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My Q-Face posted:
I asked this very question to a loudmouth Fox viewer at work recently and his response was that "hell they should have sent in some jets then!" When I asked him what "jets" would have accomplished, his response was that they could at least have dropped a few bombs on the city. I wish I were making that up or exaggerating - the real answer to your question is that these people are just loving stupid, stupid, stupid.
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May 12, 2014 03:44
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I present to this thread a great recent example of Right Wing Media.quote:Some basic facts about Eric and Charlotte Kaufman. First off, OK, whatever impressions you have of people who own boats, they are not rich. The boat is their house. They have no other home. This is where their savings went. This is a fantastic example of the kind of bubble these people live in. They say poo poo like this, and then we wonder why people think the way they do about wealth in America. I mean look at it. It is a thing of beauty. Rich people have the luxury of quitting their job, using their savings to buy a boat, selling their house, and going on sailboat sabbatical for months/years on end. Let me tell you how they aren't rich! They barely had any money to their name after they finished spending it. My name is Ira Glass. Welcome to This American Life. I wonder what my fundie right wing parents would say if they knew I found this show to be too right wing for me. ErIog fucked around with this message at 03:57 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 03:50
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Unzip and Attack posted:I asked this very question to a loudmouth Fox viewer at work recently and his response was that "hell they should have sent in some jets then!" When I asked him what "jets" would have accomplished, his response was that they could at least have dropped a few bombs on the city. I wish I were making that up or exaggerating - the real answer to your question is that these people are just loving stupid, stupid, stupid. Just making sure, this is the city your coworker wishes we had bombed indiscriminately, right?   Glass the fuckers   (But seriously, have you considered that your coworker is just evil? Stupid seems pretty charitable for someone who wants to revenge-bomb civilians). VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 04:04 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 03:59
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VitalSigns posted:Glass the fuckers Glassing cunts is the Australian and British national pastimes. I like to think we practice a dignified passive aggression here.
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May 12, 2014 04:02
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Unzip and Attack posted:I asked this very question to a loudmouth Fox viewer at work recently and his response was that "hell they should have sent in some jets then!" When I asked him what "jets" would have accomplished, his response was that they could at least have dropped a few bombs on the city. I wish I were making that up or exaggerating - the real answer to your question is that these people are just loving stupid, stupid, stupid. Was he willing to elaborate? Because it's getting into seriously weird imperialist/racist turf to think it accomplishes anything to bomb a city where a diplomatic mission was attacked by some militia. Do they bomb the mission site after confirming American deaths? Do they just bomb random parts of the city? How could he justify that without mutely doing a ErIog posted:My name is Ira Glass. Welcome to This American Life. I know I cut back significantly on NPR after their hit-week regarding disability compensation, but that was a last-straw thing rather than a personal make-or-break issue. NPR Check was a good blog when that dude had the patience for it, but they gave up years ago. What's probably still America's main source of accessible non-garbage "straight" news keeps getting worse. Still plenty of stuff worth a listen depending on your station, and I'm sure stuff like Code Switch etc is going to open some sheltered suburban minds. sweart gliwere fucked around with this message at 04:20 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 04:16
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sweart gliwere posted:I know I cut back significantly on NPR after their hit-week regarding disability compensation, but that was a last-straw thing rather than a personal make-or-break issue. NPR Check was a good blog when that dude had the patience for it, but they gave up years ago. What's probably still America's main source of accessible non-garbage "straight" news keeps getting worse. Still plenty of stuff worth a listen depending on your station, and I'm sure stuff like Code Switch etc is going to open some sheltered suburban minds. I became pretty disillusioned with TAL after that too. It always seemed like they had a really good firewall up between the main TAL show and Planet Money until the dam broke with that disability bullshit. This story about the married couple on the sailboat was actually a pretty good piece of not blaming victims, but they just had to say something so filled to the brim with privilege that I literally laughed when I heard it. TAL does good work the majority of the time still, but I definitely listen to it with a more critical ear now that my views have changed quite a bit from when I first started listening to it like 10 years ago.
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May 12, 2014 04:26
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ufarn posted:Bill Maher wants you to stop being racists. Maher is a loving smug shitlord, and he's probably up in arms about people being held to account for what they say privately because he has an assload of terrible opinions that he wants to keep away from public scrutiny.
