I could eat alphabet soup and shit something that makes more sense than this.
In this installment the prog speaks on public sector unions:
On public sector unions…..Is it not ironic that the very people that demonize and whip up anger about public sector unions are public sector government workers that worked to be elected to office, so they could have insane salaries that they could raise on their own anytime, lifetime benefits, and a pension….All at the expense of THE TAXPAYERS. The very same people in fact who will happily pass billions on tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, extend insane subsidies and benefits to billion dollar industries, vote for decades long irresponsible trillion dollar wars in league with war profiteers, and throw billions of dollars to the banks and Wall Street gamblers that collapsed our economy? And after all of those TRILLIONS of dollars pissed away they have the nerve to turn the attention on teachers and poor people as the problem? If you took away all the food stamps and teachers salaries and pensions entirely, the entire amount would be a fraction of the above mentioned insane government spending entirely authorized and executed by these teacher/poor person budget hawks. Like always, they give trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars away to the very rich and then attempt to balance the shortfall on the backs of everyone else. It’s almost as if the corporate elites that were making windfall profits off of taxpayer dollars were orchestrating these very calculated and divisive schemes to turn the middle class against one another so they don’t notice who is actually fucking them. The sad thing is, that half of the people actually BUY it and actually blame teachers and poor people for the financial havoc the corporate elite have wrought. It’s almost as if half of the people are in a cult, completely unable to see the strings attached to them and the puppeteers making them dance.
A response on Peter Schiff’s video about banning profits:
I don’t know why you insist on sending me links to the most insane people you can find on the Internet, but here we go; NO ONE has ever advocated banning profits. When people talk about income inequality they are talking about the mere fact that since Reagan, the average CEOs pay has increased a hundred fold or more. There are only so many pieces of the pie to go around, and it seems as the wealthy skim more and more and more off the top, I.e. get richer and richer and richer, there is less to go around and everyone else gets poorer and poorer and poorer. This isn’t rocket science. Corporate profits are at an all time high, wages have not kept up with inflation and have remained stagnant. The ONLY people who are making any upward mobility whatsoever are the fat cats at the very top. If you have 10 people at a pizza party, and five pizzas arrive to feed everyone, and the enormous obese guy takes four pizzas for himself, the other 9 people are barely going to get a slice each. The guy that shows up late is only going to have the crumbs in the box. The problem is not that corporations make a profit, the problem is that they don’t share the profits with the people at the bottom that make them possible.
I think my IQ just dropped 5 points. Does this guy have someone to follow him around saying “Breathe in, Breathe out?” The second part is fairly boilerplate progressive zero-sum derp. The first part is so incoherent I couldn’t even finish reading it. Was there anything in there that makes sense?
Things that make sense aren’t part of Derp’s oeuvre.
So much this…
“so they could have insane salaries that they could raise on their own anytime”
Not exactly since the passage of the XXVII Amendment
“There are only so many pieces of the pie to go around” sort of true except the pie continues to increase. Common sense should demonstrate this: 300 million people have an overall better standard or living than did 10 million in the 18th century.
“wages have not kept up with inflation and have remained stagnant”; true but has nothing to do with profits.
Also, well done equating public sector unions with the teachers and the poor.
wages have not kept up with inflation and have remained stagnant
Actually, not really true.
Also, absolutely not true for compensation.
Hmm, I thought I had read somewhere reliable that wages were running behind inflation partly because of Fed policy. But maybe I’m mis-remembering.
Agree on compensation: that’s something else I read somewhere.
So he actually uses the pie metaphor?
Not to mention the “same people who” argument.
So he also has a problem with people like Obama and Chelsea Clinton making money hand over fist not for making something useful, but for having political connections?
That’s different, because reasons.
I could eat alphabet soup and shit something that makes more sense than this.
Indeed.
As revolting as it is, I find myself in agreement that elected officials are indeed public sector workers. And should be treated a such, not deified as some sort of society leaders.
I’d also be happy to cut their salary, benefits, perks and other accoutrements along with other government works.
Elected offices should pay zero money or benefits. They should be part time done for free jobs with a one term ever limit. And I mean one term as in never again for any office. When that happens and not until, we can start seeing improvement in the level of corruption we have now. Also, cronyism of any type should be a life time sentence with no possibility of parole. In fact, hanging after tar and feathers would be better.
Almost agree. I put it to you that if you don’t pay them, they’ll pass laws benefiting their own business or the business that offers them a cushy job post term.
What I propose, in short, is to pay them well and then after their single term give them a 100%, adjusted for inflation, lifetime (and life of spouse) pension…under the condition that they may never earn or receive another dime from any other entity for the rest of their lives.
