Nail lady fails to understand socialism is bad for nail ladies
Via TPM and various publications linked therein, scenes from a Romney fundraiser:
While a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters assembled in the area, the Porsches, Range Rovers and BMWs streamed in. Here are some of the best quotes from the events.
A gem from the Los Angeles Times:
A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
Peter Cohen, the former Shearson Lehman Bros. chief, told the Associated Press — while chewing on a cigar — that Romney is a “plain-talking guy.”
Ted Conklin, who owns the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, told the New York Times that Obama is a “socialist.”
“His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Conklin added, his wife, Carol Simmons, nodding beside him in their gold Mercedes.
But wait, there’s more. From the Times:
Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!”
Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.
George Orwell, Wartime Diaries, June 3, 1940:
From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies:
“Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining… in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”
Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exists.
Lady Oxford was Margot Asquith, widow of Herbert Henry Asquith, prime minister from 1908-1916.
Update: Things you learn from wikipedia: Helena Bonham Carter is Asquith’s great-granddaughter via his first wife.
Now if only somebody would do something about the impending Social Security crisis.
… and the voter fraud epidemic.
and the NAFTA superhighway
And the hyperinflation that is JUST LIKE ZIMBABWE, which is not at all about race, but is strongly rooted in empirical observation.
And also identity cards for Americans.
Actually, I think that having a national ID card is good thing. Nearly every other democratic country has one and uniform id would make things easier. I also support a federilization of driver’s licenses and traffic laws.
Says the person who most likely identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth. Just ask trans people how hard it is to change the gender marker on your ID, and this has the potential to really fuck a lot of people over.
As a genuine question, not an argument – do you think it would be more easily done with local IDs than a federal one?
This is a procedural problem that could be fixed by proper regulations. Its also going to be a lot easier to get ids to be flexible on gender at national. At the very least, we’ll only need to change one regulation rather than at least fifty ones.
Based only on anecdotal evidence from the SF Bay Area, the Social Security offices are much less reliable than the DMV when it comes to changing gender on IDs. There’s an established procedure for both, but a sizable number of Social Security workers just don’t understand it, or don’t want to.
We call ‘em “passports,” actually.
And the point of a national ID card is not to ID those who are citizens, but to segregate and ‘stick a yellow star on’ those who ain’t
I just wish he’d stand up to the international conspiracy of fraudulent climate researchers.
And the plan to confiscate all the guns.
The plan to confiscate all guns and give them to brown-skinned criminals, you mean.
Eh, I think people were finally getting bored with saying that the imminent hyperinflation was just like Weimar Germany, and Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation was fresh news at the time. Of course, for people who want to be racist, Robert Mugabe’s complexion certainly gives them the opportunity to make dog whistles.
You know, I never really understood the fears on that one.
Social Security is in crisis = all our monies disappear! Oh no, we’ve all gone broke!
Vote fraud = democracy stolen! Oh no, we can’t trust the system!
NAFTA Superhighway = a road from Mexico to Canada! Oh no, this is so much . . . roadier? I guess? than all the other roads!
The NAFTA Superhighway is a problem for the same reason that the UN is a problem – to the particular crowd that worries about such things its an example of the encroaching menace of the Antichrist setting up his One World Government by erasing the borders between nations.
Unfortunately that’s one of those conspiracy theories that gives the left a reach-around. The Bush years made me a conspiracy theorist, but It turned a lot of other guys I knew into paranoid conspiracy theorists. A couple of them went right into the arms of the “Sovereign Citizen” libertarians.
Most conspiracy theories can be viewed from a right-wing or left-wing lens, actually.
Because most conspiracy theories boil down to a Mad Libs of [fungible group] wants to do [something innocuous] that is secretly going to do [something horrible]. For any conspiracy theory that fits this mold, you can replace “fungible group” with a left-wing bogeyman and it becomes a right-wing conspiracy, or replace with a right-wing bogeyman and it becomes a left-wing conspiracy.
It’s really easy to do crap like that when the people you are surrounded by care little for things like “fact” or “evidence” or even “a sufficiently cohesive rationale for why a group would even want to do something as vile as [something horrible]“.
Actually, we see this all the time and fail to identify it as conspiracy. ALEC is a conspiracy. Anytime you have groups coming together with limited access (“in secret” has become a weird shibboleth to defuse the accusation) to accomplish a goal other than the stated goal, you have a conspiracy. The Mafia. Some overseas military activities (see: Mali, Honduras).
“Deep politics” doesn’t just happen Over There. We have it here, too. Turning it into a weird gotcha game helps no one.
Did you learn nothing from Red Dawn?