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May 12, 2014 07:03
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Zeroisanumber posted:Maher is a loving smug shitlord, and he's probably up in arms about people being held to account for what they say privately because he has an assload of terrible opinions that he wants to keep away from public scrutiny. It's probably because he had to deal with a lot of poo poo right after 9/11 (including having his show "Politically Incorrect" canceled) when he said in response to neocons who called the attackers cowards that it took balls to fly planes into buildings. But you'd think he'd be bright enough to understand that there's a huge difference between that and making outright racist statements. Yeah, it was wrong for someone to record Sterling without his knowledge but what's done is done. What are we supposed to do, pretend we never heard him say those things and act like it never happened, and clutch our pearls when someone has the gall to bring it up? C'mon Bill.
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May 12, 2014 07:26
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Tonight some right wing radio caller was saying it was ridiculous to punish Donald Sterling for being racist but he should be punished for being a lovely NBA team owner who reaped profits by other team owners working hard to run good teams while he just didn't give a poo poo and collected income off of their work that made the NBA popular and profitable. I don't know how these people come from the same planet I do.
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May 12, 2014 08:17
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mr. mephistopheles posted:Tonight some right wing radio caller was saying it was ridiculous to punish Donald Sterling for being racist but he should be punished for being a lovely NBA team owner who reaped profits by other team owners working hard to run good teams while he just didn't give a poo poo and collected income off of their work that made the NBA popular and profitable. I heard one who said that sterling should've been fired for dating an ugly lady.
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May 12, 2014 08:18
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beatlegs posted:It's probably because he had to deal with a lot of poo poo right after 9/11 (including having his show "Politically Incorrect" canceled) when he said in response to neocons who called the attackers cowards that it took balls to fly planes into buildings. But you'd think he'd be bright enough to understand that there's a huge difference between that and making outright racist statements. Yeah, it was wrong for someone to record Sterling without his knowledge but what's done is done. What are we supposed to do, pretend we never heard him say those things and act like it never happened, and clutch our pearls when someone has the gall to bring it up? C'mon Bill. No, the dude legit has a ton of dumb beliefs, he's said a bunch of stupid poo poo about medicine and vaccines and stuff being scams.
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May 12, 2014 09:08
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sweart gliwere posted:I know I cut back significantly on NPR after their hit-week regarding disability compensation, but that was a last-straw thing rather than a personal make-or-break issue. NPR Check was a good blog when that dude had the patience for it, but they gave up years ago. What's probably still America's main source of accessible non-garbage "straight" news keeps getting worse. Still plenty of stuff worth a listen depending on your station, and I'm sure stuff like Code Switch etc is going to open some sheltered suburban minds. That Planet Money story was poo poo, but the tipping point for me was Ira Glass getting personally, vehemently upset over Mike Daisey embellishing a few parts of his one-man show about visiting Apple factories, and not the fact slightly older children than Daisey claimed were working in the sweatshops or that workers were still being poisoned, but in a different ODM factory. And not just Glass, but a lot of lovely people who apparently thought up until then their stupid consumer electronics were somehow made by magic unicorns in Cupertino by a completely different process from every other stupid consumer electronic device.
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May 12, 2014 09:35
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Bill Maher made Religulous and- in this era still under the shadow of, "You are either with us or you're with the terrorists," Bill Maher is a voice of reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkyLrDpaUg (One of the few genuine flaws in this film is how it gets fire-and-brimstone with how dangerous religion is at the end, way over the top). The full documentary is on vimeo if you're interested, it's about 90 minutes: http://vimeo.com/68370439 In a more enlightened era in the United States he would be a partisan. At present? Hell the gently caress no, he actually references facts and lets people from all walks of life voice opinions, a far cry from the daily propaganda drip from the nightly news or the Two Minutes Hate broadcast 24/7 on talk radio and the "liberal media" cable news networks. To wring your hands so hard as to call Bill Maher a shitlord is to retreat from the fanatics. I'll take Noam Chomsky over him any day, but not every one has the patience or education necessary to listen to him, just like Bill Nye (or the late Carl Sagan) could present the wonders of science to a public that has the same barriers to learning.
