ObjectivityIncarnate

It’s just a running joke for greentexts to call them “fake and gay”, which became having to come up with some justification to attach both labels to the story instead of just saying it is. This is completely regardless of what the greentext actually consists of.

The more you have to stretch to make the labels fit, the funnier it is.

when the Trump Administration gives us our tariff refund

Who is expecting this to actually ever happen?

This is an interesting notion I hadn’t considered at all, you may be on to something there.

Missing in the post’s title, but not the article’s title. No ambiguity there:

Republican Mayor Wesley Dingus charged after ‘sniffing underage girl’s underwear’ on camera

That’s not quite accurate either, it seems.

I always try to avoid absolute ‘always’/‘never’ statements, because you set yourself up for an easy ‘defeat’ if a single contrary example is brought up.

It’s much more effective to compare per-capita statistics, for example.

If you ignore that different demographics face different issues and that they are valid in bringing them up

Which is irrelevant, because that’s not what I did.

you’re right wing trash as far as I’m concerned.

Since you’ve demonstrated a deliberate penchant for deliberately misconstruing anything short of full-throated agreement, your labeling based on that has no value whatsoever. “Right wing trash” and “person who disagrees with me” are not synonymous.

The fact remains, despite your protest: the attention any given injustice a person has suffered merits, should not depend on any of the victim’s immutable characteristics. It is immoral to believe, for example, that George Floyd and Tony Timpa^[1] merit different amounts of sympathy/outrage/etc., just because one is black and the other is white.

You’re equivocating, for no reason, being equally sympathetic to an injustice regardless of the demographics of the victim in any given instance, with treating every case as if it’s identical.

Those are completely unrelated things.

P.S. You ‘may be shocked to learn’ that starting a comment like that just makes you sound like a sanctimonious jerk.

You can interpret that however you want.

Not if you want to be accurate:

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

I’d also include the controversy around “Baby It’s Cold Outside”.

The irony is that in fully understanding the song and the culture of the time it was written in, the song is literally the opposite of what the outrage junkies made of it. They think it’s a song about a guy keeping a woman at his place against her will (the notion that he actually drugged her drink (and in such a way that she could tell by tasting it) is especially hilarious) through subtle intimidation, and that rape is apparently imminent.

But in fact, it’s a very empowering (especially for its time, ~80 years ago) song about a woman who defies social/cultural norms/rules to do what she wants and go ahead and spend the night at this guy’s place:

• All of her ‘protests’ have to do with her reputation specifically, she talks about how she “should”/“must”/“ought to” leave, but never once says “I want to leave”
• “What’s in this drink” was a blame-shifting/plausible deniability tactic, not too different from how people blame their actions on alcohol even today. Although the song is very progressive, she doesn’t completely abandon the social rules, so she adds this bit as an ‘excuse’ for the fact that she is absolutely and willfully spending the night with this guy. For the same reason, she ‘can’t’ simply straight-up ‘say yes’ to him; it’d be unladylike to accept such an offer, after all. So she does the stuff in the first bullet point instead.

More detail here.

P.S. Also, the original songwriter wrote the song specifically for him and his wife to perform together for friends at a housewarming party. It wasn’t even considered to be released commercially until it became a huge hit at parties that they were invited to specifically to perform it. The idea that it’s a predatory date rape song is extra ridiculous with that context, aside from everything else.

George Carlin (who is idolized and rightly so, mostly) had a line in one of his standup specials where he said “you show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala”. Homophobia was just so normalized back then (this was the ‘80s).

I don’t think this bit was homophobic at all, and that you’ve misinterpreted it, through omission and otherwise. If anything, homophobia is part of what is being laughed at (and a small piece of the overall joke). I’ll explain.

To begin with, you left out key parts of the joke; he wasn’t expressing that as himself. Here’s the full bit:

I remember something my third grade teacher used to say. She used to say “You show me a tropical fruit, and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.” No, wait… that wasn’t her. That was a guy I met in the Army.

While the joke uses “fruit” as slang for gay as part of it, that isn’t actually even the punchline, the wordplay is just a vehicle for it. The humor primarily hinges on the notion of a grade school teacher saying something that crass (the second part specifically) to a child, coupled with the implication that it was something she said more than once (“used to say” instead of “said”).

Then he realizes it was some grunt who was in the Army with him (who it’d make more sense to say something crass/uncouth like that), which adds another element of humor in ‘how could he possibly mix those two people up?’. If anything, that hypothetical Army guy is being laughed at in part for the homophobic slur usage.

99.55%

The specificity of this made me imagine that you had actually taken inventory of every single time you’ve encountered this in your personal life experience and done the math, lol.

It’s not ironic at all. If someone steals X, it’s not ironic for them to not want that X stolen from them; it actually aligns perfectly with their previous mindset: ‘I want to have this’.

Ignoring key issues of discrimination of marginalised peoples

This is like saying that someone wanting to end all poverty is ignoring and discriminating against the single poorest person.

Stop acting like these things are zero-sum. It takes no extra effort to speak out against all instances of an injustice, compared to doing so only for certain instances of that injustice.

Doesn’t “correct this behavior” very directly imply that the current behavior (in this case, taking your full lunch break) is incorrect and therefore in need of correction, though?

It’s one thing to suggest something, but calling it a “correction” changes things, I’d think.

