Whatever. That Wikipedia article is referenced. If you want to debate what's on Wikipedia, debate what's on Wikipedia. Don't try to poison the well. Studies have shown Wikipedia is more accurate than regular encyclopedias.
Right now, I have cited sources, while you have cited a personal anecdote. Got anything to back up your claims? Or, you know, even anecdotal numbers? How many bombings were there in Ramadi in 2005-2006? How many of those were carried out by the mentally handicapped?
I never claimed poor people can do no wrong. I am saying that the recession is not the fault of poor people, but was deliberately created by the rich to siphon money out of the government and the little guy's bank account, and into their pockets. I don't have a problem with rich people getting richer when everyone has enough to survive, but it is wrong when rich people getting richer while poor people starve. I also have a problem with fraud, and the more we find out about the collapse, the more it looks like deliberate fraud.
Why is that a problem? Independent studies have shown Wikipedia contains fewer inaccuracies than traditional encyclopedias. If you have a rebuttal to any of the points I brought up, please rebut. Poisoning the well by casting unwarranted aspersions on a source is not a valid form of debate.
No, suicide bombers are usually college educated middle class people. I know that makes for a more confusing narrative than "Unstable, idealistic, and poor," but it is true.
Yes, really. You have a problem with that? You DO know that Wikipedia articles are well referenced, right? I mean, there are TONS of links to the actual studies backing up the claims. If you have a problem with the conclusions the Wikipedia article reaches, state what those problems are rather than trying to poison the well against Wikipedia. People love to claim Wikipedia is unreliable, but independent studies show it is actually less likely to contain inaccuracies than traditional encyclopedias.
Yes, your one anecdote about one homeless guy trumps everything our economic data tells us.
This is class war, planned by the robber barons as a way of siphoning off your tax dollars into their coffers. I mean, you can admit that that is what happened, but you won't call it class war? Really? Maybe you think that if you suck up to the rich and appease them enough, they will throw you a bone? They won't, they will laugh at you for harming yourself while protecting their interests over your own.
Seriously, why do you blame the people who are just like you for this while defending the people who are trying to enslave you? It is disgusting to see a person debase themselves before their enemy like that.
If you blow yourself up, certainly you are unstable. But that is the wrong way of looking at the question. If that is the only unstable thing these people have ever done, then we can not predict whether someone will suicide bomb based on their stability. The question is not "Given that they suicide bombed, are they unstable?" It is "Did they do anything unstable prior to bombing?"
It is much easier to believe these people are simply unstable or desperate, rather than looking honestly at their real motivations. If someone who is fighting you is just crazy, your choices are simple and morally unambiguous: you fight back. But if they are not crazy, things become more complicated, you need to look at your own actions as well as theirs, and you need to really consider what you would do in their shoes. Obviously, "They are unstable maniacs who hate our freedoms" makes much better propaganda than "They are normal middle class people just like you and me who believe they have been pushed too far and are fighting back in the most effective way they know."
Note that I am not saying they HAVE been pushed too far, or excusing their actions in any way. I am saying that they believe it, and that is why they are fighting, not because they are unstable. Really looking at your opponents motivations is not the same thing as excusing them. It is simply a more effective way of fighting them than making up inaccurate mythologies about them.
We should not take the decision to suicide bomb into account when determining the stability of the person doing it. Obviously, by one definition, they are not stable. But that is not the real question. The question is, can we judge who is likely to become a suicide bomber by their stability prior to the bombing? If they act like normal people before the bombing, rather than acting unstable in some way, then the answer is no.
We are looking for answers to the question, "What would make someone do that?" and one easy answer is "They are crazy." But that is no answer at all. And when we look, we see that (besides the bombing) these people don't look crazy. So we have to look further for the reasons. And that is scary. If they are simply crazy, we can wash our hands of it, there is nothing we can really do besides fight them. If they are not crazy, things become a whole lot more complicated. We need to start looking at their real motivations. And we never like what we see when we really look at their motivations, because their motivations relate to our actions. It is much easier to say "They are just crazy" than it is to say "They are regular people who believe they have been pushed too far and are fighting back."
