I have to say that "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." is a much better slogan than Hollywood's "Hack the Planet!"

The first clue that you've been lied to is the fact that those whom you take your intellectual cues from insist on 'debate' instead of research. Could a skillful debater convince you that the concept of gravity is a lie? Or that the Earth is flat and orbited by the sun? In science, research is how things are debated. Doesn't it give you any pause that those whom you've put your trust in want to keep this scientific 'debate' outside of the realm of science?

One of your biggest problems is that you seem to believe that you know what you are talking about; that the random hodge-podge of political buzzwords and slogans you've been trained to recite are a legitimate and coherent point of view. Not only do you believe you know what you are talking about, but you also believe you've arrived at these conclusions through a process of thought and reason, rather than just mindlessly lapping up propaganda you've been fed by politicians, corporate think tanks and industrial PR firms.

There is no legitimacy to your arguments on this subject. You are completely, provably ignorant when it comes to climate science. It's a farce that we are even having this conversation. Not all points of view are equally valid. In the debate between 2+2=4 and 2+2=5, only one side is correct. You are squarely in the wrong. I don't say this to hurt your feelings, but rather as a service to enlighten you. Rather than getting angry at me for being honest, why not instead turn your anger upon those who have armored you in ignorance and sent you off to battle ill equipped, or better yet, why not turn your anger inward for your own gullibility and lack of independent thought.

Individual freedom starts in the mind.

>> ^quantumushroom:

I wouldn't accuse anyone else of lacking credibility when my avatar is wearing an Obama campaign button.
My political agenda is individual rights, freedom and property rights, all three hated--in varying degrees--by leftists. That damned Constitution, always in the way of free gifts to the people like Obamacare!
Why are you SHEEP are so quick to surrender the last tattered remnants of your freedom for a few faked graphs and a consensus of concerned-about-grants government scientists? You have no hard evidence to tie global warming to man-made activity, only consensus aka a bunch of labcoats in a room agreeing on something without proof. And I'm not jumping on that merry-go-around again. These proud scientitians refuse to debate so-called deniers. WHY? Instead they announced "All debate is over?" BS. BS. BS.
Global warming Climate change ain't about global warming climate change and never was, it's about socialists trying to seize more power and destroy individual and property rights.
Oh, and posting videos isn't 'borrowing' other people's ideas? Please keep your cute little comments stolen from south park out of my comment box.
Global warming BS serves at least one purpose, you libs get a taste of what it feel like to have your religion insulted.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
Instead of copying and pasting other peoples ideas, why not try thinking for yourself? If you feel that business shouldn't be hindered for any reason, then say so, but to actually fool yourself into believing that politicians and industry PR agents know more about science than actual scientists is just plain dumb. I've seen other conservatives on this site begin to distance themselves from this brand of ignorance. Why not give it a shot yourself? It would certainly help you to garner more respect and credibility - two categories in which you are sorely lacking.>> ^quantumushroom:
Herp Derp

The US's debt is only about 80% of GDP, I say only because Japan's is 200%. The fact of the matter is, even if the US does nothing, being the reserve currency and the most widely used currency for transactions means that yields on bonds are unlikely to spike so much as gradually creep up if nothing is done. It is going to cause an apocalypse tomorrow or even in 2 years time, but it will continue to hurt the economy more and more until something is done about it.

What's needed is a commitment now to moderate reduction in discrentionary/compulsory spending and moderate increases in taxes that will kick in 3 maybe 6 years down the track. It undoubtedly should be reduced in the long term but in the short term what the economy needs is fiscal stimulus.

The spending needed particularly right now is investment in retraining of workers to needed roles or subsidising apprenticeships/on the job training, because fact is the GFC created masses amounts of structural unemployment, people who with their skills, do not have the capacity to enter available employment. Infrastructure and R&D would also help to prop up a bearish economy.

The economy may return to growth with continued austerity but the cost would be an increase in the permanently unemployed as it has been clearly shown that substantial portions of people who stay unemployed for prolonged periods of time essentially become unemployable.

http://swampland.time.com/2011/08/29/ben-bernanke-embraces-obamas-reality-based-presidency/

This isn't a particularly good article but read the lines that he quotes from Bernanke. This is a concise, frank and objective opinion by an individual not bound to populist dogma or partisan slogans.

>> ^Lawdeedaw:

>> ^Boise_Lib:
Previous comments notwithstanding, I actually believe that Ron Paul is a stand-up guy who says what he sees as the truth--and won't change what he says because of a poll. I could really get behind him if he would just embrace a rational, twenty-first century fiscal policy.

