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Messages - More Than Mortal

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14101
Quote
It emerged that there had been three previous reports into the problem which had been suppressed or ignored by officials, either because they did not like or did not believe the findings.

Tuesday’s report concluded that by far the majority of perpetrators were Asian men, and said council officials had been unwilling to address the issue for fear of being labelled racist.

I wonder what was being overlooked. Riding a bike without a helmet or something, because they were wearing a turban, maybe? Nothing to get in a twist about, I'm sure.

Quote
More than 1,400 children were sexually abused during a period of over 16 years by gangs of paedophiles after police and council bosses turned a blind eye for fear of being labelled racist, a damning report has concluded.
Senior officials were responsible for “blatant” failures that saw victims, some as young as 11, being treated with contempt and categorised as being “out of control” or simply ignored when they asked for help.

In some cases, parents who tried to rescue their children from abusers were themselves arrested. Police officers even dismissed the rape of children by saying that sex had been consensual.

Downing Street on Tuesday night described the failure to halt the abuse in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, as “appalling”.

Following the publication of the report, the leader of Rotherham council, Roger Stone, resigned, but no other council employees will face disciplinary proceedings after it was claimed that there was not enough evidence to take action.

Or the mass rape of children. Yeah, that works too.

Sigh
Fuck this country.

14102
Brits who travel to Iraq or Syria will be arrested and presumed guilty on charges of terrorism.
Quote
We also need to be far more effective in preventing British and other foreigners from getting out there…We need to make it crystal clear that you will be arrested if you go out to Syria or Iraq without a good reason. At present the police are finding it very difficult to stop people from simply flying out via Germany, crossing the border, doing their ghastly jihadi tourism, and coming back. The police can and do interview the returnees, but it is hard to press charges without evidence. The law needs a swift and minor change so that there is a “rebuttable presumption” that all those visiting war areas without notifying the authorities have done so for a terrorist purpose.

Yeah, fuck you habeas corpus.

14103
The Flood / Re: I feel like a corpse
« on: August 27, 2014, 06:35:07 AM »
You look like a corpse, too.

14104
Serious / RBS to pay £15m fine over mortgage selling
« on: August 27, 2014, 12:13:45 AM »
For fuck sake.

I know it's small-fry in the world of finance, but it was poorly-thought out regulation which pushed banks into selling mortgages in the first place.

14105
If there isn't a pandemic or world war, yes it will happen. Early 1800s we were at 1 billion. Two hundred years later and we're sitting at 7 billion.

Better hope for colonies on the moon and mars.

Well, no.

Economic growth causes population stability and innovation allows us to better deal with the areas where the population is increasing.

14106
No.

What kind of disgusting violation of personal ownership is that?

14107
Serious / Re: The Good, the Bad and the Miliband
« on: August 26, 2014, 07:11:21 PM »
>hitch slapped applied to hitch's retarded brother

jesus christ
Well, we agree on something then.

Peter Hitchens is a fucking spastic penis.

14108
From the eyes of a judge, that point shouldn't be relevant. A judge's duty is to rule in accordance with the law, not make arbitrary value judgments on what the victim was doing at the time the crime was committed.
Oh yeah, well I agree with that.

14109
We may as well rename this the Economics forum.
I'm fine with that.

14110
Not exactly, no. Because you could through Compton as a woman fully dressed and be raped without showing any skin.

It isn't your fault if somebody shoots you because you guys got in a fight. You're pretty much condoning what the violent motherfuckers in the hood do. If you "disrespect" them they'll shoot you. You agree with that behavior?
Not at all, the blame lies solely on the criminal. I'm just saying it's a consequence of your behaviour. Does that somehow make you morally or legally responsible? No, of course not. But if you can take up habits to reduce your risk, then it's not a bad idea to do it.

14111
Answer my question.

As for your question: No, it's not a good idea. But it's one thing to be mugged, and quite another thing to be raped.

The victim of a crime is not at fault. Could they possibly have avoided the situation by taking precautions? Yes. But the BLAME lies on the rapist. He could have just as easily said "Hello" instead of raping her. However, it's naive to think that would happen. You need to expect and be prepared for the worst, and avoid it if you can. But that doesn't mean we should go around victim blaming.
I don't think the argument is one of blaming the victims, merely one of consequences.

