Regardless of any “guillotine the rich” rhetoric I may espouse (both here and elsewhere), I don’t believe in committing any act of actual physical violence against the obscenely wealthy…even if they do make it tempting as fuck to start breaking out the guillotines.
Pointing a gun at someone is a deadly threat.
Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, was armed with only a plastic bag full of various toiletries, socks, and some papers.
Anthony Huber, the second man shot by Kyle Rittenouse, was armed with only a skateboard.
Gaige Grosskreutz, the third man shot by Kyle Rittenhouse—and the only one to survive being shot by Kyle Rittenhouse—was armed with a gun, but he had seen Rittenhouse shoot at least Huber, if not both Rosenbaum and Huber, and believed Rittenhouse to be an active shooter (which he technically was).
The two men killed by Kyle Rittenhouse that night were not armed with guns. How, precisely, were either of them a deadly threat to someone armed with a fully-loaded AR-15?
If you want me to feel bad that psycho right wing nutters got shot for pointing a gun at someone… not going to happen.
None of the three men shot by Kyle Rittenhouse managed to injure him with a gunshot of their own—including the only one of the three known to have been armed with a firearm that night. None of them were known to be right-wingers/conservatives, either. Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people, which resulted in two deaths, and he has become the newest victim-hero of the right-wing mediasphere because of that violence (and only that violence).
Once more:
Kyle Rittenhouse went to Kenosha during a Black Lives Matter protest, fearing that it would turn into a deadly riot. The only lethal violence that night came from him; he killed two people in an act of vigilante violence. If the people he killed were truly breaking the law that night, they should’ve received a trial, not an extrajudicial execution from a teenaged vigilante. Now Rittenhouse gets to become the poster boy for violent right-wing vigilantism—with all the media attention and grifting that implies—while two of his victims remain dead, the third gets to deal with the aftermath of that shooting for the rest of his life, and every white ally of Black protesters gets to wonder if their own safety is in peril.
The hyphenation for that compound adjective is correct, though using an en-dash (“anti–police violence” instead of “anti-police violence”) might’ve made that clearer.
You’ve already had the effects of a flat tax on the poor explained to you multiple times. Talking about the equality of the percentages being paid is meaningless now.
You’ve already had the humanities of the socioeconomic unfairness of the wealth gap explained to you multiple times. Talking about how a poor person losing $100 is not the same as a rich person losing $100 is meaningless now.
You’ve had every detail of your plan, every bit of logic you think is rock-solid untouchable, deconstructed and shoved in your face. Trying to do it again is meaningless now.
I was gonna leave your shit be. You really didn’t say anything I needed to counter again.
…but then you came for my motherfucking neck when you said I don’t give a fuck about the poor. That, I cannot abide.
I am in a financially precarious position for numerous reasons, none of which are all that important to this discussion. Suffice to say, I am one major financial disaster away from my life being completely ruined. So when I say I give a shit about the poor, I mean it—because while I live a relatively comfortable life, it is by no means financially secure. And I know for an absolute fact that I am not alone in my neighborhood, my city, my county, my state, my country, my continent, and my world.
Elon Musk could give away literally 99% of his total wealth and fuck off to the desert to drop acid for the rest of his life, and he’d still be able to live more comfortably than most people in America will ever be. He never has to worry about being clothed, fed, or sheltered. He will never have to sit at a kitchen table at 3 AM wondering whether he can afford to go without eating for a couple of days so he can make rent when his next paycheck comes in. He’ll never have to sit in a pediatric oncologist’s office and do the math on exactly how long he can afford to keep his child’s treatment going.
And you apparently think that’s something worth celebrating as a grand achievement of humanity.
All you’ve done when you’ve talked about this flat tax proposal is focused on the numbers, on the equity of the percentages of the tax. You have never once suggested that the extreme wealth gap between people like me and people like Elon Musk is something that needs to be “fixed” in any meaningful way. Hell, you’ve all but said that the obscenely wealthy deserve to hoard their wealth, regardless of how much that fucks with the economy and worsens poverty. You ignore the humanities of extreme poverty so you don’t have to think about how taxing even the lowest brackets of our economic caste system will fuck with their lives.
You think I don’t give a fuck about poor people? You don’t even want to think about how you’d fuck over poor people. That’s the whole problem I’ve had with you in this discussion, you Trumpist son of a bitch: You’re so busy trying to figure out the right number to protect the wealthy (including your precious orange demigod!) from losing their obscene wealth that you can’t even be fucked to think about how that same number will make poverty worse.
