US Politics: the Moore things change...

[Dr. Pepper]

32 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

 

Fuck him and fuck giving him any support. He couldn't die in a more fitting way. He has no issue fucking over millions of people that will die of cancer and other diseases and also had no issue telling someone that died of the same cancer he has, to move to another state to seek treatment. 

Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel.  I don't have much sympathy for him at all.  Maybe some of his family for the grief they are probably feeling, but definitely not for him.  He has played such a big part in harming millions.  

[Larry of the Lawn]

24 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

Just because you judge someone not to have compassion is no reason for you to not have any. 

If he was just an average person who supported these things, fine.  But for the last thirty years he's been in the position of being one of the people that actually makes laws and decides how the rest of us live. And he's regularly decided that thousands of people in his position deserve less than he does.  I don't feel particularly bad not having compassion for him.  I feel sorry for him but it's not the same thing.

[Paladin of Ice]

31 minutes ago, Sword of Doom said:

 

Fuck him and fuck giving him any support. He couldn't die in a more fitting way. He has no issue fucking over millions of people that will die of cancer and other diseases and also had no issue telling someone that died of the same cancer he has, to move to another state to seek treatment. 

 

3 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Hard to feel sympathy for a guy getting deluxe health care on our dime who has voted to take away health care from millions. Fuck him. No compassion for the fake maverick. Thousands of better people than him die of cancer every year.

Yeah, like I said I disagree (sometimes quite angrily) with some of McCain's actions, but I'm not exactly the kind of person who generally turns down giving care or comfort to the sick. There are a handful of people in the world who wouldn't deserve care or sympathy if they were suffering on the side of the road, but despite the irony of McCain getting top notch treatment that other might not due to him, I don't count McCain as one of them.

Plus, having seen some good people go through cancer and the devastation it wreaks on people, it's not something I wish on many. Even most people who haven't lived a good life don't what cancer can do to a person.

You guys can feel otherwise, but I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree in that case.

[Dr. Pepper]

Having no sympathy or compassion for someone like McCain isn't the same as wishing cancer on him.  I mean, I don't sit here and actively wish that a meteor falls directly on our dear leader's head, but I won't  stop myself from cheering if it does happen.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Paladin of Ice said:

 

Yeah, like I said I disagree (sometimes quite angrily) with some of McCain's actions, but I'm not exactly the kind of person who generally turns down giving care or comfort to the sick. There are a handful of people in the world who wouldn't deserve care or sympathy if they were suffering on the side of the road, but despite the irony of McCain getting top notch treatment that other might not due to him, I don't count McCain as one of them.

Plus, having seen some good people go through cancer and the devastation it wreaks on people, it's not something I wish on many. Even most people who haven't lived a good life don't what cancer can do to a person.

You guys can feel otherwise, but I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree in that case.

There's a difference between feeling bad that he's going through this and feeling that it's really fucked up that he's okay with other people going through the same thing with absolutely zero support.

[DanteGabriel]

Sympathy is in short supply in this GOP-corrupted world, and I have none to spare for a vainglorious, corrupt, misogynistic shitheel who foisted Sarah Palin on us. May the history books remember McCain for the spoiled, selfish asshole he is and the betrayals he heaped upon his country.

[Zorral]

35 minutes ago, DanteGabriel said:

Hard to feel sympathy for a guy getting deluxe health care on our dime who has voted to take away health care from millions. Fuck him. No compassion for the fake maverick. Thousands of better people than him die of cancer every year.

Damn right.

[The Marquis de Leech]

5 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Democrats should really start investing today in replicating Alabama in Mississippi. Mississippi has a larger african American population than Alabama, and if you can get more African Americans to vote than voted for obama at higher percentages than they voted for obama, you can win Mississippi too. Black Women! 98%! my God, what a number!

the same holds true for Tennessee, lets replicate the Alabama results there.

and Wyoming, there's only like 350 thousand voters state wide. Lets start investing in registration and gotv now. Big Bang for the buck in a state that tiny.

There's the caveat that Mississippi is even more racist racially polarised than Alabama. You've got more blacks to play with, but the whites are even more Republican.

I think the priority now ought to be Georgia. Large black population, the whites are less Republican than Alabama or Mississippi, and there's the Atlanta Metro. The state will, eventually, flip on demographics, but it needs help first.

Wyoming... perhaps. But I'd go after the Dakotas first. Unlike Wyoming, both of them have a history of electing Democrats to congress. 

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, DanteGabriel said:

Sympathy is in short supply in this GOP-corrupted world, and I have none to spare for a vainglorious, corrupt, misogynistic shitheel who foisted Sarah Palin on us. May the history books remember McCain for the spoiled, selfish asshole he is and the betrayals he heaped upon his country.

On that note, this guy - who said that those who lead 'good lives' should pay less for insurance, and that getting sick is part of leading a bad life - has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

[OldGimletEye]

Now conservative sorts of people. 

Why do I post stuff about dead Austrian guys and what they did almost 90 years ago?

Could it be I just like posting stuff about dead Austrian guys? Well yeah I do because I’m kind of a weirdo creeper.