You’d have loads of people lining up to do it, as it’s a good deal for your average Joe. It’s not a good deal for those interested in power/big money.
I think if you tell them they can’t lobby for 10 years after leaving office, you pretty much end the practice. The problem today is that these people leave with lots of connections and influence and then work together to rig things. If they have to wait 10 years the landscape changes and their value to people that want to rig the game all but disappears.
Funnily, one of the arguments for paying elected officials is so that they don’t need to accept bribes. And that’s working like a charm, obviously.
Problem is, they call the bribes by many different names now. One of which is campaign contributions.
There’s no such thing as a bribe. There’s only extortion. Who has the power?
Bribes are a myth created to help shield the politicians. Those poor, poor politicians have to take bribes to survive.
Yeah the problem with not paying elected officials is that it means that literally only the rich could ever run for office, and not like the every day rich, say the millionaire who is a millionaire because he owns a small landscaping or plumbing company, those guys only stay rich for as long as they run their company. It would literally be only the richest of the rich who could afford to be politicians.
That wouldn’t be a problem if we adopted the Roman system, where the rich government officials were expected to pay for infrastructure and festivals out of their own pocket in a bid for glory and prestige, leaving the tax rates on everybody else fairly low. Of course, that system, like all systems, worked right up until it didn’t, so YMMV.
The problem is, even if elected officials are only elected once, there’s still the Sir Humphreys running everything before and after. Perhaps even more so if the heads are one and gone.
I find myself in agreement that elected officials are indeed public sector workers. And should be treated a such, not deified as some sort of society leaders.
You’re right. But, I’d suggest it’s understandable. For millennia, the peoples of the world were organized around what I’ll call the “tribal” model. In the tribal model, the government sits of top of the society. People may be permitted to do some things. But it’s strictly allowed to do so at the discretion of the king, the laird, the padron or what have you. They were in charge of the tribe and everyone else was to obey their commands.
Only a few hundred years ago, the idea that government might be only one institution in society charged with a defined and specific task and held responsible for accomplishing that task started to come around. Really, though, the idea doesn’t have much of a place in the public psyche. When aliens in a sci-fi movie say “Take me to your leader”, where do they get escorted? It’s always the president or the U.N. When people talk about the president of their choice, how many of them are talking about some guy with a specific job and how many of them are talking about a god-king?
The problem is not that corporations make a profit, the problem is that they don’t share the profits with the people at the bottom that make them possible.
Of course, once they do that, they aren’t profits anymore.
And this person forgets that employees receive a share of the profits in their wages and benefits. But hey, let’s write a law making employer-based health insurance vastly more expensive. then complain about how wages aren’t increasing as much as progs think they should be.
The brain droppings of May Day.
Moar like shit flinging at the May Day Monkey House.
“Shit Flinging at the May Day Monkey House” sounds like a great album title.
and the enormous obese guy takes four pizzas for himself
Fat shaming! The skinny people should gladly give up their portions so the big guy won’t go home hungry. Doesn’t your friend even science?
Totally on topic, Venezuela increases minimum wage by 60%.
OK, at this point I’m beginning to suspect Presidente Maduro is one of us, and is frustrated in his attempts to bring down the socialism. “What more can I do?”, I picture him screaming in the dead of night.
I read that yesterday as well. I believe that Maduro played Tropico 4 a few years ago and decided to emulate El Presidente, because no one could accidentally be this hilariously stupid/evil.
Real life is Easy Mode. In Tropico, your opposition is actually on the ball and always unites.
(OK, I may be talking bollocks, I only played the first Tropico, so they may have implemented the more realistic political system)
And thank you, YouTube, the entire soundtrack is there! Certainly would make life under Maduro more bearable.
“El Presidente is always right, even when he’s wrong!”
this makes me think of Brian Doyle Murray’s line in Club Paradise: “While you’re at it, raise the minimum wage to a buck a day. Sure! Give the common man some dignity for crissakes!”
This is great! Now these impoverished, starving Venezuelans will be able to go out and buy food!
Wikipedia has a nice graph that illustrates the massive (and growing) disparity between the official (per Venezuelan gov’t) exchange rate and the actual exchange rate for the Bolivar. It’s a good visual aid to illustrate the progressively delusional state of a socialist nation. Move along, nothing to see here.
If your dollar value never fluctuates even though your GDP and external markets do, it’s a pretty good sign you’re being fucked.
…and what are paychecks? Or stock ownership for that matter?
“I don’t know why you insist on sending me links to the most insane people you can find on the Internet”
So you feel like you’re in good company.