No, I did not. Watching that movie removes IQ points faster than chugging drano.
I believe chugging Draino removes esophagus points more quickly than it does IQ points.
Doesn’t do either the tongue or the soft pallet much good, either.
JzB
But not as fast as reading Ross Douthat.
The only thing I learned from Red Dawn is that Harry Dean Stanton can turn in a solid performance in damn near anything.
Mixed gender groups of horny teenagers are less effective as insurgents than singe gender groups of horny teenagers?
It also implies nobody has ever used Google Maps to look at I-5.
The Five doesn’t count, it goes through California and other non-Real-America places.
My solution is now what it has always been: Drag the fuckers into the street and shoot them. There’s a reason most revolutions include that part. You can’t make a healthy society with people like that allowed to just go around breathing like they do.
While I like the way you think, your plan does not do enough to help the tumbrel manufacturers, who are truly the backbone of American small business. Or should be.
Clearly, that should be a barter system.
I’ll tumbrel for ya…and you tumbrel for me.
huh, what about the mom&pop tisket and tasket manufacturers?
They may switch to buggy whips.
Healthy societies aren’t usually formed on the dead bodies of dissidents either.
Or the dead corpse of sarcasm, either.
Interestingly, this is a close paraphrase of a verse from the Modern American Fundamentalist translation of the Gospel of Luke.
Yes, when the manager was forced to sleep on the yacht for there was no room at the inn.
And the three magi showed up with their presents of gold, more gold, and yet more gold.
[Singin]:
Away with the manager,
no crib for his bed,
the Miramax bigshot
lay down his sweet head . . .
[slow clap]
For inasmuch as ye did it unto the richest of these, ye did it unto me. Now let’s do it unto them before they do it unto us.
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a poor man to enter into the kingdom of God. So make sure you have your credit cards handy, and St. Peter doesn’t take Discover.
13 ¶ And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Hero’dians, to catch him in his words.
14 And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man; for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?
15 Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.
16 And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar’s.
17 And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’sPaying taxes is a mug’s game. Set up Ceasar-sheltered annuities based in Gaul, and funnel deferred compensation through that, while setting up trust funds unto the seventh generation. And they marveled at him.Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Oh wait, that’s me! Somebody hand me a stone!
Suddenly an old lady at the back of the crowd picked up an enormous rock and hurled it at the unfortunate adulteress, killing her instantly. Jesus turned to the old lady and said, “Sometimes, mother, you really piss me off . . . “
“Mary, why do we look so sad?”
“Well, I wanted a girl.”
You’ve shown me the light. Why aren’t there more religious schools for accounting? Obviously this Jesus guy would’ve made a killing in the financial sector.
Republican Jeebus is totally awesome!
Mr. Conklin and his humble 75 foot yacht were representing the middle class at this event, I take it.
only 75 ft? Lower-middle class, clearly
Ze poor cannot eat ze bread?
Let zem do zeir nails!
What happened to the cake? Marie Antoinette promised us poor people cake.
There will be cake.
Beat me to it. That should (but won’t) teach me to refresh screen more often.
You will be baked, and then there will be cake.
Please assume the Party Escort Submission Position.
The cake was a lie.
Marie was an 18th century GLaDos.
It was actually Rousseau . . .
Ask not for whom the tumbrel rolls, it rolls for thee.
This is the (un)funny irony/contradiction/hypocrisy of the Republican position/rhetoric/campaign, something like “The economy is terrible and it’s all Obama’s fault,” coupled with “What recession? Look around, do these people look poor to you? Nobody I know has lost their job.”
The beauty of that article, that paragraph specifically, is the juxtaposition the reporter makes: he lets the words speak for themselves, then sets the context. A guy who drives a gold Mercedes would know diddly squat about healthcare for the poor or student loan forgiveness or DREAM track citizenship issues.
I wouldn’t say this is inherently true. Of course, you’re right in this case. But rich people don’t -have- to not know anything about these issues. In fact, I would suspect many know a lot about it.
They know that immigrants with citizenship would be harder to abuse, and students without tons of debt wouldn’t be so easily coerced into indentured servitude.
Right. Cheap labor isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity!
Nearly everyone who is rich has gotten that way on the difference between someone else’s productivity and their wages, generally lots of someone elses (or inherited from someone who did). Even a business founder who does legitimate creative work in their own right (e.g. Gates, Jobs) doesn’t reach the fantastic levels of wealth they have without having lots and lots of employees whose pay is lower than their productivity (and the employer pockets the difference).
If they see farther than others, it is because they stand on the shoulders of multitudes. And then think *they’re* Atlas. What a joke.
