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Heck Yes! Loam!
Nov 15, 2004

a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Dude, what do you think the entirety of the military budget is? It's a jobs program for white folks and "the good ones." They call it camofare for a reason.

I've never heard of camofare before, but I like it.

If only there were away to just fund the jobs instead of the MIC and warfare machine. Oh wait.

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The Kingfish
Oct 21, 2015


Chomsky has some insanely good writing and speeches about this. The MiC/pentagon system is the only thing keeping our economy competitive, but it does so in a super inefficient way to keep government money from benefiting the proletariat.

Ardennes
May 12, 2002

The Kingfish posted:

Chomsky has some insanely good writing and speeches about this. The MiC/pentagon system is the only thing keeping our economy competitive, but it does so in a super inefficient way to keep government money from benefiting the proletariat.

Admittedly, it does have a dual purpose of furthering American foreign policy interest...well theoretically at least and binding our allies to the US via military technology/support. That said, you can see we are slipping a little bit, especially when traditional allies like the Turks/Saudis are starting to buy Russian weapons.

Granted, part of the reason may simply mean our weapon contractors are so secure in knowing their interests are taken care of they don't really have to "try that hard." The F-35 obviously is the best example of this (but the Seawolf/Zumwalt are also pretty good examples).

NaanViolence
Mar 1, 2010

by Nyc_Tattoo

Crowsbeak posted:

I would argue that it was more he was doing as JFK wanted. As well as in a untenable position due to JFK having had tte only semi competent South Vietnamese leader assassinated.

This is from a while back, but what actually most likely happened is that a number of military/CIA folks went rogue and killed Ngo Dinh Diem without any kind of authority to do so.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

So what the gently caress is up with the race to squeeze in the shittiest, most corporate-boot-licking take to any story about capitalism being bad?

The loving meltdown by Loam defending Jeff Bezos of all people was just :psyduck: to watch. Are these people being paid to defend our corporate masters or something? It's loving insane to me to see posters racing to get in hot takes like "Benefits being slashed isn't that bad!"

If any of the self-described centrist regulars would love to explain what they're doing with this style of argument, I'd loving love to know.

Trabisnikof
Dec 24, 2005

WampaLord posted:

So what the gently caress is up with the race to squeeze in the shittiest, most corporate-boot-licking take to any story about capitalism being bad?

The loving meltdown by Loam defending Jeff Bezos of all people was just :psyduck: to watch. Are these people being paid to defend our corporate masters or something? It's loving insane to me to see posters racing to get in hot takes like "Benefits being slashed isn't that bad!"

If any of the self-described centrist regulars would love to explain what they're doing with this style of argument, I'd loving love to know.

Loam will have to post in here first for us to find out:

quote:

4. This isn't a Helldump thread and shouldn't be used to litigate post histories or spread personal information. Your rear end is banned if it happens. But it is OK to make fun of people for posts in this thread.

forbidden dialectics
Jul 26, 2005





Trabisnikof posted:

Loam will have to post in here first for us to find out:

First post on this very page, my dude.

Trabisnikof
Dec 24, 2005

Heaps of Sheeps posted:

First post on this very page, my dude.

Right but we're supposed to mock each other for posts in this thread, not posts in other threads.

forbidden dialectics
Jul 26, 2005





Trabisnikof posted:

Right but we're supposed to mock each other for posts in this thread, not posts in other threads.

You're totally right. The two threads just blend very easily together in memory, I guess.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Trabisnikof posted:

Loam will have to post in here first for us to find out:

It's less about calling out one particular poster and more just wanting to know the loving bizarre mentality behind "Wow, some leftists are taking a side on an issue, gotta take the other side no matter how lovely it makes me look!"

Defending corporations, defending rich assholes, defending objectively terrible things, and time and time again they keep doing it and then act all huffy when they get (correctly) yelled at for being empathy-lacking sociopaths who put profits over people.

Is admitting that capitalism has flaws going to make them explode in holy fire like sunlight does to a vampire?

NewForumSoftware
Oct 8, 2016

by Lowtax
People have just internalized capitalist propaganda. Worker's compensation is just one of the many parts that make up a business and the profitability of said business is put first and foremost above all other concerns and this is just "the way it is", any sort of disagreement is brushed off as naive idealism.

