Apparently, child labor laws are destroying this country.
The candidacy is a joke, so, yes.
Be fair: child labor laws and overpaid janitors.
He has always been a pernicious windbag, sub-species "Telling Hard Truths." One of Newt's circa-1994 choruses was "Bring back orphanages." He even hosted a broadcast of Boys' Town on Turner Classic Movies.
Newt is a man of ideas. Insane, half-baked, batshit ideas, yes, but ideas nonetheless.
Newt's got a documentary on education titled Waiting for Mr. Clean.
It speaks very ill of conservatives that they find failed charlatans like Newt at all appealing and persuasive. Aren't Republicans the ones who lecture the rest of us about "the real world" and how "[thing] matters" and "no free lunch" and all that?
Newt is a man of ideas.
Like mass public executions of people attempting to bring 2 ounces or more of marijuana into the country. The guy is a fucking amoral lunatic who shouldn't be allowed to feed himself with metal forks, much less be let anywhere near the levers of government.
I believe he recently promised to, somehow, shut down the federal courts that have recently been in the news for unpopular (with stupid white trash peckerwoods) decisions on school prayer, flags, etc. Again, aren't conservatives supposed to big law-and-order enthusiasts?
9: Not law-and-order, but lawnorder, which isn't much concerned with the judicial process (viz. mandatory minimums).
Not law-and-order, but lawn order....
I like a nice bit of greensward as much as the next man, but come on, Republicans.
I'm told he hasn't any staff in Iowa, less than 6 weeks before the caucuses. This makes me think his presidential run is just something he's doing for the hell of it, and to make some extra scratch.
Montessori as Dickensian nightmare?
Herman Cain said he would "lead the charge to overturn the Supreme Court if they overturned DOMA". By what constitutional mechanism he would accomplish this is left unspecified. Because Gingrich isn't about to allow some black pizza mogul to outcrazy him, he says he'll just abolish the 9th Circuit Court altogether.
Where's PepperSprayCop when you need him?
13: See? Johan Goldberg was RIGHT!
14: How? Wouldn't some other godless liberal court just have take over the circuit's case flow?
Where's PepperSprayCop when you need him?
I'm wondering if "pike" will become a verb.
Also, 15 to 14.last.
16: Don't question Emperor Newt's methods, plebe. Simple minds like ours couldn't possibly grasp them.
Gingrich is a perfect specimen of the right wing pseudo-intellectual. He's got no chance of winning the nomination. Not because he's clearly nuts but because even pseudo is too intellectual for the GOP base.
The fact that the Gingrich campaign is being taken seriously seems to be to do more than show how far the Republican party has declined. It shows that there all of national-level politics is fucked up beyond all recognition.
19: I'll take any excuse to link to Michael Kinsley's "Triumph of the Dorks":
The emergence of the Right-Wing Dork (RWD) as a recognizable political type, whether running for office in Britain or conspiring behind the scenes in America, is a significant development. (It may even be as significant as the roughly simultaneous emergence of the Leggy Blond Right-Wing Commentatress--a development that has gotten far more attention, for some reason.) Washington has been packed with Left-Wing Dorks since at least the New Deal, but conservatives are supposed to value "real" work in the "real" world and are supposed to hold the capital's leech economy in contempt. Yet the RWD generally discovered politics at a tender age and has never done anything else.
And what does "overturn the Supreme Court" even mean? Its like said "You want to overturn DOMA, oh yeah, while I'm going to overturn YOU!"
13: Montessori product AB has good things to say about schoolchildren in Japan cleaning their own classrooms.
One of Newt's circa-1994 choruses was "Bring back orphanages."
That idea has been advocated by liberals in good standing.
There's a bit of a jump between teaching children to pick up after themselves and replacing unionized labor with child labor.
And what does "overturn the Supreme Court" even mean?
It's kinda like repealing Obama, but different.
24: Newt's purpose was to remove children from poor parents, not abusive ones.
Shit, I didn't realize that when y'all kept telling me to get a housekeeper you really meant I should use the kids already living here. Mara did a bang-up job pulling cobwebs from underneath furniture at our friend's house using nothing more than her hair. I suppose I should investigate further.
25: Oh, Newt's nuts, clearly. But Japanese kids are scrubbing floors, not just putting away blocks or whatever.
Needless to say, virtually nothing about the organization of Japanese society can be translated to work over here. At least not literally translated.
28: I suspect kids' long-term well-being is a concave function of how much work they're asked to do. I would be much less lazy, had I been asked to take on more useful tasks, earlier. I'm pretty sure it's not a gendered thing since my sister turned out similarly despite her extreme perfectionism in her work.
Kids on farms don't seem to turn out so horribly either. OTOH it's probably best for the kids not to slave away 16 hours a day in miserable conditions; they need to play too. So the optimal amount is somewhere in between nothing and sweatshop.
IOW just because giving them a huge amount of work to do is abuse, doesn't mean a small amount isn't ennobling and educational (as well as convenient for the parents!)
Obligatory disclaimer: Of course I don't have enough info to judge particular cases over the internet. Any implication that I know what's best for some parent to do is hereby disavowed.
31: I agree with this generally, but I can't really see it being sane or productive for school-children to replace janitors.
I just can't see any idea dreamt up and enacted by Newt Gingrinch as ennobling and educational. Just can't.
31: It's not as if these are kids who don't do anything, but the things they do all involve intense supervision, too. I do think learning to do work is good, but I also don't really want to oversee Little Mr. Slips on Everything mopping the floor either.
whoops here's the dropped link
http://cf3.8tracks.us/mix_covers/000/339/847/89376.original.jpg
34: It's an unusual stopped clock that isn't right at least twice a day.
