What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society?
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Saturday, April 25, 2026 00:05
VIEWED: 18057
PAGE 5 of 22
Quote:
Unlike you I deal with facts when I think about the real world. OTOH you have not posted a single fact yet. You keep posting fantasy.
FACT: Rush Limbaugh is a blue pill addict.
Facts do no cease being facts simply because you don't want them to be.
How do you KNOW that Rush is still an addict ? Talk about others posting only fantasy...
WOW.
More like evidence of 1kiki's sad, pathetic state of mind.
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen
I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.
" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall
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Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
The slide started in the 60's.
Actually, the Raptard IS right about this one tiny fact. The decline of the American economy started in the LATE 60's, specifically 1968-'69, after the inauguration of Nixon, when he floated the price of the dollar against gold. Before that, gold had been worth 20 dollars an ounce since at least the Civil War, until Roosevelt raised it to $35- $37 an ounce during the Second World War. The dollar was a rock solid, stable currency- that's why it was valued as a medium of exchange, sought internationally, valued everywhere. Even debased as it is today, it still is that, mostly.
Now, Nixon had some justification- Johnson caused great inflation by paying for the Vietnam War on credit, rather than raising taxes to pay for it; but old Tricky could have ended the war sooner, or raised taxes to cover its costs, but he didn't like either of those choices.
And y'all will remember that inflation came back to bite RN in the tail later, right before the Gerald Ford Presidency and the "Whip Inflation Now" button. Floating the dollar was a short term Nixon solution in '69 that contributed to the problem only a few years later.
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Well, the issue of society's fall had its own path,imo. The ever growing power of labor unions in the auto industry didn't help matters either. A sense of entitlement , getting more and more for less and less, tipped the scales and all but destroyed the industry and Detroit along with it.
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen
I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.
" AU, that was great, LOL!! " - Chrisisall
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Thank you Frem.
Indeed, culling the sociopaths from among us would be profoundly beneficial. The other option is that we... the 99% of us... simply build another society and then refuse to share. 'Cause those Randists? They NEED society; they couldn't dig a latrine or cook a pot of beans or write code if their LIFE depended on it- which, it does. (BTW, my immediate reaction to the end of the story, when all of those capitalists run away to found a "better" society was Good riddance!. Unfortunately, they will never do that because like all parasites, they do need their host.)
Until we rid ourselves of parasites and predators, all the rest of us are doing is licking each other's wounds and sharing our crumbs so that we can hobble forward to another day of being sucked dry.
But once that is done, we need to keep the parasites and predators from re-developing. You and I had this discussion many years ago. At the time, I think you suggested barter and smaller semi-independent communities. I said it would be impractical, as modern technological economies need wide-scale trade. Your answer to that was that that we needed to take a couple of steps back, and my answer to that was nobody would tolerate such as move. And YOUR answer to that was that we either do it voluntarily or we will be unprepared for when it happens on its own. Over the years, I think I've come to your position. Anyway, it was obviously an interesting discussion because its stuck with me all of these years.
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MEANWHILE... rappy is dikcing around (so to speak) with blue pills...
YOO HOO! Rappy! You "forgot" to answer this. Here are all of hte main points, in context, So hey, you don't even have to scroll! What could be easier?
Quote:Stop trying to change the topic. YOUR original complaint was about Obama's taxes. Now that you realize I know something about the tax code, and that that argument won't fly, you're just trying to divert the discussion. You would be paying the same under Bush as under Obama because the tax rates haven't changed, so that makes YOU the gutless race baiter, donnit? (BTW, my guess is that you're invested in stocks, and you're just crying because you have to pay any taxes at all on your capital gains.)
I'd still be there if Obama and company didn't keep taking from me. When the govt comes and takes the fruits of everyone, and tells us " it's for the greater good ", I don't trust the govt.- rappy
Oh, bullshit. Sop whining. Your taxes have neither gone up nor down under Obama. They're just the same as under Bush, so all you're reflecting is your own irrational (race-based) hatred of a single person.-signy
So, you think you're Harry Reid now, and know what others pay in taxes, do you ? Funny. And Obama's vast expansion of govt and inflating of our debt has ZERO to do with race. You're the gutless race baiter here. rappy
Quote:
As far as YOU'RE concerned, the government should get out of money-printing business. Get out of the business of protecting copyrights and patents. Stop negotiating international trade deals. Stop insuring banks or maintaining roads or educating the workers of tomorrow or investing in blue-sky research. Should have never "subdued" the Natives, or toppled reformist governments elsewhere. In other words, allow EVERYONE the ability of make it on their own, without government interference.
