US Presidential Elections 2008 (2 Viewers)

[Froog]

rappers.

http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/50 cent im the george bush of hip-hop_1006839

 

[reformer]

Your strict dole rules work great in theory but will only be effective for people who are happy not to work and
make no allowance for people who genuinely can't find work.
Under your scheme they will end up hungry in 6 months.
Back to the drawing board...

if you cant find a job within six months your fucked either way.

this isn't very convincing after "3/4 years studying every economic theory".

not a schniff of markey-failure, non-excludability, schumpeter, neo-schumpeterian theory, neo-classical growth models, appropriability, or anything.....

i thought i said every economic theory i could find info on,may be wrong.you know how hard it is to find books on economics in dublin?obviously they have all the usual suspects "freakonomics" "the world is flat" "the lexus and the olive tree" etc etc but serious academic books?im reduced to looking in second hand book stores and hoping i unearth something,i cant even find any works by milton friedman,had to go all the way to florida to find one of his.
and please do feel free to point me in a good direction

 

[7 - No tomorrow]

It was because his health problems are myriad.
He has a bucket load of conditions that he's getting treatment for and he's on lots of meds.

He did a 'document dump' in May.

Jon Stewart covered it earlier in the year.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/29/the-daily-show-on-mccains-age-71-is-the-new-30/

This is a funny clip, trust me.

 

[jane]

if you cant find a job within six months your fucked either way.



i thought i said every economic theory i could find info on,may be wrong.you know how hard it is to find books on economics in dublin?obviously they have all the usual suspects "freakonomics" "the world is flat" "the lexus and the olive tree" etc etc but serious academic books?im reduced to looking in second hand book stores and hoping i unearth something,i cant even find any works by milton friedman,had to go all the way to florida to find one of his.
and please do feel free to point me in a good direction

Ha ha ha, this is amazing. You're now excusing your poor argument based on a dearth of economics books in the city of Dublin?

Also, it's not just about getting ideas out of books, there's a thing called 'critical thinking', which I'm sure even authors of these elusive economics textbooks would hope their readers would do. I'm sure there are books on this 'critical thinking', although you may have to look on the World Wide Web.

Are you a broken robot?

 

[the strange guy]

if you cant find a job within six months your fucked either way.

Being skint (dole) isn't the same as being hungry (no dole).
The only way to eradicate the welfare state without making people hungry is to guarantee jobs.
But you can't guarantee jobs in a fully free market because there is no benefit
to companies/factories/corporations to employ people they don't need if a tax
system has already been removed.

please do feel free to point me in a good direction

Here are two really good sites.
The first is for books that can be hard to find and the second is just general information.

I know we're ripping the piss out of you terribly, but it's just seriously odd to hear somebody come out
with the stuff you're saying.
The fact that you seem sincere compounds our collective jaw dropping into a deafening THUNK.

 

[Froog]

i thought i said every economic theory i could find info on,may be wrong.you know how hard it is to find books on economics in dublin?obviously they have all the usual suspects "freakonomics" "the world is flat" "the lexus and the olive tree" etc etc but serious academic books?im reduced to looking in second hand book stores and hoping i unearth something,i cant even find any works by milton friedman,had to go all the way to florida to find one of his.
and please do feel free to point me in a good direction

www.amazon.com

 

[broken arm]

and please do feel free to point me in a good direction

http://www.google.ie
https://www.amazon.co.uk/?tag=thumpedcom0e-21
http://www.[SIZE=-1]books.google.co.uk[/SIZE]
http://cesifo.oxfordjournals.org
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/Economics/
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ces/index.html
http://www.springerlink.com/home/main.mpx
etc.

 

[Mormon Nailer]

Nice of google adds to put thet John McCain add up there in the banner.

 

[the strange guy]

Mine shows GayThugDating.

 

[hugh]

(loads of stuff deleted)

All of them have said, no way, not again. And I hear about this happening all over.

But the polls stay 50/50. Totally solid.

Kind of like the way people spend years and years giving out about the Government here, Fianna Fail supporters included, and then when the election comes around, they all vote for FF. Usually the justification is "ah sure I know they're a bunch of arseholes but I wouldn't trust the other lot to run the country either .. better the devil you know, eh?"

 

[hugh]

Mine shows GayThugDating.

Me too. The mind boggles ...

 

[Mormon Nailer]

Me too. The mind boggles ...

You two really should PM each other so.

 

[jane]

once or twice I've had a look outside though.


Seriously like, even old school, hard core, Republicans All Their Lives, Christian middle aged / old upper middle class white people, are fucking horrified with what is going on.
Even they are thinking ahh for fuxake lads. This had gone beyond joke now.
That's what I'm trying to say.
The people that I thought the Republicans relied on as one of their big solid bases seem to be defecting at this point.
At least that what it looked like.