“If you have 10 people at a pizza party, and five pizzas arrive to feed everyone, and the enormous obese guy takes four pizzas for himself, the other 9 people are barely going to get a slice each.”
By-laws and contracts deal with situations like that — but CORPORASHUNZ never use those….
Well if the fat guy picked up 40% of the tab, I see no problem.
Shit, I mean 80% of the tab.
Well that’s no good. The fat guy should only be allowed to eat no more than anyone else, still made to pay 80% of the tab, and then have to give the other 9 people $20.
The funny thing is that the pizza analogy actually describes how communism is supposed to work.
How do you work a pogrom into pizza?
They’re the anchovies.
Certain business leaders may consider “big government” or socialism more of an immediate threat to their interests than communism. Are they allowing themselves to be deluded by their own propaganda to the effect that organized labor in this country is in favor of big government or the nationalization of industry?
Nothing could be further from the truth. The main function of American trade unions is collective bargaining. It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government. Unions, as well as employers, would vastly prefer to have even Government regulation of labor-management relations reduced to a minimum consistent with the protection of the public welfare — George Meany on pub sec unions.
Let’s for the sake of argument say wealth really is a pizza pie that is dristributed unfairly.
Who do we put in charge of making sure it’s distributed equitably?
Who do we trust? How are they chosen?
Democracy is the answer, of course. And by democracy, we mean Democrats and other politicians progressives agree with. Not Republicans who just happen to win elections that we then complain are just rigged whether by gerrymandering (forget all the state elections lost) and the Russians.
Well DUH!
You put the marxists in charge…
Look, we had the right person and it was her turn, but Russians!
Don’t forget the uppity deplorables and their resistance to just letting their superiors/betters decide what is best for them…
How dare these low lives not just accept their lot, huh?
HOW DARE THEY!
I’ve pretty much heard that argument after the election. The Left hates the rich but they really hate the poor.
That’s cause the poor are supposed to shut up and do whatever the rich leftists tell them they should do.
They hate everyone, themselves more than anyone else.
They also think that they will be the ones with the clipboards. The Old Bolsheviks thought so too until Stalin lined their asses against the wall.
Yeah, I’m sure it would play out much the same today. After they get their revolution and their strongman in place, then they say ‘Hey, we’re the Intelligentsia and we need to tell you what to do, dear leader!’. Next is the part about up against the wall.
The modern left has hilariously rejected populism in all its forms in favour of a elitist feudalism. They will shovel ‘free healthcare’ and redistributionist schemes down at the serfs, in return for submission and complete compliance with their demands.
Sounds familiar…
They hate people who refuse to submit. They are dumbfounded by people who they’ve tried to pay off every which way to submit to their authority and who continue to refuse.
I don’t know if this is a legal requirement, but the company I work for sounds out a letter once a year detailing your wages, and other compensation; itemized to the dollar amount. The amount spent beyond my base wage is crazy – 401K, the life insurance freebie I get, bonus checks, and the big elephant in the room: health insurance.
Apparently I’m worth a well-appointed Mercedes S-class per year or something close to that. If you add up all the employees – ranging from the bottom factory workers – and up to the VPs, you are talking millions of dollars going “out the door” to keep us employed. And given the thin margins in this industry I’m honestly surprised the doors stay open.
*sends (sheesh – the middle-aged alzheimers is starting)
Not alzheimers. Your mask is on too tight. Loosen the straps.
I would like to know how much my company is subsidizing my health insurance, but I know it is a lot. Enough that it was worth them to put $600 per year* into my HSA to switch from a standard plan to an HSA plan.
*or, at least, this year. We will see going forward if that goes up down or stays the same.
They just added the HSA option this year. From my calculation, the $600 was what was necessary to make the change a net benefit beyond all but the weirdest of situations.
My insurance deduction per pay check dropped a bunch, a got a “free” $600 into my HSA, I have the benefit of the HSA, and worst case scenarios are still better out-of-pocket than under the other plan. There is a little more out of pocket per visit, but that is okay.
I know it had to save the company more than $600 or they wouldn’t have given the option. Win win.
Maybe that was Obama’s eleventh-dimensional chess move from the beginning, not to bring about a public option but to push everyone into HSAs to escape high-deductible, high-premium plans. He’s secretly a market fundamentalist.
My work puts $1k into my HSA per year for switching to the HDHP program. Calculating it out, my medical expenses would have to fall into a pretty narrow window for the HDHP to not make sense.
Of course, they keep raising my deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, so…
The $600 eliminates that window, by just a few bucks at the narrowest point.
The only scenario I can imagine where Im not better is a large number of office visits where I would have paid $25 co-pay per visit, and instead am paying full price while under deductible. I dont remember the number, but I think it would take like 50 office visits to make that happen though.
