The left believes that people cannot be trusted with overwhelming power. The left believes in regulation.
Congratulations. A glaring contradiction only two sentences in. Regulation is overwhelming power in the way it's wielded by the American government.
Some examples: Got a puddle on your land...wetland...can't plow it over without the feds arresting you. Want unpasteurized cheese...too bad. Want to run for public office? Hell, want to just get together with a group of like-minded citizens to run an issue add for a local election? Well...fill out a bunch of paperwork, make sure it's all in order, and still be subject to the risk of overzealous prosecution from a political state attorney general with a hard-on for people who think the way you do. Hell, in New York State, the AG started going after insurance companies that did business with the NRA because before Orange Man was Bad, NRA Man was Bad.
You're nuts. The stated goal of the left is to knock everyone down a peg. Bernie Sanders opining on the beauty of bread lines and AOC's word salad about the middle class not existing anymore are but one example of that.
The stated and acted goal of the right in America has always been to remove governmental obstacles from the path between where we're at now and where we could be. Historically that has included both regulation and deregulation, with an emphasis on the latter. It's all predicated on the idea, more or less borne out by history, that people who are empowered to be responsible for their own well-being in ways both big and small will generally create prosperity by themselves without a Dear Leader to guide them along.
The left rejects this view. The left believes that people are not capable of being responsible for themselves and will always be victimized by something, unless the white knight of government rides in to help. This is an echo of the belief in the divine ordination of kings, the feudal system, and slavery. It's probably hardwired in everybody. There's a Darwinian explanation for it too. Premodern societies of humans in places like Papua New Guinea are very territorial. A few hundred yards up or down the river and you're on someone else's turf. Live like that for a few hundred thousand years and the notion of strongmen and warlords to keep your turf yours can arise quite naturally. Individual liberty is what's new, what's radical. And given the baggage of the human mind, it's hard to carry through. It requires continuous mental effort to suppress the instinct to relinquish responsibility to a strongman who promises to take care of it all for you. That's what the left is. It's not radical, it's an atavism.
Starting? It's been their default state for at least fifteen years. Every big of self-contradictory nonsense that's spilling out into public view today was operating in full force on college campuses fifteen years ago when I was in school and saw it up close. In some cases, there was documented evidence of it going back to the early 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only two differences are that there's been fifteen or twenty five years of attrition at the top of the universities so the whackjobs have moved up, and this nonsense has been stewing for long enough for it to move out and infect a lot of other institutions. If social media and instant communication weren't like it is now, it would make no difference. The fundamentals would still be the same.
Politics is downstream of culture. You want better politics, live better in your private life and hold your family and friends up to a higher standard. Not in a nagging and shrill way, which is how it often comes off when people bring politics into the private sphere, which is an easy way to misread what I wrote.
They're all playing victims. From Jeff Bezos, arguably the Rhodes-like colossus of 21st century America at the top down to Mx. I-am-an-ornate-office-building over at Google, to Candace Owens and Donald Trump and Spartacus and Fauxcahontas and Kamala Harris.
It's a cultural sickness and it's wide-spread. We have to think less in terms of victimization and more in terms of positive accomplishment. I've been fucked over lots of times when I was in school, on the job, whatever. Sometimes I fucked myself over with a combination of bad luck and suboptimal decisionmaking. If I dwelt on it, it'd be a death sentence. Don't dwell on the negative. Don't amplify the negative.
Good on them for fessing up to an error and not being snobby about the institutional affiliation of the person who pointed it out to them. Bad on them for having a press release at all. The desire for media exposure corrupts science. Here, they let the lie make it several times around the world before the truth even woke up. The first press release got a lot of air time. The correction...well slashdot isn't all it's cracked up to be in terms of publicity.
Bottom line: the pipelines wouldn't be built if there were no profit to be made in selling oil and gas to whoever's at the end of the pipeline. If they didn't need oil and gas, they wouldn't be buying it at a rate that makes profit for the guy pumping it. Capitalism 101.
If it weren't necessary than the oil and gas companies wouldn't be spending their own money to build it. And come to think of it they wouldn't be asking for government subsidies to build it either. 'Cuz ya know...no point in wasting money on operating an empty pipeline.
No shit. Probably more than half of the the environmental movement is a Russian front. Especially the more than half that's about stopping fracking and oil and gas pipelines (but not so much LNG terminals), for the better to need to import Russian oil and gas with.
