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Comment count is 34
baleen - 2013-11-12

Dirt poor rural white people think that a) they aren't dirt poor and b) one day they're going to win the lottery so they will be property owners and don't you think for one minute that they gonna pay all them taxes to support negras.


Doomstein - 2013-11-12

'Uppity' negras.


Old_Zircon - 2013-11-12

I thought the Tea Party was all about He constitution, yet here they are allowing women who own property to vote.


SteamPoweredKleenex - 2013-11-12

As if there needed to be any more proof about the inherent racism and stupidity (just wait 'till them white folk realize they don't make the property owning cut) of the Tea Party as a collective movement.

On the plus side, this does seem to imply that voting has at least SOME impact on politics, since they're trying to basically outlaw it.


ashtar. - 2013-11-12

Property rights are more important than personal rights. Pretty much the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives.


longwinded - 2013-11-12

Why is Pat Buchanan still on the teevee


Jet Bin Fever - 2013-11-16

I think the bar on who is relevant is set so low for cable news that ANYONE can get on TV. ANYONE.


EvilHomer - 2013-11-12

One question that is often put to me by my friends at the VA, is why don't I get involved with the Tea Party? As many of you are no doubt aware by now, I am quite libertarian on most issues. The Tea Party is a libertarian movement (or so the story goes), so why then, do I not come to their rallies? Hang a Gadsden flag out my window, or help them hand out pamphlets to Yale students?

There are two reasons for this. The first is that I don't really "do" political organizations. I'm an independent, and quite happy to be one. I feel neither the need, nor the desire, to group up with hierarchically organized crowds that exist primarily to help me to decide what I think. I try not to look down on people who DO join political organizations or engage in "activism", but it's not for me.

The second, more important reason, is that I'm a cynic, and I've always been more than a little skeptical about the Tea Party. From what I've seen, they strike me not as libertarians, but rather as Bush-era conservatives, recast for the Obama years; the sort of people who would have spent the last decade cheering on the growth of the national security state, before suddenly deciding they hate the government as soon as a black man came to power. My hunch is that the Tea Partiers are no more genuine than the "progressive" libertarians of the Bush years, who dumped the anti-war, anti-authoritarian rhetoric the moment "their" party came to power. I believe that the Tea Party fills the exact same ecological niche, and supporting it's aims will ultimately have much the same effect: namely, none.



I've always felt a bit... bad, about this hunch of mine. I hate assuming the worst and thinking ill of other people, on the offchance that they don't really deserve my cynicism. So I'm glad to see that my instincts are probably correct.


ashtar. - 2013-11-12

You need a blog. Get a blog. I would read your blog.


EvilHomer - 2013-11-12

As for the issue raised in this video, I disagree with Mr Phillips' proposal, but for all sorts of complicated reasons that I won't get into now. I do agree with the claim that our electoral system has some serious problems, and Mr Buchanan does actually raise at least one or two interesting points (wrong, but interesting). I just fail to see how limiting the suffrage to property holders would actually HELP the situation. The apocryphal Churchill quote is really quite apt - democracy IS the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

Anyway, a real in-depth analysis of the proposal would require a lot of time and effort, and frankly, I can't be bothered to put in either at the moment. Unless someone can think of a way to relate this matter to ponies...?


Oscar Wildcat - 2013-11-12

You could just tell them the truth, homie. You can kiss your pensions and VA goodbye if the people funding the tea party actually get their way.

But perhaps you all want to play chicken again, and shut down the government? I'm all for that, and quite ready to play again. This time, let's make it like 6 months or something. Come on, I dare you. Double dog dare. Boomer^2 dare!


EvilHomer - 2013-11-12

Oh, actually, hang on, real quick. One thing I WOULD just like to throw on the table here is, maybe we COULD get a property-limited sufrage to work?

The Tea Party is fond of appealing to Revolutionary imagery, yes? Consider the slogan, "No taxation without representation!"

Well, why not take this slogan at face value? We could make a trade. The suffrage can be limited to only those who own property - the suffrage is, after all, little more than a symbolic gesture, one that confers no REAL power, at least not when you measure it against the power to control public discourse - a power enjoyed exclusively by those within the moneyed, landed elite *anyway*. So really, we'd be losing a cultural ritual, and little else. (additional point: modern elections, farcical though they may be, confer upon the government the *illusion* of a moral mandate. This makes it ever harder for the lower classes to assert their own rights and interests when they are violated; after all, if the state is doing something you don't like and would never have approved of their doing in a million years - such as torturing Arabs or wiretapping citizens - the state can simply turn around and say, well, your votes told us this was OK! Don't like it, tough, democracy, vote again next time. Contrast this with, say, a monarchical system, in which there IS no illusory mandate, and in which people are completely within their rights to kick up a fuss when the system abuses them. "Help help I'm being repressed!" As opposed to "Help help my vote didn't count ah well next time 'round for sure")

In exchange, non-landowners will be exempt from taxes, and, by extension, many of the social and economic regulatory laws which the state bureaucracy imposes upon them. No representation? No taxation. Simple. Non-landowners will not have to pay income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, whatever. Landowners will have to foot the bill entirely on their own.



Elections will work themselves out in much the same manner as they do already, the rich will be taxed even higher, and the poor will get keep more money. Everyone wins!


ashtar. - 2013-11-12

Such a system would be inherently unstable. Those in power would use their control of the state to rig the system in their favor. Those out of power would have no means of redressing injustice other than violence or the threat of violence.


baleen - 2013-11-12

Actual libertarians acknowledge that property in itself can be a form of tyranny when taken to its logical conclusion, that the most successful property owners and their children own the most property and everybody else ends up in debt...