As an aggregate, rapes will go down if women are less vulnerable. That's as far as the argument goes. If people want to spiral off and say women are "asking for it" then fine, but fuck 'em.

14112
Is it against the law for women to get drunk?
No, the point is not a normative, but a descriptive one.

The rapists should be completely morally and legally accountable for their actions. It seems obvious to suggest, however, that as the vulnerability of women declines so would the level of rapes. That's the only point being made.

14113
Not that we didn't already know.
Quote
Who pays corporate income taxes? Just one thing’s for sure: it’s not corporations.

This is because, as Mitt Romney famously put it, “corporations are people, my friend.” They also sell to people, buy from people, and are owned by people. Yes, sometimes you have to dig through layers of other corporations, pension funds, foundations, and the like to get to these people. But they’re there somewhere, trying to avoid getting smacked by corporate taxes.

In econospeak, where the burden lands is called tax incidence. “The cardinal rule of incidence analysis,” UC Berkeley economist Alan Auerbach once said, “is you do not talk about incidence analysis.”  Actually, no, he didn’t say that — although this does seem to be the rule that most journalists, politicians, corporate executives, and even economists writing for mainstream audiences follow. What Auerbach did write in 2005 was that “the cardinal rule of incidence analysis” is “that only individuals can bear the burden of taxation and that all tax burdens should be traced back to individuals.”

In the case of the corporate income tax, as the Harvard Business School’s Mihir Desai put it in an interview I recently did with him and his HBS colleague Bill George, “that tax is going to be borne by shareholders, workers, or customers.”

For a long time it was thought the owners paid the tax. That belief can be traced largely to a classic 1962 theoretical analysis by economist Arnold Harberger, who concluded that owners of capital — not just a corporation’s shareholders but anybody who owned some bonds, a house, whatever — bore almost all the burden of corporate income taxes in the U.S.

Harberger saw this as a bad thing. By taking money away from capital owners, the corporate income tax was depressing investment and distorting the economy. But for those more concerned with the distributional effects of taxation, Harberger’s model at least showed the burden landing on people who were wealthier than average.

His theoretical model, however, assumed a closed economy, one in which capital couldn’t flee to other countries and consumers couldn’t buy foreign products. As the world’s economies became more intertwined in recent decades, economists — Harberger among them — began constructing open-economy models that showed workers bearing a larger share of the burden.

This makes intuitive sense. If a country allows free capital flows and free trade and has a corporate tax rate much higher than that of its neighbors, investors can choose to buy shares in companies elsewhere that face a lower tax, and corporate management can choose to move operations abroad. Consumers, meanwhile, can buy from foreign suppliers. By comparison, workers are pretty immobile. It’s hard for them to switch employers, let alone countries. So the tax lands on them, in the form of lower wages and/or skimpier benefits. And as those at the top of today’s corporate hierarchies seem to have done a pretty great job of keeping their paychecks from being adversely affected, the impact is presumably greatest on those farther down in the organization.

That’s the theory, at least. These models are, as Jennifer Gravelle of the Congressional Budget Office pointed out in a 2010 summary of recent theoretical work, extremely sensitive to how open an economy is and how sensitive people are to incentives. Tweak the assumptions just a little, and you can get a very different result.

So in the past few years there’s been a determined attempt to answer the question empirically, with a flurry of new regression studies that dig through data across countries, states, or even 13,000 German communities to suss out where businesses’ tax burden lands. Gravelle has a 2011 summary of this work, and her chief conclusions are that the results are all over the place and the most dramatic ones just aren’t credible. But most of these studies do show some significant chunk of the corporate tax burden landing on workers, which is perhaps not yet conclusive but is really interesting.

Most public discussions of corporate taxes in the U.S., however, still ignore the possibility that workers might actually be the ones bearing the burden. Perhaps this is because other public figures really want to avoid sounding like Mitt Romney. Perhaps tax incidence is just too difficult a concept for non-economists to get their heads around (although I’m not an economist and it seems pretty straightforward to me). Perhaps it’s that the evidence is still so mixed (although that hasn’t stopped economic arguments with far less empirical and theoretical backup from gaining currency in the political arena). Perhaps it’s that the corporate executives who lobby for lower tax rates don’t quite have the chutzpah to argue that this could result in higher wages. Or perhaps it’s just that, if corporations pay lower taxes, individuals have to pick up the slack. And even if you understand tax incidence perfectly well, a direct tax is still more noticeable than an indirect one.

