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[Nabubrush]

Fuck it, AK represent, yo. Also, I know Ted Stevens, and I'd just as soon get a real zombie in there.

[Arachno-capitalist]

My argument is simple. If there was a better place to work people would work there. If there was a better place to shop then people would shop there. when it comes down to it most people abandon their philosophical notions of nationalism and welfare of the common man as soon as a "Sale!" sign is put in the window. A minority of people  make it their personal missions to shun the megamart and support the local businessman because they get satisfaction out of that. I'm not convinced that spending money on American products will contribute to paying down my government's debt. My government has proven that it chooses to spend any money they get rather than pay down its debt.

[littlefallsmets]

You're assuming all sorts of things about people and their options.

Most people don't HAVE the option to not work at a Wal-Mart or some roughly-equal equivalent to Wal-Mart... in many cases, because Wal-Mart moved into a market and shuttered or economically weakened its extant local competition.

Most people don't HAVE the option to even consider applying philosophical notions to most of their purposes... in many cases, because a Wal-Mart type company came in and shuttered or economically weakened their employers and potential future employers.

You're talking about ideas that work perfectly well in the vacuum of theory and on the page of a text book... or for people with prior advantages that allow them the luxury of making informed ideological choices about their employment and their consumer choices. If this were a vacuum or everyone started from the base line of middle-class assumptions?

You might be right.

But it isn't a vacuum and most people aren't nearly as fortunate as you or I.

It's not that I disagree with the viability of your theories in a perfect theoretical world. I get how they'd work in that scenario.

It's that in the real world and over long timescales, those theories deteriorate under the weight of their own practical application.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Well I guess we'll have to disagree on the wal-mart story. All those books and lectures have been lieing to me.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Man that sounds similar to "my country right or wrong". Hope you don't mind if I keep asking for things to get better instead of saying that they could be worse.

I meditated on this while I was on the can and then again while I oiled my rifles and then again while I plucked a bird out of the sky with a hollow point. I'm still not sure how I feel about this. First you convince me to move to Alaska - now this. Get out of my head.

[littlefallsmets]

Well I guess we'll have to disagree on the wal-mart story. All those books and lectures have been lieing to me.

Well, man, I realize that you are being dismissive in a sarcastic/sardonic sort of way but...

Yeah, yeah they have been. From a certain point of view.

While I was certainly not an economics major, I took a coupla classes in school that were dual economics/history type electives and... what you have to realize is... who is writing those books, who is giving those lectures, who formed those theories.

And those theories were formulated and written and taught by people coming from a distinctly upper-class American perspective and even if not every person in that chain was born into privilege, the ideas came from a point of privilege and disseminated for the purposes of those in privilege.

I'm not going to be Conspiracy Guy and say that these theories are necessarily put forward to specifically torpedo a more just and sane economic model... though in some cases, that could well be part of the story... but they were created and popularized and turned into college courses by people working from the assumptions of starting the game from a level at least above the working middle class. The professional class, if not the elite born directly into wealth.

Those theories do work... if you're born on second base and need to perceive yourself as having hit a double.

They function exceedingly well for the purposes of those who largely generated the theories and those who largely consume the theories... those starting in the professional class and trying to work up or those born into wealth and trying to maintain or compound that luck-of-the-womb.

While some of the flaw might well be conspiratorial, the majority of the blame falls simply on the fact of a lack of being able to step out of one's perspective. These were ideas created by Ivory Tower Landed Gentry Conservatives, for the purposes of those Ivory Tower Conservatives and, indeed, work well for the direct private interests of those Ivory Tower Conservatives.

Those textbook writers and professors... and the people who came up with the ideas they're channelling back at an audience of students who are largely the children of at-least the professional class... can no more easily step out of their circumstances to understand the flaws of their theories than a dog can stop to consider the souls of the fleas it is killing by scratching its back.

It's outside of the dog's purview to consider that. His back itches and killing the fleas improves his situation, that's all he knows.

But because those theorists and professors are also incredibly well-educated, of course their theories are airtight garages of logic... sitting there on the page, every number checks out against every other number and it all looks neat and clean like a teevee machine.

