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ChicagoMatt ~ That type of forgive and forget psychology might work fine on the schoolyard but means nothing with the ruling elite, multinational Corporations, and their political puppets. On the school yard tempers flare and are usually over trivial nonsense. The issues can be easily quelled and people can move on.
In the grand arena of our world where profit means the sacrifice of human life we cannot be forgiving. The reason is that once a criminal of this stature gets away with a crime they always come back and try to out do themselves. Our own history is proof of that. Just look at the crime of Vietnam. Thousands of families and innocent lives destroyed in both countries. Our President was shamed out of office. Did we prosecute him for any high crimes in office. No. Instead we allowed him to get a blanket pardon for all crimes in office. Fast forward to 911 and two illegal wars with nations who had done nothing to us. Countless war crimes against humanity, countless families and lives shattered, and the loss of our Bill of Rights. I say to you that if Nixon was tried, found guilty, and sent to prison where he belonged none of this--including 911--ever would have happened.
There is a time to look the other way. There is a time to turn the other cheek. There is a time to forgive and forget. However, when innocent life and our ecosphere are at stake, that is not the time!
Matt, as much as I don't like his statements and think, personally, that his views are inappropriate for the NBA and pretty much anywhere, I think I agree with you that the action of the NBA against Donald Sterling amounts to the policing of a thought crime, especially so because his statements were made privately and weren't intended for the public, and I don't think I approve of it. We don't have to like him for them and I think boycotts and the like would be fine but I don't think the NBA should act against him for what are, essentally, his private thoughts.
We don't have to like him and can strongly and actively dislike him and force him from League in that way but he can have his private thoughts and we don't have to approve of them.
If they were public statements I'd think differently.
"rpropst" says "How do we as a species work with nature to feed our growing population, or are we just going to keep using oil wars as a way of population control?" That's the $50,000 question.
Palindromedary ~ You might be right about book stores trying to gather information about what you read. However, I have noticed the same pitch from supermarkets, big box stores, and even hardware stores. I think all vendors are competing with each other for information for marketing rather than nefarious purposes. (Although I would never rule out nefarious purposes as well.) They really train their cashiers to be very insistent upon this. Yesterday I went to the grand opening of a discount hardware store near by. I was approached in the isle by a worker that wanted us to apply for their mailing list to receive coupons and a free gift. At the cash register we got hit up again. They wanted my phone number in order to check out. Then they told me my name to verify they had the right number, and then repeated my address to make sure all their info was correct. (You see I wanted to make sure they had it right, I love tools and love to get their catalogue.) Nevertheless, both employees were very pushy and annoying. Of course they are only selling tools. It just goes to show that when one store starts to use a successful marketing strategy, all the others simply have to follow suit just to stay in business.
That being said, I must agree that I would never give my ID to a bookstore. Not even to buy a cookbook. Anytime I go into one I go with cash as Sam Smith. If anyone wants to know what Sam cooks they are welcome to that info. (I'll never forget my buddy in the hardware store. When he paid with his debit card they asked to see his ID. He responded, "Which one?")
Matt, why are you not in the classroom right now? This is Friday and not a holiday, and even here in the Pacific time zone it's heading towards the middle of a workday. Just askin'... - AIW
I think they might get "redirected" to pro small government but they would be wiser to be inspired to pro bigger government as the only real reason they'd be upset is that they'd have to be bothered with writing checks every two weeks when that's what government offices are for. Social Security is a very popular government function. Most seniors will start a fist fight with you if you suggest ending it.
Presuming everything you are telling me is true - and it does sound a little straining to credulity, i.e., that you are paying more than your mother is receiving as Social Security is, essentially, an insurance plan and a premium being greater than a payout of a claim sounds far fetched (An SSDI payout is usually about $700 per month, you mean, are paying more than that in Social Security tax?) - Social Security is better for society than what you are suggesting. It's an example of what I was talking about, you not getting everything you want so that someone else can get what they need and as a result, neither you nor anyone else will have to go without what they need.
Social Security is, essentially, a group insurance plan and much more affordable and much more fair than any private plan. The example of your mother still strains my credulity but for the example of your father, that's how insurance works. We, as a society, democratically decided it would be good to implement it. Anyway, before recent Republican noise making, Social Security was paying out at 62 and there was talk of having it pay out beginning at age 58. You can thank the Republican flim flam machine for stopping that.
