How ‘Monopoly’ Perpetuates Myths About CapitalismI hope his next essay is on how Simon Says undermines religious authority.
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
SO BAD THAT A SORT OF GRANDEUR CREEPS INTO IT.
It's rare you see pinched, everything's-an-Alinsky-plot culture-warrior thinking so perfectly distilled as in this headline, so kudos to Walter Hudson at PJ Lifestyle:
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I am shocked by the leftward tilt of the National Review. NOT ONCE did the author mention that Monopoly money is fiat money, that players are not allowed to amass gold, nor that the mere existence of a mandatory central banker is tyranny. He does correctly note that it does not simulate a free market, because "rules" (of which Monopoly has many) are the same thing as government. But, in the end, the failure to allow players to employ private armies to protect their God-given property (which they alone earned), proves that Monopoly is SOCIALISM. Overlooking these unconstitutional aspects of this "game" show that Walter "the river to the left of Manhattan" Hudson is just as socialist as Hitler or Bernanke.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I am not a nut.
"Bank Error In Your Favor." Yeah, right.
ReplyDeleteYou aren't supposed to win the thread with the first comment. It leaves the rest of us out in the cold.
ReplyDeleteHudson uses the old 'CRA caused the housing bubble' canard to hint that ethnics caused the global recession. Perhaps we can agree that Countrywide Financial were once the Crips of the upper middle class.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why you're mocking - this is a shocking expose on the lies in contemporary board games. Who would have thought that Monopoly was not an accurate reflection of real world economic theory? Hudson should turn this into a series. Who knows what other deceptions have been slipped into rainy day games? Maybe naval warfare involves something other than blindly firing the main guns of a battleship into a random spot in the ocean. Maybe there's more to military strategy than occupying Australia and waiting until you have a huge army. Maybe historical knights could move in a straight line. Who knows? Tell me, Walter!
ReplyDeleteThat's the sort of egalitarianism that keeps me from buying all the properties and forcing you out into the cold.
ReplyDeleteDon't tell anyone, but Parcheesi isn't all that cheesy.
ReplyDeleteThe use of snakes to lay low the upper classes is reminiscent of the (ladder based) Great Leap Forward.
ReplyDeleteHe's clearly never heard of Class Struggle:
ReplyDeletehttp://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1510/class-struggle
or he would really have something to get in a snit about.
Monopoly is clearly inadequate to reflect a proper conservative worldview. We need something new, something that combines a board game with a 90's-era tabletop RPG. It would have to have an arcane formula to leverage an opponent's assets into illusory money. You could then spend that fake money to buy pundits, and then send them around to convince the other players that the ensuing disaster is the fault of poor people and minorities.
ReplyDeleteI smell a Kickstarter project...
Lordy, do not tell him about the game of "Life."
ReplyDeleteOr "Candyland," for that matter.
If players could choose whether or not to pay rent when landing on Boardwalk, the game would never end.
ReplyDeleteHold the phone, now. Capitalism means that rent is optional? Why was I never informed of this?
"A free market would look nothing like Monopoly. Transactions would never be compelled. Wealth creation would not be capped. And competitors could freely enter and exit the market. The “game” would continue as long as people continued pursuing their values and creating wealth. A free market economy would not be limited to a predefined pool of resources, but propelled by the unlimited resource of the human mind."
ReplyDeleteShorter: Capitalism isn't 'Monopoly,' it's 'Calvinball.'
Found that one out the hard way!
ReplyDeleteIt is in Free Market Capitalism! Monopoly does't have options for landing on rent-free squares like Under the Overpass or Your Parents' Basement or The Back Seat Of Your Impala, which grossly distorts the dynamics of the market.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes, a great post title--invoking H.L. Mencken on Harding just fits to a "t."
ReplyDeleteRumble and bumble. Flap and doodle. I love the bit about rent payment being optional--as if capitalism weren't founded on rent-seeking. And these days, with the supreme capitalists of the day evading prosecution, the less said about "Get Out of Jail Free" cards, the better.
Maybe Hudson just intentionally misses the fucking point entirely--that "Monopoly" brings out the greedy, acquisitive little fucker in all of us, so we, ourselves, end up parodying the actual greedy, acquisitive little fuckers in society. I'm sure that Hudson just hates that aspect of the game--by playing it, we end up making fun of our "betters."
Jaysus, does this guy ever need for someone to pull that stick out of his ass.
