>> ^BoneRemake:

>> ^shuac:
Community- John and Shirley Foosball game
Ooohh, no I'm so sorry. The correct answer is Jeff and Shirley. Jeff and Shirley. That's too bad...Johnny Ola, tell our contestant about Videosift: the home game while Keyboard Cat plays him out.

That is correct, at the time I was masturbating to gay little people porn and the "actor" was named John smally, must of just stuck in my head. Thanks for the heads up.


Ok hands up...who immediately Googled "John Smally"???

>> ^shuac:

Community- John and Shirley Foosball game
Ooohh, no I'm so sorry. The correct answer is Jeff and Shirley. Jeff and Shirley. That's too bad...Johnny Ola, tell our contestant about Videosift: the home game while Keyboard Cat plays him out.


That is correct, at the time I was masturbating to gay little people porn and the "actor" was named John smally, must of just stuck in my head. Thanks for the heads up.

Yeah... let's give all the "little people" a fucking free pass because they have no balls to think for themselves, and think shitting on other people is acceptable.

"I was just following orders!" is the same bullshit excuse over and over and over. People need to get their collective heads out of their fucking collective asses, and start acting like normal human beings and not some drones who do everything they're told.

Yes, the chief of police and chancellor need to pay as well, obviously.

Its stupid to terrorize the cop. The chief of police and before her the chancellor ordered the police to do it. Stop crapping on the poor little people. If you dont want to be a moron about this, then do this to the chancellor who gave the order and not to the dumb cop who is just as broke and 99% as everyone else.

and oh

Yet another pointless grammar nazi comment.
>> ^shuac:

>> ^Morganth:
Flooding someone's email, personal, and home phones constitutes criminal harassment. Ordering multiple pizza's to be delivered to them not only is also harassment, but may also qualify for some forms of identity theft.
1) I'm pretty sure Videosift does not allow videos that promote & are intended to propagate crime
2) You really want to counter their injustice with your own crimes and harassment? That would only be giving them fuel and reason to crack down harder. There's no way this actually came from anonymous.

Pluralizing the word 'pizza' by using an apostrophe-s is also wrong but, to my chagrin, we have no prohibition against it.

Better read again, because the articles do discuss equivalent jobs. But – because I anticipate (and compensate) for your laziness in advance…

http://blog.american.com/2011/07/the-value-of-public-sector-job-security/
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/07/19/group-says-ill-state-workers-paid-more-than-private-sector-peers/
http://www.dispatch.com/content/downloads/2011/09/BRT-Public-Sector-Comp-Study.pdf
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-03-01-1Apublicworkers01_ST_N.htm
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-10-05/news/fl-jscol-pensions-salaries-public-smith-1005-20111005_1_private-sector-government-workers-salaries
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj30n1/cj30n1-5.pdf

I implore that just once you attempt to penetrate the callus of propaganda that buries your free-thought. Public workers are not underpaid. They are – in fact – paid notably more than private sector equivalents.

The thing that really amazes me about your fight to screw people out of their promised wages

So the public should have to pay for the bad deals made in bad faith by unelected union scalps collaborating with politicians behind closed doors to arrange unrealistic benefits packages in exchange for power, labor dues, and votes? Nope. Not buying it. The public had no say in these deals, and therefore the public has no obligation to pick up the tab when those lousy deals made by crooks go belly up. Public workers should get mad at thier union mafiosos and the lefties that connive with them - not the private-sector citizens who had nothing to do with it.

77 Billion dollars?

That’s just for federal employees. It deals in no way with the many other areas where the Federal government vastly overspends – defense included.

77 Billion dollars is what you're saying is going to bring this country to it's knees? That's your "silver plated budget?" What a crock

The 77 billion is just one example out of literally thousands of areas where government overspending is indeed bringing the country to its knees. But – I never said that alone was the reason for the federal government’s budget failures. On the federal level the blame lies almost entirely on entitlement spending – of which federal employees are a significant portion but certainly not all. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are the primary offenders there. However, you are ignoring the Illinois example. Illinois’ budget woes are almost entirely due to paying its employee burden of wages, benefits, retirement, and health care. They offer gold plated packages, but don’t have two pennies to rub together.