Apparently not though.
Or have they recruited some other mysterious source of votes?
I just dont understand the polls.

I dunno, this is the thing. Because there *are* Republicans waking up and going, "Fuuuuuck, how long was I high for?" and voting for Obama.

There are also Clinton supporters who are -- sadly -- made up of well-off middle-aged ladies who just thought it was their turn to have an imaginary golf buddy in the White House, who have decided to vote for McCain. Because even if a lady was president, it still means a nice white couple are in charge of the garden parties. A black guy? Oh god. I mean, he talks nice with his subject-verb agreement, but what about his friends? Do we really want to see Krunk in the Rose Garden? Or have the presidential tree replaced with a Kwanzaa bush? Or have the Lincoln bedroom draped in kinte cloth? Nothing racist, of course -- just tradition.

I don't know are there genuinely enough of those to account for McCain's success so far. But sadly, there are a lot of these so-called 'commonsense' types out there, people -- mostly white guys and a slightly smaller number of white women along with a miscellaneous mixed bag of pricks with inexplicable self-loathing -- who think that civil rights, feminism, gay rights, well, they all had their day, and now it's time to cut the crap and get down to business. Sure, white lesbos and black homos can be part of the operations, so long as they don't want 'special rights', like getting married or not getting fired for getting pregnant.

White guys who went to medium sized and mid-ranked universities where they were B/C students and who haven't really ever pulled their heads out of their arses or their arses out of college; neoconservative Stanfordites who saw Condi talk at convocation and really 'got' the neoconservative 'commonsense' approach because only liberalism is ideology; barbecue-happy suburban dads whose wives 'chose' to give up work, miserable suburban women whose husbands insist that they 'chose' to stay home with the kids; happy women who work in nice mid- to high-income jobs who are either too old or too young to know or remember firsthand what it's like to be told you're not getting a job because you might go get pregnant (i.e., who are still comfortable and unbothered enough to believe the world is a meritocracy) or to have an abortion or to not be safe inside or outside their homes; families on benefits who think that 'welfare reform' genuinely means that they'll get access to jobs (not, in fact, that they'll simply be left out in the cold instead); white trash types who think it's great that McCain would rather be at a bike rally than surrounded by adoring mobs in a country where they don't use deodorant; idiots with goatees and Ford pickups and associates degrees who work on commission and drink in the local sports bar with their buddies and admire McCain's 'straight talking' style because it mirrors the way they never did a fucking thing in school except mock the kids who tried hard.

People who don't give a shite about anyone but themselves, who care about their communities only for as long as it takes them to move to one with a lock on its gate, and who've managed to convince themselves that McCain cares about 'their' kind -- the no-bullshit, no-sympathy-for-the-weak (because people in vunerable positions are only there 'cause they is TOO WEAK and PUSSY), straight-shooting asshole with a flattop. That guy. There's a female version of him, a nicely tanned, preened, moderately-educated woman who doesn't recognise her privilege, either. They think McCain cares about them because he's 'like' them. Just like Bush did.

Then McCain turns around and accuses Obama of being elitist because he went to Harvard. Then Obama has to spend energy defending that accusation, and then they accuse him of trying too hard to be a man of the people. And then That Guy, well, he can't figure out why Obama is trying so damn hard when if he really had the balls to back it up, he wouldn't talk so damn much. And of course, McCain went to a private boarding school and then to USNA -- the most fucking privileged school in the country, where you have to be appointed by a senator or member of congress to even get a fucking look in. Not elitist, though. Not in the slightest. USNA partyboy (they all fucking are, though) versus Guy Who Earned Every Second He Spent At Harvard. Hm.

There are about 40 million of That Guy in the US, and he works in every industry, lives in every town and in every state. And That Guy feels like he doesn't have a voice, even though he's got more respect than he deserves but because he gets it by default, he doesn't notice it. He feels like girls and blacks are getting handouts they don't deserve, even though he still managed to graduate high school without trying because he could throw a good pass and his dad got him out of any scrapes with the law.

Did That Guy even want to go to Yale? Not fucking likely. And yet That Guy still frets about affirmative action, not because it undermines his rights, just feels like a threat to his sense of entitlement as a white guy whose idea of the world relies on his belief that he lives in a meritocracy -- to believe he has any privilege at all would undermine the sense of achievement on which his self-worth relies.

Does That Guy want to be a dad at 21? Not really, but he'll just make a few phone calls and take care of that problem from the frat party. It's other girls who are the problem, who use abortion as an excuse to be whores. And whores are fine as long as it's That Guy they're fucking. Does he want to fuck a stripper? Hell yeah! Does he want to help fund her survival when she gets pregnant and has to take time off to have a kid because she couldn't afford an education and stripping pays the bills? No fucking way. She should get herself a real job, not be a sponge off the state. Does he want to die in a war? No, but even if he got sent there, he knows how to take care of himself, and he'd never lose sight of his buddies or the goal: liberate Iraq from its non-American tendencies. But he's not going to die in a war. He's not going to be on the front lines because he's just that *little bit* more connected. Because when you have a college degree, you start at a higher rank and are less likely to end up as cannon fodder because hey, you might have a skill beyond lending your guts to a landmine.

