This is about where the line is...or if there's no line at all.
If some dude patted your behind, would you try to have them charged with rape, or even sexual assault? Would you even report the assault, or might it be unworthy of reporting?

What I take issue with is you repeat it doesn't matter until people get ridiculous prison terms or death, but when lives are ruined over nothing, or at most an innocent misunderstanding not corrected, too bad. Many, myself included, find that irrational and over-reactionary.
If someone treats you badly, you can't lambast them in the media from an anti nambla rally without some comeuppance, I think rightly.
Warning others outside of that guilt by association context is another matter.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

I'm as surprised as most everyone at how the election turned out. In the week or so leading up to election night, I considered the possibility that Trump might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, but not the other way around.

Still, as someone who thinks the electoral college is bullshit, consider this thing from all angles:

Hypothetical Possibility 1: At first, when I thought that Trump might win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, I thought that would be a good thing going forward. Both sides would have been screwed out of a victory by the idiotic system in recent memory, which might push for bipartisan support to scrap it.

But thinking further ... I don't think that would have actually panned out. The GOP establishment wouldn't have seen that as "their" candidate getting screwed, they would have been happy. They might have had to pay lip service to the idea of reconsidering the electoral college to pander to angry Republican voters who felt cheated out of a Trump presidency, but they could easily have just left it at that and sat on the issue until apathy took over again.


Possibility 2: The likely reality. Trump will win by electoral votes but lose the popular vote, and that will stand. The Senate and House are both Republican controlled, and the Supreme Court will very likely swing further in that direction. Possibly a LOT.

That sounds terrible. And it definitely means that in the short term, there will be absolutely zero traction for anyone wanting to push the idea of getting rid of the electoral college. BUT -- it also sets up a gold-plated opportunity to see real, actual movement on that front in 2 years. Think Trump is going to be horrendous? Think GOP-controlled Legislature will be abysmal? Look on the bright side -- if those expectations are correct, the blowback in midterm elections won't be a "wave". It'll be a fuckin' tsunami. And that's what we need to have a shot at killing the electoral college.


Possibility 3: Faithless Elector rampage. You can argue, with some merit, that the electoral college was intended to prevent or safeguard against exactly the kind of situation that we are in now. And I'd love to see President Bernie myself. But what would actually result if enough electors swapped to make that happen?

First, NYTimes projects Trump getting 306 electoral votes. That would mean that 37 faithless electors would have to happen to flip the election. You have to go back more than 100 years to find an election where there has been more than 1 faithless elector. There has only been 1 election with more than 37 faithless electors, and that was in 1872 because the candidate died. So realistically, it would be close to impossible to pull this off. (all info from wikipedia)

But forget the odds and just assume that it did happen. I think that would be a strategically terrible idea for Democrats, liberals, etc. Trump won because enough people didn't like the prospect of President Hillary and/or actually wanted to see what Trump himself could do. In either case, his voters generally aren't going to give him a whole lot of leash to screw things up or fail to deliver on their expectations. It will be next to impossible for him to keep those swing people happy. If Trump is 1/10th as terrible as the average Democrat expects him to be, he will alienate all of those people in very short order.

But if faithless electors "stole" the presidency from him (and you know that's how it would be perceived)? Oh, man ... he'd effectively be a political martyr. The anger and backlash would likely be apocalyptic and/or lead to revolt. Worse than almost any realistic way that Trump himself might fuck things up as the President. Even if that was somehow avoided, which I tend to think would be impossible, whoever got installed as President would have the shortest leash of all time, and a massively hostile and motivated Legislature that they would be forced to attempt to work with. Better have some sacrificial lamb to put in there that has zero political future, and even then they would probably cause massive damage to their party by association when they inevitably fall.

No, I think the clear best option is to let Trump (and the GOP) dig his own grave over the next year or two, and then graciously ride the wave of comeuppance.

... and one more for good measure: The Fury and Failure of Donald Trump by Matt Taibbi

Hell of a zinger right at the start:
"Keeping up with Trump revelations is exhausting. By late October, he'll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery. There are not many places left for this thing to go that don't involve kids or cannibalism. We wait, miserably, for the dong shot."

And it only gets better:
"Trump's early rampage through the Republican field made literary sense. It was classic farce. He was the lewd, unwelcome guest who horrified priggish, decent society, a theme that has mesmerized audiences for centuries, from Vanity Fair to The Government Inspector to (closer to home) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When you let a hands-y, drunken slob loose at an aristocrats' ball, the satirical power of the story comes from the aristocrats deserving what comes next. And nothing has ever deserved a comeuppance quite like the American presidential electoral process, which had become as exclusive and cut off from the people as a tsarist shooting party."

"Radical feminist"? Lame. WTF does this have to do with feminists. These are just stupid chicks getting their comeuppance for being violent assholes. Adding feminist (in the description, now removed) is so weak. Agenda much?

I agree you get physical with someone dont be shocked when you get your shit checked. They all seemed to have it coming as does anyone who takes a poke at someone. Never swing and not expect to have someone swing back. That's just being ignorant.

