Feed the Poor vs. Heal the Sick

Looking at this from another angle. What happens to our society and culture based on the political decisions we make?

Some feel that the deal that’s being discussed in the Senate to end the shutdown is a betrayal. Many will claim to be able to predict the future about what the outcome will be. To be honest, I’d hoped for more from our Senate leadership, but I don’t know what I’d do in that situation.

What happens when you pit the sick versus the hungry? How long are you willing to let people suffer? It’s a special kind of cruelty to pit the poor versus the sick, and it takes a special kind of monster to do that. Make no mistake—this is exactly what happened. Although this capitulation feels like a betrayal, from a political party that just won handily across the nation, there is a political betrayal here. Many will discuss that, I’m sure. But I also feel that few will discuss how falling into the whims of a dictator on this issue is also a betrayal to the young men in this nation, many of whom are circling the drain we call the manosphere.

Let me explain.

A pillar in the “red pill” ideology is anti-empathy. The idea is that empathy is a weakness and that it causes people to make bad decisions. The soft core explanation for this is that they prefer rational thinking over emotion, but that’s just to get people through the door. The net effect of this anti-empathy poison is to justify cruelty. That sort of thinking is dangerous and short-sighted.

What I can see from the outside is power being wielded with cruelty, and the cruelty winning. I’m not sure how the mental calculus works for Chuck Schumer. Maybe it’s “quit while you’re ahead.” I see this in roller derby games, where teams can control the clock to some degree throughout the game. A team will run up the score and stop the bout to prevent the opponent from scoring.

But it doesn’t look like that to me.

I’m scratching my head here because the Democrats got little more than a promise to vote on the health care issue, which means the Americans got little more than a promise to vote on the health care issue. From the ground, it looks like cruelty won. It looks like causing people to suffer was the catalyst for change that red-pill people claim.

This is not the message that we want to perpetuate in our society.

I play a lot of chess, and my eight-year-old does as well. They’ll sometimes get emotionally attached to a chess piece, and then be unwilling to sacrifice that piece (particularly the horse) when the move is needed to win the game. So I can see a situation where emotions can cloud judgment to the detriment of the larger group. The hard-line stance of anti-empathy causes society to crumble. You can’t build a society based on a lack of empathy. A lot of why society works (ask anyone living in a city, if you doubt me) is the presence of empathy. Empathy is the super-power that allows us to imagine what others are going through, and sometimes…often…we may be going through the same things. This helps to align our collective interests and is a boon to any civilized community. To lack empathy is to show a world where it’s every person for themselves. We see it in the infighting in the Trump Regime. We see it in the way they demonize their political opponents.

Empathy is the glue of civilization. And I believe that it’s simply not true that anti-empathy is power, despite this move. Because millions of people march, protest, and spend their finite amount of time on this Earth supporting their friends and families, and even strangers. This is why there are nearly non-stop protests at ICE facilities. That’s a strength.

But it’s not what people will be talking about now. What people will talk about now is how Trump won. They will talk about how the bleeding hearts caved (again). And they’ll use this to add to their arsenal of examples as to why empathy is a weakness. And I hate that narrative because it’s not true, but it takes inspection to understand that fact.

Here’s the silver lining about the bad decision. The silver lining is that Congress must come into session to pass the bill, because there are changes to it. The House of Representatives has to come back, and then this brings the issue of denying the seat to Rep-elect Grijalva full-on into the spotlight, which brings the Epstein files right back into the public eye. So from a cynical, politics-only perspective, there is an upside. The last excuse Mike Johnson has to not seat her has just evaporated.

Also, and importantly, the people on SNAP won’t have to go hungry for the reason that SNAP is being cruelly denied to them. Whether they can afford to eat when the health care premiums hit, we’ll have to see. Then we’ll know for sure whether the capitulation was worth it.

I’m guessing the answer is no. So bring out the primary challengers, and I’ll see you in the streets.