Correct?-signy
Nope. But keep telling other people what THEY believe, because that's all you frelling want to hear anyways.-rappy
Well, since you suggested that we should be like the old west (as you saw it), where people lived and died by their own efforts and luck... not much money, no insured banks, little law, no roads. and no industry ... I thought you were making a broad-brush "get rid of government" proposal. If not, in what areas do you think a government SHOULD interfere? And why? (Gets in car to run errands and some popcorn, will be back later.) -signy
Well, obviously I've been back for quite a while now, and you still haven't explained your views on which areas you think government SHOULD support and which areas it shouldn't. I expect a very self-interested answer from you... so surprise me.
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"What will it take for us to get back to being a decent society?" Not this, certainly:Quote:
As millions of Americans gather in their homes for the holidays, there will be those who will congregate in a different kind of home.
An abode common to other parts of the world now proliferates across America: Tent cities.
The total number of homeless people residing in tents and makeshift homes is unknown. Many of these communities are small and hidden from public view, while others claim hundreds of residents and are sprinkled through major urban areas.
Some, like those tucked under roadways, are temporary and relocate frequently. Their conditions are vile, unsanitary and fail to provide refuge from storms and winds. Then there are communities, such as Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon, that have a more sustained presence. The 13-year-old "ecovillage" set up by homeless people is hygienic and self-sufficient.
Preliminary findings by The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty show that tent cities have been documented in almost every state, and they're growing.
A report released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, for example, found that homelessness and hunger rates are rising, culminating in 47 million Americans living below the poverty line. A fledgling economic recovery, high unemployment and contracting government services are largely to blame. So is the paucity -- or paradox -- of affordable housing. While homelessness is increasing, more than 10% of homes in America are empty.
Emergency services, meanwhile, aren't filling the void. Homeless families and single adults are routinely turned away by shelter homes because of lack of bed space.
Tent cities are an organic, last resort response to crushing economic circumstances. Yet, rather than ameliorating the conditions that give rise to these communities, many states and municipalities are cracking down. While some encampments are legally sanctioned or permitted to operate on church grounds, officials routinely invoke prohibitions against public camping and sleeping to disband these encampments, leaving tenants languishing out in the cold.
Epithets suggesting that homeless people are mentally ill, lazy, criminal, violent or some combination thereof only fuels the fire.
These accusations are largely urban myth.
Most homeless people do not suffer from mental illness or drug abuse. Many homeless people have jobs but simply can't afford housing. Some tent cities, for example, cater to local economies, and many of their residents are gainfully employed. Homeless people also tend to be the victims of countless hate crimes, even though they are a protected class under numerous state hate crime statutes.
Lost in this shameful rhetoric is the fact that the right to housing is a bedrock of international law and protected by U.S. law. Some courts have held that tearing down camps when no alternative is available amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and a deprivation of property without due process of law.
That we can even stroll through our cities while some of the residents languish in squalor is hard to believe. A few decades ago, tent cities would have been unimaginable.
In 1964, a group of researchers famously roamed the parks of New York City and found only one homeless man. Fifty years later, homelessness in New York City has reached a record high. The same can be said for much of America: Homelessness has doubled since the 1980s. Those who declare that we're close to ending poverty just need to look around and see the victims of the Great Recession.
Tent cities are an ugly reminder of America's growing income inequalities. Yet, in the absence of meaningful economic reform, these self-reliant communities must not be dismantled. Nor should they be forgotten. For in sanctioning them, we risk capitulating to the epidemic of poverty and shifting our public policy from eliminating poverty to accommodating it.
This is
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Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Well, the issue of society's fall had its own path,imo. The ever growing power of labor unions in the auto industry didn't help matters either. A sense of entitlement , getting more and more for less and less, tipped the scales and all but destroyed the industry and Detroit along with it.
You know, I can actually see where you're coming from here and why you think that, but you're missing the other side of this equation: that the car manufacturers were going to move operations overseas anyway, no matter what the unions did. The organization of the unions was a desperation tactic to keep their jobs, and they failed because they weren't getting liveable offers. Inflation in America meant that the employees couldn't live on the 5 cents an hour that the businesses could pay someone overseas in a 14 hour-a-day death trap. Now we have the proud distinction of being a former manufacturing powerhouse that imports more than we export, and every bit of those imports is covered in blood. This has thoroughly screwed over the job market and the economy and which has exacerbated our now endless debt and inflation. Fun times.
