|
zeroprime posted:That is just so drat sad and depressing. And typical. Everytime I get into the debate with people and point out how a universal system would not only be better fiscally, but morally and even spiritually, everyone always does the same thing; They look like a deer in headlights as the realization dawns on them that they've been fed a line of bullshit for years and years and everything they thought they knew is garbage, then about 5 seconds later the talking points kick back in and I'm back to square one. It's aggravating. I think the Libertarians are the worst because their perspective is so immature and childish and completely unserious they think they have a lock on the argument. And this is when I realized, Libertarians are the most full of poo poo people ever.
|
#
?
May 29, 2013 16:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 21:24 |
|
|
Mister Bates posted:You'd think so, especially considering how many on the right seem to jerk off to Red Dawn fantasies all the time. A lot of the time it sounds like they want the US to be invaded so they'll have a justifiable reason to run off into the woods and shoot people. At the same time, though, I think a lot of the gun nuts and the warmongers are, deep down, just massive cowards who are loving terrified of everything in the world and need to shelter behind layers upon layers of protection in order to feel safe enough to function. The huge stockpiles of guns they tend to amass are one part of that, a kind of physical, tangible security blanket they can see and directly interact with that helps to calm the crippling everyday fear - but that alone is not enough to fully salve their terror at the 'encroaching' Red Menace and/or Muslim Menace and/or (for the older folks) Russian Menace, all of which they assume we are always permanently at the brink of war with, and all of which they assume are both willing and able to invade the US mainland in force at any time. They are convinced that there are enemies at the gates, and they won't feel safe without being sheltered by a numberless horde of gatekeepers armed with the fanciest and prettiest weapons in the world and funded so generously that they're literally drowning in cash. It's also wise to keep in mind that authority figures of various kinds have been working to instill this sort of unthinking fear in the populace since before any of us were born. How many times a year do prominent Republican politicians still insist that Russia is an imminent threat to the United States? How much do the media, the military-industrial complex, and the prison-industrial complex stand to gain from a population terrified of enemies domestic and abroad?
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2013 20:06
|
|
|
Gourd of Taste posted:This woman is seventy years old, lives in Virginia, and isn't trying to make a political point. She's legit wondering if the new law is going to mandate that she not receive treatment and certain people have poisoned the well so goddamn badly that she can't research it on her own. People are consciously lying to elderly cancer patients because that fear is profitable. Here we go -- note that this site makes note of the falsehood (after "Update") but then goes on to say, "Yeah, well, we all know there really will be rationing regardless."
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2013 20:10
|
|
|
1stGear posted:I've always felt that ancient religions got it right by making their gods selfish, flawed assholes. Once you start worshiping a perfect, omnipotent being who loves you very much but will gently caress you up royally the moment you step out of line a lot of uncomfortable questions start cropping up. And most of them were open to bribes/prayers only if you were pretty enough, had sex with them, or your enemies really really pissed them off, like by serving the gods human children in a pie. It's easier to think of the Christian god as a one-man Mafia. You grease the wheels enough, he does tit for tat for you. But if he kills you, it's nothing personal, it's business. The Mafia doesn't give a poo poo about you either but does promise you a lot of pain if you ever, ever try to gently caress it over.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 00:37
|
|
|
Moving this over from the debate help thread because this quickly entered stupid territory when a friend of the person I was debating with decided to chime in with "you're too stupid to discuss this topic". (I'm the green one)  Remember, the best way to get your point across is to actively refuse to discuss it any further than blatant rhetoric, and then try to accuse someone of being a dumb kid when they pursue it any further than that. 