33: But how else will they learn Kepler's laws?
Good reasons for child labor:
- To make children feel they are capable of accomplishing things
- To teach teamwork
- To bring children up to not be lazy all the time
Bad reasons for child labor:
- Because they have limited legal rights
- Because they'll work for less money than adults
These facts are not unrelated to those regarding prison labor.
Not law-and-order, but lawn order
A Mown Lawn.
It's kinda like repealing Obama, but different.
Moderate Republicans want to identify the parts of Obama that have bipartisan support and pass those as a separate president.
Moderate Republicans want to identify the parts of Obama that have bipartisan support and pass those as a separate president.
The technical term is Re-Heel and Re-Face.
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I was worried when the paper I'm grading now opened with a quote from Rand. But it turns out all that means is that the student prefaces everyone one of his statements with "reason dictates."
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But intuition knows how to type.
This comment thread at Lawyers Guns and Money included some pretty good points, such as the likely outcome of Gingrich-style implementations of this idea -- poor kids having to clean the toilets of their classmates. Wow, that sounds fun.
I actually am a supporter of young people have the opportunity to do real work -- but not, emphatically not, in that kind of way.
Also, I feel the need to be Humorless (tm) about 9. As unpleasant as it is to read Shearer's racism, let's not engage in our own version.
47 was me. I own up to my humorlessness!
47: Flippanter Commenting Services LLC regrets the error. We meant that comment to be interpreted in a wholly classist fashion.
47: Yes, if he were convinced that this was beneficial for children he could just suggest that schools require their children to do cleanup as part of a normal curriculum, without pay. If, on the other hand, he thinks this is only appropriate for those children ...
What makes Gingrich think the kids won't join the custodian's union?
In the creches the little ones will self-organize to allocate labor privileges according to intuitive socialist principles. There will be Stakhanovite miracles.
"Their morale is high, their work ethic is Stakhanovite, their number tiny and their output phenomenal."
Gingrich of course envisions his child-labor within an authoritarian and capitalist production-system, and so of course not only claims the surplus and desires to reproduce reactionary values, but sees labor as discipline.
Labor under socialism will be so much fun, and so limited in opportunity, that the children will compete for the one hour a day of productive recreation. Just imagine the creche, the locked library + playground with food slipped under the door. It is hard to believe, but perhaps the children will tire of reading the classics of worker enlightenment and singing Woody Guthrie songs. Mopping the floors and cleaning latrines will be rewards.
I would pay* to watch a McManus-Gingrich debate.
* Not a lot. But still.
34: But Dr. Gingrich wrote a whole Ph.D. dissertation on education in the Belgian Congo! (Which now makes me wonder how those schools got cleaned, and whether there isn't perhaps a Mr. Kurtz turn to the proposal.)
54: Don't conservatives hate pointy-headed intellectuals? Though they call Newt and Alan Keyes (!) "Doctor" readily enough.
55: Glenn Beck also had a "professor" persona.
4: One of Newt's circa-1994 choruses was "Bring back orphanages."
And that gave us an entire subplot in William Gibson's Idoru! It's an ill wind that blows no good. Mad ill.
So did a few pro wrestlers in the '50s and '60s, no?
It's like some part of them realizes that intellectuals are important but they don't understand how they work, so they try to build them out of straw and coconuts.
59: Nice. You could build that one out a bit and have a nice depressing essay to publish when Newt next strides the blast.
Well, I couldn't, but someone could.
More right wing-idiocy a href here, discussing the pepper-spraying at UC Davis. Of course, these are just run-of-the-mill hacks, not front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, but as far as I can tell that's just because they haven't bothered to throw their names into the ring. After all, neither of them is named Mitt Romney, as far as I know, which seems to be pretty much the only qualification these days. Honestly, at this point I see no reason to doubt that if Bill O'Reilly declared his candidacy tomorrow that he'd be leading in the polls a week from now (and fizzle out in a month). Anyway, on to the idiocy:
"Pepper spray, that just burns your eyes, right?" O'Reilly asked Kelly.
"Right," Kelly said. "I mean, its like a derivative of actual pepper. It's a food product, essentially."
It's just a food product!
Also, there's this gem from O'Reilly:
But wait a minute, O'Reilly said. "We don't have the right to Monday morning quarterback the police," he said. "Especially at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus."
I honestly have no idea what he's trying to say in the second sentence there. But the first sentence is terrifying.
Well, if not children working, what about animals? My 9 year old was explaining to me today how she decided not to sponsor a chimpanzee, but went for a polar bear instead, because polar bears are more endangered. And they are more restricted to where they live, whereas a chimp could pretty much live anywhere we can because they're adaptable like us. They could even get a job if they were trained!
I do not believe that a policy of employing chimpanzees as janitors would turn out very well. Do not invest in the company with this business model.
|| Speaking of the future, NMM to Vietnam hawk and dragon-porn artiste Anne McCaffrey. |>
67: That is a wikipedia entry sorely in need of editing.
Vietnam hawk? I did not know that. But objectively terrible in many ways as those books are, I loved them as a teenager. They had something.
I do not remember orphanages in Idoru, but I found them plenty terrifying in Snow CrashM.
I do not believe that a policy of employing chimpanzees as janitors would turn out very well.
Seriously. The chimp who sounds like Roddy McDowell would try to organize them into a union. And then we'd be right back where we started.
Gingrich is as strange as his name sounds to me.