As an American, you should be ashamed of yourself

Back atcha, Clyde. A real American wouldn't have anything to do with the commie BS crap you are cheerleading. The fault of everything you’re whining about lies at the feet of the liberals who ran these unions and governments into the ground. And you have the temerity, audacity, and gall to complain about grown-ups and other good folks that have to come in and clean up the filthy mess made by your philosophies? Leftists deserve to be pilloried, tarred and feathered, and then run out of the country on a rail for their bullcrap policies because it is leftists that have ruined these people’s lives. It is leftists who end up crushing the ‘little people’ all in the name of big government socialist policies. Leftists do more to squash human dignity and push more people into poverty, ruin, and oppression than any other philosophy in history. For leftists to gripe about conservatives who have to fix stupid liberal screw-ups in order to save the system from collapse is pretty rich. What's your solution? Oh yeah - tax and spend. The same level of stupid that got us here in the first place. The solution is conservatism which means cutting back - and yes that means on stupid contracts made with evil unions that put unrealistic burdens on the private sector.

Yeeeeeah,

Except the link that you posted doesn't compare wages by "equivalents". It compares what public employees make with the entire private sector. Well, serving big macs and pumping gas are certainly important jobs, but the jobs in the public sector are more specialized, and so they mostly require educated people.

The "study" that you linked to was created by an organization of business people who's whole purpose is to show exactly what they wanted. That is: to imply that public sector employees make more money. When you compare for equivalent jobs, and add education into the mix, there's no study you can site that shows that public employees earn more. Except for maybe custodians, and good for them, they deserve it. Most private employers I know would rather bitch about immigration during the day, and pay people an illegal wage to clean up their shit at night when no one is looking.

And the second "study" you link to, also created by a partisan, republican think-tank to present their opinions as facts, is exactly the same. One of the most interesting things completely left out of the equation is that they're including the benefits of public employees who are already retired, and who accumulated those benefits on a scale that is drastically different from the one used for employees today. Here, in Oregon, those people with tier one P.E.R.S (public employee retirement system) benefits are retiring right now, or have already retired. The "public" have decided over the last decade or so, that since those people worked their entire lives on a promise of those benefits, it would be dishonest to take them away and treat those employees entire lives of service as garbage. Maybe you feel differently. Either way, employees are paid on, and accrue benefits on, a scale that offers much, much less than the old. That's what should be taken into account regarding current wages in any study of current pay, but it's not. And there are a million non-partisan peer responses out there that show that for all the education data they use, their conclusions are false. Look them up yourself if you're so interested in facts.

The thing that really amazes me about your fight to screw people out of their promised wages to make life easier for yourself without actually having to do hard work for it is this: In the AEI study, which looks more credible than the first (but should still be seen as inflated at best, considering the authors) the amount the taxpayers could save by screwing over fellow citizens is... :

77 Billion dollars?

Seriously? As you said above: "700 billion. Only HALF of just the deficit... anyone that thinks that the only place we need to cut is ‘defense’ and that’ll fix it all it living in a dream world."

So that's your big plan? Slash and burn our social programs, putting millions of people out of work, paying the essential workers minimum wage, and leaving all the people who rely on those programs in the dark, causing an unemployment crisis unseen in the history of our country, to save less money than we spent on the recent conflict in Libya that we didn't even fight in?

77 Billion dollars is what you're saying is going to bring this country to it's knees? That's your "silver plated budget?" What a crock of shit.

As an American, you should be ashamed of yourself. You're risking real people's lives by playing the game you're playing. And all for an insignificant fraction of the budget you're claiming. The attack on unions goes not only against your own interests, but against the first and most important amendment to our constitution. If people want to speak up for their rights, and negotiate their terms, well, get used to it. That's what we do here in America, public employees or not. Benjamin Franklin was a public employee, who you have limited his right to express his opinions and negotiate?

If you have a problem with the things people ask for, figure out a solution and deal with it yourself. Stop trying to get the ignorant and greedy to form a big enough group that you can legislate away the rights of your neighbors.

Jesus Christ, you wanna talk wage disparity? Why don't you try looking somewhere where the wage disparity, even with the biggest pile of evidence you can accumulate, amounts at a few thousand dollars per person at best. And spare us all your "search for the truth." Don't like the way unions work? Let them go on strike. Let them strike until they give up and are forced to accept the truth. Don't try to act like you still want everything to get done, but for less money by simply legislating people's rights away. When you do that, you'll see this country crumble before your eyes.

Stop attacking the little people to get what you want. Focus on the ones pulling your own strings.

I hate to wrap up, but my eleven-month-old is crying. I tried to tell him to go get a job if he wants some food, but all he does is whine when I do that. And if I keep typing anyway, pretty soon I'll be hearing from you about how I "might" be abandoning my children and sleeping with the guy in the next tent over.

Thank you to all the little people who helped remove the dread scarlet P from my cold dead hand.

LOL @ the "little peoples'" movement being set back at least 50 years.

