Dear gods, I read half that screed, and Card has reached the point that most of his ideas don't make any sense at all - it's just a collection of far right screeds unconnected by any shreds of rationality.
I got through Obama's election as a sign of the apocalypse (whether because he's a Democrat or because he's black OSC didn't say), and bailed out when he tried to pitch "rich" as meaning upper middle class middle aged people. I don't know if that's willful ignorance or willful bullshit and I can't be bothered to care.
The amazing thing is how indistinguishable it is in prose style and general construction from John C. Wright in similar screed mode. I would have difficulty telling them apart if the references to their specific sects were removed, except that Wright's adjectives are somewhat purpler. But only somewhat.
A decade or so ago they believed that by now they would be part of a right-winger bunch dominating the world - and now they realize that they don't even return their phone calls.
He really has completely peeled away from observable reality. This bit made me laugh: "...the ones they call 'rich' are usually just hard-working people in late middle age, finally reaching their peak earning years." He might just as well have said "I now live in a world formed entirely of my own anxieties, because I am the center of the universe."
The self-similar nature of income inequality in the US makes it hard to think about who is rich, because even people in the top 1% are keenly aware that there are people almost unimaginably richer than they are. And our weak social insurance means that even people who are quite rich feel insecure.
I'm more or less one of the "peak earning years" people Card is thinking of. I'm not in the 1% but I'm safely top quintile. And there are gigantic gaps above me just as there are below me, and I am in no way resentful of people proposing to raise my taxes, and I'm especially not resentful of efforts to raise the taxes of people making ten or a hundred or a thousand times as much as I do (and those people exist).
The whole system is messed up; I shouldn't have to be in the economic elite just to secure my daughter a place in some kind of social lifeboat.
And our weak social insurance means that even people who are quite rich feel insecure.
I was talking with someone last night who said that he had "bought in" (his words!) to the idea that if you don't make a million dollars a year you and your family will be completely screwed when something something disaster something. I said, "Preppers, but with dollars instead of bags of beans." He said, "Yes, basically."
I mean a million dollars literally, not figuratively. He said quite seriously that if a career path topped out at $250k/yr he wasn't sure he'd be able to follow it without a feeling of terrible anxiety at having so little money.
Meanwhile, my family of three adults makes about $200k collectively and we feel filthy rich. Mindset matters!
See, it is almost entirely impossible to change the entire course of a giant nation's take on socialist medicine, retirement savings, and defense spending. It is difficult, but not impossible, to earn a million dollars.
If he is facing down the barrel of poverty for his family, making the millions is the rational choice, if his family is the most important thing. Yes, overall, if everyone like him chose social change, it might work, but-- For his family's sake, making the individual cash is the better choice.
What kind of disaster leaves all but 0.2 percent of the population in deep shit, AND allows money to retain any value? I mean, I can see that sailing away on the yacht to your remote island might be a plan, but that's not about money per se, it's about yachts and islands. Bigger bean bags, really.
Yeah, that's pretty much the definition of an economic depression. Massive deflation, crowds of desperate unemployed to serve you, and things are actually great for anyone sitting on a huge pile of money, which becomes extremely valuable.
I wonder if fears of hyperinflation are common in those circles. Some generic stereotypical redneck might ride out this economic disaster still in possession of his truck, farm, shotgun, and dog; owning a bank account full of numbers and many stock certificates from failed companies would not be so satisfying.
Also, there are the individual disasters of getting old, acquiring a serious medical problem, having kids to put through college with exploding tuition, etc. From a pure Prisoner's Dilemma perspective, it may be that the only way to manage it is to become loaded.
But it's not actually difficult-but-possible to have a gigantic income unless you have some good luck to begin with. For most people, it's completely impossible.
Those aren't disasters in the hoarding-bags-of-beans sense at all, though. I was thinking of social breakdowns, plagues, nuclear explosions, failure of the banking system, that kind of thing. And I have to say, I know many, many people who are rich enough to afford college and retirement and such with relative ease, and none of them is remotely near the million-a-year mark.
I'm not happy about the current state of the US (nor of lots of other countries), but I wouldn't say it's disaster time for 98.8 percent of people, either. Not yet.
