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Miss Fats posted:Meant to post this in this thread but I'm a functioning retard. That people get upset about well-wishes of peace and joy from other cultural angles than their own, is downright ridicilous. I don't get offended when people wish me a merry Christmas or happy holidays, because I know people mean well, and it's the thought that counts. Instead of taking those wishes at face value, some people go out of their way to see malicious intent behind them, and I think that's really quite sad. Also, the etymology of "Holidays" is "Holy days". Angry Avocado fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Dec 12, 2010 |
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Dec 12, 2010 15:20
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Miss Fats posted:Meant to post this in this thread but I'm a functioning retard. Quit trying to take the MASS out of ChristMAS. It's a CATHOLIC holiday! You Protestants have no right to try to steal Catholic holidays.
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Dec 12, 2010 15:36
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swarthmeister posted:It'd be funny to see her respond to some smart-rear end replying with a list of a dozen or so non-Christian origins of current Christmas festivities under that post. Maybe she'd boycott everything but simple nightly worship while waiting for gift-giving Zoroastrians to surprise her at a random time of year? A similar message was posted on a friend's wall. And immediately, one of my devout Mormon friends posted this long diatribe about the pagan origins of Christmas, and how retarded it is to hate other people's religions during December. She then posted her own status update to the tune of "STOP BEING WINTER BIGOTS."
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Dec 12, 2010 18:27
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I can't fathom how people who are not rich can defend the rights of the rich to not pay taxes. I mean, wouldn't you want more money? Don't you know giving money to the poor multiplies the wealth? (actually, you probably don't.)
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Dec 12, 2010 22:35
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Well they justify it under two "understandings" of economics. 1.Reaganomics says trickle down theory works 2.The government is nothing but a leeching vampire who will use your tax dollars to pay for welfare queens and congressmen's salary. So, understanding these 2 points, they believe that when the rich keep their money, they will use it to pay the poor and middle class working for them (working being the key point, not to "welfare queens"). If the government takes taxes it's not going to the working poor. Of course theres also the rich who are whiney babies and don't want to give up their money.
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Dec 12, 2010 23:33
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RagnarokAngel posted:Well they justify it under two "understandings" of economics. Also, "when I make my millions I want to keep my money."
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Dec 12, 2010 23:52
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ThePeteEffect posted:Also, "when I make my millions I want to keep my money."
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Dec 13, 2010 00:46
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PerniciousKnid posted:In all fairness everyone I know is a staunch Republican and none of them think this. Yeah I agree. It's less that lower income GOPers believe that they themselves will become rich (in my opinion and experience) than that they've simply absorbed the Fox News/GOP mantra that everyone does better, including them, when the rich get to keep all their money and let all those delicious, delicious crumbs fall from their table for the rest of us. They've absorbed that so completely that it's simply an article of faith at this point. Resentment of presumably nonwhite poors wasting all their tax money helps reinforce this as well.
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Dec 13, 2010 01:32
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Zwabu is spot on. My crazy conservative family and friends think that not believing in trickle down economics is akin to not believing in God (see what I did there?). When I say Trickle Down doesn't work, they dismiss anything else I have to say on the basis that I'm crazy to think it doesn't. Also, they don't think it's fair that the rich pay more. It's not that they want to poor to pay higher taxes, it's that they think that everyone should have to pay the same percentage. My dad is a huge proponent of the fair tax because that way those loving drug dealers have to pay taxes which would solve all our problems.
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Dec 13, 2010 01:40
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Miss Fats posted:Zwabu is spot on. My crazy conservative family and friends think that not believing in trickle down economics is akin to not believing in God (see what I did there?). When I say Trickle Down doesn't work, they dismiss anything else I have to say on the basis that I'm crazy to think it doesn't. Have you tried confronting them on the fact that a number of corporations have more money than ever but are simply not investing? If trickle down was in any way accurate this whole thing would be solved so gently caress hard we'd be in a second golden age.