Here's the thing: increasing the minimum wage will push inflation up. Inflation is a flat tax. I keep being told that a flat tax is not equitable because taking 10% spending power from someone on the bottom puts them at jeopardy of not being able to eat while taking 10% spending power from someone on the top won't do much harm. Maybe I agree with that to a point, which is why I have to scratch my head at the analysis that says doubling the minimum wage from 7.25 to 15 won't kill the spending power of poorer people. Sure they have twice the cash (assuming they still have a job, that is) but if the corner store has to pay their stockboys double, then won't that end up essentially doubling the cost of the low-margin stuff they sell?
Profits today benefit people tomorrow. Don't believe me? Ask yourself if the country you want to live in ten or twenty years from now is one with a decade or two of high corporate profits under its belt or a decade or two of dismal performance. Hell...do you want to work for a company that's making money or one that can't run two nickels together?
Keep going, you're almost there. You want people whose natural talent and proficiency at learned skills is tempered by humility, empathy, and a respect for their users as partners and brothers together on the road of life, not toothless lusers who are too dumb to not be outsourced or replaced by the nice man who doesn't speak a word of English after 20 years here, but sure does mow my lawn real nice.
I've heard them tell me with a straight face that what's good for Wall Street is good for everyone. I haven't heard them tell me that their money-grubbing is going to transform the world like the second coming.
I don't live in California, so all I've got is what I read in both mainstream and not-so-mainstream media, but it looks for all the world like they think they're some sort of gods out there and that the same rules don't apply to all Americans don't apply to them. That's sad. I know some people who have worked for Google or are still there and have risen up through the ranks, and I know they're individually good people...but wow. Brazenly lying to the United States Government in the face of evidence to the contrary...and not just about (for lack of a better word) silly things like money and accounting tricks, but about real fundamental mom-and-apply-pie stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of thought. That's awful. And it is the result of hubris.
That's true but it's a cop-out to place the majority of the blame on foreign actors.
We have a rot in our collective soul. It's unfortunate, it has potentially horrifying consequences, but it wasn't put there by the Russians or the Chinese or international socialists, or Islamists, or the Nazis who escaped to Argentina in the 40s and snuck across the Mexican border in the 90s.
I was and is exploited by our enemies, but that's true with everything that falls in the same bin as "The CIA invented AIDS to kill black people."
You have to ask why things like that are believable. With that, it's believable because we imported slaves, kept them as slaves for centuries, and when we liberated them we kept them as an underclass. That alone is a red herring, because no one who was a slave or born to slaves is still alive, and the number of people born into a legally codified underclass is dwindling and dwindling. But the point is that there are enough people primed to believe it, and there are enough bad actors in society to give people reason to believe it.
That's the right winger's way of explaining away fake news as a product of the mindset of "those people" who aren't in the mainstream of society. Now let me look inward: I am a while male Republican and work for an academic institution in one of the bluest of the blue states. If a female or an ethnic minority were to even accuse me of sexual or racial insensitivity (let alone harassment), I have absolute confidence that my employer will not have my back and that I may very well lose my job and be blacklisted from working anywhere around here. Part of that blacklisting would be self-imposed. I'm not a liar and I would answer truthfully if asked why it was that I'm looking for work and why it is that I don't have it. And it would be poison. After MeToo and Kavanaugh and James Damore, no one around here would make a hire like that, even if it's just an accusation. I don't have children yet, but when I do, I worry for them too. I'd like to think that we as a society value reason and logic and the rule of law and freedom of speech and tolerance and the presumption of innocence, but I'm not as cock-sure of that as I was even two years ago.
Let me summarize: I, an upper-middle-class member of the technocrat class, embedded in the belly of the education establishment, distrust the higher education establishment, technology companies (big and small), the media, and just about any cultural or government institution we have. I'm pretty damn sure I'm not alone. Strategically, that's death. If smart people don't trust something as fundamental as education, as employment, then we're all done. We won't push ourselves or our kids to push aspire to reach the top (why bother if a single accusation ruins you), we don't go out on a limb at work (why push yourself if someone can cut you down for good with a word), we won't start businesses or go into politics (why put yourself out there if the consequences of failure can push your family into poverty for generations?), and we'll all be weaker and poorer for it.
