Lurker > Antifar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-trump-named-craig-phillips-to-fix-wall-street-w479332

In early 2007, a group of Morgan Stanley bankers bundled a group of subprime mortgage instruments into a package they hoped to sell to investors. The only problem was, they couldn't come up with a name for the package of mortgage-backed derivatives, which they all knew were doomed.

The bankers decided to play around with potential names. In a series of emails back and forth, they suggested possibilities. "Jon is voting for 'Hitman,'" wrote one. "How about 'Nuclear Holocaust 2007-1?'" wrote another, adding a few more possible names: Shitbag, Mike Tyson's Punchout and Fludderfish.

Eventually they stopped with the comedy jokes, gave the pile of "nuclear" assets a more respectable name – "Stack" – and sold the $500 million Collateralized Debt Obligation with a straight face to the China Development Industrial Bank. Within three years, the bank was suing a series of parties, including Morgan Stanley, to recover losses from the toxic fund.

The name on the original registration document for Stack? Craig S. Phillips, then president of Morgan Stanley's ABS (Asset-Backed Securities) division. Phillips may not have written the emails in question, but he was the boss of this sordid episode, and it was his name on the comedy-free document that was presented to Chinese investors.

This is just another detail in the emerging absurd narrative that is Donald Trump naming Phillips, of all people, to head up the effort to reform the Government-Sponsored Entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Phillips headed a division that sold billions of dollars of mortgage-backed investments to Fannie and Freddie. Many of those investments were as bad as the ones his unit sold to the Chinese. In fact, as Morgenson noted, Phillips became a named defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), which essentially charged, as the Chinese did, that Morgan Stanley knowingly sold Fannie and Freddie a pile of crap.

Morgan Stanley ended up having to pay $625 million apiece to Fannie and Freddie to settle securities fraud charges in that case.

Phillips worked in an area of investment banking that was highly lucrative and highly predatory. The basic scam in the subprime world in particular was buying up mortgages from people who couldn't possibly afford them, making those bad mortgages into securities, and then turning around and hawking those same mortgages to unsuspecting institutional dopes like the Chinese and Fannie and Freddie.

Phillips had a critical role in this activity. As Morgan Stanley's ABS chief, he was among other things responsible for liaising with fly-by-night subprime mortgage lenders like New Century, who fanned into low-income neighborhoods and handed out subprime mortgages to anyone with a pulse.

...

The worst actors in the financial crisis worked in this shady world involving the creation of subprime-backed securities.

Of those bad actors, there is a subset of still-worse actors, who not only sold these toxic investments to institutional investors like pension funds and Fannie and Freddie, but helped get a generation of home borrowers – often minorities and the poor – into deadly mortgages that ended up wiping out their equity.

Phillips, who helped Fannie and Freddie into substantial losses and worked with predatory firms like New Century, belongs in this second category. As Beavis and Butthead would put it, Phillips comes from the "ass of the ass."

Donald Trump, then, has essentially picked one of the last people on earth who should be allowed to help reshape the mortgage markets.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

The case you are making here is "once a statue is made, it wrong to remove it."

I think that's silly.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

The proper nomenclature is "boss baby," thank you
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

meingott posted...

the difference is that there was a war during the Bush administration. an expensive one. and the Great Recession.

These things did not end in 2009.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

It's not every day you see it laid so bare.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

UnfairRepresent posted...

Why? Its part of history.

So are Klebold and Harris. So is the Dred Scott decision. So is Watergate. It's fine and dandy to acknowledge and honor history, but when something bad happens, we don't sculpt the perpetrators out of marble.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/oil-gas-industry-power-builds-wells-near-schools-colorado-trumping-environmental

The political power of the oil and gas industry has been on display in Colorado this Spring. When an explosion earlier this month incinerated two men in a Colorado home near an aging oil well, the catastrophe could have prompted lawmakers to pass an initiative forcing the oil and gas industry to site such wells farther away from schools. But it was too late: Only days before the disaster, Republican lawmakers bankrolled by fossil fuel industry corporations had killed the bill to do just that.

The legislation passed Colorado’s Democratic-controlled House just after a University of Colorado study suggested a possible link between child cancer rates and proximity to oil and gas sites. Despite that, the Republican-controlled upper chamber voted the measure down — only months after the state Senate GOP was raking in five- and six-figure checks from major oil and gas corporations operating in the state.

