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[Frumple]

How the f did that guy become embassador in the first place?

By being an ambassador that embarrassed our country :V

... incidentally, I could get behind hijacking the old unused variant. Ambassador that more or less is an active detriment to their country's dignity. It's a nice encapsulated description of some of the louder shitty ambassadorial appointees, and gives a reason for embassador to exist that isn't annoying people and confusing spellcheckers.

[Antioch]

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?"

Your president, folks.

Also, just answered your own stupid, stupid question, Donald.

But the USA IS the shithole country nowadays.

[martinuzz]

Yeah, the typo was too glorious to correct.

[scriver]

Ambassadorial positions are one of the few that are still strongly a part of the spoils system. As the US generally strives to have relations with every nation in the world the amount of diplomatic positions that need filling are massive, and tend to change between Presidents who also want their appointees to be loyal. The Netherlands is a nice place to live and does not have high tensions with the US, so the ambassador there in a normal Presidency is going to have some chops but also definitely be a friend of the administration too. In the standards of Trumpworld, you get...well, this. Though at least he said all those things before he was ambassador.

Don't even ask what the standards are like for ambassadorships in tropical nations the US is apathetic towards.

It looks like he's already been ambassador for several years.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

No? He began his duties literally two days ago.

[Starver]

What is absolutely hilarious is the way the staid BBC newsreaders are reporting amd directly quoting the words Trump used to describe certain countries. But, in the midday news on R4 at least, they worked their way round to it by reporting Boris Johnson calling his (Boris's!) successor a "popinjay" (vain/conceited person, esp. one dressed extravagantly).

(Face it, 'Murica, you'd actually much rather have someone like Boris than Trump in the Whitehouse. And it's even possible. Make it happen, people!)

[scriver]

No? He began his duties literally two days ago.

Oh, I took martinizzz saying it was three years ago to mean that he was already ambassador at that point.

[McTraveller]

Laughing about the situation of those who are getting shat on while being closer to the top of the pile of shitters tends to engender fairly understandable anger.

In general I agree that inequality is a breeding ground for such things.  But part of what I was saying is - generally speaking, most of the people "at the top" (by sheer numbers at least) are not laughing at those at the bottom.

Do the needs/wants of a stupendously large number outweigh the needs/wants of the merely huge number?

Yes. That's just basic math. More is more than less, and less is less than more.

Also, you talk a lot about sacrificing for the greater good. The stance of the left generally is not that anything should be taken away from anyone, but rather that new resources should flow towards those who need them.
If there's a table with 99 starving people with empty plates, and 1 fat guy whose plate is overflowing with food, and you bring in a cart full of food and just park it next to that fat guy, and you don't see anything wrong with that picture, there is something wrong with your moral compass.

Right, more is more, less is less - but that doesn't mean that more is better.

There is a subtlety that is missed in the example about the table and meal as you have described though, and it characterizes some of the tension I think between the right and left.  The subtlety is this:  from where did that new cart of food originate?  Most on the right would say that if the already "wealthy" person made it themselves (or paid for it to be made) then it's perfectly fine that the food would only be delivered to them.  There's also the subtlety in the quantity of "new stuff" created.  Say the cart of food only has enough to satisfy, say, 5 people.  Which 5 of the starving should get it (assuming none goes to the person who made it/paid for it)?  Because if you divide up among all those who need it, they won't all get enough to be satisfied.

Other subtle questions - what level of inequality is "tolerable"?  Unless you argue that everyone should have exactly the same amount of wealth, that means there is some ratio on the spectrum between "everyone equal" and "1 has everything, the rest have nothing" that is acceptable.  How do you know you've achieved optimum?  I'm thinking it's probably empirical, not analytical - basically as a measure of relative unrest perhaps?

I'm not even talking about absolute wealth levels - let's take for instance a hypothetical situation where everyone has at least a lifestyle associated with, say, $50k annual income per person (so $100k for a house with two working people) in someplace like the southeast, which is a very middle-class standard of living.  But what if the richest person in that society has a hundred times that?  Would it cause unrest? What about a thousand? A million?

This leads me to hypothesize that it's not merely inequality that matters - it's inequality and the absolute value of the lowest wealth bracket.

[SalmonGod]

There is a subtlety that is missed in the example about the table and meal as you have described though, and it characterizes some of the tension I think between the right and left.  The subtlety is this:  from where did that new cart of food originate?  Most on the right would say that if the already "wealthy" person made it themselves (or paid for it to be made) then it's perfectly fine that the food would only be delivered to them. 