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May 12, 2014 10:08
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Maher has good opinions, Maher has bad opinions, and Maher has some retarded opinions (e.g. vax and tax). He couples this mixed bag with a rather shrill preachy tone, so this thread can't handle him, as has been demonstrated by probably half a dozen Bill Maher derails I've seen since I started following it. It's better to limit discussion to unambiguously hard right dipshits here, and avoid Hollywood Lolbertarians because they confuse everyone, imo. Don't ever mention South Park here Homura and Sickle fucked around with this message at 10:46 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 10:42
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I like his show sometimes but it's on a cable subscription channel so who cares. That the right finds time to hate him is only evidence of how small and insubstantial the American left really is. That we find time to hate him more.. Idk. Colbert moving into late-night is a way-the-gently caress bigger deal.
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May 12, 2014 10:49
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Centripetal Horse posted:Rush is absolutely furious that we force football players to wear helmets and padding. It's the pussification of American sports. If anything, it's the opposite. If anything, the padding and safety gear actually encourages more violent and injurious behavior because the participants think they're protected. ErIog posted:This is a fantastic example of the kind of bubble these people live in. They say poo poo like this, and then we wonder why people think the way they do about wealth in America. You know, that's a bubble of ignorant self-pity you live in as well. You don't have to be rich to live a dream like that. All you need to do is sacrifice and live for a single goal, and not spend money on anything else. Skydiving is one of those "for the rich" activities where a whole lot of the participants, including many of the Pros, make less than $30,000 a year. A lot of the professionals live in dilapidated trailers or tents and do nothing else with their lives but chase their dreams, it's not about being rich. A 36' Sailboat costs between 10-50,000 dollars, and if you have no other assets, bills, or other requirements, costs less than $1000 per month to live on. This Eric Kaufmann was a former enlisted sailor in the Navy who likely never made more than $50k a year in his life, and his wife was a teacher, I'd love for you to tell me she made a lot of money. They spent the last 7 years saving up for this and sold everything they had fixing up a cheap boat with bargain parts. They had a plan, they had a budget, they stuck to it and they made it. That's pure lower-middle/working class American Dream right there. My Q-Face fucked around with this message at 11:03 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 11:00
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agarjogger posted:I like his show sometimes but it's on a cable subscription channel so who cares. That the right finds time to hate him is only evidence of how small and insubstantial the American left really is. That we find time to hate him more.. Idk. Gonna be awesome to see a non-white late-show host for the first time since, what, Arsenio and Kamau Bell?
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May 12, 2014 11:56
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Yeah, owning a small sailboat or power boat isn't necessarily a rich guy thing to do. You could own and maintain one for about as much as a car. I did a half share on a power boat for 12 grand.
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May 12, 2014 12:11
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My Q-Face posted:
Without getting into the particulars of this specific guy, this does seem like the sort of thing that should be possible for a "middle class" American to do -- and as many Americans as possible should have a "middle class" lifestyle.
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May 12, 2014 13:06
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Without getting into the particulars of this specific guy, this does seem like the sort of thing that should be possible for a "middle class" American to do -- and as many Americans as possible should have a "middle class" lifestyle. I absolutely agree. Calling out NPR for doing a story fellating the rich because they pointed out one middle class family that did manage it is counter-productive to that end.
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May 12, 2014 13:52
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My Q-Face posted:If anything, it's the opposite. If anything, the padding and safety gear actually encourages more violent and injurious behavior because the participants think they're protected. I'm pretty sure this is a symptom of the erosion of the middle class. We've gotten to the point where people making moderate amounts of money are being conflated with being rich. I mean here we are in the year 2014 and we have people freaking out that a guy who makes less than 50k a year is somehow loaded because he sold his home and singlemindedly saved for years for a single goal. Freaking out about that doesn't strike me as rational, it sounds like petty jealousy. I would hope that this doesn't become prevailing opinion because I can and always have gotten behind "eat the rich", but if that is expanded to "Eat the middle class too because gently caress everyone", yeah no not riding that train.
