Cut all the benefits/welfare, fix the economy

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While Labour do indeed have some responsibility for situations like Craig28's, the majority of the blame must go to the freeloaders who choose to live their lives like that, because it is a choice if they've been doing it their whole lives and they're almost in their 30's, and there's no excuse for it.

Ah, so typical of the American Left: you have no facts on your side so you resord to ridicule.

The fact is, ACORN was powerful enough to get an unknown first term Senator elected President. It was only after someone went undercover and exposed their willingness to help set up a prostitution ring, and released it on video on the internet so the leftist press couldn't ignore it, that ACORN got into trouble. Meanwhile, they've filed several lawsuits aginst the person who got the video to try to keep that kind of truth from getting out again.

So are we to say that Breitbart is the most powerful man in the world? He brought down the mighty ACORN, he must be the most powerful man in the world, with power greater than all the puny banks put together as ACORN was able to bend the banks to its will.

The videos were doctored. They were without credibility. At the same time, Breitbart released videos of the Gamiliel Foundation prayer where they said "Hear our cry O God", and he put subtitles saying "Hear our cry Obama". This man has no credibility yet this anti-ACORN smear campaign was treated with all seriousness. Had ACORN been so very powerful these videos wouldn't have been aired on TV, had they they would have been dismissed, and ACORN would have been protected in the coverage. It was not. ACORN was not powerful. ACORN in no way could have bent the banks to its will.

By the way, James O'Keefe broke the law in several states with the secret recordings. Why isn't he facing charges? Why are prosecutors reluctant to commit themselves to prosecute him? Seems to me that he is above the law too. When he tried to wiretap a senator's telephone, there were no effective consequences for him at all. Other people trying the same thing would be facing Life Without Possibility of Parole as part of the War of Terror or would be in a brig somewhere. James O'Keefe is above the law.

Last edited by xenon13 on 05 Dec 2010, 12:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, it seems to me with their denial of known scientific reality that it is the right who don't have facts on their side. I'm not addressing the ACORN issue with this remark but the right's denial of evolution and global warming. While I am not an expert on global warming, the little research I have done on this the past year or so seems to show a scientific consensus that it is not a conspiracy as some right wing nutjobs claim. Evolution on the other hand is something I do know quite a bit about, and I can state unequivocally that most (at least 99.99%) of the arguments used against it by right wing nutjobs were thoroughly debunked long ago.

I'm not saying everyone on the right is a nutjob. I do notice that since the 1980s the right seems more skewed to the extreme position of its side than the left is to its extreme position. I'm sure many are good people, but they are badly misinformed by corporate or religious leaders who LIE in order to manipulate things to their advantage.

Well I'm not on benifits by choice - I am actively looking for work, but because of my extremely high anxiety disorder, I am taking up a little course to boost my confidence for employment (it's under the job centre, so it's not like a college course or anything). So at least I am helping myself to push myself a bit. Helping myself to do these things is better than doing nothing waiting for a perfect job to fall into my lap. I left college at 18, which was 2 years ago, and I know 2 years is a bit long to be on job-seekers but that's because I still haven't decided on what I want to do. I've had work placements within the 2 years, but they didn't take me on afterwards (even though I was a good worker and turned up on time every day). And I send CVs out to different places. But I was looking for retail, but after I've tried retail work plcements, I've realised it was too much for me, so now I'm looking for something a bit more for me.

And in the 2 years of being unemployed, I've been doing voluntary work at a charity shop, to keep me busy. So I'm not just sitting about on my arse accepting free handouts - I'm doing whatever I can to get myself into work, so I can come off job-seekers and stop the handouts.

So that's all my money explanatories.

Then I have nothing against you at all.



Exactly, couldn't agree more. But try telling Craig28 that.

So let me get this straight Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck is the most powerful person in the world cause they even scare the President of the United States.



They looked to be editted for a news segment not doctored, and thing is those people in those tapes did work for ACORN. Lip movement in image matched that of the the audio (if it didn't (aside from what you may see in image lag when viewed on net) then that would have been evidence of doctoring video. That stuff wasn't there.



1st Amendment - Freedom of the Press

If they did go after him on that they could end up in all kinds of trouble including the law being tossed. Furthermore in some cases it came out that O'Keefe found some interesting information about certain prosecutors being in bed with ACORN. What O'Keefe was doing can't be called treason either because he is going after a group concerning corruption. This same group is in trouble for voter fraud.

If ACORN sues, they end up in all kinds of problems because O'Keefe can demand documents from ACORN.

