You know what is bullshit ?
Putting an asshole like Inhofe in charge of the Environment.

lying, evil, corporate owned, anti-American, sociopathic, uninformed, Republicunt$.

When I first started volunteering to serve at a homeless shelter, many years ago, I didn't know exactly why I was doing it. Certainly it felt like the "right" thing to do. I was at least confident that I wasn't doing it for personal gain because I didn't wear it on my sleave, didn't brag about it or hang my ego on my personal identity of being a good person. When dissillusionment set in, when I realized just how many of the people I was serving were homeless by choice, I pushed through and carried on...and I still didn't know why. I just trusted that I would get it one day.

Eventually I made a connection to the time I spent living in Sweden. In the town I lived in, every night a group of vagrants assembled in the market square. Every bit as dirty and drunken as the worst homeless person that most people imagine them all to be. Fighting, having sex in the public restroom, vomiting and carrying on loudly all night. But this was socialism, so they went home every night to their government payed for apartments. I realized that no matter what you do, there will always be a segment of society that just doesn't give a Fuck and is happy to take and never give back. We've all known these people. Family members, friends, acquaintances, who use up the good will of everyone they meet until they've got no one left to use and it falls to the larger community to support them. No economy, government or community planning will ever compell them to support themselves. We loathe them and shun them. Politicians with ulterior motives tell us that ALL homeless and disadvantaged ARE them. But it's a lie. There are the mentally and physically ill who have no support structure, who NEED their communities to help them. Most of these people were once functioning members of their communities who no longer have the ability to survive on their own.
And so I came to understand that it's better to feed a hundred leaches to serve a single helpless individual.

Boy was I proud of myself for realizing that.

And then I was layed off and my job shipped to India, followed closely by my wife spending a year in and out of the hospital, with no insurance. A careers worth of hard work, reduced to a data point on a corporate profit sheet. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, when the medical debt comes for me and everything I've built in my life is taken, to become a line in someone else's ledger. Betrayed by the greed in the system. Because I upheld my end of the social contract. I worked hard in school, excelled in my career, had two kids and bought a house in a neighborhood with good schools. But the system is run by the greediest and most power hungry. Politics and business is the domain of the high functioning sociopath. And to a sociopath, you're not a real person like them. You're a data point, a line in the ledger.

Then I came to respect the other segment of the homeless. The ones who rejected the social contract, who don't feel societal pressure to give more than they take. Because they got it right. It's all a lie. You don't earn anything in America. You don't deserve the fruits of your labor. You subsist at the whim of the people with money and power. And when it serves them, you get nothing.

We are all standing in line for food, hoping there's a room for the night.

@lucky760
um...what?
inmates are wild animals?

i guess i could get on board with your opinion if the parameters were exclusively directed toward extremely violent psycho/sociopaths.

otherwise your comment makes no sense.
2.4 million inmates in american prisons.the majority for non-violent offenses (think pot smokers),70% are non-white and to singularly lump them all as somehow being "wild animals" unworthy of participating in normal society,reveals a serious lack of understanding.

the american penal system dehumanizes and has zippo to do with rehabilitation OR corrections.
which is why i referenced the milgram experiment.

treat someone with humanity,even if they are paying a debt to society,and the results will always be a better outcome than what we do to prisoners here in the states.

the american penal system is a racket,a business.it commodifies the poor and those not deemed "of value" and its a travesty.something we should all be ashamed of,not celebrating.

The reason why these campaigns will get nowhere: the subtleties asked for are sometimes too arbitrary and too subjective to expect large numbers to go along with it and because women are not always mind readers (contrary to what this one may think), and misinterpretations can easily occur. Some dangerous psychos and sociopaths actually come across as being quite "charming," while some friendly and innocuous comments may be interpreted as being rather creepy. So, campaigns like this will get nowhere in actually changing anything for the better.

The skills of understanding context will continue to devolve as communities break down (along with families and childhood education). Increasingly, we are living in a society of strangers, and this is yet another result of the statism that progressives continue to defend. See, it's all about feeling safe. And without community, contexts that feel safe become more scarce. A state-driven "society" is not a community.

Meanwhile, in reality, the very attempt to legislate behavior like this will serve to further develop two trends: the "catcall" culture they so dislike and something along the lines of what's going on in Japan, the other opposite. Despite what this video attempts to portray, I have already heard the complaint many many times from women that they either get harassment or they get no attention at all.

