Google translate. Actual article. A bit old, but worth paying attention to.

The Moderates outgoing party leader Fredrik Reinfeldt broke the silence and before Christmas Eve, and made a new leftist statement with regards to the upcoming re-election. The former prime minister now claims that Sweden's borders are fictional and that Sweden belongs to the immigrants who come here - not the Swedes.
The statements was made based on the planned new elections next year and Reinfeldt confirmed Mattias Karlsson (SD) perception, that elections are primarily a vote on immigration.
– It's an election on what kind of a country Sweden wants to be Reinfeldt told TV4.
– Is this a land owned by those who have lived here for three or four generations or is Sweden is what the people who come here in mid-life make it to be and developing it to be? He asked rhetorically.
– For me it is obvious, that it should be the latter and that an open society is both stronger and better, said Reinfeldt.
In connection with TV4's "Nyhetsmorgon" during the morning of Christmas Eve he went even further, claiming that Sweden's borders are only imaginary.
– What kind of a country is Sweden? Is it owned by those who lived here for four generations or those made up some kind of border? He said condescendingly.
Then he said that the Swedes are uninteresting as an ethnic group and that it is instead the immigrants who create the new Sweden.
–What the immigrants do in Sweden makes Sweden, he claimed.

Yes, Sweden is a fucking utopia we should all strive to emulate. I mean, really? I'm incredibly pro-immigration and even I find this really quite annoying. Is this how far the rot of cultural relativism has spread? No wonder parties like UKIP, Front National and the Sweden Democrats are becoming more popular.

your gonna be a man soon aight so dont let no honkey niggers be puttin you down aight nothings gonna stop you carrying on our tradition of being a bunch of self hatin cigendered tranny coongooks aight you gotta be tough you gotta be strong aight to carry on the family name and fuck some whore in the alleyway aight and make her raise your son on her own while you spread you vietnam fucking shit seed all over america aight like genghis fucking khan has come again in the form of a black chinese albanian dwarf aight listen to my mixtape

Who is your favourite theologian from whatever religion, favourite atheist and favourite philosopher? Your reasons for choosing the philosopher, however, must be secular.

My favourite theologian is definitely Friedrich Schleiermacher, because I have a soft-spot for the Irenaean tradition of theodicy and I'm a fan of Schleiermachian ethics.

My favourite atheist is probably Christopher Hitchens, simply for his wit and passion.

My favourite philosopher is obviously Nietzsche, although I do like Roman philosopher Boethius too.

This would be painful to watch if it weren't so funny.

Thought I'd bring this back, since they tend to be interesting enough. So, what are your most controversial opinions? Be they philosophical, political or economical.

Philosophy:
- Nietzsche was right about a lot.
- St. Augustine was an idiot.
- Noam Chomsky is a fucking idiot.
- Punishment makes almost no ethical sense.
- Morality is objective, and is essentially Aristotelian in nature.
- Power is essentially the currency of social relationships.
- Rights don't "exist"; rights are just privileges extended by the powerful, and they should line up with morality.
- Induction is a myth, people learn hypothetico-deductively.
- Islam is the worst and most dangerous religion on the planet.
- Free will doesn't exist.
- Whether or not the world is deterministic or indeterministic is largely irrelevant to discussions of free will, although I lean toward deterministic.

Political:
- Prisons ought to essentially be abolished in their current form. They're only appropriate for people who cannot be rehabilitated.
- Terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants and subject to the death penalty.
- Government collection of metadata is justified, and doesn't constitute spying.
- Snowden is a traitor, who deserves a hefty sentence.
- There's no such thing as an absolute freedom, and the trade-off between security and freedom is one which must be made.
- People on the Left are almost always "Bolshevik" in nature, in that they seem to think people are so stupid as to be controlled by a clandestine group of neoliberal masters.
- Freedom is desirable because it encourages responsibility and self-reliance, not because freedom is intrinsically valuable.
- The European Union is one of the least useful, most damaging institutions in European history.
- Coursework is more important than examinations.
- Iran is a terrorist state, and America embarrassed themselves during the nuclear negotiations.
- The Iraq War was justified, and will prove beneficial for Iraq in the long-term.
- Obama's foreign policy has been an absolute joke.
- The anti-war and civil liberties lobbies are becoming excessively hysterical.
- Feminism is a joke, and distracts Western societies from the very real plight of women in Africa and the Middle East.
- All drugs should be legalised.
- Euthanasia should remain illegal.
- Euro-western exceptionalism is valid.
- A unipolar world where America is at the top is better than a bipolar world.
- The British Asian community has a cultural issue when it comes to sex crimes.