I think solar and wind farms are an excellent use of these sites, probably would not be suiteable for anything else. The governments of the world along with all industries have one thing in common, that is the rising population of around 7 billion people on this planet. I can only imagine that number will increase with time, how do we feed all these people. These industries are giving the people what they need or want, but most of them are destroying the enviroment in the process. How do we as a species work with nature to feed our growing population, or are we just going to keep using oil wars as a way of population control?
Nah, I'm not suggesting anything of the sort.
Before this they were just a bunch of wanna be 'let's continue fighting the civil war' wackos.
Now though in this case they've done a might more than talking a bunch of bs around the camp fire. They've directly threatened the federal government with deadly force.
It's easy enough to dislike that crew for a number of reasons, but my feelings about the situation don't have anything to do with those reasons. Rather those feelings are about the actual armed confrontation against the United States of America.
Letting them to get away with it will only lead to more serious trouble down the road.
Is it wrong, Matt, to criticize someone who's trashed your democracy, your government, your environment and your livelihood?! You seem to think we should all just suffer in silence while they eat our breakfast, lunch and dinner, steal our homes and bankrupt us. To this you respond with cliches and platitudes, from your comfortable little pedestal. - AIW
Matt, what people dish out comes back to them. Donald Sterling is getting exactly what he deserves. I call it karmic justice. You call it what you like. - AIW
That sounds an awfully lot like "Two wrongs make a right". Or, as I hear a lot from my students, "He/she did it to me first!"
I'm not defending what he said. I'm only lamenting the "pitchforks and torches" treatment he's getting.
Matt, I can only speak for myself. But it's your views that I dislike, not you personally. I don't happen to know you well enough to like or dislike you as an individual. However given the divergence of our points of view, some tension is inevitable. If you can't handle it, no one is forcing you to participate on this forum. I'm not suggesting you leave, but only that you accept the inevitable. I think it's probably a healthy thing to challenge one another this way; it makes us think, prompting us to re-examine opinions and ideas we normally take for granted.
In the first of your two current posts you point out: "A bigot is, by definition, someone who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people or ideas." But then you defend Donald Sterling, a bigot by that very definition. The guy made some ugly, offensive comments about a group of people distinguished only by skin color, which is a genetic characteristic nobody chooses, that is inherited at birth. Call that fair? Yet you dismiss this obvious display of bigotry as merely a "view that isn't popular". Publicly tried for "thought crime"?! Gimmie a break. Frankly, Matt, I find this extremely hypocritical. According to you, racism is just an "unpopular opinion" while those who condemn and marginalize racists are the "bigots". Huh? Hello…
Only a recipient of unearned white privilege could sound this clueless.
Sterling is (or was, until his racist rant) the owner of a team of professional athletes, some of which are black. And he was profiting from the performance of those athletes. When one steps into the public arena (as Mr. Sterling did when he "purchased" that team), there is a certain responsibility that goes with it: to conduct oneself with dignity and treat others in a dignified manner. Is that expecting too much? Apparently so. But I'm gratified that for once, a big-mouth bigot has consequences to pay for his publicly aired hate speech.
The reality, Matt, is that white people still dominate the culture as well as the economy of this society, giving more white-skinned individuals way more access to media exposure than blacks. Consequently white racist bigots get the microphone all the time. We hear it in sports, in scenarios like this Bundy spectacle in Nevada; even from Congress! It's fairly common to hear whites trashing blacks over the public airwaves, while blacks have no comparable platform from which to respond. You call that fair? - Aliceinwonderland
I respect your opinion, but I would opt out of social security if possible. If I read my SS statements correctly, I can begin collecting at age 67. That's two years later than it was for my parents. My father died at 59. His father died in his 50s. My other grandfather died in his 20s. I know my health. I know I am highly unlikely to see 60. I also see my paycheck, and think of what I could do with that money that social security has taken.
Plus, (here comes the "privledged class" part, so prepare yourself), I have a private retirement account with my wife. Assuing I make it to 55, we will have about $5 million waiting for us.
