While not really a rage inducing Republican thing, I found this earlier today and was puzzling over the financials. For one thing, how the heck do they pay 1,088 people over $100k? What do those people do?
That leads to the question... is 1/60 people making over $100k standard for a large organization?
As well... holy balls, they spend nearly 45% of their revenue on payroll. I wonder if that is normal.
I seems like we started to hear a lot about the immorality of contraception around the time when the White House ordered catholic run hospitals to provide contraception and its been used as a dog whistle / wedge to rally GOP religious base.
Also, while Santorum has stated that he believes contraception should be available even though he personally believes it is wrong, he's also stated that he doesn't think that his personal religious views wouldn't or shouldn't inform his policy, so who knows what he'd do. Maybe people can have the pill if they agree to random drug testing and mandatory spiritual support meetings to ensure that it isn't enable their immoral lifestyle?
There is a difference between the position if "no birth control for you" and the position if "you have to pay for your own birth control."
I could be wrong but I don't know of any Republicans who are against birth control pills and devices. Abortion is a separate matter.
You don't know some conservatives... Some of them have some crazy ideas and I've met them...They are scary (though it's definitely not a mainstream position).
Just when you thought Santorum was the craziest motherfucker in the republican party, here's some quotes by our good mate Rand Paul, the ideological mini-me to Ron.
On Child Labor: "sometimes in really poor families, kids just have to pitch in"
On industrial accidents and liability: "I mean, sometimes mines just collapse, you know? Nobody's fault. I think it's called gravity"
On whether Restaurants should be able to discriminant against non-Northern Europeans: "I mean, if you don't trace your ancestry to northern Europe and you're really hungry, if you ask nicely, maybe they'll let you come in."
His feelings on universal health care: "It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses."
On classes: "There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor"
On criticism of BP after the oil spill: "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business"
On the Dept of Education/Same Sex Couples: "I would rather the local schools decide things. I don’t like the idea of somebody in Washington deciding that Susie has two mommies is an appropriate family situation and should be taught to my kindergardener at school. That’s what happens when we let things get to a federal level. I think I would rather have local school boards, teachers, parents, people in Paduka deciding about your schools and not have it in Washington."
On Medicare/Medicaid - "The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed — socialism doesn’t work"
On Corporate Greed - "The other thing just infuriates me is that they blame greed, not that greed is a good thing to have. … But it is an indirect way of blaming capitalism. What is greed? Greed is an excess of self-interest, but what drives capitalism? Self-interest and profit. They are good things."
On Social Security - "I think the average American is smart enough to make their own investments the more freedom the better … Reform is going to happen, and I hope it’s privatization."
On the Civil Rights Act - "Decisions concerning private property and associations should in a free society be unhindered."
On freedom of speech - "But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison"
Read this incredibly long article and suddenly Rand Paul makes sense (in that his existence is explainable, not that he's right).
TL;DR:
at the heart of Libertarianism (and many other Utopian ideologies) there lies six major problems
1. The Fallacy of Revolution: that there being no foreseeable problems with fundamentally changing a society is the same as there being a guarantee of no problems in a changed society.
2. The Libertarian Fallacy: freedom on paper is more important than the actual ability to do things when you want to. Furthermore, any loss of the latter type of freedom is moral if it is caused by an increase in the former.
3. The Fallacy that pretty much everyone falls victim too so it doesn't get its own name: that something feeling right and true is the same as it being right and true.
4. That the fundamental right is the ownership of property and that any violation of property rights is an "initiation of force" that morally justifies violent resistance: from this it is determined that your right to your own body is based on it being property that you own and furthermore should be subject to forfeiture or allowed to be used as collateral in contracts. By extension, things like civil and human rights are a violation of property rights since it disallows things like slavery and discrimination (thus limiting your ability to own and use property as you wish).
5. The Taxation Fallacy: that any money taken as taxes vanishes into thin air (since it is accepted as being axiomatically true that any public entity is incapable of accomplishing anything).
6. The idea that "the market" is a natural force like "the tides" and that it will simply be "fine" if left alone and that growth and prosperity will naturally follow deregulation (and that the historical failure of this ever happening is the result of not deregulating hard enough).