I've read that suicide bombers tend not to be unstable and tend to be well educated middle class professionals. A little fact checking on Wikipedia shows there have been other, conflicting studies, though. Still, in general, suicide bombers are not the unstable, low income, desperate types portrayed in the media.
Where do you even get this wild speculation from? It wasn't the already wealthy who made out like bandits? It was a bunch of upstart Gordon Gekko wannabees? Sorry, no, all those Gekko wannabees were already rich, or from wealthy families. It was not all levels of society, that is a false equivalency. The top one percent were the ones who sold this to us and did this to us.
The thing is, the rich own the media, so they control the national dialogue about this. They set the narrative, and you've bought right into it, debating on their terms, using their mythology.
Well then I shall thank them for buying everything they wanted with money they did not have so I can pay for their Viagra when they are 85.
You should, you took advantage of them. You did not make it through hard work, you made it by taking advantage of the less fortunate. You come from the dominant culture, which means that you get to tell yourself happy little lies and no one with the power to challenge your lies would want to, because they are telling themselves the same lies. Even so, you can not rise above middle class and become a part of the owning class. If you were part of the owning class, you wouldn't be here arguing on Slashdot. If you were and you wanted something said, you'd just pay several hundred people to say it for you.
Seriously, what do you think would happen to our economy if everyone saved and invested instead of buying things? What would all those people invest in? Certainly not in jobs making things no one will buy. You see, the problem is not individual failings, it is systemic. There is simply no way that the majority of the poor could work for themselves. Where would they get the money to invest in a business? And if they did, it would not be their business, it would be the bank's business. They would be working for the bank, i.e. for wealthy investors.
40-50 years ago, people could support a family on one income. The average person still did not make enough to really save, though. They worked hard, but no harder than people today work. The average person got the same government benefits in the sixties as they do now. They sued just as much.
The average person today does not look for government handouts. being on the dole still carries a huge social stigma. People are born knowing that to prove your worth to others, you contribute. It is in our genes. Non-cooperators got shunned. Nearly everyone wants to contribute, but no one wants to be taken advantage of.
I know it is easier to blame the poor for their problems than to admit the system is unfair. When you admit the system is unfair, you have to look at how it was, just possibly, unfair in your favor. Then you have to question the myth you tell yourself: that you got ahead because you are superior. You can not go on believing that you were better than other people, rather than privileged or lucky.
Personal responsibility is certainly a good moral value, and should be taught, but you may also want to teach your children not to be doormats of the rich and powerful. Sometimes when something goes wrong, it is because a criminal is taking advantage of you, not because you screwed up. Sometimes the way to take responsibility for a situation is to stick up for yourself, and to fight those who would enslave you.
Sadly, there are times when nothing you could possibly do will make any difference. For example, the White Citizens Councils used the free market to destroy the lives of minorities who tried to stand up for their rights. They ensured that no one would do business with any "uppity" minorities. Those minorities could not have avoided that situation through any other choice but sitting down and shutting up. Is that what you tell your children to do when someone bullies them?
No, because people on both sides of the debate, fanboys and fascist authoritarian lovers, are all idiots. I've argued against both sides when they make idiotic statements, and both sides respond with vehement attack rather than reasoned debate.
Capitalist values are not human nature, they are sociopath nature. Modern economic research shows that most people value reciprocity, fairness, and egalitarianism more than they value profit. Most people will accept harm to themselves in order to enforce fairness in others. People are naturally social creatures, not greedy individualists.
Poor phrasing on my part, but I actually never said that inheriting wealth is creating it. Investment does not create wealth either. Work, and only work, creates wealth. Investment is simply one thing out of many that can allow work to happen.
Okay, whatever, but the question is, were the ultra rich hurt in any way by the recession? I do not believe they were, and if they make money primarily from investments, then not only were they not hurt, they made out like bandits. Where is the stock market today, and where was it when Obama took office?
What is the percentage of new businesses that survive longer than five years in this country? Would you say that every business that fails, fails due to a lack of hard work or intelligence? Are you claiming we have a true meritocracy?
Look, even people who start their own business and succeed do not become rich, they become upper middle class. Most small business owners make far less than $250,000 per year, and even that is still only upper middle class, not rich. The top one percent own more than the bottom ninety percent combined. Even if you do start your own business and succeed, you are still making a rich investor richer, unless you come from a wealthy background and have all the money to invest yourself.
