in his defense...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Mary_of_Denmark
http://www.hellomagazine.com/imagenes/profiles/crown-princess-mary-of-denmark/5856-princess-mary.jpg

11 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^legacy0100:

I'm surprised that this hasn't been sifted before.


It has. 3x, in fact.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Extremely-lazy-Jack-Russell-terrier

Heh, I didn't even know it was from Denmark. None the less, don't ever do this. You will break your teeth eventually and that will cost you far more than a beer opener.

>> ^Lann:

Denmark won't let me have any fun. Humpf!


Damn! They really won't let you leave the country??? Booo!

Denmark won't let me have any fun. Humpf!

Happy Birthday, there's a cold beer and big warm hug waiting for you in Denmark, if you come by.




no homo

>> ^rougy:

@bcglorf,
The problem I have with your point of view mainly rests on the presumption that the people who were defrauded "got what they deserved." I just don't see it that way. It's sort of justifying the bankers actions.
When somebody who is in a position of power and respect, as are most bankers and investors I would say, you can't blame John & Jane Doe for trusting in their advice.
The bankers and investors should have known better, and the vast majority of them did, but that didn't stop them from spreading the lies and conning people into signing their lives away.
P.S. - I hope Greece defaults. Something is rotten in Denmark when entire countries must go bust in order to satisfy Wall Street.


The people I figure were defrauded were the ones investing in the companies that were carrying terrible bad mortgages but calling themselves grade A safe investments. Those investors were defrauded and have very serious cause for concern as they were outright lied to by people wanting to profit off them.

As for the people buying homes at inflated prices, I would say they hold some blame and some plain old bad luck. The ones that took on mortgages they could only afford if the home increased in price I do blame pretty readily. They took a big risk, and risk were they were informed. They knew that they were betting on housing prices increasing. They knew the terms they were betting under and what it would mean if they won or lost the bet. They lost and should take the loss. The banks encouraging and focusing on those bets lost as many times over as they had customers lured in. The difference is the banks were pocketing more profit and got tax payer assistance to cushion their loss while the customers were left to deal on their own. I'd prefer both were left to deal with the consequences.

As for Greece, I've only scratched beneath the surface still, but it is looking like their debt problems run much deeper than just social services spending. I'm very curious were the real turning/tipping point in this was. If anyone has any good advice aside from the lead Rougy already threw out that'd be great. My current trail is the 40% of the Greek economy that was purely public sector jobs. That makes for a house of cards that's very vulnerable to government cut backs. My province(Manitoba) is in that very same boat and it is federal transfer funds from the federal government alone that is keeping us afloat.

@bcglorf,

The problem I have with your point of view mainly rests on the presumption that the people who were defrauded "got what they deserved." I just don't see it that way. It's sort of justifying the bankers actions.

When somebody who is in a position of power and respect, as are most bankers and investors I would say, you can't blame John & Jane Doe for trusting in their advice.

The bankers and investors should have known better, and the vast majority of them did, but that didn't stop them from spreading the lies and conning people into signing their lives away.

P.S. - I hope Greece defaults. Something is rotten in Denmark when entire countries must go bust in order to satisfy Wall Street.

"If the Americans want to live the American Dream - they should move to Denmark!" Classic!

I find it interesting that most people are opposed to taxes, but if you take a closer look at what life is like in Denmark, France, Norway, Germany, Holland, you should realize that there's actually a beneficial way of spending taxes.

What does not benefit the hive, does not benefit the bee.

@dystopianfuturetoday

1. "well, if everyone works hard enough, can everyone be rich?" Of course not. It's a pie in the sky.

One of the biggest differences between careerists and collectivists is that careerists view society as a multi-sum game rather than a zero-sum game. (In a multi-sum game, the more one person contributes, the more he and everyone else benefits. In a zero-sum game, if one person gains, another must lose, and the balance is always zero.) Steve Jobs revolutionizing technology 5 times didn't make everyone else poorer, it made them even more lucky than they already are.

Liberalism is created by a genetic 'yuck factor' against hierarchy, so liberals feel that we can only be happy if we're well-off relative to our neighbors, rather than well-off in more absolute terms --that is, relative to the 99.99% of humankind throughout human history that were poorer than us.



2. In places with stronger social democracies like Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, the UK (among others) you see happier, healthier people and far less suffering, poverty and unemployment.

Those places are wealthy because they're filled with white people and they inherited infrastructure from previous generations. They could run just about any government policies and they'd still have high academic test scores. Use the same measurement on the US (only count white people (or count Asian Americans also)) and the US performs even better than Europe on just about all metrics (crime rates, academic test scores, health and medicine, etc.)



3. "Still, these people are generally anti science"

As soon as liberals stop opposing the human sciences, they can criticize others for being anti-science. I left academia to become a capitalist because I realized liberals were always going to prioritize tribalism over science, so the professional pursuit of knowledge was useless unless it's for the purposes of making money. Indeed, they view it as bad faith to even bring up the human sciences, despite their importance to human knowledge.



4. "@chilaxe I challenge you to be more critical with your politics; to question what you've been taught, who taught it to you, and what these people stand to gain from your support?"

I accepted your challenge years ago and became critical of my liberal upbringing. My entire family's liberal, and 95% of the people I've ever met are liberal. (I grew up in northern Califiornia.) I began to question what I'd been taught by my teachers and professors, 100% of whom were liberal.

The problem with market libertarianism is that it is "liberty" only from a wealthy person's perspective. Unregulated markets do nothing to guard against chattel or wage slavery, labor abuse, environmental destruction, violence or other kinds of exploitation. The libertarian defense to this is usually 'if you work hard enough, you too can be rich', but this argument quickly falls apart when you ask yourself "well, if everyone works hard enough, can everyone be rich?" Of course not. It's a pie in the sky. The other defense is that 'the magic hand will make everything right', which, to me, is indistinguishable from religious faith.

Market libertarianism is the best attempt yet at a moral justification for plutocracy. This is why you see plutocrats like the Koch brothers and the Scaife Foundation spending so much money promoting libertarianism. Though these are generally dishonest people, I don't think they are dishonest in their support of market libertarianism, I think they are true believers every bit as much as you or blankfist.

However, if you look at places like Chad and Somalia that have free market principals in place (small governments, little regulation and low taxes), the quality of life is very low.

In places with stronger social democracies like Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, the UK (among others) you see happier, healthier people and far less suffering, poverty and unemployment.

If you looked a little deeper past the ego stroking rhetoric about 'individualism' and 'meritocracy' you will see there is no substance to market libertarianism. It's a racket used to sucker citizens into freely giving away democratic power.

I agree that right-libertarians are the most intellectual (and arguably the most pure) type of conservative. Still, these people are generally anti science and anti academia, so (IMO) I don't think they've earned the right to justify that title just yet.

@chilaxe I challenge you to be more critical with your politics; to question what you've been taught, who taught it to you, and what these people stand to gain from your support?

This video has been declared a duplicate by the original submitter; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof declared by bareboards2.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Police-Brutality-Denmark

This vid is longer, due to some words tacked on to the end. Will make a nice back-up embed.