@mgittle, @snoozedoctor, and one can wind that back even further into ridiculousness by saying "government is people, my friend."

Taxes go into government's pockets. Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings, my friend.

As an argument that raising taxes on corporations is somehow bad, it's stupid.

One can make the argument that corporate income tax at the end of the day winds up falling most heavily on low-wage employees and consumers, but if you make that argument then you're implicitly conceding that it'd be better for the tax burden to fall more heavily on rich people, which is the entire liberal position on taxes.

I think if the actual Republican position on taxes was "liberals won't tax the wealthy as effectively as we will", I'd probably be sympathetic to their position. But it's not -- the reason why conservatives make this argument is to try to make people think that taxing the rich is futile because they're always going to be able to pass the cost right back to the little people, so therefore you should lower their taxes.

It's not true! Rich people actually do have to pay taxes, and they can't foist all of them onto poor people without Republican help!

i can't prove my idea, but i don't think we had this many security guards 40-50 years ago.

I suppose government and corporations really need to keep the little people out (or down) but it really looks like every single building has a security team.

it would take a small army of ruffians to hit everywhere at once

>> ^VoodooV:
So how come we can't ban lobbying? Wouldn't that be something the people could get behind and completely overwhelm all the corporations? It seems like it would be such an easy sell since it's so anti-democratic.
Is there a genuine upside to lobbying at all?


Yes. Many good things come from lobbying. It is catching the ear of those who lead. It is an information pipeline. However, when 1000 phones are ringing into the halls of congress from big business, and the line is always busy for the little people, then it becomes a useless tool.

Look who was wearing little people pants yesterday !

In reply to this comment by kir_mokum:
oh, so she's a whore. i get it.

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner, of course you think your mock answers are better. I think I answered enough. If you want more answered you should email reason.


Well, I think my mock answers were at least attempts to answer the questions directly, rather than a series of attempts to dodge the question. Yes, there was quite a mocking tone to them, but they're all based on arguments I've seen other conservatives and libertarians make with a straight face when asked similar questions.

>> ^blankfist:

You can always head to http://reason.com/ to submit your questions for the next round of 'Ask a Libertarian Day'. You don't always have to ask grandpa blankfist.


The thing is, I'm not interested in what Reason has to say. My interest in having these conversations with you is because I care what you think. For some reason, I have this silly notion that you do care about the little people who're suffering, and aren't just putting on airs to try to get a tax cut by any means necessary.

I do mock and cajole, but turnabout is fair play. In any case, I mostly do it to try to shake you out of this really weird logical cul de sac you've fallen into.

At a minimum, I'd love to induce you to reexamine your deeply held beliefs, but these days you just dodge and weave away from the contradictions laid out in front of you, rather than try to untangle them.

nope, but you can direct them to places where they can learn the tools, or scrap the psa and use the money to teach stress management classes in schools. >> ^alien_concept:

>> ^peggedbea:
The idea that the abused grow into abusers is kind of.... meh.... Only about 30% of people who were abused as children grow up to abuse their own kids. Because 70% of us grow up to see ourselves in the eyes of every frightened child ever.
Abuse is about anger and it's about power. It's the inability to cope with stress or feelings of powerlessness. It's rampant in areas of high poverty, but certainly isn't non-existant in the homes of the wealthy.
Sure, I like the IDEA of PSA's.. but generally find them targeting the wrong side of the issue. This PSA targets the symptom, but not the root. If the root cause of domestic violence is power and an inability to cope with stress productively, then why can't we have a campaign to teach positive coping skills and educate little people and big people and even bigger people how to productively manage stress and take control of their own lives? ..... oh, right.. because that might actually EMPOWER people instead of just scare and depress them.

Because you can't teach people how to cope and manage stress in a 30 second advert?

>> ^peggedbea:

The idea that the abused grow into abusers is kind of.... meh.... Only about 30% of people who were abused as children grow up to abuse their own kids. Because 70% of us grow up to see ourselves in the eyes of every frightened child ever.
Abuse is about anger and it's about power. It's the inability to cope with stress or feelings of powerlessness. It's rampant in areas of high poverty, but certainly isn't non-existant in the homes of the wealthy.
Sure, I like the IDEA of PSA's.. but generally find them targeting the wrong side of the issue. This PSA targets the symptom, but not the root. If the root cause of domestic violence is power and an inability to cope with stress productively, then why can't we have a campaign to teach positive coping skills and educate little people and big people and even bigger people how to productively manage stress and take control of their own lives? ..... oh, right.. because that might actually EMPOWER people instead of just scare and depress them.


Because you can't teach people how to cope and manage stress in a 30 second advert?