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Essential Trump/Alt-Right Ridicule Thread

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petee said:
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new.



i know my flogging of a biden ad won't go over well with many here. as i've said before, biden's a senator from DE, which long ago won the race to the bottom, and he didn't get re-elected repeatedly without massive corporate support.

otoh, trump.

otooh, nobody with electoral politics, including sanders, is going to have a proletarian brief. so the choice is trump, or any other life form, including an orchid, or a guy with his own lifetime record as a corporate puppet, because that's the guy the party chose, and because the international proletarian revolution won't happen, it seems, before november of this year.
 
not really sure this is the right thread for this but, ladies and gentlemen, Tyler Cowen:



(seen elsewhere)

What are university endowments for, anyway? This debate has become more intense with the arrival of Covid-19 and the accompanying economic devastation. There is now a clear division between two visions of a university: Is it a community devoted to the well-being of its members, or an elitist institution dedicated to learning above all else?



Some think that endowments are for bad times when colleges and universities need to dip into their savings to safeguard the well-being of their communities. In that view, an endowment might be used to compensate students for hardships suffered and instruction foregone.




A petition to the University of Pennsylvania protests student evictions from dorms and asks that all university students be provided with housing security. It also demands that the wages of hourly workers, such as janitors and those in food service, be maintained. (Similar petitions are circulating at many universities.) In case you are wondering, as of last June the University of Pennsylvania’s endowment was estimated to be $14.7 billion.




So far the university has not announced any plan to satisfy the demands of the petitioners, nor has it announced tuition refunds, nor refunds for room and board fees.



Elsewhere, the University of Chicago is paying its food-service workers. Harvard is offering 30 days’ pay for its dining service employees, but nothing for the subcontracted workers. As of last June, the Harvard endowment was valued at $40.9 billion.


If you spend time at these universities, as I have, you will notice that the overwhelming majority of the political rhetoric of both the faculty and the students is supportive of egalitarianism and is critical of accumulated wealth. Yet the actual behavior of these universities does not accord with that rhetoric.

That contradiction has now become impossible to sustain.

I support a radical vision of the university as an institution devoted to learning and innovation above all. If a school is successful and fortunate enough to have a significant endowment, I am happy to see that school invest it at (one hopes) high rates of return. Even putting the mission of the school aside, those investments are good for overall economic growth, which in turn enriches the broader citizenry. The accumulated wealth also means that those universities will endure and reflect some of our civilization’s highest ideals.

Only a few institutions in the world have been in continuous existence since medieval times, and most of those are universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Bologna. (The Icelandic Parliament also has a long heritage.) For the most part, those institutions have been geared toward investing and accumulating wealth and social capital, not spending it down, and the world is much better off because of that. 1

The real contributions of Harvard, MIT and Stanford to the world are not the food-service workers they hire. They are the ideas and innovations produced by its researchers, plus the talented students they educate. Less successful universities also contribute those same broader benefits, even if at a lower scale of effectiveness. Furthermore, the top schools rely on those lesser institutions, if only as future employers of their graduate students and thus maintaining a liquid market in scientific endeavors.

Harvard, Stanford, and MIT stay true to their missions not by regularly asking whether they ought to redistribute their endowments to starving people around the world. And their food service workers are not more needy because of Covid-19 than other possible recipients of the funds — the dengue victims in Central America, say.

I am not saying these universities shouldn’t do something charitable for their workers. They should, if only to maintain amicable relations within the university community itself. I am saying that their moral obligation to extend charity to those workers is not very strong. Had such charity been prioritized in the past, the U.S. never would have developed and maintained top universities. Part of America’s greatness as a nation, and as an innovator, is its unwillingness to ask anew every day whether its elite accumulations of wealth should be torn down and rededicated to everyday purposes of a supposedly greater benevolence.

Many of the technologies, innovations and companies crucial to the fight against Covid-19 will come from colleges and universities. Those schools need a single-minded dedication to their missions of learning, research and innovation — no matter how urgent or extreme the demands of the day. And that means saying no to a lot of those demands, in the process acknowledging the elitist ethos these schools have long embodied. To say that these schools don’t need that much money is to underestimate the focus needed to maintain that quality.
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As long as we're posting about corrupt preachers:

babylonbee.com

Joel Osteen Tests Negative For Christianity

HOUSTON, TX—On a video posted to his Facebook page Thursday, a relieved Joel Osteen announced that he's tested negative for biblically faithful Christianity.
babylonbee.com babylonbee.com

If you remember, this is the guy who kept his church closed to hurricane victims. He finally opened it up after getting some (deserving) bad press.
 
petee said:
new.



i know my flogging of a biden ad won't go over well with many here. as i've said before, biden's a senator from DE, which long ago won the race to the bottom, and he didn't get re-elected repeatedly without massive corporate support.

otoh, trump.

otooh, nobody with electoral politics, including sanders, is going to have a proletarian brief. so the choice is trump, or any other life form, including an orchid, or a guy with his own lifetime record as a corporate puppet, because that's the guy the party chose, and because the international proletarian revolution won't happen, it seems, before november of this year.
Click to expand...

I guess it’s all about which rapist is the better one to lead the country.
 
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