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I posted this in the last thread but it was buried under a sea of dorks telling boring 9/11 stories. Koch brothers caught impersonating randos in order to make it seem like more people hate net neutrality than actually exist: quote:Many of the critical statements from American Commitment's past email petitions began arriving in lawmakers' inboxes en masse earlier this month. To solicit support, the group used display ads that asked visitors to sound off against the FCC's net neutrality rules. Those messages were then delivered March 5-10 in the House and March 8-15 in the Senate, according to Kerpen. You can bet this has happened before and they haven't been caught, and you can bet this will happen again. You can also bet that this will never become a major news story and will slowly slide into the memory hole.
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Apr 1, 2015 15:04
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duz posted:Not linking to the full post in the March thread since it's locked and won't let me, but re: this What's annoying is most stories covering this have buried the lede in favor of "look at the rude response he sent!" I mean, that looks like a cheeky automated out of the office response to me. Watch people cry about the death of civility and ignore the undue influence money has on decision-making.
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Apr 1, 2015 15:54
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mcmagic posted:20 years. This is loving infuriating. What's most infuriating is that any woman can miscarry, but they clearly believe that this simply doesn't happen to "good people." If they did, they would be afraid of losing their wives and daughters. Of course, ignorance of female biology doesn't surprise me. This is from the party that brought you that rear end in a top hat who thought you could observe a woman's uterus by having her swallow a camera.
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Apr 1, 2015 15:56
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Funny how "hey, X, stop complaining - they treat X way worse elsewhere" seems to reinforce existing power structures.
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Apr 2, 2015 16:43
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But do they have bee???
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Apr 2, 2015 19:03
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This kinda reminds me of how so few people understand how our tax system works, to the point that I've heard people say "I always have the maximum amount of income taxes taken out of my paycheck because I like getting a big refund!" Just put in the number the W-4/your accountant tells you, you goofs. You should get as much money as you can as you earn it. Even the Austrians got this right. I remember because one of my profs was a lolbertarian and I had to write a long-rear end essay on Bohm-Bawerk for his class...
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Apr 5, 2015 08:52
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Wow I also really like how Oliver actually asks some tough questions and doesn't slobber all over Snowden's dick. And I approve of what Snowden has done.
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Apr 6, 2015 08:56
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Gravel Gravy posted:How do you be "gay at the time"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLo-ylNPXyE I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to too.
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Apr 6, 2015 15:30
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My boss was arguing against providing subsidized vaccinations to children. I am for it because I don't like human suffering but I argued with him that it will save money when these kids don't have to go to the ER with some awful disease. My boss answered that they can go to "low cost hospitals" funded by charity if they come down with measles. Yeah it's impossible to argue cost because they don't actually give a poo poo about saving money, they just don't want the "undeserving" to get help. But on the whole "let him die" business, people who are alive, employed, and pay taxes are hella valuable to an economy. The death of Paul's campaign guy was expensive - the guy had a fairly nice earnings potential regardless of whatever his job was. So now you don't have him paying taxes. You don't have him buying goods and services (with revenue on which vendors will pay taxes). And now his family's demand for goods and services is depressed by the debt. Since he was fairly young, his death may have cost the economy a million dollars. But we'd rather lose that money and those lives than help the undeserving. Welp.
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Apr 7, 2015 18:47
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Will be lost down the memory hole because facts don't matter. Kochs could install themselves as God-Emperors of America and most people wouldn't give a poo poo. E: but holy poo poo depressing if true
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Apr 8, 2015 01:12
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Pretty sure lots of dams in California would be a terrible idea given that they tend to render the land downstream non-arable and they destroy everything upstream. I thought conservatives LIKED farmers. (Lol just kidding I know they like them about as much as are troops. That is to say, not at all.)
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Apr 8, 2015 01:21
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Crowsbeak posted:Yeah I think you need to talk to someone, if they actually tried something like that we'd have a Caesar in a decade. Meh, just make it seditious. I like that the definition of treason is so strict. I believe you need witnesses attesting that you swore fealty to a different sovereign nation and that you fought in war against the USA.
