Hee hee!
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If you don't hate your boss, you're a stooge of the plutocracy!
Vive le Galt!
I dont hate my boss. I like my boss. My boss's boss can go to hell though. Can I still be in?
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Minor quibble about the H.R. 347 article. They make it seem D.C. has laws that are outside of the Federal jurisdiction. All laws in D.C. are Federally enforced, even misdemeanors. All felony crimes in D.C. are prosecuted under Federal guidelines and result in federal prison time or federal probation. No exceptions.
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Andy, D.C. doesn't have any laws that aren't Federal. That's the point. Their rapists and murderers and types that would go to state prison anywhere else go to Federal prison.
And, no, a DC jaywalking ordinance, which, by definition and enforcement, is Federal, isn't applicable (or enforcible) in Sheboygan.
Andy, from RT (Russia Today) Sad that its one of the better places to get American news.
Derek, I didnt infer that. I did not know that, though, and I agree that is a minor quibble.
Clowns to the left of me, stooges to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you!
For you, dear leader ;p
Excellent work, Comrade Knife!
Smash imperialism!
Vive le Galt!
Actually not. My local's hall is in Charlestown, MA, which for those not in the know is pretty much the same as Southie. My last union meeting was on St. Patrick's Day and there was no way I was going to drive down to Boston with an uninspected car on such a day of debauchery and enhanced police presence.
So, of course, that's the day that Mark Wahlberg and a film crew shows up to tape our local meeting. :(
Also, that Real Housewives of South Boston video at the bottom is pretty funny because it's true.
Yeah, but The Sopranos has been off the air for quite a while now.
Hmmm, Paizo is sadly lacking in products starring the Goblin Mafia.
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I'll probably get thrown down a flight of stairs at the next meeting for posting this, but, whatever.
Teamster Power!
Not to mention that a bad joke is worth dying for.
I'll probably get thrown down a flight of stairs
Actually, you will be thrown down several flights of stairs for just being a goblin.
Also, and as I've said many a time before, School Sucks.
Also, and as I've said many a time before, School Sucks.
Is our children learning?
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Anklebiter, that do you think about Chris Hedges? He's rapidly becoming a favorite of mine.
Before I answer that, I would like to recompose the list of famous lefties that have told me to "shut up:"
1) Noam Chomsky
2) Howard Zinn
3) Cornell West
4) Billy Bragg (I can't believe I've left him off of this list in the past, but it's true--I was heckling him back in 199? when he talked smack about "Trotskyites selling newspapers")
5) Sean O'Brien, future star of Mark Wahlberg's Teamsters--not that he's really a leftist, but he did send me a nasty e-mail after I and another steward asked him why he let three members get suspended.
I should go find Chris Hedges and piss him off, too.
Anklebiter, that do you think about Chris Hedges? He's rapidly becoming a favorite of mine.Before I answer that, I would like to recompose the list of famous lefties that have told me to "shut up:"
1) Noam Chomsky
2) Howard Zinn
3) Cornell West
4) Billy Bragg (I can't believe I've left him off of this list in the past, but it's true--I was heckling him back in 199? when he talked smack about "Trotskyites selling newspapers")
5) Sean O'Brien, future star of Mark Wahlberg's Teamsters--not that he's really a leftist, but he did send me a nasty e-mail after I and another steward asked him why he let three members get suspended.I should go find Chris Hedges and piss him off, too.
I find it hard to believe that these people are telling you to shut up.
I have read Chris Hedges's War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning and I have flipped through my friend's copy of Death of the Liberal Class. He was one of the first dudes who supported Occupy Wall Street!.
The last time I saw him, he was on Russia Today denouncing the Black Block as agents-provacateur and pronouncing it with a French accent, which I don't think I'd ever heard anyone do before--I read more than I watch the news.
He's alright. I'd hang out with him. But I bet if we really started exchanging viewpoints, he'd eventually tell me to "shut up."
In case it ever gets down to the union hall, I should say that Sean O'Brien was correct in telling me to "shut up"--I was an inexperienced steward at the time.
Socialist Norwegian Cabinet Minister also plays D&D:
I am torn between my desire to say "cool" and my desire to call him a "stooge of the plutocracy."
I can think of reasons to irritate Chomsky and Zinn (and on the latter I suspect I could probably get him to either admit error or twist pretty wildly to avoid doing it) but I suspect I'd prefer to use the time to learn from both. I'd need a shovel to get anything out of Zinn these days, though.
Zinn was always much nicer than Chomsky. I was actually surprised when he cut me off during the Q&A period of a presentation he and the Gnome gave at Boston University on "Democracy and the Campus." (Irony?)
Maybe he lost the pre-speech coin-toss about who would be rude to the goblins?
Okay, I'll bite, possible-Comrade Samnell:
What errors did that stooge of the plutocracy Zinn make?
