Stop picking on rich people!! If you hats the rich, then you’re just like a Nazi.
But you can pick on the Queen, since she isn’t so rich anymore.
Sad about Pete Seeger.
A tale of Chicago’s Two Cities.
Pretty pictures make me happy.
Fantastic guide for arranging framed pictures.
Apt. 11d 
In that first link, Yglesias has the best rhetorical question I’ve heard in a while.
“Because who better to solve the world’s problems than the people who benefit from the status quo?”
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No doubt, Chicago is two cities, as is New York. But the alternative seems to be cities like Detroit, which is definitely just one.
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The Yglesias article is mostly about overvaluing the intellect/ability to contribute of the super-rich. That’s an issue we grapple with a lot — it’s really easy for someone who is successful in one thing to think they are insightful and knowledgeable about everything and that everyone should listen to them. The key is whether you are willing to listen and learn when you enter an area outside your own expertise. Then, you have a chance of being smart. But if you think you have all the answers, you probably don’t.
Of course, the same complaint applies to sports stars, actors, and scientists (out of their own area of expertise).
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Here’s your example! Magnus Carlsen versus Bill Gates, 79 seconds:
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-v-magnus-carlsen-in-chess-2014-1
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The Nazis were big into scapegoating and self-pity and redistribution (namely redistributing stuff from “bad people” to Germans). Everything bad that happened to Germany was always somebody else’s fault.
Closer to home, David Duke LOVED Occupy Wall Street. He hates bankers, too.
I give you “Occupy Zionist Wall Street,” a very special message brought to you by David Duke
I only watched the beginning but I heard Glenn Beck riffing on it hilariously a couple years ago, when Occupy Wall Street was more of a thing.
The rhetoric about “the 1%” and banker-blaming is toxic, and people who use it should remember that it has extremely nasty reverberations. The US Jewish population is right under 2% of our population, and there’s obviously a substantial overlap between that 1% and the Occupy Wall Street 1%.
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That’s just absurd. The defining characteristic of the Nazis wasn’t self-pity and scapegoating. Those are common (nearly universal) human traits. It was how far they were willing go to “correct” the problems. Also, it’s offensive to elide the difference between punching up (e.g. criticizing those in actual power) vs. punching down (e.g. blaming those who can’t effectively fight back) on these matters.
And there is no way to explain the economy of the past five years without blaming bankers. They really did cause massive devastation to others in the search of private profit.
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Nazism made no goddamn sense as an ideology, since it was some weird melange of varying thought fads and forms of racism from the late 19th century onwards. In so far as they had a plan, the Nazis main motivations were colonialism & national chauvinism/racism. The Germans wanted to be a colonial power, and they were going to do it in Eastern Europe. America had Manifest Destiny, the Third Reich had Lebensraumpolitick. There is really, really no way that international solidarity with the working class fits in anywhere with colonial expansionist settler state mentality. The Nazis came to power on a pro-family values, anti-Bolshevism ticket, with the support of Germany’s wealthy industrial class. It was absolutely their desire to preserve the status quo, except without any ethnic minorities, interesting art or music, and women in the workforce, and with control of the Ukrainian wheat bowl.
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I think that the self-pity and the scapegoating were really essential and characteristic features of the Nazi ethos. They’d been done wrong, they’d been betrayed, they could have won WWI if they hadn’t been been stabbed in the back on the home front, their ethnic German brothers were being mistreated in Eastern Europe, Germany had been deprived of lebensraum, etc. These people were dripping with self-pity and scapegoating was very much the Nazi modus operandi (see the Reichstag fire and the German attempt to make it look like they were foiling an invasion attempt by the Poles, of all people).
With regard to punching up versus punching down, if 99 people jump one guy (even if he is a really big guy), that is by definition punching down, and it is cowardly.
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Seriously, the guy wrote “Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now? ” He didn’t draw complex parallels (which should always be tread with extreme care — frankly I think that no one but a true scholar should attempt to draw parallels between anything else and the Nazis– it’s rarely produces a productive conversation). He called progressive radicalism the descendant of Kristallnacht. And used as as examples people’s complaints about rising housing prices in San Francisco and the replacement of public buses with private buses for the rich, as well, as, calling Danielle Steele a “snob.” I know there are anarchists out there breaking windows on occasion, and even that wouldn’t be a parallel, but, really, calling Danielle Steele a snob has nothing to do with Krystalnacht in any stretch of the imagination.
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No, really the has a comically exaggerated sense of self-pity and no sense at all. It’s not even in the ballpark. Middle-class teenagers muttering about “slavery” when they have to take the garbage out are in this same territory.
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My favorite part is that he was actually convicted of killing a guy with his yacht, paid only a small fine, and still feels put upon.
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I believe Perkins is upset by the anti-google protests. There seem to be various factions on the left: some hate all rich people; some say bankers bad, tech millionaires good. I don’t know if the factions have separate lunchroom tables.
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Oh we all hate bankers. except for George Baily, but of course, he didn’t run his bank for the benefit of the capital holders, so we can generally sit at the same table. Just have to be a bit careful about the talk.
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My opinion of Bill Gates goes up ’cause he’s willing to be beaten at chess and not just keep pretending that he can beat a master by never playing one. I keep hoping that he’ll learn from the education mistakes, too, ’cause he does seem like someone who can listen.
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