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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)2014-09-30 01:23 am (UTC)(link)
How are you defining disastrous? It's easy to say things are not too bad if your standard is, say, an African warlord rampage zone.
(Hm. Perhaps that came off a little harsh. What I mean to say is that it came off to me a little dismissive of the bottom 20% which are barely hanging on by their fingernails.)
I only meant to sound dismissive toward Rose's Mr. Millions, not anyone else. It just seems to me there's a difference between a depression and a prepper-scenario disaster, as I said in a comment above.
Relevant here (with the usual reminder that vox.com is not VD): http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/25/6843509/income-distribution-recoveries-pavlina-tcherneva
...because even people in the top 1% are keenly aware that there are people almost unimaginably richer than they are.
This. It's what you compare yourself to. Spouse and I are around 95th percentile in the US, and the distance between us and US middle class is far smaller than the difference between us and the 99.9th percentile. What that extra income buys us, though, is basically a lot more security in a close-to-middle-class lifestyle.
I've heard that "the one per cent" isn't accurate-- the lower half of the one per cent includes a lot of professionals who earned their money by skilled work.
However, the top half of the one per cent is mostly finance, and a lot of that is getting fees for shuffling money around in useless or destructive ways.
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seth ellis (from livejournal.com)2014-09-30 12:50 am (UTC)(link)
But then a lot of those skilled professionals acquired their skills through the grace of expensive educations, family connections, etc. In my experience this is true of most professional-class libertarians.
If we want to view how things have changed since about 1980, I've teased out statistics that show that all of the increase in income since them have gone to the top 0.1%, and that furthermore 1/2 of it has gone to the top 0.01%
And in response to Seth Ellis below, I think of the deterioration of corporate success from the time that the people who ran the corporations were actual experts at what the corporation did such as Ford, Carnegie and the like to lawyers, then MBAs who had the hubris to believe that they could successfully run any company to the financial whizzes who succeed by vampire capitalism, sucking money from otherwise successful companies, the companies at death door but the whizzes enriched. Note the first made us the richest and most powerful nation on earth, the lawyers and MBAs brought us into a very gradual decline, and the last making us a huge debtor nation with most of our manufacturing outsourced.
This rant brought to you by 'Generalizations R Us'
"Carter and Clinton did slash defense and weaken America's capacity, but they did not damage the economy to the point where we could not recover our strength within a few years of a responsible person occupying the Oval Office."
He can't very well point out that the Clinton administration prepared a more efficient and modern military force for George W. Bush to go send into pointless conflicts. Clinton was a Democrat!
Oh, yes. Carter and Ford both tried to do something about the stagflation of the 1970s; that was not only frustrating but confusing, as many economic models of the time suggested that stagnation and inflation should be mutually exclusive symptoms and that clearly wasn't happening. I'm not sure how you can spin the Clinton years as damaging to our economy...
"Obama, however, because he is ideologically pure and never compromises,"
That does it. He's posting from an alternate universe. Otherwise some of his other observations such as: "Since there was never either truth or evidence supporting this belief, contradictory evidence will hardly make a dent in it," would indicate he was looking in a mirror, and thinking that he was reporting on the left.
Man, I miss the OSC of a few years ago, who was nutty about gay marriage and Islam but still sane on lots of other issues. Including the Obamas, on occasion.
If you are stubborn or masochistic enough to read the last half, his comments on the Republicans seem semi-coherent. Except for his petulance that if the evangelicals hadn't stayed home because Romney is Mormon (site needed) his comments that the only sane Republicans are label RINOs seemed spot on. (I've previously stated privately that by labeling them RINOs what they really mean is 'not batshit crazy').
And his comments that the 'no amnesty ever no matter what' stance of the T party is not only bad politics (in the long run) but bad economics and profoundly non-Christian seemed evidence that he has gone only 75% of the way to la la land.
I thought that there was a study done in the last few years that showed through congressional voting records that there was no longer any overlap between the parties. IOW the most conservative Democrat voted more liberally than the most liberal Republican.
I'd say there's far less difference between RINOs and most Democrats than between RINOs and the crazy wing of elected Republicans but still a gap.
Maybe if the RINOs weren't afraid of getting primaried by the crazy wing of the party there would be actual overlap, I don't know.
