True for a lot of people. Occasionally I speculate about what one delusion or falsehood I would purge from people's minds if I could. It's a crowded field, but it would be hard not to pick "I need to defend the economic interests of millionaires over my own, because any day now, I'm gonna become one."
Roy: You may know this already, but there's a new film out about Harry Dean Stanton. Marc Maron interviewed him, and then the filmmaker, for his podcast. The whole thing was fascinating.
Also, I hope you'll have something to say about Philip Seymour Hoffman.
"The roots of the economic crisis lie in the intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state. That same intersection has given us Barack Obama, Paul Krugman and severe unemployment and income inequality."
This is bordering on word salad. It's almost as if it was created by a right-wing complaint generator that spouts out nouns the wingers don't like. The context implies he meant Krugman and Obama are secret Wall Street shills who pretend to support the welfare state because greed. But he also doesn't like the welfare state so wouldn't such hackery be a good thing in his eyes?
Don't think to hard on it though, Greenfield sure didn't.
In what seems like self-parody the actual poverty solution currently on offer from conservatives is complete underpants gnomes economics: 1) Get married 2) ??? 3) profit.
For extra irony bonus points the great conservative complaint about poor people is that they don't work hard enough and don't realize nothing in life comes free. Apparently the exception to that rule is a marriage license which evidently comes with a printing press.
Speaking of social inequality, it looks like that awful black thug's team beat that handsome white quarterback's team quite brutally. Sigh, Obama's America... rat on rat on rat on.
Given that and Krebs' comment, I wonder if he realized that "the intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state" could be read as "Big business benefits massively from government largesse, and even the most rhetoric-spouting libertarians won't admit it because they're all corporate stooges." Too close to honesty for a right-winger, obviously, so he had to throw in some red herrings ("Obama! Krugman!") to keep 'em off the scent.
John Elway, in a Fox interview, said he doesn't believe in the safety net. I don't seem to remember him dismissing his offensive line, but his team may have done that today.
How many conservatives pointed to "Harrison Bergeron" as evidence that inequality is the cat's meow when Vonnegut was alive? Because if he got wind of it I can't imagine him not telling them to shut the fuck up. And John J. Miller is outstandingly douchey in that link, so especially him.
So this guy Bill Reeves wants us to ignore spurious ideas like "green and smart growth" and side with the little guy. I'm guessing The Great Gazoo has been whispering to him again about an exciting new way to stick it to the electric company.
It was a loooong time ago that John Steinbeck said that Americans thought of themselves as "temporarily disadvantaged millionaires." That's a pretty good assessment of the aspirational ingredient to how we treat the rich, but, it didn't go very far in explaining the outright defense of predatory capitalism that is common today among the wingers, and especially among those that have been steadily ground down by the rich through preferential treatment in the tax code, privatization of the commons, destruction of the compact between worker and capital, and via direct and indirect subsidy by government.
To paraphrase, never in history have so many been so encouraged to such delusion for so long by so few.
I despise all these louses in some form or another -- so many words spit out to describe poverty as the poor's fault, a punching down attitude so ingrained, it's obviously the only thing they enjoy in their dark, awful lives -- but I have to say I find Godlstein to be both the single biggest dink in the known world and, easily, the most pathetic. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be him, even for a minute. The "I coulda been an academic" speech -- coupled with his adolescent-like defiance about why, plus his obviously overcompensating love of guns...I mean the guy is a fucking seething bucket of mess. I can only imagine how his not-veiled-at-all anger over being a househusband will damage his kid (to say nothing of his overstuffed, yet idiotic, thinking, his gun fetish and his diseased rage). And what's amazing is that I only catch wind of him (he smells like gas or something -- I think Sowell was having a stroke in the middle of his essay) in passing once every few months. He's just an astonishing asshole on every level.
He actually said he doesn't believe in safety nets, even though he thinks we've got to have them. I suspect a CAT scan of his brain would have quite a few dark spots.
He actually said he doesn't believe in safety nets even though he thinks we've got to have them. I suspect a CAT scan of his brain would have quite a few dark spots.
Some of the brethren just tried to wish it into the cornfield. "Has 'Income Inequality' Become Code For 'Envy?'" asked Elise Hilton of the Acton Institute Power Blog. (After consulting with St. Thomas Aquinas... she decided yes, it was.
Since Tom is dead, maybe we could consult some major living figure in theology on the question of whether Envy is at the heart of all laments over income equality. I nominate the Pope.
If the two brain surgeons were guaranteed to earn the same amount of money no matter how hard they worked or how well they performed their job, what is the incentive for one to outperform the other?--Mike Peters (out).
Oh yeah? If there is no Gawd, then what keeps anyone from taking whatever they want? Killing, raping, stealing? What is the incentive not to do whatever they want? --random Christist displaying his moral reasoning skills to normal person in any college class in America.
How do you explain to people who assume everyone is only motivated by Reward and Punishment that there is a higher morality?
But remember it is said that Whosoever Smelt It, Dealt It. So, it would appear that the mere ability to "deal it" is not sufficient, as admirable as that is. The smelling part is essential to success.
I dunno. I know a working class guy who is a big fan of the "Fair Tax" -- the flat tax scheme touted by Steve Forbes et al to lower rich people's taxes even more at the expense of people like him. Like too many people, he is completely ignorant of the consequences of this on his own class, and has no idea why a progressive tax system exists in the first place. He just thinks it makes sense to be "fair" and tax everyone at the same rate. Along with the level of abject ignorance, this intuitive sense of fairness that most Americans have is something that economic feudalists have been exploiting for years. It's why Luntzian phrases like "death tax" work so well on ordinary people -- why, it isn't fair to tax someone just for dying! (Which turns the whole idea of fairness upside down, but that's the point.)
I think another factor is the intense desire to belong to the "right" group, or, perhaps even more intensely, not to be identified with the "wrong" group. Better to be a tough individualist who don' need no help no how to make it on his own than a weak-kneed, union-loving liberal who takes your money and gives it to minority moochers. It's actually kind of fascinating how much they resent poor people who have zero influence on their lives, and ignore the billionaires and millionaires who do. I know another working stiff who's out of a job and a big Limbaugh fan, and it's awesome to listen to him agree with the $75 million/year radio asshole telling him that unemployment insurance -- the check this guy gets every week -- shouldn't exist because it's disincentivizing him from getting a job. Such ignorance is bliss, at least for the billionaires who count on it.
It's probably a misquote I remember, but I always preferred "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," as a term more accurate to their mindset that it is a personal failing to be not-rich.
He's "ours" because he's always said that tax cuts for the rich don't do anything except make the rich even more wealthy. And, really, that's all it takes these days to be called a wild-eyed leftist extremist.
I know a working class guy who is a big fan of the "Fair Tax" -- the flat tax scheme touted by Steve Forbes et al . . .
Two years ago when I was running the local radio station, I had two employees (neither of whom made more than $30K) who were convinced that the government was going to take half of their estates when they died, and so they supported repeal of the estate tax. Even showing them that the $5M exemption was written down in black and white could not convince them that big guv wasn't going to tow away the double-wides they lived in should they kick the bucket.
The real issue, of course, that no one really talks about is that income inequality isn't just about "money;" it's about those who are so wealthy that money ceases to have any meaning. Everything might as well be Free to those at the very top. It's about the absolute power that kind of wealth enables.
This is what assholes like Tom Perkins are yammering about when they cry that they aren't "really rich." Their eyes are on the Endgame, when they can dispense with money entirely and enjoy complete freedom from conventionality. If Perkins were maxed-out level-wise, he would not have been fined by mere mortals, and the family of the doctor he ran over whilst playing with his boats would have apologized and paid to fix the damage done to Perkin's vessel.
Money is only the points accrued to reach that level of existence. Only then can humans be truly free.
If the two brain surgeons were guaranteed to earn the same amount of money no matter how hard they worked or how well they performed their job, what is the incentive for one to outperform the other?
Aren't most surgeons self-employed, with OR privileges at a hospital that doesn't actually employ them? Don't they get paid mostly by insurers, which set pay rates as a block rather than based on individual surgeon performance? In which case, what's the incentive now? If he thinks neurosurgeons still try to do a good job under these conditions, why wouldn't anyone else?
Its use as a pull-quote may have removed the context somewhat but, but "and God is glorified by the taking of dominion"?? I'll admit I'm unfamiliar with current Christianist boilerplate phrasing; it still sounds to me like dialogue from Tales from the Leather Nun...
You may have hit upon the crux of their resistance. (Wash your hands.) If marriage makes you rich, married gays will get rich at the expense of Jesus-loving, red-voting het couples who must not be made to share the Lord's wealth.
"I gave up what could have been a career in academia in order to have a stay at home parent for our children... that was my choice... it was a tradeoff I was willing to make, and one that as a free man I was free to make."
"I gave up what could have been a lifetime of frolic as Marie of Roumania in order to stay at home and be unemployed...that was my choice..it was a tradeoff I was willing to make not one that was forced on me by, you know, reality."
"I gave up what could have been a career in academia in order to have a stay at home parent for our children... that was my choice... it was a tradeoff I was willing to make, and one that as a free man I was free to make."
By far my favorite quote in the piece, and code for "After having seventeen different department heads slowly rip my C.V. to shreds in front of me, I decided to stay home and teach my kids Krav Maga and how to field strip an AR15. Fuck it... I didn't want to be part of your liberal academic bund anyway..."
Ticket taker (ticket taker!) at Sturbridge Village made a face when she saw my Kerry button lo these many years ago. She told me she "couldn't afford to pay more taxes" at a time when they were only talking about raising marginal tax rates on people making more than 250,000 a yaer. The heisenberg "I don't know what the fuck these people are talking about" principle means that, as you both say, if you can show these morons in black and white that the taxes we are talking about apply only to people making miloions more than they do they would still get nervous and start doing the potty indecision dance and bleating "well, I don't know, you can't trust government people...."
And I sympathize with that. No one who doesn't pay attention, and even those of us who do, can figure out what the fuck is going on when your local political actors feed a good or bad idea into one end of the sausage making machine and a ground meat octopus comes out the other side. I think I was in my thirties before I realized that some of the stuff politicians were saying during the election were actual, you know, policy positions they were planning on trying to take once they were in office. It might even have been Clinton and health care that did it for me. That might have been the first time I realized that although everyone talks about the weather Clinton was actually proposing to try to do something about it. I can't blame some 60 year old wizened ticket taker at a bizarre 19th century theme park for just sticking her head in the sand.
"If the two brain surgeons were guaranteed to earn the same amount of money no matter how hard they worked or how well they performed their job, what is the incentive for one to outperform the other?--Mike Peters (out)."
National Organization For Marriage and Right to Life were going to get together to bomb a gay bar and an abortion clinic to a danceable music track but they decided they'd rather get together to complain about the Coke ad showing unaborted foreigners and potential urban gays and rural dark skinned people.
"Taking dominion" is a flavor of the prosperity gospel based on generously taking Genesis 1:28 to mean that if you're not actively going out and exploiting as many resources and people as possible, you're giving the little baby Jesus a sad.
Actually, I've always felt that for a large chunk of these folks, their fear of gay-marriage was exactly that...not fair for two guys to double-team a poor redneck saddled with a mere wife and kids.
