… Who concisely describes the Republican Party Platform, aka, “Only the Good Get Rich”“:
… The big, if-not-quite-articulated, message in Tampa was that in a free economy, everybody will get what they deserve. There is no need to worry about the vast, growing gap between the richest and the rest, or the shrinking middle class, or the fact that America currently has one of the worst rates of social mobility in the developed world.
Untrammeled, the business sector will create plenty of jobs, and the hard-working big-dreamers will jump in, amass wealth and achieve success. You cut taxes, reduce regulation and let the magic happen. It’s that or what Paul Ryan called “a dull adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”
Listening to the convention speeches, it was easy to get the impression that every high-ranking Republican in the country had parents who were truck drivers or convenience store workers who moved up entirely through their own efforts. Also, there were a lot of grandfathers who worked in the mines. Republicans love mines, particularly coal mines. This is partly because of their big donors, but the fact that environmentalists hate coal makes coal mines even more adorable.
And the miners themselves are always sympathetic figures because they work hard and play by the rules. As a result, their biggest dreams have been realized, and they are able to spend their lives underground developing chronic pulmonary disease.
Shortly before the convention, Mitt Romney had pressed the coal theme with an appearance in Ohio, where he stood with a group of sooty miners whose sad, solemn faces seemed to underscore their concern about big government. Also, some of them later told the news media that they had been required to show up and weren’t paid for the day…
She’s a real reporter, even if contractually obliged to baby-sit the unspeakable BoBo Brooks.
cathyx
God only rewards good people with a lot of money. If you don’t have it, you’re just not good enough to deserve it.
Violet
“Only the Good Get Rich” is also the Prosperity Gospel, where only the Good Christians Get Rich.
Maude
Thanks for the new thread, I couldn’t read the last one. I can’t read about severe violence.
There was also an op ed about the new building Facebook is decorating. It is a warehouse and all of the engineers are together. No outside input from regular people.
Corner Stone
@Maude:
What does this mean?
Corner Stone
@Violet: You mean “Joel Osteen” et al?
cathyx
@cathyx: And according to my bank account, I’m a very very bad girl.
Villago Delenda Est
There it is. The “if it angers the lieberals, it’s good!” thing.
These people are not mentally ill. They are mentally diseased.
PZ
Couldn’t bring myself to read Douthat’s column but was amazed by the title-
Franklin Delano Romney
Are conservatives really that desperate-trying to rally their base by claiming Romney would be transformational?
Chris
Pretty much. And a lot of the public buys it too.
The reason the Great Depression shattered that ideology is that when something like a quarter of the nation (e.g. either you or someone you know well, unless you’re insanely rich and connected) is out of work and stays that way for years at a time no matter how hard they try to fix things, it becomes pretty much impossible to hold onto the belief that “everyone earned their place.” Had to wait a full half century before that memory had faded from the public’s memory enough that people could afford to believe Reagan’s snake oil bullshit.
raven
@Maude: I asked for a new one because the topic did not lend itself to off topic banter(not that it stopped me).
HRA
Hey! Coal miners hate coal mines and that includes Welsh miners, too.
Yes, Gail Collins is a real reporter/journalist.
Chris
As Churchill once said of a Labour leader – they love the working man. They love to watch him work.
@PZ:
It’s also a hell of a thing that it’s “Franklin Delano Romney” rather than “Ronald Wilson Romney!” Reagan not transformational enough for you, bro?
4tehlulz
@Maude: This probably means no architects.
Engineers, esp. older ones, tend to hate them. Don’t be surprised if the result looks like it was ripped out of Cold War East Berlin.
Violet
@Corner Stone: Yep, and the
BrokebackSaddleback guy, Rick Warren.arguingwithsignposts
@Corner Stone: Joel got it from his creepy dad and that House of Love shit. honestly sounds like a bordello more than a church.
Violet
@4tehlulz: It’s being designed by Frank Gehry.
Maude
@Corner Stone:
It means that they only interact with each other. I put it badly. It cuts them off from new information in the form of just chatting with people who are doing different things. It signals the lack of innovation of companies like Facebook as they get older.
@4tehlulz:
There is a firm that designed it. There will be over 2,00 people in that one huge room. It will be like an ant farm.
You are exactly right. It is like the old gray buildings.
Corner Stone
@arguingwithsignposts: Joel Osteen and Rand Paul were separated at birth.
geg6
Yes, Gail Collins can be a real reporter. But how she sits there chatting with Bobo every week without clubbing that man to death is unfathomable to me. I couldn’t do that.
Maude
@raven:
I wanted to ask you, are you going to be watching the debates and commenting here? I think they will be important and I want to know what you think.
Ben Franklin
in a free economy, everybody will get what they deserve
Someone, a thread down, gave a pretty good explanation for the conservative impressions of the subject of rape, and it applies here, as well.
