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redtreviso said:
it's okay little buddy, i know it's hard to admit you got duped. but hey, at least he closed gitmo, oh wait........
- Mar 11, 2009
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Scott SoCal said:
You failed to notice I guess that my post was not directed at you. I never quoted you on this, nor mentioned you by name. As I stated, I would challenge anyone to walk through a nursing home and determine that these people should fend for their own health care. Yet you felt the need to attack my criticism. As such, upon reading your harsh reaction that I can only draw the conclusion of others. That you must be a cruel and greedy person.
If you actually think my parents depended on the government I can only assume that you feel that about anyone who is thrust into positions like this. Maybe that's what your family did. But most of the people stuck in these homes worked their entire lives, and never asked for a thing. They aren't the welfare seeking lazy b******s you must think they are.
My father worked for 40 years at skilled labor, saved their money, never asked for a single thing. And they had long term care. They were cut off from it, and all their savings quickly drained, all of it. I'm glad that won't happen to you. Of course, I now gather the impression that you are predator who gains as much money as possible, everyone else be damned. That's what they get for not fighting with you and your winner take all viscous plan for society.
No, government health care isn't ideal. But to support the party who believes these people will be better off negotiating for their own health care with nary a peep to criticize it, is incredibly callous and brutish.
As naive and idealistic Red may be, at least he has a heart. I have tried to reason with you many times on these issues. And instead you would rather parse them, and paint everyone who disagrees with you, including myself, as a "leftist". But reading your responses to these issues, I can only conclude you would take everyone's last possible penny if you could all for yourself, and then blame them for not fighting harder to keep it.
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Alpe d'Huez said:
To start, get the hell out of these wars, they're breaking us. Public flogging for lobbyists, stocks for crooked politicians as a minimum punishment, with a maximum sentence of public hanging for anything involving misuse of campaign funds or public funds. two tiered flat tax with no loopholes, same for corporations with a sweet rate for companies investing in workers and production located in this country. I don't mind paying more taxes but I don't want to spend my freakin weekend doing my return. Means testing for social security and Medicare. Education education education. We used standardized testing to rate teachers performance, then biotch because Johnny can't read, write, or compete in math and science. Teach kids how to learn, not the answers to a test. If you want good teachers pay them accordingly. death penalty for anyone who owns an automobile worth more than their home, that's just plain idiotic. I'm tired now, but you get the idea......
"I'll be paying for that" is one of the more popular sentences said by rank and file Republicans..Like they alone unwillingly provide for those in need or those who fall on hard times.. It is never "we" or the government or the public it is "I"
I WILL BE PAYING FOR THAT/HER/HIM/THEM. In talking to most Republicans there is always a accusatory tone to their crap, like anyone they talk to must be taking from them or have a family member who is or just know someone that is or not share their hate for someone who is.
This is not politics.. Its hate.. pure and simple..
I WILL BE PAYING FOR THAT/HER/HIM/THEM. In talking to most Republicans there is always a accusatory tone to their crap, like anyone they talk to must be taking from them or have a family member who is or just know someone that is or not share their hate for someone who is.
This is not politics.. Its hate.. pure and simple..
Alpe d'Huez said:
You, like so many others, just can't stray too far from your roots.
There is nothing, I mean nothing I've written that could lead anyone with any capacity to reason that I'm a 'predator' with a 'winner take all attitude'. This is complete bull**** and I know you know it. You write this **** to stay in with the crowd you think you want to belong to. You have nearly zero capacity to think in your own terms which I find highly disappointing.
I was way wrong to think highly of you. You are nothing short of a passive agressive closet liberal touting the fact that you voted for a republican once. You have been exposed as such.
And this is way beyond shitty;
Hopefully this gets you a seat at the table Redtreviso sits at. You two were made for each other.
Good luck in your life dude. You're gonna need it.
Scott SoCal said:
Unlike Alpe I have never voted Republican for anything..I wouldn't even want to go fishing with you scott..I am surrounded by people like you who can only talk about other people near and far from their station in life who are taking from them, or are taking from them if they disagree with them on just about anything. I'm so fProud of myself in spite of you or someone you know or someone you saw taking from ME etc etc. You must have a hand in taking from me..
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Okay, I'll try to be reasonable.Scott SoCal said:
Why defend the predators? Why attack those that have no chance to fight back against them without help from the government?
When there is no policeman, someone fills the power void. In this case, it's thugs and brutes. People who make millions, billions - more money than they could possibly spend, by doing things like shipping jobs overseas, trashing the environment, and trying to destroy workers rights. People like the Koch Brothers, Phil Knight, etc.
That's what I don't get. I don't for the life of me understand why anyone would defend this ilk. It's baffling.
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patricknd said:
The root of the problems of modern schooling in a country such as America, arise from the transformation of education into an arm of industry and the markets.