Economics:
- Marginal tax rates as high as 80pc are justified when it comes to taxing the consumption of the wealthy.
- Almost everybody except a small group of monetarists got the Recession wrong.
- Inflation as high as 10pc can be justified in economic downturns.
- Talking about interest rates in terms of monetary policy is almost useless.
- Income inequality is mostly driven by NIMBYism and rising rents.
- Fiscal stimulus is almost always useless.
- Redistributing wealth will just tend to make people poorer.
- Taxing the rich also tends to make society, on aggregate, poorer since the government is expropriating savings.
- Corporate income tax should be abolished.
- Capital income taxes should also be abolished.
- Public sector unions should be abolished, or at least disallowed from striking.

I'll add any more I can think of.

Oh, it's like there's an orgasm in the back of my head.

who would actually write "blam" instead of swearing and letting the filter do his work for him

some people

like he didn't even write "-blam!-"

He'd write "blam"

Scott Sumner over at the National Review.

Why are wealth and income inequality increasing? Why is labor, relative to capital, commanding a declining share of national income? These have become the central questions in the economics profession, and they’re increasingly central to our political debates as well. Much of the discussion seems to suggest that there is some sort of mystery to be explained. Perhaps corporations are getting better at lobbying in Washington. Or maybe there has been a cultural change that makes CEOs bolder in demanding high pay.

We find those sorts of explanations to be unsatisfactory. Once we consider recent structural changes in the economy, there may not be much left to explain. Here are three key factors: first, obstacles to building and subsidies to homeowners, which raise rents in residential real estate; second, the increasing complexity of regulation, which imposes burdens on smaller firms and discourages new entry; and third, the growing importance of intellectual property.

In all three cases, government regulation has probably contributed to inequality.

Why Are Housing Rents So High?

Until recently, economists tended to assume that the labor share of national income in the U.S. was fairly stable, as labor had earned about 50 to 59 percent of GDP since the Bureau of Economic Analysis began tracking the data in 1929. Given that the economy has grown by nearly 500 percent over that time (in real terms, per capita), most economists thought that long-run economic growth was far more important than distributional issues. In the last few decades, however, the labor share has dropped modestly, while the share of national income going to capital has increased.

Last year a French economist named Thomas Piketty created a sensation in the world of economics with a major historical study of capital and wealth inequality. Piketty argued that the recent slowdown in economic growth was likely to lead to even greater concentrations of wealth at the very top. More recently, an MIT graduate student named Matthew Rognlie took a closer look at Piketty’s data and found that almost the entire change in the share of domestic income going to capital in major developed economies was explained by rising rents on residential real estate. Non-rental capital income (including the corporate sector) still has a fairly stable share of domestic income.

To understand Rognlie’s argument, it is important to distinguish between the consumption of housing and the ownership of housing. Both tenants and owners consume housing in the same way, but only one pays a rent check that can easily be counted toward statistics such as the national income. To address this problem, the government estimates the “implicit rent” on owner-occupied housing by looking at rental equivalents — the rent on comparable properties.

In terms of labor vs. capital income in the U.S., in the eight years leading to the fourth quarter of 2014, compensation declined from 53.7 percent to 52.4 percent of Gross Domestic Income — a significant decline, considering the tight range of this measure over time. But rents moved relentlessly higher during this period, and as a result, rental income to homeowners climbed from 1.3 percent to 3.7 percent of GDI. If we add homeowners’ implicit rental income to compensation, then the combined share has actually grown by 1.1 percent instead of falling by 1.3 percent over this period.

Interest rates are now quite low, even in real terms, and one would expect the combination of high rents and low interest rates to lead to an enormous boom in housing construction. However, since 2006, the construction of new homes has plummeted to historically low levels. What explains this discrepancy?

It’s not enough to point to the severe recession, as that would have been expected to depress construction by depressing rents. As can be seen in the following graph, renters have seen a rising share of their incomes going to rent. The rent/income ratio briefly leveled off during the housing boom, but has jumped during the bust because of the shortage of new housing. Housing may have been overbuilt in some locations, but nationwide a growing scarcity of housing has hit renters hard.