Ytlaya
Nov 13, 2005

WampaLord posted:

It's less about calling out one particular poster and more just wanting to know the loving bizarre mentality behind "Wow, some leftists are taking a side on an issue, gotta take the other side no matter how lovely it makes me look!"

Defending corporations, defending rich assholes, defending objectively terrible things, and time and time again they keep doing it and then act all huffy when they get (correctly) yelled at for being empathy-lacking sociopaths who put profits over people.

Is admitting that capitalism has flaws going to make them explode in holy fire like sunlight does to a vampire?

To be fair, it's not like this is something limited to centrists/liberals/whatever. I think people of any ideology can develop a tendency to automatically take contrarian views towards people they dislike for whatever reason. I mean, it's still dumb regardless, but it's not something unique to Loam's ideology/politics.

Tiberius Christ
Mar 4, 2009

Also people are still scared to speak up for socialism, the red scare was really effective at turning any sort of progressive left into american heresy, even though the massive recruitment campaigns for unionization was from the help of Socialist and Communist parties of america that lead to such a huge increase in the standard of living in the 20th century. There's a lot of cultural baggage that people need to get over, so in the meantime we get this weird brokebrain/woke/hot take mentality, especially from those that have done really well in the current system.

Heck Yes! Loam!
Nov 15, 2004

a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

Ytlaya posted:

To be fair, it's not like this is something limited to centrists/liberals/whatever. I think people of any ideology can develop a tendency to automatically take contrarian views towards people they dislike for whatever reason. I mean, it's still dumb regardless, but it's not something unique to Loam's ideology/politics.

Its this. In this particular case i was annoyed by condiv's insinuations regarding wapo being such a terrible place to work when the workers enjoy benefits the majority of the workforce does not. I didn't really defend Bezos as many of you insisted that I did. As always, Ytlaya is a much better poster than I am.

NewForumSoftware
Oct 8, 2016

by Lowtax
Ahh the ever rare pentupledown

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN

JeffersonClay posted:

Yes. The US welfare state has never been more effective at reducing poverty than it has been this decade. The kink in this graph in '09 coincides with the deepest point of the great recession when automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance were at their highest level. The US government has literally never been more effective at shielding people from the deprivations of a market society or the vagaries of chance and circumstances than it has been this decade. That doesn't mean it's sufficient.

You really managed to demonstrate the limitations of your own perspective here. You probably have never thought about poverty in any depth up until this argument started and now you are approaching the issue in the most thoughtless and hamfisted way possible, meaning that you completely miss the forst for the trees. None of this would have happened if you understood that using program spending is a terrible metric for determining how effectively the government shields people from poverty.

For instance, while the headline rate of poverty hasn't increased this disguises the fact that - especially post 1996 - government assistance has been largely targeted toward people just below the poverty line. Meanwhile, those in extreme poverty (i.e. living off $2 a day or less) has increased sharply:



“The Rise of Extreme Poverty in the United States” - BY H. Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edi posted:

The prevalence of extreme poverty in the United States may
shock many. As of mid-2011, our analyses show that about
1.65 million households with about 3.55 million children were
surviving on $2 or less in cash income per person per day in a
given month. These estimates account for income received from
TANF and other direct cash income transfer programs, plus contributions
from family and friends and income from odd jobs,
among other things. Households in extreme poverty constituted
4.3 percent of all non-elderly households with children.

Worse yet, the prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply
between 1996 and 2011, with the highest growth rates found
among groups most affected by the 1996 welfare reform.
When
income over the quarter is used, rather than income from a
single month, the proportional increase in extreme poverty over
the study period is comparable to the monthly estimates (and in
some cases, is larger), although the overall incidence is lower.

The safety net is succeeding in reducing the most extreme
forms of deprivation. Yet by no means does it eliminate extreme
poverty. When we recalculate the mid-2011 figures after treating
SNAP benefits as equivalent to cash, this reduces the number
of extremely poor households with children by about half (48
percent), and when refundable tax credits and housing subsidies
are subsequently added, the number falls by 63 percent. We
estimate that these major means-tested aid programs currently
save roughly 2.38 million children from extreme poverty each
month, but they leave 1.17 million children behind.