Schools regularly fail to achieve their most basic goals in inculcating literacy and numeracy in children, least of all in promoting cultural intelligence. The unmonitored teachers often cleave to outmoded so called progressive teaching methods that have long proved demonstrably ineffective; and, in the inner cities, they are plagued by mass truancy.
Moreover in the 1960's the state schools began a reckless experimentation with teaching methods and curricula that was accompanied by a headlong rush toward comprehensivation, with the inevitable result in a decline in the educational standards and the appalling deficiency we now have in students' critical thinking ability that has been enhanced more recently by the intolerable standardized testing procedures.
The conservative and neo-conservative response to this predicament has been to advocate the privatization of schools and other educational institutions, or at least the introduction into them to the market institutions (which have in fact been the major corrupting elements in the resultant learning baseness). Privatization of itself would accordingly be no remedy to this decline, which has deeper institutional and cultural roots. For these same reasons, not even the commonest variation on this neo-conservative response, the proposal of a voucher scheme for schools, can bring about the renewal of community.
Whereas the higher education institutions have increasingly become managed like corporations, not like universities, for which students become the paying clients of a market service in which they are pamapered. The resultant increase in both weight and measure of the business schools at these institutions, has left its mark on the latest generation's cultural illiteracy and in fact their having no sense of the relevant historical events, not only in their own country, but within the Western tradition at large; for which anything that isn't about making a so called living in the business environment is overlooked and is in fact seen as completely alien to their world. All the stuff, that is, that nurishes the soul, that invigorates the mind, is lost within a concept of the eternal now, the only enevitabilty out of which is the certainty of a tomorrow on the job where the past has left no mark in a world that exists beyond the end of history, again. This is naturally accompanied by a perception that commercial consumerism and materialism are the only barometers of well being and status that can fill the otherwise existential void, which has more or less resuted in the general state of vulgarity and debasement, for how else could it be called, we come across in the streets.
I have said before that the only solution to this dilemma seems to be for this culture in the schools to be done away with completely, for it to be first destroyed and then secondly obliterated. How this is to exactly be done I don't know, only that it must be. To then start teaching children and young adults the value of an education and learning for its own sake, in the humanistic tradition, and not merely as a hoped for market passepartout, and thus for the noble ways in which it can cultivate the mind: the missed opportunities in these regards under the present institutional culture has, along with the mental emptiness it promotes, resulted in a real social crime committed against our youth, which is our civic future and hence that of the nation.
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baffling indeed. they get people to vote against there own self interests by keeping up the myth that they could be a rich fatcat too. just work harder.Alpe d'Huez said:
what a load of cow pie.
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a few hours.
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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Thanks for the candid response. It's easy to just complain, I do it too. So to at least here some solution ideas from anyone is good.patricknd said:
That stems from not only greed, though that's the crux of it. For example, because some 40% of the country doesn't pay income tax, the perception is that they should pay at least something, and in the right light, I can see that.redtreviso said:
Of course one can analyze it however they like, and talk about sales tax, or various taxes that are trickled down. The conservatives then argue that these taxes should be cut as it's hurting the consumer. But my counter argument to that is that the individual owner, or business paying the tax that is trickling down won't pass on the savings to the consumer, they will merely pocket the money. They will continue to charge what the market will bear. This is a prime example, as I see it, why we have these zillionares at the top of the heap, and everyone else is going broke. When the taxes at the top are cut, those people don't stimulate the economy with it, or pass it down, they simply keep the money, and hoard more things with it.
The other issue with having poor people pay more tax is that their wages and benefits have been so suppressed for the last three decades, and some of them are in absolute poverty, there's nothing more to take. This applies to a great deal of the working poor.
Alpe d'Huez said:
Included in that 40% are the wives and launch failure children of the complainers.. They see taxes as a minimum citizenship thing.. Like if someone makes 12k a year and pays say 700 dollars income tax that ought to be their maximum burden also..The difference between what they pay and that 700 dollar guy is being taken from them.. As if that 700 dollar guy reaps as much of the tax provided services.. You can bet that as anyone's taxes go up with their income their ability to make that income is enhanced or supplied outright by the services taxes provide.
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usedtobefast said:
Yeah well, it roped in Scott and he is not completely stupid, they could get almost any of us if we let our guard down.
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I believe what happens is that someone starts making decent money, and paying more taxes, and misses out on something that Warren Buffet noted. That is, had he been born somewhere like Uruguy, Ethiopia, Turkestan, etc. he would have lived a life of total poverty. But this country gave him the opportunity to make more money than he'd ever need. Once he passed that point, the rest was just piling on, all while people like every day workers, including the likes of teachers, police, firefighters, etc. continue to make this country a place where someone like Buffet can prosper, while being attacked by many conservatives for essentially being greedy.