For someone like Hudson, that one looks like apoplexy in a box.
ReplyDeleteIn a contemporary version of Monopoly, the bank error card should take away some of your houses.
ReplyDelete500 words on Chutes & Ladders, perhaps?
ReplyDeleteIt would be fun to see Hudson create a board game around his "free market" principles. He could call it "La-la Land."
ReplyDeleteBut, how would one codify--on a game board--the pursuit of "values." And how about that "unlimited resource of the human mind?" (I think that's where the Calvinball comes in.)
When I ponder this stuff for even a moment, it's apparent that this guy is on a really dangerous utopian jag, of the sort that our esteemed Mr. Greenspin himself found very, very attractive, and which inevitably caused him to ignore all the signs of impending economic implosion. I don't think that our Mr. Hudson is willing to admit, just yet, that greed and raw, naked avarice are values, too, and that the inevitable result is the fraud and theft that enable them.
My Mousetrap game has yet to snare a single rodent.
ReplyDeleteIt almost caught a cockroach,but the less said about that the better.
Illusory money? Pestering other players? Racism? Hell, sounds like World of Warcraft to me.
ReplyDeleteAnd every chance card would be "Go directly to jail" (until you had over a million dollars. Then they're all bank error in your favor.)
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of pathetic when you can see, just from the words, someone getting angrier and angrier as they type. I can picture him up 'til 2:00 AM cranking out this opus, the keystrokes getting more and more furious, as he keeps himself awake with sheer rage. "People out there think this board game is a perfect representation of reality! They're WRONG! They're LYING! I'll SHOW THEM!" And so it continues until he gets to the end, screams "UNLIMITED RESOURCE OF THE HUMAN MIND!" as he types it, loud enough to wake the neighbors' dog, then mentally high-fives himself for slaying such a magnificent journalistic beast.
ReplyDeleteI really hate it when stupid twits think they've done something smart. I know it's shallow, but I do.
What would be the proper conservative board game, one wonders? Risk is properly militaristic, but given that it doesn't always end with the U.S. conquering everyone, it can't be trusted. Chess is about war, too, but something beloved by so many Russians is suspicious. Guess Who has succumbed to the diversity Nazis with its non-100%-WASP lineup. I propose either a modified version of Snakes and Ladders that's all Snakes, or a remake of Candy Land where at the end you stab Michelle Obama with a lollipop carved into a shiv.
ReplyDelete"I'm NOT Sorry!"
ReplyDeleteClue would definitely be right out.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to go that far. Just introduce him to The Landlord's Game, on which Monopoly was based.
ReplyDeleteSo what, like a Rifts scenario based on Snow Crash? I'm gonna bet like 50 of those exist, and we're just blissfully ignorant.
ReplyDeleteWeeeeeeellll... Mageknight sounds suitably conservative in terms of it being all about acquiring wealth and power at the expense of your competitors, but you have the option of cooperating, so that's probably out...
ReplyDeleteMonopoly? Does he mean the game that always ends up being boring as shit for all players except the one who owns everything and spends the end game handing out "deals" just to keep the game going? The game that everyone either changes the rules to (i.e. REGULATE) make things more fun (and fair) or never plays again?
ReplyDeleteHe thinks that game casts capitalism in a bad light?
Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. And here I've been thinking it was a pretty simple and clear reflection of unregulated capitalism and how that economic trick should NEVER be confused with a responsible social system.
From the look of things, I'm thinking there are already folks well into the 2nd Edition of this game--and we are all the unwitting NPCs.
ReplyDeleteNow, let's not go too far here, in assuming Monopoly is completely irrelevant to real politics. In Monopoly, financial traders and real estate tycoons are frequently sent to jail for no apparent reason, perhaps judging that they must have done something wrong. Looking at our current financial sector, would that be so bad a lesson to learn in the modern world?
ReplyDeleteThe Cootie company stands behind their products, so obviously they're on the side of the takers, not the makers:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRUtzHqZSSM
I heard there was a board-game version of The Turner Diaries once, but they'd unwisely made all the parts out of cardboard instead of washable plastic, so after the first time a wingnut used it the pieces would all be stuck together.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry. A round of brain bleach for everyone?
Adding extra cheese doesn't help the playability or the edibility.
