nanana

That seems like too broad a takeaway. I’m not advocating that you listen to me unless I make sense to you. If I do make sense and you want to support a general claim for “black” people, I think I’ve pointed to MANY more recent injustices where you may be able to mount a specific claim on behalf of specific people against specific people that can prove a traceable specific harm that doesn’t have a lot of variables mixed up in them. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much energy they want to spend righting past wrongs versus building new positives. I’m not advising anyone on how to spend their time and effort or how to deal with forces that are bigger than I am.

You clearly don’t get me. I think that people of all partisanships (including mine) have foibles. Love I say but don’t be gullible. Like my favorite church lady (I was Episcopalian) said, “God told us not to judge but he didn’t tell us we had to be stupid…”

A cross-partisan toast to the end of the Bush-Clinton-Cheney era. May their bloody legacy recede into oblivion.

Sorry, didn't pick up on what you meant by #1 until right now when I was supposed to be working on some deadline, oops. The "Slave Reparations" movement is a great example, but people could argue that it is a straw man for the point, since I am not aware that any jurisdiction has passed "Slave Reparations," so I pick it more because it is a clear illustration of what I was talking about rather than because it is more than a wish of a few percentage of our fellow citizens. There are many muddier examples, but let's get the water out of the mud until it is crisp pottery that makes a good illustration. There have been periodic attempts to get various states and/or the federal government to pass a law to remunerate descendants of slaves for the agreeably unjust conditions and economic deprivations they experienced. Since slavery was outlawed in 1865, a day-old slave-owner when the amendment passed would be 158 years, 11 months, and 8 days old. It is unlikely that a 1-day-old would have achieved a high level of agency, so let's pretend that 18-year-olds whose families owned slaves (a tiny minority even in the South) who had reached their majority and who were in a position to actively REJECT the lives they had been born into were able to make full use of their "agency". They would be 176 years, 11 months, and 8 days old). It is unlikely that even very good gene therapy or vampirism would have enabled any slaveowner to live that long. So, there's no way to apply reparations to anyone who had any agency at that time. Lest people wonder whether I deny the potential legacy to the progeny of slaves, I do not. I am sure it has a multi-generational effect. But when I try to translate that into a percentage effect, and when I try to get the state to levy reparations against all citizens, many of which were not progeny of slaveholders, many of which were post-1865 immigrants with no direct or indirect role in slavery, I find the traceability, onus, and practicality problematic. Let me also say that there have been many subsequent injustices, racial and otherwise, since 1865 (limiting myself so I don't overtax the patience of you gorgeous bareback sluts, inseminators, and receptacles) to African Americans (but I could pontificate on the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Italian, the Mexican Bracero dues-paying that happened). After 1865 at the hands of state and Federal government, trotted Jim Crow laws, FDRs creation of Social Security for whites and Welfare for blacks, the redlining of black neighborhoods by FDR's administration, Brown versus the Board of Education, the Civil Rights era, the "Great Sociaty" reforms of LBJ that may have had the unintended consequences of making black families jump through government hoops to qualify for subsidies, Dixiecrats, etc. Each of these injustices should be subjected to the same analysis of whether it is possible to trace the injustice to an ACTUAL PERSON OR GROUP OF PEOPLE and levy their profits from the bad behavior. If it can be done, then okay for all of us. If there were a way to have a more traceable payback to the source of injustice, I would not at all be opposed. The more diffuse and collective and involuntary the payback becomes, the more I oppose it. Let me be accountable for things I DID, but let me question the collective punishment I suffer when the real criminals or sources of injustice were just people who LOOKED like me. (I'm mostly Caucasian by the way.) I am VERY EXCITED, however, to be part of VOLUNTARY solutions that help all of God's children see and achieve their full potential. I would also say, however unfortunate it may be from an individual perspective, that bloodlines have an effect on the POSSIBILITY to access past generational investment and the mindset of investment in FUTURE generations. For example, if I were born a princess as high-born as many of you are, you beautiful pixels, my parents might have indoctrinated me into a view that I was a 32nd-generation-prince(ss), which may have affected my allegiance to my class, my burden to carry the bloodline forward, and my desire to conform to (or potentially rebel against) my predecessors' expectations, including (happy or unhappy) impregnation of a (willing or unwilling) female spouse, and multi-generational accumulation wealth and capital. If I were an orphan (or academic middle-class trash like I actually am), I may have less consciousness that my decisions were a multi-generational investment in my 7th generation (to cite the time-horizon of native American tribal decision-making). There may have been a contribution to my mentality of discrimination in the past that deprived me of my multi-generational consciousness that gained me access to past wealth (perhaps finagled from others) and gave me a consciousness to pay it forward so future members of my family could benefit. There may be much injustice in this, but I am not at all convinced that I could quantify the portion gained from finagling (BAD & WRONG, BUT MAYBE SO FAR IN THE PAST IT BECOMES TOO WOVEN IN WITH OTHER VARIABLES) versus multi-generational investment consciousness (NOT BAD, PERHAPS UNDESERVING OF PUNISHMENT). (THIS MORALITY IS MUCH MORE RELEVANT TO BREEDERS than to most gay culture, which has mostly opted out of the gene pool, though please accuse me of simplifying if you think this diatribe is too short...). As much as DISCRIMINATION plays out in inter-generational wealth, so does a MULTI-GENERATIONAL investment consciousness play out. Without suggesting that people are immutable, and also without suggesting that thieving bigots of the past may have discouraged people from maintaining a multi-generational investor consciousness, it is hardly fair to expect the most far-sighted investors to adopt the habits of the most happy-go-lucky, here-and-now investors. Lady Fortune is a multi-generational bitch, and if we stay at her roulette table, Washington of the 22nd century may finally rival Baghdad of the 11th century or Giza of the 10th century BC.

