Messages

Show me someone who is worried about their taxes limiting their freedom and I'll show you someone who is way overextended on credit cards and someone who probably took out one of those fancy-pants mortgages that is causing the economy to melt before our very eyes.

It's called budgeting people.  If the taxes are putting that much of a crimp on your style, perhaps your style is more than you can afford. 

Fuck you! This is America; if I can use my credit card to convince me that I can afford an SUV, a $500,000 suburban house, weekly massage treatments, plastic surgery, and a new iPod every year, then I have a right to it and it's the job of the government to make sure bad shit doesn't happen to me because of it!

This, you understand, is dramatization and exaggeration. In many cases, predatory lending practices bordering on fraud are what got people into these shitty mortgages in the first place. Most people don't have a clue about the real estate market or what is entailed in buying a house. There are education programs out there, but most people naturally assume that the most trustworthy authority on the matter is their bank -- which it should be. So people trust the banks, the banks screw the people, and now everybody's fucked.

This is of course all because Clinton deregulated the financial sector in the 1990's, plus the Bush Administration's boneheaded handling of the first half of this decade (not that it's gotten any better in the last 3 years).

Unfortunately, even the shady lenders have to be bailed out now, otherwise the whole system will crash and we'll all be lucky to have so much as a tin of sardines to roast over the burning remains of what was supposed to be our American Dream.

discordianism can't be a real religion, because unlike any other religion, when you join a bunch of them and assume they all think like you do, you're always wrong.

the price of freedom is taxes, more than it is "self-sacrifice in the name of liberty."

secondly, don't blame taxes for your inability to get ahead in life (by the way, a flat tax would only make that problem worse, anyway). your inability to afford expensive shit is caused either by your unwillingness to further your own education and workforce marketability now at the expense of instant gratification, or your employer's belief that he deserves to be paid more than you do even though you do more actual work than he does. in either case, government programs and regulations can help -- either by funding continuing education or forcing the dickbags behind the desks to pay either higher taxes or higher wages.

no, but being smarter makes you a discordian.

Discordianism.
It's an obvious ploy to turn otherwise malcontented people with the potential to network outward and inflict damage to the machine, into harmless postulators of nonsense who will investigate anything from circus clowns to their own feces, find a few correlations between their experiment and larger societal patterns, then promptly publish their findings into a Kleenex and file it in the nearest wastebasket.

the only way to have a perfect society with no government is to drag our enemies into the streets and kill them.

Government isn't society but it's our mechanism for distributing services to our society. It's overgrown and leaning a little too far past the Fascist mark right now, but obliterating it and pretending we'll be better off without it is hardly the answer. Government is a necessary evil. The problem is that too many people have forgotten that.

At the same time, absolute freedom in the market tends to put a lot of people in the position of eating shit sandwiches for every meal, and taking all the taxes away tends to disintegrate a society to the point that even if people were willing to band together, there's nothing left to band together for.

And while I'm at it, libertarians and their "we don't need no stinkin' taxes" bullshit piss me right the fuck off. Who the fuck are these people to claim the right to live in any modern society full of modern conveniences, and expect to get all that for free? Where the fuck do you think the street in front of your house comes from? The Government Services Fairy? How do you expect to pay the people who are, at least once in a while, actually enacting public policy that makes your life better than the life of some poor mud-sucking victim of a corrupt Indonesian puppet regime? You'll drive a car made safer by government regulation down a street patrolled by government-paid police to your job where regulations cover you for pay and safety. For all my talk about taking down the System and bringing power mongering jackasses to justice, I do believe that if you live a good life, then you owe something back to the society that makes that possible.

Every modern society has a fiat currency, so the success rate there is better than a flat tax. Also, if RP hates restrictions on freedom so much, why does he want a federal law banning abortion nationwide? He's anti-war and anti-establishment and that makes him cool with a lot of people who are actually liberals and socialists but are too dumb to know how to follow policy, but it doesn't mean anything he proposes makes any real sense.

Taking our economy back to a 19th Century model sure as fuck doesn't make any sense. The Constitution doesn't technically provide any legality for the system we have now, but that's because economics wasn't very developed in 1787, and couldn't have predicted the need for a fiat currency or a global economy anyway, and the system we had wasn't working. Yes there's corruption and lots of people are getting screwed, but at least the economy provides for a certain continuity of civilization.

If you listen to RP's discourses on economics, you'll find that his views are vastly oversimplified and he makes a lot of assumptions that aren't necessarily true. I'm glad he's Fighting The Man and everything, but I'm also glad he doesn't have a chance in Hell of becoming the President, ever.

rp isn't a moron, he just plays one in his policies.

just to piss you off, roger, he's going to vote "present"

again - you probably aren't the target audience, but this is all i can seem to write lately. fucking election years.

