RealityBucket

Not the least of which is that it angered me enough to do that funky punctuation thing.

But seriously: being poor is not a crime. If you have problems with the consequences of the welfare state, then you might want to take a hard look at the welfare state, rather than seeking to punish those who use it. You can’t humiliate people out of being poor any more than you can legally force them not to be poor. Going after the individual for the sins of society is useless at best. Or, to put it more bluntly, if you don’t think welfare ought to exist, get rid of it instead of fucking around with deciding who’s deserving. Either it’s ok for the government to take your money and give it to somebody else, or it isn’t. Once you stipulate that it is, and hand it over, you’ve lost control of it.

Even more seriously: this is only a start. Don’t you understand? It’s not going to stop there. It NEVER stops there. What is done today to the people who you think deserve it will be done to you tomorrow. And by the time it does, you’ll have forgotten that we were ever outraged by outrageous behavior.

Just you wait.

NYT

When a company chooses to offer a product it figures it can sell? I’m OK with that. As a matter of fact, I still subscribe to the notion that there’s this market thing that will cause them to stop trying to sell it if nobody buys it. And if people buy it? Well, they can do that. And the company makes money, and sinks it into crazy things like creating jobs and trying to figure out what will sell next. And the world goes ’round.

As a matter of fact, I feel vaguely reassured by the existence of Buck Fush t-shirts. I choose to see them as a sign that we’re a bit farther from the next revolution than I sometimes think we are.

Joyner:

Less amusing: “You already know you’re not a threat — show us!” Doesn’t that turn a free society on its head?

Why, yes. Yes it does.

You know, I went to elementary school in the early eighties, when the Russians were going to nuke us if the Japanese didn’t buy the whole place first, and I’ve got to say that more and more it sounds like someone pulled this shit straight from the scenarios that we heard about why the commies were the scariest people on Earth. I never would have guessed that we’d descend into this sort of madness in my lifetime.

Then again, as a child it was difficult to see how far down the path we’d already gone. The way things are when you’re growing up has a tendency to become permanently fixed in your mind as normal and therefore good, and given that those perceptions are limited and then blurred by age, it’s sometimes hard to believe that things stayed as good as they did for as long as they did. Humans are marvelously adaptive creatures. Sometimes, though, it seems a shame that we can get used to almost anything. This would be one of those times.

Jay and Deb have very kindly invited me to post here.  They say it was to get an alternative point of view, and thus more traffic.  I also think they did it to reduce my email traffic to them, providing me with a place to post all the interesting links I find.   (Yep, I’m on to you guys). 

I have been flirting with the idea of starting a blog of my own for a long time.  But I never did, mostly out of a desire to protect my privacy, but also, in small part, because of my distaste for the extremes that seem to occur naturally on the Internet.  There’s a self sorting that happens when people are together, anywhere, in groups.  Sometimes it can be beneficial.  Sometime it can be frivolous and fun.  Sometimes it can be stupid.  Sometimes it can be lunatic fringe.  And sometimes it can be actively and poisonously malicious. 

Anyway, back to posting a different point of view.  Anyone here ever hear of the Colorado Experiment?  Even if you have, I’d like to point out the first and last posts from Cass Sunstein’s guest posts at the blog Talking Points Memo.  Essentially, the whole discussion is on the effects of the Internet on democracy; how it may or may not effect the extremes of our national debate.  This week’s discussion at Table for One seemed a perfect fit for my first post.  I do believe that Jay and Deb may be running a mini-Colorado Experiment of their own.  8-) 

We’ll be underway shortly. Enjoy the flight!