This guy would give Scrooge a bad name. He is a gold plated void surrounded by a sphincter muscle. He should be taken out back a beaten to a pulp allowed to heal and beaten again.

The Poorest man in golden bed…

Lack of money in the pockets of one’s parents does not magically produce criminals in the next generation. I grew up with many poor people who never considered committing the kinds of crimes you are ascribing to the poor. However, it was our experience that many of the “rich” kids we grew up along side did commit many of those crimes. You know, for shits and giggles.

Yes on the first one, no on the second. “Foreigner” in Greek is “xenos,” the root of “xenophobia,” fear of strangers.

I believe someone posted earlier that “Sinos” means “sour.”

There are only 3 words you definitely cannot type on BoingBoing.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/01/boing-boing-moderati.html

Dickheads like this guy are all about ‘hard work’ for other people, but never seem to be above simple bullying for themselves.

Gotta love ad hominem.

I was once at a Tony Roma’s (chain rib restaurant) and noticed that the local Dennis Kucinich for President campaign was having their meeting there. Kucinich is a vegan.

Oy vey, Adamnvillani, where to begin?

You don’t have to be a Limbaugh-style dittohead to support a political candidate. Kucinich is a vegan, but turning all Americans into vegans was not part of his political platform. I wanted Al Gore to be President in 2000 while disagreeing with his stance on capital punishment (he’s for, I’m against). Your ribmunching Kucinich fans were not being hypocrites.

Libertarians oppose public funding for just about everything except national defense. I recently read a blog comment wherein a self-identified Libertarian referred to public libraries as “welfare book stores”. So, unless it was a meeting of “Libertarians Who Are Libertarian About Everything Except Libraries”, they were being hypocrites. It would be like the Richard Dawkins fan club meeting in a church basement, unless they were actually the “Richard Dawkins And Delicious Irony Fan Club.”

Here endeth the lesson, as Richard Dawkins would not say.

Surprising to read lots of negative comments about ‘poor people’ here on BB. Are you seriously trying to propose the old tired adage that because people are poor they are more prone to criminal conduct than to people who are ‘not poor’. [...]

The only difference between poor people and rich people in my experience is that if you have money it’s easier to get out of bad situations with a few extra bucks in your pocket over the person who has less money and who cannot afford the same type of help that the rich person has available to him.

I think you are reading too much into the comments, and overstating their prevalence.

Do people with money break laws? Sure. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they break more laws than poor people do.

But I’d also guess that they break different laws, for the most part. The kinds of crimes that panic rich people tend to be violent or property crimes, while rich people who break laws are generally doing things like embezzlement, fraud, etc. There’s a lot more to the “difference between poor people and rich people” than how much money they can pay a defense lawyer. There are fundamental differences in motivations and types of behavior, driven in large part by what opportunities exist or not in the life experience of each.

While I don’t agree with the logic involved (and frankly, I don’t see any indication anyone else here does either), it’s not hard to see how a rich person might mistakenly take the position that certain kinds of public services or projects could attract poor people to their neighborhood, and that doing so in some way increases the rich person’s exposure to certain kinds of crime.

In other words, the BB comments you are criticizing aren’t expressing the views of the commenter their self, but rather that commenter’s observation of the behavior of some subset of the population of rich people.

The library is a village department funded by the general fund, same as the police, fire department and public works. It has no taxing power. Its budget comes from the village, and much of that money comes from sales tax, as there is no property tax. And sales at the mall and other businesses are down.

“We’re probably going through what a lot of towns are going through,” Niemeyer says of the budget cuts. “None of these things are easy.”

It’s not complicated for Xinos.

“You may like the library, but when you call 9-1-1, you want a policeman or a fireman before someone to tell you where the books are in the library,” says the man who has talked of privatizing, outsourcing or even closing the library.

“I understand that my philosophy is conservative,” Xinos says, adding that government just needs to catch bad guys, put out fires, fix the streets and make sure buildings are sturdy.

He campaigned, successfully, against a plan to bring subsidized housing for seniors into town by declaring, “I don’t want to live next to poor people. I don’t want poor people in my town.”"
(Xinos, Constatine. Interview by Burt Constable. Daily Herald. Daily Herald, 1 Oct. 2009. Web. 8 Oct. 2009. < http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=325508>.)