Quote:
Originally Posted by Double Eagle
God damn this thread is just such a perfect microcosm of economics (and politics) as morality play. Makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out. Kudos to PB for hanging with it this long.
Haha, thanks man. It's really interesting because multiple posters have been caught either having no idea what's going on and/or making stuff up and no amount of correction changes their opinions. It's clear to me that they are mostly making up the facts from their axioms (syriza = bad, greeks = bad, debt = moral obligations) rather than forming opinions based on facts. And of course ignoring all inconvenient facts and literally not even reading the posts they are responding to.
For example, if you go back and read, say, grizy's posts, he's been proven wrong on almost every prediction he made that it's possible to be already wrong about. It's incredible - every time he says something is going to happen, the exact opposite happens instead. None of this ever makes him question, maybe, the model he's using for understanding reality is wrong. Instead, he doubles down, even more eagerly searching for or making up facts that would prove him right.
The Greek debt crisis is a perfect right-wing cause where the scary foreigners are also the poor lazy debtors whose failure to pay back their debt is like super scary or something being debtors paying back is the basis for their understanding of capitalism in general and the worth of their assets specifically. I suppose it also threatens to invalidate their internalized sense of obligation - if we all are paying, why aren't they paying? Why aren't they making hard choices? It's hilariously bad economics - you know, not too different from the Mises/Goldbug/Neoconfederate nonsense that used to be popular around here, but hey it's the Greeks, they deserve bad policies or something I guess.
It does worry me greatly because it demonstrates how easily people adopt extreme right-wing positions where bombing a bunch of foreigners is no big deal, but a foreign politician asking to only increase their VAT by 1% instead of 2% is so scary that he may as well be a terrorist lovechild of Stalin and Hitler. I have grizy pegged at somewhere around center-right, smart and reasonable as far as this forum is concerned and the right-wing rhetoric he's been spewing, from an American perspective, is indistinguishable from the content-free lunatic fringe stuff I used to read and listen to, in order understand the relationship between political extremism and mental illnesses. It's like the exact reverse of what's going on with Syriza. They managed to put together politically radical groups to present, effectively a compromise that even its ideological opponents would agree with. It's extremely heart-warming and encouraging - they are literally turning **** into gold. On the other hand, the right-wing populism here seems to be accomplishing the exact opposite - it's turning otherwise reasonable-seeming people into fringe-rhetoric-spewing zombies.
I'm sitting here somewhere to the right of Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson, two of whom are Republicans, largely satisfied with both the popular vote in Greece and the compromise in Europe and I get called a lefty-pinko steelhouse by someone who thought there was some nefarious, shady deal between the fed and investment banks that allow them to get FIRST DIBS on freshly printed money or something that allow them to get INSTITUTIONAL RATES that aren't available to plebes like himself. The level of delusion is stunning.