That is such a great point, Cole. You get the same weird sense of entitlement to be "free" from labor costs as well. When you read right down through the unironic, non editorial, parts of the WSJ and rightwing commentary there is always a basic assumption that labor costs are the only costs that can't be, or shouldn't be, fixed in some way. If there's an oil shock and oil prices rise the captains of industry are angry and they want something done about it, preferably by the public purse, but its not a moral crisis. But if the worker demands more than less-than-minimum-wage or humane living conditions that's a moral crisis for these guys, a sign of the end times. All claims by the worker to own his own labor and to determine the price at which it is set are seen as an insult to the owners and the stockholders.
I can't dredge up any examples right now but I've had plenty in talking to people about profit and labor costs--it never occurs to business owners (or venture capitalists) or the WSJ or the pea brained voter who is defined as a "consumer" that there are several places in the production/sale process where profits are made--labor, costs of materials, and profit. Yes! When the cost of one thing goes up you can shave a few points off profits in order to keep the company going. Privately companies acknowledge all the time that some costs can't be "passed on" to the customer but publicly and in terms of the fantasy life of the owners all costs should be borne by the workers. If the cost of wood goes up the cost can be passed along to the customer, or carved out of the worker's paycheck, but profits must never be touched. In fact I'd argue that profits and the rate of return on investment are stripped out of the conversation entirely and have dissapeared from the public discussion. The right to profit even as your workers are dying or on public assistance is so culturally embedded that it has become invisible.
Lets flip it and use the language they like to use about Teachers and other public servants
"I wouldn't want someone who was in it for the money to take that job at all. I think you shouldn't go into teaching if you aren't willing to make some sacrifices. What kind of a teacher would you be if you were always worrying about how to increase your paycheck?"
The necessary inducements for the upper class (money, power, respect) are apparently disincentives for the lower class. If you aren't willing to eat shit for your employer, at low pay, without control over your workplace then fuck you, you don't have any value to society or any right to the pursuit of happiness.
@Spaghetti Lee - a good one, to be sure, but I'd pick "there is an invisible man in the sky who will give me a reward later if I just do whatever these guys who promise they've talked to him tell me to". That sweeps a whole bunch of problems all at once...
Pro wealthy populism is going to take a nose dive--perhaps it will already--when there are more out and proud Asian and Hispanic and AA billionaires out there for Limbaugh and Fox's audiences to rage against.
Right now they have managed, very successfully, to turn the word "poor" into a synonym for "non white" and to turn "welfare/safety net" into the word "entitlement" and thus they have manufactured an bizarro world in which Logan Echols (yes, I'm watching Veronica Mars) isn't the spoiled son of a millionaire actor but a an AA single mother who drinks and smokes dope on the public dime in high style.
That's worked surprisingly well--since at least Reconstruction when the first AA congressmen were parodied and pilloried as ignorant drunkards. But you will see the rise of Storm Frontish white nationalism if we get a few more AA people in public power and the embbedded notion that capitalism and darwininan evolution go hand in hand to make white people be in charge of everything for all time crack up together. This is a horrible run on sentence but the recent influx of white supremacist bloviators both here and at LGM has reminded me that their most important shibboleth is the notion that white people run everything important because of their inherent genetic virtue. You can see how they've subsumed the rise of China and the notion that Asians are "smarter than whites" into their paranoid delusions--it enables them to see the battle as joined on specifically race grounds and then whatever "we" do to fight back against "them" will be justified in advance by their presumed racism against us. But ditto for the corporate class--and I think that the ownership class is smart enough to know that they have to tread a fine line between showcasing diversity at the lower ranks (to imply meritocracy) and encouraging people like Trump and Perkins to go their limit as avatars of white success to keep the hamsters running in their little cages protecting the privilige of belonging to the same tribe.
What's funny is that, by their usual standards, Jeffrey's fellow teabaggers would ridicule someone like him as a liberal "looser" -- the homemaker husband supported by his wife who wears the Baby Bjorn to the mall, with all the usual pussification tropes. Of course, Jeffrey compensates with lotsa bench presses in the basement, commando gun-stroking, and manly "I got mine so molon labe motherfucker" free marketeer blog posts, but still. Peesa work.
I can't blame some 60 year old wizened ticket taker at a bizarre 19th century theme park for just sticking her head in the sand. Sure. But these are the same people to who convinced that 50% of the entire federal budget goes to welfare, another 50% goes to foreign aid, another 30% goes to food stamps, and maybe 40% more goes to the National Endowment for the Arts, while the teachers' unions suck up the remaining 80%. What can you do with a substantial portion of the electorate that is innumerate, aggressively ignorant, and passionate about making life as easy as possible for millionaires while making their own existences miserable?
There's an argument to be made that what they really wanted all along was the social inequality, and the economic inequality has just been a means to an end.
Would be funnier if there weren't people in this country who actually believe that, if Timmeh had been in the game, he would have taken a knee with a minute left on the clock and his team down 25 points and summoned the Wrath-o-God down on the other side, turning them all to pillars of salt, at which point his team would win by forfeit.
I rocket back and forth between anger and empathy. Because no one is more shocked than these (white) people when they discover that down, down, down at the bottom of the heap financially, when their UI benefits are cut off and the Republicans have ended the heating oil support during the winter, that there isn't any safety net at all. They are sincerely surprised. The flip side of their innumeracy and ignorance is that they honestly believe that vast sums of money are available to the poor and destitute.
They've been nursed on the notion that the people they see begging in the streets are grifting on top of an enormous government check every month, like they panhandle for fun just because they like it. But by the time they figure this out its too late and they prefer to retreat to a Fox news cocoon that tells them that their misfortunes are the fault of "the government" or the non whites who hoovered up all that sweet sweet money while no one was looking so there's nothing left for them.
I'll just leave this here: http://wonkette.com/540961/derp-roundup-byu-idaho-fights-the-battle-of-the-boner-and-other-dispatches-from-the-war-on-stupid although I'm sure everyone has already seen it. The amount of gun fondling bromance in this WWI story of Fraternal love and Masturbation is just so obvious that my teenagers were pointing out the tropes.
Krugman was created in the nineteen-forties by a secret project formed by Alan Turing and Gertrude Stein who were afraid that the Greatest Generation was about to wipe out liberal fascism once and for all. He was frozen in a blind trust for decades before being thawed out by Jimmy Carter to rise as Captain Keynes, greatest menace to freedom that the world has ever known!
Get thee behind me, semi-colon. Which reminds me, I have to make an appointment for my next colonsocopy. They've sent me a letter headlined, puzzlingly, "Recall."
It speaks very well to that time in my life when I'd be in the checkout line, trying to find a card that wasn't maxed out while mentally deciding what I could stand to have put back on the shelf.
After consulting with St. Thomas Aquinas... she decided yes, it was.
On the other hand, was it not Albertus Magnus who once said, "Shut the fuck up forever, Elise, you barely-literate dumbshit. And stop holding the Gospels upside-down"?
Your point about His Holiness would be well-taken, except that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't have a pope right now, just some random schmuck who doesn't actually know anything about Church doctrine or the Bible, and deserves no respect from true Catholics. Hence, e.g., Jeebus-lovin' conservative Catholic Paul Ryan referring to the Vicar of Christ as "this guy." (John Kerry had to be publicly threatened with denial of the host because he doesn't believe in politically enforcing a doctrine invented in the Nineteenth Century, but the Real True Catholics can call the pope a babbling ignoramus on national television with no consequence. What a shocker.)
Do unto others before they do unto you. Isn't that the Republican mantra? Naturally this would cause some sleepless nights as you try to figure out what it is they are planning to do to you so you can get in there first.
I know everyone here knows this except me, but it just occurred to me that the right advances its interest via appeals to emotion, expressed in the language of self-sufficiency (except when it comes to abortion, religion, etc.). That language ("self-made," "freedom," "liberty," "common sense," etc.) is at the heart of the American myth. So even the stupidest person is familiar with it and can enjoy a patriotic thrill up his or her leg when it's used.
Whereas the left *has* no comparable language, other than "United." Obama can say, "We're all in this together" until he's blue in the face--go picture that--but people tired and angry from sustaining a self-image of independence and personal sovereignty while being screwed by banksters and Rush Limbaughs (but who don't know it) don't want to hear that.
They don't want to be "in this" along with those they need to feel superior to, and their simmering resentment triggers feelings and thoughts of, "All in this together? Then why does (latest object of resentment--"elites," "Hollywood," etc.) think they're better than me?"
What's needed, then, is a vocabulary that invokes shared cost to yield a desirable group AND individual benefit, that can appeal to people who get out of bed every morning pissy because they know they could be both Daniel Boone and Henry Ford, if it weren't for George Clooney and some strangers in suits in a building in DC.
Then there's Uber, whose creepy founder spells "gouging" with the letters "surge pricing." In times of special need (e.g., snow in NYC), their price doubles and triples. A 1.5 mile drive across Manhattan hits $60, 70, 80. The justification is that "higher prices bring more volunteer drivers out onto the street."
Uh-huh. So he lets the customer pay for his staffing problem. God forbid he take a smaller cut, lure out more drivers that way, and make up in volume what he loses per ride.
Presumably when someone pointed out, "The name of your company is a word most associated with the national anthem of Nazi Germany," he brightened and said, "Right!"
Fred Clark had a post last week on the dif between pre-millennialism and post-millennialism. the pre people expect the rapture with the delicious bonus of getting to watch horrible things happen to all those people who called you stupid. After that, then Jesus comes and reigns on earth for 1000 years.
The posties think Jesus won't come back until christians have taken over the world and set up the kind of government they like, They're the dominionists.
"Jeff Goldstein: "I gave up what could have been a career in academia in order to have a stay at home parent for our children... that was my choice... it was a tradeoff"
He knocked up his girlfriend. I'm telling you, half the trouble in this world could be very much ameliorated if somebody clearly explained human reproduction and its relation to sexual intercourse to adolescents.
Well, we have this language but the right has pre-poisoned it. For instance "we are family"--we can talk about family and government/people as a family and the country as a shared house all we want but they are deaf to this appeal because: racism. And when you drill right down to it, culturally and psychologically speaking, this makes sense because even words that you think have a shared meaning in the US context actually don't. We've talked about this before but even basic words like man/woman/child, liberty, identity, freedom, marriage , public, private, just don't have a shared meaning at all and never did. Different subcultures in the US have different dialects, sometimes amounting to idiolects.
At the psychological level I'd like to add that the kind of egalitarian, loving, sharing, ideal liberal family style--companionate marriage, companionship between generations--is actually anathema to authoritarian, patriarchal, and religious family styles in this country. I've had this conversation with people, online--specifically right wing women. When you talk about "the family" they mean something different--their families are full of contention, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse and they are working as hard as they can to distance themselves from siblings and cousins and even (sometimes) parents and children who are a drag on the family economy and polity. The more authoritarian and religious the family the more unforgiving of unproductive or problematic members--I'm not accusing people of wanting to throw away special needs members I'm just reflecting on conversations I had with people who told me that "after age 18" I'm "kicking my kid out" and he/she can suffer independence just the way I did." Read the comment thread at Ann Landers and people are really clear that every family has its druggies, losers, beggars and etc... and the popular response is "cut them off...tough love is what they need."
There's a ruthless side to right wing families that make presidential or political appeals specifically to images like "we are all in this together" seem risible and communistic instead of familial.
Uber is, of course, a form of rent seeking piece work system where the costs of the labor and the machine itself are entirely borne by the worker while the guy "putting out" the work takes a cut for which he returns almost no value. He's more like the middle man who took the cloth around to people sewing in garrets and tenements--he lets it out while they assume all the risks, own their own machines, pay for their own materials. They are free to work any 90 hours a week they choose.
