smug and condescending then job done. I didn’t find others falling off chairs funny as a kid, maybe I lack the gene for schardenfreuder. I don’t really care any more though, if you want to explain it further that’s up to you, but as far as I’m concerned it sucked and it was lost and still is lost on me.
Social commentary it is, although barely, social science it most certainly is not. If he wanted a discussion on it at all then he should of prefaced it with some point, if not then he should of just placed it in mundane babble or the rant section where this “republican hilarity” stuff usually ends up. Consistency is appreciated.
EDIT: I think Chad Daniels has a point.