Hard work is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to create wealth. Plenty of lazy rich people inherit money without working for it, and most people who work hard, even start their own business, fail. When someone does succeed by starting their own business, most of the time a big corporation then moves in, undercuts them, puts them out of business, takes over the market and raises prices.
The rich did not eat the losses, the losses were farmed out to small investors while the big trading houses got a bailout. This recession was not even a speedbump to the ultra wealthy. Look at the bonuses, the Dow Jones, the income disparity: the rich were not hurt at all by this recession, they profited from it.
Good point, but the downfall of the rich has always been hubris. They do not see peasants as real people. They do not believe they are capable of uprising. History would seem to prove them wrong, but one privilege of being rich is that you simply do not have to pay attention to things that prove you wrong.
So you agree that "people" make decisions, and that government is just a group of individuals. Good. I never claimed we currently have a discrete, democratic government. In fact, I claimed that government is currently dominated by the rich. Again, the concept of government is not the problem. Government is nothing more than people getting together to decide amongst themselves how to conduct their lives. The problem is that we let the rich have more power over government than we should have.
I simply can not fathom how someone can lay blame at the feet of the government without looking any further to determine the root cause.
A natural monopoly arises where the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, has an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual and potential competitors. This tends to be the case in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market, and hence high barriers to entry; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity. It is very expensive to build transmission networks (water/gas pipelines, electricity and telephone lines); therefore, it is unlikely that a potential competitor would be willing to make the capital investment needed to even enter the monopolist's market.
The reason we do not have more economic activity is that the rich will not invest in American business. Why would they, there is no demand for more products because people are too poor. The rich will gain a greater profit by investing in countries with poor labor, workplace safety, and environmental laws. They can exploit poor countries much more easily than rich countries.
The Fed is controlled by rich banking families, not by the government. It is a "quasi-governmental agency," meaning it is entirely a tool of the rich. Again, government is not the problem, the rich are.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever. That Wikipedia article is referenced. If you want to debate what's on Wikipedia, debate what's on Wikipedia. Don't try to poison the well. Studies have shown Wikipedia is more accurate than regular encyclopedias.
Right now, I have cited sources, while you have cited a personal anecdote. Got anything to back up your claims? Or, you know, even anecdotal numbers? How many bombings were there in Ramadi in 2005-2006? How many of those were carried out by the mentally handicapped?
I never claimed poor people can do no wrong. I am saying that the recession is not the fault of poor people, but was deliberately created by the rich to siphon money out of the government and the little guy's bank account, and into their pockets. I don't have a problem with rich people getting richer when everyone has enough to survive, but it is wrong when rich people getting richer while poor people starve. I also have a problem with fraud, and the more we find out about the collapse, the more it looks like deliberate fraud.
Why is that a problem? Independent studies have shown Wikipedia contains fewer inaccuracies than traditional encyclopedias. If you have a rebuttal to any of the points I brought up, please rebut. Poisoning the well by casting unwarranted aspersions on a source is not a valid form of debate.
Are you claiming that Wikipedia is unreliable?
No, suicide bombers are usually college educated middle class people. I know that makes for a more confusing narrative than "Unstable, idealistic, and poor," but it is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bomber#Profile_of_attackers
Yes, really. You have a problem with that? You DO know that Wikipedia articles are well referenced, right? I mean, there are TONS of links to the actual studies backing up the claims. If you have a problem with the conclusions the Wikipedia article reaches, state what those problems are rather than trying to poison the well against Wikipedia. People love to claim Wikipedia is unreliable, but independent studies show it is actually less likely to contain inaccuracies than traditional encyclopedias.
Yes, your one anecdote about one homeless guy trumps everything our economic data tells us.
This is class war, planned by the robber barons as a way of siphoning off your tax dollars into their coffers. I mean, you can admit that that is what happened, but you won't call it class war? Really? Maybe you think that if you suck up to the rich and appease them enough, they will throw you a bone? They won't, they will laugh at you for harming yourself while protecting their interests over your own.
Seriously, why do you blame the people who are just like you for this while defending the people who are trying to enslave you? It is disgusting to see a person debase themselves before their enemy like that.