TL;DR of the TL;DR: Libertarian Ideologues see reality through the filter of their beliefs and not the other way around.
This is quite true, and an excellent analysis of the position, and of the position of his followers. That doesn't make Rand any less of a crazy motherfucker, it just means we know in exactly what manner.
We're going to fight them overseas so we don't have to fight them over here!
As sad as it is, that's probably the actual rationale behind that.
While the amendment to add the aircraft carrier was scrapped because the land-locked state couldn't afford to buy, run, man, or even buy bullets for it, the fact that some fearful nutbag is already trying to make laws to have a state raise their own standing army is very troubling. In fact, it's unconstitutional unless it's like a Air National Guard and congress has to give explicit permission for that. Looks like Wyoming makes the list of "states I don't consider states anymore".
I thought the point was that a high school diploma from 50 years ago was equivalent to a 2 yr degree today? Least, that's what I hear in those sorts of statements.
Where the heck did you hear that? A high school diploma is more useless than ever these days.
I don't think that's not actually what Steve meant. I think he meant that anyone saying that a high school diploma was minimally sufficient fifty years ago would also agree that an associate's degree is minimally sufficient today, as they are, for all intents and purposes, nearly the same quality of education.
Not complaining about youngsters - this may well be better interpreted as a complaint against the older people running the schools - but who here would say that HS is better today than it was fifty years ago, EXCEPT (and I'm looking your way, Scott) in technological fields such as CS that didn't really even exist at the HS level fifty years ago. What I mean to say is, who here can really, credibly say that the AVERAGE kid in HS today is getting the same basic quality of education as the same average kid in HS fifty years ago? That's why an AA/AS degree today might be the equivalent of an HS diploma from fifty years ago. Or rather, a HS diploma today is pretty useless on its own, which is just what you were saying, Mr. Sketchbook.
Okay - just taking the devil's advocate position there. Also, as a last thought, Steve - while I understand your position, I think it's really giving those people too much credit to suspect that this is what they really mean. I think we can take their meaning from their plain language and not worry about nuance or reading between the lines. The republicans have devolved to the point where they are actively anti-intellectual, anti-education, and anti-progress in all things. That's fine, I guess for people like Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum, who already have theirs, and who are already in the upper class. It's in their interests to have a large population of uneducated cannon fodder.
That's fine, I guess for people like Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum, who already have theirs, and who are already in the upper class. It's in their interests to have a large population of uneducated cannon fodder.
In just about every discussion about politics that I have, it ends up coming back to this. If your goal is to stay in power, it is in your best interest to have a populace that can be easily manipulated. The best way I can think of to accomplish that would be to keep people from thinking critically about their situations and what you're saying. Therefore, you can kill funding for and attack the legitimacy of education.
It's beautiful, really. Over the past dozen years or so, we've seen religion pitted against education and the two have become enemies in a lot of people's minds. Therefore, rather than building someone's analytical abilities, that skill has been linked with anti-religious personalities.
I wanted to say "And we wonder why it's so hard to argue..." but really, I don't think anyone is wondering about that anymore. I think it's more just despair.
Despair and more despair. I usually pride myself on my cynicism, but I allowed myself to be overcome by hopefulness that Obama could and would "change" a lot of the sort of thing you're talking about.
However, if you're talking about despair, it reaches back further. I remember when people were talking about the "peace dividend" in the early nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We really had no credible threat. We could have cut back the military/industrial complex to pre-WW II strength and used the money saved to do all kinds of things. This future we're living in pales by comparison to where we could have been if we spent the nineties improving infrastructure, going back into space, developing alternate energy, etc. instead of having the old, hard-line apparatchiks spending all their time arguing about a soiled dress in public while raiding the coffers in private.
We're currently living through a new Gilded Age in which the wealthy are at least as much despot-like and tyrannical so as to have inspired revolution in the past, but they are made safe now by the cheap toys with which we in the lower classes are all distracted to the point of delusion.
The only question in my mind these days is whether it's too late for reform, or how much the people will tolerate before actual revolution. I have a feeling they'll tolerate a lot as long as they can afford Netflix.
That's the feeling I get, too. I was really hopeful with Obama as well, although I don't think I quite realized how difficult his job would be.
