ObjectivityIncarnate

The OP says “doesn’t work”, not ‘does work but not enough to satisfy an arbitrary threshold of “working for a living” so it doesn’t count’.

Nobody is saying owners do literally no labor

The OP literally says “doesn’t work”. Is “doesn’t work” not equivalent to “no labor”?

It’s just a running joke for greentexts to call them “fake and gay”, which became having to come up with some justification to attach both labels to the story instead of just saying it is. This is completely regardless of what the greentext actually consists of.

The more you have to stretch to make the labels fit, the funnier it is.

If you ignore that different demographics face different issues and that they are valid in bringing them up

Which is irrelevant, because that’s not what I did.

you’re right wing trash as far as I’m concerned.

Since you’ve demonstrated a deliberate penchant for deliberately misconstruing anything short of full-throated agreement, your labeling based on that has no value whatsoever. “Right wing trash” and “person who disagrees with me” are not synonymous.

The fact remains, despite your protest: the attention any given injustice a person has suffered merits, should not depend on any of the victim’s immutable characteristics. It is immoral to believe, for example, that George Floyd and Tony Timpa^[1] merit different amounts of sympathy/outrage/etc., just because one is black and the other is white.

You’re equivocating, for no reason, being equally sympathetic to an injustice regardless of the demographics of the victim in any given instance, with treating every case as if it’s identical.

Those are completely unrelated things.

P.S. You ‘may be shocked to learn’ that starting a comment like that just makes you sound like a sanctimonious jerk.

You can interpret that however you want.

Not if you want to be accurate:

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

I’d also include the controversy around “Baby It’s Cold Outside”.

The irony is that in fully understanding the song and the culture of the time it was written in, the song is literally the opposite of what the outrage junkies made of it. They think it’s a song about a guy keeping a woman at his place against her will (the notion that he actually drugged her drink (and in such a way that she could tell by tasting it) is especially hilarious) through subtle intimidation, and that rape is apparently imminent.

But in fact, it’s a very empowering (especially for its time, ~80 years ago) song about a woman who defies social/cultural norms/rules to do what she wants and go ahead and spend the night at this guy’s place:

• All of her ‘protests’ have to do with her reputation specifically, she talks about how she “should”/“must”/“ought to” leave, but never once says “I want to leave”
• “What’s in this drink” was a blame-shifting/plausible deniability tactic, not too different from how people blame their actions on alcohol even today. Although the song is very progressive, she doesn’t completely abandon the social rules, so she adds this bit as an ‘excuse’ for the fact that she is absolutely and willfully spending the night with this guy. For the same reason, she ‘can’t’ simply straight-up ‘say yes’ to him; it’d be unladylike to accept such an offer, after all. So she does the stuff in the first bullet point instead.

More detail here.

P.S. Also, the original songwriter wrote the song specifically for him and his wife to perform together for friends at a housewarming party. It wasn’t even considered to be released commercially until it became a huge hit at parties that they were invited to specifically to perform it. The idea that it’s a predatory date rape song is extra ridiculous with that context, aside from everything else.

George Carlin (who is idolized and rightly so, mostly) had a line in one of his standup specials where he said “you show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala”. Homophobia was just so normalized back then (this was the ‘80s).

I don’t think this bit was homophobic at all, and that you’ve misinterpreted it, through omission and otherwise. If anything, homophobia is part of what is being laughed at (and a small piece of the overall joke). I’ll explain.

To begin with, you left out key parts of the joke; he wasn’t expressing that as himself. Here’s the full bit:

I remember something my third grade teacher used to say. She used to say “You show me a tropical fruit, and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.” No, wait… that wasn’t her. That was a guy I met in the Army.

While the joke uses “fruit” as slang for gay as part of it, that isn’t actually even the punchline, the wordplay is just a vehicle for it. The humor primarily hinges on the notion of a grade school teacher saying something that crass (the second part specifically) to a child, coupled with the implication that it was something she said more than once (“used to say” instead of “said”).