ReplyDeleteOooh, oooh, Small World. All you do is fight your enemies and loot the land's precious resources until you've completely exhausted everything that's available to you, at which point you go into Decline and start again with another group of people to do EXACTLY THE SAME THING, having learned NOTHING. At the end, the person with the most money wins.
ReplyDelete(It's a hell of a fun game, actually. My nine-year-old sister is getting quite good at it.)
A free market economy would not be limited to a predefined pool of
ReplyDeleteresources, but propelled by the unlimited resource of the human mind.
I had to go over and look at the original article just to be sure that Hudson had really, actually typed something so incredibly stupid. Of course he had...
Exercise #1: Please count the number of planets' worth of resources we have access to. If you come up with a number other than one, please come see me after class. Or report to the psych ward. (And yes, I have read that paper on how much a Space Shuttle full of helium-3 from the moon would be worth. The burden is on you, dear student, to come up with a working fusion power plant to put the stuff in, a new Shuttle since we canned the old one, and (mainly) a spreadsheet that will show how it's going to be cheaper than the helium-3 I can buy today with my Visa card.)
It's a big planet, but it's not infinite. If gold were as common as aluminum, it'd be worth the same amount. (Aluminum used to be a precious metal until we figured out how to refine it with cheap electricity.) In econ-speak, value is defined by both scarcity and demand: things that nobody wants have little value regardless of how common they are, while common items do not have high value regardless of demand.
Exercise #2: please list all the "free markets" that have ever existed in civilized society. Again, if your answer is anything other than zero....
The mythical "free market" is a model that professor use in order to communicate ideas about how economic systems work. It's further from factual than Freud's id/ego/superego model. (Also a soft science, though you'll never catch Greenspan copping to it.) Every useful market ever has required an enforcement framework and regulation: think of contract enforcement, standardized weights and measures, and the prevention of non-consensual negotiating tactics such as murder. People who can't--or won't--understand that an actual, functioning market needs a way to deal with cheaters are deluded fools who should be offered a deal involving millions of dollars that need to be transferred out of Nigeria...
Jesus. In one fuckin' sentence, Hudson flunks out of Econ 101.
Next up: How Milton Bradley's OPERATION! demonstrates the profound flaws of socialist medicine and Obamacare.
ReplyDeleteI think this is the game you (and Hudson) are looking for:
ReplyDeletehttp://newsone.com/2038745/public-assistance-board-game/
Or, for those whose idea of perfect cinema is Red Dawn
http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic428644_md.jpg
It if fun, but conservatives might have trouble swallowing the game-fact that races' characteristics are not immutable.
ReplyDeleteOperation, the game, used to be fun, until Obamacare ruined it. Now, when the buzzer goes off, you have to file 15 pages of paperwork explaining why you failed the state. And the funny bone now looks like a Hammer and Sickle.
ReplyDeleteGood point. Conservative Small World would have only two race and power cards, locked perfectly together: "Hard-Working White People" and "Lazy Minorities". Ooh, maybe "Terrorist Muslims", too.
ReplyDeleteWell, considering that the board game Monopoly was based on a board game created as an educational tool to show people how dangerous it was to let a handful of people amass giant land monopolies, this is kind of the case of a blind squirrel finding a nut here - at it's core the board game Monopoly IS a critique of the lunacy of unfettered capitalism without any kind of intervention to top the robber barons from destroying the system. The problem I have with Monopoly (besides the fact that it's incredibly boring) is that people think that the behavior you use to win at Monopoly is how an economy is supposed to work, rather than seeing it as the "don't do this" lesson that it was intended to be.
ReplyDeleteThe blind squirrel then drops the nut on his head when he tries to describe capitalism in a way that not only doesn't resemble the real world, but doesn't actually resemble anything taught in an econ textbook either. But amazingly he's managed to suss out on his own something that is in the first paragraph of the wikipedia entry for the game Monopoly. A pat on the head for Walter Hudson! (Honestly I love pointing out to conservative Monopoly lovers that the creator of their game was basically a committed socialist out to educate people about the evils of unfettered capitalism. For the truly nutty ones in my family it has made it so that they HATE MONOPOLY AND NEVER WANT TO PLAY IT AGAIN. Which IMO is a giant win for me, because if I wanted to watch a bunch of people spend a lot of fake money to run in circles I'd be a NASCAR fan...)
Why do I ever read the comments?
ReplyDelete"Ethnic ethnic ethnic gay gay gay ethnic ethnic lazy drones", says the game.