In the past several years I've definitely realized how much of a job he has had to do, with so much incredibly entrenched opposition to just about everything. Change is so painfully slow, I'm not actually sure if it's possible if we keep changing directions every 4-8 years.
To be honest, I'm thinking that we're in a slow decline and it will more than likely continue in a slow decline. I think people are far too distracted to really pay attention, and when they do they can't understand the complexity of the issues they're trying to grasp, so they latch onto simple explanations.
We have more bread than we can eat, and it's making us fat. We have an infinite circus.
The worst thing is that most of the deepest problems are a direct result of conservative ideology and the actions of the Republican party. The Democrats are no saints, but they're slightly-right-of-center and progressive (at the rate that society naturally progresses through death and new generations), as opposed to the actively regressive Republican efforts of the last two decades.
Imagine this future had we made all the same mistakes and obsessed over the same bullshit, but where:
1. We didn't lower taxes (the Bush era tax cuts) 2. We didn't invade Iraq
The feeling of a tipping point now is in my opinion solely due to the aggravation of longstanding but slowly healing wounds by the conservative movement, one whose very core philosophy is anathema to pretty-much everything I personally stand for.
However, consider that despite everything, things are slowly getting better for people, and have been continuously, albeit at a snail's pace at times, been doing so since the bottom of the dark ages. Every day is a little bit better on average, and we've come a long god damned way from the problems of the 1960s, or the 1860s, or the 1360s.
Even if you've lost all hope in humanity as a brutish, violent, expansionist, dim-witted, prejudiced, race of mouth-breathing circus-watchers, I implore you only one thing.
Circumspice.
Look about you.
Somehow, despite this brutishness, violence, expansionism, ignorance, prejudice, apathy, manipulation, and idiocy of general society, the distractions of circuses and the pancea of bread, we somehow built this enormous, technology-driven, future-society with space stations, little cars on the moon, cures for the plagues of centuries, skyscrapers, nanotechnology, direct flights between New York and Tokyo, and Wikipedia.
Things get better despite regressive and conservative movements. They always have, and they always will. We're just impatient now that we see the full march of time.
I like to think that I can be convinced that pretty much any of my most deeply-held beliefs can be changed if there is an adequate amount of verifiable information showing that they are wrong. As examples, I show that I was once an evangelical Christian who went on mission trips to convert unbelievers. I also regularly adjust my opinions based on new information that is uncovered.
With that in mind, I've never been presented with good information showing that giving money to social programs is a mistake, or that tax cuts to highest income Americans does any real good for the economy. Likewise, although Greece and Italy are having problems, I've not been shown that the European model of socialism doesn't work. Especially the parts about access to education and healthcare.
I don't know what my point is. Really, it seems like the Republican party as of late was simply wrong, and I haven't been convinced that that sentiment is unfounded.
or that tax cuts to highest income Americans does any real good for the economy
This is an assertion that is progressively rankling me. We've have years of Bush tax cuts and widening of tax loopholes for the wealthy elite here.
At the same time, the rich and powerful spin that in two opposite, mutually exclusive directions: They simultaneously crow about tax cuts while blaming Democrats for job losses. The evidence against the efficacy of trickle-down economics is clear and present. The rich are richer than ever and unemployment is high. What does that tell you?
or that tax cuts to highest income Americans does any real good for the economy
This is an assertion that is progressively rankling me. We've have years of Bush tax cuts and widening of tax loopholes for the wealthy elite here.
At the same time, the rich and powerful spin that in two opposite, mutually exclusive directions: They simultaneously crow about tax cuts while blaming Democrats for job losses. The evidence against the efficacy of trickle-down economics is clear and present. The rich are richer than ever and unemployment is high. What does that tell you?
Then the Randians will tell you that this is absolutely correct and OK. It's just self interest working, and those people who are the richest have obviously worked harder and better for longer to get that rich.
Problem is, while that's fine and dandy in a hunter-gatherer society where success equals life, we're talking about an entire nation and so many people that aren't able to compete suffer. We're supposed to have evolved past letting those people suffer and die.
Things get better despite regressive and conservative movements. They always have, and they always will. We're just impatient now that we see the full march of time.
I'd like to agree with you. I really would.
