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The global trend is toward the poor getting less poor...

Are you sure? I'd hope so, but it doesnt seem that way, where do you derive this from?

Might be an appropriate time to differentiate on relative inequality vs absolute or something. I don't know what is the good metric to even use here. For all I know being a farmer is awesome. Though probably not.

I can't speak for full blown farmers, but I grow enough vegetables to sustain my family, and raise enough chickens to never be short of eggs, and I think it's one of those things where if you enjoy it, it's  rewarding enough in itself.

The problem is that the current socio-economic structure doesn't allow there to not be a group of poor people.  More unfortunate is the fact that there is no simple solution to this class issue.  Communism has already proven to be flawed in many ways, and one of the few other options I can think of is the abolition of currency, which would be a lot like communism, not to mention virtually impossible in todays money-centric society.

Pleased to meet you.

I do what I can.  I'm guessing that that's not the norm?

To compound this, the central Discordian text, the Principia Discordia suggests that a Discordian should never believe what he or she reads, thereby causing a paradox, wherein the Principia renders all of its own contents moot.

I've actually thought about this particular part of the principia pretty extensively, and the conclusion that I have come to accept is that it is meant to make a statement about reaching your own conclusions.  If you follow everything you read with blind faith that it's the truth, you never really think for yourself.  At the same time, if you don't believe anything you read, then you still never really think for yourself.  You have to decide what's true and what's not.

Sort of like how nothing is true, everything is permissible.

As for why people become discordians, I must say I've never actually met one in real life, and I haven't been on this forum for very long so I don't know how it plays out here either.  That being said, the way the book is written could appeal to people who don't understand the sophisticated portion of the humorous, choosing to just take it at the face value of the parts they can understand, which would leave them with act crazy and do whatever because discordianism says words and stuff.

In short, such people are idiots, a la "LODD could also staand for lots of deluded dupes" because people don't understand it really.

And now for why I became a discordian, because this comment is already a wall of text and I don't want to half-ass my first wall post on this particular forum;
I was on deployment with the Navy, and sick of not believing in the afterlife or spirits in the sky or whatever, so I brought along a plethora of religious books, and started reading to find something that would appeal to me.  I read the Qu'ran, The Torah, the Talmud, some stuff on Wicca, Thelema, the left hand path, and the satanic Bible.  All of it was crap.  Then I notices a folder on my computer called discordianism, and went meh, fuck it.  It was the greatest thing I ever read, changed my life, yet I was lonely.  I was the sole discordian I knew of.  Then a few years later in a drunken stupor, I went man, I bet there's some kind of discordian forum on the Internet somewhere.
and lo, I was enlightened.