When I listen to people like Eric Cantor, Michelle Bachman and most of the other current GOP lot, I think there's something beyond that. It's like a cult. I can't possibly understand what would make something support some of their ideas, why they possibly think it would benefit the country. Why it would benefit anyone other than the wealthiest of individuals who have tight connections to the government.
Maybe I'm an alarmist, but I seriously think at some point one of two things is going to happen: The working "conservatives" are going to go broke, seriously broke, and realize that it wasn't other poor people, or the government, but the GOP connected super rich who has been shafting them all along. Or the "liberals" are going to break out of their passive shell and leftist mobs - similar to what has been seen in other countries - will rise up. But unlike other countries, there is an alarming amount of weapons and ammunition in this nation that could cause a tremendous amount of damage.
When I listen to people like Eric Cantor, Michelle Bachman and most of the other current GOP lot, I think there's something beyond that. It's like a cult. I can't possibly understand what would make something support some of their ideas, why they possibly think it would benefit the country. Why it would benefit anyone other than the wealthiest of individuals who have tight connections to the government.
Maybe I'm an alarmist, but I seriously think at some point one of two things is going to happen: The working "conservatives" are going to go broke, seriously broke, and realize that it wasn't other poor people, or the government, but the GOP connected super rich who has been shafting them all along. Or the "liberals" are going to break out of their passive shell and leftist mobs - similar to what has been seen in other countries - will rise up. But unlike other countries, there is an alarming amount of weapons and ammunition in this nation that could cause a tremendous amount of damage.
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usedtobefast said:
This is what my conservative father thought and, naturally, so too did my conservative brother. Having viewed life as an eternal quest for monetary success he was let down so often that he became embittered at an early age and soon took on the embittered features of my father, whom life had generally let down, wrapped up, as he was, in his conservative ideals, for which hard work, discipline and savings were their chief concerns; naturally for the family, for the community and even for the country. My brother took on the embittered features of my father - or rather he took them over, as one takes over property - and he soon came to resemble his father in every way. How often I have thought to myself, Your brother walks like your father, sits like your father, stands like your father, eats like your father, and strings his words together like your father, in long, ponderous sentences; in thirty years he has become identical with your father. He adopted all the habits of your father, who was my father too.
Like him he very soon became an indolent person, who feigned activity, though in reality he was inactivity personified. He pretended to be constantly on the go, working nonstop and never allowing a moment's rest - and all for the sake of the family, who wished to see him as he pretended to be. The family took this show seriously, not realizing - not wanting to admit - that they were watching an actor, not the essentially indolent person behind the act. The truth is that my brother did as little work as my father and merely feigned unremitting activity that they all admired, the dedication to work that satisfied them and in the end satisfied him too, for suddenly even he could no longer see it as a pretense.
Throughout his life my father played the part of the immensely hard-working, even work-crazy, businessman who never let up for a moment because, as a good family man, he could not permit himself to. And the same applied to my brother, who naturally copied my father's act: both of them soon realized that it was sufficient to play at work without actually doing any. Basically they did nothing all their lives but polish their act, and in this field - not to say this art - they became consummate performers. Most people feign work, especially in Northeast America. They constantly play at working and go on polishing their act right into old age, but the act has as little to do with real work as a play has to do with real life. Yet because human beings would rather see life as play than as real life - which they regard as tedious and laborious, indeed as a gross indignity - they prefer playacting to life and, therefore, to work. Unlike the others, I never attached much importance to my father's capacity to work, knowing that it was for the most part just playacting. So was my brother's, who imitated and improved upon my father's act in order to show it off to an admiring public.
But it is not just in the higher classes, co called, that work is being simulated rather than performed; even among supposedly simple people the simulation of work is widespread. Wherever we look, we see work being simulated and activity feigned by people who are in fact idling, doing nothing at all, and creating nothing but mischief instead of making themselves useful. The truth is that there are no longer any workers, only actors who put on a show of working.
Watching my father at work, I often told myself, He's only acting, he's not working at all, and the same applies to my brother. I don't blame them for simulating work and hoodwinking the public, as the rest of humanity does, but they really shouldn't say at every turn that they're working themselves to death, let alone that they're doing it for the family and even, on occasion, for the country. Uncle Michael, my father's brother, on his annual return form the South of France, was right when he said to me once, Your father and brother were pretty smart; they pretended to be the family robots, when in fact they've turned their offices into a cozy urban stage on which they make fools of us all. We didn't take advantage of them - they took advantage of us. And we fall for their hypocrisy. In the end a businessman is like a farmer, who, if he wants to pass for honest and hardworking, all he has to do is turn up the sound of the grunting pigs, as one turns up the radio, and broadcast the sound from the world of bad conscience.
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That's pretty funny. I used to where at a place where this one guy, crippled I might add, blared Limbaugh all day on his radio and pontificated about the evils of all things not wingnut. He was worthless as an employee, and usually when you walked by his office he was dozing off lol.
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