An International Business Times review of campaign finance data found that individual and corporate donors from the oil and gas industry pumped more than $738,000 into Colorado Republican senators’ election fund during the 2016 election cycle, which immediately preceded GOP lawmakers’ move to kill the setback bill. In total, oil and gas industry donations comprised nearly a third of all the cash the fund pulled in during the election. The donations included a $45,000 contribution from Anadarko, whose well exploded in mid-April and which this week said it is shutting down 3,000 vertical wells across northeastern Colorado. The shutdown news sent Anadarko stock plummeting 7.5 percent in less than 24 hours.

IBT reviewed campaign finance records compiled by the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics. Those records showed that the hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry flowed to the Senate Majority Fund, whose website says it is “dedicated to retaining a Republican majority in the Colorado Senate.” In all, since the 2014 election when the GOP took back the Colorado Senate, the oil and gas industry has delivered $1.1 million to the Senate Majority Fund, and a total of $1.25 million to Colorado Republican Party committees. Over the same period, oil and gas interests gave just $16,235 to Democratic Party committees in the state.

Many of the largest donations to the Senate Majority Fund came from firms that only months later directly lobbied against the setback legislation, according to state documents reviewed by IBT.

“The oil and gas industry has a stranglehold on the Capitol right now,” Democratic Rep. Mike Foote, who introduced the bill, told IBT. “If they oppose a bill, no matter how reasonable, every Republican will vote against it. Simply put, that’s the only reason why our school setbacks bill did not pass.”

The Colorado Senate Republicans’ office did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Neither did Senate President Kevin Grantham, or Jerry Sonnenberg, the Republican chair of the Senate Agriculture, Natural Resources and Energy Committee that killed the setback legislation. Committee Vice Chairman Randy Baumgardner, a Republican, declined to comment.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Related:
http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/04/the-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-000395
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-39744030

Brazilian cities went into partial shutdown on Friday as the country observed its first general strike in more than two decades.

Millions of workers, including public transport staff, bankers and teachers, have been urged to take part by trade unions and social groups.

Protesters are taking a stand against the president's proposed pension reforms.

President Michel Temer says the changes are needed to overcome a recession.

"It is going to be the biggest strike in the history of Brazil," said Paulo Pereira da Silva, the president of trade union group, Forca Sindical.

Demonstrations are taking place across the country, with organisers saying they would focus attention on disrupting cities rather than small towns and rural communities.

Participants are opposed to the government's pension overhaul, which will be voted on in Congress next week and which could set the minimum retirement age at 65 for men and 62 for women. Public sector workers have been able to retire at much earlier ages.

A congressional bill to weaken labour laws also progressed earlier in the week, and the country is experiencing an ever-unfolding corruption scandal, which has been linked to many top politicians, fuelling further public discontent.

Some protesters set up roadblocks in various cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia.

The route to Sao Paulo's international airport was among those barricaded with burning tyres in the early hours of the morning.

Polls suggest President Temer is very unpopular but up until today he had not yet faced a mass demonstration like Friday's general strike.

Many private and public schools are closed across the country. In Sao Paulo - the country's biggest city - most bus, metro and train services are not operating. There are few people on the streets here and it feels like a holiday.

The government says the current pension system is unsustainable and is dragging down the economy. Unions say the president wants Brazil's poor and unassisted to pay the price for the country's economic woes.

Whatever the turnout is for the protest, Mr Temer still looks fairly strong in Congress. Earlier this week he won a vote for his labour reforms with a wider margin than needed.

This has been the hallmark of his administration: a president who is very unpopular in the streets, but is able to get things done in Congress.

A spokesman for the Anglican Church in the coastal city of Recife, Dr Juanildo Burity, told the BBC that it would also be taking part in the strike.

"Officially the Church has taken a position that encourages its members to be part of this movement, because it understands the political situation," he said, citing concerns over living standards.

A reminder that President Temer was not elected - he was banned from even running due to breaking campaign finance laws. He took power in what was effectively a legislative coup last year, wherein people with actual corruption issues ousted the former president, Dilma Roussef, on unproven claims of corruption.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

green butter posted...

rural america is not sexy nor can the voters be really manipulated for any political purposes

Uh, about that second part
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39743303/fyre-festival-turns-from-luxury-to-disaster-with-ticket-holders-stranded-in-bahamas

A luxury music festival in the Bahamas, with tickets costing up to $12,000 (£9,200), has been branded a "disaster", with reports of no security and cancelled flights.