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May 12, 2014 13:54
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My Q-Face posted:I absolutely agree. Calling out NPR for doing a story fellating the rich because they pointed out one middle class family that did manage it is counter-productive to that end. Well, I get why it's annoying. Boats are pretty heavily stereotyped as the exclusive domain of the very wealthy, so it's pretty easy to hear a story like that and go "what the gently caress, yachting and vacations are not middle class," especially when most Americans are working jobs where either one of those things -- the boat or the vacation -- is an unachievable fantasy. I don't want to give up so easily on the classic middle-class American dream for everyone though. Some European nations mandate up to a month of vacation time yearly. Spaceman Future! posted:I'm pretty sure this is a symptom of the erosion of the middle class. We've gotten to the point where people making moderate amounts of money are being conflated with being rich. I mean here we are in the year 2014 and we have people freaking out that a guy who makes less than 50k a year is somehow loaded because he sold his home and singlemindedly saved for years for a single goal. .. . I would hope that this doesn't become prevailing opinion because I can and always have gotten behind "eat the rich", but if that is expanded to "Eat the middle class too because gently caress everyone", yeah no not riding that train. I just feel like if everyone thinks this dude is "rich," then the class war is over and everyone who isn't actively wearing a monocle and top hat right now has already lost. Even if those things aren't present reality, they're within the realm of legitimate aspiration for what we want our middle class to have access to. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:06 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 13:57
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Seriously. Non-rich people do buy houses while not selling everything they own. Not all, obviously.
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May 12, 2014 14:05
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If you make over 30k you are rich and an enemy of the Proletariat.
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May 12, 2014 14:08
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:No, the dude legit has a ton of dumb beliefs, he's said a bunch of stupid poo poo about medicine and vaccines and stuff being scams. It was a reasonable stance to take and he didn't go ANTI-VAX. He is a fan of eating non-hosed-with food. I'm not going to fault him for that. He seems to know his poo poo quite well, and if he comes off as sanctimonious, well guess what? So did Carlin and Hicks and a ton of other opinionated comedians. He was RIGHT when he said martyr pilots were wrong but they weren't cowards. I think people can't stand his smugness, and I care about that as much as I care about the way people felt about Christopher Hitchens. Mostly, the dude is right. His stupid poo poo about medicine and vaccines and stuff is mostly a smart dude looking for the truth.
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May 12, 2014 14:30
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comes along bort posted:That Planet Money story was poo poo, but the tipping point for me was Ira Glass getting personally, vehemently upset over Mike Daisey embellishing a few parts of his one-man show about visiting Apple factories, and not the fact slightly older children than Daisey claimed were working in the sweatshops or that workers were still being poisoned, but in a different ODM factory. And not just Glass, but a lot of lovely people who apparently thought up until then their stupid consumer electronics were somehow made by magic unicorns in Cupertino by a completely different process from every other stupid consumer electronic device. I can see why Ira got pissed off. That guy had an amazing story to tell and he just couldn't let it be. He drew a lot of attention to a real problem and then undercut himself because he wanted a better story, made poo poo up and blew his credibility. Then the dude busted out his "I never claimed to be 100% factual defense" and pretended he had no idea people were taking his talk at face value. You're shooting the messenger. Daisey was the idiot who couldn't settle for telling an important truth and had to embellish. He's the one who dishonestly captured the limelight and damaged everyone coming forward with a story of worker exploitation.
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May 12, 2014 14:48
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My post wasn't meant to be some sort of incitement to blame them or eat the rich or anything. I'm not angry at them or jealous of them. I was pointing out the refusal by Ira Glass and TAL to recognize privilege.My Q-Face posted:This Eric Kaufmann was a former enlisted sailor in the Navy who likely never made more than $50k a year in his life, and his wife was a teacher, I'd love for you to tell me she made a lot of money. They spent the last 7 years saving up for this and sold everything they had fixing up a cheap boat with bargain parts. Together, their income puts them among the top 20% of earners in the United States. Yeah, it's a dream that everyone in America should be able to aspire to. It's a dream that should be achievable by everyone. Unfortunately, right now, it isn't. So don't loving tell me their behavior is normative or doable for the majority of people in the US. Go look at the loving numbers. It isn't. By definition it is not. I'm not denigrating them. I'm not saying they didn't work hard. I'm saying that pretending people in the top 20% of household income are "middle class" is completely loving insane. That kind of gaming of the numbers is the reason people in the US cannot have a sane discussion about the current state of wealth/income in the United States. Spaceman Future! posted:I'm pretty sure this is a symptom of the erosion of the middle class. We've gotten to the point where people making moderate amounts of money are being conflated with being rich. The rest of this post is some bullshit worthy of Keith Ablow, but this is the point I was making. The state of our country is such that there is a refusal to acknowledge, even among ostensibly liberal people in media, that very modest incomes/safety nets/dreams/etc. have become extraordinary in the current state of the US economy. Once again. I thought the story was good in terms of laying out why victim blaming is stupid. I don't think they should forcibly have their wealth redistributed in the glorious revolution. I'm pointing out that even liberal commentators(and it looks like lots of people in this thread too) want to pretend people who are, by definition, at the upper end of the household income scale are somehow "in the middle". ErIog fucked around with this message at 15:15 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 15:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Well, I get why it's annoying. Boats are pretty heavily stereotyped as the exclusive domain of the very wealthy, so it's pretty easy to hear a story like that and go "what the gently caress, yachting and vacations are not middle class," especially when most Americans are working jobs where either one of those things -- the boat or the vacation -- is an unachievable fantasy. I guess it's easy for people who don't live near significant water to feel that way, but that's not really new https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGD-tUsySPs, and the reality is that boating was always a cross-class activity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDDcs_0BI6k.