Problem Boise, who has had a sound fiscal policy?
We have how much in debt, 20 trillion? 30? 50? I don't know because they have hidden debt so well that it scares the fuck out of me. The fed could borrow and loan unlimited amounts, which is part of what we would owe...not to mention liabilities and such... Plus rotten infrastructure, half-assed programs that accomplish little, and so much more...
Is RP's policies worse than what has happened? I doubt it... But we will elect the same guys, just with different faces, who do this every time; because we vote on platform, not on actual people.
Here is a saying I made the other day while daydreaming about becoming a tyrant, I mean Congressman. "If you vote for an honest man you won't get everything you want. But if you vote for a liar you get what you deserve."

Are you ever going to address the fact that the Great Depression was ended by massive record deficits, followed by taxing the richest by over 90%?

Your entire argument is deficits never work, and raising taxes on the rich hurts the economy. I just gave you an irrefutable example of that being dead wrong, and you go into FDR's New Deal. Dude, I'm not debating the New Deal with you.

Prove that the US economy got out of the Great Depression without massive deficits (regardless if it was New Deal spending or WWII spending, it's irrelevant), followed by massively taxing the rich over 90% in the 1950s, during which the US economy was extremely prosperous.

That's the thing, dude. You can try to dodge this all you want. I'm not letting you try to move to discussing the New Deal, or Social Security, or how apparently communist George W. Bush (SERIOUSLY?!?!? WTFBBQ?!?!?!?) is.

This example in US history proves your rigid, ideological economic philosophy is dead wrong. You can't argue honestly that deficits are always bad, and massive gov't spending is always bad, and the US gov't can't help aid in turning around the economy. It most certainly can. It indisputably did. There's no "some fact" to this. It absolutely is historical fact.

That's the thing. Once you admit that yes, deficits can and do help end recessions, and taxing the rich more heavily can be good for the economy, we might be able to actually have an honest, adult conversation about how to help the economy. Until that, you're just spewing idiotic and/or intentional misinformation.

And then you just completely glossed over the entire reason why the gov't is almost always the one who HAS to spark the economic turnaround. We NEED the gov't to stimulate the economy, just as we need the gov't to put the brakes on when the economy grows too quickly, which is when those deficits can get paid for incidentally.

Are you just gonna sit there and call everyone other than the Tea Party communists, or are you actually going to address any of this?

>> ^quantumushroom:

The rich pay a higher percentage, and more taxes overall than the poor. Why do you think anyone is saying otherwise?

And that's absolutely how it should be, for the good of everyone, rich included.
But why doth "the poor," who siphon the "free" money, have no civic responsibility at all? Shouldn't they be paying something into the system? Or maybe "dependency voters" are needed by a certain political party?

It's perfectly sensible to talk about why some people don't pay any taxes at all. I'm not even debating that. But the rich should still pay more, regardless. The US has been one of the strongest economies for most of the 20th and 21st centuries with a progressive income tax, and it's been a heck of a lot more progressive than it is now, and we were still very prosperous.
The rich already DO pay more. It will do NO GOOD to shakedown the rich for ever more $$$. The problem with tax addicts is they can never get enough. It's too easy to spend money. Destroy the incentive to invest and/or create (or deny there is incentive at all) and you get stagnation. GOVERNMENT CREATES NOTHING.
Showing fraud in some programs doesn't mean the program should be abolished. It can be reformed as well. There are plenty of ways to do that. We didn't abolish welfare in the 1990s. We reformed it. And no, it's not true that private businesses will always create the jobs when the economy is down. History has proven quite the opposite. Why would a business invest to make more goods and services if there's no market for it. A downturn in the economy breeds more economic decline. It's called a business cycle, and it's a natural occurrence. If you were a business owner, generally speaking, if you know less people out there have the money to buy your goods and services, would you increase production and hire more workers? Of course not. Does the average person put more money into the stock market or take money out when the market tanks? Takes money out, which drains money for investing. This is basic micro and macroeconomics.
But what about now, when our cherished federal mafia creates INstability? No sane businessperson will hire now with the Hawaiian Dunce in office. I've heard this claptrap about government spending as savior before.
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Some force has to run counter to the natural tendencies of the market to force demand to increase, and of course this virtually always requires running a deficit. This is why slogans like "the gov't should be run like a business" are simplistic and wrong. The gov't should in those situations create jobs through various programs, thereby increasing income for the lower classes, which creates spending and demand, which then causes businesses to increase production, hire more workers, and that gets the economy back on track. You can site case study after case study in our history we've done this, and it worked.
But it's not working now, is it. OOPS! I agree that govt should not be run like a business. It should instead by treated like the dangerous raw force it is, because that's ALL it is.