I posted that Terry Pratchett quote because I thought, for once—for motherfucking once in your miserable, overwrought, godforsaken commenting history on this site—your ignorant conservative ass might finally understand how poverty compounds upon poverty. I thought you might finally understand how economic disparities only make things worse for the poor. And yet, when given one of the best goddamn metaphors for that concept ever written, you scoff at it because “fairness for the rich”.
FUCK THE RICH.
Do I want to take their money? Goddamn right, I do! But I don’t want it all for myself. I want it for everyone who is struggling to survive—not thrive, but merely survive—in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. I want it for the sake of feeding the hungry, housing the houseless, and paying people a wage that will let them worry less about the necessities of life. I want to take rich people’s money away from them because they don’t fucking need it like poor people do (which was my entire goddamn point with trying to explain the Law of Diminishing Utility to you).
The obscenely wealthy have so much wealth accumulated in stocks and bank accounts and they’re sitting on it like Tolkein dragons sit on their hoards of gold. That wealth isn’t going back into the economy—tax breaks, paid-off politicians, and ignorant simps like you who push for the rich to keep their wealth make sure of that. When I say being a billionaire is unethical and immoral, it is the truth: No one “earns” a billion dollars without exploiting the poor in ways that piss on the law (and human decency), and no one who sits on a billion dollars of wealth while people living in the same country starve from having to choose rent over food can be said to be morally righteous.
All you see is numbers, percentages, digits on a balance sheet that you think have to be balanced in fairness to people who never have to work another day in their lives to accumulate wealth beyond the dreams of even yourself. You don’t see the inhumanity of your decisions—the callousness of all but saying “poor people that they should work harder if they want to make more money and pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. In this country, right now, are people who work two or even three full-time jobs for the sake of paying all their bills—and there are also people who, in the span of an hour, make the same annual salary of those full-time workers without doing a goddamn thing.
And you think that’s fair. You even think that’s a good thing. I mean, why else would you be stumping so hard to protect the wealthy from giving up even a substantial fraction of their immense wealth?
I give a fuck about wanting to help lift as many people out of poverty as possible, which is why I support plans that stop the wealthy from becoming obscenely wealthy—plans that including high personal taxes on those wealthy persons (including a 100% tax on every dollar past $1 billion). All you support is protecting rich people from giving up more money than they’ll ever even miss having in their lives, regardless of how many poor people that decision will kill.
Congratulations, Lodos: You really are a American conservative.
Important to note: Rittenhouse went to Kenosha during a Black Lives Matter protest, fearing that it would turn into a deadly riot. The only lethal violence that night came from him.
Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people in an act of vigilante violence. If the people he killed were truly breaking the law that night, they should’ve received a trial, not an extrajudicial execution from a teenaged vigilante. And now he gets to be the poster boy for violent right-wing vigilantism—with all the media attention and grifting that implies—while two of his victims get to be dead and the third gets to deal with the aftermath of that shooting for the rest of his life.
And every white ally of Black protesters gets to wonder if their own safety is in peril.
You know what? Fuck it. I’mma give this one last try, and if Terry freaking Pratchett can’t teach you some shit, no one can.
So I invite you to read The “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness. And if still don’t fucking get it after that, I don’t know what the fuck else to tell you besides “fuck off back to eating rich people’s literal shit”.
A socioeconomic theory that is mathematically inaccurate. 10% of 1000 is greater than 10% of 100. $100 has greater utility than than $10.
Wow, you…you really don’t fucking get it. I’m not going to even bother trying to explain it now because you really don’t seem to understand (or care) that a poor person losing $100 is not the same thing as a rich person losing $100 when talking about wealth and poverty.
Have the rich trickled their wealth down on you yet, or are you fine with drinking their piss instead?
Bloody hell no wonder they failed in marketing if that was what they had to work with.
To be fair, that’s what the actual factual duel on which the film is based was about: Jean de Carrouges accused Jacques Le Gris of raping Marguerite de Carrouges, and (long story short) King Charles IV called for a duel—the final judiciary duel in French history, hence “The Last Duel”—wherein the survivor would be declared the winner and the matter would be settled. (Side note: If de Carrouges had lost the duel, his wife would’ve been burned at the stake as punishment for a false accusation.) So…yeah, that says a lot about Ridley Scott’s taste in scripts if that’s the kind of story he thinks people want to see these days.