The Founders evolved from such an age, where the landed gentry imposed debts upon the lower classes who's grandchildren would be paying it off by selling their own children to settle ever more draconian interests.

There's really good reasons why this sort of language was not in the Constitution.


Bort - 2013-11-12

"they strike me not as libertarians, but rather as Bush-era conservatives, recast for the Obama years"

Yep, exactly that. What you may not recall is, when Clinton became president, suddenly Republicans got all religious about spending and taxes, after 12 years of Reagan / Bush wrecking the economy. Republicans do this same song and dance every time; it's just that this time they put on costumes.

And one other thing: in 1995 or so, Newt Gingrich and his bunch were loud newcomers who could not possibly have been as stupid as they pretended to be; they accused Clinton of all sorts of things but they knew they were just stirring shit. But today's crop -- Michelle Bachmann and frineds -- really are that fucking stupid; they "grew up" with Newt Gingrich and didn't understand it was cynical politics. It's no longer politicians stirring up the rubes; it's rubes stirring up the rubes.

You're correct to be cynical about Teabaggers; they're really some of the dumbest, worst people America has to offer. Here's Matt Taibbi talking about them:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-on-the-t ea-party-20100928


Oscar Wildcat - 2013-11-12

Real Libertarians would not join the army either; given that the only place with _more_ restrictions on your rights and freedoms is a jail cell.


Oscar Wildcat - 2013-11-12

Now now Bort, Sister Sarah is as cynical as they come. This is the person who made their political bones getting the oil industry to share drilling profits with every Alaskan. That's pretty much socialism in a nutshell. I suppose she's repudiated that by now, but it's what got her the governorship. If she wasn't so cynical in her approach, it's likely she's still be a force in US politics.


memedumpster - 2013-11-12

"One question that is often put to me by my friends at the VA, is why don't I get involved with the Tea Party?"

You're not a traitor? That would have been my guess.


cognitivedissonance - 2013-11-12

So I reconnected with Jared Sloan, EvilHomer. It occurs to me that you are both equally logorrheic in an endearing way.


memedumpster - 2013-11-12

EvilHomer may have an interesting idea here. If corporations became the sole landowners, they could act as a capitalist electoral college, with points being related to manpower on their workforce. If they couldn't somehow make true mind controlled slaves of people, jobs competition would be directly tied to corporate political power, making the worker the most important part of the company. Corporations could politically outmaneuver one another by poaching each others' workforce. Dead workers would also weaken them politically. Purging the workforce would be genocide, and they'd have no one to sell crap to.


RockBolt - 2013-11-12

Sounds a bit like the bafflingly complicated arrangement the City of London has, because almost no one actually lives there many votes are cast instead by the companies of the workers who commute there

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc


SteamPoweredKleenex - 2013-11-12

If owning land = paying taxes, the rich would just rig their accounting to appear that they don't actually own the land. It would be owned by a holding company that exists in some nebulous tax-loophole limbo that they can siphon money from and still use the property without paying any taxes on it.

It's no different than what they already do, all while whining that paying more than 15% is tyranny.


chumbucket - 2013-11-12

Movement implosion


Hooker - 2013-11-12

How can someone influential just come out and say something like that? I seem to find myself asking this question a lot lately, too.


Hooker - 2013-11-12

Like, I'm not even asking how can someone think that. I was making websites and on IRC and newsgroups and ICQ as a teenager in the 90s. I saw the social side of the Internet begin and evolve to the way it is now. I have a pretty good understanding of how people think worse things than they publicly say. I'm wondering how someone who is in the business of politics - what they do all day is politics - can think that's even a remotely reasonable thing to say ever.


SteamPoweredKleenex - 2013-11-12

It's been noted recently that the wealthy and influential that perpetuate a lot of the right-wing baloney actually buy into the fictions they're promoting. Previously, yeah, it was assumed that monied interests would get pundits or politicians to say outrageous things like all poor people are lazy or choose to be poor, all immigrants are drug dealers, etc.

Things like the hidden-camera footage of Romney's 47% speech pretty much show that these guys have bought their own big lie. They're also used to not being told "no" about anything, including "you really shouldn't say that out loud."


Bort - 2013-11-12

Uh, guys ... ? Even if you own a trailer, the park still owns the land you're own.


memedumpster - 2013-11-12

Shit, I almost fived my own video due to this comment.
Here you go, ☆☆☆☆☆


Bort - 2013-11-12

You have my permission to five-star your own video, and that's whether or not you own land. It's a very good video and everyone else has been five-starring it, you might as well too.


cognitivedissonance - 2013-11-12

Carry it out to the logical ends of the conclusion and you realize that all them propah-tay owning white folks would lose said propah-tay the second they cease to pay their propah-tay taxes.


CIWB - 2013-11-12

A lot of dirt poor rural white people own their own land. Land's cheap in Cooter's Hollow, Arkansas and the like.


Oscar Wildcat - 2013-11-12

Yes of course and this is why it is being proposed. It would make the cities completely at the political mercy of the rural/suburban areas. You can guess how that would skew the vote...


memedumpster - 2013-11-12

A lot of dirt poor rural white families own land, so if it goes off one landowner, one vote, the land will have to be legally divided $$$$ by a state zoning $$$$$ officer $$$$$$$$$$ so that the proper voting $$$$$$$$$$$$$ qualifications... what... can't afford it, well fuck you one vote, hillbilly.


pyslexic dharmacist - 2013-11-17

"What's next, Pat, ENGLISH ONLY voting? Ahahaha..."
"Yes!"
"........"


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