Why does that stick in my head? Why can a Russian or Chinese internet troll push my buttons so that I believe what I just said? Same reason: there's a kernel of truth to it. Google did not stand up for free speech and intellectual honesty. Universities have publicly failed to stand up for free speech and intellectual honesty. Half of the Democratic members of congress have failed to stand up for intellectual honesty and rigor and the presumption of innocence and the rule of law. The media may have fanned those flames (to their everlasting shame) but they didn't create the lynch mob. The lynch mob has always been there, waiting to accrue members and burn a witch. What had been happening in this country for a very long time (to its everlasting credit) is that we, the people, our elected officials, the leaders of our cultural and educational institutions, had consciously chosen to suppress the instinct to join the mob. And I don't mean "violently suppress
Population control is a totalitarian's wet dream. It's trotted out as the solution to every problem, whether that problem is current, probable, possible, or entirely made up.
In America we have a system of government that limits the ability of totalitarians to make any headway. We fight it with laws, with traditions, and if need be with the guns most of us keep in our homes. Traditions are the more potent weapon. Maybe "population control" mumbo-jumbo will fly in some third-world shithole where they can't tell a latrine from the dirt floor in their own hut, but we're civilized people and we've been around long enough to know that there's not a damn thing wrong with the way we live.
Here's the thing though. The democrats ginned up roughly the same amount of fear and apprehension over Romney, W, Dole, Bush 41, and Reagan before him.
The echo chamber was what was scary. Liberals were psyching themselves out beyond reason. The Atlantic ran an article provocatively raising the question whether Jews counted as white, and people with whom I talked regularly (online) were with a straight face citing that article and telling me that questions were being raised about whether Jews counted as white...on account of the coming ethnic cleansings.
It's the rumor mill. The whisper factory. A game of telephone set up by the power-hungry to profit from fear. Nothing gets the sheep in line like the howl of a wolf off in the distance. Never mind who's doing the howling...we swear it's the other guys.
Slashdot Mirror
The left believes that people cannot be trusted with overwhelming power. The left believes in regulation.
Congratulations. A glaring contradiction only two sentences in. Regulation is overwhelming power in the way it's wielded by the American government.
Some examples:
Got a puddle on your land...wetland...can't plow it over without the feds arresting you.
Want unpasteurized cheese...too bad.
Want to run for public office? Hell, want to just get together with a group of like-minded citizens to run an issue add for a local election? Well...fill out a bunch of paperwork, make sure it's all in order, and still be subject to the risk of overzealous prosecution from a political state attorney general with a hard-on for people who think the way you do. Hell, in New York State, the AG started going after insurance companies that did business with the NRA because before Orange Man was Bad, NRA Man was Bad.
Get the idea?
You're nuts. The stated goal of the left is to knock everyone down a peg. Bernie Sanders opining on the beauty of bread lines and AOC's word salad about the middle class not existing anymore are but one example of that.
The stated and acted goal of the right in America has always been to remove governmental obstacles from the path between where we're at now and where we could be. Historically that has included both regulation and deregulation, with an emphasis on the latter. It's all predicated on the idea, more or less borne out by history, that people who are empowered to be responsible for their own well-being in ways both big and small will generally create prosperity by themselves without a Dear Leader to guide them along.
The left rejects this view. The left believes that people are not capable of being responsible for themselves and will always be victimized by something, unless the white knight of government rides in to help. This is an echo of the belief in the divine ordination of kings, the feudal system, and slavery. It's probably hardwired in everybody. There's a Darwinian explanation for it too. Premodern societies of humans in places like Papua New Guinea are very territorial. A few hundred yards up or down the river and you're on someone else's turf. Live like that for a few hundred thousand years and the notion of strongmen and warlords to keep your turf yours can arise quite naturally. Individual liberty is what's new, what's radical. And given the baggage of the human mind, it's hard to carry through. It requires continuous mental effort to suppress the instinct to relinquish responsibility to a strongman who promises to take care of it all for you. That's what the left is. It's not radical, it's an atavism.
Starting? It's been their default state for at least fifteen years. Every big of self-contradictory nonsense that's spilling out into public view today was operating in full force on college campuses fifteen years ago when I was in school and saw it up close. In some cases, there was documented evidence of it going back to the early 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only two differences are that there's been fifteen or twenty five years of attrition at the top of the universities so the whackjobs have moved up, and this nonsense has been stewing for long enough for it to move out and infect a lot of other institutions. If social media and instant communication weren't like it is now, it would make no difference. The fundamentals would still be the same.
