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Local free magazines and newspapers are the best at being the worst about columnists disingenuously whining about taxes.Mark J. Lucas posted:Dude… 
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May 15, 2012 04:17
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amaranthine posted:I'd have probably hated that too, except that I was too busy frothing at the mouth over yet another case of military hero worship. I also wanted to say Ms. West Point sounded like a figment of the writer's imagination with the way he was  over her, but I didn't have time.
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May 15, 2012 04:49
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Urban Space Cowboy posted:free magazine What I want to know is how someone who made only $8500 in one year, has a tax liability of $1200 when: -One's taxable income is almost always less than their real income thanks to deductibles and credits, -At such a low income, he would've definitely qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit, which would have given him a refund, and -Up until last year the IRS would have prepared his tax return for free. This year he would have been sent to a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance center operated by a local non-profit. Either I'm missing something or this guy is full of bullshit.
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May 15, 2012 05:02
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constantIllusion posted:What I want to know is how someone who made only $8500 in one year, has a tax liability of $1200 when:
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May 15, 2012 05:05
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As far as the numbers go, I coincidentally made about $8500 this year and yes, I owed just about exactly $1200. Zero income tax (yeah, I'm one of those freeloaders) but as a freelancer I still have to pay self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare). EITC shaved about $200 off it. The author is somewhat correct in that the tax code is a bloody mess, and that leaves huge advantages to people who can hire slick accountants. However the flat tax is a stupid as gently caress solution to that.
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May 15, 2012 05:13
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Uh Jesus I made more than that last year and the IRS gave me money for bothering to file. I don't want to tell you you're doing something wrong, but somebody is doing something wring. The tax code is all kinds of hosed up. Seriously you should not have to pay taxes on income that's like 50% the poverty level. How did you end up paying taxes on that?
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May 15, 2012 15:21
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Arglebargle III posted:Uh Jesus I made more than that last year and the IRS gave me money for bothering to file. I don't want to tell you you're doing something wrong, but somebody is doing something wring. The tax code is all kinds of hosed up. Poor people still pay FICA, right?
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May 15, 2012 15:22
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Arglebargle III posted:Uh Jesus I made more than that last year and the IRS gave me money for bothering to file. I don't want to tell you you're doing something wrong, but somebody is doing something wring. The tax code is all kinds of hosed up. Armyman25 is right, (non-self-employed) poor people still pay FICA. This is ~6%, because their employer pays the other half (and the employee's half is withheld immediately from their paychecks, making it less obvious). However, FICA doesn't apply to the self-employed; they pay a self-employment tax, which really isn't any different than FICA except you're paying the full amount (you have no employer to cover half), so ~13%-15%. This is why the conservative "48% of people are freeloaders who pay no taxes!!" canard is bullshit; that stat refers to federal income taxes, and not other federal taxes (or state taxes, sales taxes, etc.). Choadmaster fucked around with this message at 20:38 on May 15, 2012 |
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May 15, 2012 20:35
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The guy smokes a pack a day, and is spending about 30% of his income on them. He's clearly an idiot.
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May 16, 2012 18:06
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303552104577438421678904222.html?mod=hp_opinion Wherein, the WSJ blows what can only be described as a dog vuvuzela
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Jun 1, 2012 17:42
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Goatman Sacks posted:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303552104577438421678904222.html?mod=hp_opinion I can't believe my family still gets that rag. They've been getting it since I was a kid and it was a respectable publication and sheer inertia has kept them renewing it every year even though they now disagree with virtually everything it says. I keep telling them to cancel and get the NYT if they want a paper but whenever I visit or mention it my mom is always like "oh I forgot and just renewed it again."
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Jun 1, 2012 17:53
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Goatman Sacks posted:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303552104577438421678904222.html?mod=hp_opinion That's a lot of words to say "Holder's People". Who wrote this crap, A Freeper or some wealthy College Republican little poo poo?
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Jun 2, 2012 03:15
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I really, really ought to know better than to read letters to the editor. USA Today (insert pithy comment here) is particularly terrible, with at least one "BOOTSTRAPS!" letter a day, every day.