A trained chimpanzee would probably poll double digits in the Iowa caucus.
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Genius? Tasteless and decadent? Tasteless, decadent genius?
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74: I have a hard time believing that the supply of AKs, given (i) inventory, (ii) the Chinese weapon-manufacturing industry and (iii) the cottage industry of manufacturers throughout Central Asia, can be substantially reduced. A better way to match the beneficial effect of, say, removing X rifles from circulation would be to sponsor a couple of clean wells, some livestock via the Heifer Project or an anti-malarial program.
75: Well, you'd need to train him to say he absolutely, positively doesn't believe in evolution without rolling his eyes.
74: Peter Thum, the entrepreneur behind Ethos Water
Since only approximately $0.05 to $0.10 of the retail price ($1.80) goes to charity, the Ethos brand is primarily commercial.
I'm going to guess that while it might be genius, it's not the sort of genius that actually helps anyone else.
76 gets it right. "Want to get the drug dealers out of your neighborhood? Why not buy out all their inventory? Again and again and again?"
80: I keep failing at the liquor store, but I will protect the innocent from boxed wine.
Do all debates start with a live rendition of the anthem, and since when?
82: Since people stopped hating America, Jm! USA! This eagle doesn't run! Tebow!
Oh awesome: the candidates are mostly agreeing that criminal law shouldn't apply to "terrorists" even in the US.
Also awesome: Fred fucking Kagan just asked a question about whether we should launch a full-out drone-bombing campaign against Pakistan.
Question: Who wouldn't you kill?
Candidates: Americans? White Americans? Who aren't hippies gays Muslims Democrats terrorists?
Crowd: Applause!
Candidates: Also Israelis?
Crowd: More applause!
Damn. Michele Bachman just called Rick Perry naive--and she was right. (He was suggesting that if Pakistan didn't have America's best interests in mind, then we shouldn't give them aid.)
Naive is sort of a French word isn't it, Michelle?
Anyway, she only called him naive because she can't get away with calling him stupid.
87: Some Israelis must be hippies, I assume.
Oh Christ, Huntsman and Romney hate each other.
90: I thought Israel exported them all to Goa? (In which case, NMM to them.)
91: Perhaps they have their eyes on the same planet.
91: Oh Christ, Huntsman and Romney hate each other.
I sort of enjoy that. Huntsman actually has his head on straight, despite being a Republican; ever since Romney made that idiot remark in one of the recent debates about dragging China before the W.T.O., Huntsman can barely stop himself from sneering at Romney.
Make no mistake: Huntsman is still a conservative Republican on the issues.
Oh, and now Paul Wolfowitz is asking a question about development assistance. How droll.
Do all debates start with a live rendition of the anthem, and since when?
Of all the people here, you're probably in the best position to know. (I mean that in this spirit.)
96: Oh, I know. He just doesn't sound like a fucking moron, or utterly crazy, or else a panderer, all the time. It's almost shocking.
98.--These are actually the first two debates I've watched seriously.
skipping to the end of the thread
53: I would pay a lot. and much as we make fun of bob, c',mon people, 52 is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. also: the belgian congo?!!??/ I'm afraid someone's going have to take one for the team and read it. a university professor in the humanities.
that was me, obvs. and having read the thread: the anthem? paul wolfowitz on development assistance? and, I mean, I know that republicans think that once you're accused of terrorism you don't have any rights even as a citizen within the US, but aren't the usually sort of careful not to say so? living outside the country for so long has given me some insight into how we look to the rest of the world. we look like a fucking dangerous bunch of insane yahoos who are armed to the everloving teeth. to be fair, we are a fucking dangerous bunch of insane yahoos etc. but, dude. the fuck, america?
Bachmann is now quoting Steve Jobs on the difficulty of finding American engineers.
101: "[O]ne of us is just going to have to go out there and take one for the team. And I think in all fairness it should be Butters."
102: Counterpoint: there are clearly way more flavors of Doritos available right now than at any previous time in my life.
we look like a fucking dangerous bunch of insane yahoos who are armed to the everloving teeth.
Sure, if you just go by what we say and do, but we have a tender side, too.
They're pitching themselves to Iowans.
I've honestly never understood why we arrange primaries in the way we do, with Iowa and New Hampshire (highly conservative states) leading the pack. As far as I can tell, it's tradition. Can we rework this somehow? It seems ... problematic.
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I like to think that our own Natilo wrote this "most helpful favorable review" of Defense Technology 56895 Pepper Spray on Amazon.
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dude. the fuck, america?
In fairness, most observers think that this Republican primary is crazytown as well.
Cain has just suggested that the best way to address the violence in Syria is to stop buying Syrian oil.
but we have a tender side, too
That's where Columbia held us while dipping us in the Styx.
113: I'm not sure what to make of this.
108: Be sure to check out the user's photos, too.
Santorum is concerned about South American militant socialists joining up with militant Islamists.
81: At a chi chi wine/liquor store in one of the suburbs, they were selling some sort of box wine--said that it was quite good for the value, some sort of spanish wine whose name started with a T.
115: Aha. I'd seen a bunch of those but never the review, somehow. I had a feeling I might be posting something everyone on earth had seen already.
116: That seems to be a theme of sorts: Perry said that Hamas and Hezbollah are infiltrating the US from Mexico.
They are all so frightened, and feel we should pick up our skirts and tighten our chastity belts lest our borders be violated.
108, 115: See the customer images for the product too. It's like the internet is everywhere.
107.2: Iowa and New Hampshire are both unrepresentative, but I wouldn't call either conservative. They both have gay marriage, for one thing.