Aren't most surgeons self-employed, with OR privileges at a hospital that doesn't actually employ them? Yes, but if they present a problem, the hospital will deny them OR privileges. The hospital at which I work (as an employye, but that's another story) will pull a surgeon up short for incompetence, abuse of staff, failure to pay dues, or any of a number of other things. Losing privileges at one hospital has a ripple effect; other hospitals want to know why Dr. X's privileges were pulled, and respond in a very nervous manner. Surgeons are watched very closely; if a surgeon is not motivated to be a good surgeon by self-regard (a quality few surgeons lack), they are surely motivated by the state medical board, hungry malpractice attorneys, and hospital credentials committees.
Surgeons have to deal with all of those pesky, job-killing regulations. Freedom-loving surgeons (hi, Rand!) would be advised to make up their own boards.
Regarding the "envy" issue, the vast majority of poor people just want to be able to pay their bills and occasionally go out for dinner or see a movie.
Rich people, on the other hand, always seem to go out of their way to portray themselves as common "salt-of-the-earth" types. They tell hard-luck stories about having to (GASP!) sell stocks to pay for college, they run out to buy beat-up pickup trucks before they start campaigning.
Self respect is bad because it seduces people into thinking for themselves instead of obeying established norms. You start off by making your own decisions and in no time you've degenerated into someone who is true to her own nature and cannot be manipulated, abused or frightened.
And one of the strange things is there really are few to no people who want no variability in earnings. There's a video probably most here have seen about income inequality, and almost everyone surveyed, right and left, agreed on what would be the ideal income distribution curve, and it was a real curve, where some made several times more than others. It seems to me that not having anything close to that curve despite everyone agreeing points to it being more an issue of greed at the top instead of envy.
Thanks, I hadn't seen it. And it's Something. Else. I had to watch it with the sound off at first, and Hello, soldier! could the undertones (not to mention the exchange of knowing glances) be any gayer? Wow.
I rocket back and forth between anger and empathy.
I do pretty much the same. It's like, I can't get mad at people for wanting to be rich, or wishing they were. Hell, if I won the powerball tomorrow I'd budget out 2 million a year and never punch another clock in my life.
And the people most you all are describing, lifetime working-class people in dead-end jobs, probably middle-aged or older, where it makes the least sense that they're going to be rich any day now, it kind of makes sense to me: they're going to identify so ferociously with the rich and delude themselves into thinking they belong to that lifestyle precisely because they know deep down they'll never, ever get there. It's like the stereotypical soap opera fanatic: the person who's never going to live in that house or drive that car or sleep with that man is the one who loves watching others do it. The white-collar yuppie Republicans, on the other hand, don't have to cling quite as tightly, because a lot of them still think they really will hit the big time fairly soon, which is why they might not be as fanatical even though they probably stand more to lose.
In fact Jeff would have been laughed out of his local gun store in a massive display of homoerotic male bonding ritual hazing. He should be thanking liberals for making it socially acceptable to stay home with his kids instead of force his wife to quit when she became pregnant so they could live in manly poverty. It never occurs to him that cutthroat capitalism makes it much harder for him to survive. Or that his wife might decide to take the right's advice and marry the boss.
Wow, aimai, this is a very enlightening comment (to me personally) -- it never occurred to me that speaking of family could backfire this way. Sure, I know people who have contentious families -- but most families I know are peaceable; there's a drunk but she's not onerous, there's a narcissist but he's easy to ignore, there's some undisciplined kids but unless they break something, whatever. It literally never occurred to me this language could have a second, terrible meaning.
To that: I think that to be progressive American is to hear two messages in everything. The multilingual Coke ad during the Super Bowl is a good example: I had my own reaction ("Sure, whatever") and less than one second later I had an awareness of the very different ad that conservatives were seeing. As a friend originally from the rurality remarked when it ended, "Well, there goes my Facebook." But forget rurality -- morning DJs on a Los Angeles zoo-style shows asked people to call in who were offended, and they sure got callers. It's small comfort that there turns out to be no way to speak against the Coke ad without revealing yourself to be a big dumb racist -- too many people grab that hat and don it without one self-aware worry.
What's needed, then, is a vocabulary that invokes shared cost to yield a desirable group AND individual benefit
Maybe 'A rising tide lifts all boats'? Reagan was a monster, but he knew how to write a slogan.
I think Law Zero in this sort of talk is that deeds trump words 98% of the time. There were tens of millions of words spent on Obamacare, but it's gaining in popularity and sign-ups now because people have tried it and it works.
Liberals' problem these days is that the government is so paralyzed and clogged with bullshit that they can't actually do anything.
I once heard someone bemoan either here or on Balloon Juice that they can't really explain why equality or fairness are good things because it should be so self-evident and obvious. It's like trying to explain why breathing is a good thing. I think it's a subtle but important difference to understand. Republicans of old might have said "Sure, we all want fairness and equality, but not at the expense of the capitalist system" while the true believers these days say that equality and fairness, to the extent that they exist at all outside of liberal propaganda, are themselves antithetical to capitalism. That we must not merely avoid pursuing them above all else, but actively destroy them and defame them and dump them in the grave of history if capitalism is to survive.
I think another problem, and this is just my personal observation, is that a lot of liberals prefer logical and rational arguments to convince people, but this particular battle is going to require a lot of emotional appeals, appeals to selfishness, appeals to populism, appeals to sheer rage, that a lot of lefties just have an automatic aversion to, because they know the sordid history of getting people whipped up with emotional appeals against a supposed enemy within. Of course, in this case, the enemy is far from 'supposed', and is in fact guilty of almost everything we're accusing it of, but a lot of people just can't swallow the idea that a calm and logical refutation might not cut it and that they need to make people angry.
Well--you need to make people on your on side angry (about injustice) but you need to appeal to the people on the other side through a mixture of guilt and exhortation and embarrassment and that isn't always an unmitigated good. I mean--I have these conversations with people and you can appeal tos ome people one way, and other people only through other means. You can appeal to some people through their better angels, their pity, empathy, etc... But if you listen to Rush Limbaugh one of his basic goals is to make this kind of appeal impossible. He spends hours, literal hours, helping his listeners repel this kind of appeal. And you can hear the result when Republican politicians are able to say, striaghtfaced, that they aren't against equal opportunity but that equal outcomes are impossible and even dangerous. Or when people say to you "yes, of course no one should go hungrybut after all, if people can't be bothered to work..." They know the appeals we will make and they work hard, in advance, to defang those appeals.
Depends on whether you do it from up to down or from a perspective that is "across." Howard Dean basically made the argument that lots and lots of people have made that class issues should unify us where race/sex issues might divide us. I never tell someone--and I doubt anyone does--that I think they are a rube or a mark. But I will absolutely cop to the fact that we are all being screwed over by the same people politically and economically.
I guess by his wording he believes that he was lucky he gave up his career back when it was Bush's America, because in Obama's Amerikkka we're no longer free men able to freely choose whether we'll stay home?
On the subject of what gets said/what people hear I never heard this expression so much as from both right and left on a family exchange board "Crabs in a bucket." Its a prominent feature of a recent book on families and dysfunction-the argument is that individuals and families from poor neighborhoods can't get ahead because every time one person tries to work their way out the rest drag them back "like crabs in a bucket" each trying to claw over the other and pulling the others back down. Its an ugly image but one that resonated a lot with both kinds of political thinkers on the board. If you are in one of those communities/families you can definitely see your own income and education being sucked away by large numbers of friends and family who have no other source of support or income. Or at least you think you can see that. The real American slogan isn't "E Pluribus Unum" but "He travels fastest who travels alone."
Haven't read the books, just watched the whole show. However, one can still 'pay ones debts' when they come due, while doing anything in one's power to reduce their impact before they are due.
I know--my favorite part of a video that is just rife with favorite parts is the way the two roommates share a glance past the babbling girls. Nothing could be clearer: our hero has been saved from the sin of onanism and has redirected some attention towards available virgin girls. But it is sufficient that he has left the computer behind--he's not actually interested in these wholesome girls. He isn't making eye contact with them or listening to them or even staring at them lustfully--he's busy playing peekaboo with his roommate and casting him humid glances.
Well, if she does Jeff will just seamlessly move over and join the MRA movement. He will finally grasp that he is the classic Beta Male Mangina of their fears and she will dump him for an alpha male.
If the brain surgeon were that concerned about money, he would have come an anesthesiologist. Since they often have a captive customer, they tend to not contract with insurers, so are "out of network" and charge you the full-monty.
(When this happened to me, the neurosurgeon was paid something like $1800 while the anesthesiologist charged and got $3000. But, in a pleasant surprise, my insurer reimbursed me for the full amount of that bill, and that was on a much-maligned individual market policy, though back in 2007. Some time later I read that anesthesiologists are generally considered the greediest specialists by other doctors).
Yes, the ideal free market in surgeons would encourage top surgeons to accept bribes to leave poorer patients sprawled open and unconcious on the table when a richer patient bids higher for the surgeons services. It would be like Uber for Surgeons with point-of-service bidding. Maybe with enough money, and enough lack of regulation, your gurgeon could charge you more for not harvesting your organs and selling them to Dubai while he has you open on the table and unable to keep up the bidding war.
They argue that explicitly. The white rightists posting so hysterically in defense of Rod Dreher argue that racism/tribalism is natural and inherent in every community so the White Tribe has to do whatever it has to do to protect itself. Racism isn't a bug, in this model, its a feature--a natural feature of human organization and they particularly hate white liberals for, as they see it, refusing to admit it.
They're still holding on to the belief that there's some additional welfare that they just don't get a part of cause they are white. I had a good seethe hearing a few co-workers talking about some complete BS report about just how much panhandlers take in each day (tax free!). All it takes is one homeless-y looking dude on TV saying he made $100 today to make them feel ok saying that they all must be. An anecdote always wins with these folks. That's why even hearing of one person buying something they don't approve of with a food stamp sends them into such apoplectics.
I get the newsman headlines and scams straight to my inbox. There are an enormous number that are focused on the idea that "Obama" personally hands out money to people in certain categories--and that if you can tap into these government monies you are golden. So there are always advertisements or notices informing you that "Obama" has just made it easier for you to get college money, or lower your mortgage payments, or something. This is not because Obama is your pal--its because Newsmax is and is going to help you navigate and get your own Obamaphone-style goody. I have the feeling that Newsmax's readers see this stuff and think "finally, I can get mine. Black people have social workers and full time government aides to get them their freebies." And you hear it in what people say to you about how when they get medicaid or medicare or unemployment they "earned it" or its just "getting my own taxes back." Not like those other moochers.
Oh -- I hadn't heard the crabs bit, but I had heard of that dynamic, particularly w/r/t the poor AA community: that anyone who starts doing well can come under enormous pressure to help pay his or her older brother's rent, fix their sister's car, hand out "loans" to all sorts of cousins -- the new income is viewed as communal. I don't know how prevalent this is, because my whole extended family is some version of middle class suburban and intrafamily money transfers are ultra-rare, but it would be a real handicap to achieving stability.
(Related: I have an aunt who has saved nothing for retirement; she is 80 and still working, so although she says she intends to work until she dies, obviously this might become impossible. I have to admit, I will resent it if I have to gimp my 401k to bail her out of never saving a cent.)