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Dec 13, 2010 02:26
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Zwabu posted:Yeah I agree. It's less that lower income GOPers believe that they themselves will become rich (in my opinion and experience) than that they've simply absorbed the Fox News/GOP mantra that everyone does better, including them, when the rich get to keep all their money and let all those delicious, delicious crumbs fall from their table for the rest of us. Point taken. I have known a few people who seriously expressed my earlier sentiment, but they will say it as a hypothetical. They were more of a libertarian bent, however. It's probably more accurate to use "if" instead of "when". A few cursory google searches shows that worship of the rich or weird sympathy for the rich is much more common than than the notion that they will one day become rich.
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Dec 13, 2010 02:43
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Yeah, it does come down to a sense that taxing the rich more is picking on the rich, and that that's not fair somehow. My grandmother tried to tell me about the Fair Tax, and I explained to her how it was in fact unfair, and about how progressive taxation actually works. She listened, and thought about it, and agreed that that does make sense. It wasn't some malicious, strongly held belief of hers, it was just something she assumed was fact because she'd been told it was. Specifically, she'd read Mike Huckabee's book, and Stephen Forbe's book. As a strong Christian, she assumed they, as strong Christians, were giving her the facts.
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Dec 13, 2010 03:05
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The other thing is that your lower income GOPer is usually white, and they actually see themselves having more in common with fabulously rich people (most of whom are white) than they do with nonwhite people who may be in exactly the same economic situation and social strata as themselves. The way race politics has been played by the GOP since the 1960s, this is really a big part of the whole modern phenomenon of low income GOPers sympathizing with the rich.
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Dec 13, 2010 03:10
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where does this whole idea that the super rich are "innovators" come from, I mean Warren Buffet never invented a drat thing, Bill Gates bought QDOS from a Seattle company and worked with IBM to put it to there spec. Chase Bishop invented windows, and he isn't even on the list of the super-rich. Hell the biggest plurality of the super rich are the Walton descendants who invented nothing. Carlos slim made his first millions on real estate and stock speculation, I couldn't find much reference to his inventing much of anything.
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Dec 13, 2010 03:40
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Zaxxon posted:where does this whole idea that the super rich are "innovators" come from, I mean Warren Buffet never invented a drat thing, Bill Gates bought QDOS from a Seattle company and worked with IBM to put it to there spec. Chase Bishop invented windows, and he isn't even on the list of the super-rich. Hell the biggest plurality of the super rich are the Walton descendants who invented nothing. Carlos slim made his first millions on real estate and stock speculation, I couldn't find much reference to his inventing much of anything. Enron. Most innovative company 6 years in a row.
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Dec 13, 2010 05:06
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My family is investing thousands of dollars into the Iraqi Dinar and expects to be millionaires within a few weeks. I really had no other place to post this, and no email, but how can they think this is a good thing?
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Dec 13, 2010 05:24
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Vonnegut Asterisk posted:My family is investing thousands of dollars into the Iraqi Dinar and expects to be millionaires within a few weeks. http://www.iraqidinarscam.info/ First hit off Google. Started typing "Iraqi dinar" and it autopopulated "Iraq dinar scam". Sounds like your family just got scammed hard.
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Dec 13, 2010 05:26
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Dameius posted:http://www.iraqidinarscam.info/ Oh no, I'm totally aware of that and tried telling them. Too bad I get my views from the liberal media.
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Dec 13, 2010 05:30
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Vonnegut Asterisk posted:Oh no, I'm totally aware of that and tried telling them. Too bad I get my views from the liberal media. 
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Dec 13, 2010 16:15
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Zwabu posted:The way race politics has been played by the GOP since the 1960s, this is really a big part of the whole modern phenomenon of low income GOPers sympathizing with the rich. I think it goes back farther than that. I remember reading an argument that racism was consciously used to help dismantle the progressive movement of the '30's, when a lot of organizers were trying to help people organize by class. The landowners successfully split the movement in the south by race.
