Monday, July 23, 2018

Those Silly Leftists...

So get this...

● In the name of helping college students avoid student loan debt, colleges are apparently experimenting with taking a percentage of future income rather than issuing loans. This used to be called indentured servitude and was one of the things that was banned after the Victorian Age because it was tantamount to slavery. So liberal colleges are re-instituting slavery. Well, liberals do love repeating history.

● Income inequality, the left's favorite cause, is rising... in liberal states. In fact, it's worst in these states: New York, Florida, Connecticut, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, California, Nevada and Wyoming. In each of those, the difference between the top and the bottom is at least 30times with California being the only state in the 40s. Most states are in the high teens. Illinois just barely missed the list at 29. So the five top liberal states, dominate the list, with the sixth close by. As for the others, Florida and Nevada are blue-trending swing states. Wyoming, the only conservative/red state on the list, is probably a statistical anomaly, since no one lives there. So once again, liberal states are the home of what liberals complain about.

● I have been telling you that there are a lot of problems in the alignment of the tribes on the left. Some of them just don't fit together. Blacks and women don't play well together. Atheists and blacks. Environmentalists and unions.

One group that fits particularly poorly on the left are gays. Moreover, within the gay community, I've always thought that male-transgenders/transvestites do not fit well at all with lesbians or women generally. There are three problems with this relationship. First, lesbians tend to be anti-male, regardless of how the male dresses. Secondly, trans-males typically are using a stereotype of women that is more than a little misogynist. You see this really intensely with drag queens, who mimic women in ways that would get a heterosexual man torn apart by the #metoo community, and it seems to carry over into other aspects of the trans community. Third, when you have trans-men trying to join things that are set aside for womyn, you run into deep tribal problems. We see this in recent events with trans-men like Bruce/Caitlin Jenner being award Woman of the Year and thereby taking one of the few things the genetic woman tribe have set aside for themselves. You see it also in the trans-men who go into women's sports and "surprisingly" dominate because no matter how they look, they still have more powerful male bodies.

Anyways, in the past few months, there have been a growing number of clashes between lesbians/feminists and the trans community. Just the other day Facebook actually banned a UK feminist group for "transphobia" in their posting. A month ago, a lesbian group brought protest signs against trans groups to a gay pride rally. Look for this rift to continue to worsen, especially now that gays are no longer tied to the collective for political reasons and are free to attack whomever they want.

● The left is upset that dirty evil banks are stepping up their lobbying efforts because they feel like they haven't gotten anything from the Trump administration. Think about that. The left is pointing a nasty finger at Trump because banks are hiring more lobbyists because Trump isn't giving them what they want. Shouldn't they be celebrating the fact Trump is standing up to the banks? Not this left.

11 comments:

Anthony said...

1) Eh. I guess it all depends on the percentage and the number of years, but proposal doesn't strike me as eyebrow raising. Trade schools have been doing that sort of thing for a while.

Its kind of like a school betting on its students. Sucks for the person and the school if they don't find work or get a low paying job, great if they get a lucrative job.

2) Its worse in blue states but income inequality is up in every state in the union due to low wage growth. I've never gotten the sense anyone actually cares about inequality. People who don't have 'enough' whine about people who have too much, but a guy who has 'enough' doesn't worry about what the next guy has.

As I've pointed out for years, the world is changing and lifetime employment (which on the whole benefitted workers) is now the exception rather than the rule. Everyone benefits from cheap (cell phones were once a luxury of the rich but are now a commodity) but cheap has costs for workers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/income-inequality-continues-to-grow-in-the-united-states.html

“When you look at economic expansions, it’s in that recovery that you see income growth – businesses recover, reorganize, workers find jobs,” Price said.
In those expansions since 1973, there has been less income growth for the bottom 99 percent, said Price.
Meanwhile, CEO pay has increased from about 20 times the typical worker’s pay to 271 times greater, from 1965 to 2016, according to 2017 a study by the EPI.

3) America is a two party country. That means each party consists of many groups which are not natural allies, but which are allies because Party A is less hostile than Party B.

I don't know much about the sexual variances, but I do know that they have fewer, less intense enemies on the Dem side of the line than they do the Republican side.

Also both parties are made up of people that stay home if there is nothing to get excited about. Trump barely edged out scandal prone horrible campaigner Hillary (who had to rig her party's own primary to win) in a very low turnout election so clearly a lot of people on both sides stayed home.