However, our fuckin' resources are running out and nothing is going to be there to replace them. Also, climate change is going to be bringing the pain.
Why do you think the rich are so desperate to wring every last drop of blood they can from the American turnip? Because they know that the consequences of their policies, which have ensured our problems with resources and the environment, are going to be that we don't get that bright, long future that you suggest.
Here's what's going to happen: In about five to ten years we're going to hit peak oil (if we haven't already). Then, the people will have to pay more and more for their cable, NASCAR, and Netflix while at the same time paying more for food. They'll also have to pay more for food due to climate weirdness. That's if they can find a store that still has food due to the distribution problems expensive gasoline will bring. There's no other power source that will be available. These two things alone, peak oil and climate change, are going to be our swansong.
THEN there will be some unpleasantness. It's hard not to imagine an interruption in progress that will be like a dark age, and without oil and with the changed climate, it's hard to imagine a recovery.
Before you say it, I'm not talking Malthusian resource dwindling. The only resource that I'm talking about here is oil, and I don't believe anyone seriously thinks it's going to last much longer. Also, I don't think anyone seriously believes that an effective replacement will be developed in time.
Am I wrong? I'd like to think so. Convince me. It gives me absolutely no joy to make such assertions. However, I believe they are essentially correct.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to look up these things at work, but what about the assertion that oil companies themselves are already developing alternative energy sources in preparation for peak oil?
It would hurt those companies specifically if they didn't have a way to keep their profits up once peak oil hits, and demand will only carry them so far.
Especially if you consider that the high worth of many of the executives hinges not on liquid assets which can be provided by salaries (and are in turn directly tied to profits) but are tied up in a lot of shares of their corporations. Regardless of diversification of their assets, I'd venture to say the majority of their personal wealth is tied up in their own company's stock. If market analysts start thinking that the company's profits might suffer due to peak oil, they'll start deciding to invest elsewhere and those executives' personal wealth will suffer.
Oil companies seriously developing alternatives? Not just corporate propaganda? If someone can find actual evidence that's not just propaganda, I might sleep better tonight.
Once I get home I'll dedicate some time to actually trying to find real information on such projects. Mostly what I've heard is corporate propaganda, although the core argument (which I laid out in my previous post, sorry for the ninja-edit) seems sound.
It does, however, assume that the people running these companies care about anything other than short term growth and profit. I'm not entirely convinced of that.
Oil companies seriously developing alternatives? Not just corporate propaganda? If someone can find actual evidence that's not just propaganda, I might sleep better tonight.
Well, Royal Dutch Shell does have some hydrogen stations set up in Iceland, helped in part by that country's crazy amount of geothermal power making it cheap to produce hydrogen. Otherwise, I've only seen stuff along the lines of ExxonMobil bragging about their research during their announcements that they're sponsoring PBS shows or whatever.
All the talk I've heard lately re: climate change seems to say we need a 30/40 year plan. It's weird to me tho, cause like 3 or 4 years ago I remember Bill McKibben (350.org) saying we need an 80% reduction in carbon emissions within 10 years.
I'll also say that I remember seeing a lot of things about oil companies starting to get involved in cleaner energy sources. I also think biofuel is really big for them, maybe cause it means less retooling?? Also have no specific sources, but if you do some google there's a good amount of articles about it.
The shitty part is that I think we will actually get to a renewable and clean energy grid, except it will happen when it's the most profitable move for the current energy super-powers; and not necessarily when it's most beneficial to the environment or inhabitants.
Also, HungryJoe, am I correct in thinking you've seen Collapse??
I'm all for biofuel. I hear very interesting things about algae-based biofuels that current day engines can use without modification. Granted, biofuel really should only be used for transportation as we have yet to find a better alternative (battery tech isn't there yet and isn't practical for some applications). For all other stuff, I definitely think we need more investment in renewable and nuclear to provide electricity, at least until if/when we get fusion power figured out.
I just disagree with "Conservatism" as a philosophy in general. In its dictionary definition, it boils down to an aversion to change and a protection of the status quo. Being raised on speculative fiction gave me a longing to rush toward the future with arms wide. I'll fight the inevitable new problems along the way, but seriously, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Conservatives are cowardly, in that they shun and fear the uncertain and unknown, and are dragged kicking and screaming into the inevitable changes of a progressive future.