If you blow yourself up, certainly you are unstable. But that is the wrong way of looking at the question. If that is the only unstable thing these people have ever done, then we can not predict whether someone will suicide bomb based on their stability. The question is not "Given that they suicide bombed, are they unstable?" It is "Did they do anything unstable prior to bombing?"
It is much easier to believe these people are simply unstable or desperate, rather than looking honestly at their real motivations. If someone who is fighting you is just crazy, your choices are simple and morally unambiguous: you fight back. But if they are not crazy, things become more complicated, you need to look at your own actions as well as theirs, and you need to really consider what you would do in their shoes. Obviously, "They are unstable maniacs who hate our freedoms" makes much better propaganda than "They are normal middle class people just like you and me who believe they have been pushed too far and are fighting back in the most effective way they know."
Note that I am not saying they HAVE been pushed too far, or excusing their actions in any way. I am saying that they believe it, and that is why they are fighting, not because they are unstable. Really looking at your opponents motivations is not the same thing as excusing them. It is simply a more effective way of fighting them than making up inaccurate mythologies about them.
We should not take the decision to suicide bomb into account when determining the stability of the person doing it. Obviously, by one definition, they are not stable. But that is not the real question. The question is, can we judge who is likely to become a suicide bomber by their stability prior to the bombing? If they act like normal people before the bombing, rather than acting unstable in some way, then the answer is no.
We are looking for answers to the question, "What would make someone do that?" and one easy answer is "They are crazy." But that is no answer at all. And when we look, we see that (besides the bombing) these people don't look crazy. So we have to look further for the reasons. And that is scary. If they are simply crazy, we can wash our hands of it, there is nothing we can really do besides fight them. If they are not crazy, things become a whole lot more complicated. We need to start looking at their real motivations. And we never like what we see when we really look at their motivations, because their motivations relate to our actions. It is much easier to say "They are just crazy" than it is to say "They are regular people who believe they have been pushed too far and are fighting back."
I've read that suicide bombers tend not to be unstable and tend to be well educated middle class professionals. A little fact checking on Wikipedia shows there have been other, conflicting studies, though. Still, in general, suicide bombers are not the unstable, low income, desperate types portrayed in the media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bomber#Profile_of_attackers
Where do you even get this wild speculation from? It wasn't the already wealthy who made out like bandits? It was a bunch of upstart Gordon Gekko wannabees? Sorry, no, all those Gekko wannabees were already rich, or from wealthy families. It was not all levels of society, that is a false equivalency. The top one percent were the ones who sold this to us and did this to us.
The thing is, the rich own the media, so they control the national dialogue about this. They set the narrative, and you've bought right into it, debating on their terms, using their mythology.
Well at least we both agree that the guy should be called "Mittens."
Well then I shall thank them for buying everything they wanted with money they did not have so I can pay for their Viagra when they are 85.
You should, you took advantage of them. You did not make it through hard work, you made it by taking advantage of the less fortunate. You come from the dominant culture, which means that you get to tell yourself happy little lies and no one with the power to challenge your lies would want to, because they are telling themselves the same lies. Even so, you can not rise above middle class and become a part of the owning class. If you were part of the owning class, you wouldn't be here arguing on Slashdot. If you were and you wanted something said, you'd just pay several hundred people to say it for you.
Seriously, what do you think would happen to our economy if everyone saved and invested instead of buying things? What would all those people invest in? Certainly not in jobs making things no one will buy. You see, the problem is not individual failings, it is systemic. There is simply no way that the majority of the poor could work for themselves. Where would they get the money to invest in a business? And if they did, it would not be their business, it would be the bank's business. They would be working for the bank, i.e. for wealthy investors.
40-50 years ago, people could support a family on one income. The average person still did not make enough to really save, though. They worked hard, but no harder than people today work. The average person got the same government benefits in the sixties as they do now. They sued just as much.
The average person today does not look for government handouts. being on the dole still carries a huge social stigma. People are born knowing that to prove your worth to others, you contribute. It is in our genes. Non-cooperators got shunned. Nearly everyone wants to contribute, but no one wants to be taken advantage of.
