I got this blog post off of Facebook. At first I skimmed it, and then in the middle of the post I found Bayes' Theorem, correctly stated (for the two case situation).
So I thought: perhaps this blog post deserves further attention and so I read it.
Yes, there was the anger from a poor person as being seen as something in a petri dish to be studied, and anger out of the common assumption that the poor are poor...because they deserve to be.
I admit to being a bit surprised as I read this person: "gee, this person seems reasonably intelligent ...I wonder why...." and then I realized that I (a proud liberal) was falling into the same old trap. The article is below the fold:
Here is the blog post.
A section of the piece that really struck me:
Being poor is being fetishized, demonized, and infantilized by teams of “poverty experts” from the middle and upper classes.
Being poor is hoping you and your disabled spouse make it through winter alive without freezing to death, or dying in a house fire from a space heater mishap after your gas got cut off because they raised the rates by 20% and you can’t afford the bill.
Being poor means nothing around your run-down home ever works and everything is in serious disrepair because there’s no money, or way of getting money, to fix what’s in disrepair.
Being poor and white means being an invisible non-person.
Being poor means you have no pictures of your “ancestors” — or even of yourself and your sister — after being evicted where anything you might have had got taken away from you when your roach-infested ghetto apartment got padlocked.
Being poor is a lifetime of everything always getting taken away from you.
Being poor is being wrong even when you’re right.
Being poor is never fitting in.
Being poor is guilty until proven innocent and still getting slapped with unaffordable fines or a criminal conviction regardless.
Being poor means never getting a chance your entire life, and then having some self-centered privileged person tell you how poor they are when they enjoy far more economic opportunity, comfort, and security than you will ever get a chance to have — especially if you’re still poor by the time you’re middle-aged (and therefore unemployable) after an entire lifetime of never getting a chance for a good job, no matter how hard you tried.
Being poor means going hungry at least two or three days out of each month for years.
Being poor is living in a neighborhood where you can’t put chairs or a couch near the window because of the drive-by shootings.
Being poor is dying or becoming permanently disabled from pregnancy and childbirth complications.
Being poor is facing having to go blind from glaucoma because there really isn’t “all this help out there.”
There is far more there.
I was also reminded of what William Julius Wilson said in his book When Work Disappears. He states that even when there ARE jobs to be had, often they are too far away from where the poor live for them to take advantage of them (given that public transportation is poor or non-existent).
Unfortunately, the poor don't vote in large numbers and so they remain a mostly powerless voting block; I haven't a clue as to what the solution is.
6:00 AM PT: Yes, this blog post was written in 2010, but it was new to me.