XyloJW posted:

I know I could do that, but A) it's the first day and immediately I see that come up, and B) I'm kind of curious how far the rabbit hole goes.

I was also surprised, since as a Libertarian, I thought he would despise Yoo and Thomas for their support of torture.

Also, haha, I just looked at his interests: "Southern secession."

Dr Christmas posted:

I swear they're trying to trick us into defending him.

Beerdeer posted:

Crossposted from asking for advice, here's a fun convo I'm having. I'm Peter:

Sarion posted:

3) Rich people don't hire people to work for them because they have money sitting around. They have to believe there is an unmet demand out there for their current business, or a new one, before they'll spend money. If hiring 10 extra workers is going to cost them $1M a year and bring in no additional revenue, why the hell would they do it?

quote:

It’s been a week of discovery and revelation. Thanks to the idealists at Occupy Sydney and at other Occupy sites throughout Australia and the world, we have been made aware of many troubling facts about modern society.

Let’s humbly review all the things we’ve learned so far from these global gatherings and how we may address the issues raised:

1. Despite living in the greatest city on earth during a period of unprecedented wealth, abundance and freedom, there are a small number amongst us in Sydney who feel that absolutely everything is wrong and who wish to dismantle every structure underpinning Australian achievement.

Contrast these people with those who demonstrate against the carbon tax and wish for only one thing: an election. The latter group seeks a democratic means of maintaining and building upon our wealth. The former group is insane.

Suggested action: water cannons.

2. The appearance in our midst of a few dozen whiners with piercings and dreadlocks in lieu of any coherent political philosophy or even a clearly-explained list of grievances prompts expressions of solidarity and concern from certain media outlets. Apparently, according to these outlets, we have something to learn from rich kids who think dressing like herdsmen is an economic argument.

Suggested action: plastic wrist restraints.

3. Despite many of the protesters coming from universities and other advanced centres of learning, their spelling and grammar is abysmal. One young woman appeared at Occupy Melbourne with a sign that spelled “silent” incorrectly. She believed it was spelled “scilent”. The kids at Occupation Tallahassee in the US set the benchmark here, contributing “marrige”, “evoulution”, “survivle”, “fitess” and “glutonoues”.
Attention paid to the poor spelling of Occupy activists frustrated one Occupant at Occupy Los Angeles, who fired in this online response: “Spelling concern’s REALLY?!
I have seen So many post’s regarding spelling & grammar that seem to be an attempt to cloud the original message. I have even seen a few who criticize other’s for their spelling, while having misspelled words in their own post’s, WTF!”
WTF, by the way, is an abbreviation of “Wasted Tertiary Funding”.

Suggested action: Tasers.

4. The basic economic belief of the protesters is that wealth is finite, and that someone having money means that another person is necessarily denied money. This is not the case. Wealth isn’t distributed from a common pool; instead, it grows, depending on where the opportunities for that growth exist and where people are prepared to work for it.
To test this theory, the geniuses at Occupy Sydney ought to try an experiment. First, gather up all your bank balances and work out the total. Then, a day or so later, return to the nearest ATMs and get an updated amount. Unless Centrelink is paying out, the amount will be identical.
In the meantime, businesses and individuals across the nation will have increased their own wealth by many millions. Not one cent of it came from an Occupant’s pocket.

Suggested action: pressure point grips.

5. General knowledge is a problem for Occupants. Asked if the US government spends more military or on health care and pensions, 94 per cent of Occupy Wall Street respondents identified the former. Wrong. Military spending in 2010 was less than half that spent on health and pensions.

Suggested action: waterboarding.

6. The gap between rich and poor, economic inequality, income disparity … call it what you like, but these terms all refer to an elemental jealousy. Someone has more stuff than you and it’s just so unfair.
Sydney’s Occupants claim to represent 99 per cent of the human population. Maybe they should consider the fact that they are richer, healthier and more liberated than 99 per cent of people who have existed in the entirety of human history. Would an Occupant trade places with Louis XV, ruler of France from 1715 to 1774? Not unless he wanted to give up air travel, penicillin, the internet and pain-free surgery. In real terms, who’s richer?

Suggested action: Wicker Man.

7. The extent of meetings, the establishment of committees and working groups and the management of activities at any event occurs in inverse proportion to that event’s value. At Occupy Sydney, the initial meeting to establish basic pointless aims ran for three hours. Around 24 committees and working groups were set up, or one group for every two people who were arrested on Sunday at Occupy Sydney’s Martin Place camp.
On Saturday, Occupants debated for one whole hour whether they should go for a walking tour of Sydney’s various corporate headquarters. They never reached an actual decision, leading to this bizarre comment from an Occupy organiser:?"If you feel frustration with having to discuss and debate things, recognise that that frustration is an indication that we are doing this right.”

Suggested action: deployment of helicopter gunships.

8. Left to themselves, Occupy groups will inevitably dissolve into warring Labor-like factions. New Yorkmagazine reported on the weekend that Occupy Wall Street, the hub of the worldwide movement, was in conflict over proposed limits on drumming. “They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” said Occupant and drummer Seth Harper. “I wanted to introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t.”

That sounds like racism.

There was trouble, too, when Occupy Wall Street leaders tried to gather up tents and tarpaulins so that their park site could be cleaned. As the magazine told it: “A bearded man began to gather up a tarp and an occupier emerged from beneath, screaming: ‘You’re going to break my loving tent, get that poo poo off!’ Near the front of the park, two men in hoodies staged a meta-sit-in, fearful that their belongings would be lost or appropriated.”

Suggested action: chemical defoliants.