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Dec 13, 2010 16:22
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Vonnegut Asterisk posted:My family is investing thousands of dollars into the Iraqi Dinar and expects to be millionaires within a few weeks. Just echoing this incomprehension. How did they explain it to you? Is the Iraqi central bank buying up 80% of Iraq's currency? How could they ever expect currency exchange to net them 10000% profits?
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Dec 13, 2010 18:10
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Arglebargle III posted:Just echoing this incomprehension. How did they explain it to you? Is the Iraqi central bank buying up 80% of Iraq's currency? How could they ever expect currency exchange to net them 10000% profits? The scam apparently goes from the following logic when currency sellers pitch it: 1. Iraqi Dinars are currently bottom barrel exchange rates with the US dollar because of our military operations there have obviously destabilized the economy. 2. This destabilization plummeted the value of the Dinar. 3. The US won't be in Iraq for ever acting as a destabilizing force. 4. Iraq's economy will recover from its current lows or stated more obviously get much stronger. 5. A stronger economy == stronger Dinar 6. You can now buy back dollars with your much stronger Dinar, the better exchange rate netting you massive profits 7. Sit around and be smug over your neighbors as they are now the poors and you are rich. There are a whole host of assumptions in there already but one very important thing that they forget to mention is that if you are going to do your buyback into dollars you have to do it in Iraq.
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Dec 13, 2010 19:22
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Dameius posted:There are a whole host of assumptions in there already but one very important thing that they forget to mention is that if you are going to do your buyback into dollars you have to do it in Iraq. Yes, but clearly once the Iraqi Dinar is super strong Iraq will be a fairyland of peace and tranquility. It'd be like taking a vacation. Seriously though, Forex scams are so common it's almost laughable that they still exist. Unless you're a professional trader with a lot of experience and knowledge of the market (along with a ton of capital), you should have no business with Forex. Foyes36 fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Dec 13, 2010 |
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Dec 13, 2010 22:16
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Pfirti86 posted:Seriously though, Forex scams are so common it's almost laughable that they still exist. Unless you're a professional trader with a lot of experience and knowledge of the market (along with a ton of capital), you should have no business with Forex.
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Dec 13, 2010 23:01
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All of modern America's institutions are a conspiratorial system designed to keep that single person down, which is why they can never get any money. But this here, this person selling dinars outside of the system, he will be their salvation.
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Dec 13, 2010 23:05
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cheerfullydrab posted:All of modern America's institutions are a conspiratorial system designed to keep that single person down, which is why they can never get any money. But this here, this person selling dinars outside of the system, he will be their salvation. If you believe that then I got this van full of stereo equipment that I can sell you on the cheap man. Its a hot offer so its going to move quick so buy now!
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Dec 13, 2010 23:24
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tendrilsfor20 posted:That's what I don't get. It's like, you get the forward that says "Buy Dinars!" Wouldn't your first reaction (assuming you believe the message) be to call your banker and say, "Hey, buy me some Dinars?" Who would click on a link and buy Dinars on the internet from 'some guy selling Dinars'? What?? Only ivory tower elite have personal bankers! REAL americans do it themselves!!! USA! USA!
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Dec 13, 2010 23:42
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:What?? Only ivory tower elite have personal bankers! REAL americans do it themselves!!! USA! USA!