But maybe it’s also because dead Austrian guys are influential on people like the Kook Brothers, your friendly feudal libertarian overlords, who spend lots of money to promote stuff dead Austrian guys said.

It could be because people like Margaret Thatcher held up a copy of Road To Serfdom and said, “this is what we believe.” It could be because it’s influential on people like Paul Ryan. It could be because what dead Austrian guys did and said has been a big influence on conservatism and the American right. 

Anyway interesting stuff about dead Austrian guys , their modes of thought, and their errors.

Quote

But Hayek denounced any monetary policy that aimed to raise prices during the depression, arguing that such a policy would treat the disease of depression with the drug that had caused the disease in the first place. Decades later, Hayek acknowledged his mistake and made clear that he favored a policy that would prevent the flow of nominal spending from ever shrinking. In this post, I am excerpting the introductory section of the current draft of my paper.

Up until 1934, Hayek was on the delfationista band wagon, a policy that was extremely destructive. It lead to some really bad shit. And in extreme cases might have helped to bring about some really, really, bad shit.

He later admitted his error. But, it seems just recently certain sorts of people forgot he had admitted his errors. Like say maybe people like Ted Cruz.

Quote

Few economists, if any, ever experienced as rapid a rise to stardom as F. A. Hayek did upon arriving in London in January 1931, at the invitation of Lionel Robbins, to deliver a series of four lectures on the theory of industrial fluctuations.

Lionnel Robbins was largely on Hayek’s side during the 1930s. He’d later change his mind though.

Quote

Only 31 years old, Hayek, director of the Austrian Institute of Business Cycle Research headed by his mentor Ludwig von Mises, had never held an academic position

Mises was big pals with Ayn Rand.

Quote

When he arrived in England in January 1931, Hayek actually went first to Cambridge to give a lecture, a condensed version of the four LSE lectures. Hayek was not feeling well when he came to Cambridge to face an unsympathetic, if not hostile, audience, and the lecture was not a success.

Word on the street was the smart Joan Robinson gave him a bad time.

Quote

This objective would be achieved, Hayek argued, only if injections of new money preserved the equilibrium relationship between savings and investment, investments being financed entirely by voluntary savings, not by money newly created for that purpose. Insofar as new investment projects were financed by newly created money, the additional expenditure thereby financed would entail a deviation from the real equilibrium that would obtain in a hypothetical barter economy or in an economy in which money had no distortionary effect. That  interest rate was called by Hayek, following Wicksell, the natural (or equilibrium) rate of interest.

Did it ever cross Hayek’s mind what would happen if the money rate of interest departed from the Wicksellian rate? 1) Either it doesn’t happen because markets rapidly clear and hit a new equlibrium on every market or 2) they don’t. Hayek had to be smart enough to that 1 was delusional.

Quote

But according to Hayek, Wicksell failed to see that, in a progressive economy with real investment financed by voluntary saving, the increasing output of goods and services over time implies generally falling prices as the increasing productivity of factors of production progressively reduces costs of production. A stable price level would require ongoing increases in the quantity of money to, the new money being used to finance additional investment over and above voluntary saving, thereby causing the economy to deviate from its equilibrium time path by inducing investment that would not otherwise have been undertaken.

And Hayek failed to see what happened when the demand for money increased. And if prices don’t adjust loanable funds doesn’t work.
 

Quote

Although he did not offer a detailed account of the origins of the Great Depression, Hayek’s diagnosis of the causes of the Great Depression, made explicit in various other writings, was clear: monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve during the 1920s — especially in 1927 — to keep the US price level from falling and to moderate deflationary pressure on Britain (sterling having been overvalued at the prewar dollar-sterling parity when Britain restored gold convertibility in March 1925) distorted relative prices and the capital structure.

The astute conservative sorts of person will see this where people like Rand and Ron Paul get their stuff.

Quote

When distortions eventually become unsustainable, unprofitable investment projects would be liquidated, supposedly freeing those resources to be re-employed in more productive activities. Why the Depression continued to deepen rather than recover more than a year after the downturn had started, was another question.

In short, he too apparently was Says law believer. There can be no general gluts, just excess supply on the investment goods producing sector balanced by an excess demand on the consumption producing sector. Of course the Great Depression and the Great Recessions were “general gluts”. 

And about 80 years later people like Fama, Cochrane, and Mulligan were Says Law Believers. There was no general glut evidently.

Quote

 But Hayek was incapable of, or unwilling to, translate this abstract precept into a definite policy norm.

Guess he was afraid of being accused of not being a true conservative.

Quote

Thus, Hayek concluded his series of lectures by implicitly rejecting his own idea of neutral money as a policy criterion, warning instead against the “well-meaning but dangerous proposals to fight depression by ‘a little inflation.’”

Yet, a little inflation is exactly how FDR engineered a recovery in 1933.

Quote

Larry White has defended Hayek against the charge that his policy advice in the depression was liquidationist, encouraging policy makers to take a “hands-off” approach to the unfolding economic catastrophe.

Even Milton Friedman would disagree. 