And everyone conveniently ignores why those benefit packages have grown to such extent. The government incentivizes certain behaviors, and then bitches about those incentives working so it can expand its reach even more.
The whole focus on wages is disingenuous. All stagnation the left points to vanishes when benefits are factored in. Total compensation has in fact grown substantially.
Doesn’t count because free shit!
And employers have realized that the only way they can really control real wages is by cutting benefits. Hence the rise of contractors, part time, etc.
Derpmining is a dirty and dangerous job, further harried by advances in frerping. I have the greatest admiration for those resilient souls who continue toughing it out toiling in those dismal pits.
Derpetologist really is our Mike Rowe
Speaking of derp, the series Dear White People is now streaming on Netflix. Is there any brave soul out there who will sit down and watch a few episodes and do a rundown, in the name of derp science?
If it’s the social justice equivalent of Drawn Together, I’m game.
NO
I will. I’ve been wanting to watch it anyway so I’ll let you know how it goes.
You’d have to pay me enough to make me legitimately privileged to watch that.
So you’re asking for the ultimate sacrifice?
Between that, Bill Nye and Hot Girls Wanted… I’d be tempted to cancel Netflix, but who am I kidding, I won’t. But I’m sick of seeing it “recommended” to me (so very curious that they did away with star ratings right before Dear White People and Bill Nye came out)
Recommended? It’s pops up on auto play when I turn on Netflix. I’d cancel except it’s pretty cheap.
Netflix isn’t a charity though. There must actually be demand for this crap.
There may be a demand, or it may be that Netflix is flush with enough cash that they can afford to take a few losses to salve the execs’ sensibilities. Or maybe those programs are relatively cheap to produce, thereby turning a profit even without large numbers of viewers. After all, Netflix dropped $100M on “The Crown”, a series about the current Queen of England, and that was seen as enough of a success to justify ordering five more seasons. The prog shows would need merely 10% of the number of American viewers who would watch British history to justify a $10M budget, which would probably be doable to get a cheap show out.
It may be worth noting that the red star ratings have always* been “adjusted” based upon Netflix’s profile of your preferences. In other words, if you saw a title with 4.5 stars, somebody else with different tastes might see it with 3.5 stars (I don’t know how far the adjustment can go, only that I definitely saw different ratings on friends’ Netflix screens). Honestly, changing to a “how likely you are to like this” type system is really just making what was already mostly there more explicit.
* = At least since ca. 2012
Episodes?
I thought it was a movie?
fuck me. The movie made $4m at the box office. That justified a TV series?
Oh wait a minute, I agreed to watch the movie, I am not watching the TV show! Nope nope nope fuck nope I’m popping smoke on this one.
So I just looked up the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. The critic score was 91%, but the viewer score was 63%. when the viewer score and critic score are way off, usually that means there’s some fuckery about, and I have noticed that the viewer score is commonly higher than the critics, so when it isn’t, you can bet a crisp high five that the critics are fart sniffing over the film rather than actually reviewing it on it’s merits.
Speaking of fart sniffing, Al Gore is releasing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2017/mar/29/an-inconvenient-sequel-truth-to-power-movie-trailer" title="An Inconvenient Sequel” target=”_blank” >An Inconvenient Sequel.
Well, shit. I’ll just do it the old fashioned way.
A+ Gilmoring, brah
An A+ would involve turning every post below this one into some weird format.
Also, the link also still actually works, so at best, B+.
Gee, I wonder if he’ll review all the hilariously wrong predictions he made in the first film.
Review? He doubles down on them. Manhattan flooded just like he predicted!
I will leave it to the professionals like Derpetologist.
Projection is a hallmark defense mechanism of cultists.
Hell, I could write a whole article explaining how Marxism is a cult, by definition. I didn’t realize this until I saw a few of Sargon’s videos on their behaviors and case studies.
The dehumanizing of The Enemy (Lenin was good at this, it is a prerequisite for violence)
The punishment for ideological deviation
The fear of mistakenly deviating yourself (self criticism, self censorship, knee-jerk apologizing)
The ritual denunciation of apostates (those who deviate too far are lumped with The Enemy, and subject to career assassination)
Dog whistle social signalling
A sense of moral superiority
Widespread paranoia of things that don’t exist (right-wing extremists committing violence, which is in fact a projection of their own behavior)
Iron-clad confirmation bias (if it doesn’t fit my worldview, it’s right-wing propaganda)
Hostility to the concept of the family unit, which makes it harder to secure recruits
Severing of all other social ties to non-members of the cult (even as trivial as removing Facebook friends who disagree with you)
Indoctrination of the most vulnerable: children stuck in mandatory public schools
Belief in a utopia, only if the cult gets their way (all outsiders are actively working against the goal)
A by-any-means-necessary attitude, where consideration of tradeoffs is deemed counterproductive to the utopian goal (Climate cultists rejecting Nuclear, etc)
I could go on.