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Dec 14, 2010 01:37
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TGLT posted:Have you tried confronting them on the fact that a number of corporations have more money than ever but are simply not investing? If trickle down was in any way accurate this whole thing would be solved so gently caress hard we'd be in a second golden age. This: Vonnegut Asterisk posted:Oh no, I'm totally aware of that and tried telling them. Too bad I get my views from the liberal media. Zwabu posted:The way race politics has been played by the GOP since the 1960s, this is really a big part of the whole modern phenomenon of low income GOPers sympathizing with the rich. It goes back further than that, my friend. And it's not necessarily a GOP thing so much as a rich white folks thing (who are incidentally represented by the GOP). Notahippie posted:I think it goes back farther than that. I remember reading an argument that racism was consciously used to help dismantle the progressive movement of the '30's, when a lot of organizers were trying to help people organize by class. The landowners successfully split the movement in the south by race. Goes back even further than that. Prior even to the founding of this country. Before the so-called "New World," there was no real concept of race, or at least racial superiority. There weren't large groups of racial minorities in most places where it wasn't more convenient and to use religion (e.g. Spain). However, once the colonies began importing black Africans as slaves, this all changed. Because the colonies were isolated from the power bases of their sponsors (Britain, mainly), the rich (who incidentally were WASPs) needed a new way to keep the poor in line. Poor whites had more in common with poor and enslaved blacks than they did with the rich whites. Politically they shared the same interests, etc. The Rich needed a way to make the poor whites think their welfare was common with the rich and all they really had in common was their lack of melanin. As we all know, those who have the money control the debate, and the rich began telling the poor whites how inferior the blacks were, how they would rape your women, kill your children, and steal your sitcom time slot. They began giving poor whites a more "intellectual" "ownership" of the "problem" by putting them on runaway slave patrols, etc. Thus, race became an issue of divide and instead of class warfare, we have race warfare. Welcome to the present.
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Dec 14, 2010 07:10
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Honestly that reading sounds 1) More sinister than the reality and 2) A very US centric way of understanding race relations (for want of a better term). The fact is when Europeans first encountered Native Americans it sparked a great debate about whether they had souls. Less ridiculous than it sounds the debate really centred around whether they deserved the protection the Church and Christianity afforded to all human beings. Whether they could be enslaved and effectively treated as a new form of livestock (where circumstances allowed) or whether the goal should be to treat them like any other newly encountered pagans. It definitely didn't start when Africans started being imported to the Americas. gently caress saying there was no such thing as racial identity is itself trying to impose a modern concept onto a very different mindset, particularly since religion could in many cases stand in for racial divisions. There was no question of white Muslims and Jews were an easy to identify ethnic and religious group. Racial 'solidarity' was certainly a tool used by rich white people in America to keep order by giving poor white people someone to look down upon while also employing them as a way to preserve the Status quo but that wasn't identical with the slave trade. Plenty of areas separated slave plantations from the general population (all the sugar plantations in the Caribbean and West Indies where there wasn't any populations of working class whites that weren't already directly involved in slavery). There was also plenty of racism in countries that had long done away with slavery, the influx of West Indians to the UK in the 50's as cheap labour sparked racial tensions that weren't stirred up as part of a capitalist conspiracy. People are just a bit broken. Hell another example of exactly what you identify as racial relations would be (I'd argue a big part of it) evident in Northern Ireland where wealthy Protestants successfully unified working class Protestants to work against reforms that would have directly benefited them. There were gangs of working class Protestants who fought against being given the loving vote in the 50's and 60's because it would have meant lots of Catholics being enfranchised. People fought against being given the loving vote in the name of religious sectarian divisions.
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Dec 14, 2010 11:03
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I would imagine crowding out class warfare with other prejudices goes back at least to ancient Egypt. Egypt was populated with humans so I think it must be true.
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Dec 14, 2010 14:02
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Miss Fats posted:It goes back further than that, my friend. And it's not necessarily a GOP thing so much as a rich white folks thing (who are incidentally represented by the GOP). No, I know that pretty much everything suddenly becomes "liberal" when it disagrees with their previously held notion but even something like the Wall Street Journal reported that. I don't think the WSJ is considered liberal. That being said you do add more guided menace to the birth of racism than there probably was. I'm going to agree with MrNemo, people are just pretty quick to look at anything vaguely in the out group and say "gently caress you". That being said it is certainly accurate that the rich have used race to blunt criticisms of themselves. Or religious hatred. Or really anything that can be used to say "Hey I'm totally like you gently caress those other guys". Such as the GOP's manipulative Southern strategy. They didn't create racism, and hell I don't even know to what extent every one of them believed black people were evil themselves at the start(Strom Thurmond certainly loved him some darker skin) but drat did they love winning.