Of course, that's just Social Security retirement we're talking about. Not SSDI. My mother collects SSDI for nerve damage in her legs. The amount she collects is less than the amount I pay. Why not cut out the middle man and just let me pay her directly?
If the Republicans ever get control of Congress and the Presidency again, they would be wise to take away the automatic payroll deductions. People would still have to pay SS, Medicare, Income Tax, etc... But make everyone actually sit down and write out the checks every two weeks. You're see a massive pro-small-government shift once people had to do that.
Chicago Matt complains that Thom and us progressives are giving millionaires & billionaires grief. Whatever "grief" we've given the pampered and privileged power elite is vastly outweighed by the damage they've inflicted on our democracy, our government, our environment and our livelihoods. Sorry, no apologies. - Alice IW
The difference is the right wing militia are uninformed and misinformed. They rally to the very agenda of the corporations and against the one thing that can save them, democratic government or, IOW, the American people, organized. Misinforming and misdirecting the public is an old technique of the PR business and forming phony grassroots, or "astroturf" movements is a common method for it. The Tea Party is a great example. The Tea Party gets its marching orders from people like the Kochs but the rank and file members have no idea and are brought into the movement for many of the same reasons we and Occupy are brought into lefty movements, corporate kleptocracy and money corrupting politics. But while Occupy was genuinely addressing the true issues and true causes of the problem theTea Party members were redirected by Koch type think tanks to further help the corporations and actively oppose their own well being.
Matt, I think you've been redirected. There are some things that are, for all intents and purposes, objectively "good for you". Why, for example, would anyone want to opt out of Social Security? Maybe, in some purely abstract, putative sense you are being denied a "freedom to choose" but its a freedom to choose to harm yourself. It reminds me of some of the initial arguments against Obamacare when people were getting a better plan but conservative pundits were decrying that those people were being denied, essentially, a "freedom to choose" a worse plan. It was like, "Yeah Thom, what if they don't want decent healthcare?". Some things are not genuinely controvertible.
In any case, in a society like ours, we choose, democratically, what to do and what priorities to keep and sometimes some of us can't get everything we want so that someone else can get something more important. We all, through a democratic process, come to decide what those priorities will be and there will be times when you won't get everything you want - maybe many times, depending on what you want. That, however, isn't tyranny. That's just having to share the world and the society with others and will happen in any society, and, hopefully, you will live in a democratic society where you and everybody can participate equally in the decision making process and have equal influence on what the decisions will be. That's better than an undemoratic society where elites decide what's good for you (which is really, most undoubtably, what's good for them rather than what's good for you and, probably, at the expense of what's good for you) - and whether or not you realize it, that is the kind of society you are advocating for due to your redirection by the Kochs (the elites).
In any case, self centeredness and selfishness are sicknesses and not good for anyone, you or anyone else, but you have been "redirected" by the Kochs and their surrogates to think that they are, again, because your selfishness is good for them, not for you.
Yep! Trying to describe the experience that solidified my faith would be like trying to describe an orgasm to someone who has never had one. Words don't do it justice. You have to experience it for yourself to understand. And, once you've done it, you just want to keep doing it.
Before I got into teaching, I was a manager for a retail chain. Our evaluations from the district manager included how many of those "loyalty cards" we were able to "activate", which meant how many people we signed up to be on the mailing list. I didn't think anything too sinister of it - they just wanted to know where to mail their flyers. When stores ask for your zip code, they just want to know where they should open new stores.
Here's an interesting anecdote: When I ask my students to use their Ipads to log on to the same website that I am on, the ads on the borders are all geared toward the individual student. The girls gets ads for make up and stuff like that, the boys get ads for video games, and I get ads for baldness cures. I am NOT going bald, but they know enough about me to know I am around that age.
Again, I don't think it's anything too sinister. Just clever marketers using the resources at their disposal. Then again, having been online my entire adult life, my expectations of privacy are less than my older friend's expectations.
We start teaching our students about internet safety in the fifth grade. Rule number one: NOTHING is truly anonymous. Anything you send online can be traced back to you. We do it mainly as a scare tactic, to keep the kids from sending inapproriate pictures or talking to perverts. It is true though. Privacy and anonymity seem a little anachronistic.