An econ professor I know once said that when she teaches a class at a business school she like to start the class by making the point out that their success depends on them introducing–or more precisely exploiting–an inefficiency into the market. In other words, their generating profits is dependent on their charging more for their “good” than the cost to produce it. She finds this is often jarring to the b-schoolers, because in their imaginations they are cost efficiency maximizers and it’s only everyone else–labor especially–that wants to “distort” the market.
Anyone who has a gold Mercedes is flouting his ignorance of real day concerns, in my opinion.
Or let me put it another way: they are gloating that they’ve risen above those concerns. Aware? Perhaps. Perhaps some smidgen of media-frenzy over the latest stabbing and highlighting that the poor have it tough might have soaked thru his gin-addled brain, but they care not one whit enough to really find out how tough it is out there.
The New York Times Sunday Review had an interesting article that argued that people really only need to earn $75,000 a year to be happy. With taxes, we can make sure that every adult known to exist to the federal government has at least $75,000 a year. The rich won’t like it that much but the aggregate bliss would compensate it.
Even taking that claim at face value, it should be clear that if everybody had that much money, the happiness threshold would (practically by definition) move higher.
Right, my understanding is that for moderately affluent societies and up, the point of diminishing happiness returns for income is pretty consistently between 150-175% of the median.
Wasn’t it you reminding us just recently, in another context, that human nature does have a dark side?
I believe the research is generally that once people have enough money to be comfortable (shelter, food, basic income security, etc.), the additional income does little or nothing for happiness (since at that point it’s almost all being spent on positional goods, which by definition are zero-sum when considering total overall happiness).
So if the powers that be really cared about human welfare, the focus would be on making sure everyone has enough. (Obviously that’s not the world we live in.)
Positional goods are “by definition” zero-sum? My pleasure in showing off my Cervélo R5 is by definition matched by the aggregate envy or disgust it inspires in others?
To be clear, I believe everyone should live adequately, and something like the UBI would be good. But I don’t think that could possibly calm our lusting after positional goods (and I certainly don’t think there’s any such accounting identity).
I was thinking not that the displeasure of others’ envy cancels out the pleasure of a positional good, but rather that the total pleasure to be gained from positional groups in a group should be approximately capped: only one person can have the nicest car (and therefore feel good about having the nicest car). If everyone has the nicest car, no one does. If two people have the nicest car, they share the pleasure of lording it over the rest. Possibly there’s some equilibrium point of optimal nice car distribution to maximize total happiness, but that gets deep into utilitarianism and the usual problems with the impossibility of quantitatively measuring these things.
Positional happiness could also be non-zero sum if everyone chose something different as their positional good, and therefore each person managed to feel superior to the ignorant masses. However, there are probably a lot of people who only get positional pleasure out of a good if other people also care about that specific good.
More to the point, I think you’re correct that people’s lusting after positional goods is likely insatiable, and the policy response should therefore be to simply not care about it – guarantee everyone a job and a comfortable living, and let those who want to envy the Joneses do so, and let those who don’t give a damn do that, and everyone will be more or less as happy as they choose to be.
Makes sense (L2P below likewise). In fact, I’d quibble further that a good can hardly even be positional if nobody else cares about it, but we agree on the conclusion.
That’s not quite it. It’s more like the utility of your fulfilled desire to have a Cervelo R5 is outweighed or matched by the disutility of the unfulfilled desires of all the people that lack one.
The R5 isn’t a great example of a positional good (it might be, but I don’t know). Positional goods are more like having a Rolls Royce instead of a high-end Lexus. The difference in actual performance (and I include nice leather, workmanship, style, and all that in “performance) between a Rolls and and high-end Lexus can almost be measured by the most advanced electron microscopes, but the Rolls costs a bucketload more because of that hood ornament. There’s not a lot of “basic” utility for getting the Rolls outside of telling your friends and neighbors “Hells yeah! RR, biatches!” The utility comes mostly from being better than other people.
Research shows that after you get to about 200% of median income that’s where most of the money gets spent. Designer jeans, name brand instead of generic, that sort of thing.
Cervelo R5? You gram-counting fascist!
Of my actual bikes, one is a slightly retro-faddish 30-year-old “bike boom” number from Criagslist, the other a positively unfashionable 10-year-old hybrid. When the Cervelos zip past me (as they do, in San Francisco), I’m offended at their owners’ presumption.
You oughta try being spat out the back of a paceline of Pinarellos…
I may be a complete misfit, but I dont get this. After I’ve satisfied basic needs (food, shelter, and so on), excess income gets spent on things that make me happy – not positional goods, but things that make me happy no matter what others have – books, cd’s, travel to new places.