4) I haven't heard anything indicating a negative relationship between Trump and banks though there was a recent Politico piece indicating big banks are not the sort of thing politicians like to be associated with nowadays. It doesn't seem like Washington/Trump is failing to give big banks what they want (nods towards deregulation), it just doesn't want to be seen doing it.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/09/banks-lobbying-donald-trump-669706

Banks are hardly suffering. They will reap huge gains from the tax-reform law signed by Trump in December and they stand to benefit from significant deregulatory moves to come from the Federal Reserve and other agencies. Still, some in the industry don't believe the major banks have done a good enough job winning over Washington officials, given their crucial role in the economy.
One clear symptom: The landmark, bipartisan bank deregulation legislation that became law in May contained relatively few victories for the global banks, with lawmakers repeatedly emphasizing instead the benefits for small “community banks” linked to Main Street. Most lawmakers from either party didn’t want to be seen as helping the likes of Wells Fargo, which has been racked by a string of scandals involving consumer abuses.

tryanmax said...

We seem to be witnessing a realignment whereby the Democrats are more overtly becoming the party of the wealthy. That they are in any way siding with banks says their prior animosity was less than pure. Add to that the way they are overtly defending tax breaks for the rich in high-tax blue states. Income inequality is really only the concern of well-off liberals who feel guilty but not guilty enough to tithe to charity. Even if it's fringey, the Democrats' dalliance with socialism is an appeal to the trust-fund set who are convinced it will go well for them. Even the indentured servitude college plan can only appeal to those for whom income is not a pressing concern.

AndrewPrice said...

tryanmax, I think the Democrats are slowly morphing into the party of professional white women. Their interests seem to be trending that way.

Critch said...

Rush Limbaugh started off today with an article about how the rich can't run from Connecticut, New York, California or New Jersey to get away from the high taxes because of the laws in those states..it's really an interesting read. My own feeling is that I'm glad they can't run here to avoid the high taxes they voted for, we don't need their infection.

AndrewPrice said...

Interesting bit here...

CNN has released a tape of Trump and Cohen talking. Cohen is Trump's lawyer. Why Cohen taped him or can legally release it, I do not understand as attorney client privilege should cover this.

Also interesting, Cohen's lawyer is Lanny Davis, who was connected to the Clinton Administration.

Anyways, I'm assuming this is the smoking gun the left has been promising. What is says (charitably) is that Trump wanted to buy the silence of a woman threatening to claim she had an affair with him.

1. This is not a crime.
2. People do this all the time.

If this is the smoking gun, it's more like a steaming plate of so what than a smoking gun. I think this is about to blow up on the neverTrumps as no one in the American public who doesn't already hate Trump is going to care about this at all.

AndrewPrice said...

Critch, I haven't seen the article, but that would be great if they were stuck in those places and now needed to pay the taxes they supported and then avoided.

Anthony said...

Infidelity and lies will hurt Trump no more than they hurt Bill Clinton. Their supporters know what they are and such revelations are more likely to trigger a rally round the flag effect than anything.

AndrewPrice said...

Anthony, I don't think they hurt him at all. As with Clinton, the vast majority of the public really doesn't care about infidelity. In fact, they are angrier about people making a big deal of it than they are about it. Further, everyone already thinks he cheats, so this is just repeating what we already know.

That said, the people who hate him will turn blue over this, but they're not being rational like the rest of the public. They want this to get him, so they will see it that way. And no doubt, we'll see a ton of hangwringing from people who have already handwrung more than once.

I think what this does hurt is the anti-Trump case. Here's why:

1. This and the Russia thing have been conflated. The media makes both sound like they are connected.

2. They haven't been able to explain what is wrong in either issue, but they've made HUGE promises. "It will be so bad that he will be impeached and might even end up in jail!!" //wipes foam away from mouth

3. This gets released. It gets billed as the smoking gun. But the public can't figure out what the big deal is. So he wanted to buy some silence. That happens every day in millions of ways. What's the big deal? Why is this illegal? THIS was the big evil thing Trump did?

And the public will stop paying attention.

AndrewPrice said...

As an aside, someone has pointed out to me (correctly) that drag queens are generally gay men, not transgenders, and their misogynism should not be attributed to the trans community. I stand corrected.

That said, I think the incompatibility problems within the gay community are the same. And now that there really is no "gay issue" to keep them together politically, I think they drift apart again.

Unknown said...

I agree, Andrew.
This is just my observation based on the attitude of most of my gay and transgender friends:

Most despise both the Democrats and Republicans.
They despise the dems because they are anti-liberty and the republicans because, sadly, they don’t feel welcome.

Both parties try to use them.
The dems to push leftist agendas and to fire up the left feimge and the republicans often use them negatively, in order to fire up the right fringe.

The republicans could gain the support of many traditionally democratic lgbt if they would take the time to understand them better and stop using them as scapegoats and believing what the left says they are.

To be fair, there is a small but very vocal group of gays, lesbians amd trans people who help to muddy the waters and play to the stereotypes but most that I know lean more libertarian than left.

tryanmax said...

Just 2¢ worth of anecdote: When I was in the theater scene, I went to more drag shows than a white-cis-het-male is normally allowed to attend. (They give you a punch card; I stole some extras. 😉) In my estimation, drag queens are about 50/50 gay men and straight men.

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