Hi @PozBearWI, thanks for the clarification the (and for implanting the idea of being your friend 😀). There has been a lot of monkey business with the Democrats outright lying and misleading the voting public about the Republicans and Russia. While I am ABSOLUTELY sure that Russia, China, Iran Britain and many other countries have deep states comparable to that of the United States, I can’t get very excited about a vague line of argumentation that demonizes an entire nation and implies a nefarious purpose, all at the same time UK Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer sent UK bureaucrats to campaign for Kamala Harris. I am sure that US-based NGOs have manipulated many a foreign election and fomented many a color revolution.

This is disingenuous. Again, a face-value-quality interpretation. Democrats are so desperate to pretend that all dissent from their policies originates from bad foreigners. Tim Poole didn’t get his ideas from Russia. And so what if he did? Any NPC who gets his ideas from NPR is falling for British bullshit propaganda. It may be hard to see this since Britain has such pervasive mind control over its ex-colony. Democrats have their cold-war Russian boogeyman; Republicans have their Chinese boogeyman. Two mirror parties channeling mirror fears and aggressions.

But at least tip a hat to the political question of Olaf Schultz…. Maybe he was self-impregnated at the lab? Or in the muck of Karl Marx Allee?

Should we be sad or happy that Olaf Schultz is now more like a geranium folded into a bible than a German Prime Minister? Please discuss you sexy bareback homos you! Then maybe comment on the joys of cumming in a group hole at the Lab or alternatively of having fuckers tip your butt-liquid content closer to that of a watermelon or human milkshake rather than that of a charcuterie board or full-size butt-boy.

PS - I include both business owners AND laborers in the category of producers. And - we don’t have capitalism in this country, we have fascist corporatism, where the government provides some guarantees for certain businesses, e.g., military industrial complex, regulated industries, big pharma, etc.