By which I just mean that I thought of the photoshopping stuff as a non-Amazon thing.
That's just some kind of not-very-funny joke, right?
I believe it's what's known as a modest proposal.
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Okay, I've created a whole panoply of online justification of Natilo Paennim. So those of you who are friends of my other FB pseudonym, I'm going to friend you with that one. Is that okay?
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Sort of to the OP: Way, way back in the day, freshmen at Carnegie Tech would work in the power house shoveling coal.
Cain has just suggested that the best way to address the violence in Syria is to stop buying Syrian oil.
Looks like most of it goes to Europe anyhow. Earlier, Cain explained that the terrorists have just one goal: to kill all of us. No, the terrorists' goal is to frighten all of us, and they do appear to have succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation with the crowd on that stage.
Yeah, I'm kind of a crappy live-blogger. I put on headphones and settle in to draw unrelated stuff. That Cain line just vanished into the mist of undifferentiated crazytalk.
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Planning an 8-dish menu and starting to cook two days in advance for Thanksgiving isn't totally crazy, right? Even if it's just going to be the two of us? I'll call it a dry run for some future holiday event where we actually have guests.
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The fact that the conventional wisdom is that security theater breaks in favor of Republicans (and it certainly seemed to do so in the monstrously fucked-up 2004 campaign) continues to amaze. The judgment of history will harsh and unsparing.
Bought-up AK-47s could be recast as Berlin ironware jewelry for some neo-imperio-goth trifecta. (I think it's gorgeous.)
The judgment of history will harsh and unsparing.
Dude, who's gonna write it? I mean, it's not like we have much more time. Remember: Mayans.
129: Also that Newt Gingrich. a man who left his prior government position in disgrace and then shortly thereafter went on to receive multiples of a typical American's income per year over a period of years for incontrovertibly doing nothing but influence-peddling with the government, is now a leading candidate for Presidential nominee for a party that paints itself as the party of fiscal conservatism. This, this too indicates that we are collectively insane. I know we think it is just "them", but I'm afraid we are all tainted as well.
Except bob.
I'd say both Iowa and New Hampshire are pretty close to the center on a left-right axis. What they definitely both are, though, is disproportionately rural and white, which has plenty of distorting effects in the nominating process.
131: OK. The judgment of history archaeology will [be] harsh and unsparing.
Is there a single Republican, anywhere, who is not a total and complete fuckhead? I say no -- definitionally, if you are a Republican in 2011, you are a fuckhead. Case closed.
130 and following: C.J. Chivers' The Gun is a fantastic book.
Preceding, following, whatevs. It's almost 2012! The End of Days is nigh!
The lack of a sufficient area of Mediterranean climate inexorably led the Americans to fatal fuckheadism.
I am just so sick of being forced to take these clowns even semi seriously. I'm even sick of the folks like DeLong who tut tut about how I wish there were reasonable conservatives or oh how we long for the lost Rockefeller Republican who can represent our reasonable opposition and blah blah blah. Fuck them, fuck them all. Fuck this boring shit and farce of bloated right wing morons competing for votes it's all horseshit on top of C-grade low value entertainment for morons that makes most of the reality TV shows I work for look like fucking Shakespeare at the original Globe Theater.
The transcendental awfulness of 2012 should cheer me up whenever I think about us all dying and shit next year, but it was so bad it wrapped around the snark scale to being merely depressing.
On the bright side we have moved some metal deposits from inaccessible places in mountains to relatively convenient locations although some of the best future deposits might go underwater.
I guess Hoban and others have that angle covered pretty well.
139: I know, crazy motherfuckers! On your TV! Running for Preznit by trying to be crazier than the next motherfucker! People writing shit about the crazy motherfuckers that other people are supposed to read! Look at this crazy shit, we're only halfway through! Now we are engaged in a great ordeal, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure shit that is this motherfucking crazy.
I know other places in the world have had objectively crazier motherfucking shit, but this shit is still pretty motherfucking crazy.
Probably this is too much inside baseball for people not directly affiliated with the UC, but it's still pretty funny.
142 -- God help us. I really wonder whether we can survive a Republican victory. I mean, 2004 was bad, but at least GWB just seemed evil, and the party's main public image wasn't a Freikorps of insane half-wit 55 year old white middle managers from Alabama dressing up like the wannabe candlestick maker they rejected from Colonial Williamsburg for being creepy around 12 year old girls. Fuck them all.
145: If it's any consolation, I doubt we can survive a Democratic victory, either.
143: I take some comfort from the fact that it's always been pretty fucking crazy. 3/5ths compromise? Crazy. Indian removal? Crazy. The pro-slavery argument? Crazy. A civil war that killed more than 600,000 people? Totally fucking nuts. Forgetting all of the lessons of that war during Reconstruction? Tragically crazy. The Gilded Age? Can-I-have-another-hit-of-lithium crazy. The first Red Scare? Batshit insane. The early years of the Depression? Off-the-fucking-charts nutso. Then there was the New Deal, which, even though it pivoted on keeping the crazy cracker-ass segregationist crackers happy, was relatively sane. But then we're on to the Cold War. I mean, the Bay of fucking Pigs? Wow, so crazy as to make the War on Terror seem...well, okay, still pretty crazy. And so on.
USA! USA! USA!
But then we're on to the Cold War. I mean, the Bay of fucking Pigs?
On the other hand, the Nixon-Kennedy debates weren't all that insane. But I listened to the recordings while driving, so I didn't pay attention to every word.
