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Popular Thug Drink posted:A more concrete example would be infrastructure. The government spent money to build the highways, which then allowed new growth and development which would eventually return in a higher tax base. Functionally it's the same as a huge software company producing their own framework for other firms to use and generate revenue, some of which would eventually end up back in huge company's pockets. That's actually very different. Read about the railroad era of the 19th century and you'll see that all sorts of insane shenanigans end up happening when you let businesses control the infrastructure with no rules in place. Part of the reason we have a national highway system now and not a private one is all the bonkers poo poo that went on 150 years ago. If you let private interests control and construct infrastructure you can bet that they'll abuse it for profit. Similarly you can look at the phone system. While society had progressed to the point that not having access to a phone made existing in modern society difficult to impossible, or at the very least severely limited what you were capable of accomplishing, not everybody even had the possibility of getting a phone. It's also beneficial for emergency services that everybody have a phone as it gets messages of disasters happening out faster. This is a huge deal in cases like wild fires, which you want to respond to as fast as freaking possible. Yet "every community is wired to the phone network" didn't happen until the government twisted AT&T's arm and forced them to do it. Of course, what we've seen over the years is instances where telecommunications companies have wired everything up but are still abusing the system for profit. Cell phone companies, for example, were caught colluding with each other to keep monthly subscription fees artificially high. When it comes to the internet you see companies like Comcast setting it up so they're the only show in town and you can either have internet through Comcast, a company notorious for being extremely lovely, or none.
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Mar 4, 2014 20:03
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:This is going to be really difficult to argue against because it's a barely formed idea. A lot of the time free market true believers are impossible to get to shift even that small amount. They just know that private businesses can do literally everything better.
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Mar 4, 2014 20:42
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ProperGanderPusher posted:Money doesn't matter. They just blatantly despise the poor and figure drug use or laziness must be the only thing keeping them back. There's a lot of assumption that poor people are poor because they're all lazy shits that do drugs and drink and gently caress all day and that's it, as if unemployment only exists because that percentage of people just refuses to work or isn't looking hard enough or something. In live in PA and a lot of people were pushing for the drug testing thing here too. For a while, anyway. It seems that it died down after word got out that Florida is so corrupt they should build monuments to the levels of corruption they've attained and the program cost like 20 times what it saved. Whoops! Here in PA they also instituted a program where you were REQUIRED to go down to the job center and look for jobs a certain amount of time and, if you were collecting unemployment, go actively search for jobs. This is even if it was temporary unemployment because your job vanished for a few months for some reason or if you were taking time out to get new training because your job literally doesn't exist anymore. Like, you could sort of get unemployment and some money to go learn a new trade or something but the state still forced you to hunt for jobs. The whole thing changed unemployment exactly "not a single loving bit."
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Mar 4, 2014 22:34
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Discendo Vox posted:Man, where's the Powell love? Colin Powell publicly gave the GOP poo poo for turning into the hideous monster they've become today. He said they're racist, religiously intolerant, and really loving hate the poor. Powell was a Republican ultimately because of loyalty to America not because of loyalty to a political party and gave a public speech amounting to "You aren't the Republican party I joined, you're being a bunch of shitheads. Cut it out." They kicked him out and declared him a traitor.
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Mar 7, 2014 02:43
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hamster_style posted:Holy poo poo The increased unemployment from the shut down of 70% of a major spectator sport would be significant. In the already dismal economy many of the unemployed would remain that way and, increasingly desperate, some of them would, rather unfortunately, no doubt turn to crime. A Good Cartoon. sweart gliwere posted:Of course they'd immediately start stealing hubcaps and sticking up liquor stores - it is the nature of THOSE WHO PLAY HOOP In a way I like how this one isn't even a dog whistle. It's just so flat out, overtly, blatantly racist. It's right out there. The next tweet might as well just be "in case you forgot I hate black people." How long until we see tweets about feral urban youths? On the other hand it distresses me that somebody that overtly racist can, you know, be a Congressman.
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Mar 10, 2014 02:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:What part of pushing through (one of the) the largest healthcare reform bill in modern US history and sticking with it through 50 (!!!) attempts at its repeal does not show leadership, gravitas and the ability to "get things done"/"effect change"? Putin gets things done that conservatives like. I know it wasn't explicitly stated but that's what they're saying.
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Mar 10, 2014 08:53
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"If we cut taxes on the rich jobs will magically appear in the millions." "Taxes on the rich are already their lowest in 90 years." "We didn't cut them enough!"