And this'll be yet another "I told you so" that they'll miss.

Ayn Rand is still popular because she gives a philosophical fig leaf for sociopathic behaviour of the rich and powerful. Whether she was right or wrong is irrelevant, at least she sounded clever.

I got recommended to read Atlas Shrugged by a friend of mine. That friend turned out to be a beret-wearing high-art-snob ponce, but i didn't know it at the time.

I managed to finish it and whilst there were reasonable ideas in there that i think in some way we have paralleled in reality - whilst i find that most of her characters are sociopathic to some degree, i can very much sympathise with the idea of being led by the least capable in society who abuse the system of power that they shape and build to implement bad ideas badly.

I like the idea that the world would grind to a halt if the morons in charge did not have the ordinary, hard working people to keep things afloat... but that's about all i like about it. And i think we genuinely can see it happening in the world today in a less exaggerated fashion - the recent recession clearly demonstrated that the people in charge of money and property do not understand what they're doing and ignored the warning signs for years. Furthermore, our feckless leaders have done nothing about it, property bubbles continue to grow and bonuses for the upper echelons are still outlandish whilst the lower workers are struggling to get by in the recession. And then the expenses scandal of the MPs in Britain literally stealing money from the public pocket to have their moats cleaned (that actually happened) and such. Yesterday the watchdog looking into the scandal has decided that the investigation will take place in secret from the public and punishments will also be kept secret. Et voila, two clear instances of those in charge having no clue and no moral compass swept under the rug and forgotten about.

In conclusion, Ayn Rand is a very small minded individual who thinks that everyone in the world must think like she does. That is the only reason i can think of for the approximately 30 pages i read about the female lead character's personal sexual obsession with being taken aggressively by a man and made to feel defiled and used, and how all women feel that and all men wish to dominate and use a woman in turn.

But i think she got it spot on about how being led by those least capable morons will bring the world to its knees, and it won't require the hard workers to quit either. It just requires them to let it happen. And there's no little paradise to run off to, there's just Earth.

@artician - that's exactly it. The characters have no human empathy in Atlas Shrugged. I don't understand why it has to be all or nothing for most people - all conservative or all liberal. Why not the best of both? It IS possible to be ethical, productive and innovative at the same time.

Sociopaths

@ChaosEngine I understand wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt. It does sound unfair, but my outlook is colored by the multiple police officers I know personally who think, talk and act that way.
It's disgusting, but time and again I've seen exactly how the institution works inside, and I know too many guys who became cops because they "get to beat the shit out of people".
The people I'm speaking of are truly sociopathic masochists and assholes. It has always been primarily in urban areas (Sacramento, Oakland, LA), and the problem runs straight through the institution end-to-end.
I have police in my family, some of them are good people. I know that a lot of police are good people, so I'm sorry for being so bluntly blinded by my personal experience-turned-anger. When things like this happen so frequently, it really gets my ire up.

Ultimately you're right, a taser would have been slightly more appropriate. Talking would have gone a lot further in the realm of humanity though.

He might be right... if he's only talking about sociopaths.

Self-righteous pricks have that effect on a lot of people. Especially the apparent sociopaths who seem incapable of empathy or understanding.

I'm not a violent sort of person, but I'd be damned tempted to give him that punch in the face and say, "You deserve far worse, perhaps a probe with a broom handle."

Maybe it has something to do with my wife having been raped. I don't take rape apologists lightly...and saying that -anything- justifies rape is being an apologist.

You seem angry, unstable, and/or trolling. You'd do well to chill out, relax.

It's interesting that you take responsibility/blame for politicians being sociopaths.

On what are you basing your claims that a single-payer would be a net gain? You're an economist now?

And I did look up the Australian health care system. Another disaster.

"This is hacky propaganda, quit placing yourself in the same corner as these pieces of shit from Campus Reform."

Classy.

Look. I understand that you're upset. Obamacare is a failure like all state programs.
Politicians are sociopaths, and that won't change, it never has been any different and it never will. Tough.

You can complain all you want, and you can try to tell me what to do or what to not do. It won't get you anywhere. You won't change anything to your liking. You won't get your Australian healthcare (and it's a good that you won't).

Shut up Stupid you don't get to post a shit whiny propaganda piece like this hunk of crap and not get taken to task for it. Now take your lumps you Breitbart wanna be.