An example of climate cult ostracization (stolen from Ron Bailey)
“The dehumanizing of The Enemy”
This one is important and you gave a few examples there. But they not only dehumanize the enemy, the dehumanize themselves. To be human is to be an individual. But the left suppress that for the sake of the herd, the collective. People are not ants or bees. They have zero understanding of human nature, which is why they cannot even understand why they’ve been losing.
They understand one thing about human nature, and that’s greed and self interest. That’s why they aim to exterminate this behavior with a eugenics program, then when the remaining humans are 100% altruistic, a state will no longer be necessary and will “wither away” so that the true paradise can be realized. They believe that this is how human nature is “supposed” to behave.
More people need to understand that Marxists are eugenicists. And that their goals are impossible, but they are not acting out of deliberate malice. They genuinely believe the benefit of this utopia will justify the means. And this is why they’re sympathetic to murderous Communist regimes. The ones who don’t understand that try to cast those regimes as an Outsider by naming them State Capitalism.
They don’t understand why they’ve been losing because they believe they’re in a fight of good against evil. To put yourself in the shoes of an Outsider is to flirt with apostasy, and their fear of ejection makes that extremely uncomfortable.
That’s why they aim to exterminate this behavior with a eugenics program, then when the remaining humans are 100% altruistic, a state will no longer be necessary and will “wither away” so that the true paradise can be realized.
This is the doctrinal position of Marxism, but I don’t think that the second part has been a component of the modern left for some time now. The modern left is interested in control and management, the power itself is their goal in order to carve out the society they see fit. There’s no interest in the state withering away because the state is now the goal.
I disagree. They have a very stulted view even of those aspects of human nature. They
1. Refuse to understand voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit,
2. Adhere to beliefs which take as a premise the selective nonexistence of these traits, and
3. Lack the introspection to admit these traits exist in themselves as much as in those they hate.
Really, they don’t understand it at all.
*sigh*
If you have to explain your position by way of it’s not rocket science, that’s a paddlin’. And speaking of rocket science, there should be a rule for PSAs that rely on cellos, like NDT’s recent video on climate change. If you have to use ominous string backing to sell the urgency of your message, that’s a paddlin’.
I remember Thatcher making a good observation about the Left. When they go on and on about the gap, what they are really talking about is making the rich poorer, even if it’s at the expense of increased productivity and wealth creation.
Collectivism’s main objective is always to bring mass misery.
But at least we’ll be miserable together.
Ah, the time idiot Tories ditched her and Labor decided to try and make hay. Bet they regretted the idea.
When it’s time for me to burn all my bridges, this video is going up on my Facederp feed.
You can say what you want about Thatcher but she did not give any fucks at all. She called the Left for what they really were without any hesitation. Today our spineless leaders on the right are always trying to compromise with the Left and let them dictate the rules of the game.
Compromise:
Left: Drink this glass of poison.
Right: No
Left: Let’s compromise. Drink half this glass of poison.
Right: Okay
You can say what you want about Thatcher
OK.
She was the best political leader West has produced in at least 60 years, she saved the UK from drowning in its own shit, and I’d vote for a combination of her decomposing corpse and hologram reciting snippets of her speeches if I could.
Hmm….provincial election is coming up. A write-in vote just jumped to the top of my list…
Don’t blame me, I voted for Zombie Reagan.
The reason why the Left in Britain hate her so much is because she actually proved that their policies and philosophies were bankrupted. I mean think about it, pre-1980’s UK was a Leftist wet dream: socialized health care, the trade unions ability to shut the country down and dictate economic policy, lack of school choice, an active and robust welfare state, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. And what was the result? Double digit inflation, the trade unions screwing over the average citizen to maintain their power and benefits, inefficiencies with telecoms and energy because of nationalization, being referred to as the sick man of Europe.
Her coming into office and reversing a lot of their bullshit proved that the Leftist doctrine is a bankrupted and immoral one. The Left has never forgotten or forgiven her for exposing their policies as bullshit.
Sort of OT: I never understood why the Left pisses and moan about corporations not wanting to pay their workers anything, but also complain that women are paid horribly. If that’s the case then, if corporations are greedy assholes who wants to increase their profit margin, wouldn’t it make sense for them to only hire women?
Yeah. But then, like once a month, all enterprise and industry would shut down for three days. It would wreak havoc on the economy.
