HenAi wrote:I think his point is more like: Suppose Obama was president and replace all of the "endorsed Clinton" on that list with Breitbart clones. Would you think the media was biased in that case?
The thing is, for that analogy to hold water you need to assume that the entirety of the "mainstream" (or whatever you care to call it) media is coming from the same self-serving foregone conclusion as the Breitbart sector (or Fox, for that matter), i.e. they openly declare that
everything else is
so biased in one direction that they not only can, but
must go completely off the deep end in the other direction, in the name of "balance". The "mainstream" media has many,
many faults, and is obviously not magically free of any and all prejudice, but it
doesn't adopt the same mission statement/excuse for ludicrous behavior and slapdash, reactionary "reporting" that the "alt-right" and its ilk do, and its endorsements and other coverage are nowhere near as foreordained.
Durandal wrote:From what little I know, the USA already has the highest corporate tax rate in the Western world
As others have noted, this is an
extremely tortured stance to take (not that plutocratic apologists have missed a beat, of course), but the reason I posted what I did is because Trump is merely the latest in a
very long line of economic conservatives to insist that by throwing as much money as possible at the super-rich,
everyone will eventually benefit. The only problem is, despite many,
many indulgences thrown their way over countless decades, it's never even come
close to happening: when the rich get richer, they
don't hire, they
don't invest, and they sure as
hell don't raise wages,
especially in an economy suffering from sagging demand like we have now. Whenever they get a new tax break, subsidy, exemption, or - my personal favorite - a "tax holiday" wherein cheats who have been hiding their profits overseas can bring them back into the USA with absolutely no penalty, which means they not only get out of prosecution for tax evasion, they
still get to evade the taxes (man oh man, those billionaires have it
so tough 
), they use almost every last cent of it for increased executive compensation, share buybacks or other perks which workers never.
ever get within spitting distance of.
What makes the "trickle down" argument even
more ludicrous is that these same apologists proudly subscribe to the Ayn Randian "greed is good" pseudo-philosophy, which maintains that personal avarice is the
only legitimate motivation for
anything, and that if you're letting morals, ethics, human empathy or anything else get in the way of your desire to further enrich yourself for even a moment, you're Doing It Wrong. As such, whenever they propose a new gift for the rich they trot out "trickle-down" to convince people that it'll be
totally worth it, but when the promised benefits inevitably fail to materialize - because, after all, the rich are just practicing Pure Reason - it immediately turns into "we're not running a goddamn
charity here, quit complaining and get back to work, slacker" (also feel free to include a canned statement about "fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders")! And once the next plan to coddle the rich comes up, if anyone remembers how badly it failed last time, just insist that we obviously didn't coddle them
enough yet - once we give them even
more, it'll
totally start raining hundred-dollar bills!
It's about as pretty a sham as anyone's ever been shameless enough to cook up...and somehow, some way, the entirety of the
rabidly liberal media never
quite seems able to put two and two together on this subject, let alone actually
call anyone out on it.
quash wrote:BulletMagnet's dilemma is that he can't do this. You can take a few guesses as to why, but by now it's hilariously transparent at least to me.
Because I don't intend to yet again use this thread's latest side trip as means to redirect or abandon the current unfinished conversation and hope nobody notices until the next as-if-nothing-happened reboot of convenience?
Because I don't ignore and dismiss direct queries on the loopy pretense that the fact someone responded to something I or a favored figure said - you know, as people tend to do when discussing matters of import - automatically means I'm "winning"?
Because I don't insist that there are mysterious, amorphous, More Important Things To Talk About than the "red herring" that the current leader of the free world and the political wing which enables him are both
irredeemably full of shit, and flippantly deflect requests for further discussion on the grounds of You Losers Wouldn't Get It Anyway?
Because I view the fact that a modern, information-age presidential election can still be won with a cocktail of impotent bombast, shameless dog-whistling and a wholesale rejection of quantifiable fact (with a hefty side of creative redistricting and "anti-fraud" voter suppression) as a problem in need of fixing as opposed to an opportunity ripe for not only exploiting, but openly celebrating?
Because I'm not a
complete asshole?