"Well, some people on Welfare ARE lazy cheating frauds!" says the first, highest-rated comment.
In Soviet Monopoly, Rent Has You!
ReplyDeleteIf we weren't limited to board games, I'd cite Homefront, written (or not, as the case may be) by Red Dawn auteur John Milius.
ReplyDeleteWell, I was about to dismiss your whole argument out of hand, until I read the last sentence. Now that I know that you're not a nut, it's clear to me that your logic is impeccable.
ReplyDeleteThe Affordable Care Act will start rationing the batteries needed to play Operation. Thanks, Obama!
ReplyDeleteThe Shuttle, of course, is in no way equipped to go to the moon, but regardless, it's worth reflecting that there are at least two big sci-fi blockbusters (Independence Day and Pacific Rim) whose extraterrestrial/extradimensional invaders' ultimate goal is strip-mining Earth, and every other planet they could reach. In the PJ version, they'd be the heroes.
ReplyDeleteAtlas Shrugged: the board game. Coming soon to a store near you!
ReplyDeleteLordy, do not tell him about the game of "Life."
ReplyDelete"Life" was a great game before Obama. But now instead of the Poor Farm of Millionaire Acres, everybody ends up going straight to the Death Panel. Where's the suspense?
It would be fun to see Hudson create a board game around his "free market" principles.
ReplyDeleteNo need to - we're living in that game and have been for the past 30 years.
Although the initial investigation identified Colonel Mustard as the suspect who allegedly did the dastardly deed in the kitchen with the candlestick, a subsequent examination of events implicated Professor Plum in the library with the lead pipe, and yet another fingered Miss Scarlet in the billiards room with the rope. DNA may have conclusively targeted a single suspect, but none was gathered before the crime scene was irrevocably tainted. What kind of half-assed cop shop are they running there, anyway?
ReplyDeleteHaving played Rifts, I say that the more people ignore it, the better.
ReplyDeleteAs John Oliver reported just a week or two ago, the new version of Monopoly doesn't have a jail, so kids can get a more accurate experience of the economic system they'll be living under for the rest of their lives.
ReplyDeleteAdd Oblivion to that list. Yes, I went and saw it in the theater. (hangs head in shame)
ReplyDeleteIf you really want to go down the rabbit hole, this is pretty much rock bottom.
ReplyDeleteFlogging the point was a popular pastime in the 1970s, and during that decade a copy of Monopoly called Anti-Monopoly ("The 'Bust-The-Trust' Game!") was marketed. Haven't seen it since.
ReplyDeleteThen hastily pulled from the shelves to punish the unworthy masses.
ReplyDeleteThe game Hudson is pining for was invented way back at the dawn of the Reagan era.
ReplyDeleteProving, if nothing else, that the wingnut sense of humor has matured not at all in the 30+ years since.
Please count the number of planets' worth of resources we have access to. If you come up with a number other than one, please come see me after class.
ReplyDeleteBUT NEWT SAYS WE CAN GO TO MARS
Maybe he'd prefer Iluminati, the game that encourages you to cheat!
ReplyDeletehttp://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/859/illuminati
At least for 525,600 minutes.
ReplyDeleteYou know who also wants to go to Mars? The hoochie coochie LaRouchie who Barney Frank likened to a table.
ReplyDeleteOnly a godless liberal would accuse a fine, upstanding military man like Colonel Mustard of murder. Obviously, the socialist academic Professor Plum is the guilty party.
ReplyDeleteBoth conservatives and liberals can agree that fingering Miss Scarlet is good policy.
Government cheesy!
ReplyDeleteHe is right that Monopoly would be more realistic if you didn't have to pay rent on Boardwalk. A more accurate game would allow you to just pay rent on Baltic. It would also take years and be less a "game" than "an excruciating simulation of reality."
ReplyDeleteIt's a much better game if you play it by the actual rules, i.e., every property that is not bought by the person landing on it goes up for auction. Speeds things waaaay up. There's no reason for marathon length Monopoly games.
ReplyDeleteNerds. All of you.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually surprised this Galtian jerkweed never heard of the Parker Brothers game "Billionaire" (from back in the 70's when that actually meant something). Hudson certainly isn't in this photo of little Johnny Galt, "Raggy" Danneskjold, and Dagnithea "Dagny" Taggart loving the hell out of proxy fights and investment analysis. A family friend gave this game to me two years in a row in the 70's (forgetting they'd done so the previous year), probably hoping I'd learn to become megarich or something.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember the name, but there was this bluffing game we used to play. Everyone has some dice and a rolling cup. Each player then makes a declaration on what all the dice are showing based on what s/he has. This keeps going until someone calls bullshit, and whoever was wrong loses a die.