And for the short-term applications of those who started with advantage, they do seem to work! There's no doubtsy-boutsy.

But for practical application, for the purposes of the vast majority of people, they're bullshit.

If you're saying, Ennewhy, that laisse-faire will probably work for you in your life, either because you come from privilege or believe that you will earn/luck your way into privilege that you'll want to preserve and multiply for your later life and for your descendants?

You may be right.

But deregulation and wacky bank loans and out-sourcing and multi-national corporations and downsizing and mergers and all the things that Reaganite Laisse-Faire Theory hath laid out... they're chewed out the core of the American middle class and, indeed, Middle America leaving us with... parking lots and closed down factories and dollar stores and wig shops and dusty children barefoot in the streets and... small gated communities ten miles out of towns, covetously guarding their churches and McMansions from the decay of the underclass rabble.

But the dudes in Ivory Towers in... A-CAP or... Syracuse University or... wherever... that's not their world, those things don't effect them and while most of them are just to set in their ways to even notice the actual larger effects of their theories, those who DO notice know that to reverse that decay would mean undermining the things that allow them to have McMansions and Ivory Towers.

So, yeah. The books and lectures are lying to you.

The good news is, they probably don't even know that they're lying, if that is some kind of cold comfort.

[Nabubrush]

Those theories do work... if you're born on second base and need to perceive yourself as having hit a double.

I like your shit, but this is the second time I know of that you have used this.

[littlefallsmets]

but this is the second time I know of that you have used this.

Really? Sorry about that.

Spring training on the brain. LASTINGS MILLEDGE FOR PRESIDENT.

[Nabubrush]

No problem. The first time I ever heard this expression was on that Pearl Jam album - is this a common saying that I am not farmiliar with?

[littlefallsmets]

I heard and started using that phrase long enough ago where I don't remember when I first heard it.

Though in the pop-culture sphere, that Pearl Jam song is probably its most well-known usage.

I don't think it's an exceedingly common saying, it's just that being a baseball guy, it stuck with me.

[AugustWest]

Stay in one persona, dammit!

[Doc]

US farmers and lumber get lots of government support. They're huge industries, which could be outsourced all too easily, but it's money which needs to stay in the economy...

Government tarriffs are one thing that make me apply my (I think) fairly liberal views in a fairly hard arsed way. I really don't like them because I feel they prevent the economy and job market from evolving, my impression is that they tend to make people complacent and fight to keep their old jobs when really they should be learning and building skills so they can get new and more relevant jobs. Sooner or later every job that can be outsourced to somewhere where people will do it for 30 cents an hour or done by a ***** will be and I see tarriffs as a temporary stopgap at best. If countries were forced to compete on a more even playing field I think governments in well off countries like ours would quickly realise that many developed countries have little to offer the world that cannot be had for cheaper elsewhere with the major exception of our expertise, technology and knowledge (oxford comma be damned!) and that these are what we should be exporting and what our governments should be throwing money behind so we have a well educated and skilled workforce that can really start competing on an international level. This also has to be done fairly soon since china and india are going to be able to surpass us (where they don't already) in these areas very soon. My (admittedly pretty extreme) end game with tarriffs as they are is that they slowly fail and all unskilled and lowskilled jobs slowly seep away until we have a huge unskilled workforce that are only suitable for service industry jobs and a country where everything is imported and we only make money selling it to each other.

The corrolory to this is that more judicious application of foreign aid could allow foreign workers to expect a standard of employment and payment that we have come to expect, this is obviously a much more difficult goal but would see greater wages and benefits to those in pretty despicable conditions and would mean we would see less jobs going overseas (though there would probably be wage cuts but it's better than the jobs going altogether).

[littlefallsmets]

I finally figured out what gives me an immediate reaction of distaste to a lot of your viewpoints. There is constant limitations, repressions and restraints, as well as herd behaviour but very little exibition of free will. I tend to think people can exercise themselves to do any damn old thing, obstacles or no. Your perspective puts me in mind of a viewpoint in which people, for the lacks within and without themselves, require shepherding. It's a nice entiment, but one I will not accept into my worldview.

