ObjectivityIncarnate

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  • 89 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • I’m confused, didn’t you answer your own question?

    No, there is a difference in motivation between doing whatever you want because you believe it’s hopeless re ‘consuming ethically’, and doing whatever you want because you’ve never given a single thought to the matter of ‘ethical consumption’ at all.

    My contention is simply that the vast majority of people who ‘do whatever’ are in the latter category, that’s all.


  • people who interpret “no ethical consumption under capitalism” as a license to do whatever they want, because it’s all unethical.

    Have you actually encountered someone who did this? Everyone I’ve ever known of who was in the ‘do whatever they want’ mindset, certainly wasn’t because of how they interpreted that ‘slogan’, it was just because they don’t give a shit to begin with—they almost certainly had never even heard it before.





  • You mean the same Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) that Trump and Musk killed the enforcement of after a tweet? (Both billionaires, btw.)

    Goalpost move, you said billionaires prevent those laws from passing. They passed. You lied. The end.

    Are you arguing that a 1% excise tax limited to stock buybacks (even lower than the 2 and 3% I already argued won’t change the status quo) in any way counters [anything]?

    Nope. A new tax that applies only to the wealthiest demographic successfully passing is just another refutation of your assertion that billionaires prevent legislation that affects them negatively from passing, and that’s the only reason I mentioned it. More desperate goalpost moves.

    For every legal loophole that is closed

    So you admit they do get closed. I thought billionaires never let detrimental legislation pass?

    It would be convenient for you, if I were to suggest that, or any other argument you try to put in my mouth.

    Behold, your words, verbatim:

    When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.




    1. Irrelevant, as I never claimed such. I pointed out the lack of correlation between billionaires per capita increasing over time, and poverty over the same period of time. Not all correlation is causally linked, but all causally linked things are also necessarily correlated. But if two things are not correlated, then they can’t be causally linked, either (at least not to a statistically-significant degree that isn’t wiped out by other factors), and that’s what I pointed out.
    2. So, by which financial measure would you say that working-class Americans in 1925 are doing better than they are in 2025, then? There must be at least one, if your assertion is correct.
    3. Then that should make the question above, all the easier to answer.

    Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.

    Are you seriously suggesting that legislation that is detrimental to billionaires never becomes law?

    The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, among other things, imposed an excise tax on stock buybacks, something that will literally never impact anyone who isn’t significantly wealthy, and that passed. A year before, the Corporate Transparency Act passed, and basically struck the death knell for shell company schemes, (not a whole lot of that happening among the working class, lol) by requiring “Beneficial Owners” to be reported to FinCEN, so they know who the actual human beings who own them are. Billionaires lost the ability to hide assets and real estate within anonymous LLCs.

    It’s ridiculous to think that billionaires are all just smiting any and all legislation that would negatively impact them at will. You are clearly deep in some echo chambers.


  • Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation

    I think you don’t understand what “correlation” means. The correlation is clearly and inarguably what I showed it to be: billionaires per capita went up as poverty went down. That’s a plain fact.

    43% of the US living in poverty

    I’m not going to bother examining how legitimate this stat is, because even if I just take this at face value, what is that compared to the 40-60% I cited? It still does nothing to support the point that billionaires are ‘holding the working class down’ to any statistically-significant degree. If we take the bottom of the range of the estimate I got, 40%, and took your figure as-is, 43%, then a 7x increase in billionaires per capita increased poverty by 3% total over 100 years! That stat takes “nothingburger” to a whole new level.

    That doesn’t do much of anything to support the assertion that billionaires are ‘capping the lives of the working class’, when there being seven times more of them makes no statistically-significant difference in the poverty rate.

    Not to mention that 1925 is in the midst of the roaring twenties, before the Great Depression, and your article was written a few years after a global pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s economy—two facts that both skew things in favor of your claim.



  • The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”

    The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”

    Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.

    And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.








  • Combine that with some rape cases that get swept under the rug with phrases like, “boys will be boys,” “she was asking for it,” or even something as outright cruel as “it’s the only way she’d get laid anyways,” and yeah, where OP is coming from isn’t too hard to understand.

    And yet, cases of male victims of female rapists get “swept under the rug” basically 100% of the time, but the outrage toward that is non-existent, even though the also-swept-under-the-rug fact is that women rape men just as often as men rape women:

    And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).

    In other words, if being made to penetrate someone was counted as rape—and why shouldn’t it be?—then the headlines could have focused on a truly sensational CDC finding: that women rape men as often as men rape women.

    The whole reason a woman raping a man isn’t simply called “rape” in these statistics is because of successful explicitly anti-male lobbying by feminists like Mary Koss, and NOW, who don’t think it “counts” as rape when the man is the victim of a woman.


    As one of these male victims of a female rapist, it’s always extremely frustrating to see women complaining to men about things like under-reporting, or men who get away with it, when it’s so much worse for men and boys, that the average person believes that a female raping a male is something that is literally impossible.

    A boy got molested by his female teacher, and she won child support from him! Could you in a million years imagine a male rapist achieving such a legal judgment from a girl he molested?