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Mar 13, 2014 12:51
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Pththya-lyi posted:Also you should literally just go the places you want to work at and give them your resume unsolicited. The next time they're hiring they will definitely consider you over the boss' friend's nephew. I pretty regularly end up pointing out to people that "discouraged workers" are, in fact, a thing that exists. If it weren't for college and student loans I'd have no income. They always ask "did you apply at McDonald's? You should apply like everywhere." Well yeah, I did. Fast food places, retail, wherever. Nobody even bothers calling me back. There just aren't jobs. I can't make a job magically appear and, worse yet, I can't get around very fast or be on my feet for an 8 hour shift thanks to some damaged parts. While I used to unload trucks now I just can't do it fast enough to do it for a living. I'm not qualified to do much else at the moment and I live in a college town. Why hire a 30 year old when you can grab a 19 year old that can do the work twice as fast? Especially when you have a thousand applications to choose from. "So start a business!" No money. "So borrow some from your parents!" No parents. "So develop some skills!" Well yeah no poo poo, I'm a college student, that's like what I'm here to do but that only helps me AFTER I have a degree and doesn't help me at all in the inevitable time between getting a job and getting the degree. So what between then, starve? Thanks, I'll get right on that.
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Mar 13, 2014 15:34
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Landsknecht posted:It's amazing how most of these "outrage issues" have no sense of scale whatsoever; I don't know if the angry people just can't comprehend the size of budgets or what. They don't have a sense of scale and a great deal of it is propaganda anyway. It all comes down to how you say it. There was a bit about that on The Daily Show, actually, where Jon Stewart pointed out that the GOP was going utterly batshit about one $5 million expenditure but at exactly the same time was writing of another $5 million expenditure as small beans that didn't matter. They don't give a poo poo about scale. It's really a case of selective outrage. If $1 trillion were spent on buying every soldier a large collection of very nice hats it'd be totally cool but if you spent $1 trillion on new food production facilities that could provide every American with enough food for $0.10 a day per person they'd lose their goddamned minds. You see it a lot, actually. If money goes to a thing they don't like it's never ending ZOMG! GOVERNMENT OVERREACH OBLAMMO IS A SOCIALST! YOUR TAX DOLLARS WASTED! AMERICA IS OVER! but if the same amount of money went to a thing they liked you wouldn't hear a word. It's basically why they constantly harp on how wasteful welfare programs are while completely ignoring the fact that welfare is a tiny sliver of the government's budget.
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Mar 13, 2014 20:04
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VideoTapir posted:How many cake decorators oppose gay marriage, anyway? It was a convenient talking point to harp on ARE FREEDUMZ!!!!! and little else. I'm pretty sure 99% of cake decorators would be all "thanks for the money, here have a cake."
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Mar 16, 2014 14:10
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:The sad part is that to a certain extent it's correct. Where it fails is in two ways: that your choices are informed by things that happen to you (background, education, values, etc) and that the things that happen to you are not at all solely the result of your choices. These are the people that would organize a race and force one person to run twice the distance then yell at them for not training hard enough. Sorry dude that had to run twice the distance, if you wanted to win you would have tried harder.
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Mar 17, 2014 21:19
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Ron Jeremy posted:Fwiw, that picture of obama is from his time at occidental college, when he was 18-20 or so. Shut it. I won't have you and your "facts" destroying my argument. That isn't even the point; the point is that Oblammo smoked pot once (that MUST be pot, right? It can't be a cigarette because that invalidates my argument!) so he is OBVIOUSLY a communist gay lover that still smokes the devil's weed and is actively trying to destroy America and undermine Christianity from within.
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Mar 18, 2014 17:20
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babies havin rabies posted:I can't even fathom how people use mental gymnastics to act like being literally on the street is a vacation from all sorts of responsibilities or something. I'm not a saint by any means but I don't understand how people can be this callous when they have to think about that situation. The logic is that they got there because they're lazy and the horrible, dismal, difficult lives they lead now are punishment.
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Mar 18, 2014 21:11
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Moatman posted:Honestly, that wouldn't surprise me. In my experience, richer people tend to be more conservative (at least fiscally), and paranoia would come with wanting to protect your money. Me and people like me got where we are because we're just so awesome. People that are not like me did not do as well in life because they are inferior. Wealthy people tend to be white guys.
