GunnerJ posted:

"law" training

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Straight faced assertions that capitalism is the best economic system EVAR...

Are the sign of a person who hasn't read about any alternatives

DeusExMachinima posted:

I dunno dawg, I'd say ability to continue existing while the alternative fades away impotently is pretty important.

Tesseraction posted:

It doesn't continue existing. It's had to change multiple times over the past 150 years just to stop itself from imploding. Each new iteration is called 'capitalism' but there's a reason even capitalist economists differentiate the stages of capitalist history.

Plus the whole social-democracy thing continuing to exist despite the best attempts by the laissez-faire crowd.

Tesseraction posted:

It doesn't continue existing. It's had to change multiple times over the past 150 years just to stop itself from imploding. Each new iteration is called 'capitalism' but there's a reason even capitalist economists differentiate the stages of capitalist history.

Plus the whole social-democracy thing continuing to exist despite the best attempts by the laissez-faire crowd.

DeusExMachinima posted:

I dunno dawg, I'd say ability to continue existing while the alternative fades away impotently is pretty important.

UrbicaMortis posted:

So Giantbomb recently posted an article about the value of unions in games development. It's pretty good but the relevant bit to this thread is the libertarians appearing the comments to angrily yell about the free market.

Here's a taste:



Full thing is here: http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/guest-column-now-youre-working-with-power/1100-5422/

UrbicaMortis posted:

So Giantbomb recently posted an article about the value of unions in games development. It's pretty good but the relevant bit to this thread is the libertarians appearing the comments to angrily yell about the free market.

Here's a taste:



Full thing is here: http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/guest-column-now-youre-working-with-power/1100-5422/

Mr Interweb posted:

It never ceases to amaze me how working class people side with their employer over their fellow working class people. You would think as a worker that your interests would be shared and protected more by other workers than the people cutting the checks.

Mr Interweb posted:

It never ceases to amaze me how working class people side with their employer over their fellow working class people. You would think as a worker that your interests would be shared and protected more by other workers than the people cutting the checks.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

One of the reasons food stamps is such a successful program is because of that; the socialism is "everybody that can't afford enough food gets free money to buy food with." The capitalism part is that these people can spend that how they please rather than creating a huge bureaucracy that tries to decide who gets what. "Hey brah, sorry you can't feed your family, have some fuud buxx. Go buy just like...whatever."

Nessus posted:

So would you say things like Wisconsin instituting ever more tight restrictions on what you can buy with Uncle Sam's food funbucks are making things more like a Stalinist hellscape, not less?

quote:

Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.

Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, then get a job.

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your “home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.

In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good.”

Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules.. Before you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,” consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.

If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

AND while you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Don't you mean the ability to continue existing by folding in just enough of the alternative to stave off revolution?

GunnerJ posted:

Check it out: http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2011/07/22/if-i-were-in-charge-of-welfare/


Government-imposed food rationing with crap selection, forced sterilization, inspections to eliminate vice, lovely barracks housing, punitive conscript make-work labor, and loss of your political rights are all about freedom as long as it's for undeserving lazy poors!

DeusExMachinima posted:

I dunno dawg, I'd say ability to continue existing while the alternative fades away impotently is pretty important.

quote:

Forty-five minutes after Suozzi was declared dead on the morning of January 17, 2013, her corpse arrived at Alcor headquarters, where a crack team of quacks shaved her head and drilled a number of sizable holes into her skull. Microphones were then inserted in order to detect the cracking sound of tissue-destroying ice crystals—a freezer-burned brain being even less useful to the imaginary reincarnators of the future than an otherwise undamaged one. At 9:33 a.m., Suozzi’s body was moved to an operating table. Ten minutes later, Alcor’s technophilic necromancers completed “cephalic isolation”—a euphemistic neologism that means they cut off her head. Such bloodless jargon obscures the macabre slapstick of the antics in the morgue—er, “operating room.” As the magazine account went on to relate:

9:45 a.m.: Cephalon placed in holding ring of cephalic enclosure.
[Translation: They put Suozzi’s head in a box.]

9:51 a.m.: Cephalon fell out of holding ring.
[Translation: Her head fell out.]

