via talkLeft, we get this love letter to America from outrage blogger Skimble:
If McCain wins, it will be because Americans deserve him, just as we have deserved Bush Junior. If Obama wins, he will be a glorified janitor for the endless piles of shit the GOP left in its wake. Just as Bill Clinton was for Reagan and Bush Senior.
Our complacency will be our downfall, and I no longer care. Let Rush Limbaugh and ExxonMobil have America – it’s becoming a crumbling shithole anyway.
And on that happy note, we end the blog.
Jeralyn at Talkleft sympathizes:
All a Democrat can do is hope November comes quickly and our candidate wins, so we can get on with the business of fixing health care, ending the parade of right-wing ideologues as nominees for federal judgeships, preserve the independence of our Supreme Court, get out of one war (hopefully without getting back into another) and, fingers crossed, start to empty our prisons of non-violent offenders.
But for having those goals, and being excited that the convention is taking place in Denver, I might stop blogging about the election too. I’m not where Skimble is yet, but I certainly understand his thinking.
I don’t. I don’t begin to understand the toxic thinking behind that kind of position, and all I can do is link it to some deep kind of self-hate. I’m unhappy with a lot of things about America – things which I think we need to fix and patch and shore up so it’s an appropriate vessel for our grandchildren. But it’s a grand and glorious vessel even so, and the journey so far – and the journey to come – is going to be an adventure worthy of the best in all of us.
Broadly speaking,that the Left attracts victims, the disaffected and yes, losers. Why? Because the Left is about ‘someone else’ (i.e. the government) fixing individual problems.
Whereas on the Right, the emphasis is on individual improvement.
Polls and studies consistently indicate that those on the right are generally happier. Why? Because those on the Right feel like they have more control over their lives, as opposed to waiting for someone else to build a Utopia.
Also, for the Left, unhappiness is part of the attitude. Being angry and outraged is part of the attire, like tattoos on rock stars. Remember, it’s all about the FEEEELLINNGS!
This is why “full immersion” politics is a lousy substitute for normal human life. As a life passion, politics is not only inferior to culture, art, religion, and science. It’s inferior even to Dungeons and Dragons.
Normal life is not possible when you believe that you live in an evil empire full of monsters and war criminals. When the people around you go on living happily anyway, you start to hate them, too.
The only answer to the evil empire is a total magical transformation, and Obama has been made into a symbol of this. But even though Obama’s ride is far from over, a few little bumps have ruined it for Skimble, and (s)he wants to get off.
Bitterness and sore losing on the left? I’m shocked, SHOCKED! Does the fact that they’re trotting out the “stupid Americans” trope mean they are no longer as confident of victory in November as they were? One can only pray.
Hey, now, have some sympathy for young liberals who are driven to distraction. I remember the Clinton years — which they don’t, really — and how the right was driven to distraction. “An ‘assault weapon’ ban? What the #$%# is an ‘assault weapon’? Do any of these idiots know anything about the arms they want to regulate? This rifle is banned, but this other one with the same caliber, rate of fire and capacity is legal because it has a wooden stock?” “War in Bosnia? Why are we spending blood and treasure on this foreign wasteland? Don’t we have problems at home? They’ll never be fit for democracy anyway, look how they kill each other and the drop of a hat…”
If Obama does win — which I hope he does not — there will at least be the consolation prize of letting these youngsters see the other side for a while. The part where you take responsibility for fixing something, and the other side carps day and night at your every effort, and seems to care more about tearing you down than fixing the problem.
_Because the Left is about ‘someone else’ (i.e. the government) fixing individual problems. Whereas on the Right, the emphasis is on individual improvement._
I’ve never seen it that way. The right is primarily about deergulating industry while regulating christian morality. The left is primarily about regulating industry, (1 pt- developing programs for impoverished) and deregulating legislation on christian morality.
