The Good Post Gallery

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Nobody agrees with me that jacking up the tax rate on capital gains, is just about the worst place to raise revenue? (The Buffet Rule doesn't raise jack sh*t in revenue in any event; 6 billion a year is next to nothing, and that may assume a static rather than dynamic analysis, while portending an increase economic inefficiency.)  Cut the deductions first, and then  ...  well I am repeating myself. I mean I dump on Romney when he is wrong. Do you guys just think all of Obama's ideas are the cat's meow? And I am one Pub who agrees that we need to raise more revenue, and we still can't agree on much, including trying to raise revenue in a way that will minimize economic distortions, and increase economic inefficiency.

It is going to be a long campaign.  

You'll get no disagreement from me, but you keep presuming that the vast majority of Americans have any understanding of taxes or tax rates or economics, especially involving taxes they don't pay.  I also don't see why you think this site will be any different, being populated by liberal arts major types who couldn't balance a checkbook if their life depended on it.  I've lived too long with those types, and now I deal with lawyers, who are just the same, except that they can argue consistently.

One thing is almost certain - Buffett will end up making more money through this plan.  His involvement with government on anything is always towards this end.  I think I know how, but will not say that much at this time.

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Any post ending in "I think I know how, but will not say that much at this time," belongs in the Deluge, not the Gallery.

It is vintage spade.

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Any post ending in "I think I know how, but will not say that much at this time," belongs in the Deluge, not the Gallery.

It is vintage spade.

Yes, but that's the problem.

There is no problem. He is a national treasure.

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Extremely hawkish Democrat.

That implies Democrats today aren't hawks.

True, it's pretty sad that a majority of Senate Democrats voted for the Iraq war. One of many reasons why I think I'll be abstaining on this year's Senate race.

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Everyone on the internet has Asperger's. As does everyone even halfway interesting from the past. As everyone is on the internet now and as everyone from the past was at least halfway interesting, this must mean that everyone who has ever lived has had Asperger's.

Very true Al. Everyone semi-interesting from history is also gay and, bizarrely, left-handed.

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good find zach. also kind of an obvious one:

Dane Cook is the Nickelback of comedy.

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One of the most ridiculous things I can think that has ever happened in this country is that the 2003 Bush tax cuts, which contained enormous tax cuts for the rich that didn't take affect for another several years were somehow an economic stimulus. The so called media of course went along with this nonsense, but just because no one called the Republicans on the insanity of that didn't mean that it wasn't totally absurd.

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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."

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It has effectively no factual basis whatsoever.  Basically the entirety of the Taliban's leadership were in Pakistani refugee camps throughout the Soviet War in Afghanistan, where they were taught by a low-ranking vet of the war, Mullah Omar, who lost his eye in the mid-80s and left.  The people that actually were in Afghanistan (Dostum, Massoud, Hekmatyar, Rabbani, etc) were not the roots of the Taliban at all, and their power struggle with each other is what gave the Taliban their opening (with Pakistani financial backing) to win over the people as an alternative to chaos.  Even then, Hekmatyar even tried to ally with Massoud(!) against the Taliban.  None of the senior Mujahideen commanders ever ended up in the Taliban government, and, again, most of the Taliban's senior leadership (excepting Omar) were too young to fight the Soviets in the first place and were kicking their heels in refugee camps.

I keep hearing people trot out this myth that the Mujahideen evolved into the Taliban, and it's not really based in fact at all.

Didn't a large amount of Mujahedeen foot soldiers with combat experience and donated weaponry later join the Taliban though?

Much of Hekmatyar's forces defected to the Taliban after he lost Kabul in 1996, but mostly because by that point Taliban victory was a fait accompli.  The original 1994 Taliban was pretty much all refugees in Pakistan (funded by the Pakistanis after Hekmatyar proved to be a very poor puppet).

Idiocy is bipartisan.

And that includes me, I suppose. Mikado, I will admit I actually believed that theory until just now because of my lack of information on that subject. Thank you for informing me. I assume the Mujaheddin was composed of people like Massoud et al?  

It was more a collection of 70+ different militias without a formal hierarchy who, after the fall of Kabul in 1991, promptly started shooting each other for three years until they lost all credibility and the Taliban swept in.  Massoud was a Tajik, he wouldn't have been able to hold the show together, but Rabbani was the figurehead he was backing.  Massoud/Rabbani vs. Hekmatyar with the (ethnically Mongol, religiously Shia) Hazaras getting shot at by everybody and shooting at everybody.

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So, are people not encouraged to point out the obvious any more then?  I mean, we've seen what happens whenever people do that for religious folk and so on, and I guess this is what got memphis his personal lynch mob to start with.  But are we all now to pretend Santa is real just to keep the delusional happy?

