What are our national goals? What about the international rules of the road? And who are "we", anyway?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Monday, August 31, 2026 20:17
VIEWED: 6222
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I could answer my question but I'd really like to know what SECIND thinks
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:I have had this same confrontation about metrification. Clients outside the US want their petrochemical plants designed using metric units, and the Texans doing the paperwork in Houston bitched about it being an affront to an American's right to use their customary units of inches, gallons, pounds per square inch, and degrees Fahrenheit. It didn't surprise me that those Texans who complained about metrification also voted for Trump, at least the ones who hadn't died before 2016, because American Freedom meant to them gluttony, drunkenness, smoking, fornication, drug use, breaking speed limits, and guns. Every Trumptard I knew from my old engineering/construction days is either in poor health or dead because they live foolishly, refusing to adapt. Refusing to adapt to other people's ideas brings out the philosopher in Trumptards. They want a detailed explanation of why they should change. They are not changing, and trying to convince them with words won't work, just like words didn't work with slave-owners. Only violence and force work. Or, if it is an engineering project, firing them.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Answer the question, SECOND.
You've amply demonstrated that different people thought different things about slavery for different reasons.
I want to know why YOU think the way you do.
Metrication has a political connection. The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 coordinated a voluntary shift to the metric system. But as inevitable in the USA, the U.S. Metric Board faced widespread public apathy and political pushback. Reagan dismantled the board in 1982. Even something that the entire world is doing, except for the USA, becomes a fight between Republicans and the world, while average Americans are saying, 'I don't know that it is right to follow the world. Maybe, maybe not. Not sure. Can we change the subject to something bland and non-controversial?'
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have had this same "confrontation" about metrification.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Answer the question, SECOND.
You've amply demonstrated that different people thought different things about slavery for different reasons.
I want to know why YOU think the way you do.
Huh?
What is it about slavery that is evil, SECOND?
I'll give you a head start:
Some say that it legally deprived humans of freedom. Of course, there are many freedoms, some maybe more important than others. The freedom to vote, for example, might feel less important to some than "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" so if that's what you're reacting to I'd be curious which freedoms you feel most strongly about.
Others say it's bc slaves could be legally cruelly treated. But, what if there were laws against mistreating slaves?
Others say that slavery denigrates work. If slaves are the workers, then anyone not a slave wouldn't want to work, and work is the foundation of a prosperous and peaceful society.
Still others say it creates a disaffected, rebellious population within a society. That in order for a society to hold together, enough people have to "buy into" it bc you can't keep a society together long-term thru force alone.
But maybe it's something else.
Probe your reaction to slavery, SECOND. Add or subtract variables to the concept of slavery and pin down what bugs you the most. You bring it up so often that it's really meaningful to you, in which case you might be interested in finding out something about yourself. I know I'm interested.
Just to be clear, I'm not a big fan of slavery.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Leaked: CIA BEGGED Trump Not to Start Iran War!
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Maybe the CYA is telling the truth. For once.
But usually a circular firing squad forms in a debacle.
It's everyone else's fault.
As they say: "Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan".
Oh, and the process of finding a fix?
When ppl are urged to "think outside the box"?
It's called "blamestorming"!
Bureaucratic fun and games!
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:I like that ending where you write, "I'm not a big fan of slavery." But you are a big fan of Russia, which is enslaving, killing, and expelling Ukrainians from Ukraine.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have had this same "confrontation" about metrification.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Answer the question, SECOND.
You've amply demonstrated that different people thought different things about slavery for different reasons.
I want to know why YOU think the way you do.
Huh?
What is it about slavery that is evil, SECOND?
I'll give you a head start:
Some say that it legally deprived humans of freedom. Of course, there are many freedoms, some maybe more important than others. The freedom to vote, for example, might feel less important to some than "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" so if that's what you're reacting to I'd be curious which freedoms you feel most strongly about.
Others say it's bc slaves could be legally cruelly treated. But, what if there were laws against mistreating slaves?
Others say that slavery denigrates work. If slaves are the workers, then anyone not a slave wouldn't want to work, and work is the foundation of a prosperous and peaceful society.
Still others say it creates a disaffected, rebellious population within a society. That in order for a society to hold together, enough people have to "buy into" it bc you can't keep a society together long-term thru force alone.
But maybe it's something else.
Probe your reaction to slavery, SECOND. Add or subtract variables to the concept of slavery and pin down what bugs you the most. You bring it up so often that it's really meaningful to you, in which case you might be interested in finding out something about yourself. I know I'm interested.
Just to be clear, I'm not a big fan of slavery.
And your notions about holding society together are nonsensical. For decades, the tax code has been an honor code, where you pay what you feel you owe while at the same time electing representatives who promise to alter the tax code to decrease revenue and fire IRS auditors. Revenue has decreased successfully. Half of Congress does not even want the President to reveal how much he paid because that would invade his privacy. The other half insists he release his IRS Form 1040. It is as if Congress has a split mind about paying vs non-paying of taxes, just as it was once split between whether workers should be paid at least a minimum wage versus being paid nothing at all as slaves. Congress is even split between those who firmly believe labor unions are evil versus those who believe employers should not prevent employees from asking, as a group, rather than individually, for a pay raise.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Perhaps one national goal should be not to give the nation to the wealthy, particularly not to the biggest cheaters on taxes.