You can sometimes get away with it when it's posed as rhetorical question, as in, "you gonna let someone punk you like that?" You know, turn it around to where it's not you but the guys they think they side with who are calling them suckers, rubes, and marks.
Wasn't that the philosophy of many of Bernie Maddox's clients? They guessed he was doing something illegal, probably unethical, but so long as they got BIG profits, they were OK with it.
If a business can't generate enough income to at base pay the people required to run it enough to live, then it is a business that should not exist,
Not to mention employers who actually rip off their minimum wage workers because it's just too easy to squeeze ever more profits from them. Like this prick, who owns a corporation running several Domino's franchises, and just settled for $1.3 million with the workers he was stealing from.
I was a delivery boy for a local pharmacy after school when I was a kid. I made $1.60 an hour minimum wage in 1968, which is the equivalent of $10.71 now, and I was 13 years old at the time. I then got a trainee job after high school to pay my way through college at $110/week, now worth almost the median personal income.
People need to understand that wealthy corporations - specifically the wealthy people who own them - are stealing their lives.
And they need to understand how much their lives would be economically better off even if we just turned the clock back a few years.
Bohunk My grandmother, who was of Bohemian-Czech extraction, always referred to herself and her family and "Bohunks." I haven't heard that term since about 5 years before she passed away.
Seriously, I never thought about it that way. It makes self-motivation seem… subversive somehow. I'm reminded of the Newspeak word "ownlife" described in 1984.
Not to defend anesthesiologists, but their malpractice premiums are second only to the ob-gyns. I met the surviving family of a man who expired while having his tennis elbow fixed; that insurance company was going to be putting five kids through college.
More than once I've heard wingers dismiss the whole concept of fairness by saying essentially that fairness is subjective; what's fair to you may not be fair for me.
How can a person reject such a basic part of being raised as human being? It's as if they were raised by wolves.
That "A Synopsis" cartoon... These guys want to draw Obama as a banana-chomping, tree-swinging chimpanzee so bad I think we literally have no conception of the brain-pain it causes. How the fuck they can function this way is a mystery. Well, "function". That cartoon obviously has meaning for them, but I'll be damned if I know what it is (beyond "ooga-booga!", anyway). What *is* funny about it is the fact that, while the figures behind Obama are obviously meant to be Biden and Boehner, they bear no resemblance I can see. "Biden" looks like a high school kid, and "Boehner" looks like his pissed-off Principal. A lot of effort was put into Obama's face, though, to the point that though excessive, the caricature is vaguely recognizable. A true labor of love hate. The "artist" might have had the caricature ready, and just slapped some fore/background on it.
"kneecap the federal government!" "overrun the bureaucracies!" "socialist coup!" "we are finished as a nation!"
Drum can probably link to a dozen proofs I'm wrong, but dayum, it sounds like we're approaching some sort of Wingnut Singularity. The over-the-top rhetoric is on a hockey-stick graph all its own...
I have a dermatologist I go to very year or two to get "scanned" and maybe have some benign spot of skin frozen off, but it is clear from his website, office brochures, etc., that cosmetic stuff is the overwhelming focus of his practice.
What is the equivalent of the incoming fire the roommate dodges — is that “modern society’s disapproval of taking a moral stand,” or is it exploding pornography, or…?
Aimai: The defining characteristic of all things right wing is the belief that life is a zero sum game. It may not just be about winning for yourself (though in fact, it usually is) - it may be justified by speaking of winning for YOUR nuclear or extended family, tribe, class, region, society, nation, "race" or species - but it is always about excluding any other from regard or resources. Loser is the epithet they fear most, and that fear defines them.
Not enough, though. I used to think till just recently that, similar to the way you can fix the electronics in a balky remote by whacking it on the arm of the Barcalounger, so could you also straighten out mental defects with a sharp blow to the head. I was counting on Elway to be a lab rat for that test.
So this is what our wise forebears meant when they warned us before time began that peak wingnut is an illusion. Wingnut progresses ever closer to a singularity. Yet while taking ever decreasing steps toward it, it manages never to arrive! Damn you Zeno! Damn you to hell!
That goes beyond ignorance and into the realm of taping a "kick me" sign onto the back of your own head. The sad thing is I've known my share of moneyless masochists like this myself.
"The name of your company is a word most associated with the national anthem of Nazi Germany," I am forced to point out at this juncture that the Deutschlandlied has been the national anthem since 1922 -- so it's not a Nazi thing -- and has strong liberal, revolutionary associations.
For the nine-to-five job with no emergency calls in the middle of the night, not to mention astronomical fees, nothing beats radiology. You don't even have to see actual live patients.
Maybe racism/tribalism IS a natural feature of human organization.
I remember watching Cosmos when it was on television (back in the '70s, wasn't it?) Carl Sagan was standing in front of a giant human brain and talking about the R-complex.
He was explaining that this part of the brain was the seat of aggression, territoriality and hierarchical thinking, and how lucky we were to have the large forebrain on top to help us transcend these base instincts. How lucky we are to live in a society of science, art and philosophy!
I was a teenager growing up in the working-class South when I watched that, and I remember being jealous of Carl Sagan. I wished that I lived in the world that he was describing.
My point is this: perhaps that reptilian brain is deep inside of all of us, and we all need to use our higher brain functions to temper it, and control its impulses. I think that anyone (even the Rightwingers) have this capability, if only they can see the importance of using it.
Noted. (And thanks.) In my (feeble) defense, then, let me say that the Third Reich subsequently discredited--for as long as movies and documentaries exist--a previously admirable song. Along with everything else it did.
So if you can smell gas, maybe you can get a job as a rightwing columnist, too.
ReplyDeleteI think the ability to pass gas - large quantities of it - is more essential to the job.
They aren't stupid enough to think the game isn't rigged, but they are stupid enough to think they can get a real piece of the action.
ReplyDeleteWell, in all fairness, lap dogs do get the crumbs from the table.
ReplyDeleteTrue for a lot of people. Occasionally I speculate about what one delusion or falsehood I would purge from people's minds if I could. It's a crowded field, but it would be hard not to pick "I need to defend the economic interests of millionaires over my own, because any day now, I'm gonna become one."
ReplyDeleteAlso, you know who could use some pro-equality laws right about now? The Denver Broncos. Thanks folks, I'm here all week!
ReplyDeleteRoy: You may know this already, but there's a new film out about Harry Dean Stanton. Marc Maron interviewed him, and then the filmmaker, for his podcast. The whole thing was fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I hope you'll have something to say about Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Point sharing is theft!
ReplyDeleteBut aspiring lap dogs don't, and that's the problem.
ReplyDelete"The roots of the economic crisis lie in the intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state. That same intersection has given us Barack Obama, Paul Krugman and severe unemployment and income inequality."
ReplyDeleteThis is bordering on word salad. It's almost as if it was created by a right-wing complaint generator that spouts out nouns the wingers don't like. The context implies he meant Krugman and Obama are secret Wall Street shills who pretend to support the welfare state because greed. But he also doesn't like the welfare state so wouldn't such hackery be a good thing in his eyes?
Don't think to hard on it though, Greenfield sure didn't.
The intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state? Sounds like Walmart to me.
ReplyDeleteMust be an alley behind Hanover Square.
ReplyDelete~
In what seems like self-parody the actual poverty solution currently on offer from conservatives is complete underpants gnomes economics: 1) Get married 2) ??? 3) profit.
ReplyDeleteFor extra irony bonus points the great conservative complaint about poor people is that they don't work hard enough and don't realize nothing in life comes free. Apparently the exception to that rule is a marriage license which evidently comes with a printing press.
Speaking of social inequality, it looks like that awful black thug's team beat that handsome white quarterback's team quite brutally. Sigh, Obama's America... rat on rat on rat on.
ReplyDeleteAt NR, the ability to not smell Jonah's gas is a prerequisite.
ReplyDeleteGiven that and Krebs' comment, I wonder if he realized that "the intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state" could be read as "Big business benefits massively from government largesse, and even the most rhetoric-spouting libertarians won't admit it because they're all corporate stooges." Too close to honesty for a right-winger, obviously, so he had to throw in some red herrings ("Obama! Krugman!") to keep 'em off the scent.
ReplyDeleteI want to take this comment on an upscale shopping trip to Target.
ReplyDeleteJohn Elway, in a Fox interview, said he doesn't believe in the safety net. I don't seem to remember him dismissing his offensive line, but his team may have done that today.
ReplyDeleteHow many conservatives pointed to "Harrison Bergeron" as evidence that inequality is the cat's meow when Vonnegut was alive? Because if he got wind of it I can't imagine him not telling them to shut the fuck up. And John J. Miller is outstandingly douchey in that link, so especially him.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting to press a guy like Ace on the relationship between the hated"diversity" and his version of "social inequality".
ReplyDeleteSo this guy Bill Reeves wants us to ignore spurious ideas like "green and smart growth" and side with the little guy. I'm guessing The Great Gazoo has been whispering to him again about an exciting new way to stick it to the electric company.
ReplyDeleteThe intersection between Wall Street and the welfare state? I wanted to set up a boutique coffee kiosk there, but there were too many squeegee men.
ReplyDeleteHarrison Bergeron? Does no-one read L. P. Hartley these days? Harrumph.
ReplyDeleteIt was a loooong time ago that John Steinbeck said that Americans thought of themselves as "temporarily disadvantaged millionaires." That's a pretty good assessment of the aspirational ingredient to how we treat the rich, but, it didn't go very far in explaining the outright defense of predatory capitalism that is common today among the wingers, and especially among those that have been steadily ground down by the rich through preferential treatment in the tax code, privatization of the commons, destruction of the compact between worker and capital, and via direct and indirect subsidy by government.
ReplyDeleteTo paraphrase, never in history have so many been so encouraged to such delusion for so long by so few.
I despise all these louses in some form or another -- so many words spit out to describe poverty as the poor's fault, a punching down attitude so ingrained, it's obviously the only thing they enjoy in their dark, awful lives -- but I have to say I find Godlstein to be both the single biggest dink in the known world and, easily, the most pathetic. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be him, even for a minute. The "I coulda been an academic" speech -- coupled with his adolescent-like defiance about why, plus his obviously overcompensating love of guns...I mean the guy is a fucking seething bucket of mess. I can only imagine how his not-veiled-at-all anger over being a househusband will damage his kid (to say nothing of his overstuffed, yet idiotic, thinking, his gun fetish and his diseased rage). And what's amazing is that I only catch wind of him (he smells like gas or something -- I think Sowell was having a stroke in the middle of his essay) in passing once every few months. He's just an astonishing asshole on every level.
ReplyDeleteHe actually said he doesn't believe in safety nets, even though he thinks we've got to have them. I suspect a CAT scan of his brain would have quite a few dark spots.
ReplyDeleteHe actually said he doesn't believe in safety nets even though
ReplyDeletehe thinks we've got to have them. I suspect a CAT scan of his
brain would have quite a few dark spots.
Some of the brethren just tried to wish it into the cornfield. "Has 'Income Inequality' Become Code For 'Envy?'" asked Elise Hilton of the Acton Institute Power Blog. (After consulting with St. Thomas Aquinas... she decided yes, it was.
ReplyDeleteSince Tom is dead, maybe we could consult some major living figure in theology on the question of whether Envy is at the heart of all laments over income equality. I nominate the Pope.
If the two brain surgeons were guaranteed to earn the same amount of
ReplyDeletemoney no matter how hard they worked or how well they performed their
job, what is the incentive for one to outperform the other?--Mike Peters (out).