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Mar 24, 2014 05:24
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Cowslips Warren posted:gently caress, wasn't Katniss herself pretty tan/brown? I thought at least she was biracial. She wasn't white. Katniss and the people she lived near were described as olive, if memory serves. It's never explicitly stated but given that she lives in a hilly, forested coal region I'm going to guess that the intent was that District 12 people were descended from the various Slavs that settled in and around PA. In the book Katniss is from the working class, which is olive-skinned, and there is a higher merchant-ish class that's generally white. But yeah, Katniss was in that category of kind-of, sort-of white people. Olive-skinned folks are lumped in with Caucasians but not necessarily treated like they're white.
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Mar 25, 2014 14:51
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RagnarokAngel posted:The Vatican has never stated anything against vaccinations and frankly I don't see why they would. They're generally OK with scientific development as long as killing babies isn't involved in the process (Hence why they are mistakenly against stem cells). I think the Vatican is against embryonic stem cells rather specifically. I think the anti-stem cell fervor came about because people think that non-embryonic bodies don't have stem cells, which is absurd. Adults have stem cells. They aren't always easy to find and aren't as good as embryonic stem cells but really, the rhetoric used by some of the far right was "stem cells only come from murdered babies, we must stop this!!!!" The Vatican has become increasingly pro-science but the religious right as a whole is very anti-progress. It gets very muddled because different sects of Christianity have radically different views on science. Do remember that there are some sects that think that all medicine is inherently wrong and preventing people from dying ever is interfering with God's plan. Because I guess God's plan involves large numbers of children dying very young of easily preventable diseases.
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Mar 25, 2014 17:54
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Doomsayer posted:Doesn't Beyonce have a full-time staff of like 80 people anyway? As in, jobs she created? I seem to recall a story of her giving her employees a $45k bonus apiece last year. Bonuses given to poor people is communism. If she had business sense she'd have all the work done by unpaid interns and invest that money.
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Mar 29, 2014 20:49
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sweart gliwere posted:Cowboys weren't racist, I guess. And none of them used underage prostitutes. And they were all devout Christians who never raised a hand save for defending the innocent. gently caress, Blazing Saddles is more historically accurate than that macro. That's kind of their point, really. Conservatives pining for the past aren't pining for what actually happened but rather for what they want to believe happened. They want the fantasy not a reality. They watch westerns and think "this is what the west was like" when really, that's not what it was like at all. Mostly it was sparsely populated and boring. Few people carried guns. Almost nobody used them. Shootouts and gun duels weren't common and you could have your free land and prosperity wiped clean away by magic if a railroad decided it needed to be where you were. Many great fortunes were built by exploiting immigrants or engaging in legal fuckery on a grand scale. Corruption was rampant as was crushing poverty. Vast swathes of people were dying to the spread of diseases that are no easily preventable or just flat out don't even exist anymore. There were fencecutter wars. Gold rushes were often sources of misery when you consider that few people actually got rich and most people just moved in, grabbed a claim, and went broke. The other era was the 1950's, which were pretty awesome if you were a white Christian guy. If you weren't, well, you should have chosen to be born one.
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Apr 1, 2014 22:39
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SedanChair posted:Go on. "Civilians massacring natives" was more often the militia. Natives were also few in number by that point and were mostly crushed. Very few tribes managed to hold out until the 19th century. While I'm sure there were a lot of people just itching to massacre another tribe there weren't many left of note. By that point all the plagues and conquering of the last 400 years kind of did them in.
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Apr 2, 2014 02:56
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NatasDog posted:If only there were some event we could point to in 2008 before the election even happened (let alone before he took office) that put the economy into the lovely state that we're just now recovering from in any meaningful way. Yeah, that's all it really boils down to. The crash was initiated by Bush policies and started during his presidency but the low point was during Obama's presidency so obviously Oblammo is at fault. We haven't recovered yet so obviously he's a weak, ineffective president, so long as you ignore the five years of GOP congressmen literally sabotaging Washington's ability to do anything except rename buildings.
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Apr 4, 2014 00:09
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Mo_Steel posted:Man, think about it. Like, car seats and stuff. Why would I follow the laws just because BIG GOVERNMENT swears that infants should be in rear-facing seats to better protect their head and neck in the event of a crash. My children haven't died in a horrific and preventable manner, I'll just keep letting them crawl around on the front dash. That's how I show them FREEDOM to CHOOSE to be a goddamn moron. Pennsylvania recently banned texting while driving and even though it literally was getting people killed poo poo loads of people went absolutely bonkers because "MY FREEDOMS!!!" You have no idea how monumentally stupid people can be about safety in general. I used to be a safety guy and it's unbelievably difficult to get people to understand that doing an unsafe thing 200 times doesn't make it automatically safe. The 201st time might be the time where something goes wrong and somebody dies. Same thing goes for basic life skills like keeping emergency money squirreled away somewhere or having plans for when poo poo goes wrong. Something going wrong isn't a matter of "if" it's a matter of "when" and "where."
