The Good Post Gallery

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Yeah, there have certainly been cases in which the godawful state of mental health 'treatment' in the U.S has clearly contributed to a massacre (I dimly recall that being the case in the VA Tech thing anyway; though I might be remembering wrongly), but that's about as far as you can go. Most of the rest of the time we are generally talking of after the fact diagnoses, and often of the 'well, you'd have to be mentally ill to do a thing like this' variety. Which is about as useful as a chocolate blast furnace.

In any case, most people (and by 'most' I mean 'in excess of 99 per cent') people with mental health problems are no more dangerous than the rest of society. That includes the minority of cases that are things more obviously 'scary' than depression and the like. I don't see how increasing the stigma - something that is utterly ludicrious given how common mental health problems are - helps anyone. It certainly wouldn't help to prevent these regular little massacres; the violent punctuation marks of contemporary American society.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

I generally go to xvideos or xnxx or xhamster.

[they don't love you like i love you]

xhamster is great.

[opebo]

xhamster is great.

Yeah seems to be the best one, but was blocked here in Thailand for years.. however sometimes it is unblocked for a few days, for whatever reason.. like today and yesterday.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

xhamster is great.

Yeah seems to be the best one, but was blocked here in Thailand for years.. however sometimes it is unblocked for a few days, for whatever reason.. like today and yesterday.

opebo?  You would subject yourself to the laws of a society that would find it necessary block xhamster?  I would guess the availability of cheap Thai hookers would eliminate the need for porn to a degree, though.   

[opebo]

opebo?  You would subject yourself to the laws of a society that would find it necessary block xhamster?  I would guess the availability of cheap Thai hookers would eliminate the need for porn to a degree, though.   

Yeah, of course.  Not just cheap but much more appealing than back home.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

opebo?  You would subject yourself to the laws of a society that would find it necessary block xhamster?  I would guess the availability of cheap Thai hookers would eliminate the need for porn to a degree, though.    

Yeah, of course.  Not just cheap but much more appealing than back home.

More appealing than the Bunny Ranch girls?  To each his own, I assume. I certainly have a thing for Asians, though.  Must absolutely take a trip to the Eastern half of the globe.  

How much would one this good-looking run me?

[they don't love you like i love you]

It's always funny to see presumed left-wingers suddenly argue that people working in degrading jobs where they get exploited is a great thing. I guess that mostly just applies as long as the people doing the work are coloured women rather than white middle-class males.

It gets extra funny when Lief himself compares it to working in coal mines.

See Gustaf, this is the problem with you.

I find Lief's arguments to be completely wrong, misguided and somewhat silly. But there's nothing in what he posted that in any way suggests he's a misogynist or a racist. You're just bringing out strawmen instead of actually addressing his points (which you don't need to, since Politicus did that excellently).

That's what I said when I mentioned your "disturbing tendency to judge people very early and to argue against strawmen instead of against them". At least get aware of this.

[opebo]

The problem is that a security guard who is effective in the rare situation where he is needed, but is not a pompous nuisance, a detriment to your business, and frankly a minor danger to customers is very hard to find and deserves a much higher salary than he is going to get.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Eh well I missed that part. The rest though was a good rebuttal to Gustaf's constant pearl-clutching in that thread. Antonio's doing a great job of owning him otherwise.

[Gustaf]

Eh well I missed that part. The rest though was a good rebuttal to Gustaf's constant pearl-clutching in that thread. Antonio's doing a great job of owning him otherwise.

Eh...do you realize that that post was not directed at me nor did it rebut anything I said in the thread? Also, Antonio is mostly agreeing with me in that thread (as is Ingemann, actually).

For a devout Christian at Christmas time you seem very blinded by your hatred, dearest.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

homelycooking says what I tried to say in this same thread, and says it much better:

Multiple assailants?  I promise you this, if multiple assailants come at you, all you need to do is threaten to shoot one and most will back off.  If there are more than 10 then you are f'd (even if you have a weapon with a mag with more than 10 bullets).

Is Rwoy a perfect shot somehow, capable of taking down 10 mobile adult men with 10 bullets, or does he have experience in this manner?