The simple but important conclusion is that a growing population
of children
experience spells with virtually no income.

How are they getting by—if they are—and what are the human
costs of subsisting on $2 a day or less? On the basis of the results
presented here, we of course cannot know what types of survival
strategies are being used. It would be useful to carry out
research that would cast light on these strategies, their human
costs, and on policies that might more fully address the plight
of the extreme poor

Here's a more visceral measure than just looking at who is scraping by on $2 a day or less - the incidence of hunger (aka "food insecurity") in the United States. Guess what? It's been on the rise:

National Geographic posted:

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country; today there are 50,000. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

This is too short a post to really get into all the details of why your approach is so off - a proper treatment of this subject would go into more detail about fiscal policy, the abandonment of the old commitment to full employment and unions, etc. and it would go into more detail about how the bubble economy of the Clinton years disguised the real damage caused by "ending welfare as we know it". The fact you're trying to celebrate the Democrats here when it was Clinton's signature that did so much damage to millions of people - in particular the most vulnerable parts of the poor - speaks volumes.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Its this. In this particular case i was annoyed by condiv's insinuations regarding wapo being such a terrible place to work when the workers enjoy benefits the majority of the workforce does not. I didn't really defend Bezos as many of you insisted that I did. As always, Ytlaya is a much better poster than I am.

Dude, you can't loving gaslight an internet forum. We have access to your posts, it was just yesterday. You can tell yourself "I didn't really defend Bezos" but you absolutely did.

Remember, the context in which you were speaking was right after a story was posted about benefits being slashed and you jumped in with "Bezos is doing good work at WaPo!"

Do you not see how that looks like defending him?

Also, what happens if some people call Bezos an rear end in a top hat on SA? Do you think he knows or cares? Why do you feel the need to stick up for the world's richest man online?

Falstaff
Apr 27, 2008

I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Its this. In this particular case i was annoyed by condiv's insinuations regarding wapo being such a terrible place to work when the workers enjoy benefits the majority of the workforce does not.

Except he didn't. You misread him.

Condiv posted:

i'm sure the guy who owns a company that is a living nightmare to work for is acting in the best interests of workers though

:lol:

You read that as referring to WaPo, when Condiv was pointing out the guy's largely responsible for Amazon being so lovely. That you misread him is on you, not him, particularly given that you could have asked for clarification rather than going all "ARGH LEFTIST BAD!"


quote:

I didn't really defend Bezos as many of you insisted that I did.

Except you did.

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

This information does not feed condiv's massive persecution complex, thus it will be ignored.

Jeff Bezos may not be a good person, but what he is doing for WaPo is very good. As long as he doesn't interfere with the actual journalism and just runs the business it will continue to be good.

You said that as a response to a story about Jeff Bezos cutting benefits at WaPo. That's defending Jeff Bezos and the actions under discussion. If that's not what you meant, then it's on you to clarify, rather than pentupledown.

quote:

As always, Ytlaya is a much better poster than I am.

This much is true.

Heck Yes! Loam!
Nov 15, 2004

a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

Falstaff posted:

Except he didn't. You misread him.


You read that as referring to WaPo, when Condiv was pointing out the guy's largely responsible for Amazon being so lovely. That you misread him is on you, not him, particularly given that you could have asked for clarification rather than going all "ARGH LEFTIST BAD!"


Except you did.


You said that as a response to a story about Jeff Bezos cutting benefits at WaPo. That's defending Jeff Bezos and the actions under discussion. If that's not what you meant, then it's on you to clarify, rather than pentupledown.


This much is true.

I never once defended the benefit cuts, and I even said that multiple times. I did however defend that WaPo was not a terrible place to work, and if that wasn't what condiv was arguing then i did indeed take it the wrong way. I also defended WaPo itself still existing due to Bezos' general takeover as good thing. This was then interpreted as me being for the benefit cuts.

I did argue that from the perspective of someone with no benefits, that the benefits offered by WaPo are amazing in comparison. it seems odd to focus anger on a company that provides more benefits that the majority of the workforce. Yeah, it ain't awesome that benefits are cut, but if I worked there I wouldn't quit over it.