The people on the right would be wrong in the most conceited fashion, and playing into a negative stereotype about the rich.

They didn't make it.  The poor people under them that they underpay made it.  Others would have loved to be involved in making it, but the rich only agree to hire (and overwork) so many people.  So it's not by choice that the others have no claim of labor, it's by social construct that is again enforced by the rich person.

There's also the subtlety in the quantity of "new stuff" created.  Say the cart of food only has enough to satisfy, say, 5 people.  Which 5 of the starving should get it (assuming none goes to the person who made it/paid for it)?  Because if you divide up among all those who need it, they won't all get enough to be satisfied.

And this is totally wrong and irrelevant in modern day.  We have enough.  We really should be living in a post-scarcity society when it comes to basic necessities.  We don't because of two basic truths about capitalism.

1.  Those who are wealthy enough to own and exert significant control over distribution of resources are only incentivized to care about distributing to those who are useful to their agenda (increasing their share of the economy).  In other words, if you can't generate profit, then no food for you.  Even if there is no practical shortage, there is still the imaginary number game of the economy associated with those resources.  Unconditional sharing makes no sense by raw numbers, and because it endangers the legitimacy of the imaginary number game that the wealthy depend on to grant them their special status.

2.  Capitalism assigns value according to scarcity.  If a resource is too abundant, it fucks up the imaginary number game.  So far, this is always coped with by artificially enforcing scarcity.

[Frumple]

... also, even in some odd future where there is only enough for five, just RNG would leave you better off than the 1 & 9 if you really can't figure out how to get enough food on all the plates. Only being able to feed five doesn't mean nine should starve and one should eat. There's nothing subtle about the scenario being screwed up, or about how roughly any change (save maybe ones that involve actually eating people) would be an improvement.

End of the day optimum can get fucked until we have better.* Frankly can get fucked afterwards too if we can manage less optimization to continue to make things better.

* And if you really want to quibble over what that is, call back when hunger, homelessness, lack of healthcare, and lack of effective shelter against natural disaster are all casual choices made freely instead of more or less anything else. It's a good starting point.

[RedKing]

I might actually just join RedKing in Maoist guerilla insurgency.

Join us, brother! We have biscuits made from the tears of orphans, the wills of strong women, and the tenderly baked flesh of Steve Bannon.

Actually, I just emerged from the frozen jungle to comment on this bit:

The democrat party and left wing americans in general are not the GOP, and a lot of that villain fuck the other tribe shit doesn't resonate nearly as well, especially without the decades of priming right wing media has been hammering the GOP base with. Maybe that'll change in the next few years, but if it doesn't going that route would screw us sideways about as fast as straight up running trump as a dem candidate would at this point.

Can I just say that if anyone, ANYONE ran on a platform of something like "Let's draw and quarter the CEOs of the Fortune 500 and hang their severed body parts in front of the NYSE as a warning", they'd have my vote in a heartbeat?

"Fuck the other tribe" resonates BEAUTIFULLY for me these days. I don't want "justice" or "fairness", I want total-war, scorched-earth REVENGE. Revenge for the last 20 years of my working life being largely for naught, and pre-emptive revenge for the next 20 years being just to avoid bankruptcy.

Run another pro-corporate centrist like Hillary, trusting that even that is more palatable than another four years of Trump? You'll get four more years of Trump.

[smjjames]

Not sure if there is a Democrat approaching or are more anti-corporatist than the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders though. At least none of the ones that seem to be heading for a 2020 run. fakeedit: Well, maybe Kamala Harris?

Which I suppose is part of the problem, their bench is so thin from atrophying that the new crop in 2016 and 2018 might not have the experience or political capital or whatever to win. Though being a congressperson for two or four years is a hell of a lot more experience than Trump would have had.

[Arx]

RedKing, I'm surprised how little empathy you seem to have for Republicans given that you're behaving exactly the same way as them except on the other side. You're railing on in literally exactly the same way as Republicans that want to repeal Obama's laws just because Obama made them.

[Frumple]

RedKing, I'm surprised how little empathy you seem to have for Republicans given that you're behaving exactly the same way as them except on the other side. You're railing on in literally exactly the same way as Republicans that want to repeal Obama's laws just because Obama made them.