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Speaking of dead presidents, reality is motherfucking crazy at the micro-scale but in a reassuring way. Errol Morris with a short interview of Josiah "Tink" Thompson--Kierkegaardist and Haverford professor of philosophy turned gumshoe and Kennedy assassination investigator--on the Umbrella Man in Dealey Plaza. Hint: Neville Chamberlain.
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Yeah, plenty of crazy motherfuckers in the olden days, as well. But they mostly just weren't building things, not taking very good things built by the sane (like, for example, the University of California) and destroying them. Also I feel like with a lot of the historical wackjobbiness in the USA you at least knew that the majority were also racist fucknuts, so it was harder to blame the politiicians; what's so weird about the present situation is that most of the There are so many millions of people who are not insane goober facist morons, just sane people trying to get by, yet all the energy is taken up by the insane goober fascist morons and all the money goes to like 10,000 people, all of whom are assholes.
The There--worst band name ever.
all the energy is taken up by the insane goober fascist morons and all the money goes to like 10,000 people, all of whom are assholes.
Like this? Is awesome. Go, Feisty Halford, go!
horseshit on top of C-grade low value entertainment for morons
Yeah, I regularly see in my Facebook feed people I went to high school with following up a "the more I see Herman Cain, the more I like him" sentiment with the complaint that "fucking liberals just think we're dumb." First off: if you like Cain more after seeing his stream-of-consciousness comedy of errors, well, what other conclusion is a person supposed to reach? Also, I've known you since you were twelve years old. It wasn't your politics that convinced me.
Oh look, they're replaying the debate. Whoever did Bachmann's make-up made her look like The Joker.
148: all of this dawned on me soon after the Iraq war started. It was like a revelation. However, I did not take any comfort from it.
we look like a fucking dangerous bunch of insane yahoos who are armed to the everloving teeth. to be fair, we are a fucking dangerous bunch of insane yahoos etc. but, dude. the fuck, america?
I think most of the rest of the world is just hoping the inevitable collapse into warlordism and civil war America is going to enter is only going to drag Canada along with it, to be honest.
What 158 said.
Although I expect there'll be a bunch of Tories queuing up to argue that the lack of warlordism, famine and death in the UK is a sign that we are stuck in old socialistic Europe-loving anachronistic ways.
To be fair, I see no reason why the current antics of the ECB shouldn't precipitate a collapse into warlordism, famine and death in Europe as well.
At this point Europe is radically more likely to collapse into warlordism, famine, and death. The most likely cause for a US collapse is a European collapse that destroys the US banking system.
A couple of years ago Canada was negotiating a trade agreement with the EU that would have made it a kinda-sorta member.
I have to say I like the pissed-off Halford as well. His mind is deranged with Crossfit-induced rhabdomyolysis! He bounds over the LA skyline like King Kong in a slanket! He wants Herman Cain's skull for a pizza!
But seriously, folks. Newt Gingrich is still a thing? I was listening to the Stone Roses earlier on. Does this mean I can retake the bad decisions I made between 1996 and 2010? It seems hilarious that he's still around.
For once, ToS seems to be in tune with the mood of the meeting.
Only Canada can save the world from the US: dilution is the one true solution to the American Question. But no, the Canadians are too selfish to save humanity.
128: I once participated in a thanksgiving dinner for 3 that consisted of minimally 40 pounds of food. It was beyond ridiculous.
Has this (study: Fox News Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don't Watch Any News) been linked here yet?
Fuck this boring shit
This. Everything Halford says above is right, but even once you get past the crazy and the horrible consequences of Newt et al.'s policy prescriptions, I am so fucking tired of having to waste so much of my time and thinking on this shit.
"I once asked Denoon to make the thought experiment of asking himself what he would have done with his life if he had been born into a world evolving on its own decently enough that his personal attention was not required."- Norman Rush, Mating
re: 161
And suddenly Blairite and continuity-Blairite policies of the past decade and a half all make sense. We've now a pool of soldiers with a decade of combat experience ready for the coming zombieeuroapocalypse.
Only Canada can save the world from the US:
dilution is the one true solution to the American
Question
If only it were so simple. Let's stipulate that adding Canada would give the center-left a bit of extra weight in the electoral college. Back of the envelope, Canada would collectively have about 60 EV's, (assuming reapportionment of the house and no Senate representation for the Territories), of which a preponderance would go Dem under winner-takes-all rules.
Nevertheless, annexing Canada would barely move the needle in the House (maybe a net of 10-15 Dem seats in a good year), and it would actually make the malapportionment of the Senate worse (GOP would control approximately half* the 20 new Senate seats, representing less than 35% of the Canadian population).
No, a better solution is to cede the prairie states to Canada, thus fucking up Canada's future, but saving America for the greater good of the entire world.
*Assumes Republicans are favored in New Brunswick and Labrador/Newfoundland as well as the prairie provinces.
The Canadians are pissed off about the tar sands delay. They really don't want to save us.
I thought the solution was to split into Red-statia,* and Blue-statia?
* to be renamed something that honours standard political colour symbolism, at the request of the entire fucking world.
The Canadians are pissed off about the tar sands
delay.
My "give them the prairie states" plan solves that problem, too! It's a win-win!
I like the pissed-off Halford as well
Unfortunately, mostly brought on by self-hatred during a long night of pursuing my strategy of trying to join the 1% by doing mildly unpleasant, time consuming but lucrative tasks for the .001%.
I had a conversation with my priest this morning, where I brought up "um I'm maybe not doing so good on the whole 'loving your neighbor' thing since I keep fantasizing about putting 20% of the population, including maybe me, in tough-minded reeducation camps run by autonomous workers' councils."
