And then there are cultural tropes calling for pity for those "less fortunate" "disadvantaged" those who "just ain't making it." I have very little patience for this literary genre - which is what gets me in trouble on this list. This does not mean that I am incapable of compassion (I am) - it simply means that I have low tolerance for moralizing, con-artistry, theatrical emotionalism, mountebankery, free-riding, orthodoxy, and following the party lines.
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Perhaps it's true that what "gets you into trouble on this list" is your lack of patience for "moralizing...mountebankery".
An alternative explanation's available.
More likely it's the tone, which, even if unintentional, sounds an awful lot like the ventings of a person who believes himself to be superior, in maybe every way, to the people under scrutiny.
Or to put it another way...
Long ago, a woman told me, while we were in the midst of an argument, that it wasn't what I said (she conceded I was right about whatever the hell it was were going back and forth about) but the way I said it that got her hot as lava.
And not in a good way.
You'd think a fellow such as yourself -- who often mentions the possibility that our biological componentry might determine much of what we do (for example, the tendency of some people to ignore hard facts and vote for a person like Mr. Bush, whose deficiencies seem so clear to others) -- would understand that the reception of ideas may also be, to whatever extent, bio determined and tune your presentation accordingly.
Regarding what you refer to as those "...cultural tropes calling for pity for those 'less fortunate' 'disadvantaged' those who 'just ain't making it"...
In the United States, as in other places within the neo-liberal universe, appeals to aid the poor have travelled full circle from the gains made during the Great Depression -- in which a wider (though far from complete) acceptance grew of the notion that a modern, civilized nation should not allow millions of its citizens to simply fall into destitution without collective intervention to prevent it -- to an earlier model of unreflective, alternating pity and fear: tender scenes of wide eyed children in filthy rags, fear of the terrible consequences of not providing some amount of help (visions of hordes of poor descending on peaceful burbs) and related imagery.
What's missing is the idea of a commonwealth that advances together towards greater general health, knowledge, tranquility and civilization.
Humans, like all animals, thrive when a particular set of physical and mental needs have been met. A society that provides for those needs -- through whatever arrangement seems best to its members -- will be more peaceful and pleasant to live in than one which doesn't.
And here is the great irony and maybe the killing joke of advanced industrial society: for perhaps the first time, it's possible to provide for the material needs of an astounding number of people. Despite this, our organizational limitations and self destructive tendencies (given a powerful framework via capitalism) prevent our latent potential from being more than partially realized.
.d.