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Apr 8, 2015 01:52
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Crowsbeak posted:I prefer to have it so that Democracy is the ideal of our nation, and trying to undermine it, makes one obviously a hostis publicus. Best of all get this to be a constitutional amendment and you'd get something that the tea party mount breathers would love. Whilst stripping their creators of one of their means of corrupting the system. Undermining the rightful government of a nation is basically what sedition is. Since our government is meant to be "of the people," short circuiting the democratic process could be interpreted as sedition if there was a legal framework pointing to that. I hate to be pedantic, but the founders themselves were quite specific on treason vs. sedition. Basically because charges of treason can be great for doing away with people whose lives are inconvenient to the ruling class.
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Apr 8, 2015 02:26
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Are we talking consensual weddings between people with different shapes of junk here, or are we talking poor terrified Christians being forced to marry gays against their will, because I have heard that the gaystapo is going to force their marriage agenda on us all!
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Apr 8, 2015 03:19
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If I were pregnant at 11 months I WOULD be like OMG kill it kill it now.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:06
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greatn posted:Just funny local Alabama political news: a bill making it illegal for teenagers to ride in the tailgates of pickup trucks on state and federal highways failed to pass because of parental responsibility and lolbertarianism. I don't see this as a bad thing. I remember such a law was proposed in California when I lived there back in the 90s and prominent Hispanic leaders were against it because white cops always seem to think 20-something Hispanic men are teenagers. They saw it as giving cops another way to harass Latinos since an outsized proportion of them perform manual labor and get to work via pickup beds.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:03
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Rand Paul, kill your parent.
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Apr 10, 2015 05:32
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Evil_Greven posted:Didn't see this and search yielded nothing: Seems kind crass given that ISIL has targeted Iraqi Christians for execution, but then again it's not like he actually gives a poo poo about Christians, just American Conservatives.
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Apr 12, 2015 16:56
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So who's Squirmin' with Vermin?
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Apr 12, 2015 20:51
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Not to mention, while demand for housing is inelastic, demand for one's own room in one's own dwelling is not. While many poor people already have roommates, if rents get jacked up just because all the landlords are like "we can totally do this because min wage earners are making more!" people whose salaries are in the $30-$40k range who won't see an increase in earnings are just gonna get roommates or move in with their parents. And anyway, as said before, vendors of other goods can't just go "people aren't poor anymore, jack up all the prices!" because people will just go shop at whoever doesn't gouge them. What a lot of conservatives miss is that the price of something is not set by how much money the potential customer has. If we have actual competition (lol) then the prices of identical goods are set pretty close to the marginal cost of producing them and the differences in price are mainly caused by the small differences between items of the same type. Outside a monopoly, people will tend to want whatever gives them the best value, and if I sell a widget for $10 and my competitor sells it for $5, I either need to also go to around $5 (because getting $5 is still better than $0) or I need to communicate to my customers that my widget is different enough to warrant the price difference (it's the aged Hennessy xo of widgets or something.) what I'll probably do instead though is call up my competitor and tell him that we'll both sell for $10 and then we'll give each other high faves later over the body of a forsaken child.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:22
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Amergin posted:There would be if parents would stop coddling their children.  I actually enjoy your trolling but this is too patently obvious. Do it again but right this time.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:29
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I don't have it with me right now (phone posting from work) but in Capital in the 21st Century, the (European) author says something like "raising the minimum wage will not significantly improve inequality. Except in the USA. Seriously, what the gently caress is wrong with them?"
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Apr 16, 2015 20:34
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Karnegal posted:I haven't been here long enough to know if Amergin is a dedicated troll or just a reprehensible human being. Which one is it (although I suppose it could be both)? Troll. He can be sensible and even contribute positively on occasion (mainly seen in other threads although he has also proposed some hilarious thread titles for this thread series on a number of occasions) either because he's too lazy to switch forums accounts or disinclined to buy two forums accounts. You can also tell because over time he takes positions and arguments that indicate inconsistent internal motivations. I think he's useful in that the USpol threads attract huge numbers of lurkers who never post so responding to him gives you an opportunity to basically speak to any who might harbor similar thoughts. I think it's a waste of time to respond if he's saying something deliberately incendiary however.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:48
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Stereotype posted:So what if it was my dream to own a restaurant, and I started my own that served burgers and fries. What if I worked there as the main line cook to save costs, and employed my wife to be the waitress, would that be a real job? I'm not relying on "minimum wage" or a big corporate employer as benefactor, but I am doing literally the exact same thing as fast food employees. I probably could even support three kids and an apartment above the store! Why would my dream be entrepreneurial and gutsy but if I hired someone they would be entitled and lazy and dumb? Actually employing your own family members in a business can be an awesome racket if you know what you're doing. Transfer money from business to personal funds and then deduct the business expense. That's why so many local businesses stick their family members in adverts or so I've heard.