168 - What a great book Mating is.
I thought only Alberta would be expected to be republican. The conservative party there is like the centrist dems not like repubs, right?
At any rate, an influx of a large number of moderate republicans is exactly what we need. The US will always have two roughly balanced parties, what we need is for the one that's mostly wrong to be less insane. Canada would help for that.
174.last: Tough love is still love, Halford.
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Starting Satyajit Das Extreme Money hottest new finance expose. Not impressed so far.
But pg 50
The bimetallism debate spawned Frank Baum's satire on the currency debate, the Wizard of Oz (actually the Wizard of Ounce--of gold). etc
This is now fact, this is now truth. Whatever the past "was" has now been changed, as if by time travel.
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I keep fantasizing about putting 20% of the population, including maybe me, in tough-minded reeducation camps run by autonomous workers' councils leather-clad dominatrices
The US will always have two roughly balanced parties, what we need is for the one that's mostly wrong to be less insane.
Or for the other one be less useless, and actually do it's goddamn job of balancing out the insanity on the other side. It's a see-saw you're standing on, you fucking imbeciles. It's fine to have a bipartisan hug in the middle but if the other side walks out towards their end you'd better do the equal and opposite or we're going to tumble in the direction they're walking.
I would take today's batshit Republican party and a genuinely progressive Democratic party over a slightly less insane Republican party every goddamn day. I mean, sweet Christ, Bob fucking Dole was slightly less insane than today's Republican party. As were Ronald fucking Reagan and Richard fucking Nixon. But I nevertheless do not want to be governed by any of those people. Their ideological heirs might be too sane for today's Republican party (hello, Mr. Huntsman), but they're nevertheless bad, bad, bad.
179: "Lick my boot while you repent the theft of the surplus value of the labor of the proletariat, you capitalist worm!"
The sad state of electoral politics and the courage and sophistication of the OWS movement is telling me that now is not the time to work within the system.
What amazes me is that the actual steps to prevent the system from unraveling are so small in bigger scheme of things, but the powers-that-be aren't willing to do them. They could engage in policies that would satisfy the populace and yet almost completely maintain the status quo, but since this would require the tiniest amount of self-sacrifice in the short-run by the plutocrats, it's inconceivable. I think if it wasn't for the specter of Communism, capitalism would never have survived as long as it has.
184: but is preservation of the current system really a primary goal of the powers-that-be? All in all I'm not sure modern feudalism is going to be worse for the plutocrats than modern capitalism has been. It will probably be better. And almost certainly better (for them) than more egalitarianism would have been.
184:I think if it wasn't for the specter of Communism, capitalism would never have survived as long as it has.
The Guardian created an Ideological Map of Europe 1972-2011
Neat.
185: Eventually, those doing the guard labor would realize there's no reason what they're guarding should belong to someone else.
187: you're more of an optimist than I am.
184: I see no reason to believe that the plutocrats are playing a long game. It's all just short term jockeying for immediate personal advantage. The 1% is just as stupid and shortsighted as everyone else.
189:I think you are wrong. There are some cultures who have history and can play the long game.
China, Saudi Arabia
Japan (just trying to survive and not get eaten)
Germany?, US? Not sure yet.
185:What is valuable in the long game of neo-feudalism?
What has always been valuable. Not paper.
Land, vassals, and serfs. Keep an eye.
"We don't have the right to Monday morning quarterback the police,"
Food product! Man, just because NOPD shot a few guys on a bridge is no reason to get all oversighty on everyone.
189/190: I don't disagree. But the point is that the "unraveling" of the system isn't necessarily (or even likely) going to usher in a communist revolution in the United States, or any other sort of egalitarian people's revolution. In most realistic breakdown scenarios, the plutocrats as a class do just fine, and perhaps further concentrate their wealth and power. Roman plutarchs became (across generations) medieval lords, etc. (It's not a perfect 1-to-1 alignment, of course, and some currently prosperous individuals will end up in bad situations, but that's true of capitalism from year to year as well.)
The people fucked by an unraveling of the system are the middle class and the poor. OH LOOK.
Roman plutarchs became (across generations) medieval lords
Dubious.
On the broader point, I don't think you and Toggles are disagreeing. AFAICT, the superwealthy are short sighted because they are justifiably confident that they will keep on doing just fine no matter what. In fact, in the current recession, that appears to be very much the case. Unlike my folk sense of the Great Depression (probably doesn't match up to the reality of the GD, but I feel like this was a common pop culture theme) there are almost no stories of formerly rich people actually becoming impoverished or, really, suffering any loss of status or deprivation at all.
OT: Who's being the bigger dick in this exchange?
I saw 197 earlier and thought "how long will this take to get onto Unfogged."
But the answer is clear, especially once you watch the video. Don Young is being a dick. Doug Brinkley is calling out the dick.
Think more feudal
The capitals/capitalists act as a unified class only in opposition to the proletariat, which currently is not yet a real threat.
Without that threat they are always in cutthroat competition with each other (or at their borders), although they will try to hide this from the proles with ideology. And proles have a hard time seeing past ideology anyway.
Jon Corzine was not a stupid deluded servant of the system. He was a fucking pirate, trying to steal money from the other plutocrats.
Don Young is being a dick. Doug Brinkley is calling out the dick.
No, they're both being dicks. Don Young is being a bigger dick, but it's close. And yes I watched the video.
It is time to invoke what I have called in other contexts "The Big Monkey Reverse Difference Principle."