Fyre Festival, co-organised by Ja Rule, promised a "cultural moment created from a blend of music, art and food".

Tickets included a flight from Miami, a stay in a "geodesic dome" and activities including yoga and kayaking.

But festival-goers, have described the event as a "complete disaster".

William N Finley IV has been documenting his experience of Fyre Festival on social media.

https://twitter.com/trev4president/status/857787891573022720

Fyre Festival has made an announcement on Instagram, saying flights to the festival have been cancelled.

"Things got off to an unexpected start at day one of Fyre Festival," they said.

Blink-182, who were set to be headlining, have already pulled out of the festival.
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Ticket holders were still making their way on flights to the island, but these have now all been halted.

"Due to circumstances beyond our control, and in line with a culture of safety, all inbound charter flights to the Exumas have been cancelled," festival organisers said.

"Your ticket and any funds uploaded to your RFID [contactless payment] band will be refunded.

"Thank you for bearing with us as we work through the growing pains that every first year event experiences.

"Revised itinerary information will be shared soon for the remainder of this weekend and weekend two."

Ja Rule has yet to comment on what is happening at the festival.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://theweek.com/articles/695025/why-democrats-need-stop-concerntrolling-trump-about-deficit

When President Trump released his new tax plan — all one single page of it — his critics immediately pounced on a glaring factoid: The proposal could add $5.5 trillion or more to the federal debt over the next decade.

"It will blow up the deficit and debt," declared Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), adding that "working Americans" will pay the bill. Jason Furman, the former head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, pointed to a projection that the debt increase would slow economic growth. The New York Times was ringing the alarm that the GOP is about to abandon its relentlessly austerian fiscal principles.

Obviously, this is the fattest of targets. The irony and hypocrisy of Trump's plan is sky-high. So I get the temptation to rake Trump over the coals for threatening to add to the federal debt.

Nonetheless, I must plead with Democrats: For the love of God and all that's holy, stop it!

Fear-mongering about the debt is just wrong on the economic merits. But it also undermines and destroys the very political values liberals seek to advance.

The claim that more debt will hurt the economy goes like this: More debt will lead to higher interest rates sometime in the future, forcing the federal government to hike taxes to pay those obligations. Those interest rates will crowd out private sector investment, and the taxes will slow the economy. The analysis that Furman highlighted takes this route, for example.

What this story doesn't tell us is how much borrowing we'd have to do before we start running a real risk of interest rate increases. It just assumed the risk is ever present.

But a quick glance at the data tells us the risk is minuscule: Interest rates on U.S. debt remain at historic lows. You may have heard economists talking about how America is stuck in an enormous savings glut: Huge amounts of money are sloshing around financial markets without enough assets (like U.S. treasuries) to invest in. On top of that, international trade relies on the U.S. dollar as its exchange currency of choice. So other countries are always trying to sock away big reserves of financial assets denominated in American dollars. Add it all up and demand for assets like U.S. debt vastly outstrips supply. Hence, low interest rates.

More borrowing by the U.S. would actually create more of those assets, bringing supply back even with demand. Once we've created enough assets to soak up the savings glut, then we'd face a real risk of higher interest rates.

The trouble with modern economic thinking is it more or less says that massive and persistent savings gluts can't happen. At worst, they should rapidly and naturally self-correct. So the models like the one Furman pointed to simply aren't designed to handle what's going on in our economy right now, and vastly overstate the effects of the debt load.

The next layer to this is the Federal Reserve. The central bank's job is usually described as managing interest rates. But how this works in practice is the Fed creates new money (technically bank reserves) with which it buys financial assets — again, usually U.S. treasuries. So in a pinch, the Fed can always create new demand for U.S. debt out of thin air.

Now, in the world as it exists, the Fed is an extremely inflation-averse institution that caters to the desires of big finance. It's far more likely the Fed will choke off economic growth too early than allow inflationary pressure to build too much.
...

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/jjcr5/til_mr_belvedere_had_to_stop_production_on/
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

billcom6 posted...

A city of 12,000 would never have that many tall buildings downtown.

Yeah, I think that's because it's a tourist district. But you aren't wrong. A city this size also probably wouldn't have such a big transit system/subway
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

chill02 posted...

do they have dlc on the xbox version?