I know it is easier to blame the poor for their problems than to admit the system is unfair. When you admit the system is unfair, you have to look at how it was, just possibly, unfair in your favor. Then you have to question the myth you tell yourself: that you got ahead because you are superior. You can not go on believing that you were better than other people, rather than privileged or lucky.
Personal responsibility is certainly a good moral value, and should be taught, but you may also want to teach your children not to be doormats of the rich and powerful. Sometimes when something goes wrong, it is because a criminal is taking advantage of you, not because you screwed up. Sometimes the way to take responsibility for a situation is to stick up for yourself, and to fight those who would enslave you.
Sadly, there are times when nothing you could possibly do will make any difference. For example, the White Citizens Councils used the free market to destroy the lives of minorities who tried to stand up for their rights. They ensured that no one would do business with any "uppity" minorities. Those minorities could not have avoided that situation through any other choice but sitting down and shutting up. Is that what you tell your children to do when someone bullies them?
No, because people on both sides of the debate, fanboys and fascist authoritarian lovers, are all idiots. I've argued against both sides when they make idiotic statements, and both sides respond with vehement attack rather than reasoned debate.
Capitalist values are not human nature, they are sociopath nature. Modern economic research shows that most people value reciprocity, fairness, and egalitarianism more than they value profit. Most people will accept harm to themselves in order to enforce fairness in others. People are naturally social creatures, not greedy individualists.
Poor phrasing on my part, but I actually never said that inheriting wealth is creating it. Investment does not create wealth either. Work, and only work, creates wealth. Investment is simply one thing out of many that can allow work to happen.
I knew that wasn't the best phrasing but I seem to have a lot of posts to respond to and I was in a hurry. By "create" I meant "obtain."
Okay, whatever, but the question is, were the ultra rich hurt in any way by the recession? I do not believe they were, and if they make money primarily from investments, then not only were they not hurt, they made out like bandits. Where is the stock market today, and where was it when Obama took office?
What is the percentage of new businesses that survive longer than five years in this country? Would you say that every business that fails, fails due to a lack of hard work or intelligence? Are you claiming we have a true meritocracy?
Look, even people who start their own business and succeed do not become rich, they become upper middle class. Most small business owners make far less than $250,000 per year, and even that is still only upper middle class, not rich. The top one percent own more than the bottom ninety percent combined. Even if you do start your own business and succeed, you are still making a rich investor richer, unless you come from a wealthy background and have all the money to invest yourself.
Hard work is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to create wealth. Plenty of lazy rich people inherit money without working for it, and most people who work hard, even start their own business, fail. When someone does succeed by starting their own business, most of the time a big corporation then moves in, undercuts them, puts them out of business, takes over the market and raises prices.
The rich did not eat the losses, the losses were farmed out to small investors while the big trading houses got a bailout. This recession was not even a speedbump to the ultra wealthy. Look at the bonuses, the Dow Jones, the income disparity: the rich were not hurt at all by this recession, they profited from it.
Good point, but the downfall of the rich has always been hubris. They do not see peasants as real people. They do not believe they are capable of uprising. History would seem to prove them wrong, but one privilege of being rich is that you simply do not have to pay attention to things that prove you wrong.
So you agree that "people" make decisions, and that government is just a group of individuals. Good. I never claimed we currently have a discrete, democratic government. In fact, I claimed that government is currently dominated by the rich. Again, the concept of government is not the problem. Government is nothing more than people getting together to decide amongst themselves how to conduct their lives. The problem is that we let the rich have more power over government than we should have.
I simply can not fathom how someone can lay blame at the feet of the government without looking any further to determine the root cause.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly :
A natural monopoly arises where the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, has an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual and potential competitors. This tends to be the case in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market, and hence high barriers to entry; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity. It is very expensive to build transmission networks (water/gas pipelines, electricity and telephone lines); therefore, it is unlikely that a potential competitor would be willing to make the capital investment needed to even enter the monopolist's market.
The reason we do not have more economic activity is that the rich will not invest in American business. Why would they, there is no demand for more products because people are too poor. The rich will gain a greater profit by investing in countries with poor labor, workplace safety, and environmental laws. They can exploit poor countries much more easily than rich countries.
The Fed is controlled by rich banking families, not by the government. It is a "quasi-governmental agency," meaning it is entirely a tool of the rich. Again, government is not the problem, the rich are.