Re: Chris Hedges
 

No, you're not. Perhaps in a colloquial sense, but not as used in monetary economics. Not even in any of the quirky, out of the mainstream schools that I'm aware of.

Re: Chris Hedges
 

Which tax issue? One of Amazon's early advantages was not charging sales tax when it didn't literally have to. I'm pretty sure that's largely gone away (it has here in Minnesota, where it's now required to charge sales tax) as its physical footprint has expanded to pretty much every state. And as states have adopted sales and use taxes intended to apply to it, I think it's mostly acquiesced rather than tried to challenge them (again, that might just be the expanding physical presence).

Is there some other tax issue you're thinking of?

Well, it also employs a lot of people and, as we've discussed ad-naseum we're not seeing huge spikes in joblessness (last measured prime age employment to population ratio is less than half a percentage point below the pre-recession peak EDIT: Correction, point and a half. Read the chart wrong. Point being, there's slack but it's not it's not "massive").

You used to buy toilet paper at Target. Taxable event. You now buy toilet paper from Amazon. Taxable event. What about it taking retail market share reduces taxable events?

It's amazing that you think of everything except all of the various tax cuts of the last two decades as reducing tax revenue.

Or just raise the minimum wage.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

"Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?"

National Review (!)

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Kevin Williamson has long been one of my favorite Twitter follows. He’s not an insignificant part of why the National Review is my favorite conservative publication.

I don't understand
 

Why the R's don't just suggest killing or enslaving the middle class. It will be better for the middle class, believe me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/u...T.nav=top-news

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Did you understand the (apparently gratuitous) dig at Elizabeth Breunig? I didn't have any idea who she was, or why he took that shot at her.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

He may or may not have said something interesting there; I wonder, by which I mean, I wonder.

It appears he has some interesting points buried within the equivocation. Most of them appear to be derived from the European neo-Marxist cultural critics of the 70s and 80s. But I do like the question as to whether Bill Bennett can tap dance, though I'd rather see him Samba.

Re: I don't understand
 

On that point, Ray Dalio: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/our-b...mies-ray-dalio

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

This article is very hard to get through. The fact that the author chooses an analogy he doesn't even try to understand undermines the whole piece.

If you're going to use Tupac and Ice T, you need to put in more than a gesture in the direction of actual work when it comes to understanding who they are/were, what they were trying to accomplish, and the environment in which those things are shaped. Using a video of Tupac as a fucking kid and describing him as an "effeminate young man" as the basis to question the authenticity of who he became as an artist (and a person) later is fucking inane.

Tupac's mother was Afeni Shakur, an activist, a paralegal, and a former member of the Black Panthers. She was also a former drug addict. When the family was homeless, Tupac joined a theater group, which changed his life. His mother made him read the NYT when he was a child. She was a deeply complicated, flawed, thoughtful person. Tupac was as well.

This idea that this author saw the "real" person in the video he uses and that he took on a thug persona just to be a successful rapper is such a superficial, ignorant reading of an amazingly talented, intelligent, and conflicted artist. Tupac was many things on stage and off. The reason why people loved him so much (aside from his talent) was his genuineness. He put himself out there as an artist and the many contradictions of who he was are reflected in his work. He could write a piece as touching and "soft" as Dear Mama in one instance and turn around and write a piece as vicious as "Hit 'em up" in the next. The whole point of his professional work was to show that he embodied both the beautiful and the ugly. The statement he continually made in his music and in interviews is that this country and its treatment of people like him created him. And no matter what he did, he was going to be seen as a thug. He tried to take that and use it in a number of different ways. Sometimes he was purposefully in the face of the society that created and then labeled him. Sometimes it was him working out his issues with anger and violence. Sometimes it was to talk to people who were similarly labeled and cast aside to let them know that they have value. But in no way was it just a fucking mask he put on just to sell records.

Now, that's not to say that Tupac wasn't deeply flawed. He was. So was Ice T. But the reduction of complicated people and artists (and I'm no fan of Ice T, although he had a couple of okay songs early on) that this author uses as the basis of his analysis for his broader point is truly annoying. I understand what he's trying to do in this piece, but Jesus. Try a little harder.

If you want to use an interview to sum up Tupac, use this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrL3HmGdAZE

Aside from that, I found the article to be muddled and mostly without a point. I'm guessing the main point, which is hard to see through the anecdotal bullshit and "the poor are poor for a reason" recurring theme, is that the right should stop manipulating their base into thinking their problems can be blamed on third parties by using inauthentic voices passed off as genuine. While this is an easy concept with which one can agree, it overlooks the fact that this is entirely what the Republican Party has been about since the fucking Southern Strategy. So I'm supposed to take from this piece that this new wrinkle is bad because elite whites put on a white minstrel show to fool non-elite whites into thinking they are also non-elite to get their vote? This article is a whole lot of nothing.