It comes with After Dark, but I'm not sure if any of the other DLC is available yet
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

If they would like to be paid, they should do the work.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

"I think ice cream is too spicy."
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

SK8T3R215 posted...

Well the quotes are probably because they gave them raises 2 years before their contracts were to expire.

Good.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-american-airlines-raises-20170427-story.html

American Airlines is giving pay raises to its pilots and flight attendants, who have complained they are paid less than peers at other airlines. Wall Street isn't happy.

The raises come about two years before contract negotiations. Assuming they approve the increases, pilots and flight attendants will receive additional pay totaling close to $1 billion over three years.

At a time when American and other airlines are seeing higher costs for labor, fuel and maintenance while finding it difficult to raise airfares, this goodwill gesture didn't sit well with investors.

“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers,” Citi analyst Kevin Crissey wrote in a note to clients. Investors showed their displeasure by sending American Airlines Group Inc.’s stock down 5.2% to $43.98 on Thursday.

Rising costs hit the bottom lines of all the major airlines in the first quarter. American said Thursday that profit fell 67%. Earlier this month, United said earnings plunged 69%, and Delta reported a drop of 36%. Southwest Airlines Co., which also reported earnings Thursday, said profit dropped 31%; its shares fell 2.1% to $55.75.

The higher expenses have alarmed investors because airlines have struggled to raise airfares — although there recently have been signs that fares are heading higher after falling for about two years. American said revenue for each seat flown one mile, a proxy for average fares, rose 2% in the first quarter and expects it to rise again in the second quarter. United, Delta and Southwest all predict an increase in the revenue measures, known as PRASM, for the current quarter.

Despite the improvement in revenue, much of the discussion on American's conference call with analysts centered the decision to raise pay.

The union employees have been complaining loudly that they are paid less than their counterparts at Delta and United. Pilots now stand to get 8% more pay, and flight attendants 5%. American estimates the raises will cost it $230 million this year and $350 million a year in 2018 and 2019.

Chief Executive Doug Parker told analysts that the out-of-contract raises “might surprise or even dismay some of you because it adds costs to the airline.”

Parker called the raises an investment in the company that will lead to better service by employees and, eventually, higher revenue.

Time will tell whether the investment bears out, but Parker was right about how analysts would feel. Jamie Baker of Morgan Stanley downgraded American shares to “neutral” from “overweight,” saying the pay decision “establishes a worrying precedent, in our view, both for American and the industry.”

Oh man, those quotes...
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

I apparently forgot to save and lost some progress >_> but made up for it, now at 15K
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

A hurricane wall
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/27/us/weather-houston-hurricane-wall/index.html

Texas lawmakers are asking President Donald Trump to help them build a wall -- no, not that wall. Instead of a border wall built to keep immigrants from crossing into the state illegally, this wall would protect the critically important cities of Houston and Galveston from the devastating storm surge of a powerful hurricane.

Texas General Land Office (GLO) Commissioner George P. Bush sent President Trump the request in a letter, which was cosigned by more than 60 state and local leaders in Texas this week, asking for "$15 billion in federal funds to protect this vital area."

The Houston and Galveston bay areas are critically important to our national infrastructure, with 428 million tons of cargo flowing through the region annually. In fact, the Port of Houston and the Port of Beaumont are the 2nd and 4th busiest ports in the United States.

The region is also a critical hub for the nations petrochemical resources. The nation's largest Strategic Petroleum Reserve is in Freeport -- which is responsible for over half the country's jet fuel and the number one energy supplier to the US Military -- which makes protecting it "crucial to national security" said Bush in the letter.

Unfortunately, this economically vital region is also extremely vulnerable to hurricanes with 20 different hurricanes coming ashore within 50 miles of Houston since records began in 1850.
This includes the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 8,000 people and is the deadliest natural disaster in US history.

Despite this, Texas leaders warn that the bay area is "largely unprotected from hurricane related storm surge."

This vulnerability was highlighted in September of 2008 when Hurricane Ike devastated the Texas coast, causing $29.5 billion in damages and killing 74 people. Ike was the third costliest hurricane in US history, but could have been significantly worse.

The storm did not hit the Port of Houston directly, and weakened to a category 2 storm before landfall. In the letter to President Trump, Commissioner Bush claims that "a direct hit from (Hurricane Ike) would have resulted in over $100 billion in damages."