Are private sector citizens supposed to gamble their lives and the lives of their women and children on this theory?

"Their women and children"? You refer to them as one would a piece of land or a house - as chattel.

"Ten mobile adult men"? The image you conjure up is one of urban gang violence - one we unconsciously but inevitably associate with black, hypersexualized, undisciplined, acutely menacing bodies.

And then you refer to "private sector citizens": defined, by your own syntactic implications, as the rational, disciplined antithesis and counterpart to these two groups. Gun ownership is important here: it represents the efficient, calculated use of deadly force against savagery as well as the political "organ" of American frontier masculinity.

You've managed to neatly distill centuries of bigotry into two sentences. As Americans, we're all burdened with these racist and sexist fantasies, but that doesn't mean that it's all right to give them credence in an argument as you have.

Merry Christmas

[Lief 🗽]

Porn is a horrible curse and so are functioning libidos.

Haha, it is testimony to the prudishness of this forum that one cannot be certain you are joking here.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Both of those nested posts are good, according to taste. Both are also Deluge-worthy, according to taste.

[Goldwater]

An entity has no soul. It is merely a product of the people in it. Therefore, it would stand to reason that regardless of the stance the Democrats took 150 years ago is irrelevant. One can as well easily observe the direction the Democrats took in transforming from a party of agrarians, Catholics, and Southerners, to a party of Northern liberals. Ironically, it would be a Catholic who assisted in this transformation. No conservative should believe in collective sin. That's for the affirmative action folks. Fact is, all the supporters of slavery are long, long dead. Many segregationists are dead or out of office.

[they don't love you like i love you]

From a rather surprising source...

Oldies, there are a plethora of reasons the Republican Party is today more worthy of your vote than the Democratic Party.

Not only is 'the Democrats supported slavery in the 1860s' not one of them, that's actually really stupid. Because organizations that have been around for centuries change with the times.

The example that you are Christian but disapprove of the Crusades was brought up. You answered that that's OK, because Christ would have disapproved of the Crusades too.

Lincoln wanted to deport black people to Central America. However, this is not a valid reason to oppose the Republican Party today. Why? Because everybody who was part of the organization back then is dead. Therefore, they no longer matter. You have to judge an organization by what it does now, or what it's done in the comparatively recent past (within the memberships of the majority of it's current members is how I would define this) to decide whether you approve or disapprove of it. The 1860s can't decide your vote in 2012.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Excuse me... I said ATTEMPTED.

What has that to do with the price of rice?

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Somewhat inevitably it appears that you don't know the first thing about the target of your juvenile ravings. Religion is far too complex a thing (if it is even really a single thing) to be dismissed as merely a form of 'social control'. The same rites and institutions that may be profoundly oppressive to one person may well be profoundly liberating to another. And that's just scratching the surface.

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I don't think that's true, but it is certainly true that I found your particular post to be quite offensive. I believe that I have a right to find offensive what offends me; I think we all do, actually. No one has a right to have their opinions accepted without question, without criticism.

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Leaving aside first the irony and second the idea that 'religion' can be thought of as a single 'institution', it strikes me as a little strange to view (say) a rosary as more evil than (say) Treblinka.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

And why the removal of right to work?

Because it has been consistently shown to lead to lower wages everywhere it is passed.

But it offers people the choice not to join a union.  If they so choose to do so, why should they not be allowed to do so?

Because it creates a situation where someone can benefit from agreements like better wages and benefits that were obtained through collective bargaining, while not having to pay the costs (such as union dues) that were necessary to obtain such agreements. This sets up a version of the prisoner's dilemma where the best scenario for the group would be to cooperate (maintaining the union and keeping higher wages and benefits), but the best scenario for each individual is for them to not cooperate and the others to cooperate (meaning they get higher wages but don't have the costs associated with being in a union) and the worst scenario for each individual would be to cooperate while others don't (leading to them having to pay union costs but have wages go down anyway). This creates an incentive for all workers to avoid cooperation, which leads to the second-worst possible outcome for each individual and the worst possible outcome for the group as a whole.