Can’t find enough women to fill those positions as they’re all in the kitchen making sammiches.
I believe that there are cases where women were discriminated against in terms of wages. I have never met or spoken to a woman who can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she is making 77% less than a man in her same position. I’m not saying it’s impossible, or that it never happens, but I suspect that much like campus rape if the reality matched the reported statistics you wouldn’t be able to swing a dead cat without hittin’ some chick making $0.77 on the $1.00. And there would be nothing but lawsuits.
Ugh, come on, Bill. 33% less. Need 100% more coffee.
23%
Sowell has covered the dishonesty of that statistic for decades. In short, you basically have to ignore every single influence on how and why men and women work different positions, different hours, and have different lifestyle choices in order to conclude that the statistic is a result of discrimination.
Is there cases where women are being paid less than men for an equal amount of productive work? Sure, but as you mention, they tend to get sued over it. Anecdotally it’s possible to find circumstances but overall there is no systemic root discrimination.
Hell I believe that there still ARE cases where they are discriminated against I just think they are rare isolated incidents not indicators of a general societal trend that needs to be fixed.
“bzzzt, ping,…does not compute!…bzzt.”
The CBO just released a report showing that public sector workers earn more than their private sector counterparts. The only exceptions are for those that hold specialized advanced degrees (such as MDs and the like). This poster doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
It’s interesting that the pizzas “arrive” there, via magic, or the grace of a loving God, or natural forces. Maybe fatty bought all the pizza. How much did Skinny McFuckface pony up? Maybe the person or persons unknown who bought the pizza wanted Big Pun to have four. Or, if the pizza really did materialize out of thin air, then nobody has any particular right to it. If Biggie got to the table first, well, too bad. Just because he’s a dick about sharing doesn’t mean putting pizza allotment in the hands of the NKVD will result in better outcomes or is morally justifiable in any way.
The reason why the Left advocates such policies is because they have no idea how wealth is created or even what is wealth. They think of the rich and business owners being like Scrooge McDuck. Having a room full of gold and him swimming in it. I call it the Scrooge McDuck Theory of Wealth and Savings.
It’s reflected in how they talk about people in different economic cohorts “receiving” X% of wealth. As if it just magically falls from the sky, but was never actually earned through work, investment, or innovation.
It’s fun to try to get a prog to actually explain, step by step, how their pet nefarious plots are enacted.
I’ve done this numerous times wrt to the Russians “hacking” the election.
It’s my new favorite hobby – seeking out that confused puppy look on their faces.
It boils down to belief in the fixed pie theory of economics. The way to argue against this, I think, is to prove to people that it’s not true, and in fact the opposite of the truth. Somebody who gets rich in the unfettered marketplace could only have done so by providing people with something more valuable than the money they paid for it. To understand this, you have to understand that value is subjective, which is why trade is mutually beneficial as long as it’s voluntary.
Unfortunately I can’t think of a simpler explanation, and some people who struggle with abstract thinking may never be able to grasp it. But it really is one of the most important lessons of economics.
Maybe easier to explain is the concept of capital flight. The moment you try to take the wealth to redistribute it, the rich jerks will take their ball and go home. Now you don’t even have a pizza any more. Just some half-chewed pieces of crust, and the poor significantly worse off.
A computer…
The KKKorporation that makes computers buys some silicon, some plastic and some raw metal worth about six to nine dollars. It manipulates those materials using labor (several hundred dollars worth) into a product worth up to several thousand dollars. The delta $9 to $2k, or $1991, is value (wealth) that didn’t exist prior to the process. Wealth is not fixed, it is created, and no one profits at the expense of others.
A co-worker recently started talking about how when some people make a lot of money, that money isn’t doing anything in the economy, and that’s why people shouldn’t be allowed to make a lot of money. I countered that it was all actually being lent out to people who needed it, fueling investment. He answered that I had just proven his point: it was being lent out and invested, not being spent on consumption which is what makes the economy better. I couldn’t even.
Setting aside the cargo cult attitude about consumption, what does he think people do with the money they get lent? “Oh, I just took out a loan for $10 million, I think I’ll put it in my Scrooge McDuck vault forever. It’s not like I need to pay the bank back with interest or anything.”
It’s weird that there weren’t leftists decrying the wealth of the Obamas. That’s a real puzzler, right there.
The nomenklatura nobly sacrifice every day to improve the lives of the proletariat. It is only fair and right that they are a little more equal than the rest of us.
My brother has a fallback line about how corporations should be taxed more heavily (he uses corporations and wealthy people interchangeably) for the privilege of doing business in the United States. See, it’s because we’re so rich that they come here to market their goods. Total magic pizzas logic.