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Jun 2, 2012 05:46
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Katherine Kersten has a lot of terrible opinions, but her editorial today in the Star Tribune is particularly appalling:Katherine Kersten posted:The faulty case for changing marriage laws "I'd guess"? Well if that's our threshold than "I'd guess" that 95% of Minnesotans would like to watch you swim in a sewer so best get to it. She continues from there to bemoan that marriage has always been this one way (it hasn't) and that if you allow the gays to marry then why will straight people see any need for marriage and won't you think of the children oh and bigots will be ostracized by people too. 
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Jun 3, 2012 23:30
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Marriage exists so that kids can grow up with a mom and dad, and that is why our society allows:
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Jun 3, 2012 23:43
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Can't you see? Marriage is about turning women into baby factories. If we start letting in people who only want use it as an expression of their love, then hetero women might also start thinking that their union is based on more than just procreation. What relationship could stand up in the face of such artificially high expectations? 
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Jun 4, 2012 00:59
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Urban Space Cowboy posted:Local free magazines and newspapers are the best at being the worst about columnists disingenuously whining about taxes. People pay for this poo poo? This is like a poorly-written blog post. I think we've found out why he makes so little!
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Jun 4, 2012 01:14
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The Dark One posted:Can't you see? Marriage is about turning women into baby factories. If we start letting in people who only want use it as an expression of their love, then hetero women might also start thinking that their union is based on more than just procreation. What relationship could stand up in the face of such artificially high expectations? I can't remember where I saw it (I think it was in a documentary about Prop 8 in California that I saw on Netflix) and there was a preacher speaking to his congregation and he said of "the opposition" that "they think that love is enough!" in a way that suggested he was disgusted with the idea or found it naive. There was a shot of an old lady in the congregation sadly shaking her head. So there's definitely something to this idea, though its adherents would try to keep the central claim implicit.
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Jun 4, 2012 01:20
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What is minnesotas massive civil rights enforcement regime? I grew up and spent most of my life in MN and never ran afoul these thugs.
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Jun 4, 2012 01:26
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Attention UK goons: Good news! There is no austerity in Britain!quote:Britain, "austerity," and the lessons of economic history
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Jun 4, 2012 01:27
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I love that austerity has been so thoroughly discredited in the U.K. at this point that pro-austerians have to claim that what they're doing isn't actually austerity at all. They're backpedaling so hard that they can't possibly claim a shred of intellectual honesty to an intelligent observer.
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Jun 4, 2012 03:57
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Branis posted:What is minnesotas massive civil rights enforcement regime? I grew up and spent most of my life in MN and never ran afoul these thugs. The person who wrote about the civil rights regime and how people against gay marriage will be publicly shamed or fired because of it seem to think that, given the chance, the LGBT community will happily do to them what they have been doing to gay rights advocates for years. All they see is a cycle of revenge.
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Jun 4, 2012 04:09
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There's just something about this way of thinking with a lot of the far right. They seem to assume that everyone they hate is just as crazy and vindictive as they are, and you see it a lot in the Freep thread.
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Jun 4, 2012 04:43
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Duck_King posted:There's just something about this way of thinking with a lot of the far right. They seem to assume that everyone they hate is just as crazy and vindictive as they are, and you see it a lot in the Freep thread. There's some research to show that people who believe in conspiracy theories do so because they are willing to conspire in the first place. Its classic projection, I'm willing to do it so they are too. http://www.psmag.com/culture-society/belief-in-conspiracies-linked-to-machiavellian-mindset-30295/ quote:“At least among some samples and for some conspiracy theories, the perception that ‘they did it’ is fueled by the perception that ‘I would do it,’” University of Kent psychologists Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton write in the British Journal of Social Psychology. They think the other side will publicly shame people because they are willing to shame the gays.
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Jun 4, 2012 05:05
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This showed up in my local newspaper today. The editorial page is always outlandishly offensive, but this one bugged me in particular:quote:History is the propaganda of the victorious Confederate apologism, with a nasty underlying "slavery is just the way things are" theme.