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Okay, I'll bite, possible-Comrade Samnell:
What errors did that stooge of the plutocracy Zinn make?
And what exactly is the hierarchy between "possible-comrade" and "semi-comrade" ? Does the Galt revolution have ranks ? Do you grant brownie points, or goblin points ?
There is no hierarchy of ranks here in Galt, but there are definitely brownie points. It's all about who you know, of course.
Anyway, I've never seen quasi-Comrade Samnell post about big, high-falutin' political crap like revolutionary socialism or smashing imperialism, so I'm not sure where he stands. His profile says he's wicked far to the left as measured by an American standard, but that means nothing here in Galt!
As to "semi-comrade," I was shocked into realizing how far apart our politics are, you stooge of the plutocracy, and I apologize for the barely-hidden hostility. But, I think you will agree, Lenin and Trotsky would have said even nastier stuff.
Break with Social-Democracy! Workers to Power!
Vive le Galt!!
Okay, I'll bite, possible-Comrade Samnell:
What errors did that stooge of the plutocracy Zinn make?
The one that comes to mind, having not read the book in years, is accusing Lincoln of initiating hostilities in the Civil War. It stands out because People's History is all about telling the stories one does not usually hear in the consensus-driven, white male Christian plutocrat-centric narrative of American history.
It's in error in two ways, the first being that the rebels had already:
1) seized federal property, which is what they demanded John Brown be hung for not so long previous
2) Opened fire on a ship in the employ of the US government for official military business
3) effectively blockaded Fort Sumter (which involved, but isn't entirely about the previous)
The first and last alone would be construed acts of war by the standards of the 19th century. Both together certainly are by contemporary standards.
Zinn could have pleaded that he's writing a polemical work and deliberately takes the opposition side, but he obviously did not here. For a century after the war, including the time he was teaching in the South and thus undoubtedly intensely aware of the fact, the notion that unilateral secession was fundamentally legal and Lincoln was the great villain of the piece was the Establishment history of the war. It still is largely the establishment history of the American Right, though less so than it used to be.
Therefore: WTF, Howard?
I admire Zinn's work and activism, elsewhere in A People's History and in other writings. The essay collection Declarations of Independence had a major influence on my thinking. Perhaps there are other such incidences I'm unaware of or have forgotten as I did most of my Zinn and Chomsky reading back in the 90s, but this is a major departure from what I think of as his normal form.
Anyway, I've never seen quasi-Comrade Samnell post about big, high-falutin' political crap like revolutionary socialism or smashing imperialism, so I'm not sure where he stands. His profile says he's wicked far to the left as measured by an American standard, but that means nothing here in Galt!
The short version is either non-violent Social Democracy or non-violent Democratic Socialism, depending on how I feel on a given day and what we're talking about collectivizing. There's also a strain of technocratic instrumentalism, but extant technocratic movements have done little to endear themselves to me lately. The EU bureaucracy and the Third Way types promote themselves as being technocratic pragmatists, but seem at least as rigidly ideological as any Lenninist party I'm familiar with.
The closest real world exemplars of what I'd like to see include the US only in very narrow areas like the separation of church and state (though I think the French ended up doing that one a bit better than we did in many details) and free speech (but the US outlaws some forms of speech I think ought to be protected and protects some I don't even consider speech).
Overall northern Europe and especially Scandinavia does much better at realizing my vision on Life, the Universe, and Everything. Were I King of the World, someone like Obama would lead the far right of the political spectrum. Elections would be between three or four parties, two of which would be an old school European socialist/trade unionist party and something a bit like the Greens, without the loopy new age vegan crap. The other one or two parties would be some mix of extreme leftists and rightists that generally coalition with the two dominant sorts but are different enough and powerful enough to be more than a protest vote.
The state would be strictly unitary and parliamentary with proportional representation. The parliament should be big enough to get a reasonably representative sample of the population. (For the US this would mean somewhere in the low thousands of legislators, I think.) No electoral districts: seats are elected at large off party lists. Also no separate houses, parliament would be strictly unicameral.
Minority rights would be protected by an independent judiciary, culminating in a high court like our Supremes but with fixed, if long, terms of office. Twenty years is probably good. If someone drops dead, is impeached, resigns, etc, another person can be appointed to serve out the remainder of the term. Terms would be staggered so that a seat opens roughly every two years, with two coming together about once a decade. A person can serve one and only one term and there would be some provision like that in the 25th Amendment to cover people who serve part of the term of someone who died/resigned/etc getting a term in their own right.