Further, a lot of the charges were dropped on O'Keefe for a seperate issue because it was found that they didn't have the equipment for bugging a phone. He just wanted to prove the Senator's phone worked and she just wasn't listening to her constituents. All he wanted to do was see that the phone was working.

No, don't go. I want to know what bennies you're claiming where you can get 25k cash in hand.

Actually, if someone is unemployable or has difficulty gaining a job in their early years, they will often become less employable as they age. Companies like work experience. If you get to thirty with little or no experience, then you're not going to win a post over a younger more experienced candidate. For the past thirty years or so there have been a raft of ineffective initiatives and training schemes, very few of which increase the employability of an individual. That's why they don't last and get replaced with newer schemes, which also fail.

Maybe more people would find work earlier if they properly reintroduced apprenticships, with a decent living wage, and maybe angled schooling more towards employability than it is now, at least in later years. Kids are leaving school now who can't change a plug, safely cook a meal, or spell their own names. Who the hell wants to employ them? And they grow up, and are still unemployable.

And you're STILL assuming that everybody is equally able to go for any job that appears.

Better still they can get rid of this idea of NAIRU - Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, the Milton Friedman invention that re-defined "full employment" as being between 5% and 8% depending on how badly people were being paid, the worst pay making "full employment" lower, then bosses would have no choice but to take these people and integrate them into the work force. The Neoliberal Era is a disaster. The Reserve Army of Labour is what the elite want and that's what we have.

I'm not sure about cutting off all benefits, but I agree that welfare is BS. If any benefits are given they should be done under the philosophy of "Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime" rather than just handing fishes out.

Another favorite leftist tactic - when the facts aren't with you, change the subject - though at least you admit you're doing it.

I'll address your points, though. "The right" doesn't deny evolution; it's just that a few people in fundamentalist religions on the right deny evolution. There are people on the left in fundamentalist religions that deny evolution too, but the difference is that, first, the press prefers to pick on the right, and second, that the right is willing to listen to the other opinions of those people and treat them like human beings, while the left treats their fundamentalists, who are mostly black baptists, as a captive vote who get paid off with financial benefits at the price of shutting up and allowing their actual opinions to be ignored.

Global warming is somewhat of a consensus among climate scientists that is ignored by the right, yes, but the left ignores scientific consensus on other topics, such as the consensus view among human intelligence researchers that intelligence differences between races are large and genetic. The real issue is that science doesn't work by consensus; for example, there was a scientific consensus for the majority of the 20th century that humans had 48 chromosomes, but it eventually turned out that all those scientists just counted wrong.

Specifically about global warming, there was a significant global temperature rise between about 1970 and 1998, and at that point global warming looked pretty clear. However, since 1998, global average temperature has been flat or declining. If climate scientists were just honest and said, 'overall there seems to be global warming but there are some recent data that we still need to explain', they'd be credible. The problem is, that's not what they say; they seem to be trying to hide the recent data to support a consensus view that may be outdated. When scientists try to hide or downplay valid data, people become rightfully skeptical of their pronouncements.

If you want a more detailed discussion with some graphs on this subject, look about half way down the page here:

http://psychohist.livejournal.com/52898.html

My bottom line is, while it looks to me like there's human caused global warming, it's a topic on which reasonable people can differ.

Well that lifestyle is certainly an example of selfishness, and is also an illustration of how the economic system that's truly based on selfishness is socialism rather than capitalism.

Unfortunately, 99% of humans are selfish 99% of the time, even if they don't admit it to themselves; that's just how the world works. Blame them or not, you're not going to be able to change the actions of people who can make as much money refusing to work as they can working. The only realistic way of fixing the problem is to fix the system so people who voluntarily drop out of the job market are not rewarded for it.

What if everything is produced by robots? What then? Production is more than enough with a large Reserve Army of Labour. The thing that people must understand is that in the end, production is a function of demand. That is, if there is insufficient demand, there will be less production. So if we cut the members of the Reserve Army of Labour off of benefits this will cause production to decrease. Surely you don't favour reducing production!

Under socialism workers are glorified. Under Capitalism, workers are chumps. They are hired hands. Only owners and controllers have any value. Remember the days of "Coal not dole"? Who was for dole? The Conservatives. Is it so difficult to imagine that with the deck stacked against you, with selfishness considered to be a virtue, where people try to take what they can, that these values are absorbed by people in the lower classes? That's how to survive in this neoliberal wasteland.

[applauds]

I've been saying this for YEARS.

Age discrimination STARTS at 30. Employers expect you to be experienced/career-driven if you want the job. Only people with accomplishments are sought out as they get older, and in a bad market, even that's not enough.

Start out BEHIND the curve and you might NEVER get caught up.