Here’s the thing: You can now look out your window and see where government dergulation gets us: foreclosures, record oil profits, Enron Accounting systems. How does the republican system help individual share holders for Enron, Tyco, etc? You could say the emphasis of the republicans is individual improvement… you could also say they just don’t care about non-voting constituents.
But I quibble. Democrats aren’t doing much better. And these are just oversimplifications of large senate and republican voting blocks a la talk radio.
“Here’s the thing: You can now look out your window and see where government dergulation gets us: foreclosures, record oil profits, Enron Accounting systems.”
Huh? How are ‘record oil profits’ a bad thing? How are record any profits a bad thing when the business is legal AND regulated?
Foreclosures? So what? Without govt. intervention, the only people affected by the foreclosures would be the buyers and banks who got in over their head. Note everyone is affected because we’re all paying for the mistakes of a few.
You illustrate everything that is wrong with the left: life isn’t perfect, but how can government make it so?
“you could also say they just don’t care about non-voting constituents.”
No, you could say that Republicans don’t look down their noses at everyone and don’t believe that govt. needs to come to the rescue. In short, people can take care of themselves and rarely require a political solution.
The idea that left cares about anything other than their own power is laughable.
So tell me which Demo-controlled inner city is just humming along?
One last thing, and I actually laughed out loud: “The left is primarily about regulating industry, (1 pt- developing programs for impoverished).”
So instead of encouraging the impoverished to develop work skills, nah, just take money from successful industries and give it to the poor. Yeah, great idea.
Being on the Left doesn’t mean you must hate America, however it does not escape even the most casual observer that the Left is the the default position and repository of nearly all of those who do.
As someone who grew up thinking he was liberal, that realization was a bitter pill to swallow back in 1993, when I found out differently. The Classical Liberal position, AKA Libertarian (AKA Goldwater Conservative), is almost entirely abandoned by the contemporary Left, and it is a fact that with great consternation that I note so many otherwise like-mined people fail to perceive.
The very term “Liberal” has changed so greatly from it’s original meaning in this country as to constitute doublespeak.
_”You can now look out your window and see where government dergulation gets us: foreclosures, record oil profits, Enron Accounting systems”_
I look out the window and see 94% of the working population employed. I see industries thriving that didnt exist 20, or even 10 years ago. I see the poor with air conditioning and playstations and cell phones where poor in most of the world means starving. I see a nation producing so much wealth it can piss it away by the hundreds of billions and hardly notice.
Government regulation never produced a penny of wealth. It ‘creates’ jobs only insomuch as it takes money from wealth creators that would be spent in ways producing private sector jobs.
Government regulation is the reason a gasoline refinery hasnt been built in 30 years, or a nuke plant in 50. Its the reason gas stations are required to mindlessly sell boutique blends of gas in individual regions of the country, allowing single suppliers literal monopolies regionally.
Government bailouts encourage certain industries to behave wrecklessly in the knowledge that they wont be allowed to fail.
Government _creates_ most of the problems you described, and it rarely solves any of them.
alchemist:
How does endless war against “corporations” help anybody’s share holders?
Those share holders include workers, union pension funds, retired people, widows and orphans. Those are the people who collect the evil profits. Exxon Mobil investors are getting about $2 profit per share right now, slightly more than Microsoft – it might be a record for them, but Walmart share holders are getting closer to $3 per share. Aetna share holders are getting $4.
High profits encourage competition. People who really believe in alternative energy SHOULD GET DOWN ON THEIR KNEES AND PRAY TO GOD FOR HIGH ENERGY PROFITS.
In those terms what was GWB but a glorified janitor for all the crap Clinton left in his wake?