BTW, I won't claim that the Democrats don't have their own crazies, they just don't have the power that the Republican wing-nuts do.
Seeing that Card has deteriorated so far makes me sad. This rant is not sane, honest, or honorable, and he used to be all three, or at least able to pass for them.
Or Card thinks they're hypocrites who have the 2 parent family structure but indoctrinate the poor defenseless youth in order to destroy the American family, and therefore destroy America.
Maybe OSC will follow up with an article about how two parents are insufficient and families should have at least three or four - which would be completely practical if not for the spoilsports in Washington DC.
Speaking as someone currently parenting in a four-parent situation I am fairly sure that we have the minimum required for something approaching sanity and wonder how normal households manage.
Single parents are clearly at minimum demigods....
As an academic at a university in the Bible belt, I can assure everyone that the predominant academic religion is probably Episcopalian or Methodist, not atheism. Some protestant moderate Christian religion, anyway, with plenty of followers of Judaism, Catholicism, and Hiduism, plus the occasional Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, etc. Atheists are pretty rare. You'll get more 'church is too much WORK ZOMG, I need 8 more articles before tenure--here, do you want to read something I wrote?" answers than any kind of moral atheism. Crikey.
YOU SEE THE PROBLEM IS WITH ALL THOSE LATTE LIBERALS WHO ENFORCE CULTURAL MARXISM IN SCIENCE IF THEY HADN'T SUPPRESSED THE BRILLIANT DEAN DRIVE BECAUSE JOHN W. CAMPBELL WAS BRAVE ENOUGH TO SPEAK THE TRUTH TO POWER WE WOULD BE LIVING ON THE CANALS OF MARS BY NOW IN THE BRAVE NEW FREE WORLD OF MARS WHERE MEN ARE FREE TO BE RUGGED INDIVIDUAL MEN WITHOUT BIG GOVERNMENT BREATHING DOWN THEIR NECKS AND RESTRICTING REAL SCIENCE WHILE THE ESTABLISHMENT ORDER KEEPS ON WITH ITS PROGRAM OF CONDUCTING SCIENTIFIC LYNCHINGS AGAINST ANYONE WHO DARES QUESTION THE ORTHODOX VIEW WHILE THE SOVIETS POISON OUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS, FLUIDS WHICH CAN BRING THE LIGHT OF CIVILIZATION TO THE GREEN FIELDS OF MARS WHILE WE STRIP-MINE ITS FORESTS FOR MORE COAL TO POWER OUR MIGHTY TURBINES OF STEAM, BUT YOU KNOW THOSE EFFETE INTELLECTUALS WOULD SAY CARBON DIOXIDE DOESN'T DO ANYTHING GOOD, BUT TREES POLLUTE MORE THAN HUMANS DO ANYWAY, RONALD REAGAN SAID IT AND WHO ARE YOU TO CORRECT THE GIPPER
*ndr* L**v*n has asserted -- or assumed -- that the crucial difference is between two sexes of parents vs. one sex of parent, rather than two parents vs. one parent. The reasoning is beyond my feeble understanding.
My wife asserts that Obama is further right than Reagan. But then I think a sizable percentage of the U.S. is completely batshit crazy, OSC is just one of the voices of these hateful jackalopes.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-09-28 02:34 am
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Conservatism is not a mental illness, but it seems to disrupt logical thought rather badly.
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Only, if only
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I'm more or less one of the "peak earning years" people Card is thinking of. I'm not in the 1% but I'm safely top quintile. And there are gigantic gaps above me just as there are below me, and I am in no way resentful of people proposing to raise my taxes, and I'm especially not resentful of efforts to raise the taxes of people making ten or a hundred or a thousand times as much as I do (and those people exist).
The whole system is messed up; I shouldn't have to be in the economic elite just to secure my daughter a place in some kind of social lifeboat.
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I was talking with someone last night who said that he had "bought in" (his words!) to the idea that if you don't make a million dollars a year you and your family will be completely screwed when something something disaster something. I said, "Preppers, but with dollars instead of bags of beans." He said, "Yes, basically."