Oh yeah? If there is no Gawd, then what keeps anyone from taking whatever they want? Killing, raping, stealing? What is the incentive not to do whatever they want? --random Christist displaying his moral reasoning skills to normal person in any college class in America.
How do you explain to people who assume everyone is only motivated by Reward and Punishment that there is a higher morality?
But remember it is said that Whosoever Smelt It, Dealt It. So, it would appear that the mere ability to "deal it" is not sufficient, as admirable as that is. The smelling part is essential to success.
ReplyDeleteI dunno. I know a working class guy who is a big fan of the "Fair Tax" -- the flat tax scheme touted by Steve Forbes et al to lower rich people's taxes even more at the expense of people like him. Like too many people, he is completely ignorant of the consequences of this on his own class, and has no idea why a progressive tax system exists in the first place. He just thinks it makes sense to be "fair" and tax everyone at the same rate. Along with the level of abject ignorance, this intuitive sense of fairness that most Americans have is something that economic feudalists have been exploiting for years. It's why Luntzian phrases like "death tax" work so well on ordinary people -- why, it isn't fair to tax someone just for dying! (Which turns the whole idea of fairness upside down, but that's the point.)
ReplyDeleteI think another factor is the intense desire to belong to the "right" group, or, perhaps even more intensely, not to be identified with the "wrong" group. Better to be a tough individualist who don' need no help no how to make it on his own than a weak-kneed, union-loving liberal who takes your money and gives it to minority moochers. It's actually kind of fascinating how much they resent poor people who have zero influence on their lives, and ignore the billionaires and millionaires who do. I know another working stiff who's out of a job and a big Limbaugh fan, and it's awesome to listen to him agree with the $75 million/year radio asshole telling him that unemployment insurance -- the check this guy gets every week -- shouldn't exist because it's disincentivizing him from getting a job. Such ignorance is bliss, at least for the billionaires who count on it.
It's probably a misquote I remember, but I always preferred "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," as a term more accurate to their mindset that it is a personal failing to be not-rich.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yet, most of these economic geniuses are in favor of withholding the Golden Key to Financial Success from gays.
ReplyDeleteHe's "ours" because he's always said that tax cuts for the rich don't do anything except make the rich even more wealthy.
ReplyDeleteAnd, really, that's all it takes these days to be called a wild-eyed leftist extremist.
That's why he keisters his stash all the time, not just when going through checkpoints.
ReplyDeleteI know a working class guy who is a big fan of the "Fair Tax" -- the flat tax scheme touted by Steve Forbes et al . . .
ReplyDeleteTwo years ago when I was running the local radio station, I had two employees (neither of whom made more than $30K) who were convinced that the government was going to take half of their estates when they died, and so they supported repeal of the estate tax. Even showing them that the $5M exemption was written down in black and white could not convince them that big guv wasn't going to tow away the double-wides they lived in should they kick the bucket.
I see you have been struck speechless.
ReplyDeleteBut is it not also written that He Who Denied It, Supplied It? Does success, then, require that one unfairly blame the dog?
ReplyDeleteThe real issue, of course, that no one really talks about is that income inequality isn't just about "money;" it's about those who are so wealthy that money ceases to have any meaning. Everything might as well be Free to those at the very top. It's about the absolute power that kind of wealth enables.
ReplyDeleteThis is what assholes like Tom Perkins are yammering about when they cry that they aren't "really rich." Their eyes are on the Endgame, when they can dispense with money entirely and enjoy complete freedom from conventionality. If Perkins were maxed-out level-wise, he would not have been fined by mere mortals, and the family of the doctor he ran over whilst playing with his boats would have apologized and paid to fix the damage done to Perkin's vessel.
Money is only the points accrued to reach that level of existence. Only then can humans be truly free.
If the two brain surgeons were guaranteed to earn the same amount of money no matter how hard they worked or how well they performed their job, what is the incentive for one to outperform the other?
ReplyDeleteAren't most surgeons self-employed, with OR privileges at a hospital that doesn't actually employ them? Don't they get paid mostly by insurers, which set pay rates as a block rather than based on individual surgeon performance? In which case, what's the incentive now? If he thinks neurosurgeons still try to do a good job under these conditions, why wouldn't anyone else?
Its use as a pull-quote may have removed the context somewhat but, but "and God is glorified by the taking of dominion"?? I'll admit I'm unfamiliar with current Christianist boilerplate phrasing; it still sounds to me like dialogue from Tales from the Leather Nun...
ReplyDeleteMust not believe in strong safeties (or free safeties) either.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me: this is now the second time a John Elway-led Denver Broncos team lost to a black quarterback.
It has something to do with thighs. Howard Cosell had that figured out, but the Diversity Junta had him disappeared.
ReplyDeleteYou know, this is what people sound like when they reduce all of human endeavor to a race for gold and glory.
ReplyDeleteYou may have hit upon the crux of their resistance. (Wash your hands.) If marriage makes you rich, married gays will get rich at the expense of Jesus-loving, red-voting het couples who must not be made to share the Lord's wealth.
ReplyDeleteWoah, Godlestein:
ReplyDelete"I gave up what could have been a career in academia in order to have a stay at home parent for our children... that was my choice... it was a tradeoff I was willing to make, and one that as a free man I was free to make."
"I gave up what could have been a lifetime of frolic as Marie of Roumania in order to stay at home and be unemployed...that was my choice..it was a tradeoff I was willing to make not one that was forced on me by, you know, reality."
We're going to keep doing this until you get it right, Howard. Now say it with me.
ReplyDeleteLook at that GUY run.
I learned the expression here and I like "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" too. Embarrassed seems like its part of the whole deal.
ReplyDelete"I gave up what could have been a career in academia in order to have a
ReplyDeletestay at home parent for our children... that was my choice... it was a
tradeoff I was willing to make, and one that as a free man I was free to
make."
By far my favorite quote in the piece, and code for "After having seventeen different department heads slowly rip my C.V. to shreds in front of me, I decided to stay home and teach my kids Krav Maga and how to field strip an AR15. Fuck it... I didn't want to be part of your liberal academic bund anyway..."
Ticket taker (ticket taker!) at Sturbridge Village made a face when she saw my Kerry button lo these many years ago. She told me she "couldn't afford to pay more taxes" at a time when they were only talking about raising marginal tax rates on people making more than 250,000 a yaer. The heisenberg "I don't know what the fuck these people are talking about" principle means that, as you both say, if you can show these morons in black and white that the taxes we are talking about apply only to people making miloions more than they do they would still get nervous and start doing the potty indecision dance and bleating "well, I don't know, you can't trust government people...."
ReplyDeleteAnd I sympathize with that. No one who doesn't pay attention, and even those of us who do, can figure out what the fuck is going on when your local political actors feed a good or bad idea into one end of the sausage making machine and a ground meat octopus comes out the other side. I think I was in my thirties before I realized that some of the stuff politicians were saying during the election were actual, you know, policy positions they were planning on trying to take once they were in office. It might even have been Clinton and health care that did it for me. That might have been the first time I realized that although everyone talks about the weather Clinton was actually proposing to try to do something about it. I can't blame some 60 year old wizened ticket taker at a bizarre 19th century theme park for just sticking her head in the sand.
I don't say often enough how much I love the concept of "skree."
ReplyDelete"If the two brain surgeons were guaranteed to earn the same amount of money no matter how hard they worked or how well they performed their job, what is the incentive for one to outperform the other?--Mike Peters (out)."
ReplyDeleteThank God for Angie's List!
National Organization For Marriage and Right to Life were going to get together to bomb a gay bar and an abortion clinic to a danceable music track but they decided they'd rather get together to complain about the Coke ad showing unaborted foreigners and potential urban gays and rural dark skinned people.
ReplyDeleteOr his soul.
ReplyDelete"Taking dominion" is a flavor of the prosperity gospel based on generously taking Genesis 1:28 to mean that if you're not actively going out and exploiting as many resources and people as possible, you're giving the little baby Jesus a sad.
ReplyDeleteSay, that does sound comfortable, but don't the wetbacks cancel out the smokes?
ReplyDeleteThis new learning amazes me...
ReplyDeleteActually, I've always felt that for a large chunk of these folks, their fear of gay-marriage was exactly that...not fair for two guys to double-team a poor redneck saddled with a mere wife and kids.
ReplyDeleteA whole chain-reacting Fukushima of wrong.
ReplyDeleteThat is such a great point, Cole. You get the same weird sense of entitlement to be "free" from labor costs as well. When you read right down through the unironic, non editorial, parts of the WSJ and rightwing commentary there is always a basic assumption that labor costs are the only costs that can't be, or shouldn't be, fixed in some way. If there's an oil shock and oil prices rise the captains of industry are angry and they want something done about it, preferably by the public purse, but its not a moral crisis. But if the worker demands more than less-than-minimum-wage or humane living conditions that's a moral crisis for these guys, a sign of the end times. All claims by the worker to own his own labor and to determine the price at which it is set are seen as an insult to the owners and the stockholders.
ReplyDeleteI can't dredge up any examples right now but I've had plenty in talking to people about profit and labor costs--it never occurs to business owners (or venture capitalists) or the WSJ or the pea brained voter who is defined as a "consumer" that there are several places in the production/sale process where profits are made--labor, costs of materials, and profit. Yes! When the cost of one thing goes up you can shave a few points off profits in order to keep the company going. Privately companies acknowledge all the time that some costs can't be "passed on" to the customer but publicly and in terms of the fantasy life of the owners all costs should be borne by the workers. If the cost of wood goes up the cost can be passed along to the customer, or carved out of the worker's paycheck, but profits must never be touched. In fact I'd argue that profits and the rate of return on investment are stripped out of the conversation entirely and have dissapeared from the public discussion. The right to profit even as your workers are dying or on public assistance is so culturally embedded that it has become invisible.
Lets flip it and use the language they like to use about Teachers and other public servants
ReplyDelete"I wouldn't want someone who was in it for the money to take that job at all. I think you shouldn't go into teaching if you aren't willing to make some sacrifices. What kind of a teacher would you be if you were always worrying about how to increase your paycheck?"
The necessary inducements for the upper class (money, power, respect) are apparently disincentives for the lower class. If you aren't willing to eat shit for your employer, at low pay, without control over your workplace then fuck you, you don't have any value to society or any right to the pursuit of happiness.
Oh, yes, its the same rage they felt at the Tinks (two incomes no kids).
ReplyDelete@Spaghetti Lee - a good one, to be sure, but I'd pick "there is an invisible man in the sky who will give me a reward later if I just do whatever these guys who promise they've talked to him tell me to". That sweeps a whole bunch of problems all at once...
ReplyDeleteThanx for the insight. It just seemed odd to me, like it was a phrase one appended to sentences at random (to the dismay of some on the left).
ReplyDeletePro wealthy populism is going to take a nose dive--perhaps it will already--when there are more out and proud Asian and Hispanic and AA billionaires out there for Limbaugh and Fox's audiences to rage against.
ReplyDeleteRight now they have managed, very successfully, to turn the word "poor" into a synonym for "non white" and to turn "welfare/safety net" into the word "entitlement" and thus they have manufactured an bizarro world in which Logan Echols (yes, I'm watching Veronica Mars) isn't the spoiled son of a millionaire actor but a an AA single mother who drinks and smokes dope on the public dime in high style.