Politics is downstream of culture. You want better politics, live better in your private life and hold your family and friends up to a higher standard. Not in a nagging and shrill way, which is how it often comes off when people bring politics into the private sphere, which is an easy way to misread what I wrote.
Considering most of us either work for one or own stock in one...you can see how it makes sense.
Could it be that India is also one of the most densely populated places on Earth while America is one of the least?
They're all playing victims. From Jeff Bezos, arguably the Rhodes-like colossus of 21st century America at the top down to Mx. I-am-an-ornate-office-building over at Google, to Candace Owens and Donald Trump and Spartacus and Fauxcahontas and Kamala Harris.
It's a cultural sickness and it's wide-spread. We have to think less in terms of victimization and more in terms of positive accomplishment. I've been fucked over lots of times when I was in school, on the job, whatever. Sometimes I fucked myself over with a combination of bad luck and suboptimal decisionmaking. If I dwelt on it, it'd be a death sentence. Don't dwell on the negative. Don't amplify the negative.
Good on them for fessing up to an error and not being snobby about the institutional affiliation of the person who pointed it out to them. Bad on them for having a press release at all. The desire for media exposure corrupts science. Here, they let the lie make it several times around the world before the truth even woke up. The first press release got a lot of air time. The correction...well slashdot isn't all it's cracked up to be in terms of publicity.
Bottom line: the pipelines wouldn't be built if there were no profit to be made in selling oil and gas to whoever's at the end of the pipeline. If they didn't need oil and gas, they wouldn't be buying it at a rate that makes profit for the guy pumping it. Capitalism 101.
If it weren't necessary than the oil and gas companies wouldn't be spending their own money to build it. And come to think of it they wouldn't be asking for government subsidies to build it either. 'Cuz ya know...no point in wasting money on operating an empty pipeline.
No shit. Probably more than half of the the environmental movement is a Russian front. Especially the more than half that's about stopping fracking and oil and gas pipelines (but not so much LNG terminals), for the better to need to import Russian oil and gas with.
Well that's only half of it. The other half is that the 15 dollars I thought I had isn't worth what 15 was worth when I was making 7.50.
Here's the thing: increasing the minimum wage will push inflation up. Inflation is a flat tax. I keep being told that a flat tax is not equitable because taking 10% spending power from someone on the bottom puts them at jeopardy of not being able to eat while taking 10% spending power from someone on the top won't do much harm. Maybe I agree with that to a point, which is why I have to scratch my head at the analysis that says doubling the minimum wage from 7.25 to 15 won't kill the spending power of poorer people. Sure they have twice the cash (assuming they still have a job, that is) but if the corner store has to pay their stockboys double, then won't that end up essentially doubling the cost of the low-margin stuff they sell?
Profits today benefit people tomorrow. Don't believe me? Ask yourself if the country you want to live in ten or twenty years from now is one with a decade or two of high corporate profits under its belt or a decade or two of dismal performance. Hell...do you want to work for a company that's making money or one that can't run two nickels together?
Keep going, you're almost there. You want people whose natural talent and proficiency at learned skills is tempered by humility, empathy, and a respect for their users as partners and brothers together on the road of life, not toothless lusers who are too dumb to not be outsourced or replaced by the nice man who doesn't speak a word of English after 20 years here, but sure does mow my lawn real nice.
I've heard them tell me with a straight face that what's good for Wall Street is good for everyone. I haven't heard them tell me that their money-grubbing is going to transform the world like the second coming.
Yeah, just like that.
I don't live in California, so all I've got is what I read in both mainstream and not-so-mainstream media, but it looks for all the world like they think they're some sort of gods out there and that the same rules don't apply to all Americans don't apply to them. That's sad. I know some people who have worked for Google or are still there and have risen up through the ranks, and I know they're individually good people...but wow. Brazenly lying to the United States Government in the face of evidence to the contrary...and not just about (for lack of a better word) silly things like money and accounting tricks, but about real fundamental mom-and-apply-pie stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of thought. That's awful. And it is the result of hubris.
That's true but it's a cop-out to place the majority of the blame on foreign actors. We have a rot in our collective soul. It's unfortunate, it has potentially horrifying consequences, but it wasn't put there by the Russians or the Chinese or international socialists, or Islamists, or the Nazis who escaped to Argentina in the 40s and snuck across the Mexican border in the 90s. I was and is exploited by our enemies, but that's true with everything that falls in the same bin as "The CIA invented AIDS to kill black people."