We see two important regulatory factors in high rents. One that has been of increasing importance in recent decades is restrictive zoning. Today it is much harder to get approval for large new housing developments in many of the coastal states — where one can still observe quite elevated house prices in addition to high rents — partly for environmental reasons and partly due to “NIMBYism.” Many environmentalists favor “smart growth,” such as more high-density development along transit lines in bigger cities. But those developments are often blocked by regulations such as rules requiring parking spaces for each housing unit. Many economists on both the left and the right have become highly critical of these restrictions on new-home construction.

The second factor is that it became much harder to get a mortgage in the U.S. after 2006. This is partly due to the large losses that banks and homeowners suffered during the subprime crisis, but it’s also because regulation has been tightened. Those unable to buy new single-family homes because of a lack of new construction were pushed into the rental market, driving rents higher despite the relatively weak economy. Because renters tend to be less wealthy than homeowners on average, this worsens economic inequality.

Our owner-biased tax code already puts renters at a disadvantage, relative to homeowners, because the rent they pay must cover all the income and capital-gains taxes that landlords pay but homeowners do not. Rent inflation from the limits to homebuilding that we have described further worsens economic inequality, because homeowners tend to have higher incomes than renters, spend less of their income on housing, and are immune to rent increases because they own their homes.

The housing bust, made worse by regressive zoning and tax laws, is creating haves and have-nots — owners and renters.

The Regulatory Burden on Small Firms

The combined forces of globalization and the telecommunications revolution have led to substantial growth in the size of many high-tech firms. Some of this shift is inevitable, and indeed beneficial to the U.S.; the U.S. is better off than it would be if the high-skill jobs created at Apple, Google, and Microsoft had instead been created overseas. But it does increase inequality. In a 2015 NBER working paper, Holger M. Mueller, Paige P. Ouimet, and Elena Simintzi find evidence that wage differentials and skill premiums increase with firm size.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419442/heres-whats-driving-inequality-scott-sumner-kevin-erdmann The combined forces of globalization and the telecommunications revolution have led to substantial growth in the size of many high-tech firms. Some of this shift is inevitable, and indeed beneficial to the U.S.; the U.S. is better off than it would be if the high-skill jobs created at Apple, Google, and Microsoft had instead been created overseas. But it does increase inequality. In a 2015 NBER working paper, Holger M. Mueller, Paige P. Ouimet, and Elena Simintzi find evidence that wage differentials and skill premiums increase with firm size.

Unfortunately, many government regulations tend to favor larger firms. In recent years we have seen the passage of some extremely complex regulations involving thousands of pages of rules, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and the Affordable Care Act. The Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Defense, and the public health-care complex tend to create opportunities for uber-firms within industries, which act as clearinghouses for public contracts and regulatory demands.

Many of the new regulations may end up being counterproductive by limiting new entry. The most powerful regulatory force in the world is the threat of new competition. The Richmond Fed notes that from 2011 to 2013, only four new banks were established in the U.S., while historically there have generally been more than 100 per year. They attribute this to low bank profits and more regulatory-compliance demands since the crisis, especially a new 2009 FDIC rule that creates substantial new regulatory burdens aimed specifically at new banks.

In other industries, the well-publicized expansion of occupational licensing, ever-widening labor regulations, and petty local regulatory burdens limits the movement between wage earner and proprietor that once served as a natural safety net for the unemployed, a source of wage competition, and a breeding ground for smaller firms.

While some regulations may be desirable, and even necessary, the recognition that complex regulations benefit large firms, leading to increased inequality, seems oddly absent from much political discourse.

Intellectual Property and Inequality

We’ve already seen that the share of national income going to capital has been fairly stable, if you exclude rental income. But this glosses over some interesting changes within the corporate world. A 2014 NBER study by Erling Barth, Alex Bryson, James C. Davis, and Richard B. Freeman found that in addition to the increased inequality in incomes that comes from larger firm size, there has also been a trend of more variance in returns between firms. It seems plausible that this reflects the increasingly “winner take all” nature of 21st-century capitalism. Peter Thiel’s popular book Zero to One captures the spirit of this trend, with its suggestion that new start-up firms aim for a monopoly position.