Then he realizes it was some grunt who was in the Army with him (who it’d make more sense to say something crass/uncouth like that), which adds another element of humor in ‘how could he possibly mix those two people up?’. If anything, that hypothetical Army guy is being laughed at in part for the homophobic slur usage.

99.55%

The specificity of this made me imagine that you had actually taken inventory of every single time you’ve encountered this in your personal life experience and done the math, lol.

Ignoring key issues of discrimination of marginalised peoples

This is like saying that someone wanting to end all poverty is ignoring and discriminating against the single poorest person.

Stop acting like these things are zero-sum. It takes no extra effort to speak out against all instances of an injustice, compared to doing so only for certain instances of that injustice.

What an idiotic article (and website in general, looks Buzzfeed-tier). From its linked source:

Negative cerebrovascular effects can be expected by compressing jugular veins and carotids

No shit.

by a necktie.

Nobody is wearing a tie that tightly, and even if it is deliberately made that tight when you put it on, it’s not like a noose, it’ll loosen on its own almost immediately as you start moving around. There are no springs in a tie maintaining the tension.

You’re welcome!

You’re going to enjoy this, I think (ignore the titles of the videos, this is definitely what @maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone was referring to, and the context makes the bit about WWW so much better:

https://youtu.be/Wo2KB1dEDdk
https://youtu.be/53hMYw8LX60

Getting the Orange Box for $10 back in the day has to be my all-time best.

It’s not perfect, so you have to do it again tomorrow. /s

But I would constantly go, “Asmongold said…”

Must be hard to break off a friendship with yourself, lol

Why not make a law against using unrealized capital gains as loan collateral?

Because that would outlaw home equity loans, for one thing. Anything you own that’s increased in value since you started owning it is “unrealized capital gains” by definition, until/unless you sell it, not just stocks.

The fact is, taking a loan out using stuff you own as collateral, regardless of what it is, is a perfectly normal thing to do that in itself deprives no one of anything. Lenders aren’t in the business of throwing money out the window—they make these loans because they get repaid, and then some. Someone who takes out a home equity loan and uses the money to renovate their house so that it’ll sell for an increased price beyond the loan amount + the interest rate, is making the exact same ‘move’ as someone who takes a loan out using their stock in a company as collateral, and uses that money to do things that make that stock increase in value beyond the loan amount + the interest rate.

Then the stocks used as collateral should be taxed as realized gains.

Why? They haven’t been realized. Literally nothing happens to collateral unless the loan is defaulted on. Do you think you should your house should be treated as realized gains (i.e. the same as if you sold it), if you take out a home equity loan?

we could make it so that it only applies to loans over some arbitrary amount…(within a certain time period to counter multiple smaller loans as loopholes)

This is literally impossible to realistically enforce, total waste of resources and effort to even try. Myriad ways to spread it out over different people/entities/etc.

Those loans are their main source of income.

Loans aren’t income. They only reason this ‘move’ works at all is because they are creating value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate + inflation. Other than the scale of the ‘tactic’, it’s no different from taking a home equity loan to improve your home so that the amount it sells for has increased by more than was lost from the interest on/repayment of the loan.

Realize that the lenders giving these ultra-wealthy these loans are not in the business of throwing their money out the window for fun. They make these loans only because they get repaid, with enough interest to make being without those funds in the meantime worth it for them.

People don’t take out home equity loans to spend on groceries, maids, or yachts. They spend it on improving or repairing their home.

1. Having worked in a financial institution for many years, I can tell you that this is not even close to universally true. It’s very common to use it as a debt consolidation strategy.
2. Even assuming this is always true, you’re essentially saying that they use the money from the loan against which their house is collateral, to do things that increase the value of the house. But borrowing using your shares in a company as collateral, in order to invest into that same company to increase its value, is essentially an identical ‘strategy’. You’re just arbitrarily deciding it’s bad for one illiquid asset to be used as collateral, but not another, even if the goal (increasing the value of the thing used as collateral) is identical.