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Dec 14, 2010 16:23
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Miss Fats posted:Prior even to the founding of this country. Before the so-called "New World," there was no real concept of race, or at least racial superiority. There weren't large groups of racial minorities in most places where it wasn't more convenient and to use religion (e.g. Spain). Yeah there was. Othello was basically all about this. I know it was post-New World but it was about the Moors, a long established, if vaguely defined group.
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Dec 15, 2010 10:47
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The moron who writes in the small-town weekly newspaper has a new column.quote:The U.S. tax system is 13,400 pages of complicated gobbledy-gook that confuses nearly everyone who encounters it. Just ask Charlie Rangel, Tim Geithner or Kathleen Sebelius. Sometimes I want to shred this guy's awful columns apart sentence by sentence, but then I realize some old man in Podunk, VA isn't worth my time. Plus I think his dad was some Republican politician, so the damage is clearly genetic. I also love how it's "the liberal" like he's some kind of goddamned anthropologist discovering a new culture.
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Dec 15, 2010 13:22
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A person's inheritance is income. Income is taxed. The "death tax" is an income tax paid by the heirs. It's as simple as that.
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Dec 15, 2010 13:40
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Anyone who uses the phrase "you liberals" has nothing constructive to add to political discourse, ever. For that matter, let me extend that definition a bit: - Anyone who compares his opponents to nazi's or communists - Applies doubly so to anyone who compares his opponents to nazi's and communists - Anyone who can't tell the difference between socialism and communism
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Dec 15, 2010 14:31
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Armyman25 posted:A person's inheritance is income. Income is taxed. The "death tax" is an income tax paid by the heirs. It's as simple as that. 
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Dec 15, 2010 14:54
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Angry Avocado posted:- Anyone who can't tell the difference between socialism and communism I don't know the difference, actually. What is it? edit: communism is a sub-division of socialism, right?
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Dec 15, 2010 15:51
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freebooter posted:I don't know the difference, actually. What is it? With communism everything is governed by a central body: jobs, wages, goods, distribution, and prices, and is very totalitarian. Wages of all workers regardless of occopation, demand or skill, are equal. Healthcare and education are free and available to everyone. Communism is a political system based on Karl Marx's ideology that all men (and women) are equal, and that the current powerstructures create un-equality between people, and supress the lower class in order to garner more wealth or power for the ones currently in charge. He imagined a perfect society to be classless, and this was the result. Socialism on the other hand is an economic system (not a political one) that works in combination with the free market, but interferes with it through watchdogs, regulations, and (progressive) taxing. The government takes care of the bare necessities (education, infrastructure, water gas and electricity, etc.) rather than have them being taken care of by the free market. As well as using government run programs that help redistribute wealth and opportunities downward. (The "natural" flow of money isn't to the hardest workers but the most powerful people, basically, wealth trickles up, not down.) I guess the biggest contrast between the two is how they combine with capitalism. Communism is the polar opposite of capitalism, socialism can't exist without it.
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Dec 15, 2010 16:50
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Angry Avocado posted:If you have a political/economical spectrum with on one end communism (free market is in government's hands) and on the other libertarianism (unfettered free market), socialism is what lies in-between. I think you need to add a forth category to your list there: - Anyone who cannot properly describe either socialism or communism. That person is you. Communism is a classless, stateless society where needs are fulfilled based upon the equal democratic participation of everyone in society. There is no central body doing anything, wages do not or effectively do not exist. Socialism is a transitional state to bring about communism whereby the workers own the means of production, usually using the state as their representative or occasionally literally by the workers themselves. The necessities of life are of course guaranteed to everyone but there is no market mechanism for anything. This is also why every single complaint leveled by Americans about anything being socialist is utterly wrong. What Angry Avocado has just described is basically a social democratic welfare state. namesake fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Dec 15, 2010 |
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