But nobody explains any semblance of how it’s true!
We’ve explained to you the Law of Diminishing Utility and the ways that both corporations and rich people avoid paying taxes. We’ve explained to you how an economic system built on unsustainable growth for the sake of continually rising profit margins puts more responsibility on the poor than the rich to keep creating that growth. We’ve explained to you how wealth and poverty both compound upon each other.
If you can’t understand any of that because you genuinely believe in “paying the same percentage of income in taxes is fair”—which is seriously on the same level of ignorance as “trickle-down economics works”—that isn’t our fault. We’re not responsible for you being unable to understand concepts like a maximum wage (e.g., no executive can be paid more than twenty times the amount made by the lowest-paid worker), a healthy social safety net, a progressive income tax that hits wealthy people harder because they (obviously) have more to give, and empathy for the poor.
I have no pity for the rich. You won’t convince me to feel it by saying “a flat tax is fair” over and over. So please fuck all the way off with that conservative economics bullshit; you won’t find anyone here with any goddamned sense who will buy into it (or your simping for the wealthy), no matter how hard you try.
The fact that the film had a graphic rape scene—which was also technically a plot point, given that the eponymous duel was literally meant to settle whether the woman was raped by one of the men in the duel—probably didn’t help matters, too. The best marketing in the world can’t overcome a word-of-mouth campaign that tells everyone what the marketing either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Two things.
That rhetorical gimmick will not work on me, Trumpist.
Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man shot by Kyle Rittenhouse, was armed with only a plastic bag full of various toiletries, socks, and some papers.
Anthony Huber, the second man shot by Kyle Rittenouse, was armed with only a skateboard.
Gaige Grosskreutz, the third man shot by Kyle Rittenhouse—and the only one to survive being shot by Kyle Rittenhouse—was armed with a gun, but he had seen Rittenhouse shoot at least Huber, if not both Rosenbaum and Huber, and believed Rittenhouse to be an active shooter (which he technically was).
The two men killed by Kyle Rittenhouse that night were not armed with guns. How, precisely, were either of them a deadly threat to someone armed with a fully-loaded AR-15?
None of the three men shot by Kyle Rittenhouse managed to injure him with a gunshot of their own—including the only one of the three known to have been armed with a firearm that night. None of them were known to be right-wingers/conservatives, either. Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people, which resulted in two deaths, and he has become the newest victim-hero of the right-wing mediasphere because of that violence (and only that violence).
Once more:
Kyle Rittenhouse went to Kenosha during a Black Lives Matter protest, fearing that it would turn into a deadly riot. The only lethal violence that night came from him; he killed two people in an act of vigilante violence. If the people he killed were truly breaking the law that night, they should’ve received a trial, not an extrajudicial execution from a teenaged vigilante. Now Rittenhouse gets to become the poster boy for violent right-wing vigilantism—with all the media attention and grifting that implies—while two of his victims remain dead, the third gets to deal with the aftermath of that shooting for the rest of his life, and every white ally of Black protesters gets to wonder if their own safety is in peril.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
You don’t get it and you never will. Go to hell, Trumpist.
On the post: Helicopter Footage Obtained By The ACLU Shows Pervasive Surveillance Of Peaceful Anti-Police Violence Protests
The hyphenation for that compound adjective is correct, though using an en-dash (“anti–police violence” instead of “anti-police violence”) might’ve made that clearer.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
You’ve already had the effects of a flat tax on the poor explained to you multiple times. Talking about the equality of the percentages being paid is meaningless now.
You’ve already had the humanities of the socioeconomic unfairness of the wealth gap explained to you multiple times. Talking about how a poor person losing $100 is not the same as a rich person losing $100 is meaningless now.
You’ve had every detail of your plan, every bit of logic you think is rock-solid untouchable, deconstructed and shoved in your face. Trying to do it again is meaningless now.
I was gonna leave your shit be. You really didn’t say anything I needed to counter again.
…but then you came for my motherfucking neck when you said I don’t give a fuck about the poor. That, I cannot abide.
I am in a financially precarious position for numerous reasons, none of which are all that important to this discussion. Suffice to say, I am one major financial disaster away from my life being completely ruined. So when I say I give a shit about the poor, I mean it—because while I live a relatively comfortable life, it is by no means financially secure. And I know for an absolute fact that I am not alone in my neighborhood, my city, my county, my state, my country, my continent, and my world.