The plutocrats are motivated in part by a desire for wealth, and in part by a desire for inequality. They want to be sure to have more wealth than others. The Reverse Difference Principle is a rule for balancing these two goals. It says that equality is to be tolerated only to the extent that it benefits the best off.
Imagine two societies. One has a great deal of inequality, but the richest 1% are relatively poor. Another society has less inequality but the richest 1% are much better than the people in the first society. Now which society to you want to be a plutocrat in?
Don Young is always a dick. But as urple says, it's a pretty close call. Between the academic rank-pulling and the "I pay your salary" gambit, Brinkley didn't come out looking good either.
200: No, they're both being dicks.
This is why Democrats lose. The only suitable response to someone being a dick in this country is to be a bigger dick.
Young was being a standard-issue dick. Congresscritters are supposed engage in dick grandstanding during these hearing. Brinkley is being a novel dick, introducing academic snobbery in a place where it normally is anathema.
Normally, I like people who are dicks in new ways, but in this case I'll make an exception because Brinkley was running down community colleges.
203: True, and I'm all in favor of any and all dickishness directed at Republican members of Congress, particularly half-witted blowhards like Young.
The community college thing was obnoxious, but I have no problem with the salary comment. Any reminder these get of what their station should be is good.
No, a gruff "I pay your salary" is always and everywhere dickish, even if you're talking to someone whose salary you actually do pay. There's no circumstance in which it doesn't merit a response of "Fuck you," even if there are many circumstances in which that response would be ill-advised. And of course the fact that Brinkley doesn't actually pay Young's salary, but was just bleating arrogantly about the "private sector! private sector!", makes it that much more dickish.
But Young's a dick too, so my sympathy is limited.
207: Yeah, I would have gone more in a "You don't own me, and neither do the oil companies" direction.
201: I had to furrow my brow for a while before it dawned on me that you have to imagine that in these hypothetical unequal dystopias the class barriers are policed by a Big Monkey.
207: Oh, he's being a dick. I just have no problem with it.
Speaking as a community college graduate, I'm all for it.
Partly because it would piss me right the fuck off if somebody tried that with me.
Yeah, I liked it too. It's a nice inversion of a Republican trope. I guess I'd go with "dickish but called for." And while I wouldn't want everyone to do it, and like community colleges, I even like sticking the community college thing in the guy's face. You want to bash university research and be an anti-intellectual dick? Fine, here's your insecurity right back in your face, and yes I did call you stupid. What are you gonna do about it?
Obviously I am in a belligerent mood when it comes to Republicans these days.
201: Imagine two societies. One has a great deal of inequality, but the richest 1% are relatively poor. Another society has less inequality but the richest 1% are much better than the people in the first society. Now which society to you want to be a plutocrat in?
It took me a moment to parse this, as I couldn't make out how Society One, with a great deal of inequality, could still have a relatively poor top 1%. I take it this is, e.g. a 'third world country' or developing nation? Such a society needs a fairly heavy-handed police/military, doesn't it? Or else a disintegration of political institutions to such a degree that the people have little option but to toil, and toil.
I fear I'm being dense here: is the final question supposed to be rhetorical? (I myself would rather be a plutocrat in Society Two.)
Oh, wait: I gather that that is supposed to be the conclusion, and it serves as a counter to suggestions upthread that plutocrats don't play a long game. ?
Man, I'm apparently slow tonight.
The argument is meant to be an exact inversion of Rawls' argument for the difference principle, but it doesn't quite work out because the situations are not symmetrical. (The Big Monkey part is just from the name of my blog.)
Rawls was arguing in the context of the cold war, and assumed (at this point in his book) his audience was basically egalitarian. He wanted to show them that the perfect egalitarianism the communist advertised would still be no good, if everyone was equally poor. In particular, if everyone in the egalitarian society is worse off than an inegalitarian society, then any rational person would prefer the inegalitarian society. But this could very likely happen, given that a certain amount of inequality serves to motivate people to work and stimulate economic growth.
Now many people these days note that too much inequality is also bad for economic growth. The middle class really is crucial for industrial society. So let's reverse the argument, this time addressing it not to the egalitarians who are drawn to communism, but to the plutocrats who actually have power these days. They are inegalitarians. They want to have more than everyone else.
But wait, in the kind of feudal society they are driving us to, they will be worse off than they would be in an egalitarian society. Those castles are drafty and not actually that big. If you let more people have some wealth then everyone's house is bigger, even the people at the very top.
So it is in the interest of these wall street types not to completely rip everyone off. They will have more coke, better whores, all the stuff they want if they share.
It was silly of Rawls, and political philosophers in general, to address their arguments to people who believe in freedom and equality. No one with power believes is shit like that. We must, like Plato, address our arguments to the would-be tyrants.
all the stuff they want if they share
What if one of the specific things they want is not to share?
215: I suspect you're right about the coke, but wrong about the whores.
Because the whore ceiling has already been reached?
I got a fever for the flavor of some stuffing! STOVE TOP BOYEEEEE!!!
215: Thanks, Rob.
It was silly of Rawls, and political philosophers in general, to address their arguments to people who believe in freedom and equality.
I'm not sure this applies to political philosophers in general.
Rawls's principles of justice are premised on his conclusions from the original position, aren't they? All else (in his argument) follows from that. So you are basically saying that what Rawls says people would want were they in the original position is incorrect -- which is, I suppose, another way to say that the original position never obtains in real life, so, like, get real.
I don't know. It is a theory of justice. N.B. I'm pretty rusty on Rawls, and recognize that his later work and revisions or addenda to TJ addressed some of these matters. It took me a very long time, relatively speaking, to grant Rawls anything at all, but I eventually did.