TM

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The piece is hard to get through, and it's not always clear what he's saying, or why. If it came from an author with whom I generally agreed, I would be more critical of it, but I appreciate the author's willingness to agree that his own team's shit stinks.

Most artists are involved in a self-creation creation of an artistic persona, be it Robert Zimmerman becoming Bob Dylan or Thomas Pynchon opting out and using Irwin Corey as a surrogate. Williamson's treatment of Tupac is not particularly sympathetic or insightful, except in that he is wiling to acknowledge this process of creation, which is significant to him not as it relates to artistry, but as a debunking of the conservative notion (or the notion often advanced by conservatives) that black culture represents some cultural pathology. Williamson sees that it's a schtick, and that so is country music, and that the later can be just as pathological. This is not particularly insightful biography or cultural criticism, but politically speaking it is something of a statement against interest, and so relevant and admissible. Would it have been better if he hadn't tried to say anything about Tupac? Sure. But a conservative pathology is that you can't say anything critical about conservatives unless you also prove your bona fides by going after someone like Tupac or Elizabeth Bruenig, whose value in demonstrating Williamson's bona fides was, I suspect, in inversion proportion to her relevance in what he was otherwise talking about.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

The dumb shots at Shakur and Springsteen are worth skipping. The guy doesn’t get either artist (and I say this as someone who thinks Springsteen is often a cliche machine).

I see the current “minstrel show” as the natural end of the Southern Strategy. It’s what happens when a party keeps its underclass fat, drunk, and stupid, and tells them they’re “Real ‘Murica.” (Pour a 40 for Flounder, btw.)

They now think they run the place.

I’m beginning to think opioids might be the best fix for an impossible problem.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

They are running the place.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Not really.

What have the angry base received? Gorsuch? He'd have been a moderate GOP nominee.

Rollbacks of regulations, pipelines being green-lighted, defunding a health care program on which Appalachia depended?

The base is getting what it always gets: Lip service. They're useful idiots serving corporate interests favored by Trump, almost all of which are the same corporate interests served by every previous moderate GOP President. And with the exception of the fossil fuel sector, every previous Democrat President.

Meet the new boss...

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

ICE crackdowns. A young woman in custody being forced to have a baby. Successive attempts to put a blanket ban on Muslim immigration. Tons of judges. Sabotaging Obamacare.

Yeah, aside from that last one, which his base shouldn't want but does, it's not much because (1) the administration is completely incompetent, and (2) the courts are not yet stacked.

I don't understand what you're saying, but if you're saying he's a moderate among potential GOP nominees, that's not at all true. Sure, he's not the worst, but he's among them.

That's all they ever wanted. They don't like him because of policy. They like him because he hates what they hate: Muslims, black people (especially Obama), immigrants, women, liberals, trans people, and kinda sorta the gays but not so much any more because my cousin Larry is gay and he's a good guy so we're only going to make sure they stay unprotected instead of proposing to "hang them all" at least in public.

I don't know what he favors, aside from the above. He doesn't know what he favors. You don't know what he favors.

:rolleyes:

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

I think this is all fine. Like I said, I understand what the author was trying to do. But I am so sick of giving these types of assholes credit for not being complete shitbags. "Hey guys, black people aren't inherently bad people, mostly. Poverty is the issue." Great. Let's throw you a parade. You guys going to change anything at all? No? Well, here are some pats on your back for thinking about stuff, kinda.

The level of frustration I have with the world has never been higher and I grew up in NYC in the fucking 80s. I just came back from a memorial service for my daughter's step-grandfather. This man grew up in NYC. Did well. Has a large apartment on CPW and a huge house in the Hamptons (bay side, let's not get carried away). My daughter and I were the only people of color in a room of at least 100 people. Sad occasion for sure. But I'm looking around the room just completely disgusted at the isolation white people carefully cultivate. He was a Democrat. Voted for Hillary. Seemed like a nice enough guy. But how the fuck is it even possible that you don't know one black person well enough for them to show up to your funeral? That's the problem with this country. And it's never going to be fixed.

How many people of color will show up to your* funeral? What's your excuse for why none will? Travel in different circles? None in your neighborhood? Didn't really hang out with any at your elite undergrad? Not really in law school either? Private school parents aren't exactly diverse and you just haven't gotten to know the others yet because your kids aren't friends with theirs? There aren't many at work and the ones there never seem to go to group stuff? Sure. It just happened that way. You don't have a racist bone in your body. Right?

This country is fucked.

TM

*Obviously this is a rhetorical exercise.