Not to mention that people can be legally required to do many things as part of the contract they sign for a job. They can be required to undergo drug tests (in most states), wear certain clothes, work certain hours, etc. If that is legal, then why shouldn't requiring someone to join a union as part of their contract be?

This seems like a conservative position, to allow for maximum freedom of contract. Right-to-work is the government outlawing a specific type of contract freely entered into by two private-sector individuals or organizations. That seems like a pretty strange thing for a free-market, laissez-faire person to support. It's a big government, not small government, type of law.

From a more leftist perspective, I don't think that most contracts are really "freely" entered into given socioeconomic pressures on most workers to find a job, and so I support government intervention to level the imbalance of power between employer and employee. Right-to-work legislation doesn't do anything to relieve that imbalance though, in fact it does the opposite, so I don't support it. Supporting right-to-work isn't a conservative position, but it's not a liberal/leftist one either. It's a big government corporatist position, an example of using the power of the government to intervene in private matters in support of business.

[Simfan34]

Al is horrible, until you agree with him.

[Lief 🗽]

but people should have a bit more compassion.

Yes, Thatcher's lack of compassion was an awful thing. Led directly to the wrecking of countless lives.

[Marokai Backbeat]

The average American family has a mother and a father, and two children. They are white and consider themselves "Christian", but attend church only a few times a year. One of the spouses votes, the other does not, though neither follow the news particularly closely. The husband works, probably in a call center or some other office job where he's selling products bought with debt or nagging people to pay up on the debt they've used to buy things. The couple owns a house worth about $200,000, but the family owes most of that money to the bank. While they stay up to date on their mortgage payments, they know plenty of people who are unable to. The wife may have a part-time job, but is probably unemployed. Their yearly income is about $45,000. The family receives health insurance through the husband's job and is generally satisfied with it, though the co-pays and premiums are very expensive and if any family member suddenly got very sick or badly injured, they would quickly realize their insurance plan is wholly inadequate. The family has a few thousand dollars in the bank, but owes about as much in credit card debt (they receive a phone call at least once a week from a credit card company trying to get them to pay up; they allow this call to go to the answering machine). They have no money saved for retirement, nor do they have any investments (stocks, bonds, etc.), nor do they have any money saved to pay for their children's college education. They go on a "vacation" once a year, which involves a short drive to the beach or staying with family for a few days during Christmas or Thanksgiving.

[opebo]

Current DUI/DWI penalties are fine.

you support coerced 12-step participation for non-addicts and non-alcoholics?

Coerced therapy is useless to its nominal aims and not really any sort of therapy at all, but it feeds a lot of people (and feeds them well) out of the public purse without officially swelling the ranks of government employees. Besides, it's cheaper than jailing middle class offenders and preserves their respectability. From the point of view of bourgeois democracy, it's a win-win-win-win.

[Bacon King]

I seriously believe Congress should be paid the medium income of Americans.

How about they start paying us, oh wait, they already do!

You're telling me we're paid by Congress? By what? Their own munificent generosity and benevolent charity? You're joking, right? Now, I'm not much of a democrat and certainly no republican, but at least in this country, these people on the hill are beholden to the people. We could fire them all if we wanted to, and if people in this country had half a brain, they would.

I'm not going to deny that the GOP is to blame here. The amount they've been willing to ignore their beliefs, constituents, and past positions all to spite the President is just disgusting. I really don't know who the Republicans are beholden to. The rich are liberals. The neoconservatives and neoliberals are supportive of the President. It seems they're led by no ones and nobody- Norquist, Limbaugh, Santorum. Who are these people? Why are they leading the party? They're nobodies! These small minded morons aren't conservative, they aren't even reactionary, they're just dumb. The GOP today isn't being led by far right wingnuts, they're being led by just- wingnuts.

[minionofmidas]

The middle class gets the CTC while the poor gets TANF.  What is so hard to understand about why TANF is controversial?  After all when it comes to government spending, the word wasteful means, "I don't get any of it myself."

[courts]

The middle class gets the CTC while the poor gets TANF.  What is so hard to understand about why TANF is controversial?  After all when it comes to government spending, the word wasteful means, "I don't get any of it myself."