That's worked surprisingly well--since at least Reconstruction when the first AA congressmen were parodied and pilloried as ignorant drunkards. But you will see the rise of Storm Frontish white nationalism if we get a few more AA people in public power and the embbedded notion that capitalism and darwininan evolution go hand in hand to make white people be in charge of everything for all time crack up together. This is a horrible run on sentence but the recent influx of white supremacist bloviators both here and at LGM has reminded me that their most important shibboleth is the notion that white people run everything important because of their inherent genetic virtue. You can see how they've subsumed the rise of China and the notion that Asians are "smarter than whites" into their paranoid delusions--it enables them to see the battle as joined on specifically race grounds and then whatever "we" do to fight back against "them" will be justified in advance by their presumed racism against us. But ditto for the corporate class--and I think that the ownership class is smart enough to know that they have to tread a fine line between showcasing diversity at the lower ranks (to imply meritocracy) and encouraging people like Trump and Perkins to go their limit as avatars of white success to keep the hamsters running in their little cages protecting the privilige of belonging to the same tribe.
Does anyone want that last slice? Because otherwise I'm taking dominion over the pepperoni and mushroom, ok?
ReplyDeleteWhat's funny is that, by their usual standards, Jeffrey's fellow teabaggers would ridicule someone like him as a liberal "looser" -- the homemaker husband supported by his wife who wears the Baby Bjorn to the mall, with all the usual pussification tropes. Of course, Jeffrey compensates with lotsa bench presses in the basement, commando gun-stroking, and manly "I got mine so molon labe motherfucker" free marketeer blog posts, but still. Peesa work.
ReplyDeleteThat's true.
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to the motivation of self-respect? Anything worth doing is worth doing well… that kind of thing.
God is glorified when you take dominion over punctuation, Aimai ;)
ReplyDeleteI can't blame some 60 year old wizened ticket taker at a bizarre 19th century theme park for just sticking her head in the sand.
ReplyDeleteSure. But these are the same people to who convinced that 50% of the entire federal budget goes to welfare, another 50% goes to foreign aid, another 30% goes to food stamps, and maybe 40% more goes to the National Endowment for the Arts, while the teachers' unions suck up the remaining 80%.
What can you do with a substantial portion of the electorate that is innumerate, aggressively ignorant, and passionate about making life as easy as possible for millionaires while making their own existences miserable?
See also Christian dominionism in general and "Kingdom Now" theology in particular.
ReplyDeleteBottom line is, they want to be Lannisters.
ReplyDeleteThat's why they're so vicious and nippy.
ReplyDeleteThere's an argument to be made that what they really wanted all along was the social inequality, and the economic inequality has just been a means to an end.
ReplyDeleteWould be funnier if there weren't people in this country who actually believe that, if Timmeh had been in the game, he would have taken a knee with a minute left on the clock and his team down 25 points and summoned the Wrath-o-God down on the other side, turning them all to pillars of salt, at which point his team would win by forfeit.
ReplyDeleteI rocket back and forth between anger and empathy. Because no one is more shocked than these (white) people when they discover that down, down, down at the bottom of the heap financially, when their UI benefits are cut off and the Republicans have ended the heating oil support during the winter, that there isn't any safety net at all. They are sincerely surprised. The flip side of their innumeracy and ignorance is that they honestly believe that vast sums of money are available to the poor and destitute.
ReplyDeleteThey've been nursed on the notion that the people they see begging in the streets are grifting on top of an enormous government check every month, like they panhandle for fun just because they like it. But by the time they figure this out its too late and they prefer to retreat to a Fox news cocoon that tells them that their misfortunes are the fault of "the government" or the non whites who hoovered up all that sweet sweet money while no one was looking so there's nothing left for them.
"Smoke" is an ethnic slur I've never heard before. What, pray tell, does it mean?
ReplyDeleteI'll just leave this here: http://wonkette.com/540961/derp-roundup-byu-idaho-fights-the-battle-of-the-boner-and-other-dispatches-from-the-war-on-stupid although I'm sure everyone has already seen it. The amount of gun fondling bromance in this WWI story of Fraternal love and Masturbation is just so obvious that my teenagers were pointing out the tropes.
ReplyDeleteKrugman was created in the nineteen-forties by a secret project formed by Alan Turing and Gertrude Stein who were afraid that the Greatest Generation was about to wipe out liberal fascism once and for all. He was frozen in a blind trust for decades before being thawed out by Jimmy Carter to rise as Captain Keynes, greatest menace to freedom that the world has ever known!
ReplyDeleteI would totally see that movie.
ReplyDeleteWhile he's putting together something on PSH, we can work on our lists of People Who Should Have Been Taken Instead, Damnit.
ReplyDeleteIt's whatever ethnic group is considered especially jerky at the moment.
ReplyDeleteGet thee behind me, semi-colon. Which reminds me, I have to make an appointment for my next colonsocopy. They've sent me a letter headlined, puzzlingly, "Recall."
ReplyDeleteMost of them, Katie.
ReplyDeleteIt speaks very well to that time in my life when I'd be in the checkout line, trying to find a card that wasn't maxed out while mentally deciding what I could stand to have put back on the shelf.
ReplyDeleteWho need Equalization Centers when we have Yum Brands and Frito-Lay?
ReplyDeleteRefers to African-Americans. I first ran into it reading Damon Runyon's fiction.
ReplyDeleteAfter consulting with St. Thomas Aquinas... she decided yes, it was.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, was it not Albertus Magnus who once said, "Shut the fuck up forever, Elise, you barely-literate dumbshit. And stop holding the Gospels upside-down"?
Your point about His Holiness would be well-taken, except that the Roman Catholic Church doesn't have a pope right now, just some random schmuck who doesn't actually know anything about Church doctrine or the Bible, and deserves no respect from true Catholics. Hence, e.g., Jeebus-lovin' conservative Catholic Paul Ryan referring to the Vicar of Christ as "this guy." (John Kerry had to be publicly threatened with denial of the host because he doesn't believe in politically enforcing a doctrine invented in the Nineteenth Century, but the Real True Catholics can call the pope a babbling ignoramus on national television with no consequence. What a shocker.)
And I thought I overshared.
ReplyDeleteSee also Elmore Leonard.
ReplyDeleteDo unto others before they do unto you. Isn't that the Republican mantra? Naturally this would cause some sleepless nights as you try to figure out what it is they are planning to do to you so you can get in there first.
ReplyDeleteI guess that means they won't charge you for the replacement?
ReplyDeletethere may be something to that hypothesis. The man has taken quite a few blows to the head during his football life.
ReplyDeleteThat was Jimmy the Greek, not Cosell. From everything I've ever read about him, Cosell was a good guy.
ReplyDeleteI thought it should be American Indians.
ReplyDeleteI know everyone here knows this except me, but it just occurred to me that the right advances its interest via appeals to emotion, expressed in the language of self-sufficiency (except when it comes to abortion, religion, etc.). That language ("self-made," "freedom," "liberty," "common sense," etc.) is at the heart of the American myth. So even the stupidest person is familiar with it and can enjoy a patriotic thrill up his or her leg when it's used.
ReplyDeleteWhereas the left *has* no comparable language, other than "United." Obama can say, "We're all in this together" until he's blue in the face--go picture that--but people tired and angry from sustaining a self-image of independence and personal sovereignty while being screwed by banksters and Rush Limbaughs (but who don't know it) don't want to hear that.
They don't want to be "in this" along with those they need to feel superior to, and their simmering resentment triggers feelings and thoughts of, "All in this together? Then why does (latest object of resentment--"elites," "Hollywood," etc.) think they're better than me?"
What's needed, then, is a vocabulary that invokes shared cost to yield a desirable group AND individual benefit, that can appeal to people who get out of bed every morning pissy because they know they could be both Daniel Boone and Henry Ford, if it weren't for George Clooney and some strangers in suits in a building in DC.
A friend once told me he met a young lady who said she "wanted to be an aspiring actress."
ReplyDeleteHoward was in the diversity junta, stuck with Muhammad Ali through everything.
ReplyDeleteBut Tebow did appear in a T-Mobile ad, which is kind of perfect, since neither T-Mobile nor the Broncos have any kind of coverage.
ReplyDeleteThen there's Uber, whose creepy founder spells "gouging" with the letters "surge pricing." In times of special need (e.g., snow in NYC), their price doubles and triples. A 1.5 mile drive across Manhattan hits $60, 70, 80. The justification is that "higher prices bring more volunteer drivers out onto the street."
ReplyDeleteUh-huh. So he lets the customer pay for his staffing problem. God forbid he take a smaller cut, lure out more drivers that way, and make up in volume what he loses per ride.
Presumably when someone pointed out, "The name of your company is a word most associated with the national anthem of Nazi Germany," he brightened and said, "Right!"
Fred Clark had a post last week on the dif between pre-millennialism and post-millennialism. the pre people expect the rapture with the delicious bonus of getting to watch horrible things happen to all those people who called you stupid. After that, then Jesus comes and reigns on earth for 1000 years.
ReplyDeleteThe posties think Jesus won't come back until christians have taken over the world and set up the kind of government they like, They're the dominionists.
"Jeff Goldstein: "I gave up what could have been a career in academia in
ReplyDeleteorder to have a stay at home parent for our children... that was my
choice... it was a tradeoff"
He knocked up his girlfriend. I'm telling you, half the trouble in this world could be very much ameliorated if somebody clearly explained human reproduction and its relation to sexual intercourse to adolescents.
No because that would entail paying their debts.
ReplyDeleteWell, we have this language but the right has pre-poisoned it. For instance "we are family"--we can talk about family and government/people as a family and the country as a shared house all we want but they are deaf to this appeal because: racism. And when you drill right down to it, culturally and psychologically speaking, this makes sense because even words that you think have a shared meaning in the US context actually don't. We've talked about this before but even basic words like man/woman/child, liberty, identity, freedom, marriage , public, private, just don't have a shared meaning at all and never did. Different subcultures in the US have different dialects, sometimes amounting to idiolects.
ReplyDeleteAt the psychological level I'd like to add that the kind of egalitarian, loving, sharing, ideal liberal family style--companionate marriage, companionship between generations--is actually anathema to authoritarian, patriarchal, and religious family styles in this country. I've had this conversation with people, online--specifically right wing women. When you talk about "the family" they mean something different--their families are full of contention, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse and they are working as hard as they can to distance themselves from siblings and cousins and even (sometimes) parents and children who are a drag on the family economy and polity. The more authoritarian and religious the family the more unforgiving of unproductive or problematic members--I'm not accusing people of wanting to throw away special needs members I'm just reflecting on conversations I had with people who told me that "after age 18" I'm "kicking my kid out" and he/she can suffer independence just the way I did." Read the comment thread at Ann Landers and people are really clear that every family has its druggies, losers, beggars and etc... and the popular response is "cut them off...tough love is what they need."
There's a ruthless side to right wing families that make presidential or political appeals specifically to images like "we are all in this together" seem risible and communistic instead of familial.
Suberbala-Bowl! Super-duper Bowl! Supra-Bowl! We won! And I shouted Hooray off my deck, and didn't care.
ReplyDeleteUber is, of course, a form of rent seeking piece work system where the costs of the labor and the machine itself are entirely borne by the worker while the guy "putting out" the work takes a cut for which he returns almost no value. He's more like the middle man who took the cloth around to people sewing in garrets and tenements--he lets it out while they assume all the risks, own their own machines, pay for their own materials. They are free to work any 90 hours a week they choose.