Bush got a legacy of corporate corruption, a politicized State Department, disfunctional intelligence agencies, Albright taking off her heels to kiss up to a pedophile terrorist, the 2nd intifada, the A. Q. Khan nuclear smuggling ring, Pakistan and India at the verge of nuclear war, the corrupt ‘Oil for Food’ Program, Clinton’s half-hearted political poll generaled half war ‘Operation Desert Fox’ and the ongoing blockade of Iraq, North Korea, the huge bubble economy waiting to splatter, bombing aspirin plants and baby milk factories rather than Osama bin Ladin, the 1st WTC bombing, the genocide in Darfur, his ‘cut and run at the first sign of trouble’ ala Mogidishu, the BATF being practically at war with rural America, a bitterly divided electorate, and on and on. Turns out that history hadn’t ended afterall, and that Clinton in fact hadn’t ‘fixed the economy so that we’d never have a recession again’.
Let me give Skimble a clue.
‘We didn’t start the fire. It’s always burning since the world’s been turning’.
Bill Clinton inherited an easy ride compared to Reagan and GWB.
“You can now look out your window and see where government dergulation gets us: foreclosures, record oil profits, Enron Accounting systems”
a) The Enron malfeasement started on Clinton’s watch using accounting systems of the time. This was back when people on the left were saying ‘Integrity and character don’t matter’.
b) In 2003, Freddie Mac was fined for underreporting its earnings. It had first started doing so in 1996, back when people were saying ‘Integrity and character don’t matter’.
c) The mortagage market was first deregulated back in 1968, but things didn’t get really look shaky until the 1990’s (again, on Clinton’s watch) when politicians began passing targetted legislation encouraging Freddie and Fannie to give out higher risk loans in the interest of encouraging home ownership amongst the lower class. Things got so bad that legislators were passing rules that encouraged Freddie and Fannie to invest in high risk loans in thier congressional district. That turned Freddie and Fannie into just another government pork project.
d) The real estate collapse is in no small part due to government intervention and regulation of the market through control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (‘government sponcered enterprises’). When you create a situation where private companies are taking profits, but the government is underwriting the risks you just have a bad situation. It’s nothing like the sort of market capitalism endorsed by those who want to see deregulation.
e) As for record oil profits, how the heck do you think that has anything to do with deregulation? The oil industry is hugely regulated, and turns over several times more in taxes than it makes in profits. Just witness the current debate over where the oil industry will be allowed to drill, and whether it will be allowed to build new refinaries, etc. The reason the oil industry is making record profits, is record demand. You put a cap on profits by American industries, and you are just begging the oil industry to be taken over by someone like the Chinese. It’s happened before. America used to be the number one ship building nation in the world, then Congress decided to kill the goose that laid the golden egg and within a decade private ship building in the United States utterly collapsed and now they are all made elsewhere.
I think celebrim has it half-right on the housing bubble.
So far, so good. Certain types of privatization work well—for all we ridicule airline service, fares are a small fraction (in real dollars) of what they were pre-deregulation. The type of privatization that applies only to profits, while the losses are socialized, not so good.
I don’t think celebrim has it right, though, when he says,
I’ve read this elsewhere. It seems to be the libertarian example du jour of how programs to help the lower class invariably end up badly (instead of trusting to the Invisible Hand), but I don’t think it’s backed up by the data. Let’s look at today’s wire service story (admittedly, non-specialized media often botch these). “Freddie Mac on Wednesday posted a second-quarter loss that was more than three-times larger than Wall Street expected as a huge number of borrowers with good credit fell behind on their exotic and risky mortgages. [my emphasis]”
As far as I can tell, the worst of the crisis is in lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class exurbs that have become undesirable on $4/gallon gas. Urban home prices aren’t nearly as affected. And you can hardly blame Congressional interference for the private sector disaster created by manufacturing bizarre, very highly-leveraged instruments out of these exotic mortgages. On the contrary, more regulation to prohibit or discourage these monstrosities (through supervision of the ratings agencies, for example) would have been a good idea.
Andrew J. Lazarus: I think you have it half-right on me.
I agree that the worst of the crisis is in upper-middle class exurbs, particuarly in Florida and California where housing prices were already high and many people say purchasing a larger home as an investment. But I believe this is the case of a the law of unintended consequences. Creating legislation aimed at making suburban homes more affordable for new home owners had the side effect of allowing riskier mortagages by middle class families on upper income homes where the object was to hold the property for a while and then turn a profit.