While there are positives to this system, and forms and conditions under which such a system can work, in other ways it can also be incredibly self-destructive. We decided to go down the path towards oblivion.
You know your history AURaptor, although perhaps viewed through a different lens than most others here. I know you scoff at comparisons to the Roman Empire, but they fell during a period of rampant inflation when they started contracting out their military and security to private and foreign entities. History always repeats itself.
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What Byte said.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Thank you Frem.
Indeed, culling the sociopaths from among us would be profoundly beneficial. The other option is that we... the 99% of us... simply build another society and then refuse to share. 'Cause those Randists? They NEED society; they couldn't dig a latrine or cook a pot of beans or write code if their LIFE depended on it- which, it does. (BTW, my immediate reaction to the end of the story, when all of those capitalists run away to found a "better" society was Good riddance!. Unfortunately, they will never do that because like all parasites, they do need their host.)
Until we rid ourselves of parasites and predators, all the rest of us are doing is licking each other's wounds and sharing our crumbs so that we can hobble forward to another day of being sucked dry.
But once that is done, we need to keep the parasites and predators from re-developing. You and I had this discussion many years ago. At the time, I think you suggested barter and smaller semi-independent communities. I said it would be impractical, as modern technological economies need wide-scale trade. Your answer to that was that that we needed to take a couple of steps back, and my answer to that was nobody would tolerate such as move. And YOUR answer to that was that we either do it voluntarily or we will be unprepared for when it happens on its own. Over the years, I think I've come to your position. Anyway, it was obviously an interesting discussion because its stuck with me all of these years.
Well, come to find out that this is prettymuch how most of the scandanavian countries developed, and they somehow managed to develop that wide scale trade and supporting infrastructure without the madness, in large part due to the stronger social bonds rooted in such a structure to begin with.
One enormous part of their current sanity, comparative to ours, is that the plague of fascism that reared its head back in the 1930's was mostly rejected by them because it required a form of childrearing which was inherently abusive in order for humans to become twisted enough to accept and embrace such a horrific and inhumane social structure, and to do this en masse was against their very nature - conversely america seems hell bent on it despite not only its proven failure as a system, but the unbelievably horrific aftermath of every attempt.
It was that aftermath, in fact, that gave rise to social consciousness of the form mostly attributed to Alice Miller, and firmly and scientifically proven by CITIVAS and Doc Perry.
A lesson we continue to ignore because instead of locking them up in a rubber room, we put these fuckers in charge, and that's gotten us where we are now.
The predictive model we're working from is in fact both well-sourced and backed up by something as close to an actual AI as makes little difference, and one of the analysts worked for 538 before Nate sold it off under suspicious circumstances, so it's not an off-the-cuff assessment, but one that's been formulated for some time, and basically there's a two way split.
The high probability course is a civil war in all but name, resulting in 25% near immediate casualty, concentrated amongst women, children, elderly, disabled, and so forth and so on, and a follow through of up to 25% more in the aftermath as the necessary infrastructure to support them will have failed or been destroyed.
People don't think about this stuff, but if you cut a major city off from power, water, fuel and food, for any extended period, they're dead, period - and in a severe civil unrest situation it's quite plausible for the powers that be to do such a thing ON PURPOSE, especially since a mild form of it has recently been pulled on us.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-committee-to-investigate-chris-chri
stie-bridge-controversy/
Ain't the violence itself which'd be the primary factor of casualty, it would be starvation, exposure, and rampant sickness/disease which follo
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Quote:
You know, I can actually see where you're coming from here and why you think that, but you're missing the other side of this equation: that the car manufacturers were going to move operations overseas anyway, no matter what the unions did. The organization of the unions was a desperation tactic to keep their jobs, and they failed because they weren't getting liveable offers. Inflation in America meant that the employees couldn't live on the 5 cents an hour that the businesses could pay someone overseas in a 14 hour-a-day death trap. Now we have the proud distinction of being a former manufacturing powerhouse that imports more than we export, and every bit of those imports is covered in blood. This has thoroughly screwed over the job market and the economy and which has exacerbated our now endless debt and inflation. Fun times.
Some things are out of the control of governments. Manufacturing and other industries are moving from wealthy countries where labour costs are at a premium to labour rich - economically poor countries, where large rural workforces move to find work in urban areas when farming becomes less intensive work.
The world has cycles, some of which are impossible to stem or change.
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