Imperioratorex Caprae said:
3. G.W. Bush wasn't a horrible President. Carter was the last horrible President. However the last decade of Congress has been pretty well shit, too much party infighting and petty disputes, lobbyists have too much pull on both sides for the People to really have any say in what gets passed and how it affects US citizens.
4. If someone has worked hard for their money, no one has the right to begrudge them for having it. Rich folk aren't all trust fund babies (people like Paris Hilton are worthless though) and they do pay sufficient tax. Hell they carry the burden for most of the country as it is, making them pay more is kinda punishment for being successful.
3. Interesting. I'm used to people who think Carter was horrible tying it into the Presidents after him, but you think he was the last horrible one period.
4. Ignoring whether or not the rich give back to society proportionally fair to those who are not rich, a lot of people complaining about the rich don't begrudge them for their wealth so much as the influence it gives them. Any hard work that got them that wealth does not necessarily give them better expertise than the rest of us on the policies they have influence on. Heck, it wasn't too long ago Mark Cuban was giving some monumentally uninformed advice [footnote]He was stubborn enough to argue with people more educated than him on the issue from an award winning investigative journalist/data guru/past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists to ordinary healthcare experts[/footnote] on maintaining personal health that made sense to him because that's how he handles his investment portfolio. The Dunning?Kruger effect is especially dangerous with those who have that much power.
Then, there's the fact that once you break past a certain level of wealth you actually pay less in taxes than the wealthy people you just left in the dust. [http://www.vox.com/2015/6/2/8712109/irs-tax-rates-rich] I guess you could argue the top .1% and beyond earned a lower tax rate, but I do think this is worth pointing out for sake of comparison to other wealthy people.
Most concerning though is that the richer you are that much more astronomical are the chances a majority of your wealth comes from places like capital gains and dividends. There's no denying the education and hard work put into that, especially to get those people in the spot to make such investments, but they also get plenty of time to let their money make money on itself when they're not doing anything. Most people don't have the luxury or access to the necessary education to do that and have to continue putting in just as much hard work versus the lull time one can get while their money is making money. More initial effort, education, and experience for less later effort. I'd argue that aspect of our system is worth begrudging until
[ol][li] A majority of people have the necessary access to opportunity to understand how that works even if they ultimately can't or won't take advantage of it[/li] [li]A sufficient amount of the money to come out of it goes back into the infrastructure that helped generate it (society) because chances are the person that money is going to is not going to do that themselves on the scale necessary. The growth is too large compared to the overall effort put in for you to make me believe they earned ALL to come out of that. Working income is a different story because it doesn't grow like that[/li].[/ol] Note that I'm not arguing that everyone should be able to make a lot of money in investments like that, but the lack of knowledge on it and the scale of exponential growth is worse to me than income inequality because only the ultra wealthy can have it make up so much of their wealth. Even the less wealthy are somewhat cut off from it.
And, honestly? I don't know of a single suggested tax revision that would put a majority of the wealthy in a position where they could not still go about with the successful life they lived before. I don't think it's a punishment until they suddenly are crippled in a significant way from doing what they do. A few less 0s at the end of their paychecks is not going to cripple them in the same way it proportionally would those of the middle and lower class.
LifeCharacter said:
sagitel said:
so i just finished the last season and ..... i dont see any romantic attraction. [snip]
Yeah you missed something. Namely, how friends typically don't also stare into each other's eyes while holding both of each other's hands in a pose that has been reserved exclusively for romantic couples while "The Avatar's Love" plays in the background and the scene refers back to the original series' ending of Aang and Katara doing the exact same thing. It's really not ambiguous so long as you look at it more closely than "they're just holding hands."
Also, creator intent [http://bryankonietzko.tumblr.com/post/105916338157/korrasami-is-canon-you-can-celebrate-it-embrace]. I thought that got around by this point, but I guess not. If you have time for something longer and don't avoid Tumblr at all costs there's also the staging evidence [http://heartlighting.tumblr.com/post/105606009782/final-bows-or-korrasami-is-canon-because].
Halla Burrica said:
-Skyward Sword is a great game
Good, not great. Sure.
Halla Burrica said:
and very, very, very muchbetter than Twilight Princess, since SS had some actual balls of its own and didn't just pander to the OoT and MJ fans, but actually did something original and did it well.
[snip]
-Naruto was ok, even kinda good at times until the war broke out.
[snip]
Also, after having read some of the posts in this thread, I believe fascism comes to us much more naturally than we like to think, probably more than democracy.