Well, he totally did not get that bullshit from master bullshitter Obumbles.
You didn’t bake that pizza.
Stop bitterly clinging to that pizza, you!
Well, I mean there’s no way they could just order more pizza, amirite?
THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY PIZZAS IN THE WORLD!
If you order more, the poor won’t get theirs.
Why do I even need to explain this to you? It’s not rocket surgery.
Order more pizzas? Could your privilege even be more obvious?
Don’t phonesplain at me!
There are only so many pieces of the pie to go around
Genius.
The size of the pie is fixed, right? If that’s true, why are we so much richer than people in the middle ages, when there were a lot fewer people to share the pie?
Because government scientists improved the pie recipe, yo.
It never would have happened if government didn’t fund “science”!
You didn’t build that science.
The pie changed from NY to Chicago-style. It was called the Enlightenment. Look it up!
Not only could we not have gotten richer since the Middle Ages if the pie were fixed, we also would never have experienced any economic downturns (how did all that wealth disappear if the pie is fixed?). Literally everything about the history of economics disproves the fixed pie notion, and yet it still persists.
Duh, someone is just hoarding that stuff, it didn’t disappear. Do you even economy?
Speaking of derp, the series Dear White People is now streaming on Netflix. Is there any brave soul out there who will sit down and watch a few episodes and do a rundown, in the name of derp science?
“Not I,” said the rat.
The Moment Hillary Clinton was Forced to Give Up Her Dream
The NY Post goes deeper into the fever dream of Hillary’s defeat than any previous account (mostly based on Shattered).
“Give Up Her Dream”
You mean the dream about telling the peasants to eat cake?
I was taught to never revel in the misery of others even those who you don’t like, but in this case I’m gonna LOL about this shit for a long time. Hillary Clinton is pretty much the Charlie Brown of politics and the American people represents her Lucy.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this. I’d even buy the book.
I would give up a month’s take home pay to have been in vicinity of herself for the first several hours after the reality hit home.
Since that is impossible, I’m contemplating hanging out somwhere near the Democrat shitheads during the GA 6th runoff election night. It seems like it would be a great time.
Bah! “somewhere”
Mostly interesting. But the last two paras made me want to gag.
They also paraphrase Bill as asking at 7:45pm if Florida could be turned around. I’d love to know exactly what the thinking was there.
That line struck me as odd, too. What did he think was going to happen? Or do I not want to know what he meant?
the generous reading is, “should be expect a late surge of urban votes”; the less generous is, “are we close enough where we still have options to cheat in counties we control?”
from the way they describe it, they didn’t have the option to cheat because the white districts were coming out in huge numbers
You can’t hide those kinds of gains, and you can’t offset them with marginal improvements in the lower-turnout black areas.
He was asking if the vote total was within the margin of fraud to see if they could possibly steal it with newly “discovered” ballots, recounts, etc.
I didn’t vote for Trump (or anyone, for that matter) but I’m glad that he did win. As time passes I imagine his presidency will be considered an aberration, but it did give the Republic (or what’s left of it) some breathing room to regroup. The Supreme Court being the really important prize for Hillary since she, like Obama, wasn’t going anywhere far with Congress.
Of course Trump will fuck it all up, the Dems will get back to the presidency some day some way, and their march will continue.
It’s almost as if half of the people are in a cult, completely unable to see the strings attached to them and the puppeteers making them dance.
Yep. Almost like that.
So i read the bit (h/t Straffinrun) about how the “OK Symbol” is now a hate-crime indicating white supremacy? (see: Emma Roller, + UK Independent article)
What i found entertaining was the original 4chan thread where the alt-right kiddies were discussing this…. which the idiot lefties actually linked to…. where the kiddes explained that the ENTIRE PURPOSE OF SPREADING THAT MEME WAS TO FUCK WITH THE LIBERAL MEDIA
here
https://yuki.la/pol/114552778
they fucking outright SAY that the purpose is to sow confusion with lefties on social media. and yet the lefties just go after it hook line and sinker. Because why not? because it sells stories. Are they *really* fooled, or is it just willingness to pump a new “Pepe” since the outrage-machine needs more material?
what i found especially hilarious were the people in the subthread suggesting that they also include the “Peace sign” (two fingers in V) …. as being a secret message indicating “The True Number of Real Genders”.
When I was in the College Republicans club in during my early years in college, fucking with the Liberals on campus were a fucking pastime for us. They are so easy to anger and fool that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
At the same time, you are feeding their worldview of imaginary Nazis around every corner. Remember poop swastika?
