Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Monday, March 21, 2016

The Ethics of the Elite


He has your best interest in mind. Promise!

Paul Krugman, via Economist's View:

Stripped down to its essence, the G.O.P. elite view is that working-class America faces a crisis, not of opportunity, but of values. ... And this crisis of values, they suggest, has been aided and abetted by social programs that make life too easy on slackers.
The problems with this diagnosis should be obvious. Tens of millions of people don’t suffer a collapse in values for no reason. Remember, several decades ago the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the social ills of America’s black community ... were the result of disappearing economic opportunity. If he was right, you would have expected declining opportunity to have the same effect on whites, and sure enough, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Conservatives won't stop shaming and stiffing the poor just because reality states that poverty affects culture, rather than culture causing poverty. They are already blaming liberals for the "degeneracy" of poor whites, saying that the hippies perverted the culture will all their sex and atheism. And they are blaming the poor white conservatives for their culture as well, i.e. laziness and self-indulgence.  The economic class war must continue and it must never be spoken of.

The lower classes must let the militarized police shoot them at will, to set an example for those who don't respect law and order. They must not protest ill treatment. They must not fight back physically. They must not take economic action against the upper classes. The lower classes must, under no circumstances, defend themselves in this war.

The lower classes cannot flex political power by voting out the elite and voting in someone who will raise taxes back to the level they were in during the middle class's Golden Age. The lower classes must vote for the candidate provided to them or they are traitors to the upper classes, betraying them by refusing to exchange obedience for identity, purpose and belonging, that is, security. They must play by the elite's rules. The elite's only rule for itself is that rules are for the lower classes.

I have to admit, it was a cute trick. Tell the sheeple that government is bad and taxes are bad and money is good and you want to give them lots of money. Cut the taxes for the rich. Profit.

The rich got richer.


I wonder what happened around 1981?


We got poorer.


The elite believe that you are to blame for your own problems because you are inferior to the elite, by definition. Clinton has elite ethics, not middle class or lower class ethics. She will do what is best for the elite and tell you, more or less, that she's got this.

If we have another recession (when we have another recession), what will Clinton do? Will she spend massive amounts of money to help the poor or will she use austerity measures to preserve elite wealth?

3 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Her AIPAC performance today guaranteed that I will not be voting "lesser evil" in 2016.
~

Susan of Texas said...

Touting her "deep, personal commitment" to the "Jewish state," Clinton then said that "one of the first things I’ll do in office is invite Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] to visit the White House."

I suspect people don't care because they know their son won't be drafted. Other people's kids will die but not ours, not as long as we can push buttons and sell weapons to Israel.

Absolute power corrupts. Absolute power over others' lives corrupts absolutely. When both sides are using the same dehumanizing language, neither side is defensible.


Teaching children to hate each other

Feb 8th 2013, 15:36 by N.P. | JERUSALEM

WHAT should Israel do about a report claiming that Israelis and Palestinians delegitimise each other in their schools? Delegitimise the report, is the response from the Israeli side. Sounding more amenable, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinians’ prime minister, asked for help to improve the curriculum.

“Malicious slander,” cried people in the office of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, when a study funded by the American government that compared Israeli and Palestinian textbooks found that both sowed negative stereotypes of each other. After failing to suppress the report, Israeli officials tried to delay its publication. A meeting requested by the researchers and the ministry’s lawyer never materialised. A deputy prime minister and former head of the armed forces expressed irritation that Israelis were being judged by the same yardstick as Palestinians. “We teach peace, they teach war,” said his spokesman.

The report says that Israeli and Palestinian teachers both portray their neighbours as enemies, though Israel does so considerably less. After ploughing through nearly 30,000 pages of text, the researchers found that 49% of texts dealing with Palestinians in Israeli state-issued schoolbooks are negative; in government-funded Orthodox Jewish academies the figure rises to 73%. One such textbook depicts Arabs as “bloodthirsty” and “a nest of murderers”.

In Palestinian textbooks 84% of the references to Israelis are negative. In both Palestinians and Israeli state schools the books promote “martyrdom-sacrifice through death”. Each side glorifies itself, while denigrating the other.

Moreover, the textbooks tend to deny each other’s existence. Of 800 maps of their contested land studied by the researchers, 87% of the Israeli ones mark none of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river as Palestinian, whereas 96% of Palestinian maps make no mention of Israel. “Israeli school maps feed into the Palestinian narrative that Israel wants to grab more and more land, and Palestinian school maps feed an Israeli narrative that Palestinians want to throw them into the sea,” says Bruce Wexler, the Yale professor who oversaw the project. Israeli critics of the report have panned the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, an association of local rabbis, imams and priests, who commissioned Mr Wexler, a Jewish American.

Susan of Texas said...

I just remembered Frank McCourt said his teachers/priests wanted his generation to die for Ireland and the Catholic Church.

Everyone wants us to die so they can live free.