Also i know zero feminists (woman) that think its cool to get violent with a dude and not think they shouldn't be dealt with physically, although im sure they exist.

Ok let's say there's no cameraman present, but another certain kind of person who'd be happy to give that guy his fight. Let's say the guy got his jaw broken and couldn't work and couldn't afford hospital fees, and THAT was his payment for not being civil with other people?

Not ok with that either? Well what exactly are you ok with? Should the ignorant bastard who was offensive and (attempting to be) intimidating just get away with no consequences? Or worse still offered protection that was never afforded these poor protesters? What will that teach him?

I guess my opinion is i'm happy with the law of the jungle and in this case he got his comeuppance through twitter. Whenever you go around saying stupid things and acting like you're tough, you're taking a risk. It took effort to go there and be rude, but manners cost nothing. They tried to be nice, they tried to get him to go away MULTIPLE times. The guy put in a lot of work for what he got out of this. It's not like his life is over, no one will remember his name in a few weeks and he will have another job and he might not try to make people scared for their own safety in future.

*promote This makes me very happy.

Comeuppance and Public Camaraderie. Love it.

what qualifies as news is hardly relevant to what this idiot did. Every single one of us knows how idiotic/reckless/dangerous people can be on the road.

So it's very easy to see how we can derive satisfaction from someone getting their comeuppance after being an idiot/reckless/dangerous on the road especially after stupidly confronting the news crew. If you're going to cast stones, make sure your shit doesn't stink. And his shit really stunk.

As others have already said, he dug his own grave.

@ 3:13 -
"I'm sure that if this happened to me, it could happen to ...
...
...
... a bunch of other people."

I don't want to put words into his mouth, but let's just say what everybody hears there: it could happen to anyone committing the "crime" of driving while black.

@CreamK is right, arrest quotas and for-profit jails are largely to blame for crap like this; well, that and obviously the scum cops who came real close to getting away with it here. I'm a pretty pro-police guy, but a few bad eggs like this can sure cast a stink over a lot of the good guys. Glad they are getting some comeuppance.

Scary to contemplate how often this might happen with the kind of evidence that cleared him either A) not existing (gotta be REAL careful about how much benefit of the doubt we give law enforcement) or B) being successfully hidden and never coming to light. Very scary.

>> ^bobknight33:

And MSNBC isn't on it knees slurping OBAMA juice? Give me a break.




No, they are not.

Maybe they're not frothing at the mouth to regurgitate any half-baked horseshit conspiracy BREAKING NEWS story about muffins or cigarettes or secret UN camps like FNC, but MSNBC has close to as many negative stories about Obama as Fox does.

You probably won't read any of these statistics, since the little "liberal media" fantasy world you've created will crumble around your feet, but here you go:



(this is a study from August 2010, but it's no diff today, and maybe worse)

• During the past 90 days, MSNBC has run a total of 1,193 stories about Obama with only 44% being positive while 55% were negative towards the President. The positive to negative ratio is -11%

• In the past 90 days, FoxNews has run 2,064 stories about President Obama, 46% were overall positive and 53% overall negative. The ratio of Positive to Negative stories is -7%



Also, how the fuck does Anon expect to "shut down" Fox? I don't get it

>> ^bobknight33:

And MSNBC isn't on it knees slurping OBAMA juice? Give me a break.
>> ^TheFreak:
>> ^fuzzyundies:
Their comeuppance should be delivered by ... the power of free, informed markets.

Yeah, you let me know if you ever find any free and informed markets.
Fox is nothing but the proganda wing of the republican party preying on week minds. Take them down.

And MSNBC isn't on it knees slurping OBAMA juice? Give me a break.

>> ^TheFreak:

>> ^fuzzyundies:
Their comeuppance should be delivered by ... the power of free, informed markets.

Yeah, you let me know if you ever find any free and informed markets.
Fox is nothing but the proganda wing of the republican party preying on week minds. Take them down.

>> ^fuzzyundies:

Their comeuppance should be delivered by ... the power of free, informed markets.

Yeah, you let me know if you ever find any free and informed markets.

Fox is nothing but the proganda wing of the republican party preying on week minds. Take them down.

I'm not disagreeing, but what do you do when that judicial due process and the market are owned by the people the propagandists support?

If the propaganda supports those in power, and those in power support the propaganda, there is no due process to fall back on.>> ^fuzzyundies:

I don't respect Fox News in the slightest. I consider them to be intellectually dishonest, hate-filled ideologues who rely upon logical fallacies and inflammatory innuendo to organize and incite their audience.
However:
Censorship of or damage to Fox News is absolutely wrong. Their comeuppance should be delivered by judicial due process and the power of free, informed markets.

I don't respect Fox News in the slightest. I consider them to be intellectually dishonest, hate-filled ideologues who rely upon logical fallacies and inflammatory innuendo to organize and incite their audience.

However:

Censorship of or damage to Fox News is absolutely wrong. Their comeuppance should be delivered by judicial due process and the power of free, informed markets.