ReplyDeleteIt's a little abstract, but it sure sounds like our financial system, doesn't it? What with everyone making wild guesses and lying about what they have...
Also the "Land On Free Parking And Win a Jackpot" rule. If you use this rule, you've made your games easily 5 times as long as they need to be and 10 times more boring.
ReplyDeleteStill - Monopoly "by the rules" is still a godawful boring game even if it stretches about 2 hours on average instead of "until we get bored with it and quit". The endgame is particularly lousy as it degenerates into two people hoping to get lucky rolls to finish the damn game off while everyone else has gone off to do something else.
It's still around and in print from University Games. Not the greatest game in the world and suffers from being a bit preachy (or at least it did back in the day - I have to admit I haven't seen a modern copy of the game).
ReplyDeleteThe trademark lawsuit around Anti-Monopoly makes for some interesting reading, though.
I was thinking something along the line of Settlers of Cataan, except instead of accumulating useful resources you get things like sub-prime mortgages and conservative journals of opinion.
ReplyDeleteOh, Greg Cosikyan. For a breathless moment I thought it said George Costanza.
ReplyDeletePls don't make me get out of the boat, but no one here has yet mentioned the ur-fact of Monopoly: YOU START OFF BY GETTING $200 GRATIS. If that's not socialism nothing is. And this clown has complaints that it's not accurate in its depiction of capitalism?
ReplyDeleteA better game would be Oligopoly, in which a roll of the dice determines who starts out with all the money. Everyone else has nothing. Whenever anyone except the Oligarch lands on any square, he/she goes directly to jail and stays there. Once everyone else is in jail, the Oligarch wins. The whole game takes eight minutes.
Also, the only victory condition is for the robber baron to win.
ReplyDelete"Rocks. Filthy things. Yet most of our civilization is built on them."
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I would have gone to see it except for you-know-who; knowing how bugfuck crazy he is in real life always sort of pulls me out of any film he's in. Heck, I'm planning on seeing Elyseum at some point, figuring that it's about as close to seeing one of William Gibson's Wintermute novels on screen as we'll get.
ReplyDeleteThere were various sets of alternate rules published in Beyond Boardwalk and Park Place that attempted to speed up the game and retain everyone's participation as long as possible. I has been many years, but I seem to recall that they did a pretty good job of it.
ReplyDeleteYOU START OFF BY GETTING $200 GRATIS. If that's not socialism nothing is.
ReplyDeleteYeah, for realism only the players with wealthy parents would get to start with any money.
Yes, but the auction rule isn't an alternate rule, it's actually what's in the rule book nobody seems to read.
ReplyDeleteOh, certainly. It's just that many of us read the rules with the same care we use in selecting which comment we're replying to.
ReplyDeleteHe's working his way up to "Little girls don't show enough respect for the Tea Party when they make us hold our pinkie fingers just so when drinking from toy cups."
ReplyDeleteThe SNL parody commercial writes itself.
ReplyDeleteChild's Play!
ReplyDeleteHow 'CHUD' Perpetuates Myths About Hunger
How 'Roots' Perpetuates Myths About the Relationship Between Southerners and Their Property
How 'Poker' Perpetuates Myths About Stupid People
How 'The Constitution Perpetuates Myths About Counting Past Two
There would be a lot of squares saying "privatize_____"(school, hospital, law enforcement)
ReplyDeleteMongo just pawn in game of life.
ReplyDelete~
Chutes & Ladders is a LOT like real life.
ReplyDeleteBut what if you're playing "Star Trek" Monopoly, eh?
ReplyDeleteCapitalism, like gun ownership and "Democracy", is conflated with religion by a lot of people. There is no reasoning with them: their belief is based on FAITH.
ReplyDeleteThere should be a jail for the poor, non-property-owning players, shouldn't there?
ReplyDeleteA quick search of Teh Interwebs came up with some interesting stuff about Monopoly's pedagogical origins. Whether or not you think the economic theory behind it is outmoded, it is still instructive.
ReplyDeleteYou also need Kamchatka and Alaska.