Quote

Hayek’s policy stance in the early 1930s was characterized by David Laidler as a skepticism bordering on nihilism in opposing any monetary- or fiscal-policy responses to mitigate the suffering of the general public caused by the Depression.

Yup.

Quote

The source of that intellectual and doctrinal background was David Hume and the intermediary through which it was transmitted was none other than Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises.

For some right wing nutters, who are Misean fans, Hayek is almost an outright socialist. But ya know, being conservative enough, it ain’t easy.

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 hour ago, OldGimletEye said:

Now conservative sorts of people. 

Why do I post stuff about dead Austrian guys and what they did almost 90 years ago?

It's amusing to recall that from the 1930s until the 1970s, "capitalism" was a term analogous to "fascism" in the Western political lexicon - it was a term used primarily by its opponents, rather than its adherents. Only Communists ever described the post-war Western economy as capitalist - to do so conjured up images of the Depression, and class war - for non-Communists it was the Mixed Economy/Free Enterprise. By the same token, the likes of Hayek were prophets in the wilderness for decades, cheerfully ignored until the political class that could actually remember the Depression had retired.

Ironically, the reverse now seems to be happening. It has been three and a half decades since any major Western country made a serious effort to implement socialism, and over a quarter of a century since the break-up of the Soviet Union. For younger people, labels like socialism or even communism have accordingly lost much of their negative sting - and they are also too young to remember the last desperate efforts* to maintain the post-war economic consensus. You're thus seeing the leftist prophets emerge from the political wilderness, much like Hayek did.

*Yes, the right-wing theme-park version of the 1970s is nonsense. The point though is that it's tough to use that as a boogeyman for people who weren't even alive under Carter - but who most certainly can remember the Great Recession.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

On that note, this guy - who said that those who lead 'good lives' should pay less for insurance, and that getting sick is part of leading a bad life - has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

I'm not religious--you know, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in anything spiritual. But then something like this happens and makes me all warm and fuzzy and I wants to go to church.

[IamMe90]

5 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel.  I don't have much sympathy for him at all.  Maybe some of his family for the grief they are probably feeling, but definitely not for him.  He has played such a big part in harming millions.  

Yes, yes, not getting positively gleeful at someone dying of cancer if they are republican is now a partisan issue. We get it. Have fun reveling in death. 

[DireWolfSpirit]

Mona Charen quoted someone tonight on MSNBC on the subject of how the  Republicans "Bannon Movement" has finally petered out.

Ok here it is, I really like this-

 

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

 

 

[lokisnow]

McCain will be fine, he will will himself into congress because he'll want to abolish the estate tax before he dies.

[Relic]

2 hours ago, IamMe90 said:

Yes, yes, not getting positively gleeful at someone dying of cancer if they are republican is now a partisan issue. We get it. Have fun reveling in death. 

Not sure anyone is being gleeful, just honest about the lack of emotion McCain's death engenders. I don't wish him death or suffering, but I'm certainly not going to shed a tear for what basically amounts to a giant hypocrite who is partially responsible for the lack of functional healthcare in the USA. 

[DanteGabriel]

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

On that note, this guy - who said that those who lead 'good lives' should pay less for insurance, and that getting sick is part of leading a bad life - has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

All part of God's Plan. *makes sign of the cross*

[Bonnot OG]

4 hours ago, IamMe90 said:

Yes, yes, not getting positively gleeful at someone dying of cancer if they are republican is now a partisan issue. We get it. Have fun reveling in death. 

The death of a scumbag who has no issue fucking the poor and the sick over and letting them die. A person that told someone dying of the disease he is dying of, to move out of state to seek treatment. 

You want to live with blinders on and still think Republicans are good people? By all means do so, but some of us are not naive and know they are shit, so we feel nothing about one dying of cancer, or find same joy in the fact that someone willing to kill people by supporting horrible tax plans that have cuts to health coverage in them, is dying of cancer even with all the healthcare options he has at his disposal that he is in turn willing to strip away from people and has denied people for decades.

And I don't say any of that lightly. I watched one of my grandmothers die and wither away from cancer. I saw one of my grandfathers die and wither away from it as well. Last year I had a dog that I had for 12 years die of brain cancer. I know what it entails, I also know what McCain supports and what he is willing to do even while dying. He's still willing to strip people of their healthcare through slashing at funding of healthcare even while dying of the disease. It makes him an even bigger sack of shit. 
 

[mormont]

[mod] I think that's enough discussion of how we personally feel or don't feel about John McCain being ill. Let's move on. [/mod]

[Morpheus]

Did anyone see any of Rosenstein's grilling by the House committee yesterday? Republicans be crazy. They aren't just clearing a runway for Trump to fire Mueller, they are out there waving flares. Raging asshole, Jim Jordan was frothing and popping forehead veins like a mini Hannity. Rosenstein actually looked like he did a pretty good job standing his ground in defending Mueller, far less of mealy mouthed, lying conspirator than the actual AG; obviously still part of Trump's corrupt DoJ, but he was firm in denying that there was cause for Mueller's termination.