no, the additional unspoken point is that the correlation between income and positive societal impact is exceedingly weak, and anyone earning over a certain amount (Birdman would probably argue with some justification that this is the entire Western world) is almost certainly doing so by taking advantage of market failures

Meh, I agree enough that it’s not worth a big semantic parsing imo

that no was meant to imply agreement not disagreement but I see how it was badly worded

I’m also ready to dive into the specifics of both the Kavanaugh stuff and the responses here. I need to wait until I have some time to type it out, but instead of going the route of simply expressing the (justified) anger that Master posted about earlier I’m going to start from the assumption that some of less than stellar comments were either made jokingly or due to a lack of information/understanding instead of as a result of values that I consider disgusting

Oh I see - yeah I misread your post as a supplement to the theory instead of as support for my criticism of it as inadequate

bold strategies itt

Re kavanaugh, I was thinking about:
1) how about we break will 4000 years of history and try an approach of believing women in the first instance. Trust but verify. See what happens. Maybe it’ll be the end of civilisation, maybe not.
2) I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest that we hold a higher standard for lifetime positions on the highest court in the land than we do George Takei’s career as a meme generator. Shrug.

Edit: it’s not like the guy is going to lose his job, it’s about whether he gets to be a scotus for life.

Ready to hear what you have to say.

So I want to take this piece by piece because it’s long - let’s start with the issue of whether she is being truthful - specifically

So we don’t have any direct witnesses willing to corroborate her story, but we do have a couple key pieces of evidence. The first is that neither Kavanaugh nor anyone else is making the argument that the allegations are impossible due to the timeframe/location/circumstances/people or any other factual piece of information included in these reports, which would almost certainly be the first argument if one of those things could prove the story false. Second is the fact that we do have some independent documentation of her story - namely notes from a therapy session in 2012 and the concurrent recollections of her husband that corroborates the gist of her story and a polygraph that indicates that she believes she is being truthful. These bits of evidence are important because they clearly demonstrate that this was not simply something she made up due to Kavanaugh’s pending appointment to the Supreme Court. To disbelieve that she was assaulted the way she claims or to even suggest that she’s lying about the fact of the assault (in a he said she said way) requires you to consciously ignore these pieces of evidence. All of this doesn’t yet prove everything, but it does eliminate the banal “she’s just making stuff up to hurt Kavanaugh” claims. It proves beyond a reasonable doubt that she was in fact attacked in roughly manner that she describes, though we have yet to prove that Kavanaugh was the one who attacked her

So to the second point of whether Kavanaugh was actually one of the people who participated in the assault the below paragraph seems relevant

It matters because the reporting has been consistent that the accuser has had no contact with Kavanaugh after the assault took place, which means that if he wasn’t the person who assaulted her she would have had to either consciously or subconsciously chosen to accuse a very powerful man backed by an almost unbelievably motivated coalition of other powerful men in a manner that was unlikely to make any impact (an anonymous letter to her congressperson) solely because she sees some benefit to potentially complicating or scuttling the Kavanaugh nomination. It seems to me that anyone who was cold enough and calculating enough and amoral enough to intentionally fabricate this story in this context would also be able to see both that her means of making the accusation was distinctly suboptimal towards achieving that goal and that even in the event that her ploy was successful it would be extremely unlikely to achieve anything beyond what Mets has detailed above, and the only reason that makes any sense for this random woman to be willing to even potentially expose herself to the terrible process that is now unfolding simply to swap Kavanaugh for another equally conservative SCOTUS Justice is if he did, in fact, assault her.

The one possibility that cannot be categorically dismissed is the idea that she somehow over the years has inadvertently misidentified her attacker, in which case both she and Kavanaugh could be telling the whole truth as they know it. I honestly don’t know enough about such cases and situations to determine exactly how likely this is but from what I’ve read about that phenominon the likelihood of this is dependent on a number of factors that we don’t yet know in this case, but I’m sure that this particular avenue will be explored at any hearings that take place. That said I have yet to see anyone attempt to make this defense, so I’m putting a pin in it for now

Welltheresyourproblem.jpg

This kind of question is difficult to answer without more specifics. Obviously international trade has been possible without it being imperialism for a long time before modern history. Is it possible given our current material conditions (i.e. in the imperialist stage of capitalism)? Probably. But if you are asking if the US can do it I would say no depending on what we mean by "could". Like it is theoretically possible but the US could never do it for long--since imperialism is what is keeping capitalism tenable in the imperial core. IMO rather than thinking of "imperialism" as just some abstract concept that I am creating out of thing air, remember it describes actual material conditions. You have to think about how much of the economy finance capital controls in the US and then ask how such an economy is going to behave. Capital is constantly in search of surplus/profits/whatever you want to call it. In "monopoly capitalism" (imperialism), opportunities for surplus basically no longer exist domestically, so finance capital must go searching for surplus internationally. It does this in a lot of ways which we have discussed ("liberalizing" markets through wars, SAPs, etc) including imbalanced trade agreements. Finance capital is never going to voluntarily choose to not take advantage of imbalanced international trade. So in that sense it is not possible. It would be like Wal Mart suddenly deciding it is going to start paying its cheapest employees 2 dollar more than min wage. It COULD do that, in theory, but it never would. And if it did it would probably go out of businesses fairly quickly.