All of this was lost in the reactionary fight by both myself and others, but I will gladly admit to being wrong and dumb in this instance. I definitely react poorly to specific posters and it something i need to work on.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

Yeah, it ain't awesome that benefits are cut, but if I worked there I wouldn't quit over it.

No one made this argument at all, it's a loving dumbass strawman you're setting up to try to eek out a win here.

Take the L and move on and try not to lose all sense and reasoning just because you saw Condiv oppose a thing. Also your crab bucket mentality is disgusting.

E: VVV If you're going to say "I was wrong and I'll try to be better" just say that, stop trying to re-clarify what you thought you were arguing.

Heck Yes! Loam!
Nov 15, 2004

a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

WampaLord posted:

No one made this argument at all, it's a loving dumbass strawman you're setting up to try to eek out a win here.

Take the L and move on and try not to lose all sense and reasoning just because you saw Condiv oppose a thing.

I think I did that. You just want the last word?

yronic heroism
Oct 31, 2008

P sure goons stanning for the Vietnam war itt is still worse than defending the Washington post in some other thread but somehow WL stays silent about that.

WampaLord
Jan 14, 2010

yronic heroism posted:

P sure goons stanning for the Vietnam war itt is still worse than defending the Washington post in some other thread but somehow WL stays silent about that.

I wasn't involved in that discussion, feel free to make your own post clarifying who you thought was making awful points and why, that's literally what this thread is for.

Heck Yes! Loam!
Nov 15, 2004

a rich, friable soil containing a relatively equal mixture of sand and silt and a somewhat smaller proportion of clay.

WampaLord posted:

I wasn't involved in that discussion, feel free to make your own post clarifying who you thought was making awful points and why, that's literally what this thread is for.

:agreed: and if you made a bad post, please try and own up to it.

yronic heroism
Oct 31, 2008

WampaLord posted:

I wasn't involved in that discussion, feel free to make your own post clarifying who you thought was making awful points and why, that's literally what this thread is for.

E: I definitely did that. In this thread and not some unrelated thread no less.

yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Oct 13, 2017

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN

yronic heroism posted:

P sure goons stanning for the Vietnam war itt is still worse than defending the Washington post in some other thread but somehow WL stays silent about that.

Oh boy, gonna explain this at tedious length on the off chance you're actually inclined to listen:

The people defending the Vietnam War up-thread were, at worst, showcasing their historical ignorance while trying to argue in favour of a more generous and inclusive government (the one exception being Jefferson Clay who seems to think Vietnam was a genuinely defensive action, but the less said about that the better). They were overlooking Johnson's atrocious foreign policy because they wanted to emphasize that the Great Society and the kind of re-distributive policies it championed offer a political horizon to aim toward. If this were a seminar on 20th century history I'd agree they'd lose some marks for overlooking a key part of the Johnson Presidency but in the context of this debate I'm not sure what actually hinges on how left or right wing Johnson's foreign policy was. I don't really get why you'd harp on it again and again after having made your point once, because you're basically just scolding people. Are you trying to imply there's some necessary link between support for redistributive policies at home and imperialism abroad? If so go ahead and make that argument. It seems pretty clear that nobody who was calling for a return to Great Society style liberalism was actually cheering for a Johnson-style foreign policy, so unless you want to argue that the Great Society somehow necessitated the Vietnam War then I don't really get why you would want to keep returning to this.

Meanwhile the argument about the Washington Post relates to a political actor who is alive, highly relevant, and actively engaged in the modern political process as both a large employer and as the owner of an influential media company. As an outsider looking in on this argument it seems like how one feels about the Washington Post, it's owner, and that owner's other business interests, all matters a lot more than how one feels about the 50 year old politics of a war waged by a long dead President.

So yeah, people defending the Vietnam War or refusing to back down when they get called on it is silly, but it's also not terribly interesting or relevant in the context of a debate about contemporary Democratic politics, and it certainly isn't comparable to someone carrying water for a lovely neoliberal corporate titan who is actively working to strip protections away from workers right here in the present. It really comes off like you want to keep the argument diverted into some safely irrelevant dispute about Vietnam.