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Apr 4, 2014 08:33
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I've ended that argument several times by saying "Fine, I'm a Buddhist, none of my tax dollars can buy weapons or fund the military." Shuts them up reeeaaaaal fast.
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Apr 6, 2014 19:23
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:Apparently Liberal Logic 101 doesn't understand how logic works. Imagine that. Logic has a liberal bias.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:21
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The Insect Court posted:You could nitpick the facts, but that kind of misses the point in that facts aren't driving this kind of bullshit. The best response is to remind them of Oliver Wendell Holmes' quotation that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. Conservatives want to live in the sort of first-world country made possible by taxes but don't want to pay for any of it. That doesn't make them rugged individualists, it makes them greedy hypocrites. That depends, really. Wealthy conservatives generally understand why They do not want a civilized society. They want a society where they are in total control and can exterminate unruly peasants like vermin with no repercussions.
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Apr 19, 2014 12:40
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Centripetal Horse posted:If you are suffering from cancer or some other horrible disease, you may very well envy people for their lack of cancer. If you come home to a terrible spouse whose actions make your life miserable, you may envy your unmarried neighbors. If you are being crushed under a mountain of debt... well, you get the picture. "Nobody at all, including me, should have enough money that it gives them the ability to rig the system" isn't envy. While there are those that are, in fact, envious of the rich not everybody speaking out against the hoarding of vast fortunes is envious. Meanwhile, "I would like my job to pay enough that I can eat well and have a place to live" isn't envious. We live in a country where the minimum wage is not a living wage. The obscenely rich are using their wealth to pillage the country and gently caress everybody else over. Generally speaking, people aren't talking about envy in this case but rather "I would very much like to not starve to death, thanks."
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Apr 20, 2014 16:58
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red19fire posted:There was a study on the crab mentality, something like 'most people would prefer to make $25k while their peers make $15k, as opposed to making $90k when their peers make $100k.' I don't know about you but I'd happily sleep in a box under a bridge if it meant people I didn't like didn't get a box or a bridge.
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Apr 24, 2014 18:25
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Mo_Steel posted:I'm repeatedly and irrevocably stunned that people hold the belief that other people should have to earn the right to not live in abject poverty and hunger. I think the moment I first realized that was what people were actually arguing for years ago I wanted to throw up. It's morally disgusting. gently caress. The right actually doesn't want people to even have the opportunity to work their way out of poverty. They want to dangle that carrot in front of everybody but those born into dynastic wealth. They want nothing short of a caste system.
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Apr 24, 2014 21:50
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gatesealer posted:"get rid of government programs that don't work" ok which ones? And how do they not work? And what would you propose we replace them with? One thing I never see come out of these people is "what will you replace the thing with". I get that they don't like the program, but if you can't come up with a better solution then get out. It's literally "I do not like thing. Thing should not exist." They don't want to replace those "programs that don't work" with something that does they want it gone entirely simply because it's a thing they don't like.
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Apr 25, 2014 09:35
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red19fire posted:It all fits with the 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' quote by Steinbeck; the Walmarts of the world have convinced the average American that someday, when they're they're CEO of a billion dollar international retailer, they wouldn't want filthy poor's chiseling away at rightfully earned profits, so they shouldn't support things like living wages or unions now. It isn't always that. I'm from that art of society and there are other things that are used as propaganda against raising wages. Some of them are more subtle. Even so, one of them is "don't demand higher wages, it makes you look greedy." Yeah, a multi-billion dollar company that consumes everything is bitching about greed. The other one is "you can be replaced." With the continual dismantling of the safety net and the concentration of more wealth in fewer hands, with a lower demand for labor and increased competition for jobs, there is an air of "don't complain at all or we'll find somebody else to do your job." The rich can effectively dictate the price of labor given how little competition currently actually exists. It's the 19th century all over again. It's rarely explicitly stated but you get the feeling if you work for a company like Walmart. A poo poo load of applications come through the door. Floods of the damned things. Guess how much inclination a company has to raise wages if they could, at a moment's notice, replace their entire workforce in a day.
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Apr 25, 2014 22:29
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Who discovered this technique? A dad of course. But it wasn't a weird trick discovered by an uneducated mom who just happens to live within 5 minutes of me so it was obvious he just invented it for the money. I also heard my hairdresser say...