14114
They aren't.

Say you get into a fight with somebody. Verbal, physical, whatever. Well, he ends up coming over to your house and shoots you in the face. Would you blame yourself for getting into a fight with the dude? Do you consider yourself partly responsible for being shot in the face?
Yes.

If you hadn't got into a fight with the person, they wouldn't have ended up shooting you. Although that example is a bit diffuse. A better comparison would probably be walking through Detroit holding a fat wad of 20s.

14115
Oh yeah, I'll just be the one fucking guy who didn't do it.

14116
Fuck my life.

I knew it'd get to me eventually.

14117
Serious / Re: Your political opinions which make people rage
« on: August 26, 2014, 04:46:36 PM »
Jokes on me, you were only pretending to be retarded?
I think praising Nietzsche and Hitler at the same time indicates an appreciation of subtly and the finer points of philosophy, as well as satire on the current extent of the general populace's political awareness.



get troled

14118
Serious / Re: Your political opinions which make people rage
« on: August 26, 2014, 04:37:05 PM »
so were you just kidding when you were talking about how great his book was and how much you respected him (while paradoxically praising nietzsche in the same sentence)?
Fucking probably.

Have you ever read Mein Kampf? Thing reads like a fucking brick with braille on it. I didn't get further than 150 pages.

14119
The Flood / Re: When are action movies going to give up this gimmick?
« on: August 26, 2014, 04:12:27 PM »
It was only ever done well by Heath Ledger's Joker.

14120
Serious / Re: Your political opinions which make people rage
« on: August 26, 2014, 04:04:39 PM »
oh no, the seventeen-year-old who went from socialism to hitler-fanboyism to thatcherism within the span of two years thinks i'm retarded, how ever shall my fragile self-esteem recover ;_;
hue, if you think an interest in something translates to support you really are retarded m80

i never once have condoned an authoritarian state, don't get your knickers in a twist

14121
The Flood / Re: Honest opinion thread: love edition
« on: August 26, 2014, 03:45:20 PM »
Paranoid schizophrenic.

14122
Serious / Re: Your political opinions which make people rage
« on: August 26, 2014, 03:05:46 PM »
> arguing that a federalised military is the same as a political union

Are you retarded?
He is, yes.

14123
What the hell...
Hey, it's pragmatic at least.

14125
The Flood / Re: Someone just sent me the most disgusting porn
« on: August 26, 2014, 02:50:14 PM »
link

14126
Serious / Re: Anti-theists are as bad as evangelical Christians
« on: August 26, 2014, 02:19:06 PM »
Hitler and Stalin were Hitlerists and Stalinists. They weren't defined by being tied to any worship or anti-worship of anything but themselves.

You guys like to through them out as either why religion, or atheism is bad. In reality its neither. They wanted to be gods in their own time. They often used either religious or atheistic rhetoric to further their goal, but make no mistake, they punished any who didn't believe in them personally.

So, please, do us all a favor and stop erroneously using them in this argument.
Finally, some reason.

14127
The Flood / I keep stalling my fucking car
« on: August 26, 2014, 01:43:47 PM »
So I'm in the car with my instructor. Fuckin', clutch in, into first and fucking take off.

In my car, no; God fucking forbid. Fuckin', clutch in, into first, apply some gas, lift up and fucking BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-dead

Car fucking has an epileptic fit and then dies. And I got my mother next to me going "All right that's enough gas, off the clutch- YOU'RE NOT USING ENOUGH GAS, FUCKING PUT YOUR FOOT DOWN!"

Fuck me. Fuck my car.

14128
Serious / Turns out liberals just do care more.
« on: August 26, 2014, 01:38:11 PM »
Just picked up a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

As I was flicking through, I came across a very interesting passage. On average, it appears liberal personally care more - and are more distressed - when exposed to scenes of violence or suffering in comparison to conservatives, and especially in comparison to libertarians.

No surprise there.

14129
Serious / Re: European Union
« on: August 26, 2014, 01:33:01 PM »
Yeah.

I've always wondered what it'd be like to live in the U.S.S.R.

14130
u wot b8

m8, ur l8 to the p4r1y

3v3ry1 h3r3 kn0w2 the 3U is u113r shi1

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