"You have a rose coloured interpretation of the Johnson administration" is a perfectly valid point but once you've made it you can now move on. When you keep bringing it up while other people are trying to, say, criticize the owner of Amazon.com, then it doesn't exactly come off like a good faith critique.

Kilroy
Oct 1, 2000

Helsing posted:

Are you trying to imply there's some necessary link between support for redistributive policies at home and imperialism abroad? If so go ahead and make that argument. It seems pretty clear that nobody who was calling for a return to Great Society style liberalism was actually cheering for a Johnson-style foreign policy, so unless you want to argue that the Great Society somehow necessitated the Vietnam War then I don't really get why you would want to keep returning to this.
yronic isn't but JeffersonClay certainly did:

JeffersonClay posted:

Vietnam was a pragmatic calculation that it would look good to be tough on communism which would help when passing great society programs by defusing accusations of socialism!. So when people say democrats should just copy Johnson to get real popular again, Vietnam is actually quite relevant. Johnson was threading a needle by attacking both unrestrained capitalism with minimal government and revolutionary socialism. when Ronald Reagan put out records saying Medicare would lead to a socialist dictatorship Johnson could respond he was bombing the poo poo out of revolutionary socialists and Medicare was just about taking care of grandma.
If we're playing by yronic's rulebook where you've got to waddle in here and argue with people who share 95% of your ideology, every time they make a dumb post (or every time a good post of theirs is deliberately misread as such, by the usual group), then turnabout is fair play: yronic why didn't you call JC a dumb rear end in a top hat for this post? You agree with it, then?

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

Ytlaya posted:

edit: Oh, one other thing. The fact that more people who would otherwise be poor were lifted above the poverty line by the safety net just means that more people needed the help of the safety net to begin with. This is completely unrelated to progressive governance or whatever. Also it is very likely that the number of people raised above the poverty line increased simply as a result of the poverty line gradually becoming lower and lower than it should be. I.e. if a more realistic poverty line keeps increasing over the years while the current poverty line doesn't increase properly, it means that the number of people above the current poverty line is obviously going to increase.

This is some incredibly lazy analysis. First, poverty has been more effectively ameliorated by the safety net as both an absolute number and as a percentage of the total. Second, I told you exactly what metric I was using, the supplemental poverty measure. If you were capable, you might have attempted to determine if these hypothetical criticisms were in any meaningful way applicable to that measure. They are not. The SPM is based on the real cost of food, shelter, healthcare, etc. and is recalculated each year. The SPM is actually a good measure of poverty, and the article majorian posted explicitly defended it as such. If you’ve got a better one, by all means present it. It's not sufficient to argue "we can't measure poverty well, therefore you must be wrong".

Helsing posted:

You really managed to demonstrate the limitations of your own perspective here. You probably have never thought about poverty in any depth up until this argument started and now you are approaching the issue in the most thoughtless and hamfisted way possible, meaning that you completely miss the forst for the trees. None of this would have happened if you understood that using program spending is a terrible metric for determining how effectively the government shields people from poverty.

While Ytlaya is suggesting that the SPM is a bad metric because its definition of poverty is too low, and therefore underestimates poverty, you’re criticizing the SPM because its definition of poverty is too high, and therefore overestimates poverty, overwhelming the real victims of extreme poverty with some poor people who aren’t really poor enough to care about. Maybe work that out amongst yourselves?

There’s a real problem comparing poverty during the 90’s boom times to poverty deep in the great recession, and the article you cite notes that and does not claim to present a causal argument about welfare reform, but let’s ignore that. The article you cite documents an increase in 200,000 people in extreme poverty over 15 years, and you’re suggesting those 200,000 outweigh the tens of millions of people lifted out of poverty by the safety net. The suggestion that I’ve only recently thought about poverty in a hamfisted way is pretty laughable here, considering you’ve just presented an argument that would justify opposing a minimum wage increase. It doesn’t matter, you suggest, that the safety net has lifted many of the working poor out of poverty, because there’s a small population of people out of the labor force who are actually worse off. That’s exactly what will happen if we raise the minimum wage, friend. The poor who receive wages will be better off. The poor who don’t receive wages will be hurt by price increases.

