patrick.net

Well hell if Snopes says so, then it's settled.

indigenous says

Trivia Test

You do realize that Jesus was the mother of all socialists, right? Christianity demands that you give up all your material possessions to help your fellow humans.

That which you do to the least of my people, you do unto me.

The righteous is concerned for the rights of the poor, The Republican wicked does not understand such concern.

Christ, capitalism is utterly incompatible with Christianity. They are antitheses of each other. You cannot serve two masters and you god demands you abandon the false religion of capitalism and its gold idol.

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.

You can't make this shit up. Oh wait, it's from the Bible, so I guess you can.

As usual, Dan, you are going for quantity over quality

Seems to me the rich guy is going to heaven because he creates jobs.

No indigenous, Dan has just made a brilliant attack on your argument which deserves more than outright scorn and trite political sound bites in response. Jesus was concerned for the poor and thought that wealth and power detracted from the humility and submission to God necessary for right action.

I got this exact "Trivia" post in form of an email from my dad last week. Congrats on being as clueless as my old man...

He assumes, that I'm a Christian, not the case.

Jesus should have taught skills, not welfare.

indigenous says

Jesus should have taught skills, not welfare.

I am sure that right-wing Christians will jump in to argue with this atheistic libertarian who just criticized Jesus.

(Just kidding - you're in no danger - they know you'll vote with them decade after decade)

indigenous says

Seems to me the rich guy is going to heaven because he creates jobs.

So you think Christianity is bullshit then. Fair enough if you stick to your guns.

The Republican Party is an unholy collation of godless capitalist and Jesus freaks. Neither one would stand to let the other live if not for their devil's pack: let the rich exploit everyone and everything and the government will back Christian fundamentalism.

There's no contradiction between being a left-leaning (I prefer compassionate over left-leaning because the progressive left has poisoned the term left with their fucked up bs) Libertarian and Christian. The ancient world was full of evil governments taking labor, money and lives at will to their advantage and the advantage of their families.

"(I prefer compassionate over left-leaning because the progressive left has poisoned the term left with their fucked up bs"

Progressivism does not mean infallibility. The Temperance and Eugenics Movements were arguably "Progressive", coming from the same desire of getting government involved in society's development. (And clearly the full-blown "Great Society" welfare state where single mothers can just pump out the babies and get paid thousands a month for it is a straight road to eventual social destruction)

But Conservatism vs. Progressivism comes down to intervention in "the market" and an outlook on moving past what was and is vs. what can be. Conservatives don't like government telling them what they can and cannot do (but they're largely fine if government controls other people, like with limiting birth control and abortion, banning gay marriage, mixed marriages, recreational drugs, etc etc), and are pessimistic about collective and/or "technocratic" change and intervention.

These are psycho-social makeups that people are just different about.

Conservatism as structured today brings very little to the table, as its insistence on "Biblical" bullshit really kneecaps it. I couldn't care less what some desert goatherders in some asscrack part pf the world had to say ~2500 years ago about morality and social construction today.

Progressives see the fallacies that conservatives can't see, about how "individual freedom" is not the end-all or most optimal path to harmony and happiness in society.

Quite the opposite, as so much of the Wealth of the Nation is rather zero-sum in nature, when one person takes, others have to go without -- but the more wealth one amasses, the more able one is to take more wealth. This is profoundly unbalancing and the root cause of so much discord and unhappiness over the decades if not centuries here.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=18EM

is real per-capita GDP, showing it has risen 3X since 1950 and 50% since 1980. We're undoubtedly a lot more wealthier now, but life can be a lot more precarious for a lot more people now, too.

The "Two Income Trap" is part of this -- housing costs are eating tens of millions of households alive now.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=18EY

shows real per-capita spending has risen 3X since 1960. Conservatives want to cut that off. The society that would result would not be pretty, their bullshit "We've Got Ours / Good Luck Getting Yours" ideology aside.

Bellingham Bill says

Conservatives don't like government telling them what they can and cannot do (but they're largely fine if government controls other people, like with limiting birth control and abortion, banning gay marriage, mixed marriages, recreational drugs, etc etc), and are pessimistic about collective and/or "technocratic" change and intervention.

I agree with some of this, but you have to differentiate, and progressives are as bad at that as hard-core-conservatives. I'm for legalizing all drugs, but if the government would somehow introduce a monetary incentive - also called positive discrimination - for people who can prove they don't take drugs, then this is totally within their limits (whether that would be a smart or stupid measure is a different topic). Same goes for birth control and abortion. I am against criminalization (within a reasonable/pragmatic time cutoff), but that doesn't mean government and taxpayers have to financially support it. Same goes for same sex marriage. Gay couples always had the options of civil unions. The government simply positively discriminated against hetero couples because they deemed those more useful for procreation and family coherence - and research about the stability of those relationships actually shows that they had a point. This is not a civil rights issue and never has been.

Bellingham Bill says

Quite the opposite, as so much of the Wealth of the Nation is rather zero-sum in nature, when one person takes, others have to go without -- but the more wealth one amasses, the more able one is to take more wealth. This is profoundly unbalancing and the root cause of so much discord and unhappiness over the decades if not centuries here.

I disagree on the zero-sum game, because technological advances can increase everybody's productivity and reduce costs, and wealth flows in and out of nations in a globalized world. But I agree that it is logical that the more super-rich there are, the greater the imbalance becomes. However this goes back to my eternal argument that wealth disparity is greatly decreased in a recession, so the government path of deficit spending and bailouts actually fosters and promotes wealth disparity.

Bellingham Bill says

The "Two Income Trap" is part of this -- housing costs are eating tens of millions of households alive now.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=18EY

shows real per-capita spending has risen 3X since 1960. Conservatives want to cut that off.

It's irrelevant what conservatives want - we will need to cut that off because math dictates that kicking the can down the road will end eventually. I agree it won't be pretty but sometimes a great reset is necessary. You can't spend more than you take in is true for everybody and every entity.

Bellingham Bill says

Progressives see the fallacies that conservatives can't see, about how "individual freedom" is not the end-all or most optimal path to harmony and happiness in society.

I agree that individual freedom isn't always the best solution, but I'd take its disadvantages anytime over the cultural marxism propagated by the progressive left, which is IMO far more dangerous than the calvinistic "We've Got Ours / Good Luck Getting Yours" attitude.