I'm sure you know better than this Joe. Don't be an idiot.

Actually, the fact that Joe is content to write off anybody who subscribes to notions that don't fit into a strict 'A=A' rationalist Wittgensteinian episteme as 'delusional' and leave it at that is one that he's demonstrated many times.

Haha, what?  Pretentious much?

You know, for someone who rightfully hates it when people try to psychoanalyze him around here, you're certainly happy to dish it out.  What's more, you complain when people criticize your old-fashioned religious beliefs, and you complain when people don't understand your talk about 'cis-genderism'.  It's like one minute you're preaching from the pulpit at some exceedingly dull church; the next you're a giving a Womens' Studies lecture at Berkeley.

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The true irony in all this is that memphis and virtually everybody trying to defend him from the lynch mob are all supporters of gay rights.  The actual bigots have remained silent this entire time.  C'est la vie.

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So, I guess we can we all agree that it's probably a bad idea to send PM's to women (or weird people like me) that you barely know on the Atlas alluding to the desire for sex?

That was really the only point to any of how this started before it morphed into this frightening behemoth.

I agree it's neither a good idea nor a demonstration of basic decency. But I also feel that the social acceptance for introductions has swung too far in the opposite direction where men are made to feel like predators for making any sort of compliment to a woman, no matter how tactfully done. And that's a shame both because people of both genders usually enjoy compliments and because most men are not vicious predators. It's extremely rude and presumptuous to suggest we are. Today's men are are caught in an unfair situation, which leads a lot of them to live lonely lives for fear of being labelled a slimeball or even a criminal. That's not to say life is perfect for women either. It's obviously not, but it irks me when womens grievances are accepted as gospel, but those of men are so callously dismessed because of assumptions that we are so privileged and bigoted and whatever. More broadly, there is an enormous stigma about men making any complaints about our lives, and that is a huge burden to live under as well. I very much wish that people could recognize, as I've stated earlier, that there are pros and cons to being either sex. The world is not as simple as female victims and male oppressors or vice versa.

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I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply to pre-monetary or Hunter-gatherer type societies or economies unless you have a very wide definition of trade and markets.

Not of course that that really matters in the context of this discussion.

Anyway, I'm with ag here - and Andre Gunder Frank of whom I believe ag shares little fondness but this is for you, anyway, Tweed:

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In Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism. I would share the view that those three terms of pretty meaningless and should be abandoned for the purpose of analysis. Think of it as eliminativist sociology.

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Ok.

1. I do hate the idiotic lables: "capitalism", "socialism" or whatever. These are not terms that have any meaning in modern economics. They do have a very dusty library smell, believe me. You want to be describing actual historic/contemporary institutions - be my guest. But then describe them - and don't post ridiculous lables.

2. Private property and markets are things I can, sort of, understand. The former means people have the right to use and/or dispose of their assets and the latter that they can actually exchange those assets if they so like. Now, in a modern world all those things come w/ zillions of limitations (technological, legal, political, etc., etc) - some of these justifiable, others not, but that's a completely separate issue. Anyway, at least these are the things I can understand.

3. Growth. Growth of what? If you mean growth of consumption of certain goods, population, etc. - well, ok, I get it. If you mean growth of GDP - that notion in itself is completely dependent on the existence of markets, because unless we have prices, we don't even know what to add up. Estimates of GDP (and its growth) for places like the old USSR or the modern North Korea have a lot of magic in them

4. Why on earth would private property and markets require growth of anything, beats me. Naturally, it is very nice when consumption is growing - societies tend to be happy-looking places in such moments. It is also not very nice, when consumption starts falling - there are a lot of unhappy people around in those cases, of course. Even a market economy cannot make people believe they are living better today than tomorrow if they have less. But, hell, it is a lot more efficient in providing for human welfare than whatever the alternatives known to humanity - except in extraordinary short-term circumstances, such as famine, war, pestilence, etc. Yes, even Churchill and Roosevelt got their ration books during WWII, in order to buy the price-controlled eggs. But, in the end, if you try to impose such emergency measures permanently, societies adapt: there emerge black markets, underground workshops, traders. You can try to kill them off (they shot an ancestor of mine for selling shirts and needles), but, in the end, you yield. In the late 1980s/early 1990s markets in Russia emerged at the time of economic collapse. Today what makes life bearable in North Korea are the illegal and semi-legal markets. It's not as if NK were growing - but the markets did. Shoot them, murder them, declare them scum: if there is scarcity, there will be traders and markets and (illegal, but nevertheless quite real) private property. That's as much of an empirical law as social science can get you.