I personally don’t think that’s a good reason to oppose the minimum wage, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about the minimum wage lest we start thinking it’s anything but an imperfect solution constrained by our political power. I think the same thing about our current welfare system, it’s working to reduce poverty (and the article you cite explicitly agrees with that assertion, as does the article majorian posted a few pages back) but it’s far from perfect. I’m sorry the facts dispute your democrats are terrible and hate the poor narrative, but that’s reality.

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

Kilroy posted:

yronic isn't but JeffersonClay certainly did:

If we're playing by yronic's rulebook where you've got to waddle in here and argue with people who share 95% of your ideology, every time they make a dumb post (or every time a good post of theirs is deliberately misread as such, by the usual group), then turnabout is fair play: yronic why didn't you call JC a dumb rear end in a top hat for this post? You agree with it, then?

I dunno maybe he doesn't derive the same odd pleasure from flaunting a reading comprehension deficit that you do?

R. Guyovich
Dec 25, 1991

technically wampalord baited loam into bringing Other Thread stuff in here but if you're dumb enough to take the bait it's fair game imo

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN

JeffersonClay posted:

While Ytlaya is suggesting that the SPM is a bad metric because its definition of poverty is too low, and therefore underestimates poverty, you’re criticizing the SPM because its definition of poverty is too high, and therefore overestimates poverty, overwhelming the real victims of extreme poverty with some poor people who aren’t really poor enough to care about. Maybe work that out amongst yourselves?

No, this is a weird and inaccurate interpretation of what I said.

Here's what I take issue with. Your claim that: "The US government has literally never been more effective at shielding people from the deprivations of a market society or the vagaries of chance and circumstances than it has been this decade". Which is a strange claim to make when the number of households experiencing food insecurity and the number of people in extreme poverty markedly increased.

quote:

There’s a real problem comparing poverty during the 90’s boom times to poverty deep in the great recession, and the article you cite notes that and does not claim to present a causal argument about welfare reform, but let’s ignore that. The article you cite documents an increase in 200,000 people in extreme poverty over 15 years, and you’re suggesting those 200,000 outweigh the tens of millions of people lifted out of poverty by the safety net. The suggestion that I’ve only recently thought about poverty in a hamfisted way is pretty laughable here, considering you’ve just presented an argument that would justify opposing a minimum wage increase. It doesn’t matter, you suggest, that the safety net has lifted many of the working poor out of poverty, because there’s a small population of people out of the labor force who are actually worse off. That’s exactly what will happen if we raise the minimum wage, friend. The poor who receive wages will be better off. The poor who don’t receive wages will be hurt by price increases.

I personally don’t think that’s a good reason to oppose the minimum wage, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about the minimum wage lest we start thinking it’s anything but an imperfect solution constrained by our political power. I think the same thing about our current welfare system, it’s working to reduce poverty (and the article you cite explicitly agrees with that assertion, as does the article majorian posted a few pages back) but it’s far from perfect. I’m sorry the facts dispute your democrats are terrible and hate the poor narrative, but that’s reality.

You typed up this non-sense, all because I mentioned that focusing too much on the headline poverty rate will cause you to overlook how much worse things have become for some people at the very bottom. Your political horizon is so pathetically shallow that your reflexively interpret that statement as saying that there must therefore be a zero sum battle for benefits between the somewhat poor and the extremely poor.

I will repeat myself. The reason to not exclusively look at the headline poverty rate is because it's a broad category and within that broad category there have been divergent experiences. This is how you can end up trying to fool yourself into thinking that the US government has never done a better job of taking care of people, even as the number of folks subsiding at literally third world levels of income - or going to bed hungry - increases.

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich
Just sayin'

Ze Pollack posted:

nobody forced you to defend Hillary Clinton justifying her employment of slaves by saying they had "lesser emotional intelligence" than their betters, i.e. herself, and yet here we are

your stance on civil rights is quite clear, JC. you are wholly against standing for them in any way that might possibly hurt the image of the centrist establishment.

Majorian posted:

This is pretty similar to JC's previous execrable argument from the old Dems threads, ie: "you can't have left-populism without racism! If you like left-populism, you're racist!"