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Apr 26, 2014 19:32
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MisterBadIdea posted:Ads for alternative-medicine hooey often describe their product as a weird trick discovered by a dad or mom or whoever, someone that sounds ordinary. I'm not sure what the marketing technique is behind this but it happens all the time. It's preying on the "these big businesses just want your money and will do anything to get it" angle. A regular dude that just wants people to be healthier is easier for alt med types to swallow than a doctors and researchers.
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Apr 26, 2014 22:24
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LeJackal posted:I don't even understand this. What? They're suggesting that liberals are literally the mafia.
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Apr 27, 2014 18:02
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Lady Naga posted:Yes yes look that's all fine and good but What the hell am I even looking at?
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May 1, 2014 19:27
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Cat Face Joe posted:Ron Swanson is nothing like the typical libertarian or tea partier. While he talks a big game, he puts his friends and family first and regularly looks past his ideologies in order to do the right thing. He's a terrible libertarian. Ron Swanson is everything they want to be, though. He gets away with all sorts of poo poo that nobody in the real world would for more than a nanosecond, such as actively sabotaging the organization he works for or pointing a shotgun and a landmine and anybody that wants to talk to him. He's the ruler of his little world and does as he pleases, which is ultimately the tea party's wet dream but, really, not exactly freedom for the other people he happens across. Generally speaking, your average tea partier or libertarian isn't interested in anybody else's freedom, only their own, and gently caress anybody that gets hurt by it.
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May 2, 2014 01:02
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Jurgan posted:Every "you might be" list is attributed to Foxworthy, just as every song parody is attributed to Weird Al. Say what you want about Foxworthy, but there's no way he'd ever say something that disgusting (the main complaint against him, after all, is that he's bland and inoffensive). The problem here isn't who said it but that that sort of thing gets passed around as some sort of pinnacle of wisdom. Granted, this is also a group of people that believe such statements as "1 in every 20 Muslims is a terrorist." Yup, definitely 75,000,000 Muslim terrorists in the world, just waiting in line for their chance to blow something American up. That number absolutely makes perfect sense.
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May 3, 2014 02:45
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Guilty Spork posted:No, seriously. We need to stop the spread of AIDS. Family planning also prevents overpopulation, and also generally makes women do better in society, which makes society do better, which means less hungry children. They're criticizing liberals for sending free condoms instead of free food because there is certainly not a massive right wing wall of bullshit preventing liberals from feeding people.
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May 4, 2014 02:53
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MisterBadIdea posted:Money talks, bullshit walks. A good meme. I think the chart should actually be labelled "I do not like it when people disagree with me." It would actually make it more useful and get the message across.
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May 6, 2014 12:51
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Charity jobs....CHARITY JOBS?!? Obviously anybody that only makes minimum wage does so because they don't deserve a better job. Hiring a minimum wage worker and giving them any income at all is obviously doing them a favor. We should reduce minimum wage to lower such a terrible burden on the sacred job creators so they can use the money to create more jobs so fewer people need to rely on the government.
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May 9, 2014 00:45
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Swan Oat posted:Does Walmart even have store greeters anymore? I used to work near one and I never noticed any greeters when I went in. Generally no. Walmart has been cutting its staff to the bone and putting absolutely insane demands on their employees. I've been out of Walmart for years but around the time I left the staff was cut to like 2/3 of what it was, if that, including getting rid of store greeters. I once worked in a department that had five people and a manager but it was cut down to just me and then I had to cover three other departments too. The hours got down from "here have all of the overtime you could possibly every want, ask us if you want more" to "we will fire you if you are a nanosecond over 32 hours." Anybody that actually got paid well was fired for bullshit reasons and the people left were expected to do way more than they could get done. I remember frequently getting pulled out of my department all day then disciplined for nothing in my department actually getting done. It wasn't a "charity job" at all. It was a horrifying experience.
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May 10, 2014 02:38
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Alien Arcana posted:Doesn't Europe put the fluoride in its salt instead? Or something like that, I forget the exact details. The idea that "you should not add poo poo to the food and water" because it's unnatural is dumb no matter what way you slice it. In the States (I don't know how it works elsewhere) they've been putting vitamin D in milk and iodine in salt for quite a while. I remember as a kid being told there was fluoride in the water in small amounts, in toothpaste, and in these weird little white things we chewed up before class. It benefits the teeth and I don't seem to remember anybody dying or catching communism from it.
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May 12, 2014 20:04
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