It’s hard to say how much of this is due to intellectual-property rights such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks. A study that has recently received a lot of attention shows a huge rise in the share of corporate capital that is “intangible,” from about one-sixth in 1975 to five-sixths today. (Apple, for instance, has a market value of $740 billion but net tangible assets of only $100 billion.) As Robin Hanson recently pointed out, this raises the question of why investors could not compete with a company by replicating all its tangible assets at one-sixth the cost.

Of course, we need to be careful here, as there are many complex accounting issues that may affect these estimates. In addition, the term “intangible” need not imply “protected by intellectual property rights.” Companies such as eBay and Facebook probably benefit from “network effects” – people like to use these services because lots of other people also use them. We have seen a pattern of serial monopolies, where tech firms establish dominance but quickly lose it. Many of the firms that appeared as headline-grabbing IPOs over the past 20 years are already forgotten. Getting intellectual property rights is now more important and more difficult than it was when dominant firms were defined by physical capital.

Many of the newer industries also feature very low marginal costs of production. Large investments are made in areas like software and biotech, with many firms falling by the wayside while the successful firms can earn large profit margins. Producing the first unit of, say, a computer program is extremely expensive, but after that, manufacturing costs may fall close to zero. This winner-take-all feature of modern market economies dramatically increases inequality among capitalists.

There are good arguments for some intellectual-property protection, which can spur innovation. And yet many economists on both the left and the right have argued that the protections have gone too far, into areas with no obvious social benefits. Copyright protections once lasted for 14 years, applied only to maps and books, and could be renewed once if the author was still alive. Now they’ve been extended to many other products, extend for 50 years after the death of the author, and last for at least 95 years for corporations. These extensions are widely seen as reflecting the lobbying power of companies such as Disney. In the high-tech sector, patents are often granted for seemingly minor and obvious innovations. President Obama has recently been pressing the Asian countries to enact stricter intellectual-property protections. This may be in America’s self-interest, but transferring money from Asian consumers to Disney shareholders almost certainly worsens global inequality.

How Capitalism Is Supposed to Work

The market economy should have natural mechanisms to limit inequality. If housing is very expensive in coastal California, more firms should build houses. If Mickey Mouse toys and Barbie dolls are profitable, more companies should produce those toys. If some professions make more than others, people should move into the higher-paying professions.

We certainly don’t wish to suggest that regulation is the only factor increasing inequality, but to the extent that zoning rules, limits on mortgage lending, occupational licensing restrictions, and intellectual-property rights limit new competition, we should not be surprised if increased inequality is one of the side effects.

Definitely worth the read, but it's a long piece so here are the take-aways:

Housing rents:
- In the last few decades, however, the labor share has dropped modestly, while the share of national income going to capital has increased.

- an MIT graduate student named Matthew Rognlie took a closer look at Piketty’s data and found that almost the entire change in the share of domestic income going to capital in major developed economies was explained by rising rents on residential real estate. Non-rental capital income (including the corporate sector) still has a fairly stable share of domestic income.

- renters have seen a rising share of their incomes going to rent.

- One that has been of increasing importance in recent decades is restrictive zoning.

- The second factor is that it became much harder to get a mortgage in the U.S. after 2006.

- Because renters tend to be less wealthy than homeowners on average, this worsens economic inequality.

Regulatory Burden:
- Unfortunately, many government regulations tend to favor larger firms. In recent years we have seen the passage of some extremely complex regulations involving thousands of pages of rules, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and the Affordable Care Act.

- Many of the new regulations may end up being counterproductive by limiting new entry.

- The Richmond Fed notes that from 2011 to 2013, only four new banks were established in the U.S., while historically there have generally been more than 100 per year.

-In other industries, the well-publicized expansion of occupational licensing, ever-widening labor regulations, and petty local regulatory burdens limits the movement between wage earner and proprietor that once served as a natural safety net for the unemployed, a source of wage competition, and a breeding ground for smaller firms.

Intellectual Property:
- It’s hard to say how much of this is due to intellectual-property rights such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks. A study that has recently received a lot of attention shows a huge rise in the share of corporate capital that is “intangible,” from about one-sixth in 1975 to five-sixths today. (Apple, for instance, has a market value of $740 billion but net tangible assets of only $100 billion.)

- Producing the first unit of, say, a computer program is extremely expensive, but after that, manufacturing costs may fall close to zero. This winner-take-all feature of modern market economies dramatically increases inequality among capitalists.