Tocqueville has a bit somewhere or other - I've never read all his stuff - about how there's all sorts of equality in China and that this keeps people from being ambitious. Democracies also have a bunch of equality, but aristocracies have more inequality and this leads people to have greater ambitions.
Then he goes on to talk about ambition in a democracy for a while. I should read that book.
I've just read 215 more carefully, after getting 220 off my chest. Interesting -- I've never thought about Rawls in terms of his response to the cold war. That may mean I'm totally out of touch with the literature.
218: NMM to Peak Whore for a year or so now.
221: The ambition stuff, stated in terms of the desire to overcome inequality, is hogwash.
You have to be very ambitious to wash hogs without getting eaten. Fact.
Once again, I find myself at odds with the mineshaft: Brinkley is the bigger dick. There are a million ways that he could have said what he said, and none of them necessarily involved playing the completely deprecated "I'm a professor at a fancy private school" card. If he was going to get in Young's face, he should have been clever and funny, or righteously indignant and angry, but he chose elitist and obnoxious. That said, it's entirely possible that I feel this way because I think Brinkley is a dick no matter what. He is, in fact, the single biggest self-promoter in my field (broadly defined), more than happy to step over corpses (literally) to get where he wants to go (the top). Don Young, by contrast, is just a garden-variety Republican asshole.
I've actually never read Tocqueville, and feel as though there's something wrong about that. Should I? Read Democracy in America? I've read so much about it that I'm not sure it would benefit to actually read the thing itself -- but surely this is dumb.
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Meanwhile tossing about in my car is a copy of something called Tocqueville in America which is unsaleable, but I figured I'd hang on to a copy, because, Tocqueville. A mere day after my bookshop relinquished it to unsaleability, we sold a copy ... for 5 bucks. In better news, though, we sold the most expensive thing in our catalogue! So it evens out.
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218: Because reducing inequality probably reduces the supply of whores. (The Freakonomics guys have an unhealthy interest in this topic, but curiously never seem to have estimated the elasticity of prostitution with respect to the Gini coefficient.)
I thought it was about the quality of the whores.
230: I guess I've been assuming that fewer whores and worse whores go together, but I am happy to say I do not have a model of this market to back that up.
226: No, Brinkley used the weapon he thought would hurt that particular target the most. Young is going to be bothered for months.
226: Having once had the privilege of both living near and being a "staff spouse"* at the former William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Art, and Science** I can attest that it is well and truly a candidate for inclusion on the Halford List (maybe it was on it and I forgot). It was a relative breath of fresh air in Houston, but we were always somewhat surprised at what we perceived to be a relative assholishness exhibited by the student body. Because we were feminists opinionated Northern assholes.
*Really one of the best perks I've ever had in my life, $5 one-time fee for an ID that I did not have to renew and which gave me library and gym/pool privileges plus other kinds of institutional shit.
**Rice's murder in NYC in 1900 makes a great story. Turns out the butler did it (in conjunction with a shady lawyer attempting to divert his estate from the founding of the institution).
I was assuming that if those in the top 1% will pay top dollar for quality whores, said persons will present themselves (or be presented), appropriately qualified.
I'd thought Brinkley was like David McCullough: historian, writer, not a professor.
I haven't watched the clip, but it doesn't sound like it tops the mink biting outburst.
My aunt and uncle live near Rice. It's a pretty nice area.
In USSR oligarchy, congressional whores fuck you.
236: Yeah, we enjoyed living there. Just tonight had a conversation with one of my kid's friends from college who also lived in that immediate vicinity. My wife generally walked or biked to work, which put in her in the 1% for Houston. Didn't stop us from being judgmental.
226: You go to war with the dicks you have, not the dicks you wish you had. Maybe if more people insulted Republican Senators we could afford to be choosier.
Young is going to be bothered for months.
This is probably true.
which put in her in the 1% for Houston
Occupy Stormcrow's house!
If I had ten divisions of those dicks, then our troubles here would be over very quickly.
239: Or Republican House members as the case may be.
241: It was a rented duplex, you hater. Very nice, however,enjoyed the fuck out of it. And it was literally one block from two boulevards lined with some of the grandest houses in Houston. (Jack Nicholson and Shirley Maclaine strolled along it in one scene in Terms of Endearment.)
Cranberry sauce! Cranberry sauce! Cranberry sauce!
My wife generally walked or biked to work, which put in her in the 1% for Houston.
Heh. My aunt and uncle also bike to work, and most of the people they know don't know quite what to make of that.
248: The good thing for biking was that on the weekends no one was downtown so it was nice riding there. One of the main drags had lights timed for 23 mph coming into town for about two miles, so good for training. Another had them timed for 29 mph going out of town, which better riders would do in packs. I never skated, but knew some people in the Urban Animals who took advantage of the after hours desertion to use downtown as a big skate park.
Way, way back in the day, freshmen at Carnegie Tech would work in the power house shoveling coal.
Well, yes, and Isaac Newton worked his way through Cambridge as a sizar. Doesn't mean it's a good idea...
I do not remember orphanages in Idoru, but I found them plenty terrifying in Snow Crash
The analyst/tabloid TV guy, Laney, was in an orphanage as a kid, and got dosed with something weird that made him great at online research but had terrible side effects.
250: Mention is not endorsement.
He is, in fact, the single biggest self-promoter in my field (broadly defined), more than happy to step over corpses (literally) to get where he wants to go (the top).
Do tell, especially about the corpses.
Does every thread have to turn into a food thread?