5. Anyway, the world's economy isn't going to be growing forever. And the reason is obvious: every single estimate of the world's population dynamics is pointing to the population starting to drop within the next century. This is going to create a lot of problems we are all quite cognizant of: hard to sustain pensions and medical care for the elderly, when you do not have a supply of the younger folk entering the workforce. Mercifully, globally it won't happen in our lifetime, and locally it can be resolved through immigration. Then, of course, there are places like Japan that are already there. Japan hasn't much grown in a generation, and the population is already falling. When I was passing through recently, I didn't notice any price controls or socialized factories. Where should I have been looking?

6. I can go on and on. But the fact remains: the original statement was ridiculous, and not even remotely understood by its author, who himself had only a vague notion of what those words meant.

there's of course some portions of this i would raise objections to somewhat but well, yeah. there you go.

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Obviously I don't agree with everything in this post, but the bolded part is quite dead and what I'm submitting here.

For those not in the know, the English Defence League are largely a group of football hooligans and working class racists who claim to oppose radical Islam, and demonstrate peacefully against it. However, these demonstrations tend to become violent, much like football hooliganism, and attacking all Muslims, not just radical Muslims.

HI for me, I'm proud of my country, and would also be proud of the UK if I lived there, but groups like the EDL take their love way too far, and turn patriotism into ugly, ethnic/religious nationalism.

putting aside the barely concealed class snobbery there's nothing inherently ugly about "ethnic/religious nationalism." zionism is "ethnic/religious nationalism" for example, do you oppose that? somehow i doubt you do. they certainly don't. oy vey!

to me the sort of 'patriotism' you speak of is ugly. 'patriotism' (by which i mean 'civic nationalism') at its core is totally superficial and basically everything the post-60s left straw mans nationalism as being. it has no basis other than ideology and essentially state worship. it is idolatry towards pieces of cloth and paper. a few arbitrary lines on a map and 'the constitution/charter/whatever' are not enough as the basis for a nation. you need borders, language and culture. the edl has some real cretins in its ranks and ideological issues but it at least understands that. it at least genuinely respects that. so i'd take your average edl symp any day over the 'respectable conservatives.' hell you supported virgil goode, i shouldn't be explaining this to you. have some consistency at least.

knowing you i'm kind of surprised you didn't bold the parts in red too. that's something i at least have some respect for a lot of the less mainstream left on. they are at least consistent in their anti-nationalism: nationalism is always bad, therefore zionism is bad. unlike 'respectable conservatives' who are gutless or certain hypocrites on the far-right (e.g. many 'white nationalists'.. god i hate that term). both are very transparent, i'm not sure why they bother trying to play pretend.

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Those types are generally positive towards Palestinian nationalism tough, so I wouldnt call them consistent.

from what i've seen they're generally for a fully integrated secular palestinian state. which would be a different kettle of fish entirely from israel, which is explicitly based on cultural & ethnic nationalism. of course the practicality let alone likelihood of that is.. well, yeah.

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     Discriminatory policies should have no place in the land, regardless of who benefits from them.

But is SCOTUS correct in saying that diversity on campus can have an educational benefit, and if there is no other way to achieve it race can be used as a factor?

Some schools, particularly some public universities, have a policy that just about anyone with a HS diploma can gain admission. Those students aren't guaranteed success, just an opportunity. If HS scores are less of a factor, can diversity be a factor?

Why should 'diversity' be the goal? The way I understood it, affirmative action was intended to give black Americans (whom the program only originally applied to) the chance to get into college. The shift in the focus towards making college campuses a place that are 'diverse' for the sake of diversity undermines the entire original purpose of affirmative action, which was designed to promote upward mobility for black Americans. The diversity argument, more than anything else, is a shift away from that to a kind of 'admissions should enrich white students' experience' policy, rather than one that actually promotes upward mobility. Essentially, college admissions are designed so that wealthy white kids can say that they have a 'black friend', while the educational benefit toward black or other minority students is completely ignored.

Again, the only people whom affirmative action benefits are wealthy whites and wealthy minorities, who can continue to use it as leverage to perpetuate class rule. Having token black, Latino, and Asian members of the governing class helps expand the American Dream myth to those communities, as if saying 'Look at [blank]! He or She went to college, and so can you!' while forever moving the goalposts to make it impossible. And of course this kind of affirmative action policy totally ignores the vast majority of the American poor, who are, of course, white.

A much more radical solution to this problem would just be to take the money out of higher education and let everyone go based upon their own merits. But then that would deprive the ruling class its inherent advantage of access to education, so forgive me if I don't see that happening in the near future.