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But in 1976 the father could sustain his family and his house and his car, while today father and mother working is the most common family.

In 1976, houses were smaller, fewer had AC, far fewer had color TVs, many still had "party line" phones, none had cell phones, computers, or the Internet, most had one car not two or three, cars were more dangerous and more polluting, cancer and heart disease survival rates were much lower, and fewer families sent their kids to college, among other differences. If people were willing to accept 1976 standards of living today, they would not need two income earners. I'm not saying that anyone has to do that, but turning around and saying that "it takes two people today to do what it took only one to do in 1976" is not accurate.

However, we also have a much smaller middle class than we used to

Median = 50th percentile. Since CPI-adjusted median income has remained stable while the population has grown, the "middle class" is, to a rough approximation, exactly as large by percentage, and much larger by absolute numbers, than it used to be.

Trying to beat China without realizing that none of us actually want to live there.

This is why it's so important to realize that wealth is not a zero-sum game. China can become wealthy at no one's expense. The sale of goods made cheaply elsewhere not only increases your purchasing power, it also increases the standard of living of the workers who made them. You may not want to live in China, but the poverty that drives your interest away will not be eliminated by magic.

In Europe, Scandinavia is a lot better off than central and southern Europe, for example. Education, average income, living quality - whatever your measure, Sweden or Norway beat Italy or Spain in each and every one, and France and Germany in most.

And I'm willing to examine what successful economies are doing differently and adapt accordingly. However, you have to be careful not to let your conclusions become your premises. If Germany, for example, is doing well, then it is perhaps a model to emulate. But when cracks start to appear, it is important to understand why and what can be done about them, rather than saying "it's all someone else's fault, Germany would be a worker's paradise if not for the anti-union forces!" (that's not what you said, I know it's a caricature).

In another thread, someone brought up Denmark. There are many differences between a country like Denmark and the United States. Attempting to isolate just one of them, such as unionization, and saying it is a magic bullet solution is folly. Unions in the US are nothing like their Danish counterparts, and the regulatory environments in the US and Denmark differ drastically, not to mention more nebulous factors like culture and attitudes.

Collectively, we can't move forward if we grant a monopoly on "legitimate" discrimination to one particular group of people (the political correctness crowed, for example).

You gave yourself away too easily. This just some rambling bigotry from some right-wing nutter. Being against institutionalized bigotry has nothing to do with this nonsense. No one believes this outside possibly a few fringe nutters and caricatures created by the very bigots themselves. Nothing is more funny than listening to them trying to paint themselves as the victims of "PC".

It's exactly the sort of shallow, adolescant caricature of feminist thought that should offend feminists.

Actually, I find it to be a great example of how radical feminists sound to regular people who just believe in equality.

Feminist here. I know nobody who believes any of the things you claim to be tenets of "mainstream feminist doctrine." (Though it is often falsely claimed that Catharine MacKinnon has holds that "all sex is rape.") If you go in search of some loonies who think those things, I'm sure you'll find them, but I'd like to see some substantiation that there is anything "mainstream" about them. I'm pretty sure you only think that feminists don't need to be caricatured to be ridiculed because you've already confused the caricature with reality.

Feminist thought doesn't need to be caricatured to be ridiculed. It's ridiculous enough all on its own. These are the "all heterosexual sex is rape" crowd. These are the people who believe, and this is mainstream feminist doctrine, that women are unable to commit rape; and that the accusation of rape (by a woman against a man, only) constitutes proof of the crime.

We already have a perfectly good word and social movement promoting real equality. It's called egalitarianism. Feminism excludes half the population from concern right in the statement of its name. Feminism is not the solution to my problems as a man, and I will not stand to have it said otherwise. I refuse to be talked to in that tone of voice.

Nobody here is mocking women. They are mocking feminists. That kind of argument is exactly why.

Feminism: Noun - "the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes"

Men mocking feminists is by definition pretty close to men mocking women. If you actually read some of the contents of this github project...

among (person p : Unique_person):
if(p.gender==male && p.orentation==het_cis_scum):
yell('RAPE RAPE RAPE RAPE!!!!!');
crush(p); //Use the function crush in Dworkin.Xir to discard the oppressor

It's exactly the sort of shallow, adolescant caricature of feminist thought that should offend feminists. Feminism is probably the most important social movement of the 20th century and has a serious body of work behind it. This project may have started as a satire on somebody's blog post, but it clearly isn't merely geeks mocking somebody's attempts to apply social theory to a programing language. Or written by anyone actually familiar with feminist thought beyond parodies they read on the internet.