From the mouths of "conservative" radio pundits and talks show hosts, and increasingly from supporters of Hillary Clinton, there is a constant stream of dismissals of the movement championing Barack Obama for President as simply a "personality cult" that cannot see beyond the "empty rhetoric" of a smooth-talking politician. He lacks substance, they say, he offers nothing but flowery speeches and an uncommon command of rhetorical devices and suggestive political maneuvers. He is unqualified to actually carry out the job of President; he is too easily swayed by opinion polls; his supporters are not a campaign but a "movement."

These criticisms, while I certainly understand why they exist, belie the way Barack Obama's critics completely miss the point of Obama's candidacy, and worse, vastly underestimate his supporters. Barack Obama, of course, does have sound policy plans and has been more to-the-point and more specific on just about every issue he is faced with than any of his competitors, facts that the pundits ignore because they are inconvenient. But even that isn't what makes them so terribly wrong on this "personality cult" business.

Barack Obama speaks the language of a growing number of people who are tired of PowerPoint presentations and sick of hearing their elected officials pander to the lowest common denominator in theory while worshiping at the feet of the already-too-powerful in practice. Faced with a government bent on self-interest and deafeningly silent on the will of the People; opposed in many regards by the very people they have elected to represent their best interests; jobless and homeless because corrupt corporations are "good for the economy;" dying of curable ailments because no politician is willing to risk donations in order to reform our health care sistem; millions of Americans already know what is wrong with the system: it doesn't work, and it hasn't worked for a long time.

To these problems, what can be submitted as a solution but Change? When people everywhere are desperate — not for more partisan bickering and deadlock, but for progress — what can they be offered but Hope? Must every conversation on public policy and the state of our Union devolve into point-by-point soundbites to be bickered about endlessly? Must the American people forever be insulted with the language of simple minds while those who do all the talking do nothing else?

Barack Obama does a lot of talking, that's true. He does a lot of talking to people instead of at them or about them. He talks a lot about problems nobody wants to admit they have, but who can't afford to ignore them anymore. He is making a lot of promises to a lot of people. He is putting himself forward as the answer to America's problems. But then, all the candidates are doing that.

But as one of Obama's supporters, I must say that I take offense to the suggestion that I have been enchanted somehow by his speeches, which, to be honest, are good but not the most moving speeches I've ever heard. Even as a person who defends Barack Obama to my friends and to people I've never met against the ridiculous accusations he has faced, I can honestly say that I don't feel like owe the man any particular allegiance or loyalty except as a person who shares my views about America and the world, and the one person who is most likely to be put into a position where those views can find a voice in actual policy.

I am an Obama supporter, but more than that, I am part of a groundswell of dissent from the common wisdom that the answer to a Republican is a Democrat. I cannot speak for everyone who supports Barack Obama, but I can say that most of the ones I have met who do express a similar opinion.

We are not fighting for Barack Obama the man as much as we are fighting for the People who have found him standing for them. We are not loyal to Barack Obama, we are giving him the benefit of the doubt that he can deliver on the promises he has made — not because he sold us on those promises but because those promises are the expression of our demands. Our support is based not on his charisma, but on his standing as an outsider in Washington and his record of achieving meaningful and effective compromise and cooperation with people any simple Democrat might write off as insignificant (and thereby achieve nothing at all).

Barack Obama cannot be America's savior, but he alone among the contenders for the White House is willing to give the American people the chance to save America themselves. He is not perfect, but he is tuned in to the voice of the one entity that is as close to perfect as any political body can be — the voice of the People, tempered with the fair judgment of Reason.

We are not a cult of personality, we are a generation of Americans who refuse to settle for mediocre and ineffective government. We are not sheep being led by a deceptive shepherd, we are a growing band of disaffected, disenchanted citizens who are declaring independence from the status quo. We are a movement, and we are marching to recover the ground lost by failures on both sides of the isle. In Barack Obama, we have found a chink in the armor of the power mongers who have betrayed our trust. And we intend to exploit it.

Let the pundits dismiss us out of hand as invalid and inconsequential. Let small minds be concerned with small things like the difference between a "Conservative" and a "Liberal." We are the People, and we do not need the blessing of small minds and small agendas to act in the best interests of our self-government. And if Barack Obama is ultimately defeated in his quest for the Presidency, let them wonder why the Cult of Barack Obama continues to wage war against incompetent and self-destructive government, even without its "savior."

as a parent i do not have the luxury of writing off the entire planet. it's cliche and everything, but i kinda do have an investment in the future.

SC: I appreciate the sentiment.

But something has made life marginally more comfortable in 1/3 of the world over the past 500 years, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't been apathy.

Problem is that it requires coordination, which we are unfortunately not very good at. Also, I can come up with ideas but I am not exactly a Commander type, and don't want that role, so part of the failure of this project is my responsibility.

The other problem is that to work as imagined, we need a shit load of people. If we got every single active person on PD, POEE, and EB&G to participate, we would maybe have enough. Obviously that isn't going to happen so we need to recruit from other places, and that takes time. A coalition of 60 people ready to act in a coordinated manner isn't impossible but compared to everything else we've ever done, it's an enormous goal that won't happen in just a few days. So that part of the plan was just unrealistic.