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Paul Buchheit reports via AlterNet
While Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou are vilified for revealing vital information about spying and bombing and torture, a man who conspired with Goldman Sachs to make billions of dollars on the planned failure of subprime mortgages was honored by New York University for his "Outstanding Contributions to Society".
This is one example of the distorted thinking leading to the demise of a once-vibrant American society. There are other signs of decay:
- A House Bill Would View Corporate Crimes as "Honest Mistakes"
- Almost 2/3 of American Families Couldn't Afford a Single Pill of a Life-Saving Drug
- Violent Crime Down; Prison Population Doubles
- One in Four Americans Suffer Mental Illness; Mental Health Facilities Cut by 90 Percent
- The Unpaid Taxes of 500 Companies Could Pay for a Job for Every Unemployed American ...for two years ...at the nation's median salary of $36,000 ...for all 8 million unemployed.
Citizens for Tax Justice reports that Fortune 500 companies are holding over $2 trillion in profits offshore to avoid taxes that would amount to over $600 billion. Our society desperately needs infrastructure repair, but 8 million potential jobs are being held hostage beyond our borders.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday December 08 2015, @04:31PM
I didn't have to stretch very hard. Not because they as a little group are almost there, but because the whole country is almost there so naturally that little group I dislike fits under an only mildly stretched moniker. That's the interesting part, that our extreme left is none the less far right.
Its a display of absolute vs relative. In a relative sense the left is to the left of our right and they traditionally use "fascist" as a pejorative against those to the right but hilariously the whole country in an absolute sense is so incredibly far right fascist that even our most extreme brothers in the far extreme relative left are none the less so far right in an absolute sense that academic descriptions of fascism fit their behavior to a tee. Which is no surprise, they live in an ultra far right fascist country so even if they are far outliers toward the left, they will none the less still be to the right compared to reality or whatever.
Its like debating how Lenin could be to the left or the right of Marx in an abstract sense, but they're both kinda lefties no matter how far apart they may be from each other.
Rather than discussing relative extremes, we could just look at how theoretically moderate soccer mom style normie independent voters would none the less categorize somewhat fascist by any of a bazillion definitions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 08 2015, @05:19PM
I think that's pretty fair.
Fascism, by its nature, is populist. Thus all populism is likely to reek a bit of it.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 08 2015, @08:14PM
You didn't have to stretch very hard because that definition is so vague it's completely meaningless. It sounds like it was written by one of those nonsense paper generators:
Seriously, WTF does this even mean?
a culture founded on mystical thought and the tragic and activist sense of life conceived of as the manifestation of the will to power, on the myth of youth as artificer of history, and on the exaltation of the militarization of politics as the model of life and collective activity;
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Tuesday December 08 2015, @11:06PM
It sounds like something Heinlein would've written and creamed himself over.
And if they'd turned that book into a movie, that phrase would be followed by "Would you like to know more?"...
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...