ReplyDeleteAren't most surgeons self-employed, with OR privileges at a hospital that doesn't actually employ them?
ReplyDeleteYes, but if they present a problem, the hospital will deny them OR privileges. The hospital at which I work (as an employye, but that's another story) will pull a surgeon up short for incompetence, abuse of staff, failure to pay dues, or any of a number of other things. Losing privileges at one hospital has a ripple effect; other hospitals want to know why Dr. X's privileges were pulled, and respond in a very nervous manner. Surgeons are watched very closely; if a surgeon is not motivated to be a good surgeon by self-regard (a quality few surgeons lack), they are surely motivated by the state medical board, hungry malpractice attorneys, and hospital credentials committees.
Give them a column in The Atlantic?
ReplyDeleteYou see, she was gonna be an aspiring actress,
ReplyDeleteAnd I aspired to learn to fly.
She took off to think about the footlights,
And I swore off work.
Surgeons have to deal with all of those pesky, job-killing regulations. Freedom-loving surgeons (hi, Rand!) would be advised to make up their own boards.
ReplyDeleteThey are personally unacquainted with the concept.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the "envy" issue, the vast majority of poor people just want to be able to pay their bills and occasionally go out for dinner or see a movie.
ReplyDeleteRich people, on the other hand, always seem to go out of their way to portray themselves as common "salt-of-the-earth" types. They tell hard-luck stories about having to (GASP!) sell stocks to pay for college, they run out to buy beat-up pickup trucks before they start campaigning.
Who's exhibiting "envy" here?
He doesn't want to deny coal miners the pleasures of black lung disease.
ReplyDeleteSelf respect is bad because it seduces people into thinking for themselves instead of obeying established norms. You start off by making your own decisions and in no time you've degenerated into someone who is true to her own nature and cannot be manipulated, abused or frightened.
ReplyDeleteThat explains their racial fears... relax, righties, the minorities will treat you with exactly the same respect that you accord them.
ReplyDeleteMost of the people I've ever lived and worked with are exactly like you describe.
ReplyDeleteYou have a very good handle on their way of thinking. The idea of not being identified with the "wrong" group... that's described perfectly.
And one of the strange things is there really are few to no people who want no variability in earnings. There's a video probably most here have seen about income inequality, and almost everyone surveyed, right and left, agreed on what would be the ideal income distribution curve, and it was a real curve, where some made several times more than others. It seems to me that not having anything close to that curve despite everyone agreeing points to it being more an issue of greed at the top instead of envy.
ReplyDeleteIs that 'za from Dominiono's?
ReplyDeleteWow. An American ethnic slur has gone archaic? There really is hope and change.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I hadn't seen it. And it's Something. Else. I had to watch it with the sound off at first, and Hello, soldier! could the undertones (not to mention the exchange of knowing glances) be any gayer?
ReplyDeleteWow.
I rocket back and forth between anger and empathy.
ReplyDeleteI do pretty much the same. It's like, I can't get mad at people for wanting to be rich, or wishing they were. Hell, if I won the powerball tomorrow I'd budget out 2 million a year and never punch another clock in my life.
And the people most you all are describing, lifetime working-class people in dead-end jobs, probably middle-aged or older, where it makes the least sense that they're going to be rich any day now, it kind of makes sense to me: they're going to identify so ferociously with the rich and delude themselves into thinking they belong to that lifestyle precisely because they know deep down they'll never, ever get there. It's like the stereotypical soap opera fanatic: the person who's never going to live in that house or drive that car or sleep with that man is the one who loves watching others do it. The white-collar yuppie Republicans, on the other hand, don't have to cling quite as tightly, because a lot of them still think they really will hit the big time fairly soon, which is why they might not be as fanatical even though they probably stand more to lose.
In fact Jeff would have been laughed out of his local gun store in a massive display of homoerotic male bonding ritual hazing. He should be thanking liberals for making it socially acceptable to stay home with his kids instead of force his wife to quit when she became pregnant so they could live in manly poverty.
ReplyDeleteIt never occurs to him that cutthroat capitalism makes it much harder for him to survive. Or that his wife might decide to take the right's advice and marry the boss.
That and he couldn't find any other storage container that was as big.
ReplyDeleteWow, aimai, this is a very enlightening comment (to me personally) -- it never occurred to me that speaking of family could backfire this way. Sure, I know people who have contentious families -- but most families I know are peaceable; there's a drunk but she's not onerous, there's a narcissist but he's easy to ignore, there's some undisciplined kids but unless they break something, whatever. It literally never occurred to me this language could have a second, terrible meaning.
ReplyDeleteTo that: I think that to be progressive American is to hear two messages in everything. The multilingual Coke ad during the Super Bowl is a good example: I had my own reaction ("Sure, whatever") and less than one second later I had an awareness of the very different ad that conservatives were seeing. As a friend originally from the rurality remarked when it ended, "Well, there goes my Facebook." But forget rurality -- morning DJs on a Los Angeles zoo-style shows asked people to call in who were offended, and they sure got callers. It's small comfort that there turns out to be no way to speak against the Coke ad without revealing yourself to be a big dumb racist -- too many people grab that hat and don it without one self-aware worry.
What's needed, then, is a vocabulary that invokes shared cost to yield a desirable group AND individual benefit
ReplyDeleteMaybe 'A rising tide lifts all boats'? Reagan was a monster, but he knew how to write a slogan.
I think Law Zero in this sort of talk is that deeds trump words 98% of the time. There were tens of millions of words spent on Obamacare, but it's gaining in popularity and sign-ups now because people have tried it and it works.
Liberals' problem these days is that the government is so paralyzed and clogged with bullshit that they can't actually do anything.
Well, you go ahead. I'll wait outside. Too much like skunk squeezing.
ReplyDeleteOr bullion.
ReplyDeleteWhy was Jimmy the Greek looking at Howard Cosell's thighs? Were there gay people even back then?
ReplyDeleteYes, because any deity that creates universes also spends time fixing athletic competitions. Fair play is for those atheist suckas.
ReplyDeleteI once heard someone bemoan either here or on Balloon Juice that they can't really explain why equality or fairness are good things because it should be so self-evident and obvious. It's like trying to explain why breathing is a good thing. I think it's a subtle but important difference to understand. Republicans of old might have said "Sure, we all want fairness and equality, but not at the expense of the capitalist system" while the true believers these days say that equality and fairness, to the extent that they exist at all outside of liberal propaganda, are themselves antithetical to capitalism. That we must not merely avoid pursuing them above all else, but actively destroy them and defame them and dump them in the grave of history if capitalism is to survive.
ReplyDeleteI think another problem, and this is just my personal observation, is that a lot of liberals prefer logical and rational arguments to convince people, but this particular battle is going to require a lot of emotional appeals, appeals to selfishness, appeals to populism, appeals to sheer rage, that a lot of lefties just have an automatic aversion to, because they know the sordid history of getting people whipped up with emotional appeals against a supposed enemy within. Of course, in this case, the enemy is far from 'supposed', and is in fact guilty of almost everything we're accusing it of, but a lot of people just can't swallow the idea that a calm and logical refutation might not cut it and that they need to make people angry.
I can't upvote this comment enough. You have really put this beautifully. No jokes. Its just beautiful.
ReplyDeleteWell--you need to make people on your on side angry (about injustice) but you need to appeal to the people on the other side through a mixture of guilt and exhortation and embarrassment and that isn't always an unmitigated good. I mean--I have these conversations with people and you can appeal tos ome people one way, and other people only through other means. You can appeal to some people through their better angels, their pity, empathy, etc... But if you listen to Rush Limbaugh one of his basic goals is to make this kind of appeal impossible. He spends hours, literal hours, helping his listeners repel this kind of appeal. And you can hear the result when Republican politicians are able to say, striaghtfaced, that they aren't against equal opportunity but that equal outcomes are impossible and even dangerous. Or when people say to you "yes, of course no one should go hungrybut after all, if people can't be bothered to work..." They know the appeals we will make and they work hard, in advance, to defang those appeals.
ReplyDeleteI believe the rising tide was JFK's line.
ReplyDeleteOf course he also gave us "Ask what you can do for your country," which is the bedrock slogan of the Communist movement.
Depends on whether you do it from up to down or from a perspective that is "across." Howard Dean basically made the argument that lots and lots of people have made that class issues should unify us where race/sex issues might divide us. I never tell someone--and I doubt anyone does--that I think they are a rube or a mark. But I will absolutely cop to the fact that we are all being screwed over by the same people politically and economically.
ReplyDeleteI guess by his wording he believes that he was lucky he gave up his career back when it was Bush's America, because in Obama's Amerikkka we're no longer free men able to freely choose whether we'll stay home?
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of what gets said/what people hear I never heard this expression so much as from both right and left on a family exchange board "Crabs in a bucket." Its a prominent feature of a recent book on families and dysfunction-the argument is that individuals and families from poor neighborhoods can't get ahead because every time one person tries to work their way out the rest drag them back "like crabs in a bucket" each trying to claw over the other and pulling the others back down. Its an ugly image but one that resonated a lot with both kinds of political thinkers on the board. If you are in one of those communities/families you can definitely see your own income and education being sucked away by large numbers of friends and family who have no other source of support or income. Or at least you think you can see that. The real American slogan isn't "E Pluribus Unum" but "He travels fastest who travels alone."
ReplyDeleteHaven't read the books, just watched the whole show.
ReplyDeleteHowever, one can still 'pay ones debts' when they come due, while doing anything in one's power to reduce their impact before they are due.
I know--my favorite part of a video that is just rife with favorite parts is the way the two roommates share a glance past the babbling girls. Nothing could be clearer: our hero has been saved from the sin of onanism and has redirected some attention towards available virgin girls. But it is sufficient that he has left the computer behind--he's not actually interested in these wholesome girls. He isn't making eye contact with them or listening to them or even staring at them lustfully--he's busy playing peekaboo with his roommate and casting him humid glances.
ReplyDeleteWell, if she does Jeff will just seamlessly move over and join the MRA movement. He will finally grasp that he is the classic Beta Male Mangina of their fears and she will dump him for an alpha male.
ReplyDeleteIf the brain surgeon were that concerned about money, he would have come an anesthesiologist. Since they often have a captive customer, they tend to not contract with insurers, so are "out of network" and charge you the full-monty.
ReplyDelete(When this happened to me, the neurosurgeon was paid something like $1800 while the anesthesiologist charged and got $3000. But, in a pleasant surprise, my insurer reimbursed me for the full amount of that bill, and that was on a much-maligned individual market policy, though back in 2007. Some time later I read that anesthesiologists are generally considered the greediest specialists by other doctors).
See also: Reverend Ike.
ReplyDeleteYes, the ideal free market in surgeons would encourage top surgeons to accept bribes to leave poorer patients sprawled open and unconcious on the table when a richer patient bids higher for the surgeons services. It would be like Uber for Surgeons with point-of-service bidding. Maybe with enough money, and enough lack of regulation, your gurgeon could charge you more for not harvesting your organs and selling them to Dubai while he has you open on the table and unable to keep up the bidding war.
ReplyDeleteThey argue that explicitly. The white rightists posting so hysterically in defense of Rod Dreher argue that racism/tribalism is natural and inherent in every community so the White Tribe has to do whatever it has to do to protect itself. Racism isn't a bug, in this model, its a feature--a natural feature of human organization and they particularly hate white liberals for, as they see it, refusing to admit it.