The most critical piece of infrastructure in the proposed coastal barrier system will likely be something called the "Ike Dike," a combination of seawalls like the Galveston Seawall, natural-looking embankments along beaches, and flood gates at the bay entrances, designed to protect the coastline from storm surge. The Ike Dike was initially proposed by Dr. William Merrell, a professor and researcher at Texas A&M University in Galveston, shortly after Hurricane Ike hit the region.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

jayj350 posted...

at the end of the day the entire purpose of youtube was not to make money

[citation needed]
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Capital is putting the squeeze on labor.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Sex is a lot cheaper than drugs or entertainment
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Step 1: find a comfortable place to lie down, preferably a bed
Step 2: close eyes
Step 3: ???
Step 4: sleep
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://www.ft.com/content/548baa3a-2a00-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7

Sitting across from Donald Trump in the Oval Office, my eyes are drawn to a little red button on a box that sits on his desk. “This isn’t the nuclear button, is it?” I joke, pointing. “No, no, everyone thinks it is,” Trump says on cue, before leaning over and pressing it to order some Cokes. “Everyone does get a little nervous when I press that button.”

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Obey first, ask questions later
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Nobody cares about the debt; it is basically always just a proxy for other concerns
https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/857690953070653440
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

mustachedmystic posted...

you didn't know how rock and roll looked until you caught your sister with the guys from the group
halfway home in the parking lot by the look in her eye she was giving what she got

Thought of this
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Ampelas posted...

Admiral, the manchild who claims to be a conservative wanting smaller government

To be fair, I don't recall see much (if any?) "small government" rhetoric from Admiral. His conservatism seems to me more an embrace of hierarchy and order.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

ZMythos posted...

Why is there such a disconnect between public opinion and corporate interests?

Because corporations are not people
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

UnholyMudcrab posted...

Not really liking the industrial zone in the middle of the residential neighborhood. There's gotta be a better way to do that.

Yeah, that was an early game move, needed the industry close to the highway; at least this way the trucks don't really have to go through the residential areas.

Been thinking about dezoning that area and replacing it with some high-density residential/commercial
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Some aerial shots


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darkphoenix181 posted...

Doctor settled cause he knew he would lose the case in court

else why settle? if he could win then he would got more money

Any number of reasons; maybe he and United just want this to be over quickly.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

I, too, believe that all former drug dealers should be dragged off of airplanes by cops.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/opinion/do-sweatshops-lift-workers-out-of-poverty.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1

In the 1990s, Americans learned more about the appalling conditions at the factories where our sneakers and T-shirts were made, and opposition to sweatshops surged. But some economists pushed back. For them, the wages and conditions in sweatshops might be appalling, but they are an improvement on people’s less visible rural poverty.

As the economist Joan Robinson said, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

Textbook economics offers two reasons factory jobs can be “an escalator out of poverty.” First, a booming industrial sector should raise wages over time. Second, boom or not, factory jobs might be better than the alternatives: Unlike agriculture or informal market selling, these factories pay a steady wage, and if workers gained skills valued by the market, they might earn higher wages. Factories may also have incentives to pay more than agricultural or informal market work to persuade workers to stay and be productive.

Expecting to prove the experts right, we went to Ethiopia and — working with the Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute — performed the first randomized trial of industrial employment on workers. Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.

We picked Ethiopia because its small export industry was beginning to boom. It offered a chance to see what effect these jobs would have at the earliest stages of industrialization. In addition to local exporters, many Chinese, Indian and European companies are setting up factories in Ethiopia, producing everything from clothing to flowers.

The factories seemed professional and clean. Whenever a new factory line opened, we saw long rows of applicants — mostly young, unmarried women. The factory managers supported our study because they shared our optimism about the jobs.

Since there were more qualified applicants than jobs, we had a perfect opportunity for a randomized trial. Five businesses — a beverage bottler, a garment factory, a shoemaker and two industrial greenhouse operations — agreed to hire qualified applicants by a lottery. We followed the 947 applicants who were and were not offered the job over a year, surveying them multiple times.

To our surprise, most people who got an industrial job soon changed their minds. A majority quit within the first months. They ended up doing what those who had not gotten the job offers did — going back to the family farm, taking a construction job or selling goods at the market.