It's this kind of attitude that allows the ONLY PEOPLE to be in the public spectrum calculating, over coached little nothings. We're the ones that are the victims here, we make it so no actual human beings can get elected because we make it a "job" only for sociopaths.

You go after someone who's not funny trying to make a joke while on a Late Night Talk Show, and whine that she's called people Knuckleheads. What did she hurt your feelings? Grow the Fuck Up this shit has nothing to do with the argument about Obamacare, it has nothing to do with "Marketing" it's a shit hatchet piece by some fucking morons and you post that shit here and DON'T fucking destroy it? You're not this stupid.

Also the Health Care system is so immeasurably fucked up due to bureaucracy that instituting a SINGLE PAYER System would actually lower the debt. We wouldn't go bankrupt at all, we'd come out ahead. A majority of Americans supported it back in the 2004 election, except the corporations which is why it wasn't brought up during the campaigns as an option. Till fucking GM learned that hey they're spending $2000 per car more in Detroit than Canada because of health care costs.

You can look up the Australian Health Care system on your own, suffice to say it's not brought up in the media as an example of socialized medicine because it's easier to pick holes in the UK and Canadian systems.

The grander point is, you're being a hack with this crap. This is the kinda shit we take the fuck apart because it's retarded. If a liberal was going around saying "Oh Laura Bush called young people a knucklehead" we would be right to fucking destroy that liberal douche. This is hacky propaganda, quit placing yourself in the same corner as these pieces of shit from Campus Reform.

Does that mean that there is an acceptable rate of harmful sociopathic behavior within human systems? So introduce large groups of calculating murderers into populations where the growth of humanity endangers the ecosystem?

No idea how much he is worth. But The Wire in general, and David Simon in particular, were involved in the financing of food banks and rehab centers in Balitimore. They couldn't skim it off their budget, unlike other individuals do for personal purposes, but they continuously ran charity after charity, on top of the money the production poured into the local economy.

If I remember correctly, they also left sizable accounts and donations during and after their runs, so I'd be willing to give him a pass where hypocrisy is concerned.

His point about a lack of guilt, the shamelessness on part of two mentioned individuals, still stands though.

During the first part, Simon specifically mentions that any additional income of his, particularly in form of tax brakes, does the economy no good. "You can only have so many yachts" is a rather fitting hyperbole in this case. So if a privileged individual actively weakens society to further increase his own wealth -- which is already at harmful levels, economically speaking --, the lack of guilt and shame becomes incomprehensible to many people, myself included.

And if a privileged individual then tops it off by likening his treatment to that of Jews in '30s/'40s Germany... well, sociopathic is one way to describe it. We all live in our own bubbles, but their perception of reality truly is disconnected to such a degree that almost makes me pity them. Almost.

I said "cronyism aside" to explain the pure theory. Of course cronyism throws a wrench into the system. And cronyism is a function of government-granted privileges. As long as you have the monopoly we call government, you will have cronyism. Plain and simple. The most potent way to "slant the playing field" is through the use of government: a powerful and widely accepted tool of legalized aggression and coercion.

In fact, that's one of the main 'uses' of government regulation: to ensure that others cannot "catch up." The minimum wage laws are an example (contrary to the rhetoric surrounding the issue). So is taxation. And currency inflation used to pay for the bailouts. The list goes on and on.

Sociopaths win when they can use government to prevent competition. And make no mistake, the government itself is rife with sociopaths. (One might say that it's a prerequisite!)

(BTW, what exactly do the sociopaths "win?" To my mind, any "wealth" they have was not "won" at all, but was stolen by force, using the government as a mechanism of income redistribution. Without this tool, they'd have no choice but to offer actual goods/services that others want to pay for, if they want any wealth.)

.....
(And just as I was about to post this, I found this!) You think it's harder for poor folks to climb the income ladder now than it was 20 or 40 years ago? You're wrong, say the folks at the Equality of Opportunity project. (Let me note that these are NOT "right wingers." Saez is the darling of many progressives because of some his earlier work on inequality.) "The authors of this study measured the ability of children born in different income strata from 1971 to 1993 to move into different income groups. For example, it found that a child born in 1971 in the bottom 20% of household earners had an 8.4% chance of eventually making it into the top 20% of earners by his or her 20s or 30s. The chances of a child born in 1986 making a similar ascent was 9.0%."