You have to ask why things like that are believable. With that, it's believable because we imported slaves, kept them as slaves for centuries, and when we liberated them we kept them as an underclass. That alone is a red herring, because no one who was a slave or born to slaves is still alive, and the number of people born into a legally codified underclass is dwindling and dwindling. But the point is that there are enough people primed to believe it, and there are enough bad actors in society to give people reason to believe it.
That's the right winger's way of explaining away fake news as a product of the mindset of "those people" who aren't in the mainstream of society. Now let me look inward: I am a while male Republican and work for an academic institution in one of the bluest of the blue states. If a female or an ethnic minority were to even accuse me of sexual or racial insensitivity (let alone harassment), I have absolute confidence that my employer will not have my back and that I may very well lose my job and be blacklisted from working anywhere around here. Part of that blacklisting would be self-imposed. I'm not a liar and I would answer truthfully if asked why it was that I'm looking for work and why it is that I don't have it. And it would be poison. After MeToo and Kavanaugh and James Damore, no one around here would make a hire like that, even if it's just an accusation. I don't have children yet, but when I do, I worry for them too. I'd like to think that we as a society value reason and logic and the rule of law and freedom of speech and tolerance and the presumption of innocence, but I'm not as cock-sure of that as I was even two years ago.
Let me summarize: I, an upper-middle-class member of the technocrat class, embedded in the belly of the education establishment, distrust the higher education establishment, technology companies (big and small), the media, and just about any cultural or government institution we have. I'm pretty damn sure I'm not alone. Strategically, that's death. If smart people don't trust something as fundamental as education, as employment, then we're all done. We won't push ourselves or our kids to push aspire to reach the top (why bother if a single accusation ruins you), we don't go out on a limb at work (why push yourself if someone can cut you down for good with a word), we won't start businesses or go into politics (why put yourself out there if the consequences of failure can push your family into poverty for generations?), and we'll all be weaker and poorer for it.
Why does that stick in my head? Why can a Russian or Chinese internet troll push my buttons so that I believe what I just said? Same reason: there's a kernel of truth to it. Google did not stand up for free speech and intellectual honesty. Universities have publicly failed to stand up for free speech and intellectual honesty. Half of the Democratic members of congress have failed to stand up for intellectual honesty and rigor and the presumption of innocence and the rule of law. The media may have fanned those flames (to their everlasting shame) but they didn't create the lynch mob. The lynch mob has always been there, waiting to accrue members and burn a witch. What had been happening in this country for a very long time (to its everlasting credit) is that we, the people, our elected officials, the leaders of our cultural and educational institutions, had consciously chosen to suppress the instinct to join the mob. And I don't mean "violently suppress
Population control is a totalitarian's wet dream. It's trotted out as the solution to every problem, whether that problem is current, probable, possible, or entirely made up.
In America we have a system of government that limits the ability of totalitarians to make any headway. We fight it with laws, with traditions, and if need be with the guns most of us keep in our homes. Traditions are the more potent weapon. Maybe "population control" mumbo-jumbo will fly in some third-world shithole where they can't tell a latrine from the dirt floor in their own hut, but we're civilized people and we've been around long enough to know that there's not a damn thing wrong with the way we live.
There is. Stop fucking after the third or fourth kid.
In English it's "bread and circuses," comrade. In Russian the closest equivalent in English is "bread and spectacles."
Err..um... over the last couple of years they've put down the keyboards and picked up baseball bats and bike locks. There's no explaining that away.
I'm a conservative and I liked what I read. Do I have to turn in my card?
Here's the thing though. The democrats ginned up roughly the same amount of fear and apprehension over Romney, W, Dole, Bush 41, and Reagan before him.
The echo chamber was what was scary. Liberals were psyching themselves out beyond reason. The Atlantic ran an article provocatively raising the question whether Jews counted as white, and people with whom I talked regularly (online) were with a straight face citing that article and telling me that questions were being raised about whether Jews counted as white...on account of the coming ethnic cleansings.
It's the rumor mill. The whisper factory. A game of telephone set up by the power-hungry to profit from fear. Nothing gets the sheep in line like the howl of a wolf off in the distance. Never mind who's doing the howling...we swear it's the other guys.