-Copyright protections once lasted for 14 years, applied only to maps and books, and could be renewed once if the author was still alive. Now they’ve been extended to many other products, extend for 50 years after the death of the author, and last for at least 95 years for corporations.

Any day now.

🚭

BECAUSE SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOU YOU CUNT

☠

History, and politics. Fucking smashed politics; history was okay.

How was your day?

I hear he's a faggot.

In California of all places.

An 82-year-old Sikh grandfather was brutally beaten with a steel pipe by a man who reportedly targeted him for looking like one of "those people".

Piara Singh was attacked outside his gurdwara in Fresno California where he was preparing free meals to give to the homeless. He suffered a punctured lung and head injuries and was left lying in a pool of blood, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Two years later, members of Mr Singh's Sikh community say that while his physical wounds have healed, they are still waiting for closure in the case because of a third delay in sentencing.


The assailant, Gilbert Garcia Jr who was 29 at the time of the 2013 incident, was initially charged with attempted murder but admitted elder abuse and a hate crime in February.

And as they wait for Garcia to at last be sentenced, community advocate Ike Grewal told local KFSN news that the attack was all the more troubling because it is believed the attacker confused Mr Singh for a radical Muslim.

"The Sikhs have been attacked all over the United States after 9/11 and this is not acceptable because we have been mistaken as radicals when we are not," Mr Grewal said.

Speaking to the LA Times shortly after the incident itself, Mr Singh's nephew Charanjit Sihota said that police told him they found Garcia hiding behind a tree in a neighbour's garden, and that as he was arrested he shouted that he hated "those people" and wanted to bomb their places of worship.

Even if his attack was misdirected, legal expert Tony Capozzi told KFSN, it can still be classed as a hate crime. "His hatred was the focus, the driving force, towards that belief," he said. "And the fact that the victim wasn't of the religion he thought it was is of no consequence."

Not me, but a recent blog post by Paul Krugman:

Noah Smith sort-of approvingly quotes Russ Roberts, who views all macroeconomic positions as stalking horses for political goals, and declares in particular that

Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. I’m an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government.

OK, I’m not going to clutch my pearls and ask for the smelling salts. Politics can shape our views, in ways we may not recognize. But I’m aware of that risk, and make a regular practice of asking myself whether I’m letting that kind of bias slip in. In fact, I lean against studies that seem too much in tune with my political preferences. For example, I’ve been aggressively skeptical of studies that seem to show a negative relationship between inequality and growth, precisely because that result is so convenient for my political tribe (which doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.)

So, am I a Keynesian because I want bigger government? If I were, shouldn’t I be advocating permanent expansion rather than temporary measures? Shouldn’t I be for stimulus all the time, not only when we’re at the zero lower bound? When I do call for bigger government — universal health care, higher Social Security benefits — shouldn’t I be pushing these things as job-creation measures? (I don’t think I ever have). I think if you look at the record, I’ve always argued for temporary fiscal expansion, and only when monetary policy is constrained. Meanwhile, my advocacy of an expanded welfare state has always been made on its own grounds, not in terms of alleged business cycle benefits.

In other words, I’ve been making policy arguments the way one would if one sincerely believed that fiscal policy helps fight unemployment under certain conditions, and not at all in the way one would if trying to use the slump as an excuse for permanently bigger government.

But in that case, why am I a Keynesian? Maybe because of convincing evidence?

First of all, the case for viewing most recessions — and the Great Recession in particular — as failures of aggregate demand is overwhelming.

Now, this could be a case for using monetary rather than fiscal policy — and that actually is the policy I advocate in response to garden-variety slumps. But when the slump pushes rates down to zero, and that’s still not enough, any simple model I can think of says that fiscal expansion can be a useful supplement, while fiscal austerity makes a bad situation worse.

And while it’s true that there was limited direct evidence on the effects of fiscal policy 6 or 7 years ago, there’s now a lot, and it’s very supportive of a Keynesian view.

The point is that while it’s definitely OK to scrutinize economists’ motives — to ask whether they’re responding to logic and evidence, or just talking their political book — assertions that it’s all politics deserve the same scrutiny. Is my behavior consistent with claims that my views are purely a reflection of my political preference? And if it isn’t — which I don’t think it is — what’s driving such claims? Might it be … politics, deployed on behalf of economic doctrines that have lost the substantive debate?

One of his more laudable posts, although I disagree with a few things here or there.