Contrary to the expert predictions (and ours), quitting was a wise decision for most. The alternatives were not so bad after all: People who worked in agriculture or market selling earned about as much money as they could have at the factory, often with fewer hours and better conditions. We were amazed: By the end of a year only a third of the people who had landed an industrial job were still employed in the industrial sector at all.

It would be easy to see this as the normal trial-and-error of young people starting out careers, but actually the factory jobs carried dangerous risks. Serious injuries and disabilities were nearly double among those who took the factory jobs, rising to 7 percent from about 4 percent. This risk rose with every month they stayed. The people we interviewed told us about exposure to chemical fumes and repetitive stress injuries.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Bump
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/a-marxist-critiques-identity-politics/

One of the prevailing dialogues right now emergent from identity politics is that of “white privilege.” Do you think that concept is useful for understanding social structures?

I’ve written a little about the history of the term. It comes out of some groups that split off from the Communist Party in the ’50s, and really came to prominence in the’ 60s. Its primary architects were Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, and they called it “white skin privilege.” The idea of white skin privilege was that white workers had been bribed. The American ruling class, especially the Southern planter class dating all the way back to the 17th century, had bribed white workers with greater social status and privileges so they would not unite with black workers—from enslaved workers in the 17th century to super-exploited black wage workers in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s—and pose a challenge to the ruling class.

The idea was that white skin privilege was actually harmful to white people, because despite the fact that they were granted some advantages over black people, they ended up even more entrenched in their condition of exploitation precisely by accepting these advantages. As a result, they did not build a movement across racial boundaries to fight their common oppression. The fact that the idea of white privilege is used today to show why we can’t possibly unify—that’s a reversal of the core idea.

That’s quite an amazing phenomenon, that it’s turned into essentially its opposite. Now in an organizing meeting, any discussion that takes place between a white person and a person of color will be tense and guarded, because at any time the white person may be accused of white privilege, and thus denounced for bringing irreconcilable political interests into the group. That is a very different kind of politics, and not one that tends to result in open strategic discussions, building trust between activists, or effectively broadening towards a mass movement. But socialists have to understand that this also cuts in the other direction! If accusations of white privilege are made, it’s usually a sign that something is missing in that organizing.

The left has to provide a superior answer to the questions that people of color have and their very real grievances. Speaking as a person of color, I know that they are real. But a better answer has to be provided.

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an aspirin the size of the sun.

She's very attractive, but for whatever reason has never done anything for me. I can't really explain it
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UnholyMudcrab posted...

Before I click on the link, I'm going to assume this is more than likely because rates of gun ownership tend to be higher in more rural counties where there are fewer murders in the first place.

Right. And there are fewer murders not as result of gun laws or lack thereof, but largely stemming from population density. You get in fewer fights with your neighbor if he lives a mile down the road than if he lives in your apartment.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Obstacle2 posted...


Liberalism

faizan_faizan posted...

Authoritarianism
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

I accidentally clicked the "don't watch porn" option on the poll >_>
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

prince_leo posted...

Darkman124 posted...

but it is interesting how so many people who hate the welfare state are more open to UBI as a policy. it is encouraging. i understand it--mistrust of government drives mistrust of targeted govt services, but there is no target in UBI.

that's what has always been interesting to me
there are liberals, conservatives, etc. who are for it and against it. it kind of transcends our normal view on politics

It has support from both the left and the libertarian right, but I think those two groups have very differing ideas on how it would be implemented.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

Gus Fring
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Monday posted...

This is the second topic OP has made whining about the president just today.

It would be wonderful if the president didn't provide so much to complain about.

Back to the topic at hand: this suggests more scrutiny and focus should be applied to those around him, if they are in fact making his decisions for him.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

KarmaMuffin posted...

Maybe I'm unclear on everything involved, but doesn't it make sense that a society that has both capitalistic policies and socialist policies would do better than one that went full on in either direction?

Without getting into the specifics at hand, the assumption that the middle way between any two ideas/theories/opinions is best...has some issues.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

MFBKBass5 posted...

Tried watching the first episode of season 3 on FXnow and it kept giving me an error :(

:(
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an aspirin the size of the sun.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6PwIqZU8AA3qH1.jpg

A man unable to reach his love, but instead forced to look on from the outside, helpless to do anything. The man who founded Flavortown has now been banished to the cold, unforgiving wilderness.
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an aspirin the size of the sun.