There's a shitload of them. You might not notice them too much, but That Guy tends to be the very sort of Guy who gets on my tits. I encounter them more often than maybe a lot of white guys who don't rock the boat do, but they tend to bust the chops of anyone who does anything that they can't relate to directly. That Guy. That Guy who thinks that because he's doing just fine, and he worked hard to get there, that anyone who works hard will do just fine, and anyone who's not doing just fine simply isn't working hard enough.

That Guy thinks he's all common sense, but his common sense only applies to a very limited view of reality, mainly the relatively comfortable, prosperous and healthy lives of the other middle-class suburbanites or rich pricks who think it's fine for blacks and whites to go to school together, but aren't so sure they want to let them into the club. Nothing personal -- it's just, you know, tradition.

Some of That Guy and That Gal have decided to vote for Obama, but most of them don't see what the big deal is about a black guy who can talk good. They're not voting for him precisely because they are *not* racist and then went to college with some black kids who didn't like affirmative action. They haul out their token black friends as a way of showcasing their non-racism. They facebook-poke their black acquaintances from college, just so they can do this. They think it's all a load of hype, him doing his travelling Obama show, humping every rostrum he can find, when in fact, McCain hasn't said fucking SHIT over the last two months.

The Irish equivalent of That Guy is the guy that thinks Kevin Myers or John Waters has a point. The guy who thinks that Ian O'Doherty is funny because he 'tells it like it is' (which is code for 'makes me feel better about being the cunt that I am'). That Guy who isn't racist, but we can't have all these immigrants coming here and wrecking our national identity you know, because we only just got it back from the English. And then That Guy gets into a fucking screaming match with a guy about Chelsea vs Arsenal.

They think of themselves as 'moderates' or 'centrists', when in reality, they just don't have any politics outside themselves. McCain is -- sadly -- like most of the fucking people on this earth, and this majority in the middle control the outcome of the election. Which is why he's getting so many damn votes.

Most people don't have any personal politics, and they only really think about shit during election time, which means that whoever appeals the most to the people who are the least political wins the game.

OMG. I can't shut up. I'm sorry.

 

[jane]

OMG.

That's a lot. Even for me. Sorry, just wanted to paint a portrait of That Guy. Ended up with a fucking epic landscape.

Summary of post above:

Who votes McCain? Pricks, mostly white, but not all.

Because most people have no politics of their own and are pricks with no sympathy for others so don't see why you should upset tradition.

See also: Fianna Fail voters/politicians/candidates.

Also, I got gaythugdating.

Ashamed now.

 

[flashback]

Jaysus Jane.
I probably should just take an early weekend, and get a start on reading that post.

 

[jane]

Jaysus Jane.
I probably should just take an early weekend, and get a start on reading that post.

It's okay. I summarised it below.

But left the original as a reminder to myself. For the shame of it.

TEH SHAME.

Sorry.

If I'd put that kind of energy into my work today, I wouldn't still be sitting at the computer doing work, only I'm not doing work, I'm spitting out monster posts.

 

[Moods For Mallards]

I hope I don't know anyone who thinks Ian O'Doherty is funny.

 

[jane]

I hope I don't know anyone who thinks Ian O'Doherty is funny.

THIS IS THE THING.

They're probably a friend of a friend, some guy your mate grew up with. They're probably some chick from work who is kinda okay to talk to, but you only talk about work.

People like that. They are like David Icke's lizards: they're everwhere, we just don't always see the REAL THEY. They do The THEY thing in their private time. Like laugh at something Brendan O'Connor said or wrote.

I left out Brendan O'Connor. You and I and everyone here probably even know people who bought that fucking single he put out. "Who's in the House," or whatever it was called. BRENDAN O'CONNOR NOT IN MY HOUSE.

 

[flashback]

I hope I don't know anyone who thinks Ian O'Doherty is funny.

Who the fuck is Ian O'Doherty?
Is he, by any chance, a bit of a cunt?

How would he stack up against the luminaries of the field, the likes of say, Dave McSavAge?

 

[jane]

Who the fuck is Ian O'Doherty?
Is he, by any chance, a bit of a cunt?

How would he stack up against the luminaries of the field, the likes of say, Dave McSavAge?

Ian O'Doherty is like a young Kevin Myers. Only kinda worse. Also with the Indo, although I think mainly the Sindo.

Flashback, your life will be in no way enriched by knowing any more than that about him. It may push something useful out of your brain.

The dream is over.

Crying, writing this.

etc.