I really don’t care who the legislation was intended to help, whether the lower class, middle class, or upper class. It encouraged government sponcered enterprises to take on unacceptable levels of risk knowing that they were being underwritten by thier friends in Congress. That’s always bad. The fact that it was nominally targeted at helping ‘the poor’ (like myself I suppose, since I don’t own a home) is pretty much irrelevant. In fact, the cynic in me suspects that it never was really aimed at helping the poor, and that – much like McCain-Feingold – the ‘unintended consequences’ where the intended consequences all along.
The reason I can blame public as well as private industry for creating bizarre entities is that they knew that there risks were underwritten. If the money disappears, the guy writing out the instrument doesn’t lose anything. It’s just a big government backed unaccountable bureaucracy.
“On the contrary, more regulation to prohibit or discourage these monstrosities (through supervision of the ratings agencies, for example) would have been a good idea.”
It doesn’t really work. At a basic level, every bit of regulation requires a supporting bureaucracy at both the private and public level. The more regulation you have, the greater percentage of the costs of the industry are tied up in regulation. For example, nearly 20% of the costs of the health care industry are tied up in state medical regulations alone – and that’s not counting the cost of fraud. But a ponderous regulatory agency doesn’t gaurantee that what is actually intended gets accomplished. The more complex the regulations, the more likely things slip. (I know; I’ve worked with state medical databases.) Eventually, you get things into an eternal state of chaos where noone really knows whats going on and problems are buried under the mountains of paperwork and reutines.
But even if you have a perfectly designed regulatory system, serious problems will still occur because – as with Enron – people will engage in fraud. Laws cannot force people to obey the law. They can only punish for trespassing the law.
The most appropriate safegaurds are those that market capitalism encourages – a larger number of lenders (as a opposed to a centralized few) and competition. Good regulation is simple and encourages a healthy market – things like transparency, accountability, uniform industry standards where appropriate, and so forth.
_I look out the window and see 94% of the working population employed. I see industries thriving that didnt exist 20, or even 10 years ago. I see the poor with air conditioning and playstations and cell phones where poor in most of the world means starving. I see a nation producing so much wealth it can piss it away by the hundreds of billions and hardly notice._
And if you’re seeing the poor with these things – they aren’t poor. Go and venture into Appalachia, or the real poor inner city. For example, for years my family has collected clothing and donated it to a school. People there (ex coworkers of my father) know the people who are really poor, and have no choice but to wear the same thing day after day.
Where grown women break down in front of teenagers(then, me), because of the offer of tutoring, and have some of the local thugs declare my car off limits when I visit.
You know images of poverty. Not poverty. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t approach the low points of India or Africa – but not what you are saying.
_Government regulation is the reason a gasoline refinery hasnt been built in 30 years, or a nuke plant in 50. Its the reason gas stations are required to mindlessly sell boutique blends of gas in individual regions of the country, allowing single suppliers literal monopolies regionally._
Ummm.. Refinery owners have actively closed down refineries. Regulation isn’t the reason, as oil company CEOs have testified in congress a number of times that they haven’t been held back. In fact, they have been easily granted massive expansion allowances, almost without problem.
Skipping over your need to fact check when the last time nuclear plants were built, you should also be aware of the simple reason of Coal/NG plants (and other, peaker units) being cheaper to provide electricity.
Let alone the flat load growth for a good chunk of time, numerous nuke scares in the 1979-89, and overall shying away from massive investments with questionable return, and incredible efficiency improvements+single plant expansion – yes, all regulation.
_I don’t. I don’t begin to understand the toxic thinking behind that kind of position_
How hard is it? Just look at what is from the right as well. Politics as a hobby is incredibly destructive, especially combines with the anonymity of the internet. Take a look at posts 1 and 3 in this thread – pretending that bitterness and outrage is only belonging to the Left, which is something no rational person believes.
