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Comments
this site must be comedy gold to you then.
Yup.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
Dear IJBM,
If I don't post for some time, please understand that I am currently in the process of constructing an underground bunker in an undisclosed location somewhere in the Australian outback. Having been thoroughly intimidated, I now require a strategically and tactically sound location within which to shit bricks.
Regards,
MadassAlex
So, er, I guess, we leave this thread to die, right?
Well you could try to avoid derailing threads into stupid town by being needlessly contrarian for the sake of being... needlessly contrarian.
Well, technically I derailed this thread only after - and because - Godwins started to fly, but... sure, I guess?
Can somebody explain poll tax to me and how it is bad?
So far what I'm reading is that it is a flat tax based on each person in a household. e.g. 5% of your income is taken no matter what. Make $10,000 a year? $500. Make $1,000,000 a year? $50,000
Only real issue I'm reading so far is how it goes off of each person in a household, which can target the lower classes due to how the richer you are, the fewer kids you tend to have, but if it's based on the income of each person... Then isn't that moot as a kid would have an income of $0?
Before the poll tax, taxation was based on housing value. The poll tax didn't have a cap, which meant taxation went up, and the poor were overwhelmingly burdened compared to the rich.
It's the same problem as with a flat sales tax. A blind 5-8% increase isn't that much for a wealthy person who's already got all his bases covered thousands of times over and will just going to drop it in a reliable asset like bonds or real estate, but for poorer people that's quite easily the difference between subsistence and no rent.
Also, Jesus Christ people, we're gravedancing even worse than the TVT thread and pulled in Hitler. Come on, guys. The lady was bad, but she was out of power before most of this forum was born. There was less celebration over bin Laden and Kim-Jong Il.
I'd say something, but I'm the bad guy here.
How's that? Weren't you pretty much just saying that comparing Thatcher to Hitler is stupid?
You know, seriously speaking, that might be the key to it. Back there at TVT, the one with the most coherent argument for Thatcher was a person who claimed to be old enough to remember Thatcher's times. Heh, I know this effect pretty well.
Her influence can still be felt long after her reign both in the UK and elsewhere (she and Reagan were BFFs after all). Not to mention several British politicians actively trying to emulate her example. To say that she isn't relevant, even after her death, is ignorance of the highest order.
Thatcherism is still very much alive here. It's been a part of British government ever since she left power.
Saigyouji: What do you mean no cap? What is the exact relevance of this? An example of the poll tax in action, with another example of no cap going horribly, horribly wrong?
Also:
Fine, I don't understand fully, and while I think a party over anybody's death shy of Hitler, Mao, and so on is tacky, I would never deny somebody that
But these riots are just... o.o (Warning: Daily Fail link. Take everything with a dump truck of salt)
I must admit that this is fucking hilarious though:
Essentially, due to how it worked, poor people paid more tax than before, and rich people paid less.
EDIT: To give a totally fictionalised example with made up statistics. Say you have a couple earning £10k a year each. They live in a house worth £100k. Houses worth £100k pay £500 in tax a year. Poll tax comes in. Together, they now pay £1000 a year. Now we take a single guy who earns £1mil a year, and lives in a £2mil house. £2mil houses pay £100k a year. Poll tax comes in. Guy now pays £50k a year.
The Thatcher-Reagan Combine (also the name of my new band) is hugely influential on modern radical conservative ideology (I am speaking in American terms, forgive my ignorance as to what the international equivalents would be), so I'd say that people certainly have a right to hate her if nothing else.
That said I really don't see the point of celebrating.
older people being older? Yeah man I know that effect too.
Look, I didn't like Reagan either, and I'm personally getting epically fucked over by the snowball he pushed over the edge (which has actually gotten worse in the years since). I wasn't throwing a goddamn party when he died in 2004. It strikes me as a completely pointless gesture of spite.
Thatcher's misdeeds and political ripples are long since on the history books. If you wanted to break out the champagne, the time to do it was in 1990 when her party ditched her, not 20+ years later when a random old lady finally kicked the bucket after years of dementia.
@Lazuli: I suddenly get what you meant in the "is it just me" thread.
Entire towns were destroyed by Thatcher's policies. Our industry has never recovered from what she did.
it's all bog-land.
Reagan's policy currently has about half our nation living in poverty, saddled an entire generation with unprecedented education debt and then shut them out of the labor force by flooding the market with laid-off experienced workers en masse, and rather than any sign of improvement, business interest is almost openly paying off legislators (themselves largely ascendant businessmen who got there on the first wave of that policy) to make it worse.
Suffice to say, I sympathize with the situation.
snip.
I ought to have chosen a different famous leader, I suppose. Choose an example you like.
The point is that the social policies of Hitler were expunged for good reason; the likes of Thatcher continue to thrive, despite being similarly regressive and discriminatory. This has less to do with who's "worse" and more to do with what kind of malevolence is socially and politically acceptable. What most don't understand about the context of World War II is that Hitler received support from the UK and USA before he got the bright idea to invade anyone, so it was only his overt act of war that brought out the ire of other nations. No-one outside of Germany, at the time, really gave a damn about his policies concerning people of any origin but white European.
That's how political evil works, really. It depends on who has the power and who a given leader pisses off; the retribution for militant Islamic extremism against the West has been the deaths of thousands of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq. World War II had the numbers, but we shouldn't pretend that what goes on today is inherently different -- or even what went on back then. The internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps after Pearl Harbour, for instance, or the dropping of nuclear weapons on civilians.
We look at Hitler as a monster because the Allies won, and because the actions of the Nazi party are very easy to rail against given how that conflict influenced contemporary moral values. To some, though, the bombs on Japan "had to be dropped", or the citizenry of Germany "deserved" to be bombed themselves. A lot of people just accept what happened as some kind of lesser evil, all the way up to the Rape of Berlin. I don't accept those viewpoints whatsoever and we ought to hold our leaders, past and present, to a moral standard appropriate to their credentials.
If the end result of the likes of Thatcher's policies is that people can't find a place to live, can't find work, can't receive proper medical care and can't eat healthily, then I really see little difference. I just don't see why educated, intelligent people have this pop-cultural understanding of historical figures like Hitler and Stalin, building them up into these Darth Vader-like personas, when their largest crime in the eyes of history was just being too obvious. Conservative US politicians still use policy to target African-Americans, for instance -- the codeword has just become "urban". We're not far out of eight years of Bush cutting taxes for the wealthy, and the Obama administration saw fit to bail out the banks when it was primarily their failure that led to the 2008 recession. The same administration that continues to rack up civilians casualties in the Middle East, now via the latest Predator drone technology. Companies like BP are poised to sell, of all things, renewable energy.
The mass culling of the Jews in Nazi Germany was absolutely horrible. Stalin's human wave tactics similarly so. That's hardly up for debate. As I said, though, I don't get why we universally consider those things horrible, but shrug at a backlog of accepted and even celebrated politicians in social democracies that have enacted policies -- and continue to enact policies -- that contain racial, class and gender biases, up to and including the restriction of medical, economic and social rights based on these constructed divisions. And policies that continue to support colonialism under a different guise. It's as though we're willing to just accept modern atrocities as they are, as long as they're slow enough and subtle enough.
The scale is different. The kind, or the typology, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much the same. Ask Palestine.
Befitting that a thread about an awful person be as awful as the subject.
Hm, funnily enough, it doesn't even look that uniquely bad. I mean, if I just came here and read it from the start, I wouldn't really get what was so special with this one that it caused that much of a shitstorm.