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May 12, 2014 15:07
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Dr. Faustus posted:He was RIGHT when he said martyr pilots were wrong but they weren't cowards. No, he WASN'T, and putting it in CAPITALS won't CHANGE THAT. Those pilots were facing an instant, painless death in exchange for an eternity of bliss, a guaranteed legacy as hero martyrs here on earth, and absolutely no chance of ever facing any consequences for their actions. They were cowards and the act was an act of cowardice. If those men were brave, then so were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and every other
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May 12, 2014 15:12
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comes along bort posted:That Planet Money story was poo poo, but the tipping point for me was Ira Glass getting personally, vehemently upset over Mike Daisey embellishing a few parts of his one-man show about visiting Apple factories, and not the fact slightly older children than Daisey claimed were working in the sweatshops or that workers were still being poisoned, but in a different ODM factory. And not just Glass, but a lot of lovely people who apparently thought up until then their stupid consumer electronics were somehow made by magic unicorns in Cupertino by a completely different process from every other stupid consumer electronic device.
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May 12, 2014 15:13
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Bravery and heroism aren't synonyms; otherwise horrible people can be brave, just like otherwise horrible people can be strong or fast or tall.
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May 12, 2014 15:14
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Well, I get why it's annoying. Boats are pretty heavily stereotyped as the exclusive domain of the very wealthy, so it's pretty easy to hear a story like that and go "what the gently caress, yachting and vacations are not middle class," especially when most Americans are working jobs where either one of those things -- the boat or the vacation -- is an unachievable fantasy. Yachts are undoubtedly the domain of the wealthy, but a boat to go water skiing with is definitely not if you live in the parts of the country with lots of water. You can get a used boat for like 5k no problem, and a nice used one for 10k. While certainly a luxury, many middle class families can afford that, and you see boats in backyards of very modest ares all the time around here.
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May 12, 2014 15:15
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Centripetal Horse posted:No, he WASN'T, and putting it in CAPITALS won't CHANGE THAT. Those pilots were facing an instant, painless death in exchange for an eternity of bliss, a guaranteed legacy as hero martyrs here on earth, and absolutely no chance of ever facing any consequences for their actions. They were cowards and the act was an act of cowardice. If those men were brave, then so were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and every other pangstrom fucked around with this message at 15:23 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 15:20
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Apart from the whole antivax/GMO crazy, it's worth mentioning that Maher absolutely locates himself on the execrable Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens axis of New Atheist shitlords, and hates Muslims just as much as the other three. Moreover, his whole schtick is Borowitz- or Daily Currant-grade idiot liberal reinforcement, i.e. not remotely funny.
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May 12, 2014 15:22
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Bravery and heroism aren't synonyms; otherwise horrible people can be brave, just like otherwise horrible people can be strong or fast or tall. In any common usage I have encountered, they are certainly used as synonyms. "Brave" is literally used as part of the #1 definition for "heroic" in the two dictionaries I just checked. Forget that, though. The question is not whether horrible people can be brave, of course they can. The question at hand is whether one specific group of people were brave in a specific act, and I think the answer is pretty clearly "no." Committing an act you have been conditioned and indoctrinated to, with promise of great reward and no chance of any punishment beyond ascending to your version of heaven, does not require bravery. Suicide indoctrination is specifically meant to remove courage from the equation, anyway, because depending on the man's bravery results in that man sometimes not pressing the button or crashing the plane. We can split semantic hairs all day, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find many people who would spontaneously describe the 9/11 crashing of planes into the twin towers as "heroic," outside of the extremists who supported the act in the first place. pangstrom posted:What he said was that taking over planes with boxcutters and flying them into buildings is a terrible thing but not "cowardly" by any normal understanding of the word COMPARED TO firing a cruise missile, which is what made people go nuts. People went nuts because of the caveman thinking of people-bad-say-no-nuanced-things-about-bad-people and probably because it was right. I'm not sure how "compared to x" matters, here. A cowardly act doesn't become less cowardly just because you can point to other cowardly acts. I suppose you could say, "X is even more craven than Y," but that doesn't make Y any less craven.