How many times have you seen comments along the lines of “Obama will destroy the country” or “Libs hate America!”. Just as much as the right has egged on militias and the like – which ended up with McVeigh and Rudolph, or actively chosen to forget(as celebrim has) what the GOP’s positions on Mogadishu and bin Laden was in the 90s.
Wonder how much of that we’ll see again if Obama gets elected.
_”And if you’re seeing the poor with these things – they aren’t poor.”_
Heresy I say! What about the poverty line?! I hope you didnt have reservations in Denver.
_”Go and venture into Appalachia, or the real poor inner city.”_
Cant say i’ve been to Appalachia, but i’ve been in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago- volunteering and with civic groups, and I see plenty of nikes and juicy. When beggers have cell phone you need to rethink what poverty means. Poverty in America is a direct result of bad decision making and it certainly hasnt gotten _worse_ in recent years. What we consider necessities have certainly changed.
_”Ummm.. Refinery owners have actively closed down refineries. Regulation isn’t the reason, as oil company CEOs have testified in congress a number of times that they haven’t been held back. “_
The problem with this logic is that the cost (in time and capital) of overcoming lawsuits and red tape to build refineries and nuke plants _is built in._ Before it ever hits the drawing board these are known quantities, which MAKES them unprofitable. Your reasoning is circular- nobody has tried to build a nuclear plant so obviously regulation hasnt stopped it… er nobody has tried to build a nuclear plant because regulation has already made it both extravagently expensive, time consuming, and a terrible risk the next time a greenie gets some power at the local, state, or federal level and decides to kill the project 2 weeks before opening (or whenever).
_”In the longer run, market power manifests in refiners failing to invest in capacity expansion that would be profitable considered in isolation. This is done in order to maintain restricted output and high prices. Again, however, it is very difficult to distinguish this from competitive behavior. Refiners face not just high capital costs, but also local and environmental opposition to refinery expansions and new construction. They also must be convinced that the refining market will remain profitable for decades before they can justify such an investment. It is virtually impossible for an outsider to infer from accounting data that there was a decision to restrict refining capacity in order to raise margins, rather than a hesitancy to build due to political and valid economic concerns.”_
Prof. Severin Borenstein
E.T. Grether Professor of Business, Administration and Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley
“Testimony”:http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=1804&wit_id=5156 before US Senate
_”It should be noted that the refinery capacity which was shutdown in the 1980’s and 1990’s was
primarily inefficient, small scale and technologically weak assets. The industry focused capital spending on making the strong refineries more competitive through better technology, energy conservation projects, and greater ability to run cheaper crude oil, and so on.”_
…
“It is important to note that the time to engineer, permit, acquire materials, construct, and start up a refinery could take a minimum of 5 years, assuming fast track permitting, site construction approval, and environmental reviews. In the US, this could take longer due to greater likelihood of permitting delays. For example, the proposed Arizona refinery began permitting processes in 1999, and is still in that process today. Consequently, we believe this forecast has no significant upside for more refining capacity before the end of 2010.”_
THOMAS O’CONNOR
Project Manager, ICF Consulting
“Testimony”:http://www.icfi.com/Markets/Energy/doc_files/refinery-testimony-oct2005.pdf before the
House Government Reform Committee,
Subcommittee on Energy and Resources
United States House of Representatives
I don’t see fury against one’s country and culture as self-hate. I see it more as parent-hate: a kind of enraged reaction against the forces that should have supplied a better world for us. It’s not an attitude for grownups.
Some of the posters above have a good point about the tendency of the greatest extremists on both wings to hate everything about their own culture and country. The corresponding right-winger to Skimble presumably is Timothy McVeigh. Isn’t the most virulent form of this thinking the state of mind the violent revolutionary needs to get into in order to become really effective and committed? “Nothing’s going to improve until we burn it down and start over.”