ReplyDeleteC'mon, there's plenty that have gone out of fashion. How often do you hear "sheeny" any more? "Bohunk"? "Jigaboo"?
ReplyDeleteThe lyrics change but the melody stays the same.
They've moved on from infallibility to ineffability. They just can't understand anything he says.
ReplyDeleteFull Metal Whack-it.
ReplyDeleteThey're still holding on to the belief that there's some additional welfare that they just don't get a part of cause they are white.
ReplyDeleteI had a good seethe hearing a few co-workers talking about some complete BS report about just how much panhandlers take in each day (tax free!). All it takes is one homeless-y looking dude on TV saying he made $100 today to make them feel ok saying that they all must be.
An anecdote always wins with these folks. That's why even hearing of one person buying something they don't approve of with a food stamp sends them into such apoplectics.
I get the newsman headlines and scams straight to my inbox. There are an enormous number that are focused on the idea that "Obama" personally hands out money to people in certain categories--and that if you can tap into these government monies you are golden. So there are always advertisements or notices informing you that "Obama" has just made it easier for you to get college money, or lower your mortgage payments, or something. This is not because Obama is your pal--its because Newsmax is and is going to help you navigate and get your own Obamaphone-style goody. I have the feeling that Newsmax's readers see this stuff and think "finally, I can get mine. Black people have social workers and full time government aides to get them their freebies." And you hear it in what people say to you about how when they get medicaid or medicare or unemployment they "earned it" or its just "getting my own taxes back." Not like those other moochers.
ReplyDeleteOh -- I hadn't heard the crabs bit, but I had heard of that dynamic, particularly w/r/t the poor AA community: that anyone who starts doing well can come under enormous pressure to help pay his or her older brother's rent, fix their sister's car, hand out "loans" to all sorts of cousins -- the new income is viewed as communal. I don't know how prevalent this is, because my whole extended family is some version of middle class suburban and intrafamily money transfers are ultra-rare, but it would be a real handicap to achieving stability.
ReplyDelete(Related: I have an aunt who has saved nothing for retirement; she is 80 and still working, so although she says she intends to work until she dies, obviously this might become impossible. I have to admit, I will resent it if I have to gimp my 401k to bail her out of never saving a cent.)
You can sometimes get away with it when it's posed as rhetorical question, as in, "you gonna let someone punk you like that?" You know, turn it around to where it's not you but the guys they think they side with who are calling them suckers, rubes, and marks.
ReplyDelete"are good things because it should be so self-evident and obvious."
ReplyDeleteWe hold these truths...
SINGER: We the pee-pullllll, in order to form a more perfect union,---
ReplyDelete[Singing abruptly stops as SINGER is clubbed to death by TEA PARTY PATRIOTS]
TEA PARTY PATRIOTS: You're not gonna ruin America on our watch, you God-hating liberal.
Wasn't that the philosophy of many of Bernie Maddox's clients? They guessed he was doing something illegal, probably unethical, but so long as they got BIG profits, they were OK with it.
ReplyDeletePerhaps that explains the Right's approval of fracking?
ReplyDeleteAn excellent comment.
ReplyDeleteIf a business can't generate enough income to at base pay the people required to run it enough to live, then it is a business that should not exist,
Not to mention employers who actually rip off their minimum wage workers because it's just too easy to squeeze ever more profits from them. Like this prick, who owns a corporation running several Domino's franchises, and just settled for $1.3 million with the workers he was stealing from.
But what gets me is how many of these free-marketeers are such predictable assholes. This one was also a business evangelist with titles like Turn Your Minimum Wage Workforce into a High-Performance, Customer-Focused Team.
I was a delivery boy for a local pharmacy after school when I was a kid. I made $1.60 an hour minimum wage in 1968, which is the equivalent of $10.71 now, and I was 13 years old at the time. I then got a trainee job after high school to pay my way through college at $110/week, now worth almost the median personal income.
People need to understand that wealthy corporations - specifically the wealthy people who own them - are stealing their lives.
And they need to understand how much their lives would be economically better off even if we just turned the clock back a few years.
Bohunk
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother, who was of Bohemian-Czech extraction, always referred to herself and her family and "Bohunks." I haven't heard that term since about 5 years before she passed away.
What an insightful comment!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I never thought about it that way. It makes self-motivation seem… subversive somehow. I'm reminded of the Newspeak word "ownlife" described in 1984.
This is a case of when you really should have sprang for the extended warranty.
ReplyDeleteYou can try but remember, death shall have no dominion
ReplyDeleteYou mean, the first shall be last? That's Commie talk!
ReplyDeleteIt was used in a line by Paul Dooley in Sixteen Candles. He asks the older daughter if her fiancé is the "oily variety bohunk," or something like that.
ReplyDeleteJigaboo, coon, spear chucker, burr head, jungle bunnie, spade, tar baby, tootsie roll, ...
ReplyDelete(Those weren't right off the type of my head, BTW. I put the big list through my personal memory filter.)
Not to defend anesthesiologists, but their malpractice premiums are second only to the ob-gyns. I met the surviving family of a man who expired while having his tennis elbow fixed; that insurance company was going to be putting five kids through college.
ReplyDeleteMore than once I've heard wingers dismiss the whole concept of fairness by saying essentially that fairness is subjective; what's fair to you may not be fair for me.
ReplyDeleteHow can a person reject such a basic part of being raised as human being? It's as if they were raised by wolves.
A rising bucket lifts all crabs?
ReplyDeleteThis is what a economist where I work called a poverty trap.
ReplyDeleteThat "A Synopsis" cartoon...
ReplyDeleteThese guys want to draw Obama as a banana-chomping, tree-swinging chimpanzee so bad I think we literally have no conception of the brain-pain it causes. How the fuck they can function this way is a mystery. Well, "function". That cartoon obviously has meaning for them, but I'll be damned if I know what it is (beyond "ooga-booga!", anyway). What *is* funny about it is the fact that, while the figures behind Obama are obviously meant to be Biden and Boehner, they bear no resemblance I can see. "Biden" looks like a high school kid, and "Boehner" looks like his pissed-off Principal. A lot of effort was put into Obama's face, though, to the point that though excessive, the caricature is vaguely recognizable. A true labor of love hate. The "artist" might have had the caricature ready, and just slapped some fore/background on it.
All Sunday's pies were from Pizza Hut!-Hut!
ReplyDeleteWith free Coke...
Not too surprising...a lot of things can go wrong when putting somebody under, I imagine.
ReplyDeleteFrom my window, it looks like dermatology is the place to be. It can take months to get a friggin' appointment.
ReplyDelete"kneecap the federal government!" "overrun the bureaucracies!" "socialist coup!" "we are finished as a nation!"
ReplyDeleteDrum can probably link to a dozen proofs I'm wrong, but dayum, it sounds like we're approaching some sort of Wingnut Singularity. The over-the-top rhetoric is on a hockey-stick graph all its own...
You imagine? Yeah, right.
ReplyDeleteI have a dermatologist I go to very year or two to get "scanned" and maybe have some benign spot of skin frozen off, but it is clear from his website, office brochures, etc., that cosmetic stuff is the overwhelming focus of his practice.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the equivalent of the incoming fire the roommate dodges — is
ReplyDeletethat “modern society’s disapproval of taking a moral stand,” or is it
exploding pornography, or…?
Why, F-Bombs, of course.
Aimai: The defining characteristic of all things right wing is the belief that life is a zero sum game. It may not just be about winning for yourself (though in fact, it usually is) - it may be justified by speaking of winning for YOUR nuclear or extended family, tribe, class, region, society, nation, "race" or species - but it is always about excluding any other from regard or resources. Loser is the epithet they fear most, and that fear defines them.
ReplyDeleteGuns = Penis, Bullets = Sperm, Masturbation = desertion under fire, enemy attack = male rape. Obviously.
ReplyDeleteNot enough, though. I used to think till just recently that, similar to the way you can fix the electronics in a balky remote by whacking it on the arm of the Barcalounger, so could you also straighten out mental defects with a sharp blow to the head. I was counting on Elway to be a lab rat for that test.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. That was my mother's approach to raising her self-actualized son. Explains a lot.
ReplyDeleteThis comment gets a No Prize.
ReplyDeletestealing humid glances
ReplyDeleteSo this is what our wise forebears meant when they warned us before time began that peak wingnut is an illusion. Wingnut progresses ever closer to a singularity. Yet while taking ever decreasing steps toward it, it manages never to arrive! Damn you Zeno! Damn you to hell!
ReplyDeleteDepends on the pizza, really.
ReplyDeleteI believe at NR according to the charter and bylaws, it is "Whoever Smelt It, Makes the Cheeto Run"
ReplyDeleteLike "Oh drat, I left my millions in my other pants."
ReplyDelete"The flip side of their innumeracy and ignorance is that they honestly believe that vast sums of money are available to the poor and destitute."
ReplyDeleteAh, but then they probably decide the vast sums exist, but are reserved for minorities.
Ineffable? No, they're entirely effable. Eff them.
ReplyDeleteI believe the term is "making eye babies".
ReplyDeleteAnd Albertus Magnus knew his brazen mouthpieces.
ReplyDeleteAfter a 2nd look, it actually looks more like Will Smith than Obama. A distinction I daresay is probably lost on the cartoonist.
ReplyDeleteUber is for rich people. Understand that, and it becomes clear. That they have an app doesn't make them a service for regular people.
ReplyDeleteUBS foreign exchange trading has a free iPhone app, too.
That goes beyond ignorance and into the realm of taping a "kick me" sign onto the back of your own head. The sad thing is I've known my share of moneyless masochists like this myself.
ReplyDeleteThe canonical.
ReplyDelete"The name of your company is a word most associated with the national anthem of Nazi Germany,"
ReplyDeleteI am forced to point out at this juncture that the Deutschlandlied has been the national anthem since 1922 -- so it's not a Nazi thing -- and has strong liberal, revolutionary associations.
Don't eat the salmon mousse pizza.
ReplyDeleteFor the nine-to-five job with no emergency calls in the middle of the night, not to mention astronomical fees, nothing beats radiology. You don't even have to see actual live patients.
ReplyDeleteIt's as if they were raised by wolves Republicans.
ReplyDeleteFixed that for ya. Don't be dissing the wolves please. Wolves look out for one another.
The only part the right wing recognizes is "When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone...."
ReplyDeleteMaybe racism/tribalism IS a natural feature of human organization.
ReplyDeleteI remember watching Cosmos when it was on television (back in the '70s, wasn't it?) Carl Sagan was standing in front of a giant human brain and talking about the R-complex.
He was explaining that this part of the brain was the seat of aggression, territoriality and hierarchical thinking, and how lucky we were to have the large forebrain on top to help us transcend these base instincts. How lucky we are to live in a society of science, art and philosophy!
I was a teenager growing up in the working-class South when I watched that, and I remember being jealous of Carl Sagan. I wished that I lived in the world that he was describing.
My point is this: perhaps that reptilian brain is deep inside of all of us, and we all need to use our higher brain functions to temper it, and control its impulses. I think that anyone (even the Rightwingers) have this capability, if only they can see the importance of using it.
I thought it would be Tobacconists. Ooh I HATE THEM SO MUCH!
ReplyDelete[Applause]
ReplyDeleteNoted. (And thanks.) In my (feeble) defense, then, let me say that the Third Reich subsequently discredited--for as long as movies and documentaries exist--a previously admirable song. Along with everything else it did.
ReplyDelete