I remember when conservatives were hooting and hollering about Climate Science Being Wrong, because the predicted “Worst hurricane season on record” wasn’t producing a record number of powerful storms.
Well… now what? I guess we can fall back to Gaetz and DeSantis blaming Biden for a bad cleanup job. Or go the MTG approach and start talking about HARP and the Jewish Space Lasers.
I would simply inherit my father’s couch.
The DOW grew 25% over the last year.
The S&P grew 30%
The NASDAQ grew 35%
What are you doing buying 8% Treasury Bonds?
The thing about taxes is it only works when you’re a big fish in a small pond. Amazon Fulfillment Center doesn’t have to pay taxes to the small Arkansas municipal government they functionally own. But you can be fucking sure that the extremely white sheriff and his Good’ole’Boy deputies won’t tolerate a tax payment showing up late when it’s the low-income black neighborhood Amazon Fulfillment Center workers who are on the hook.
That is, after all, the agreement between the city and the business. The city budget doesn’t come from the company coffers, it comes from the salaries of the employees’ paychecks. Rents are for Little People.
It teaches the younger and weaker kids that they cannot expect administrators to act in their interests.
It teaches the older and meaner kids that they can act with impunity, safe in the assumption that administrators will look the other way.
The lesson is two-fold, and the end result is a cycle of bullying as the younger kids grow up knowing they can punch down without consequences.
Back in the 90s, my middle school had a policy of punishing any students involved in a fight. If you threw a punch, you were in trouble. If you got hit, you were in trouble. The official line being that it would be unfair to punish two students brawling simply because the teacher didn’t arrive until the last punch was thrown. But in practical terms, it meant you had a huge disincentive to report being attacked because it would amount to a confession of guilt.
Found this out very personally when a kid in a foul mood decided to start marching through the hallway and swinging at anyone standing in his way. He struck three kids on his way out of the building (including myself). When this got up to the principal’s office, the principal was forced to explain to three different sets of parents why their children were in trouble because one (older, btw) child went on a rampage.
In that particular incident, the offending kid was suspended and ultimately moved to a disciplinary school. But the policy wasn’t changed, just exempted in this particular instance.
Eh. They’ve been on the decline. Enshittification comes for us all.
But the Gulf War from the US position was less about Kuwait and more about securing oil for import to the US.
I mean, that’s one and the same. Saddam was responding to slant drilling from Kuwait into oil rich southern Iraqi oil fields. That’s why he burned the Kuwait wells on his way out. It was retaliation for what he claimed was a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.
The Kuwaiti wells, and the slant drilled wells into Iraqi territory, were operated by American petroleum companies and their affiliates. And the US incursion into Iraq, with the intention of destroying the Iraqi offensive capacity, was about restoring the ability of Kuwaiti drillers to access Iraqi fields. 2003 made that redundant. But the initial Desert Storm was intended to prevent Saddam from threatening cross-border drilling operations into the future.
Unfortunately, the solution to the paradox boils down to “Might Makes Right”. The bounds of tolerance aren’t set by a consensus, but by whomever has the Power to Yeet.
And while this game seems satisfying early on (Yeet the Nazis! Yeet the Tankies! Yeet the Radical Centrists!) you do get into a cycle of purity where you’re yeeting anyone who questions whether the last guy who got yeeted deserved it.
That leaves us with the age-old Martin Niemöller verse:
“And then they came to Yeet me - and there was no one left to Yeet back on my behalf”.
What is the appropriate degree of tolerance? How do you prevent it from expanding to include people who would dissolve the institution? How do you prevent it from collapsing into a state of cult-like obedience to authority? It’s a balancing act and one that the individuals with the power to silence fringe communities rarely have an interest in performing.
This is, unfortunately, much bigger than one guy one the internet in the last week. We’ve been hapless bystanders in the Culture War for… centuries.
It’s much bigger than “Republican voters”. You’ll find plenty of blue states with students drowning in debt and “business-friendly” politicians espousing the exact same “it wouldn’t be fair” anti-debt relief rhetoric.
These people are against their money going to other people
It’s more strategic. Student loan debt is a mechanism for controlling the employment prospects of college grads.
Public debt forgiveness becomes a method for funneling students into low paying, morally hazardous jobs (prosecutors, police, the public side of the MIC, education in underfunded neighborhoods, bureaucrat in a corrupt or underfunded agency) where you’ve got an incentive to keep your head down and do the work rather than organize your office or resist deplorable government policies.
Private industries, similarly, offer the better salaries doing the more morally repugnant work - mining and chemical manufacturing, big finance and HFT, pharma, automotive, credit and collections - which draws in the most talented people to apply their talents in the worst ways.
You’re constantly asked to sell out your principles for a paycheck/debt relief, or the most invasive and obnoxious applications of technology. You’re never going into business for yourself to challenge a corporate behemoth or pursuing public work that both benefits people and pays well. You’re never going into activism or politics without a corporate paymaster.
Ever notice how many SCOTUS judges and Senators are in the Federalist Society or from the Heritage Foundation relative to the Sierra Club or the ACLU? A big part of that is simply about the money.
He’s a cat’s paw for conservative activists. Specifically, he’s close friends with Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager with too much free time and a chip on his shoulder, who has made “anti-DEI” a focus of his investment strategy.
Robby whines about DEI, Ackman starts moving money to put downward pressure on the stock, people get scared, and Ackman looks like an investment guru for effectively manipulating the price of securities.
Well when paper money is continually speeding towards zero value
Zeno’s Monetary Policy
That’s 18 people who own about a tenth of the US GDP.
Okay, sure. But that’s bad analysis. GDP is annual and net-worth is lifetime total. That’s also global wealth, not US-domestic (four of them aren’t even American).
Agree with the sentiment, but we should really be talking about global wealth not national income.
Something needs to be done
Now you’re obligated to get a dog named Tonic.
Gaza is a cautionary tale for that
Just like with Vietnam, it seems the measure of success is in blood. Since the population of Gaza has been decimated - quite literally 1 in 10 Palestinians are now dead and we’re expecting tens to hundreds of thousands more dead before the end of next year due to famine and disease, nevermind war - while the Israelis report minimal casualties, they believe they are “winning”.
We have seen this in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam…
The lesson of these wars to the political class is that they win reelections, they generate enormous profits, and they never seem to bother the median voter over the long term.
Israel has had a scope on the head of every Arab and Persian peace activist in the region. The only folks who seem capable of surviving are the ones armed and willing to fight back.
So is Berkshire Hathaway.