What I hear and read, in the conservative posts that I most often receive, isn’t so extreme, but it can be negative. Certainly I get a lot of email forwarded to me that takes the line that the country is going to hell in a handbasket in a socialist direction. Not too much of it takes such a mean-spirited an attitude as Skimble’s “oh, go ahead, you all deserve what you’re going to get,” but it’s not that uncommon for me to hear comments along the lines of “it will serve New York right if it gets blown up, considering Blue States’ refusal to take terrorism seriously.” In rightist postings, there’s an enormous bitterness directed against groups and types of people who are viewed as whining parasites determined to enact policies that will weaken or destroy our economy. This reviled group seems to correspond to the “evil corporate bigwigs” or shadowy religious right rulemakers who are railed against in the average leftist posting. My own leanings cause me to see parasites as a far greater threat than the average CEO or evangelist.
I agree with the posters above that what passes for “poverty” in this country has become silly. When I tutored illegal immigrant children in Houston living far, far below the official poverty line, they still had a TV, a roof over their heads, adequate clothes to wear, and plenty of calories. (Even luckier for these particular children, they had an intact family, which seems to be a more powerful indicator of the likelihood that basic economic needs will be met than any particular level of income. This family took care of food, shelter, and basic medical care before even dreaming of investing in gimmicks or gadgets, and there was no such thing as lottery tickets, fast food, alcohol, or cigarettes.) I had to wonder, sometimes, whether this family was getting along as well as it was because it was illegal and therefore (at least here in Texas) not eligible for much state largesse. They were just getting to work lifting themselves up. They weren’t waiting for anyone else to make it happen for them.
_When beggers have cell phone you need to rethink what poverty means…_
OK, but:
I lived in China from 2000-1, and cell phones were very common. Of course, China is up and coming, but there is massive poverty by the US scale.
I was in Iraq six months of last year. I had an Iraqna cell phone. Good? No. Available for cheap? You bet. Indeed, I am absolutely certain that the very cheap rates per minute I was paying was a total ripoff, by which standard the guy selling us Iraqna cards was making a fortune.
(And good for him! Didn’t hurt us.)
Before Iraq, I was in the southern Philippines — Tawi Tawi, places like that. These are stick shacks, some of the poorest parts of the world, thatched roofs, rusted sheet metal if they’re lucky. People there buy gasoline in a baggie, maybe part of one gallon is what they can afford to buy — but it powers a motorcycle or a chainsaw (lumber is an industry there). You see little shacks with these little plastic baggies hanging from the wooden beams, filled with a few ounces of amber gasoline.
What else did they have? Cell phones. And cards to buy minutes. Pretty high tech electronics, really, given the utter poverty of the rest of their lives.
The cell phone thing is one of the more interesting facets of the Third World.
(Oh, and you know who doesn’t have a cell phone here in America? Me. Way too expensive to justify… but somehow, across the third world, it’s cheap and easy.)
Grim:
Brother Blood.
I hate those Nazi skull-f**king gadgets. I hate listening to everybody in America argue with their baby-sitter, all day, every day.
I understand that some people have no use for solitude. I understand that for some people, those moments of the day which are not spent chatting with their friends are pure torture. Having no thoughts that they care to be alone with, even for a nanosecond, they must grab the cell phone and talk to anybody they can reach – which is everybody these days, because everybody walks around with a damned cell phone.
Sorry to go off on a Skimble rant there, but I really hate cell phones.
OK, you got me. I confess: I hate them too. 🙂
I consider it a privilege *not* to own a cell phone. Even with the resentment that seems to bring. “I was told you stepped out to use the bathroom, but that you didn’t have a cell phone. What’s up with that?”
Well said, Mr. Shaw. My mechanic was downright irritated today that he had to leave messages and wait for me to get home from my errands before I returned his call. He was kept waiting maybe thirty minutes by my failure to be instantly accessible — rank ingratitude on my part, to keep him waiting before agreeing to pay him a thousand bucks to fix my truck. 🙂
In this company, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I have a 2000 minute/month plan…
A.L.