Ok. That's 4chan. Shallow and adolescant caricature is what they do. But when I come on slashdot and read shit like "feminists have invaded the programming community, and then demanded that the community change its character" I can't help but wince.

Can the techie comminity please lose the ridiculous overblown hostility to any woman who dares to suggest that there are real problems in our society stemming from a history of thousands of years of male domaination of it. It actually just makes us look fucking stupid.

Are you serious? You believe that it is "commonly accepted" that the Republicans ran on a racist platform and are a racist party? Give me a break.

Republicans have a long-standing record of support for states' rights; the fact that this may have also appealed to Southern racists and that the Republican strategists probably counted on it doesn't make Republicans racist, any more than appealing to any of the unsavory groups that both parties appeal to means that the parties support those goals.

I have never voted for a Republican in my life. But people need to snap out of these simplistic caricatures of their political opponents if we want to make progress in this country. What matters is what parties promise each election, what they stand for, and what they actually deliver.

a significant portion of the religious right aren't a problem either, they've been caricatured by leftist agnostics who don't understand their way of thinking and lump them in with the bigoted, anti-science variety.

Not all Christian Republicans are the religious right. If they're not bigoted or anti-science, they're not the religious right. A person might be a hard-core Christian Republican, but if they believe in gay marriage and evolution, they're not who the leftist agnostics are talking about.

Seems to me you give up too much by tossing out vegans and religious nuts. As a right-leaning, freedom loving vegan, I don't see why I bring less to the table than pot smoking libertarians. Also, a significant portion of the religious right aren't a problem either, they've been caricatured by leftist agnostics who don't understand their way of thinking and lump them in with the bigoted, anti-science variety.

This means that people who believe in BIC pens must believe in sky fairies. What's that? BIC Pens aren't like sky fairies?

People who rely on bad analogies to make an argument (like the 'sky fairy' argument, or calling climate science a 'religion' as a derogative) are making those statements because framing something complex that they don't fully understand as a caricature saves them the trouble of making a reasoned argument in support of their position. It's like saying "Jews are money grubbers" or "rag heads hate our freedoms", a blatant attempt to dehumanise, to classify their beliefs as something "other" - when in fact, their beliefs are just as justified by objective proof as your own. They have none, and neither do you.

If frustrates you that others don't rush to join your religion? It makes you angry that their beliefs contradict your own? Well whoop de do. Get over it. People have believed conflicting things for thousands of years, and by all accounts, will continue do so until the Sun swells up and we are boiled alive.

"Progressivism" in modern US politics means the idea that progress is sought through government intervention in society, for example through redistribution of wealth, subsidies, price controls, welfare, public education, etc. That is, progressivism is a political philosophy of government. People who oppose progressivism don't oppose progress, they rather believe that progressivism is ineffective and possibly harmful for actually achieving progress.

It's common for people to pick misleading labels for their political movements: modern US "liberalism" has little to do with liberty or classical liberalism either, and "conservatism" doesn't reflect conservation of traditional or historical policies or values. Liberals themselves often now prefer the term "progressivism", which is fine with me, since I'd rather reclaim the term "liberal" for what it used to mean, instead of the caricature it has become.

>>> I challenge you to find even one case where a male human and a female chimp or vice versa can successfully mate and produce fertile offspring.

Fertile offspring might be hoping for a bit much, but I think it almost strains plausibility to believe that if it's physically possible to do so, no human sperm has EVER fertilized a primate egg (or vice-versa) under lab conditions somewhere.

I mean, seriously. Think about a second- or third-tier veterinary school somewhere in the US in the 1950s or 1960s, located at some university where football was everything... at homecoming weekend. Nerdy grad student is pissed because he's stuck cleaning the lab and has to dispose of a harvested chimp ovary... then has it slowly sink in that there's absolutely NOTHING to stop him from indulging in scientific curiosity with some egg cells harvested from that ovary and his own sperm (harvested in the bathroom with a test tube). Two hours later, he's watching his sperm busily swimming around a few harvested chimp egg cells. Six hours later, he sees the first few divide... and 11 minutes after that, he's nervously washing the slide down the drain, dousing everything with bleach, and the slide is on its way to the incinerator after it sinks in that he'd be expelled (or worse) if anyone ever realized what he did.