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 10:43
|
|
|
If you can't explain it, you don't understand it.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 11:06
|
|
|
Apple pays $16 million a day in taxes, eh? Wow, that's a big number! They must really be civic minded citizens to pay that much. Oh wait, didn't I read something recently about Apple being literally the most valuable corporation of all time by market capitalization? Hmmm... I wonder how that 16 million a day compares to some other numbers about Apple. First of all, $16m/day is $5.84 billion in taxes over the course of a year. Apple's operating income last year was $55.24 billion, for an overall tax rate of roughly 10.5%. For the record, that's below the lowest marginal bracket of federal corporate taxes in the United States, which is 15% on income between 0 and $50,000. Meanwhile, Apple is sitting on $137 billion in the bank as of February (source). Clearly they deserve that low, low tax rate, because these glorious ~*wealth creators*~ are reinvesting all that money and creating jobs in America, and definitely not just assembling a giant pile of money like Smaug or Scrooge McDuck. Taxing them a little more so that they contribute to the conditions that helped them get that rich in the first place (roads, universities, educated workforce, the internet, etc) would be grossly unfair. And taxing them a little more so that the government could actually reinvest the money they're not bothering to do anything with and create jobs to stimulate the economy and end the recession would be communism.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 11:51
|
|
|
It sounds like he's never taken an economics class either but thinks he 'gets' how it works, because he's just-worlding left and right.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 12:00
|
|
|
Nevvy Z posted:It sounds like he's never taken an economics class either but thinks he 'gets' how it works, because he's just-worlding left and right. That or he's taken an economics class, reached (or reaffirmed) his own conclusions, and decided that all else is wrong. What is easy to forget is that economics is a social, not a natural science, and so that laws of economics shouldn't be treated with the same absolutism as Newton's Laws or mathematical theorems.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 12:17
|
|
|
And that econ101 is actively incorrect about how the real world functions.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 12:44
|
|
|
How many people who say ">subject< 101" have actually taken any college classes in >subject<?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 12:51
|
|
|
miscellaneous14 posted:"If you don't produce a living wage's worth of value as a worker, I have no duty to pay you a living wage" - an unbelievably cruel and ignorant shithead e: Gourd of Taste posted:And that econ101 is actively incorrect about how the real world functions. I forget which thread I saw it in but some poster made a comparison between Econ 101 and Physics 101. Both are good for delivering broad concepts but they both exist in idealized worlds of frictionless surfaces and rational, informed consumers. Lies-to-Children, essentially. Econ 101 doesn't explain the world anymore that Physics 101 does. 800peepee51doodoo fucked around with this message at 13:06 on May 30, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 13:01
|
|
|
Gourd of Taste posted:And that econ101 is actively incorrect about how the real world functions. Econ101 is a huge contributor to the ranks of shithead libertarians, because they take an incredibly basic view of a simple optimal system, do no further study, and then apply it to the real world. It's like if someone just took physics 101 and thought purely in terms of frictionless surfaces and perfectly elastic, spherical cows, but expected to be taken seriously as an engineer.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 13:13
|
|
|
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/02/robert-farago/nra-gun-ownership-soars-murder-rate-plummets/ When I asked for a source citing times when gin owners actively speed crimes I got linked this. Any advice on how to counter?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 14:40
|
|
|
SalTheBard posted:http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/02/robert-farago/nra-gun-ownership-soars-murder-rate-plummets/ 'Medicine got better. More people get shot, less people actually die.' is one part of it, tell them what they should look at is the incidence of firearm violence rather than deaths. But knowing hardcore gun folk it's not going to really change their mind unless people are brutally dying and had their corpse defiled by living guns. You could also smugly say that it dropped under Clinton and started rising under Bush.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 15:14
|
|
|
SalTheBard posted:http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/02/robert-farago/nra-gun-ownership-soars-murder-rate-plummets/ Well for one thing the number of gun owners is down. The people who have guns are just buying more of them. If gun violence is down maybe it has something to do with less people owning them?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 15:19
|
|
|