Well, no. He's railing on them because of what they've done, not who has done it. Unless you call hating obama for being a black person doing friggin' anything as equivalent to being real pissed off at the GOP (or businessfolk, or whoever) for that whole decades of persistent sabotage and hate thing, I guess.

That said, it also looks a fair bit like he doesn't give a shit if it is the same, so long as it can screw over the folks that have been fucking him over for the last basically ever. Empathy burns out pretty easily if it gets pissed on for a few decades, really...

Can I just say that if anyone, ANYONE ran on a platform of something like "Let's draw and quarter the CEOs of the Fortune 500 and hang their severed body parts in front of the NYSE as a warning", they'd have my vote in a heartbeat?

"Fuck the other tribe" resonates BEAUTIFULLY for me these days. I don't want "justice" or "fairness", I want total-war, scorched-earth REVENGE. Revenge for the last 20 years of my working life being largely for naught, and pre-emptive revenge for the next 20 years being just to avoid bankruptcy.

Sure. It'll do it for some people. Hell, I'm not entirely against it -- I've mentioned before that I'd give good odds literally beheading most of our healthcare system's upper management would cause an improvement to said system, ferex -- though I'd hella' rather just do something that doesn't involve explicit mass murder. Definitely past the point of having a degree of sympathy for the whole fucked for the last forever pass the pitchfork and torches thing. Don't really want blood but it's a fair bit past the point of understanding the allure.

I'm just pretty damn sure there's a real damn big portion of the potential democrat/leftwing coalition that would be notably turned off by moving towards that sort of thing. End of the day there's a lot of folks that really just kinda' don't like that sort of shit, and turning away from it is a notable portion of why they consistently don't vote R. Plenty of room in regards to policy inclination, but scorched earth rhetoric is hella' more likely to burn Ds, as much or more than it rallies them, than is worth risking shit on. End of the day we need catharsis like we need decency, to exactly the point it wins elections/gets the conservative wing of the country to stop actively shitting on everything.

... and while folks pissed enough to stop giving a shit about much but hurting those that hurt them do seem to be growing, they're still a damn sight distance from being large enough in number to make up for what that'd repel. At the absolute least, you'll probably need another 10-20 years at minimum before it starts reaching that point. Enough for most folks over around 40-50-ish to start falling out of political relevancy. Until then, the moral high ground shit is going to matter, regardless of how loudly people screech about it not winning elections. The lack can still damn well lose them, too.

[McTraveller]

And this is totally wrong and irrelevant in modern day.  We have enough.  We really should be living in a post-scarcity society when it comes to basic necessities.  We don't because of two basic truths about capitalism.

1.  Those who are wealthy enough to own and exert significant control over distribution of resources are only incentivized to care about distributing to those who are useful to their agenda (increasing their share of the economy).  In other words, if you can't generate profit, then no food for you.  Even if there is no practical shortage, there is still the imaginary number game of the economy associated with those resources.  Unconditional sharing makes no sense by raw numbers, and because it endangers the legitimacy of the imaginary number game that the wealthy depend on to grant them their special status.

2.  Capitalism assigns value according to scarcity.  If a resource is too abundant, it fucks up the imaginary number game.  So far, this is always coped with by artificially enforcing scarcity.

I actually agree with those observations, I just generally try to think about why, not just "it is."

That said - one thing that saddens me is that there are two approaches to bring things away from the inevitable concentration that happens with capitalism as we now have it.  The first, which is probably more difficult and requires more patience, is to start working toward a cultural shift so that people start moving away from that type of capitalism naturally.  The second, which seems to get the most attention, is the "we need to get people in a position of power to force it to happen quickly."  Maybe there's a combination of the two, but personally I'd rather the culture shift one even though I won't be around to see the fruits of such a shift, I'm already halfway through a typical life expectancy, and it's likely such a shift will take two generations.

We may get something nasty and disruptive quickly anyway, because of automation or a climate disaster or a disease disaster or a geologic disaster.  But looking for a fight between ideological tribes just sounds like a lot of angst for little gain.  Aren't there enough wealthy people on the left that could start buying up lots of land and simply not concentrating the wealth?  There is no law against not trying to get the biggest profit you can, so why don't people do this?

I guess I don't know how much capital and what minimum population it would take to start such a thing and have it be self-sustaining.  Do you need a million people? 100k? 10k?