Elon Musk could give away literally 99% of his total wealth and fuck off to the desert to drop acid for the rest of his life, and he’d still be able to live more comfortably than most people in America will ever be. He never has to worry about being clothed, fed, or sheltered. He will never have to sit at a kitchen table at 3 AM wondering whether he can afford to go without eating for a couple of days so he can make rent when his next paycheck comes in. He’ll never have to sit in a pediatric oncologist’s office and do the math on exactly how long he can afford to keep his child’s treatment going.
And you apparently think that’s something worth celebrating as a grand achievement of humanity.
All you’ve done when you’ve talked about this flat tax proposal is focused on the numbers, on the equity of the percentages of the tax. You have never once suggested that the extreme wealth gap between people like me and people like Elon Musk is something that needs to be “fixed” in any meaningful way. Hell, you’ve all but said that the obscenely wealthy deserve to hoard their wealth, regardless of how much that fucks with the economy and worsens poverty. You ignore the humanities of extreme poverty so you don’t have to think about how taxing even the lowest brackets of our economic caste system will fuck with their lives.
You think I don’t give a fuck about poor people? You don’t even want to think about how you’d fuck over poor people. That’s the whole problem I’ve had with you in this discussion, you Trumpist son of a bitch: You’re so busy trying to figure out the right number to protect the wealthy (including your precious orange demigod!) from losing their obscene wealth that you can’t even be fucked to think about how that same number will make poverty worse.
I posted that Terry Pratchett quote because I thought, for once—for motherfucking once in your miserable, overwrought, godforsaken commenting history on this site—your ignorant conservative ass might finally understand how poverty compounds upon poverty. I thought you might finally understand how economic disparities only make things worse for the poor. And yet, when given one of the best goddamn metaphors for that concept ever written, you scoff at it because “fairness for the rich”.
FUCK THE RICH.
Do I want to take their money? Goddamn right, I do! But I don’t want it all for myself. I want it for everyone who is struggling to survive—not thrive, but merely survive—in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. I want it for the sake of feeding the hungry, housing the houseless, and paying people a wage that will let them worry less about the necessities of life. I want to take rich people’s money away from them because they don’t fucking need it like poor people do (which was my entire goddamn point with trying to explain the Law of Diminishing Utility to you).
The obscenely wealthy have so much wealth accumulated in stocks and bank accounts and they’re sitting on it like Tolkein dragons sit on their hoards of gold. That wealth isn’t going back into the economy—tax breaks, paid-off politicians, and ignorant simps like you who push for the rich to keep their wealth make sure of that. When I say being a billionaire is unethical and immoral, it is the truth: No one “earns” a billion dollars without exploiting the poor in ways that piss on the law (and human decency), and no one who sits on a billion dollars of wealth while people living in the same country starve from having to choose rent over food can be said to be morally righteous.
All you see is numbers, percentages, digits on a balance sheet that you think have to be balanced in fairness to people who never have to work another day in their lives to accumulate wealth beyond the dreams of even yourself. You don’t see the inhumanity of your decisions—the callousness of all but saying “poor people that they should work harder if they want to make more money and pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. In this country, right now, are people who work two or even three full-time jobs for the sake of paying all their bills—and there are also people who, in the span of an hour, make the same annual salary of those full-time workers without doing a goddamn thing.
And you think that’s fair. You even think that’s a good thing. I mean, why else would you be stumping so hard to protect the wealthy from giving up even a substantial fraction of their immense wealth?
I give a fuck about wanting to help lift as many people out of poverty as possible, which is why I support plans that stop the wealthy from becoming obscenely wealthy—plans that including high personal taxes on those wealthy persons (including a 100% tax on every dollar past $1 billion). All you support is protecting rich people from giving up more money than they’ll ever even miss having in their lives, regardless of how many poor people that decision will kill.
Congratulations, Lodos: You really are a American conservative.
On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights
Important to note: Rittenhouse went to Kenosha during a Black Lives Matter protest, fearing that it would turn into a deadly riot. The only lethal violence that night came from him.
Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people in an act of vigilante violence. If the people he killed were truly breaking the law that night, they should’ve received a trial, not an extrajudicial execution from a teenaged vigilante. And now he gets to be the poster boy for violent right-wing vigilantism—with all the media attention and grifting that implies—while two of his victims get to be dead and the third gets to deal with the aftermath of that shooting for the rest of his life.
And every white ally of Black protesters gets to wonder if their own safety is in peril.
On the post: Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing
Further proof that bad execution overrides good intent.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
You didn’t learn a goddamn thing, and it’s clear you never will. Enjoy your ignorance, Trumpist.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
[citation needed]
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
You know what? Fuck it. I’mma give this one last try, and if Terry freaking Pratchett can’t teach you some shit, no one can.
So I invite you to read The “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness. And if still don’t fucking get it after that, I don’t know what the fuck else to tell you besides “fuck off back to eating rich people’s literal shit”.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
Wow, you…you really don’t fucking get it. I’m not going to even bother trying to explain it now because you really don’t seem to understand (or care) that a poor person losing $100 is not the same thing as a rich person losing $100 when talking about wealth and poverty.
Have the rich trickled their wealth down on you yet, or are you fine with drinking their piss instead?
On the post: Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing
[coughrittenhousecough]
On the post: Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing
To be fair, that’s what the actual factual duel on which the film is based was about: Jean de Carrouges accused Jacques Le Gris of raping Marguerite de Carrouges, and (long story short) King Charles IV called for a duel—the final judiciary duel in French history, hence “The Last Duel”—wherein the survivor would be declared the winner and the matter would be settled. (Side note: If de Carrouges had lost the duel, his wife would’ve been burned at the stake as punishment for a false accusation.) So…yeah, that says a lot about Ridley Scott’s taste in scripts if that’s the kind of story he thinks people want to see these days.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
We’ve explained to you the Law of Diminishing Utility and the ways that both corporations and rich people avoid paying taxes. We’ve explained to you how an economic system built on unsustainable growth for the sake of continually rising profit margins puts more responsibility on the poor than the rich to keep creating that growth. We’ve explained to you how wealth and poverty both compound upon each other.
If you can’t understand any of that because you genuinely believe in “paying the same percentage of income in taxes is fair”—which is seriously on the same level of ignorance as “trickle-down economics works”—that isn’t our fault. We’re not responsible for you being unable to understand concepts like a maximum wage (e.g., no executive can be paid more than twenty times the amount made by the lowest-paid worker), a healthy social safety net, a progressive income tax that hits wealthy people harder because they (obviously) have more to give, and empathy for the poor.
I have no pity for the rich. You won’t convince me to feel it by saying “a flat tax is fair” over and over. So please fuck all the way off with that conservative economics bullshit; you won’t find anyone here with any goddamned sense who will buy into it (or your simping for the wealthy), no matter how hard you try.
On the post: Donald Trump Says He's Going To Sue The Pulitzer Committee If They Don't Take Away The NY Times And WaPo Pulitzers
“Trumpists” seems like a good alternative.
On the post: Donald Trump Says He's Going To Sue The Pulitzer Committee If They Don't Take Away The NY Times And WaPo Pulitzers
Stupidity doesn’t burn people—it drowns them.
On the post: Donald Trump Says He's Going To Sue The Pulitzer Committee If They Don't Take Away The NY Times And WaPo Pulitzers
This is sad, even for a Trumpist. Even Lodos tries to make a better case for Trump being a competent ruler.
On the post: More Than 100 Hertz Customers Are Suing The Company For Falsely Reporting Rented Vehicles As Stolen
Hell, I know of at least one cinematic serial killer who would absolutely be on board with Medicare For All: John “Jigsaw” Kramer.
On the post: Ridley Scott Blames His Latest Movie Bombing At The Box Office On Facebook And Millennials, Rather Than Pandemic And Poor Marketing
The fact that the film had a graphic rape scene—which was also technically a plot point, given that the eponymous duel was literally meant to settle whether the woman was raped by one of the men in the duel—probably didn’t help matters, too. The best marketing in the world can’t overcome a word-of-mouth campaign that tells everyone what the marketing either couldn’t or wouldn’t.
On the post: NYPD Continues To Screw Over Its Oversight By Denying Access To Bodycam Footage
And if the NYPD has a problem with being treated like criminals, well…maybe they should have complied with orders.
On the post: Rock Band Doomscroll Has Trademark App Opposed By id Software
Doctor Doom alone would invalidate id’s trademark on that front.
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