We ended the Great Depression via defense spending in the form of WWII in record levels as the most obvious exaggerated example. That historically was qm's worst nightmare - record deficits in raw amount at the time, and still to this day historic
record deficits as a percentage of GDP during WWII, followed by a tax raise on the richest Americans to over 90%. And what calamity befell the US because of those policies? We ended the Great Depression, became an economic Superpower, and Americans enjoyed record prosperity it and the world had never seen before.
This is historical fact that simply can't be denied.
There's some fact in there, but the cause and effect seems a little skewered.
FDR was a fascist, perhaps benevolent in his own mind, but a fascist in practice nonetheless, the sacred cow and Creator of the modern, unsustainable welfare state. He had no idea what he was doing and there is a growing body of work
suggesting his policies prolonged the Depression.

Here's what happened - Democrats deficit spent as they were supposed to (which is exactly what the GOP would have done had they been in power, because it was started by George W. Bush), which stopped the economic free fall.
This is all quite arguable. Yes, Bush the-liberal-with-a-few-conservative-tendencies ruined his legacy with scamulus spending, but nothing--NOTHING--close to 3 trillion in 3 years! Spending-wise, it's comparing a dragster to a regular hemi.

Moody's didn't downgrade the US debt. It was S&P. They sited math about the alarming deficits which contained a $2 trillion mistake on their part. They also sited political instability as the GOP was risking default to get their policies in place, which btw still include massive deficits.
Do you wonder why you can so neatly explain things while the Democrats in DC, with their arses on the line, cannot? The failed scamulus has forced the DC dunces to change boasts like "jobs saved" to "lives touched". Apparently there's a lot more to this tale than the Donkey Version.

The GOP couldn't stop the Democrats from spending all that money?! Laughable.
They didn't have the votes.

The GOP started the freakin' bailouts and stimulus! What did the GOP do the last time there was a recession after 9/11? Deficit spent, then continued to deficit spend when the economy was strong. Dude, seriously, you have no factual basis for
that kind of claim whatsoever.
Compare taxocrats' dragster-speed spending of the last three years versus Repub spending during the 8 years before it. The argument of "But they do it too!" has some merit, but as the rise of the Tea Party has shown, business-as-usual is no longer acceptable.
Oh, and taxocrats, remember this: the Hawaiian Dunce considers anyone making over 250K to be millionaires and billionaires.

The rich pay a higher percentage, and more taxes overall than the poor. Why do you think anyone is saying otherwise?

And that's absolutely how it should be, for the good of everyone, rich included.

But why doth "the poor," who siphon the "free" money, have no civic responsibility at all? Shouldn't they be paying something into the system? Or maybe "dependency voters" are needed by a certain political party?

It's perfectly sensible to talk about why some people don't pay any taxes at all. I'm not even debating that. But the rich should still pay more, regardless. The US has been one of the strongest economies for most of the 20th and 21st centuries with a progressive income tax, and it's been a heck of a lot more progressive than it is now, and we were still very prosperous.

The rich already DO pay more. It will do NO GOOD to shakedown the rich for ever more $$$. The problem with tax addicts is they can never get enough. It's too easy to spend money. Destroy the incentive to invest and/or create (or deny there is incentive at all) and you get stagnation. GOVERNMENT CREATES NOTHING.

Showing fraud in some programs doesn't mean the program should be abolished. It can be reformed as well. There are plenty of ways to do that. We didn't abolish welfare in the 1990s. We reformed it. And no, it's not true that private businesses will always create the jobs when the economy is down. History has proven quite the opposite. Why would a business invest to make more goods and services if there's no market for it. A downturn in the economy breeds more economic decline. It's called a business cycle, and it's a natural occurrence. If you were a business owner, generally speaking, if you know less people out there have the money to buy your goods and services, would you increase production and hire more workers? Of course not. Does the average person put more money into the stock market or take money out when the market tanks? Takes money out, which drains money for investing. This is basic micro and macroeconomics.

But what about now, when our cherished federal mafia creates INstability? No sane businessperson will hire now with the Hawaiian Dunce in office. I've heard this claptrap about government spending as savior before.

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Some force has to run counter to the natural tendencies of the market to force demand to increase, and of course this virtually always requires running a deficit. This is why slogans like "the gov't should be run like a business" are simplistic and wrong. The gov't should in those situations create jobs through various programs, thereby increasing income for the lower classes, which creates spending and demand, which then causes businesses to increase production, hire more workers, and that gets the economy back on track. You can site case study after case study in our history we've done this, and it worked.
But it's not working now, is it. OOPS! I agree that govt should not be run like a business. It should instead by treated like the dangerous raw force it is, because that's ALL it is.

We ended the Great Depression via defense spending in the form of WWII in record levels as the most obvious exaggerated example. That historically was qm's worst nightmare - record deficits in raw amount at the time, and still to this day historic
record deficits as a percentage of GDP during WWII, followed by a tax raise on the richest Americans to over 90%. And what calamity befell the US because of those policies? We ended the Great Depression, became an economic Superpower, and Americans enjoyed record prosperity it and the world had never seen before.

This is historical fact that simply can't be denied.

There's some fact in there, but the cause and effect seems a little skewered.

FDR was a fascist, perhaps benevolent in his own mind, but a fascist in practice nonetheless, the sacred cow and Creator of the modern, unsustainable welfare state. He had no idea what he was doing and there is a growing body of work
suggesting his policies prolonged the Depression.


Here's what happened - Democrats deficit spent as they were supposed to (which is exactly what the GOP would have done had they been in power, because it was started by George W. Bush), which stopped the economic free fall.

This is all quite arguable. Yes, Bush the-liberal-with-a-few-conservative-tendencies ruined his legacy with scamulus spending, but nothing--NOTHING--close to 3 trillion in 3 years! Spending-wise, it's comparing a dragster to a regular hemi.

Moody's didn't downgrade the US debt. It was S&P. They sited math about the alarming deficits which contained a $2 trillion mistake on their part. They also sited political instability as the GOP was risking default to get their policies in place, which btw still include massive deficits.

Do you wonder why you can so neatly explain things while the Democrats in DC, with their arses on the line, cannot? The failed scamulus has forced the DC dunces to change boasts like "jobs saved" to "lives touched". Apparently there's a lot more to this tale than the Donkey Version.

The GOP couldn't stop the Democrats from spending all that money?! Laughable.

They didn't have the votes.

The GOP started the freakin' bailouts and stimulus! What did the GOP do the last time there was a recession after 9/11? Deficit spent, then continued to deficit spend when the economy was strong. Dude, seriously, you have no factual basis for
that kind of claim whatsoever.

Compare taxocrats' dragster-speed spending of the last three years versus Repub spending during the 8 years before it. The argument of "But they do it too!" has some merit, but as the rise of the Tea Party has shown, business-as-usual is no longer acceptable.

Oh, and taxocrats, remember this: the Hawaiian Dunce considers anyone making over 250K to be millionaires and billionaires.

The rich pay a higher percentage, and more taxes overall than the poor. Why do you think anyone is saying otherwise. And that's absolutely how it should be, for the good of everyone, rich included.

It's perfectly sensible to talk about why some people don't pay any taxes at all. I'm not even debating that. But the rich should still pay more, regardless. The US has been one of the strongest economies for most of the 20th and 21st centuries with a progressive income tax, and it's been a heck of a lot more progressive than it is now, and we were still very prosperous.

Showing fraud in some programs doesn't mean the program should be abolished. It can be reformed as well. There are plenty of ways to do that. We didn't abolish welfare in the 1990s. We reformed it. And no, it's not true that private businesses will always create the jobs when the economy is down. History has proven quite the opposite. Why would a business invest to make more goods and services if there's no market for it. A downturn in the economy breeds more economic decline. It's called a business cycle, and it's a natural occurrence. If you were a business owner, generally speaking, if you know less people out there have the money to buy your goods and services, would you increase production and hire more workers? Of course not. Does the average person put more money into the stock market or take money out when the market tanks? Takes money out, which drains money for investing. This is basic micro and macroeconomics.

Some force has to run counter to the natural tendencies of the market to force demand to increase, and of course this virtually always requires running a deficit. This is why slogans like "the gov't should be run like a business" are simplistic and wrong. The gov't should in those situations create jobs through various programs, thereby increasing income for the lower classes, which creates spending and demand, which then causes businesses to increase production, hire more workers, and that gets the economy back on track. You can site case study after case study in our history we've done this, and it worked. We ended the Great Depression via defense spending in the form of WWII in record levels as the most obvious exaggerated example. That historically was qm's worst nightmare - record deficits in raw amount at the time, and still to this day historic record deficits as a percentage of GDP during WWII, followed by a tax raise on the richest Americans to over 90%. And what calamity befell the US because of those policies? We ended the Great Depression, became an economic Superpower, and Americans enjoyed record prosperity it and the world had never seen before.

This is historical fact that simply can't be denied.

Here's what happened - Democrats deficit spent as they were supposed to (which is exactly what the GOP would have done had they been in power, because it was started by George W. Bush), which stopped the economic free fall. Moody's didn't downgrade the US debt. It was S&P. They sited math about the alarming deficits which contained a $2 trillion mistake on their part. They also sited political instability as the GOP was risking default to get their policies in place, which btw still include massive deficits.

The GOP couldn't stop the Democrats from spending all that money?! Laughable. The GOP started the freakin' bailouts and stimulus! What did the GOP do the last time there was a recession after 9/11? Deficit spent, then continued to deficit spend when the economy was strong. Dude, seriously, you have no factual basis for that kind of claim whatsoever.

>> ^quantumushroom:

this is what we've been trying to tell you QM, the system doesn't work when only a few contribute...the system works when ALL contribute based on what they can afford.
I totally agree, so why does the bottom 50% of Americans pay NO income tax? The wealthy already pay a disproportionately high percentage of all taxes and I have yet to find a liberalsifter who admits this.
I well understand that Scrooge McDuck won't miss a few more shovelfuls of gold coins swiped by federal bulldozers, but lets review reality:
1) The "extra" money attained by "soaking" Scrooge and Rich Uncle Pennybags (from the Monopoly game) will be pi$$ed away, like the 60 billion dollars EVERY YEAR lost to fraud, waste and abuse in Medicaid/Medicare. The federal mafia is composed of sh1tty stewards of our money.
2) The Hawaiian Dunce has spent 3 trillion in 3 years with little or nothing to show for it. So what magical number of dollars is going to make everything all right? A quadrillion?
3) When the socialists raise taxes, the wealthy of 2011 have their accountant press a few buttons on their computating machines, sending their $$$ overseas, invested in more stable markets. Apparently many already have, probably the moment they knew Obama was elected.
4) Liberal say, "Rich man not know difference he still rich." But there's now less money to invest and less money to create jobs. Now some liberalsifter will say, "This graph indicates that the rich don't create jobs with their ill-gotten gains."
BUT, if you're honest with yourselves, you'll know that one million dollars has a much better chance of creating jobs in the hands of entrepreneurs and investors than the government "Department of Creating Jobs" which probably spends that much just on office furniture.
5) The debt limit 'debate' is total BS, always has been. Here is what happened: taxocrats burned through tax money at an alarming rate and there weren't enough elected Republicans to stop them. THAT'S why Moody's got scared and US was downgraded. Republicans can't communicate for sh1t anyway, and so the socialists and their media lapdogs managed to blame the right for this mess.
6) Warren Buffoon likes to be liked, I get that, but he should still STFU and make a real gesture. Giving a symbolic billion dollars to the federal mafia should do it. He won't miss it.

Haha, it's funny because it's about greed! (I really must get a new slogan...)

Actually, those ads which depict men as lousy at childrearing and housework are just a subtler form of sexism (towards women, of course, but also men imo), but not misandry. The implied message is "housework and childrearing are the woman's job, only she's good at it", basically regurgitating the same crap from the 50s, but more perniciously.

There's this absolutely pathetic ad for Renault*, for example, which basically says "doing fatherly duties is emasculating, thankfully you've got our car to still be a man." (The slogan in French translates roughly to "so men can still be men", while the Spanish one says "fathers, but men", as if the two were contrary to eachother)

The reason why you won't see misandry in publicity is because, contrary to sexism, it is not an established cultural phenomenon, so advertisers know it will not reach a large audience.


*http://youtu.be/3Syyk7geHTY

In reply to this comment by DerHasisttot:
I do think there is a problem with misandry being accepted. I seldom watch TV, but especially in advertising, men in family-situations are often described as stupid or incapable, while there is a woman who rolls her eyes and does everything right. We don't see it the other way around anymore, and that's very good. But we should not see it either way imho. I try to look for an example.



Edit: Can't find anything at the moment, so consider it just my uninformed opinion :-)

In reply to this comment by hpqp:
No worries, assumed you did (btw, I was typing at the same time as you, so didn't see your comment until after posting mine : )

edit: the only reason why i didn't upvote your comment is because i don't agree about the "acceptance of misandry" bit. If i'm not mistaken this shining example received its fair share of criticism for being the spiteful crap that it is.

In reply to this comment by DerHasisttot:
Thanks. Him equating the hags with feminists completely fell under my radar. :-)

Edit: To clarify: I agree with all you said.

In reply to this comment by hpqp:
Those cackling hags are NOT feminists, they're stupid dicks. That being said, this loudmouth needs to get some perspective and not decide what feminism is based on a few singular situations.

For every story of a woman being treated preferentially (NOT what feminism is about btw), there are a million and one cases of misogynous abuse, lack of equal rights, rape perps and wife-killers walking free, "honour" killings, etc etc etc.

Most feminists will be the first to call out the hateful ignorance of situations like the one above, because it goes completely against what feminism is about, i.e. equal treatment. The way I see it, those dimwits (and anyone else who found this story funny instead of tragic) had something of an "Osama's death" moment, rejoicing over something unethical out of a sense of revenge for past (and present) misdeeds. Instead of using this situation to talk about the other side of what equality means - i.e. that women can be criminal/crazy/violent too - they took the low road of laughing at someone's mutilation. Shame on them, not on feminism.

It's like someone took all the worst of the Tea Party slogans and strung them together in one melodious whine.

Tea Party Theme Song. Jeesh.

It's like a perfect parody of what a soul-less ad man would come up with to create a completely generic 'wacky' ad to resonate with complete morons... The ridiculous slogan at the end is the cherry on the sundae.

"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.'"

-George Carlin

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Not a bad cover - but Kurt is spinning in his grave. I've always wondered about the title - what does "Smells Like Teen Spirit" mean? I suspect that Miley Cyrus smells like teen spirit.

Edit: via Wikipedia:

Cobain came up with the song's title when his friend Kathleen Hanna, at the time the lead singer of the Riot Grrrl punk band Bikini Kill, spray painted "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" on his wall. Since they had been discussing anarchism, punk rock, and similar topics, Cobain interpreted the slogan as having a revolutionary meaning. What Hanna actually meant, however, was that Cobain smelled like the deodorant Teen Spirit, which his then-girlfriend Tobi Vail wore.

>> ^blankfist:

@NetRunner, why do you think giving people more freedoms is trading for a system with no freedoms of any kind?

Because you're not "giving people more freedoms", you're talking about removing the institution that defends our freedom.

>> ^blankfist:
Right now, hypothetically if you made slavery legal, do you think slavery would come rushing back to the US? I'd venture to say no, because the world's opinion on slavery has changed, as it does and will do for everything we collectively see as bad.

Well "everyone" agrees that murder is wrong, but still people do it all the time. And frankly, I think there's less consensus on the idea that slavery is wrong than on murder being wrong.

It probably wouldn't come "rushing" back though. Our oligarchs have studied history well enough to know that they'd need to go through a slow roll out of such a thing, accompanied by some Orwellian rebranding.

My guess is that they'd start by expanding prison labor, and reinstituting the practice of sending people to jail if they default on their debts. Then they'd just continue the kind of right-wing dehumanization of poor people and criminals we see today. They'd probably couple it with how selling off prison labor contracts to private businesses will help them with the state budget or allow a new round of high-income tax cuts, but then I'm pretty sure I'm paraphrasing a Republican governor of some state when I say that already.

It's only one more step to go from selling a "prison labor contract" where the prisoner goes back to a state-run cell each night, to being allowed to be kept in bondage by the owner of his contract in a privately owned cell.

Then, voila! Slavery is back in the USA.

Alternatively, just abolish minimum wage, outlaw union organization, and crush what's left of small business with anti-competitive business practices, and come up with some snappy new name for "indentured servitude" like "work-equity debt reconstruction", and you're 80% of the way there.

>> ^blankfist:
Government is a necessary evil in the processes of human evolution, but an evil nonetheless.


Eh. I know this is one of your favorites, but it's a bit Manichean, don't you think?

People are ultimately the ones who make the moral decisions. Even then, I don't really believe in "evil" people, so much as people who do things that are morally wrong.

What's the NRA slogan, "guns don't kill people, people kill people"? Well, governments don't commit evil acts, people do.

Unless I see a candidate that can counter him with more than idiot slogans and faux-christian grand standing, he doesn't have any competition.

The ending with him riding a unicorn on a rainbow made me laugh