You can’t fix stupid, but you can make them continue ridicule themselves until normal people stop taking them seriously.
The ways that we fucked with them was having a table at the student center where we showcased the evils of socialism and communism during May Day. Another time during Sexual Assault Awareness Week on campus, we set up another table on how relaxing gun laws and allowing for CC on campus would lower the chances of women getting sexually assaulted on campus and in the city. They went completely apeshit at the latter event.
I like that. Pit their hobby horses against each other. Expose the cognitive dissonance on center stage.
This was previously referred to as the “Meme war”
while i have suggested previously that it is maybe overstated in its significance, i do think it makes for occasional hilarity.
Well, journalists are just not very bright. And a lot of them are aged by standards of 4chan.
Add to it that, once they went in on a story, they may as well go all-in. To back down, to admit defeat, would be a self-inflicted crack in the foundation of the entire structure. Yes, they are ultimately doing more damage this way. But if they are, it’s not self-inflicted, so they aren’t betraying their cause.
The meme I’ve been seeing gain traction is Isis supporters holding up the one index finger, the “We’re Number One” sign, or maybe it’s the I for Islam. People have been posting pics of shooters holding up the finger in selfies before the event
I’m Poppy.
I predict that you’re going to like this Poppy much less than the other one.
YOU ARE NOT POPPY, YOU SOCIALIST CUNT!
Setting aside the question of how you’re going to pay for it, I wonder if ol’ Popster has ever been around public housing. Because I know in my experience the fastest way to turn an area into a dangerous, ugly, crime-ridden hellhole is to subsidize the housing there. She’s basically saying that everyone should live in the projects, and having known people who’ve lived in the projects, that’s a really, really shitty idea that only a middle-class academic could put forward with a straight face.
Pretty standard to not realize that. They always say that people just don’t care enough, so they build “Council Houses” or “The Projects” and just let them go to hell because they won’t fund it.
In reality, people mistreat property that they don’t own. It becomes increasingly expensive to maintain. And in many cases, specifically because it’s public property some people want to destroy it to increase the wealth transfer.
As a commenter on that piece there notes, the author seems to write exclusively in the “GIMME FREE STUFF” genre
here she moans about her wages being incommensurate to her feelings of effort put-in
It’s no coincidence that the people who moan the loudest about corporate greed are the greediest people you will meet. Projection.
I lol’d.
Then I scrolled down, and while there are a number of comments that give me some hope for the UK I was reminded again about how fundamentally different at least the readership of the Guardian is from, say, us. Apparently, society is like this close to being better in some fashion if only these selfish people would do their bit, as they charmingly put it, instead of worrying about pesky things like rights.
“NO ONE has ever advocated banning profits. When people talk about income inequality they are talking about the mere fact that since Reagan, the average CEOs pay has increased a hundred fold or more. There are only so many pieces of the pie to go around, and it seems as the wealthy skim more and more and more off the top, I.e. get richer and richer and richer, there is less to go around and everyone else gets poorer and poorer and poorer. This isn’t rocket science.”
AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!
Apparently, it IS rocket science to him.
Oh The AVERAGE CEO SALARY IS c. 250k in North America. But let’s focus on the extremes.
What kind of person would want to keep a profit? Hoarder. This is why people are poor, homeless, and dying in the streets. Welcome to Trump’s America.
And you can bet your fucken bottom dollar his view would easily shift to banning profits the second he gets his marching orders from his intellectual masters.
I’m pretty sure the leap to it is very shallow for people like him.
It’s all the thinking of someone who never studied any economics. Zero sum games all the way down.
Hilariously, when they find an actual zero sum game, the script flips.
No, Bill. If the amount of money allocated to scientific research stays the same, you can’t possibly employ twice as many people.
Bill Nye is the classic example of a professional actor playing a scientist on TV and BELIEVING to actually be one.
I was at a birthday bbq this weekend where at least two of the attendees had PhDs in Mechanical Engineering. I was playing cornhole with a guy who would be on Mr. Nye’s dissertation committee. I’m as qualified to talk about international relations as he is about mechanical engineering. And for that matter, any science at all, I suppose.
And in those cases where the CEO and SMT are over compensated (which no doubt exist), that over payment is coming out of the shareholders pockets and not the other employees. Any reduction in their compensation should go to increase profits, not to overpay workers.
I agree with you, but it also doesn’t always work this way. Lots of CEOs are assholes who will gladly screw over their workers to bump up their own compensation.
Oh no doubt their mostly assholes who would sell the mother’s soul for a nickel, but that doesn’t mean the workers can’t go elsewhere or start their own businesses.
Actual data about the shrinking wealth gap and retreating poverty be damned!