Recently, a friend of mine became the object of the Internet’s daily Two Minutes’ Hate. An artist who’s been unemployed and down on his luck, he had the misfortune of appearing in a story which Salon decided to call “A Hipster on Food Stamps.” The article followed some college-educated but poor and underemployed people trying to eat tasty, nutritious meals while relying on food stamps. To me, it was a poignant commentary on both the failure of American capitalism and the deep pathologies of our food system.

But what the article seemed to call forth in its readers was unending bile and rage directed at people deemed insufficiently deserving of a public benefit.

The title certainly didn’t help. Calling someone a “hipster” is a license to spew all kinds of demented hate. Since the term carries connotations of slackers and trust funds, the image of “hipsters on food stamps” is designed to provoke the conclusion that someone is lazily taking advantage of the system. Certainly that was how things played at the blog of the libertarian Reason magazine, which mocked the notion that someone might both deserve economic assistance and make art and wear odd clothes.