I mean a million dollars literally, not figuratively. He said quite seriously that if a career path topped out at $250k/yr he wasn't sure he'd be able to follow it without a feeling of terrible anxiety at having so little money.
Meanwhile, my family of three adults makes about $200k collectively and we feel filthy rich. Mindset matters!
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But if he thinks the solution to that is to go make a million dollars a year, he's just not thinking.
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See, it is almost entirely impossible to change the entire course of a giant nation's take on socialist medicine, retirement savings, and defense spending. It is difficult, but not impossible, to earn a million dollars.
If he is facing down the barrel of poverty for his family, making the millions is the rational choice, if his family is the most important thing. Yes, overall, if everyone like him chose social change, it might work, but-- For his family's sake, making the individual cash is the better choice.
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But it's not actually difficult-but-possible to have a gigantic income unless you have some good luck to begin with. For most people, it's completely impossible.
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(Hm. Perhaps that came off a little harsh. What I mean to say is that it came off to me a little dismissive of the bottom 20% which are barely hanging on by their fingernails.)
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This. It's what you compare yourself to. Spouse and I are around 95th percentile in the US, and the distance between us and US middle class is far smaller than the difference between us and the 99.9th percentile. What that extra income buys us, though, is basically a lot more security in a close-to-middle-class lifestyle.
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However, the top half of the one per cent is mostly finance, and a lot of that is getting fees for shuffling money around in useless or destructive ways.
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And in response to Seth Ellis below, I think of the deterioration of corporate success from the time that the people who ran the corporations were actual experts at what the corporation did such as Ford, Carnegie and the like to lawyers, then MBAs who had the hubris to believe that they could successfully run any company to the financial whizzes who succeed by vampire capitalism, sucking money from otherwise successful companies, the companies at death door but the whizzes enriched. Note the first made us the richest and most powerful nation on earth, the lawyers and MBAs brought us into a very gradual decline, and the last making us a huge debtor nation with most of our manufacturing outsourced.
This rant brought to you by 'Generalizations R Us'
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Holy Krap! Alternate realities really do exist!
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That does it. He's posting from an alternate universe. Otherwise some of his other observations such as: "Since there was never either truth or evidence supporting this belief, contradictory evidence will hardly make a dent in it," would indicate he was looking in a mirror, and thinking that he was reporting on the left.
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And his comments that the 'no amnesty ever no matter what' stance of the T party is not only bad politics (in the long run) but bad economics and profoundly non-Christian seemed evidence that he has gone only 75% of the way to la la land.
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Somehow blind to the RINOs being not that different from Democrats.
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I'd say there's far less difference between RINOs and most Democrats than between RINOs and the crazy wing of elected Republicans but still a gap.
Maybe if the RINOs weren't afraid of getting primaried by the crazy wing of the party there would be actual overlap, I don't know.
BTW, I won't claim that the Democrats don't have their own crazies, they just don't have the power that the Republican wing-nuts do.
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It appears that Don Card Quixote is busy jousting with straw men. As in the original, the straw men are winning.
-m
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What he really means is "fag bashers find it hard to get tenure"
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Single parents are clearly at minimum demigods....
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(Anonymous) 2014-09-30 12:23 am (UTC)(link)Heinlein would agree!
:)
AwesomeAud
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As an academic at a university in the Bible belt, I can assure everyone that the predominant academic religion is probably Episcopalian or Methodist, not atheism. Some protestant moderate Christian religion, anyway, with plenty of followers of Judaism, Catholicism, and Hiduism, plus the occasional Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, etc. Atheists are pretty rare. You'll get more 'church is too much WORK ZOMG, I need 8 more articles before tenure--here, do you want to read something I wrote?" answers than any kind of moral atheism. Crikey.
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Card lives in a different reality
The first hit on the Google shows that Pentagon spending went UP every year under Jimmy Carter:
1976 283.8
1977 286.2
1978 286.5
1979 295.6
1980 303.4
( http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904490.html#ixzz3Eex2oNI1 )
We now have conclusive evidence that the best predictor of educational success is to grow up in a two-parent household.
So why then would one ever be opposed to allowing single-parent gays to marry?
Re: Card lives in a different reality
Re: Card lives in a different reality
Re: Card lives in a different reality
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