9. Victorian police are better than NSW police. This is deeply disappointing. The Victorian authorities moved in on Occupy Melbourne’s crusty collective on Friday, a full two days before NSW police cleared out Occupy Sydney. Also, they did it in daylight, allowing better opportunities for photographers. Sydney’s police belatedly pounced at 5am, limiting the chance to properly document Occupant justice.

Suggested action: royal commission.

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

For the challenge, weren't you paying attention?

modig posted:

What I learned is that if someone is wrong about spending facts, like say they thought we spent a large fraction of the US budget on foreign aid, when in fact it is a small fraction, the proper response is to waterboard them.

Thenipwax posted:

B-b-b-but the rich guy will keep the yacht builders in business! That's what you'll hear in response I'm sure.

darthbob88 posted:

4. Correct, but not entirely relevant.

Sarion posted:

It's true that wealth can grow, but the example he used isn't entirely correct. The protesters bank accounts may have remained unchanged (though they probably didn't), but all across the country millions of other people's accounts went down as they bought food, consumer products, paid bills, etc. The rise in the bank accounts of the wealthy were in fact caused by the lowered balances of millions of other accounts.

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

Where did people get the idea that a government functions economically identically to a nuclear family? I've never understood that.

Coelacanthian posted:

Yay, I can contribute! Add another Facebook image to the pile of rubbish trying to compare the national debt to personal finances. I suppose I see some value in lopping zeros off to make it easier to immediately relate ("Now children, if we take two cookies away, how many do we have left?"), but the title... Responses to this on FB included about a dozen old people weeping.

THE GAYEST POSTER posted:

Wow, it looks like the only true fix to this is to increase revenue.

Gustav posted:

Now let's paint it red and pretend it' a racecar. Vroom vroom! Wow, economics is easy.

darthbob88 posted:

Finally I've got material for this thread. Not email, from a forum I occasionally visit:

My response was that:
1. Oversimplified and/or wrong.
2 and 3. Ad hominem attack against apparent disunity, unkempt appearances, and poor spelling.
4. Correct, but not entirely relevant.
5. Correct, but either irrelevant or ad hominem.
6. "Suck it up, there're people worse off than you". Additionally, the problem is not merely "he's got a better house than I do", it's "I have to decide to eat a rat or my child, while he's debating which Ivy League school to send his kid to", it's "he makes more in a goddamned week than I'll ever see".
7 and 8. Disunity and disorganization at a protest? Well I never!
9. Whose side should I be on here?
As far as the suggested actions go, 1-3 are excessive, but acceptable, 4 is police brutality, and 5-8 are just evidence of psychopathy. A royal commission might be justified if the police are using waterboarding, gunships, and defoliants against protesters.

Armyman25 posted:

Why is it that the right wing folks who are so afraid of government control of their lives, of black helicopters and storm troopers, are the first ones to advocate agains their political opponents?

Armyman25 posted:

Why is it that the right wing folks who are so afraid of government control of their lives, of black helicopters and storm troopers, are the first ones to advocate agains their political opponents?

El Boot posted:

Holy poo poo. From Facebook:


I have no idea where to even begin with this. It flat out calls for taking the right to vote away from poor people.

I posted:

Well, I guess the forced sterilization of women technically isn't in the Bible. However, that ranks up there with China's forced abortions, and we all know how Christian they are. However, I feel that this doesn't take things far enough. Those who collect money for disabilities should be made to work for Walmart or doing simple jobs of varying danger, who send said person's money to the government, or simply pocket it in the interest of economic growth. And why allow retirement social security checks to go out to likely perfectly good workers? After all, even someone with dementia should be just fine behind the grill of a local McDonalds! And those scrounging on minimum wage, trying to feed the kids that were born because their parents weren't "clean" enough to abide by our abstinence-only education material, why, they should be truly grateful for the fact they don't work in a factory for 10 cents a week. You know, if we went back to those good old days, we might not any job shortages. And remove the age requirement. After all you can't beat child labor! Of course, you CAN beat child laborers.

Everything that people like the author of this e-mail has been done, it's been proven to be terrible for everyone except the very rich, and you're trying to bring us back to those days. Please pass this back up the line. If you have the guts.

quote:

This was meant as a what if…nobody takes it seriously. It’s just something to think about.

darthbob88 posted:

3. Despite many of the protesters coming from universities and other advanced centres of learning, their spelling and grammar is abysmal. One young woman appeared at Occupy Melbourne with a sign that spelled “silent” incorrectly. She believed it was spelled “scilent”. The kids at Occupation Tallahassee in the US set the benchmark here, contributing “marrige”, “evoulution”, “survivle”, “fitess” and “glutonoues”.

JamesJBuffalkill posted:

These people seem to completely forget about home and auto loans, which may be more than ten times someone's annual salary.

JamesJBuffalkill posted:

These people seem to completely forget about home and auto loans, which may be more than ten times someone's annual salary.

Zero_Grade posted:

This made me laugh, someone living in Australia singling out Tally. Not entirely surprising though; Florida finding a way to embarrass itself usually isn't. Good job FSU, way to keep up the state's reputation!

p.s. thanks Rick Scott

THE GAYEST POSTER posted:

Aaaand, and, I don't know if you know this, racecar is a palindrome. Post that to your Facebook!

MisterFusion posted:

This exactly. When I see that, I think "Man, the government is doing pretty good compared to me!"

After taxes, I bring home $43,000 and I'm $180,000 in debt when you factor in home and auto loans (I stay away from credit cards).

If I had more time, I'd "remove the eight zeroes" from each portion of our budget and find a "average family" comparison. I have a feeling it'd look something like:

Foreign Aid = donation to local comunity = $0.00001/year
Welfare = Kid's allowance = $25.00/year
Defense spending = home security system = $20,000/year

yaoi prophet posted: