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%."

But in a world with massive inequalities in wealth, you simply cannot put cronyism aside. Humans are corruptible, and when some people own millions of times the amount of wealth of others, they can (and many do) use that wealth to slant the playing field drastically in their favor, apparently in order to ensure that nobody can ever catch up with them, or even do as well as they did.

This is the core problem with high levels of wealth inequality. Sociopaths win.

@chingalera
to say that every person who joins the military has some form of broken empathy system is just not accurate.
do they exist?
well i would have to concede that they do.what those numbers are is not something that can be quantified.(i looked..came up with nada).

i was in the military.
many people were in the military and they all had different reasons for joining.
for some it was a way out of poverty.
others it was duty.(which was my case)
some even due to a sense of honor and to fight for freedom.(yeah yeah..we both know how that reason turned out for them).

and i am sure sprinkled in that number of recruits were the sociopaths and psychopaths,and the number may have possibly risen due to the abolishment of conscription.

when you understand that boot camp is basically brainwashing 101.the young and fairly innocent are the easiest to break down and build back up in the model that you wish them to be.

killing is NOT a natural human activity.
it needs to be taught.
and who better than an 18 yr old?

for people such as you or i,who have a lifetime of experience,morality and well established egocentric systems in place this brainwashing would almost certainly fail.

who am i kidding....it failed when i was 18.i had a huge problem with authority even then.so i did my tour and opted out.

understand i am not making a moral argument for or against the military,just that these young men all had their reasons for joining and not all of them were to kill other humans.

and yes.
the military aint for everybody.

One of great things they discovered during the draft back in WW2 and Vietnam was that a certain segment of the general population were sociopaths and abuse victims-It was some of these, the best and the darkest, who became brass...Captains, majors, colonels, etc. Now that it's an all volunteer army, they can perform psyche-tests to recruit the complete shit-spectrum of the damaged-goods humans to become the next gen of soldiers, and then back home, they can become prison guards, police, and private security fucks, or your average psycho-criminal petty thug.

Yes kids, some soldiers actually enjoy killing anything that moves.

That one guys a complete retard who will get any battle-buddy killed. Bet he washes out or stays a private for 4 years.

A contest in which nobody particularly won. Especially the man best known for okay-ing racist headlines, engendering a culture of privacy invasion in the british press/media in general (yes, the culture that eventually led to hacking a dead girl's phone messages to get a scoop) and let us not forget using his own position as editor of a huge newspaper to further shares which he beforehand emptied his bank account to invest - going so far as to invest using his wife's name - yet somehow managing to snake his way out of losing his job.

The archetypal dirty, immoral, probably psychopathic/sociopathic/whatever the current buzzword is, utter fucking slimeball, piers morgan. Who thinks an argument is won by saying "I won."

Why do i hate america so much? After watching this video only one reason; they let you on TV you cunt. I insist that if he is forced out of the country, he is not allowed to return to britain.

Those two bimbos resemble hookers in appearance, apparent morals, and intelligence level. The bonehead who keeps putting on and taking off his glasses is a sociopath of the highest order. The black guy is a sell-out.

Basically these people are all pieces of shit and I'd be thrilled to hear they got ass-cancer from contamination in the studio.

Just the facts, ma'am: Your son is a drug peddling, user, dope fiend, dredged stoner deranged mentally maladjusted offender of this God fearing, drug regulating, fear inducing, hammer driving country. Down with the communism.

Kill yourself if you can't compete. And certainly an austistic child has no place in this society of sociopathic greed mongerers.

@Yogi
im gonna go out on a limb and guess you never dealt with the courts and CPS.

i have and this mans experience resembles my own.
i realize this is not conclusive proof of anything.my evidence would be anecdotal.

i had children with two women,
feel free to judge me,i dont care,the courts and CPS judged me plenty so i am used to it.

my two oldest boys were with a woman who i remained friendly with which translated to a fantastic relationship with my boys.i never experienced the courts nor CPS in any negative fashion.

conversely my two youngest boys were with a sociopath (no hyperbole here)
.we have no relationship.in fact we are totally enstranged.
tragic in all regards.

she used the courts to punish me.
she used CPS to harrass me.

and the attitudes of CPS were so much like this purple chick.
that somehow THEY knew better and they NEVER questioned the mother.
in fact one CPS "counselor" went as far as trying to force me to relinquish my parental rights.

when you get caught in this system you realize a few things very quickly.
1.fathers are the enemy
2.they know better than you
3.you know nothing
4.if the mother makes an allegation then it MUST be true
5.if YOU make an allegation you are just being contrary and bitter

the one CPS counselor was terminated due to falsifying records.
no shock here.

i have sat through interviews almost identical as what this man is experiencing.
the difference is i am a much more adept debater than this poor dad is.

i do not suffer fools lightly and when in regards to my children i am unrelenting.
i also realized fairly early that the CPS workers never had my nor my boys best interests at heart.
they spoke in legalese and authority but it was evident it was all about control.
to control me and dictate how i was as a parent.

ah...i remember those schoolings with fondness.a certain satisfaction in putting an arrogant,self-important knowitall in their place.

but in the end i still didnt get to see my kids.
so who is the loser eh?

goddammit.now im depressed......

It's almost as if he doesn't have journalist killed that are critical of his rule.

Who wouldn't trust the word of a homophobic, misogynistic, megalomaniac, sociopath.

I think people who hunt for machismo and bragging rights are a bit primitive, but I can still understand where @shang is coming from. Of course there's a thrill to the hunt; it's a challenge, a competition. Just because someone enjoys that thrill doesn't make them a sociopath.

My dad used to hunt when I was little, but he very rarely got anything. Years later he told me he started hunting because it was a way to spend time with his father, but he never really enjoyed shooting animals. At one point he had sat down against a tree to have lunch and a deer snuck up on him while he was eating. He gave her a piece of his sandwich and pet her for a few minutes while she ate it and then she wandered off.

After that, he stopped carrying a gun into the woods and started carrying a camera. From then on he was taking a different kind of shot, but the thrill of the hunt was still there.

To be fair, they really are more sociopathic rather than merely just psychopathic.

^ been called all-of-the-above, "sociopath" my personal favorite having been so-labeled by peeps without a clue as to who and what they themselves are or could be....

I don't think that the simple act of showing death should be all it takes for a video to be labeled "snuff." In my experience, snuff is inherently grotesque. Snuff films are made by sociopaths for sociopaths, and they really only contain a morbid gleefulness. They depict brutal deaths only for purpose of portraying brutal deaths, and are essentially murder-porn.

This video, on the other hand, is solemn. It shows tragedies, and I think it does so in a pretty tasteful way. There aren't exactly close-ups of the bodies.

@aaronfr-I can't elucidate more than a gut-feeling on the matter and a few questions perhaps.... Why in the fuck are they doing this and who is in charge?

What is the great necessity for such "readiness" and at whom would such an operation be directed?? The "invisible" terrorists who threaten the "American way of life, fuck you very much" OR as a means of overwhelming control should an open-ended lock-down occur and never end?

At face value, it's scary ball-flexing by the MIC who is used to doing whatever the fuck they deem necessary to maintain their control over the world full of slaves who are drunk playing the system's games by the system's rules, and it's complete insanity.

The only terrorists are an illusion created by the real terrorists, the 1 fucking percent.


OH, and they frequently use random events like a couple of punk Muslim freaks making homemade bombs to further their process of control-Opportunistic, scheming power-hungry control-freak sickoid sociopath inbred cunts, all.

Orrrr, dial it up about a hundred notches and start talking about how fucking stupid white folks are to have let a few sociopath-narcissistic white folks create a situation close to completely fucked??

Race baiting/conflict is a tool of the Babylonian machine