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May 12, 2014 15:59
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ErIog posted:I was pointing out the refusal by Ira Glass and TAL to recognize privilege. Oh, okay. I guess I was just confused when you said ErIog posted:Rich people have the luxury of quitting their job, using their savings to buy a boat, selling their house, and going on sailboat sabbatical for months/years on end. Let me tell you how they aren't rich! They barely had any money to their name after they finished spending it. But I see the problem. ErIog posted:privilege.  100k/year is the top 20% of income, but it is still Middle Class, because wealth figures into it as well. A few months ago there was that rich kids documentary floating around here. One of the kids in it (The heir to Conde Nast I think) at the time had a job that paid $50k a year, but there's no way you could claim he was middle class. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/national/20050515_CLASS_GRAPHIC/index_01.html Raising awareness and fighting against income disparity and erosion of the middle class isn't helped by shifting the definition of middle class. A lot of people have fallen out of the middle class/lower-middle class and even out of the working class into poverty. Pointing that out is an effective way to address the issue. Moving the lines of where middle class to average/median income, makes the concept of middle class meaningless, and that's not.
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May 12, 2014 16:04
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Yachts are undoubtedly the domain of the wealthy, but a boat to go water skiing with is definitely not if you live in the parts of the country with lots of water. You can get a used boat for like 5k no problem, and a nice used one for 10k. While certainly a luxury, many middle class families can afford that, and you see boats in backyards of very modest ares all the time around here. Yea this 'boats are for the rich' poo poo is the funniest bit of actual blindness to reality because my shitbag friends in Louisiana had boats and I bet for a decent bit of them if they sold their fishing/jetski boat and literally gave up every other aspect of their life and saved for a while like this guy did they could do something like this. Yea he's living better than a lot of people, no poo poo, most people in America, in the global sense, are probably living better than most of the world, I don't know why TAL had to do a ten minute monologue about cultural privilege and poo poo in a human interest story that boils down to 'gee these people seem happy doing a weird thing, good for them'.
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May 12, 2014 16:07
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My Q-Face posted:
I think this argument is more one about how we define "middle class" than anything else. Are we using a descriptive definition, i.e., say, the middle three income quintiles (in which case these folks may or may not be "middle class" depending on exactly where their household income falls) or are we using an aspirational definition, i.e., what we believe the American middle class should have and should be and should have a right to? Personally, I don't want to yield that ground quite yet. Just because the present reality of the American middle class is poo poo, relative to the past, doesn't mean we should abandon those past ideals and past norms.
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May 12, 2014 16:19
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VitalSigns posted:Just making sure, this is the city your coworker wishes we had bombed indiscriminately, right? The conservative in me hates the Islam, but the free market entrepreneur loves the profit...
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May 12, 2014 16:22
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Tatum Girlparts posted:a human interest story that boils down to 'gee these people seem happy doing a weird thing, good for them'. I must have missed the boat [har har], but that's all TAL has ever done. In this case they did it because these two made a big media sensation for taking their very young children with them on this trip and then having trouble a few weeks out, but This American Life has -for as long as I can remember listening to it- always been about quirky things that Americans do. And I just want to point out that this is the piece that's getting ErIog so upset: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/525/transcript Ira Glass posted:Act One, When Mayday Comes in April. OK. Some basic facts about Eric and Charlotte Kaufman. First off, OK, whatever impressions you have of people who own boats, they are not rich. The boat is their house. They have no other home. This is where their savings went. That's it. Literally, that's it, that all Ira mentioned about money and priviledge. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Personally, I don't want to yield that ground quite yet. Just because the present reality of the American middle class is poo poo, relative to the past, doesn't mean we should abandon those past ideals and past norms. I think you and I are of the same mind on this. My Q-Face fucked around with this message at 16:31 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 16:28
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