Taxes in the US are overwhelmingly used for the military

“Overwhelmingly” is a bit of a ridiculous way to describe 13% of the budget, don’t you think?

and to enrich rich fucks

Cite a figure for this nebulous category, if you can.

not to help the poor.

Actually, welfare spending is barely less than military spending, at 11.8% of the budget.

By letting someone sit on them to “allow them to appreciate” is letting someone doing nothing accumulate the wealth gains of society that we all work for.

The same can be said of anyone who owns a house. There is nothing wrong with a thing you already own becoming more valuable to others.

Because those assets appreciate faster than inflation, they create inflation pressure as more asseted people have income to burn that doesn’t reflect actual economic movement. Decreasing the value of money that other people need to use to buy things to live.

This is a very confused couple of statements; most egregiously, you’re conflating asset price inflation with consumer price inflation, and only the latter has a direct effect on the working class.

The ultra-wealthy have a low ‘marginal propensity to consume’. If Jeff Bezos gains $10 billion on paper, he does not spend $10B on consumption goods; most gains remain invested. Appreciation alone does not automatically translate into CPI inflation, because unrealized gains are not income.

No one lives in a vacuum and letting people hoard assets has a negative impact on everyone else.

It’s objectively nonsensical to refer to the notion of purchasing something, and its market value increasing while you merely continue to own it, as “hoarding”. Not to mention, again, that net worth is a valuation, a price tag. It is not money. Stop acting like when the price of a stock goes up, that amount of cash money is magically vacuumed out of the wallets of the working class.

If everyone became a laborer with proper compensation, society would thrive.

People want to be able to own things (aka assets), though.

If everyone became an asset hoarder

Ownership isn’t hoarding.

society would break apart as there would be no one to operate the machinery of society.

Except this literally cannot ever happen because the demand created by the market is the whole reason those assets appreciate in value in the first place. It’s a self-correcting issue: if too many people try to just ‘own assets’, the demand will drop, and said assets’ value will start depreciating, incentivizing those people back in the other direction, to laboring.

…increasing the price of those assets, devaluing other ways of earning money

Asset appreciation is not income, stop equivocating the two.

reducing wealth inequality pushes us towards the first.

Not necessarily; it’s entirely possible for everyone to have identical wealth, and also all be poor. In fact, that was the default state of humanity for the vast majority of its history.

If you have wealth anywhere over say, $50 million, you hire an accountant to assess your business’s value.

‘Oh, our accountant says the valuation is just under the threshold for the new tax, what a coincidence!’

It is trivially easy to shift assets around in such a way that having a net worth threshold for a given tax is basically a guarantee that no one will pay it. Many countries have tried this already, and failed. Why repeat their mistakes, instead of learning from them?

We need to remember that people, and especially the ultra-wealthy, are not inert blocks of wood that don’t react to policy changes like these.

I’m calling bullshit on this. There are all sorts of taxes that fall heavily or solely on the wealthy.

Firstly, I said “only the wealthiest”, so don’t already start nudging those goalposts by “calling bullshit” and immediately tweaking it to “heavily or solely”. Secondly, if there are so many, name three.

The real value in a wealth tax is breaking up the money from individuals, the revenue is just a bonus.

And the mask comes off, revealing the true motivation. You’d happily waste the taxpayer money that is the poor’s lifeline in many cases, reducing overall tax revenue, because hurting the rich matters more to you than helping the poor.

money that’s now actually moving through the economy zombie wealth sitting in some rich fuck’s paws, doing nothing but contribute to inflation.

1. Net worth is a valuation, a price tag on something that’s already been transacted on, how could it possibly contribute to inflation? What nonsense.
2. The ultra-wealthy don’t have Scrooge McDuck vaults full of cash, their wealth consists of investments in businesses that run within the economy.

Switzerland’s wealth taxes, depending on area (there is no country-wide wealth tax) starts at the equivalent of ~$100,000 on average, putting it very squarely in the

‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.

category I mentioned before. That is absolutely not a tax aimed exclusively at the ultra-wealthy.

This is basically urban legend at this point; “buy borrow die” is a tiny piece of the ultra-wealthy’s financial strategy, at least when it comes to the “borrow” part, which is what everyone’s focused on:

• In reality, the ultra wealthy do not borrow against a large fraction of their unsold gains. On average from 2004 to 2022, the top 1% of wealth-holders only borrowed 1-2% of their annual economic income.

• Borrowing while holding unrealized gains is, in fact, more of a middle-class activity than an ultra-wealthy one: Americans in the 50-90th percentiles borrowed 42% of their unrealized gains in 2022, compared to just 4% for the top 1% of wealth-holders.

• The primary tax avoidance strategy for the top 1% is not to borrow, but simply not to sell appreciated assets.

Not likely. First of all, the net worth numbers you see for these ultra-wealthy people are all educated guesses. To actually legally impose anything based on total net worth, you need to actually audit net worth and get a real figure. The resources it would take to do this are very unlikely to yield more tax revenue than they cost, especially because there is so much one can possess whose value is pretty much completely arbitrary (the high-end artwork, etc.).

It’s actually all-but-certain it’d be a net loss of tax revenue. There is a reason that every time such a policy targeting only the wealthiest is put into place (it’s been tried numerous times over the years in a bunch of European countries), it’s gotten rid of soon thereafter, or ‘dialed down’ to be just another ‘mundane’ tax that falls primarily into the lap of the middle class.