ReplyDeleteA shitload of conservatives would disagree with fingering yucky old slutty Miss Scarlett.
ReplyDeleteI guess they'd like this one that my parents had?
ReplyDeletehttp://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1658/police-state
It's Monopoly, but in an authoritarian communist dictatorship. I think you could denounce people. Kinda weird to think of us kids in the US of A playing it, especially as my parents didn't actually have a copy of Monopoly.
Yeah, it's called "Bullshit"
ReplyDeleteRisk, on the other hand, is TOTALLY like warfare since the dawn of time. Beware my Tokens of Death!
ReplyDelete"Okay, trading, I've got wood for... gosh, where to start?"
ReplyDelete\"A free market would look nothing like Monopoly. Transactions would never be compelled. Wealth creation would not be capped. And competitors could freely enter and exit the market. The “game” would continue as long as people continued pursuing their values and creating wealth. A free market economy would not be limited to a predefined pool of
ReplyDeleteresources, but propelled by the unlimited resource of the human mind."
This gives me an idea. Perhaps we should call the game something other than "Free Market?"
Ross, you simply must stop trolling the alicublog comments. Really, it's demeaning.
ReplyDeleteLiar's Dice.
ReplyDeleteCowboys and Aliens also features aliens who want to mine all the gold out of Earth, which I guess isn't *quite* strip-mining the whole planet, but close enough for rock and roll.
ReplyDelete"A free market economy would not be limited to a predefined pool of
ReplyDeleteresources, but propelled by the unlimited resource of the human mind."
Reminds me of Ed Begley Jr's cameo on the Simpsons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Hx5gg46XY
I'm still waiting on their analysis of "Life", which I'm sure undermines family values somehow.
ReplyDeleteLike most of these libertardian armchair "economists," he does kinda misses the whole point of the name Monopoly, and why it is considered a Bad Thing--directly counter to the Free Market.
ReplyDeleteAnd doesn't he prove by writing that stuff that brains are a scarce resource?
ReplyDeleteWe actually have an Anti-Monopoly game, waaaay up in the top of the closet. Never played it once.
ReplyDeleteReally? He objects to this rather mild criticism of an economic system that his ideology defines as one where no matter how hard you work, no matter what your contributions are to society (or even to the advancement of capitalism itself) you are not guaranteed healthcare, food, housing, security or in fact any return whatsoever?
ReplyDeleteBecause every time I hear a conservative describe what they think capitalism is I am always left asking myself "why in the fuck would I want that?"
A dear friend gave us, I'm not kidding, "The Spiro T. Agnew American History Game." It's actually a pretty good game because (or in spite of the fact that) you don't have to get the answer to any question right; you just have to convince the other players that you're right. It also came right out and admitted that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was not created to "help" Native Americans but to control them.
ReplyDeleteFlogging the point was a popular pastime in the 1970s
ReplyDeleteIYKWIMAITYD.
My co-mother-in-law gave it to the kids but I think they only played it a couple of times. Well-meant but preachy, yes.
ReplyDeleteThereupon only available in the gift shop of a remote Rocky Mountain resort, with views of a barely-started mine railway and the crude dwellings inhabited by a quixotic band of business owners who subsequently starved to death.
ReplyDeleteto get the most marbles is the name of the game.
ReplyDeleteto get the most marbles, with your hippo.
--ayn rand
what I mean is they'd be uncomfortable with fingering any woman. I like old slutty Miss Scarlett.
ReplyDeleteI can see Kamchatka from my porch.
ReplyDeleteI have heard this game called "Mexican" in America. The reason is not as interesting as it might have been; the same game is called "Mäxchen" (Little Max) in Germany, and my guess is that the American name is a corruption of the original name brought over by German immigrants.
ReplyDeleteActually, it's not altogether the same game. It involves alcohol, with the loser in any given challenge draining his cup. Now, there's a rule that would make our financial system easier to endure.
Sadly, John Deere has yet to build a tractor powerful enough to pull that out.
ReplyDeleteFaith? You are calling attitudes and decisions based on what people see and hear on their TV and movie screens a matter of "faith"? I would say they are just sifting the evidence and making rational decisions.
ReplyDeleteNow, if they haven't seen the shows or movies themselves, and rely on other people's descriptions of them, that would be faith. But wingnuts operate on facts available on any cable or DVD.
I want to buy an engagement ring for this whole thread. You guys are on fire.
ReplyDelete