There would be a written constitution, but it would be somewhat easier (still a supermajority, but not a crazy high supermajority) to alter on most grounds than our own. There would be within that constitution a charter of rights and freedoms which is harder to amend but which explicitly includes the kinds of penumbras familiar to American liberal jurisprudence. It would also have some kind of language that makes it clear that its provisions are claims against and restrictions upon popular majorities and in favor of unpopular minorities. Among those rights would be freedom to roam, a personal right to privacy up to and including the use of recreational drugs and abortion on demand, a right to a free appropriate and secular public education that reflects the consensus of the relevant fields up to and including doctoral level studies if you can cut it, equality between the sexes, an absolute right to suicide (literally any time for any reason), a right to free and appropriate medically proven health care, the usual GLBT stuff, the right to unionize and bargain collectively, six weeks of vacation time, a forty hour workweek with overtime for more, a living minimum wage indexed to inflation, and probably a pile of other things I'm forgetting since I'm writing this manifesto off the top of my head. :)
They would not include a personal right to own functional firearms and I'm a little soft on personal property. Intellectual property rights would exist, but they would be time-limited monopolies for the creators instead of the effectively eternal and hereditary franchises that exist under current US law. Also rights would be strictly personal and not extend to institutions, businesses, and public accommodations. Rather they constitute claims against these and areas wherein the state is obligated to intervene on behalf of the people when said rights are abridged.
There would be no concessions whatsoever to "community standards," "cultural traditions," or any of that other crap people use to sneak outlawing porn or instituting their preferred variety of Sharia, Levitical, or whatever law as the law of the land.
These rights should be limited pretty much exclusively in that their exercise causes actual harm to some non-consenting other, in the old tradition of the right to swing your first extending only so far as the other person's nose. "I'm offended!" or "It's against my beliefs!" would not in themselves constitute legitimate harm, but one could not perjure oneself to get someone convicted and then claim it's free speech.
And probably loads of things I forgot, but that's the general sketch of Samnelltopia.
It's dreamy!
It might be dreamy, but it's not revolutionary socialism!
Vive le Galt!
I haven't read People's History in a very long time, but, yeah, I'm down with the Second American Revolution.
Also, as a UPS part-timer and a Trotskyist, I've long been in love with the Depression-era slogan: "30 Hours Work for 40 Hours Pay!" I, personally, only work about 27 hours a week (not including the hours I devote to trolling for socialism here on Paizo).
"20 Hours Work for 40 Hours Pay!"
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Shoot, they're in the same business as politicians, too bad the pols can't learn that trick.
Stop slandering prostitutes, HD, they've got a hard enough job as it is, and it's not nice.
Every last nation I mentioned has it, along with state pensions (I'd have to check on Canada for that one), universal welfare, and many other things that the extremists (I speak of both sides) in the US consider either "Nation Killers" or "Nation Builders."
Canada Pension Plan (administered by the federal government but funded equally by direct worker and employer contributions separate from general taxation), supplemented by Old Age Security (funded through general tax revenue). Only people who have worked and contributed to the Canada Pension Plan can draw from it when they retire. Almost every Canadian citizen (except those who have lived in Canada for less than ten years) are eligible for Old Age Security when they retire.
No one can retire on a pension from the Canada Pension Plan alone. If you are entitled to the maximum CPP pension benefit (and few retirees are) and have no other income with which to support yourself, you'll be living well below the poverty line.
Also, as a UPS part-timer and a Trotskyist, I've long been in love with the Depression-era slogan: "30 Hours Work for 40 Hours Pay!" I, personally, only work about 27 hours a week (not including the hours I devote to trolling for socialism here on Paizo).
I figure forty is a perfectly good baseline, but I've no objection to less. The French have 35 hours, though recent rightwing governments have effectively rolled it back.
As to "semi-comrade," I was shocked into realizing how far apart our politics are, you stooge of the plutocracy, and I apologize for the barely-hidden hostility. But, I think you will agree, Lenin and Trotsky would have said even nastier stuff.
Break with Social-Democracy! Workers to Power!
Vive le Galt!!
No prob', I have the same problem with our garden variety of trotskysts, here : they seem stuck in a "all or nothing", "either you are with us or against us" routine, and so, unwilling to make alliances to get some of their propositions moved forward.
We are too in a presidential election year, here : we have got TWO trotskysts candidates, who as usual refused to ally together, or with the other far-left candidate (who incidentally, is doing very, very well with polls at 15 %, and managed to draw 100.000 persons for a meeting on the Place de la Bastille in Paris two weeks ago : for comparison's sake, that's three times over the attendants at our beloved president's biggest meeting so far).
Purity of doctrine is an harsh mistress...
We are, indeed, known for our sectarianishness, ex-Comrade le Couard, and to prove it: I am expelling you from the party!!
All or nothing!
Either you're with me, or you're against me!
Vive le Galt!
Is Alain Krivine still alive?
What if I just don't care?
Well, it's not much fun if I expel you from the party and you just don't care.
That's right, I forgot...
Guards!