Stir, rinse, and repeat at least a few dozen times around the US during the same era. Compared to Hollywood caricatures of evil Soviet or Nazi scientists, it suddenly doesn't seem quite so implausible, does it?

You're correct. You're not allowed to ask that question because it makes you sound dumb. It's called a categorical error. Asking who created '5' sounds dumb since 5 is an entity that exists eternally by necessity rather than contingently. Sure someone might have defined '5' as '5', but it existed prior to its definition. A more interesting question might be "if there is a God why is there a God rather than nothing". Furthermore, calling people who you disagree with as "nutjobs" or whatever really isn't allowed either in a sincere conversation. It makes you sound twelve.

To illustrate it differently, you would not take me seriously if I said, "Michael Jordan is not a real basketball star since he has not made a single touchdown during his entire NBA 'career'. This is why I Michael Jordan fans as dumb sheep." Why? Because I made a categorical error and I further discredited myself by calling people who actually know anything about basketball dumb. You don't have to believe in God, but you do have to avoid arguing against a caricature of God that no one really believes is accurate.

Are you referencing the 1920's, where the rich had no limits and they gobbled up everything and the entire economy tanked(1929, great depression, etc), so we put limits on them, taxed them, built infrastructure, and we had a really good run afterward?

I do not think a substantive amount of working capital was raised by placing higher tax burden on the rich (if the Wealth Tax Act of 1935 is what you mean). It skimmed off only income and there was no attempt to go after existing asset holdings such as stocks.

Later another targeted 'tax the rich' effort was to go after Undistributed Corporate earnings, only exempting monies redistributed as wages and dividends. The idea was the veritable Corporation was like unto a bellowing cow unwilling to be milked. Cows leading up to the market crash retained almost half their milk (cash on hand) using for such things as expansion (perceived as positive) and minting tycoons (perceived as negative, the Monopoly Man was originally a hated caricature in cartoons). This massive amount of retained milk led to the explosion of 1929.

Under the tax the Stockholder and the Employee were each to be handed a teat and the government would grab a third. This left only one teat because cows have four teats. I had to look it up. But the tax capped off at 27% so even if you say one-third we're going to need a lot more teats here to get these here ratios correct. The best way would be to abandon the teat standard and assign one hundred 'fiat' teats to each cow so we could talk real percentages. Cows would be required to turn in their teats and would be issued 100 fiat-teats at fair market value. Which leaves us with the problem that Stockholder and Employee each only have two hands. I had to look it up. So we must abandon the hand standard as well to facilitate all this teat grasping. This cow analogy is coming apart at the seams. Oh dear. This happens every time I attempt to discuss economics.

But anyway the Undistributed Profits Tax itself was scaled down and finally repealed amidst fierce opposition because it was argued successfully that it would have a chilling effect on industry through prevention of Good Expansion and Healthy Acquisition.

((( All this occurring in the grand old days of politics when Real Men had the TIME to read what they were deciding on, and especially, the COURAGE to REPEAL undesired legislation. In this modern time laws are assembled by teams of rhesus monkeys snarling at each other as they manipulate and stack colored and shaped objects, each with a phrase binding in some special interest or exception, some objects supplied by lobbyist rats. The result is glued together (voted into law) and when opposition and confusion arises they send in another team of monkeys to 'fix' it bigger still. No one ever tears anything down. )))

Back towards the topic... we had a 'good run' under Roosevelt's New Deal not (in my opinion) because at the time it was honestly believed that getting off the gold standard was the right thing to do and he set out to do it..

Is it? That's a difficult one. The problem is like any designer drug, the first time an economy abandons a precious metal standard there is a one-shot injection of dreamlike optimism that becomes the new reality. At the outset everyone feels empowered because there is new capital available.

I think Ben Bernanke honestly believes that he can reproduce the conditions of the New Deal by injecting and easing. But the Roosevelt drug has worn off and it simply does not work. It worked once because people were exchanging gold for something they thought was of greater value. They weren't but the act of exchange itself is what jump-started everything and created new wealth (as opposed to just more money). Today your average person reacts with complete incomprehension to monetary policy changes. Too many factors and n

Your use of the word "evolutionist" is an invention of Institute for Creation Research to describe non-creationists. When a sect faces criticism a tactic is to lump all its detractors together - no matter how diverse and unrelated they may be aside from their shared opposition to the sect - and label them with a word ending in "-ist" and do everything you can to portray them as a mirror of itself. That way a skill sophist may deflect any valid criticism by applying it to this constructed caricature of its collective opposition.