MooselanderII posted:

People here already dealt with this argument pretty thoroughly the last time you made it. I'm not going to go into it again in much detail as to why it's dumb, but needless to say it was pointed out to you that this logic means that Bush was far to the left of Clinton. You bailed on the argument after someone pointed that out to to you months ago, so chew on that for a bit.

Cerebral Bore posted:

Besides that, remember when it turned out that there actually was a massive botnet masquerading as "bernie bros" and certain people who had been very into yelling about russian bots and "ratfucking" had to eat a whole lot of crow?

Kilroy
Oct 1, 2000

JeffersonClay posted:

I dunno maybe he doesn't derive the same odd pleasure from flaunting a reading comprehension deficit that you do?
you literally said the Vietnam War was a pragmatic calculation to help pass Great Society programs, you dumb poo poo

those are your words, quoted back to you, you weaselly gently caress

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

Kilroy posted:

you literally said the Vietnam War was a pragmatic calculation to help pass Great Society programs, you dumb poo poo

those are your words, quoted back to you, you weaselly gently caress

Yes and a historical link, as obviously existed, doesn't imply one cannot exist without the other today, you tragic simpleton.

Kilroy
Oct 1, 2000

JeffersonClay posted:

Yes and a historical link, as obviously existed, doesn't imply one cannot exist without the other today, you tragic simpleton.
Yes but you implied it anyway.

Kilroy
Oct 1, 2000
On the other hand you're already universally hated on these forums so there's really no need to continue to enable your bullshit. Ta-ta.

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

Helsing posted:

No, this is a weird and inaccurate interpretation of what I said.

Here's what I take issue with. Your claim that: "The US government has literally never been more effective at shielding people from the deprivations of a market society or the vagaries of chance and circumstances than it has been this decade". Which is a strange claim to make when the number of households experiencing food insecurity and the number of people in extreme poverty markedly increased.

How much of that food insecurity and extreme poverty increase has to do with Republican state governments?


In any case the supplemental poverty measure takes into account the cost of food, and the measured level of poverty has literally never been lower. You're still arguing that a small number of people outside the labor force should outweigh the tens of millions of the working poor who have been lifted out of poverty.

quote:

You typed up this non-sense, all because I mentioned that focusing too much on the headline poverty rate will cause you to overlook how much worse things have become for some people at the very bottom. Your political horizon is so pathetically shallow that your reflexively interpret that statement as saying that there must therefore be a zero sum battle for benefits between the somewhat poor and the extremely poor.

I will repeat myself. The reason to not exclusively look at the headline poverty rate is because it's a broad category and within that broad category there have been divergent experiences. This is how you can end up trying to fool yourself into thinking that the US government has never done a better job of taking care of people, even as the number of folks subsiding at literally third world levels of income - or going to bed hungry - increases.

First, I'm not talking about the headline poverty rate, I'm referencing the supplemental poverty measure which is actually a good metric.

Second, your economic understanding is so pathetically shallow that you still don't understand that the arguments you're making are equally applicable to opposing a minimum wage hike. There are winners and losers in most policies. We should probably support policies where the number of poor people who benefit substantially outweigh the number of poor people who are harmed. I'm sympathetic to arguments that we should be more concerned about the poorest people, but you can't just be concerned with the lowest 1% and not the lowest 20%, unless you're comfortable arguing against the fight for $15.

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Oct 14, 2017

JeffersonClay
Jun 17, 2003

by R. Guyovich

Kilroy posted:

Yes but you implied it anyway.

I think it's really weird that you take this kind of pride in your terrible reading comprehension but who am I to judge.

Kilroy posted:

On the other hand you're already universally hated on these forums so there's really no need to continue to enable your bullshit. Ta-ta.

:ironicat: Nice parting shot!

MooselanderII
Feb 18, 2004

Kilroy posted:

Yes but you implied it anyway.

JeffersonClay posted:

I think it's really weird that you take this kind of pride in your terrible reading comprehension but who am I to judge.


JeffersonClay from several pages back posted:


Johnson's aggressive anti communism insulated him from Reagan's "socialist dictatorship!" criticism when passing Medicare. Does he pass Medicare without simultaneously spending aggressively to combat communism? Probably not.

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VitalSigns
Sep 3, 2011

JC gonna keep claiming Reagan, Trump, and George W Bush are left of LBJ on poverty huh

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