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Jun 4, 2012 15:09
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Ignoring that whole bit where Andrew Johnson basically bent over backwards and let the south do whatever the gently caress they wanted.
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Jun 4, 2012 16:18
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poopy pee pee fucked around with this message at 01:28 on May 17, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2012 21:59
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I was always under the impression that the industrial revolution is what made cotton in the South so profitable. Cotton isn't useful in large quantities unless you can process it efficiently, which is what the Cotton Gin did. Factories in the north demanding cotton for their textiles is what fulled the expansion of southern plantations and the continuous import of more slaves, depressing local labour markets and making plantation owners hugely rich. Then these same plantation owners convince their poor, destitute neighbours that it's really black people's fault all the land is growing cotton now and there are no jobs, not the fault of the assholes on top who set up the system in the first place. They convinced the poor commoners to fight a war to maintain a system that was loving them over and was slowly destroying their society. This is not to mention the huge environmental problems that came from soil depletion after continuously growing the same cash crop year after year. In no way was slavery in the South necessary or sustainable, on top of it being morally wrong. There was nothing of "self-preservation" in the civil war, unless you count the preservation of inflated profits of Southern landowners.
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Jun 4, 2012 22:34
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poopy pee pee fucked around with this message at 01:30 on May 17, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2012 23:41
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Senor Gato posted:Well, I'm admittedly not an expert, but many Southerners were convinced that Lincoln was going to be a tyrant who'd take their slaves and freedoms away, and destroy Southern culture and institutions; that's why poor white people fought so hard for the Confederacy. They enslaved an entire race of people (or at least, in the case of poor whites who couldn't afford slaves, treated them as less than equal members of society), and projected their own motives and thought processes onto others. Thus, in their eyes, abolitionism became an attempt to relegate white Southerners to second-class citizens. It's sort of like how homophobes are always afraid that gay people and tolerant straight people are going to start bullying and ostracizing them or whatever. Oh, I'm sure they thought they were doing the right thing. I was just trying to point out that Southern culture would have had a reckoning at some point, even if they'd managed to successfully secede. Eventually, the problems inherent with the Southern economy being powered by slavery would have caused a collapse. Nothing about slavery, as a method of social control or otherwise, ensured the long-term survival of Southern culture. So H.V. Traywick Jr. can go gently caress himself,glorious Dixie wouldn't have been any better off now if it had somehow managed to preserve its backwards and terrible institutions.
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Jun 5, 2012 02:33
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poopy pee pee fucked around with this message at 02:35 on May 17, 2016 |
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Jun 5, 2012 03:50
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tigersklaw posted:The person who wrote about the civil rights regime and how people against gay marriage will be publicly shamed or fired because of it seem to think that, given the chance, the LGBT community will happily do to them what they have been doing to gay rights advocates for years. All they see is a cycle of revenge. Exactly. It's the same thing soft white supremacists claim about non-whites.
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Jun 5, 2012 04:46
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Senor Gato posted:Only if they were Confederate leaders. In fact, southern whites routinely disenfranchised black people during Reconstruction, even in majority-black districts and counties. Most often this was achieved by violence against black people, perpetrated by white-supremacist terrorist groups such as the KKK. The latter part of this statement rings false. It was AFTER Reconstruction, with the end of martial law and the removal of Federal troops from Dixie that the tide swung away from the enfranchisement of the Black population. It was a slow unpleasant slide into racially based law from the "1877 Compromise" to the official beginning of Jim Crow in 1890. This is not to say that all was instantly perfect for the newly freed slave population and existing free Blacks, but in many terms most notably political involvement and property rights, Reconstruction marked a sadly short lived high point.