Hella agree w/ gomidog. Society progresses naturally, and because of that, I like to think of social conservativism as a sort of social disease... or a retardation.
I just disagree with "Conservatism" as a philosophy in general. In its dictionary definition, it boils down to an aversion to change and a protection of the status quo. Being raised on speculative fiction gave me a longing to rush toward the future with arms wide. I'll fight the inevitable new problems along the way, but seriously, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Conservatives are cowardly, in that they shun and fear the uncertain and unknown, and are dragged kicking and screaming into the inevitable changes of a progressive future.
While I agree with you, I think a healthy amount of Conservatism creates a nice balance with people like me. What I think we're seeing now is a corruption of that balance due to the unhealthy affect religion is having on politics. Evangelical Christianity doesn't just preach "classic" values, but also preaches that everyone has to agree with that.
That means that they are given a more than free license (in fact, strongly encouraged) to do everything they can to get everyone to practice what they preach.
Comments
I could be wrong but I don't know of any Republicans who are against birth control pills and devices. Abortion is a separate matter.
Alaska man sues the Board of Elections, saying that Barack Obama is not qualified to be President due to his status as a "mulatto."
That leads to the question... is 1/60 people making over $100k standard for a large organization?
As well... holy balls, they spend nearly 45% of their revenue on payroll. I wonder if that is normal.
I seems like we started to hear a lot about the immorality of contraception around the time when the White House ordered catholic run hospitals to provide contraception and its been used as a dog whistle / wedge to rally GOP religious base.
Also, while Santorum has stated that he believes contraception should be available even though he personally believes it is wrong, he's also stated that he doesn't think that his personal religious views wouldn't or shouldn't inform his policy, so who knows what he'd do. Maybe people can have the pill if they agree to random drug testing and mandatory spiritual support meetings to ensure that it isn't enable their immoral lifestyle?
On Child Labor: "sometimes in really poor families, kids just have to pitch in"
On industrial accidents and liability: "I mean, sometimes mines just collapse, you know? Nobody's fault. I think it's called gravity"
On whether Restaurants should be able to discriminant against non-Northern Europeans: "I mean, if you don't trace your ancestry to northern Europe and you're really hungry, if you ask nicely, maybe they'll let you come in."
His feelings on universal health care: "It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses."
On classes: "There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor"
On criticism of BP after the oil spill: "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business"
On the Dept of Education/Same Sex Couples: "I would rather the local schools decide things. I don’t like the idea of somebody in Washington deciding that Susie has two mommies is an appropriate family situation and should be taught to my kindergardener at school. That’s what happens when we let things get to a federal level. I think I would rather have local school boards, teachers, parents, people in Paduka deciding about your schools and not have it in Washington."
On Medicare/Medicaid - "The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed — socialism doesn’t work"
On Corporate Greed - "The other thing just infuriates me is that they blame greed, not that greed is a good thing to have. … But it is an indirect way of blaming capitalism. What is greed? Greed is an excess of self-interest, but what drives capitalism? Self-interest and profit. They are good things."
On Social Security - "I think the average American is smart enough to make their own investments the more freedom the better … Reform is going to happen, and I hope it’s privatization."
On the Civil Rights Act - "Decisions concerning private property and associations should in a free society be unhindered."
On freedom of speech - "But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison"
TL;DR:
at the heart of Libertarianism (and many other Utopian ideologies) there lies six major problems
1. The Fallacy of Revolution: that there being no foreseeable problems with fundamentally changing a society is the same as there being a guarantee of no problems in a changed society.
2. The Libertarian Fallacy: freedom on paper is more important than the actual ability to do things when you want to. Furthermore, any loss of the latter type of freedom is moral if it is caused by an increase in the former.
3. The Fallacy that pretty much everyone falls victim too so it doesn't get its own name: that something feeling right and true is the same as it being right and true.
4. That the fundamental right is the ownership of property and that any violation of property rights is an "initiation of force" that morally justifies violent resistance: from this it is determined that your right to your own body is based on it being property that you own and furthermore should be subject to forfeiture or allowed to be used as collateral in contracts. By extension, things like civil and human rights are a violation of property rights since it disallows things like slavery and discrimination (thus limiting your ability to own and use property as you wish).