Federalism is not Anarchism, you've got that right. Federalist is something a *state* can be, or not, if I grok the article you linked.

Anarchism is the idea (as a very crude summary of quite a varied spectrum of ideas) that a state, as we currently know it, is too large a unit to effectively respond to the needs of individuals (and typically too intrusive at that).

Some of my friends call themselves anarchists and their idea of loosely associated networks of small, self-sustaining communities is probably most aptly called anarcho-syndicalism.

What they have in Somalia or Congo is often called "anarchy" but all I started out arguing here is that this is quite detached from the philosophy of Anarchism. In fact, I would guess that taking "anarchy" to simply mean "lawless chaos" started as a caricature, designed to discredit it. It seems that worked out as planned, then. Of course it didn't help that there were (and are) some violent fringes within the much movement.

And something else. The film is not entirely false by any means. It is a slightly exaggerated and a bit overly dramatic caricature of how things really do work in this world. Feel free to shed your naivete.

I took my 13-year-old daughter, who was absolutely dying to see it and thoroughly enjoyed it. And this wasn't entirely due to spending the whole movie drooling over Chris Hemsworth - she has enjoyed most of Marvel's recent movies. As for my take:

The Good: Loved the opening sequence with the Dark Elves. If they had made a full-length movie based on the Dark Elf/Asgardian war, I'd go see it. Really enjoyed Loki again, particularly when he was taunting Thor by repeatedly changing form. Also the exploration of the strained relationship between Loki and his mother. Eric No Pants - as the parent referred to him - was a great addition to the movie, especially showing how badly being possessed by Loki has messed with his mind. The Battle of Asgard was a visual masterpiece, and did a great job of showing Asgardian technology as the pseudo-magic they're trying to portray. Really enjoyed the final scene with Thor and Odin discussing his realization that he was not suited for the throne. And it had what I think was the best Stan Lee cameo of any Marvel movie so far. (Also liked seeing the IT Crowd's Chris Dowd in his small role.)

The Bad: Jane was forgettable and Darcy's character came off as forced, like she was playing a caricature of her character in the first movie. The main villain really needed more development; as is, he was rather forgettable. I'm sure they intended to portray him as cold and emotionless, but instead it just seemed flat. Part of, I think, came from having him speak in subtitles so much of the time. (I felt his strongest scene was his confrontation with Frigga during the invasion of Asgard.) As several others have noted, Jane's "infection" with the Aether seemed pretty badly done.

Overall, I'd say slightly better than the original Thor, not as good as the Avengers or the first Iron Man. (And as an aside, the previews for the next Captain America and X-Men look very promising.)

By asking a question like "Where Does America's Fear Come From" your audience will presuppose that fear is the cause. But is that really it? I don't think the average American is afraid of terrorists. Things like anger, self-righteousness, and the military-industrial complex are more likely explanations. The "fear of terrorism" thing is an after-the-fact justification. Those in power need justification, and 9/11 fell right into their hands. I suspect that it is going to be a lot tougher to milk that for another decade. But the damage is already done, the power grab successful.

The article opens by citing a fictional character. These TV show characters are not indicative of actual Americans. They are overdone stereotypes. Let us not look at the caricatures to understand ourselves. The average American is, however, gullible and apathetic. That is why America was unable to stop the power grab.

Don't you worry. There's a concerted, intense, yet subtle effort to make the general (uninformed, won't do their own research) public believe that each and every "libertarian" is the exact same thing as an "anarcho-capitalist". Got to make sure the whole freedom-loving movement doesn't catch on and become popular, you know, and to make sure of that it must be demonized as emotionally and unreasonably and quickly as possible. When people otherwise sympathetic to the desire for freedom are hesitant to call themselves (small 'l') "libertarian", the job is done correctly. Various political and monied interests will take care of that, not openly through argumentation, but through portrayal, framing, and association. It's the same way any smear campaign is done.

I don't think we need to assume a conspiracy, because mainstream political factions use essentially the same tactics on each other all the time. It's just that libertarianism is easy to caricature, because taken to extremes in a naive manner the likely consequences would be obviously unpleasant.

Put another way, it requires more intellectual effort to turn liberarianism from a concept into a workable system of government, whereas it is very easy to understand how extreme authoritarianism works (you just shoot the troublemakers). In an era of soundbites, simple arguments tend to have the advantage.