On par...maybe. What can I say? I have got a lot of nostalgia for TP. TP may have pandered, but what was clearly pandering was polished and had good ideas of its own. Much of what was original about SS wasn't as equally polished. It ultimately balances out I think. TP had more sword techniques, SS had directional sword fighting. TP had Midna, SS had lackluster Fi. TP had a darker aesthetic, SS stood out. TP had Ganondorf usurp the more interesting villain, SS had...Ganondorf(Demise is Ganondorf as far as I'm concerned. Very original) usurp the more interesting villain...hmmm.
The series had potential. The more religious allegory, philosophical, meta, wide-spanning it got, the harder it was to read/watch. Considering how long those themes stretch on for once any individual arc went full throttle with them I'd argue it maintained a more consistent level of downright, pretentious stupidity.
Wow. That's usually a belief founded over the long term. Those posts must have been pretty intense.
rosac said:
That obese women shouldn't model. They're not being "brave" they're promoting an incredibly negative lifestlye IN THE EXACT SAME WAY A SIZE ZERO MODEL DOES. And yet they get a lot of shit. Some women put on weight easily, some cannot put weight on. But for some reason being skinny is seen as being evil by a sector of modern "feminists" whereas being proud of your body despite weight issues is ok.
I have literally never seen this. Yes, the section of feminists you're referring to discuss body image, but I have never seem them go for outright obesity in modeling or unfairly harass the anorexic except in hyperbolic perceptions. The closest I have seen is attacks on fat shaming, which is more about downright hatred towards the severely obese that isn't helping them get their health under control. The cheering I see is towards any model that isn't unhealthily skinny, maybe a few chunky women, but nobody in an unhealthy weight range.
Anti Nudist Cupcake said:
None of these opinions really seem all that unpopular
I know, right?
Anti Nudist Cupcake said:
Boom, gone. Clean slate. Any nation that does not perpetuate a culture of liberty and progress is a nation the world doesn't need dragging it down.
I think that basically just leaves a handful of European countries.
I don't, however, take this "view" of mine very seriously. If I actually had to be the one to push the button to armageddon, I wouldn't. I don't think that I have thought it all through nearly well enough and I don't think any human has the place to make that decision over billions of people. I don't trust a single human being to make the right choice. I'd also hesitate because I know that between all the rubbish of the world that desperately needs some clearing up, some of the valuable, ethical people would also be lost.
Boom, you say? Clean slate, you say? No human should do it, you say? I got your answer
I think a lot about meteors. The purity of them. Boom. The end. Start again. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild. said:
Happyninja42 said:
I actually like the line from Attack of the Clones about sand. It's like how eskimos have 40+ words for snow. For a kid born on a desert planet, he would have VERY strong opinions about the stuff.
[snip]
I thought Legend of Korra sucked, because it was a poorly told story with a terrible main character.
The meaning behind the words were fine, but the delivery of them and the corniness of them outweigh any merit behind their intention. Luke and Han both agree to get Lucas out of the dialogue chair
Just how low are your standards? The show was ultimately a disappointment, but I have seen way too much from the true bottom of the barrel to use "terrible" to describe
Korra.
TakerFoxx said:
jamail77 said:
I'd argue we're a lot better about ideologies coexisting than we were the generation before and the generation before that and so on.
Who's we? We, meaning western culture? The world at large? The internet? No, not really. Sure, there is more acceptance of certain previously persecuted ways of thinking and minorities, but in turn other problems just rise up to replace them. There have been plenty of cultures in ancient times that were far more open minded and accepting than we ever will be, and they had problems that we find appalling. Humanity is essentially running in place, constantly evolving but never really progressing, at least not as a whole.
Humanity. On the grand scale of things I don't think those new problems are as damning. While there have been individual cultures that were better about this stuff I don't think there is a point in history where humanity, the world, was better about this. I'd say it's more akin to us running in place and taking a step once in a while.
Proto Taco said:
4) Pro-Lifers are halfwits who've never stopped to consider if the child even WANTS to be born. Until a fetus can answer the question, "do you want to live?" It is both unethical to make the decision for the fetus, and also daft to suggest a living, breathing, conscious woman has any obligation to what amounts to a mammalian vegetable in her uterus, incapable of both thought and speech.
Well, many of them are religious and could potentially easily sidestep that by the common theme that suicide is a sin. If a fetus could communicate and already thought life wasn't worth living many of the religious would argue letting the person go through with it would be aiding them in sinning and against your religious obligation to convince that person of the sanctity of their life.