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Apr 16, 2015 20:54
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To be fair, the CEO of a smaller company (50 or fewer employees) does do a lot of strategizing, but for big companies they are basically a feudal lord but with fewer obligations.
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Apr 16, 2015 21:32
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How are u posted:gently caress you, Alaska is a treasure.   A lot of people don't seem to realize that public spending is a huge boon to private business. But I suppose people don't actually give a poo poo about business as a whole, they just say that so they don't look selfish for wanting their taxes personally to go down.
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Apr 17, 2015 01:15
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Amergin posted:Give me a realistic example where spending four years studying Shakespeare will ever become crucially important and levereagable, as opposed to computer skills that you can use in most job opportunities these days (even min. wage ones). Unironically, it's a great class marker. I know I got my lucky breaks by charming the pants off of people in power, and my ability to signal upper-middle class traits was a huge part of that. That's not the whole reason or even the most important reason for learning Shakespeare, but you gotta play the game, man.
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Apr 17, 2015 16:16
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Ugh I know drakegrim is a sub-Amergin troll (at least Amergin tries) but it's important to remember that the job market metaphor works both ways. If you could do a low-effort job for $15 vs a high effort job for $18, you'll probably choose the $15. The high effort job has to increase the wage or they won't have enough people. In other words, raising the minimum wage will have a knock-on effect as employers with near-minimum wages have to stay competitive. *note: this does not apply when the employers are colluding to depress wages as seen with Google and Facebook and their ilk.
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Apr 17, 2015 16:40
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Is it bad that all I've gotten from the last few pages is the warm glow of affection for Amergin? Why are you guys even responding to this other guy? He doesn't even have cogent arguments. Oh yeah I just saw a NYT article about how Huckabee is teasing running for prez. I pity the dumb fucks who donate to him.
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Apr 17, 2015 17:30
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Oh no why won't the women vote for us? 
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Apr 17, 2015 17:45
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Skwirl posted:I don't think many people in Iran are ordering bacon cheeseburgers. This may surprise you, but atheist Persians walk among us. (they get mad when people think they are Hispanic.)
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Apr 17, 2015 19:56
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The only successful regime changes that were successful that one might reasonably argue were us-led were maybe west Germany (I don't think it counts since it's not like the republic system was alien to them) and Japan, and in both cases those nations were already industrialized - even if their infrastructure was hosed, their populations were at least familiar with industrialization. I think Japan got a kickin' rad deal out of it all things considered. They save tons of cash by not having offensive forces and the U.S. taxpayer covers the bulk of their anti-China needs. What's a nuke or two when you get that? 
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Apr 20, 2015 16:09
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Oh yeah there's also the  theory that a lot of people in Spain repeated as fact that the CIA used ETA as a front to kill Franco's right hand man (well that is more or less accepted) but that they also contacted Juan Carlos and told him that if he didn't transition into a U.S.-friendly democracy after Franco's death they'd do the same to him. In other words, per theory Spain is only a democracy because the CIA told the king they'd gut him otherwise. Seems a bit far fetched but it's a fun theory.
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Apr 20, 2015 17:24
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withak posted:Michelle Obama reacts to being told that she is too young for 51: That's really cute. Then again if I had a team of people hanging around to make sure I always looked good, I might be fine at 51 too.
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Apr 23, 2015 01:45
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Today my boss told me that if women don't have a gun, they're asking to be raped. I'm glad he's progressive enough to realize that it's not what they wear that makes women deserve to be raped! Um. I can't wait to find a new job.
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Apr 29, 2015 17:35
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Quote of a day: "While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime," he said. "And I don't think there's anyone in any of those pictures ... (who wouldn't) accept it as part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom." But you see Baltimore is different because there was never any oppression to begin with! They're all making it up because they like rioting on account of being too lazy to have jobs that are less physically strenuous than rioting.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:37
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After discovering that at least three people in my department are birthers, something I thought most people considered an insane conspiracy theory, I just don't know, man. Just wait until they start talking about female brain mass. And...black female brain mass.  on a pedantic note, isn't the only racial "disadvantage" black people have is that they have a higher than average chance of being born with sickle cell anemia? A slightly worse racial handicap than Asian lactose intolerance, admittedly...
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May 1, 2015 04:58
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