From Kakistocracy to Cheatistocracy
Rewarding the most dishonest
By Paul Krugman
Aug 31, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/from-kakistocracy-to-cheatistocracy
Transcript
At this point, it’s almost a commonplace to say that under Donald Trump, America has become a kakistocracy, ruled by the worst. But I don’t think it’s fully appreciated the extent to which we’ve also become a cheatistocracy, ruled by the most corrupt.
Today’s commentary is a follow-upon yesterday’s primer, which was about the role of tax evasion both in leading to or contributing to our downward spiral into oligarchy and also as a surprisingly large factor in the budget deficit and therefore in America’s debt problem.
Before I get to tax evasion, let me say something about where I’ve been going in my kind of intellectual journey into understanding oligarchy. As an economist, normally my instinct is to think about the invisible hand, to think about market forces, about technology as driving what happens to society. And even now there’s at least some extent to which the rise of kind of garden variety inequality, the rise of the top quintile at the expense of the middle, may be partially explained by the bias of technology towards higher formal skills, although that may be ending now with AI and all of that.
But as I began to focus on oligarchy, on the very small number of people who have enormous wealth, enormous income, but the wealth is an even bigger factor — there are a really handful of people who have come to play such a large role. In our society, in our economy, and above all, of course, in our politics— I was forced more or less by the numbers to say this is not about the invisible hand. This is not about market forces. It isn’t even mostly about technology.
Yeah, some technologies create winner-take-all markets that make people in the right place extremely wealthy. But the really big factor that’s driven us from the relatively equal society that we were 50 years ago — not obviously anywhere close to truly equal, but nothing like the dominance of a tiny elite that we have now — the really important factor is policy and above all tax policy.
We basically stopped imposing progressive taxes that limited the growth of enormous fortunes. And sure enough, as the tax barriers to accumulation of excessive wealth went away, excessive wealth began to concentrate.
This is, in many ways, the fundamental story. We got rid of, we ended the Gilded Age with its dominance by, as FDR said, the power of organized money, largely by taxing a lot of that organized money away. And we got back to something which in many ways is worse than the Gilded Age by taking away those taxes and allowing vast fortunes to snowball and buy themselves enormous political power, which allows them to snowball even further.
One factor in all of that is the rise of simply not paying taxes that you’re supposed to pay. A lot of it is reductionist statutory tax rates. We tax corporate profits at a far lower rate than we did in the 1950s; we tax top incomes at a much, much lower rate than we did in the 1950s. But what’s also true is that we simply allow people to get away with not paying taxes to an enormous extent, to almost surely a much greater extent than used to be the case.
The numbers are big, and in the primer I go through the tax gap. The money owed but not in fact collected is certainly north of $600 billion a year. It is something like 40% or more of the U.S. federal budget deficit. It is a major contributing factor to the accumulation of vast fortunes.
What is striking is that far from really making an effort to rein in that tax gap, for the most part politically our system has moved to let it rip, has basically tried to make America safe for tax cheats.
This is something that overwhelmingly benefits people with high incomes and large wealth because people with really big incomes, people who are extremely w
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Quote:I like that ending where you write, "I'm not a big fan of slavery." But you are a big fan of Russia, which is enslaving, killing, and expelling Ukrainians from Ukraine.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have had this same "confrontation" about metrification.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Answer the question, SECOND.
You've amply demonstrated that different people thought different things about slavery for different reasons.
I want to know why YOU think the way you do.
Huh?
What is it about slavery that is evil, SECOND?
I'll give you a head start:
Some say that it legally deprived humans of freedom. Of course, there are many freedoms, some maybe more important than others. The freedom to vote, for example, might feel less important to some than "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" so if that's what you're reacting to I'd be curious which freedoms you feel most strongly about.
Others say it's bc slaves could be legally cruelly treated. But, what if there were laws against mistreating slaves?
Others say that slavery denigrates work. If slaves are the workers, then anyone not a slave wouldn't want to work, and work is the foundation of a prosperous and peaceful society.
Still others say it creates a disaffected, rebellious population within a society. That in order for a society to hold together, enough people have to "buy into" it bc you can't keep a society together long-term thru force alone.
But maybe it's something else.
Probe your reaction to slavery, SECOND. Add or subtract variables to the concept of slavery and pin down what bugs you the most. You bring it up so often that it's really meaningful to you, in which case you might be interested in finding out something about yourself. I know I'm interested.
Just to be clear, I'm not a big fan of slavery.
You have strange ideas about Russia.
And a loose definition of slavery!
So, what is it about slavery that is evil?
I'm beginning to see that your problem is that you resist clarifying your thinking.
So this time, try not to introduce random topics like the metric system or Russia or taxes.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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