SalTheBard posted:http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/02/robert-farago/nra-gun-ownership-soars-murder-rate-plummets/ The very first source that article cites is an FBI Crime Statistics page but I'm not seeing any specific division of firearm homicides. It's made even more difficult because the author is doing some calculations behind the scenes to get at the "Firearm homicide rate" as a per capita level, which means we could have some strange artifacts where the population numbers are skewing the actual crime numbers because the population is the denominator. I'm also skeptical of the stopping point being 1981. Furthermore, without seeing the numbers the data just doesn't look highly correlated: from 1989 to 1997 gun ownership steadily climbed but the firearm homicide rate rose too, while in other segments the rate changed very little despite more guns being owned. We also don't know the distribution of that ownership; is it primarily new gun owners, or is it primarily people who already had guns buying more guns? That information is important to know when trying to argue causality. Basically I think the methodology of the chart isn't clear; the creator makes strange choices about what data to use, how to present it, and doesn't give enough information about considerable external factors while trying to tie what seems like a very loose correlation to a causation argument.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 15:24
|
|
|
Tim Cook isn't valuable. No one trusts him with the company and he's not been a strong leader. We know exactly how much Apple's laborers are worth. 55.24 billion. They deserve a fair wage.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 15:49
|
|
|
This is the first actual CFPE I've gotten in a while, courtesy of my dad. He simply commented that it was "too funny and profound." My dad posted:There's an annual contest at the Griffith 's University , Australia , calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term. Is PC even a thing outside of paranoid right wing pundits anymore? I seem to remember the height of its usage being the late '90s. This also got me wondering: Is it a common thing for the American right to view Australia as some kind of conservative utopia despite the fact that their PM is an atheist woman and they have strict gun control laws? Duncan Doenitz fucked around with this message at 02:22 on May 31, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 16:35
|
|
|
llama_arse posted:This is the first actual CFPE I've gotten in while, courtesy of my dad. He simply commented that it was "too funny and profound." The only time people ever complain about "political correctness" is when they are angry they cannot be as racist/misogynistic/homophobic/otherwise intolerant in public as they want. This has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with society, in large part, moving away from acceptance of racism/misogyny etc.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 16:42
|
|
|
Griffith Uni in Brisbane? Not exactly a hotbed of young liberals types I would inagine.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 16:46
|
|
|
llama_arse posted:This is the first actual CFPE I've gotten in while, courtesy of my dad. He simply commented that it was "too funny and profound." I've heard that phrase for years so either its shitthatdidnthappen.txt or the winner plagiarized.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 16:52
|
|
|
Mister Bates posted:You'd think so, especially considering how many on the right seem to jerk off to Red Dawn fantasies all the time. A lot of the time it sounds like they want the US to be invaded so they'll have a justifiable reason to run off into the woods and shoot people. At the same time, though, I think a lot of the gun nuts and the warmongers are, deep down, just massive cowards who are loving terrified of everything in the world and need to shelter behind layers upon layers of protection in order to feel safe enough to function. The huge stockpiles of guns they tend to amass are one part of that, a kind of physical, tangible security blanket they can see and directly interact with that helps to calm the crippling everyday fear - but that alone is not enough to fully salve their terror at the 'encroaching' Red Menace and/or Muslim Menace and/or (for the older folks) Russian Menace, all of which they assume we are always permanently at the brink of war with, and all of which they assume are both willing and able to invade the US mainland in force at any time. They are convinced that there are enemies at the gates, and they won't feel safe without being sheltered by a numberless horde of gatekeepers armed with the fanciest and prettiest weapons in the world and funded so generously that they're literally drowning in cash. There is an argument to be made that the 2A, when viewed in the time in which it was written, has little to do with self-defense or hunting, but with the ability of the populace to remain armed in the event that some new tyrant amassed an army to oppress the people. The founders wrote extensively about their loathing of standing armies for exactly this purpose. The military isn't SUPPOSED to be the size and power that it is, and small arms in the hands of the populace SHOULD be a sufficient deterrent to a tyrannical government trying to oppress the people.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 17:37
|
|
|
I'm getting really tired of people that don't know anything about economics, posting about economics.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:01
|
|
|
thegalagakid posted:I'm getting really tired of people that don't know anything about economics, posting about economics. Somebody's down with massive deflation.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:04
|
|
|
gently caress You And Diebold posted:The only time people ever complain about "political correctness" is when they are angry they cannot be as racist/misogynistic/homophobic/otherwise intolerant in public as they want. This has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with society, in large part, moving away from acceptance of racism/misogyny etc. The reality of Political Correctness is that it's more damaging to your image to be the person that calls out racism and misogyny than to be the guy speaking in obvious dog whistle language because saying that sort of thing is mean spirited.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:07