Well, I just think that’s funny. My business depends on everyone being available all the time, and I try very hard (when things are hot) to stay available. I have home, office, and cellphone numbers for everyone I interact with, and they all have numbers they can reach me at practically all the time, and BlackBerry, too, for constant email access, and laptops with Aircards for transmitting big documents all the time. But I still find that I get answering machines as often as not. No matter how many people have cellphones, you still can’t be sure to be able to make contact whenever you like. When people choose to be unavailable, they’re just unavailable. Same with me: when I choose to be unavailable, I’m unavailable. But all that’s OT, I guess, sorry.
I love it. The post starts out with a bunch of dour Lefties complaining about what else– America. And the post ends with a discussion about cell phone usage.
My point? America is a pretty damn good place, regardless of who’s running the show.
I get paid a premium to be accessible 24/7. The mid-range cell phone plan I pay for gets me a bump in my salary roughly 20x its cost.
While I sympathize with the cell phone haters, and partially agree with the negative effects instant communication has on society at large… at the individual level, it’s worth noting every cell phone comes with an OFF button. Very handy feature. And if you’re clever you can make your shutdown sound a clip of “HAL”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 dying, to pick up some pop culture points and make a statement about the actual utility of the device.
“I don’t see fury against one’s country and culture as self-hate.”
In a country like America, it isn’t the ORIGIN of self hate, it is an EXPRESSION of a self-hatred that already exists. It is a way of transferring the emotional baggage onto an external source instead of looking at one’s self. It’s not the only way to do it, it’s just common. There is a sense of futility that often accompanies great wealth, especially when it is unearned.
This is why the most virulent anti-Americanism is so commonly encountered among younger folks (most grow out of it later) and on college campuses, where the people who didn’t grow out of it (to varying degrees) tend to congregate because that’s where the market for their ideas exists-among the young and impressionable. There’s a right-wing corollary with youth and church, but by and large most people in our culture are aware of this extreme and the dangers it presents. It is continuously propagated in popular culture, where slashers and chainsaw wielders are most commonly religious nutjobs intent on punishing the immorality of their victims. This contrasts with the left wing, which is usually portrayed as compassionate, but in real life is directly responsible for the murder of literally hundreds of millions over the last century. Socialism is, after, a non-rational belief system championed by a couple of self-hating, upper middle class kids that in practice resembles nothing so much as a religion that simply replaces God with the State.
I MIGHT use 30 mins of air time on my cell/month. I’m a college-educated professional with a “beautiful house” and a (seriously) beautiful wife who doesn’t live beyond his means or lobby the government to make other people pay for any of his bad decisions. When I need help, I ASK other people, and when I can render help I offer it. I’m not a particularly nice guy, I just figure that the social contract in a free society means that my freedom depends on me allowing others to have theirs as well.
Hell, I spend more time with my guns than I do my cell phone. 🙂
“The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”
Eric Hoffer
bq. Government regulation is the reason a gasoline refinery hasnt been built in 30 years, or a nuke plant in 50. Its the reason gas stations are required to mindlessly sell boutique blends of gas in individual regions of the country, allowing single suppliers literal monopolies regionally.
And I must add, forces the gas stations to do twice annual kabuki where gas formulations are changed for the summer/winter & during the cross over, prices spike up suddenly & severely. When the transition is complete & supplies are eased, prices settle down much more slowly but still manage to do so until suddenly its october/march and it’s time to switch again.
“It’s inferior even to Dungeons and Dragons.”
Ha ha. One of the best sentences I have read in a long time.
I am still waiting for the day that AL finally declars that most people who call themselves ‘liberal’ and vote Democrat do not mirror his values at all, and that most people who like what he writes are actually people who find ‘liberals’ appalling.
The most classic take on inverterant cell phone mania is a Finnish ad for Nokia that shows two schoolgirls sitting on steps after school with backs to each other at a 45 degree angle with cell phones to their ears *AND THEY’RE TALKING TO EACH OTHER!*