No not at all. Quite the opposite. Communism must be international. Communism wants to promote international solidarity and works on a global scale. It is/was the lack of international communism that required the existence of a state in the USSR and now in China and Cuba etc. Ultimately borders should be abolished which would basically open all barriers to international trade. I would have to do more research but I believe international trade goes on right now between countries that are not part of the imperial core. Usually trade is only going to be "imperialist" when one trading "partner" is the 1st world and the other is in the periphery.

Finally - a reasonable moral question can be asked about whether it is fair or just or correct to hold a single drunken act committed as a minor against the person who committed that act for the rest of their life. Putting aside the fact that for many many many people in positions of far less power, prestige, wealth, and authority than Kavanaugh that is precisely what we do, voting against him for SCOTUS (and even supporting impeachment from his current job) does not even require reckoning with that question because his response to the accusation in and of itself provides ample and necessary grounds for both of those things (pending the note above). He has not said that he does not recollect this incident, and he has not said that it happened but that he is a different man now and has changed and should not be judged for one drunken mistake when he was in high school, he has completely and categorically denied that he ever did these things to her or anyone else. I’m guessing that next week he will say that exact thing under oath. This denial alone renders the entire question of what is fair punishment for the act itself moot, because lying about an incident like this is pretty necessarily disqualifying for any service in the federal judiciary and particularly for a SCOTUS seat.

As an aside, if you have ever been, or have ever dealt with, people who are extremely drunk you should be well aware that such a categorical denial of something that may or may not have happened 36 years ago when you were “stumbling drunk” does not even pass the smell test. And lest you think Judge Kavanaugh may somehow be unaware about the precision of language in such cases you should note that in response to other questions about incidents in his past (Judge Kozinski, stolen democratic memos in Bush WH) he responded using much more careful langauge (I do not recall, I am/was not aware, etc) instead of issuing this kind of categorical denial

And Mets, here is the YouTube video. It’s only 20 mins. I think it’s the third time I have posted the link itt for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT5L4YU_Fl4&t=7s

I read Robert Nozick into Herbie's response, but I don't think Mets wants to get into privatized roads/police etc.

On my reading into Bloobird's, I think there's a misunderstanding. The argument is not that society benefits from the wealthy but that the wealthy benefit from society.

So the bottom line of all this is that we have, at a minimum, two things that seem to be undeniable based on the evidence we have seen presented and the arguments that have been made so far

1. This woman was attacked in roughly the manner she described, and she believes that it was Brett Kavanaugh who attacked her
2. Kavanaugh has at a minimum gone beyond what the bounds of reason will support in denying said allegation while knowing full well that he was doing so

Without knowing anything else about the situation these facts alone should be disqualifying for a SCOTUS nominee and should also probably lead to him being removed from his current job (which isn’t going to happen). That’s a far cry from a “he said she said”, even if by some unlikely twist of fate he wasn’t actually the person who attacked her

Also Mets, I went digging through my files for an old article by Matt Bruenig that I read and knew I would want in case anyone ever started talking about the morality of taxes. Read it and tell me what you think:

https://www.demos.org/blog/3/7/16/liberal-tax-justice

no, no, I recognise your argument

it's just not the only reason why higher taxation rates on higher earners make sense

I should also note that the most likely reason he has issued a denial that goes beyond what can possibly be supported is that the way republicans and many members of the public have tended to evaluate these claims is based at least in part on how forceful or strenuous the denial is, which shows that Kavanaugh with his deep and extensive knowledge of both legal langauge and practical politics is in effect knowingly telling an untruth in order to help himself politically which should also, in and of itself, be disqualifying for SCOTUS

And the only reason for the long legalistic discussion is because people continued to feel compelled to refuse to accept what is by far the most logical and likely truth here (her story is true, he is lying about it) due to the motivated reasoning involved in him being on “our team” or whatever that always shows up in these cases regardless of which side is involved

Welp, here comes his unequivacle denial to bite him right in the ass.

Here is his handler saying that he wasn't not not there, but this wasn't attempted rape, just a little light horseplay guize!

Boys will be boys. He just happened to get a little rough and grab her by the pussy. Locker room talk. When your parents are rich and powerful judges, girls just let you do it!

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rough-horse-play

This is what we've been reduced to. A country overtaken and run by rich, entitled, ivy league rapists who have been sucking on a silver spoon their whole life and never had to do an honest days work.

The real issue is that most people are taught to look at taxes as some arbitrary policy that changes a lot and is heavily influenced by ideology while things like property rights, laws that allow the formation of corporations, wage theft, labor exploitation, inherited wealth, etc are looked at as immutable, common sense aspects of human existence.

To see taxes as theft or even as unfair would require one to completely ignore all the things the government does to allow someone to “earn” money in the first place. Like imo if we don’t want the government to enforce taxes, fine. But then let’s also not let the government enforce properly rights. There is no reason to accept the enforcement of property rights through state violence (which is how it is enforced) but then act like taxation is the government stealing

Isn't Birdman just repeating exactly what ianaww said here?

So now he admits doing it but it totally wasn’t attempted rape - got it