Why do you hate America?
My favorite part was the rich old biddy who called out from her car, “Is there a VIP entrance? We’re VIP!”.
Even among their wealthy peers, they’re looking for an edge and a shortcut and an advantage over the plebs.
Why do I keep hearing “I Want Candy” over and over in my head …?
Because you sat through a really shitty Sofia Coppola movie.
As Little Edie Beale said, East Hampton “is a mean, nasty Republican town.”
This just shows the liberal bias of the press. No effort is made to point out that the Mecedes was only gold colored, and was not, in fact, made out of gold.
I’m waiting for Politifact to rate this entire article with 5 Pinocchios for that slip-up.
Harrumph, harrumph.
That explains a lot. I was pondering what kind of engine that baby must have to wheel around a solid gold bodied car.
Maybe we should suggest to Romney he retrofits one of his Cadillacs with an all-gold body?
And a Detroit locker. At least. Do you have any idea what a gold Caddy would weigh? I mean, I guess you could spray rather than plate but still, you’re going to want to drop the 7.3 power stroke in that thing, at least.
Assuming it is not to be used to tow the dressage trailer. In which case you want to gold plate one of Sen. Scott Brown’s duallies, which kind of misses the point.
Idea already used by Auric Goldfinger… a gold-panelled Rolls would be two tons, Fleming reckoned.
Of course Fleming also had Goldfinger fly a helicopter over the flatlands of Pennsylvania, so there you go.
I like this part:
So, they want to take credit for the shitty economy now? Weird.
… much as fuel reies on an engine to burn it.
Helena’s gran was Violet Bonham-Carter, the friend of Churchill’s whose memoir provides some of the better anecdotes about him.
Margot Asquith could be a pill. I like the tale about Jean Harlow’s visiting England and meeting Lady Oxford, whom Harlow insisted on addressing as “MargoT” (T not silent). Margot finally intervened: “My dear, the ‘t’ in my name is silent, as in ‘Harlow.’”
A pill? I thought that was a pretty snappy comeback.
Snappy, and openly insulting, in response to an unintentional social error. “Pill” usually means someone who’s unpleasant to all; Asquith was amusing to many by being deliberately unpleasant to some.
That would depend upon how many times the mistake was repeated until the “finally” in “finally intervened” came into play.
Really? You think that if Jean Harlow mispronounced her name a dozen times before she was finally corrected that that rises to the level of her needing to call Harlow a slut to make her point?
The polite thing to do these days is to correct her the first time she misspeaks it, not wait until she’s done it enough times to really embarrass herself when she’s found out and then call her a harlot to stick the shiv in. But times were different then, I suppose.
Hm. I have been misusing that word for 20 years. Thanks!
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I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.
I just want to take this opportunity to point out that as a PhD candidate and graduate of a fancy-pants private university, I make about $14,000 a year after taxes and spend sizable chunks of my free time discussing the origin and development of social and political systems in a global context with similarly-educated poor people… YE GODDAMN IGNORANT SACK OF SHIT – MAY YE ROT AND MAY THY INNARDS PROVIDE SUSTENANCE FOR UNTOLD GENERATIONS OF WORMS MORE WORTHY OF EXISTENCE THAN THOU ART.
Ahem.
Perhaps, with your connections in the groes of academe, you know a 7th grade English teacher who could help this silly, silly person to understand parallel syntax?
I know, she doesn’t need to worry about starting with ‘you’ and moving to ‘they’; she can hire a tutor to get her kids through the SAT. But didn’t rich people used to be embarrassed to sound uneducated? Or is that just how I recall things back in the dark ages of the Reagan administration?
No doubt our speech is declining, but also, for better or worse, newspapers are less likely to touch it up for print.
“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”
I’m a little tired of Plutocrats telling me I don’t understand them. I understand perfectly, and I vehemently disagree with their conclusions. A big difference.
Dear boy, you’re suffering from the same not-false-enough-consciousness as the nail lady. And you lack the necessary tools to constrict your perception enough to recognize the natural order of things. I suggest you become a high-net-worth individual. Or join the Tea Party.
So you’re telling me a should live the life of Reilly?
A few years ago, I saw her in the Abingdon branch of Woolworth’s on Boxing Day. True (but boring) story. She was looking at some shitty crap that Woolies used to sell.
Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.
Oh, Jesus!
[...] individuality, but which gave to a stupid aristocracy political supremacy.”“Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exists.”This man hates you and your whole family. (Oh, unless you’re very, very wealthy. And [...]