5. The Taxation Fallacy: that any money taken as taxes vanishes into thin air (since it is accepted as being axiomatically true that any public entity is incapable of accomplishing anything).
6. The idea that "the market" is a natural force like "the tides" and that it will simply be "fine" if left alone and that growth and prosperity will naturally follow deregulation (and that the historical failure of this ever happening is the result of not deregulating hard enough).
TL;DR of the TL;DR: Libertarian Ideologues see reality through the filter of their beliefs and not the other way around.
Looks like Wyoming makes the list of "states I don't consider states anymore".
Not complaining about youngsters - this may well be better interpreted as a complaint against the older people running the schools - but who here would say that HS is better today than it was fifty years ago, EXCEPT (and I'm looking your way, Scott) in technological fields such as CS that didn't really even exist at the HS level fifty years ago. What I mean to say is, who here can really, credibly say that the AVERAGE kid in HS today is getting the same basic quality of education as the same average kid in HS fifty years ago? That's why an AA/AS degree today might be the equivalent of an HS diploma from fifty years ago. Or rather, a HS diploma today is pretty useless on its own, which is just what you were saying, Mr. Sketchbook.
Okay - just taking the devil's advocate position there. Also, as a last thought, Steve - while I understand your position, I think it's really giving those people too much credit to suspect that this is what they really mean. I think we can take their meaning from their plain language and not worry about nuance or reading between the lines. The republicans have devolved to the point where they are actively anti-intellectual, anti-education, and anti-progress in all things. That's fine, I guess for people like Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum, who already have theirs, and who are already in the upper class. It's in their interests to have a large population of uneducated cannon fodder.
It's beautiful, really. Over the past dozen years or so, we've seen religion pitted against education and the two have become enemies in a lot of people's minds. Therefore, rather than building someone's analytical abilities, that skill has been linked with anti-religious personalities.
I wanted to say "And we wonder why it's so hard to argue..." but really, I don't think anyone is wondering about that anymore. I think it's more just despair.
However, if you're talking about despair, it reaches back further. I remember when people were talking about the "peace dividend" in the early nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We really had no credible threat. We could have cut back the military/industrial complex to pre-WW II strength and used the money saved to do all kinds of things. This future we're living in pales by comparison to where we could have been if we spent the nineties improving infrastructure, going back into space, developing alternate energy, etc. instead of having the old, hard-line apparatchiks spending all their time arguing about a soiled dress in public while raiding the coffers in private.
We're currently living through a new Gilded Age in which the wealthy are at least as much despot-like and tyrannical so as to have inspired revolution in the past, but they are made safe now by the cheap toys with which we in the lower classes are all distracted to the point of delusion.
The only question in my mind these days is whether it's too late for reform, or how much the people will tolerate before actual revolution. I have a feeling they'll tolerate a lot as long as they can afford Netflix.
In the past several years I've definitely realized how much of a job he has had to do, with so much incredibly entrenched opposition to just about everything. Change is so painfully slow, I'm not actually sure if it's possible if we keep changing directions every 4-8 years.
To be honest, I'm thinking that we're in a slow decline and it will more than likely continue in a slow decline. I think people are far too distracted to really pay attention, and when they do they can't understand the complexity of the issues they're trying to grasp, so they latch onto simple explanations.
The worst thing is that most of the deepest problems are a direct result of conservative ideology and the actions of the Republican party. The Democrats are no saints, but they're slightly-right-of-center and progressive (at the rate that society naturally progresses through death and new generations), as opposed to the actively regressive Republican efforts of the last two decades.
Imagine this future had we made all the same mistakes and obsessed over the same bullshit, but where:
1. We didn't lower taxes (the Bush era tax cuts)
2. We didn't invade Iraq
The feeling of a tipping point now is in my opinion solely due to the aggravation of longstanding but slowly healing wounds by the conservative movement, one whose very core philosophy is anathema to pretty-much everything I personally stand for.
However, consider that despite everything, things are slowly getting better for people, and have been continuously, albeit at a snail's pace at times, been doing so since the bottom of the dark ages. Every day is a little bit better on average, and we've come a long god damned way from the problems of the 1960s, or the 1860s, or the 1360s.