Now, now rs allen, we can't play Gestapo either and just round up people we don't like.
One of the best things I learned in college was actually some advice from one of my dormmates. He was a finance major (of course), and he told me that, "No one ever gets ahead if all they have to sell is their time. If you're not making money even while you sleep, you're going to struggle your whole life."
That was in 1998, and it's stuck with me ever since then. It's sad that the world is that way, but it's proven true, for me at least.
What would help this country, more than anything else, would be a rebuilding of the manufacturing sector, so people can exchange their time and labor for a decent living. How to achieve this though?
People like me look back on the days before our time when a man could support a family with a factory job and just a high school diploma and wish it was still that way. Then I give my oldest daughter, who is 14 and thinking about her future, the same advice that I got in college. Right now, she wants to be a fashion designer. That's all good and well for now. But I hope she grows out of it and into something more practical before she has to really decide her career track in the coming years. I'm hoping she goes into something medical, like nursing or even becoming a doctor. Good pay, can't be outsourced, AND a chance to help people. In the modern world, it's probably the best field to go into.
I totally agree, which is why I donate my time and money to the church. If given the choice, I would give all of the $70,000 or so I paid in taxes last year to the church, rather than the government. At least I know when I give money to the church, 100 percent of it goes to buy food, which is then given out to the needy. I know this because I volunteer in my church's food pantry. Most of the people we give food to are widows and new immigrants.
I agree with Progressives that helping the needy should be a priority. But, like most things, the execution of that priority is where we differ. Give money to my local church, or give money to Washington? I think that, when it comes to getting positive results for the needy, the smaller and more local the scale, the better.
As a disclaimer: I work at a parochial school, and the food pantry is downstairs. Volunteering my time there is just a matter of staying a little later than my contract says I should every day.
I would also point out that the Bible also says not to judge others, and to love your neighbor as you love God. For all of the grief Thom and the Progressives give millionaires and billionaires, they (if they chose to be Christians) should remember that those millionaires and billionaires are still people. We should still love them and not judge them.
I'd be curious to know from people of other religious their beliefs about judging people.
I'm glad you bring up Occupy Wall Street. I see a lot of similarities between those people, and the people who are currently occupying the area around Clive Bundy's ranch. Thom said something similar in one of his posts. Both groups are angry with a system that they think isn't listening to them.
But that's exactly what the government does to me - it decides what is best for me, with or without my consent. Social Security? I can't opt out of it, for my own "benefit". Obamacare? Everyone must join, even if you don't want to, because we know best what you need. Medicare / Medicaide? Same idea - The government telling me what is best for me.
A bigot is, by definition, someone who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people or ideas. I copied that from Merriam-Webster. I don't strongy or unfairly dislike anyone. I don't dislike the media, I just ignore them. Based on some of the reactions I've gotten from my posts, and the way that some people on here seem to dislike anyone who doesn't agree with their way of thinking, some introspection is in order.
To straightaway label the 60 million people who voted for Romney in 2012 as "idiots" or "nutjobs" because they think differently than you is bigotted.
I thought about it all night, and one of the things that really bothers me about the way Donald Sterling is being treated is that he's being publically and universally condemned for having a view that isn't popular. It's almost like he's being publically tried for "thought crime". You think differently? Get him! It sets a dangerous precedent. How long until they come after other people's reputation and possessions for thinking differently?
I disagree with a lot of the Democratic principles, but I live in a VERY "blue" area - Chicago. If some of my unpopular-in-this-area thoughts became public, will they come after me, my reputation, and my possessions? I get nervous just by being one of the few houses around without a pro-union sign in my front window.
I really hope I'm not coming across as offensive. (I always tell my students - conveying tone in writing is very tricky.) I'm trying to be as cordial as possible.
I agree with Thom's original comment, but wonder if the groundwater contamination has been remediated as one would expect for a Superfund site. Or, does the solar facility serve as lipstick on this pig?
I think we missed a good opportunity to round up some dangerous people. We had a mess of them all in one place. Now they're dissipating back into the population at large to continue spreading their insane ideas.
Round them up now, throw their sorry a**es into jail and try them for treason or as the terrorists they are.