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Jun 6, 2012 02:13
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poopy pee pee fucked around with this message at 02:36 on May 17, 2016 |
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Jun 6, 2012 02:47
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While I kind of like this article, something seems a bit off about the way it's framed around the religious narrative. Take a look at it: http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/skip-reville-was-unstoppable-until-a-mother-found-him-out/Content?oid=4094572 While somewhere inside I am rejoicing that the Citadel is getting in trouble, the human part of me is revolted by what this guy did and how he manipulated several local trusted organizations to do it. Here's the part I think is kind of terrible reporting though: quote:"Unfortunately, Mr. ReVille — according to him — he experienced that as pleasurable because he had an adult male giving some attention to him. And then some 18 months later, his best friend of the same age that was a grade ahead of him brought home a sex education pamphlet from school. And from that began a series of presentations between him and his friends that expanded out to other boys his age. Is it just me, or does it sound like they're trying to say that that particular incident caused the homosexuality and school-based sex ed programs enabled him to learn more about it?
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Jun 14, 2012 17:02
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SquadronROE posted:While I kind of like this article, something seems a bit off about the way it's framed around the religious narrative. Take a look at it: That "doctor" seems to conflate homosexuality and pedophilia really readily in that quote, and by omission and implication seems to suggest that trauma can turn you gay. Since he's a "counselor" and not a psychologist, I wonder what kind of Ph.D./M.D. he has. The really gross implication of that quote is that everybody in this community is going to be suspicious of the kids this guy raped, since by the "counselor's" logic they too have the potential to become child molesters. And the first comment (never read internet comments) makes it clear that these kids will be seen as tainted or damaged: quote:Does this mean there are 35 time bombs waiting to go off? And of course the same religious fundamentalism that allowed this guy to use faith as a cover for his crimes also informs that sort of victim-blaming.
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Jun 14, 2012 17:25
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After googling the doctor (who does have a degree in psychology, though from the Citadel), it seems like his comments were made in the context of explaining how it could be that the molester explained that he was sexually attracted to adult women and young boys: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120614/PC16/120619492/reville-gets-50-years-in-prison quote:Burke said tests showed that ReVille is attracted to women and young boys. That could stem from a couple of events in his childhood, he said. The omission in the first article makes me think that the reporter's letting some bias through. Although I have to wonder how mainstream it is for psychologists to explain pedophilia in terms of reenacting past trauma. I know kids will do that and it can be a sign of abuse and that there's a strong correlation between growing up with domestic violence and either being abused or being an abuser. But pedophilia seems like it's usually explained as something innate and incurable, since kids who reenact their abuse are usually suffering from PTSD and can be helped with regular therapy and people always talk about how therapy doesn't help child molesters. Maybe I've just been watching too much Law and Order.
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Jun 14, 2012 17:43
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Yeah, I also found an article more fully explaining the device being used. While it seems a bit arcane, it doesn't sound stranger than any other first-generation device being used to try to quantify a qualitative analysis. http://www.readability.com/articles/u8y2wvlq Full disclosure: The reporter is someone who I know personally, and tries quite hard to remain neutral. I'm planning on trying to give him specific feedback, and posted the article here since I'd rather not be accusing him of being biased out of hand. Any suggestions would be interesting. Something does sound really fishy about that entire quote though.
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Jun 14, 2012 17:49
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Jack Gladney posted:The omission in the first article makes me think that the reporter's letting some bias through. I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that pedophilia is just another form of paraphilia, that is a divergent sexual attraction brought on by conditioning. It's not necessarily abuse that does it, but I'm pretty sure it's never been linked to any innate characteristics or neurology, they way being gay or trans* has. From googleing, it doesn't seem that there has been a lot of study into the causes or treatments of pedophilia, although they are available.
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Jun 14, 2012 18:49
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SquadronROE posted:Yeah, I also found an article more fully explaining the device being used. While it seems a bit arcane, it doesn't sound stranger than any other first-generation device being used to try to quantify a qualitative analysis. That article is serious  stuff. Starting using body reactions as the basis for legal proceedings is drat close to, if not actually, thought crime. And throwing an extra level of pseudo-science on top of it makes the whole article seem one degree removed from phrenology.
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Jun 14, 2012 19:40
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