Even if you've lost all hope in humanity as a brutish, violent, expansionist, dim-witted, prejudiced, race of mouth-breathing circus-watchers, I implore you only one thing.
Circumspice.
Look about you.
Somehow, despite this brutishness, violence, expansionism, ignorance, prejudice, apathy, manipulation, and idiocy of general society, the distractions of circuses and the pancea of bread, we somehow built this enormous, technology-driven, future-society with space stations, little cars on the moon, cures for the plagues of centuries, skyscrapers, nanotechnology, direct flights between New York and Tokyo, and Wikipedia.
Things get better despite regressive and conservative movements. They always have, and they always will. We're just impatient now that we see the full march of time.
With that in mind, I've never been presented with good information showing that giving money to social programs is a mistake, or that tax cuts to highest income Americans does any real good for the economy. Likewise, although Greece and Italy are having problems, I've not been shown that the European model of socialism doesn't work. Especially the parts about access to education and healthcare.
I don't know what my point is. Really, it seems like the Republican party as of late was simply wrong, and I haven't been convinced that that sentiment is unfounded.
At the same time, the rich and powerful spin that in two opposite, mutually exclusive directions: They simultaneously crow about tax cuts while blaming Democrats for job losses. The evidence against the efficacy of trickle-down economics is clear and present. The rich are richer than ever and unemployment is high. What does that tell you?
Problem is, while that's fine and dandy in a hunter-gatherer society where success equals life, we're talking about an entire nation and so many people that aren't able to compete suffer. We're supposed to have evolved past letting those people suffer and die.
However, our fuckin' resources are running out and nothing is going to be there to replace them. Also, climate change is going to be bringing the pain.
Why do you think the rich are so desperate to wring every last drop of blood they can from the American turnip? Because they know that the consequences of their policies, which have ensured our problems with resources and the environment, are going to be that we don't get that bright, long future that you suggest.
Here's what's going to happen: In about five to ten years we're going to hit peak oil (if we haven't already). Then, the people will have to pay more and more for their cable, NASCAR, and Netflix while at the same time paying more for food. They'll also have to pay more for food due to climate weirdness. That's if they can find a store that still has food due to the distribution problems expensive gasoline will bring. There's no other power source that will be available. These two things alone, peak oil and climate change, are going to be our swansong.
THEN there will be some unpleasantness. It's hard not to imagine an interruption in progress that will be like a dark age, and without oil and with the changed climate, it's hard to imagine a recovery.
Before you say it, I'm not talking Malthusian resource dwindling. The only resource that I'm talking about here is oil, and I don't believe anyone seriously thinks it's going to last much longer. Also, I don't think anyone seriously believes that an effective replacement will be developed in time.
Am I wrong? I'd like to think so. Convince me. It gives me absolutely no joy to make such assertions. However, I believe they are essentially correct.
It would hurt those companies specifically if they didn't have a way to keep their profits up once peak oil hits, and demand will only carry them so far.
Especially if you consider that the high worth of many of the executives hinges not on liquid assets which can be provided by salaries (and are in turn directly tied to profits) but are tied up in a lot of shares of their corporations. Regardless of diversification of their assets, I'd venture to say the majority of their personal wealth is tied up in their own company's stock. If market analysts start thinking that the company's profits might suffer due to peak oil, they'll start deciding to invest elsewhere and those executives' personal wealth will suffer.
That's logical, right?
It does, however, assume that the people running these companies care about anything other than short term growth and profit. I'm not entirely convinced of that.
I'll also say that I remember seeing a lot of things about oil companies starting to get involved in cleaner energy sources. I also think biofuel is really big for them, maybe cause it means less retooling?? Also have no specific sources, but if you do some google there's a good amount of articles about it.
The shitty part is that I think we will actually get to a renewable and clean energy grid, except it will happen when it's the most profitable move for the current energy super-powers; and not necessarily when it's most beneficial to the environment or inhabitants.
Also, HungryJoe, am I correct in thinking you've seen Collapse??
That means that they are given a more than free license (in fact, strongly encouraged) to do everything they can to get everyone to practice what they preach.