An assertion not borne out by the data. Certainly people will have noticed that gas prices fluctuate. The price of a TV, a microwave, a transistor, and other goods that benefit from innovation and productivity-of-learning-and-repetition gains fall in price. Houses rise and fall in price. The Fed invents imaginary money for its friends and thus makes the dollar worth less. Limitations in supply or changed in demand also affect the rise or fall of prices. Disincentivizing producers is a GUARANTEED method of creating scarcity and driving up prices. Lower-than-market-rate interest rates is another time-tested guarantee that people will be fooled into overpaying for things. Ultimately money is a mechanism for ensuring that producers wish to continue to produce. Anyone who thinks producers should be forced to produce without reaching an agreement with a consumer is an advocate of slavery.

While this may technically be true, it is laughably free of upstream and downstream consequences. Upstream, what obligation does anyone in the market have to produce ANYTHING, even if they are overpaid by the consumer. It’s comical to think that a value-producer is a slave to someone downstream. It’s laughable to think that a value chain is ATTRACTIVE to anyone who cannot make some kind of living. It’s downright Minnie Pearl RIDICULOUS to think that anyone has an obligation to take an UNSUSTAINABLE LOSS by continuing to participate upstream from non-payers in the value chain. Agreed that for disruptions to the value chain, suppliers may decide that it’s in their legitimate interests to take a loss to keep the value chain on LIFE SUPPORT. Tell me, what’s in it for producers to continue enslaving themselves to people downstream who can’t afford to make the value chain SUSTAINABLE? Is that really so hard for socialists to understand? What do the CONSUMERS do in an economy that disincentivizes the PRODUCERS? Please help me see what I’m missing.

a very brainy, but not so hearty, answer, I guess if I can no longer afford beef, I should call boatman to be corrected about my perceptions about the quality of my life.

@BootmanLA, I appreciate your argumentation, which is factually formidable but feels incapable of a universal empathy. It rarely feels as if we are going to land on some new insight V/R, usually feels to someone with my strengths and weaknesses as if some dated insight is going to be regurgitated. But to play to your strengths, I do not conceal that Trump has a penchant for creating less-than-affectionate nicknames. Perhaps my attempt to distinguish "woke" stumbled on something more representative of a variety of individuals not pegged to a single group. I will try harder next time to distill the essentials of "woke" and concede your point. NEDenver arrogates all of the insights to his side, which convinces me that there will be no interesting give and take to arrive at a new profound understanding. Feeling sublime and not upset in the least, I wish the out-of-luck left-wingers much joy in their failed semi-coherence, which perhaps they are too lofty to be introspective about. Street-sense / elite-sense... so many good options and paths to gaining a deep understanding of the world. Sadly, the left-wingers usually kow-tow to expertise and authority to gain their self-value. We are all touching a man's nether-regions, and to my way of experiencing it feels like a hole. To another's way of experiencing, it feels like a worm or maybe a big tree. Actually, it's both, and I pity those who only see either/or and not both. I leave you to your bitterness or your explosion of discovery about how to move us all forward.

For me there is a pretty clear distinction between presenting a government view of something versus the government trying to get another point of view shut down and disappeared. In the first scenario people get to compare the sense of both statements. In the other scenario there’s only one statement to consider. There’s extensive evidence the Biden administration pressured social media to disappear information. In my view, as much as “objective fact” might exist, I don’t see any authority with the purity of motive to be entrusted to adjudicate it, certainly not on my behalf. I have a lot less trust than you do that organizations actually stop doing things, I think they usually figure out how to morph them. I think we may agree that there is a tendency to focus on past injustices while ignoring current, as-yet-unnoticed injustices. I think we may agree that it’s always a good time to hold politicians accountable for good governance. Trump specifically has said he would dismantle the government’s ability to manipulate social media into banning people and suppressing their speech. I don’t think it would preclude the government from promoting anti-smoking messages. But what do I know? I am going to continue being skeptical of what any politician says and believe actions and efforts to be transparent.

There’s a lot of evidence that the Biden administration pressured social media to deplatform and repress people whose views contrasted with their own, as extensively reported by Matt Taibi among others. Multiple administrations attempted to prosecute Julian Assange for reporting on US war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere. Do these not meet your definition of censorship? Perhaps they don’t fit a model of having to be approved by the government before being published?