As to free will... it's a nice sentiment, I agree. Sounds great in a philosophy text book, wonderful for speechifyin' about, slices, dices, juliannes, makes its own sauce in its already-included pan.

But... I'd also really like to be able to move a penny with my mind. I'd do it for hours as a kid, just concentrating on a penny, convinced that I could be telekinetic (at least a little bit) if I just put my mind to it. From time to time, even as an adult, I'll try it for a minute or two.

It's never happened. It's never gonna happen. Maybe one or two people CAN do it, for all I know. But that's immaterial. I ain't never gonna move that penny with my mind, all the free will, all the positive thinking and boot-straps and hands-up-not-hand-outs in the world...

That penny ain't doing shit.

Similarly, I'm never gonna get that time machine working so that I can fuck Sophia Loren when she was in her early thirties. Been working on that goddamn thing ever since I found out about that whole "putting your c*ck inside pretty ladies" deal back around twelve.

Milton Hershey went bankrupt fifteen times while walking to school through five feet of snow in shoes made out of broken glass because that's all they had to put on their feet back then... and he's got a roller coaster named after him!

...most of the people who go bankrupt pretty much never recover from it financially and some day they'll be an old person in a really shitty nursing home, hating themselves for never having been Milton Hershey.

America has this weird obsession with believing that everyone can be the exception to the rule. I ain't immune, I'm probably the biggest sucker born in the particular minute I was cut out of my mom... I'm trying to get paid to write movies... I could be the biggest rube in the whole damn Rubix cube.

We're so into the exception that we honestly believe anybody can be the exception. And we hate ourselves for never becoming the exception. And we hate everyone around us for not being the exception we were supposed to be, either. 98% of the nation hating themselves, thinking they're failures because they can't beat a rigged game.

A nation of sitcom-level get-rick-quick schemes. Pretending that stocks aren't just another way of buying lottery tickets. People taking out loans for houses they can't afford after the first two years, thinking the property value will go up so fast that it won't be no thang.

The only real person who ever got rich in a Horatio Alger story was Horatio Alger.

And yet there is this... Stockholm Syndrome. This "house slave" mentality. The self-defeating belief that instead of working to raise everyone up, we should instead try and be the fluke. Worship those who have touched The Magic and hope that we shall be like them, instead. Knock our brother-man the fuck down in pursuit of that goddamn rainbow.

Motherfuckers fighting over the crumbs of the crust instead of trying to get the whole pie cut up a little more equitable-wise. And like I say, that's me, too. I ain't... running for local office in Little Falls or... all bein' a lawyer to oppressed motherfuckers in South Central or... nothin'. I'm on a computer, in Van Nuys, talkin' all raw typing-style, drinking cheap wine and thinkin' my names gonna be on the bottom of movie posters.

It's as much my fault as anyone's. I am, we shall say, part of the precipitant, if you follow.

However.

I'm not saying that people need to be sheparded, so much as... there needs to be someone making sure the wolves don't get too goddamn saucy until there ain't no people no more at all.

Because most people who go bankrupt don't bounce back and be all roller-coaster-named in a hundred years. Most people just fade away. And... our responsibility as a nation or as a society isn't to the 0.5% of us running around with roller-coasters. Those aren't the people who NEED the help.

It doesn't say "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness... for dudes whose parents were rich or who hit the lotto or whatever". That whole part after the ellipsis isn't in there at all, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure those guys didn't say "dude" back then.

My ethos does not revolve around sympathy for dudes who drive Hummers with vanity plates bragging about their low gas mileage while another dude wakes up in the morning and has to decide whether to put on the Wal-Mart smock or shoot himself.

With sincere respect to all other points of view, I am rooting for that second guy.

[AugustWest]

LFM, prolix much?

[littlefallsmets]

I... have no idea what prolix is.

I looked it up and only found this: http://www.prolixlubricant.com/

I can safely say that I have never lubricated a gun, that I know of. I have done some crazy things on the sauce. If I have ever lubricated a gun, I do not remember.

But I definitely wrote half of that before running out to pick up my brother after work and do some shopping and then the second half afterwards. Perhaps that is what made my theories particularly gun-lubricating?