9:52 a.m.: Cephalon repositioned.
[Translation: It’s a good thing that, as far as anyone knows, none of these people have been operating on live human bodies.]

Suozzi’s bodily fluids were flushed and replaced with a specially formulated and questionably effective “cryoprotectant”—antifreeze. The official recap alludes to a certain amount of rubbernecking and bickering consistent with past insider accounts of Alcor operations. That wasn’t all. “Unfortunately,” the Cryonics report notes, “there was some confusion and disagreement regarding the ideal temperature at which to perform surgery.” One might assume a forty-four-year-old organization devoted to storing body parts on ice would have reached some working consensus on this question by now.

DeusExMachinima posted:

As frustrating as the occasional welfare cheat is,

Captain_Maclaine posted:

It could that one bitcoiner/sovcit who fished some law books out of a dumpster and claimed that as the basis for his various genius theories.

mojo1701a posted:

Didn't Glenn Beck also claim you don't need funding for education because public libraries have all the knowledge you need?

GunnerJ posted:

Check it out: http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2011/07/22/if-i-were-in-charge-of-welfare/


Government-imposed food rationing with crap selection, forced sterilization, inspections to eliminate vice, lovely barracks housing, punitive conscript make-work labor, and loss of your political rights are all about freedom as long as it's for undeserving lazy poors!

GunnerJ posted:

Check it out: http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2011/07/22/if-i-were-in-charge-of-welfare/


Government-imposed food rationing with crap selection, forced sterilization, inspections to eliminate vice, lovely barracks housing, punitive conscript make-work labor, and loss of your political rights are all about freedom as long as it's for undeserving lazy poors!

Your Dunkle Sans posted:

I get the impression these kinds of people literally think of welfare recipients not as human beings but factory farm chattel to be pressed for extraction of maximum work efficiency.

E: Also at voluntary consent to rules =/= violation of rights. At the very least it is absolutely abuse.

E2: By this logic, they would be saying "you have nobody to blame but yourself" when it comes to someone applying for government assistance after being laid off due to company downsizing/mergers or unemployed after a company goes under due to economic recession/contraction. That's a pretty hosed up way of viewing the world, and one I mainly blame on an American culture of individualism and worship of workaholism.

Kthulhu5000 posted:

Free us, but bind them in chains! If poor people are to be in thrall to a government, they had better be in thrall. It's as if the prospect of slavery can never be completely exorcised from hardcore libertarian ideology.

Nosfereefer posted:

Hey, how could anyone say that they were truly free if they didn't own literal slaves to compare themselves to?

Nosfereefer posted:

While I'm not all that familiar with the cultural developments during the period, I've gotten the impression that during the early stages of the cold war, the US elite was pretty frightened by the prospect of the Soviets guaranteed standards of living compared to the depths of poverty seen in the states at the same time. I'm kind of getting the idea that apart from instituting some basic services, a big part of dealing with that PR-issue internally was to demonize the poors even further. While it's obviously a lot more complicated than that, I'm guessing the cold war didn't really help.

SedanChair posted:

It shouldn't be frustrating to you.

DeusExMachinima posted:

If actual Iron Curtain life was ever a serious PR concern for the West (lol Holomodor, lol tankies), it definitely became less of one as the experiment went on.

Nosfereefer posted:

the depths of poverty

Nosfereefer posted:

While I'm not all that familiar with the cultural developments during the period, I've gotten the impression that during the early stages of the cold war, the US elite was pretty frightened by the prospect of the Soviets guaranteed standards of living compared to the depths of poverty seen in the states at the same time. I'm kind of getting the idea that apart from instituting some basic services, a big part of dealing with that PR-issue internally was to demonize the poors even further. While it's obviously a lot more complicated than that, I'm guessing the cold war didn't really help.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I think at one point the Soviet Union was using the deplorable state of race relations in the US as propaganda against it.

Nosfereefer posted:

DeusExMachinima posted:

Now ask yourself, is this the result of a stupid welfare system or genuine scarcity? And then you'll have the answer as to the difference between this and the picture I posted.

DeusExMachinima posted:

Now ask yourself, is this the result of a stupid welfare system or genuine scarcity? And then you'll have the answer as to the difference between this and the picture I posted.

DeusExMachinima posted:

idgi