|
|
|
Radish posted:The reality of Political Correctness is that it's more damaging to your image to be the person that calls out racism and misogyny than to be the guy speaking in obvious dog whistle language because saying that sort of thing is mean spirited. Then she went on to say a bunch of other horrible and ignorant things including that she doesn't want to be forced to pay health insurance because she is healthy and her money would go towards unhealthy people. She currently doesn't have insurance and said that she has "savings" that will cover her bills should anything happen to her. I was getting pissed at her hypocrisy, and her response was "why are you so mad about it?" Ugh, I should just leave the room if she comes over, as it's tough to deal with a fundamentalist christian that apparently hates everybody in need and thinks God will protect her from any medical maladies. Keep in mind, this is an educated and successful woman. It saddens me.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:15
|
|
|
thegalagakid posted:I'm getting really tired of people that don't know anything about economics, posting about economics. Just pull up a price chart over the last year. Do you really want to be paid in money that can fluctuate in value that much?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:22
|
|
|
thegalagakid posted:I'm getting really tired of people that don't know anything about economics, posting about economics. Shitlibertarianssay.jpg How would this help? So that way we can all melt down our sweet, sweet silver and make our own, better money?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:23
|
|
|
KillerJunglist posted:Shitlibertarianssay.jpg Well some libertarians would argue that yes, we should do exactly that and the best currencies would be the ones that would survive. Look up the numerous, numerous articles in favor of bank currencies over national ones.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:24
|
|
|
Barudak posted:Well some libertarians would argue that yes, we should do exactly that and the best currencies would be the ones that would survive. Ignoring, of course, that the free banking era was a thing that happened.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:27
|
|
|
 Haven't posted any of this guy's stuff yet. God he's horrible.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:31
|
|
|
Ferroque posted:
Post the "pee pee doo doo" cartoon but scratch out Bush and put his name in. "Your move."
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:35
|
|
|
Gourd of Taste posted:Ignoring, of course, that the free banking era was a thing that happened. No see it totally worked in Scotland because England had a crash while Scotland stayed relatively strong if you ignore pretty much every possible detail to that circumstance and all the other massive historical failures of free banking.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 18:36
|
|
|
Are there any really concise, quick rebuttals to Friedman a la the Paulbomb? My super conservative brother in law is in town and he's driving me nuts.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 20:15
|
|
|
aBagorn posted:Are there any really concise, quick rebuttals to Friedman a la the Paulbomb? Thomas or Milton?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 20:19
|
|
|
Gourd of Taste posted:Thomas or Milton? Milton
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 20:23
|
|
|
Interlude posted:The real answer is probably Muslims, and the countries where they come from. Conservatives aren't terrified of China in the "kill em all turn it to glass" way. Ironically China has a Muslim population of somewhere between 20 and 50 million(Depending on the source, the government likely underestimates and Muslim groups likely overestimate, from what research I've seen 30 million seems like a reasonable estimate), meaning its Muslim population is around the same as Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, etc. Even the lower estimates place it around the same as Yemen and Saudi Arabia. But around half are more closely related to the Han Chinese ethnically than to any middle eastern ethnicity since they're descendants of Arab and Persian traders that married into Han families over a millennium ago, so they can't really be used that well as a scare tactic.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 21:43
|
|
|
aBagorn posted:Milton A history textbook. 
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 22:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 21:24 |
|
|
Ferroque posted:
FOX has seen its viewership fall like lead since the November election, so there's that. It's almost like, all cable news networks are losing their viewership. Although it is pretty sad how apparently viewers just vastly preferred Ed Schultz's giant loving head yelling at them. lousy hat posted:Econ101 is a huge contributor to the ranks of shithead libertarians, because they take an incredibly basic view of a simple optimal system, do no further study, and then apply it to the real world. It's like if someone just took physics 101 and thought purely in terms of frictionless surfaces and perfectly elastic, spherical cows, but expected to be taken seriously as an engineer. I am stealing the hell out of this. aBagorn posted:Are there any really concise, quick rebuttals to Friedman a la the Paulbomb? Well, for starters, Friedman supported a guaranteed income through a negative income tax I believe. It's almost like, those who really love the market also know it doesn't really work well when 1/2 the people in the market have poo poo all for buying power and leverage.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2013 23:19
|
|