It’s been said, ‘everyone wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die’. The God most of these honor is the God of Cotton Mather, the ‘Angry God’. You know, the god who fillets and roasts his sinners in the 7th circle of Hell. ‘Fear God’ is the Mantra. A loving god is lurking in the background, but seems impotent in the face of his angry persona. They feel all action/inaction is rewarded/punished, in this Life, not just the next. They don’t bother to read Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job, where the righteous suffer while evil people flourish.
Don’t confuse them with their own Holy Book. They find it expedient to their world view to see success as a gift from the Almighty, rather than dumb luck or plain hard work. I’ve said enough about this.
Violet
@Maude: The article I read talked about desks that can be easily moved around when new teams formed. Where did you read about engineers being siloed away from everyone else?
Suffern ACE
@PZ: He specifically said he wouldn’t be. He and Ryan both laid out a vision where it is foolish to try to solve any problems we face and the mocked Obama for failing to do so. For Ruan, the biggest calling of his generation is to preserve everything the way it is for his children. Not make it better. For Romney is just worry about your family. Doing other things are a funny. I won’t tackle those problems. The whole we can do better is nothing but what me worry.
Spaghetti Lee
@Chris:
One argument I use on Gospel of Wealth types is, “You know, two-thirds of people in this country make less than $40,000 a year. X number of people are below the poverty line, X number of people are unemployed, X number of people go to bed hungry every night because they can’t afford food. And you think the most logical answer is that these people-millions of them-are all just lazy? That they could become millionaires any time they wanted to but just choose not to, because they’re morally deficient? That half the country or more is just flat out immoral?” (This often leads into me telling them that if you stayed on welfare for a year you’d earn way less than minimum wage, and the government probably won’t let you stay there for a year anyway.)
Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn’t. I think it did click with a co-worker of mine. Good on some issues (anti-war, anti-drug war), but a horrible, horrible racist. I told him that two-thirds of welfare recipients are white (which is close to the proportion of whites in the population) and it just blew his mind.
Davis X. Machina
@4tehlulz: No, there are architects, the distinguished Taiwanese firm of Lo Bid and Associates.
Engineers love their work.
Maude
@Violet:
They are in an office park. They aren’t near a town or anything like that.
4tehlulz
@Violet: So it’ll leak like a sieve, look awful, and be overpriced?
The East Germans at least saved money.
chrome agnomen
the reason the republican party lives is that even the grim reaper doesn’t want anything to do with them.
Corner Stone
@Spaghetti Lee:
Yes.
Lyrebird
Thank the Spaghetti Monster for Gail Collins, champion of Seamus!
What surprised me in the snippet of the speech I watched was this…
It fits nicely w/the Armstrong tribute and all, but gosh golly gee, when he delivered that line, it really rang with a nasty overtone of “..and not some half-Kenyan”. Am I just imagining things? or Rmoney’s disparagement of Obama’s (purported) overly-lofty goals, but he’s going to help you (in the audience) and your family (but not those OTHER people).
Was it Clinton or Gore who reminded the country that we were “THEM”-ing each other to death?
Violet
@Maude: Sorry, I don’t understand. Facebook is building a new campus/building. Its employees are going to work there. Their desks will be easy to move around and as far as I could tell from what I read, they won’t segregate certain types of workers (engineers, for example) and have them work by themselves.
Are you just saying that they aren’t going to be working with people from other companies? Is the issue that it’ll only be Facebook workers there?
Maude
@Lyrebird:
Do really big stuff?
Wow.
Americans are rich white men. The rest of us, not so much.
Violet
@Lyrebird: It struck me as slamming That Kenyan in the White House (dogwhistle) and also American Exceptionalism. The whole thing was like a bad Team America scene.
Maude
@Violet:
They are cut off from society during the day. They will stagnate mentally. It’s like the DC reporters all talk to each other and stay in their little social set. Except Tom Friedman, he met a cabby.
Facebook will become stodgy. It already has and the IPO wasn’t good at all.
The building will be prison chic.
This has been going on a long time with corporate. People become isolated in office parks.
Jennifer
I wonder if Mitt Romney would’ve been lauding great American hero Neil Armstrong if the evil gubmint – using much higher tax rates than we enjoy today – hadn’t funded the mission that put him on the moon. Somehow I doubt it.
kuvasz
Collins is describing what Weber linked to with capitalism in Europe, to Calvanistic Predetermination and the Protestant Work Ethic: being careful not to waste money, save it, invest it, and that economic prosperity reassured people that they were favored by god. This is what the Calvinists, in all their forms, believe about religion,
politics, and economics, which they do not consider to be
separate considerations.
The Republic of Stupidity
hmmm… if I’m not mistaken that is actually a very succinct summation of Ryan’s entire life…
Violet
@Maude: I am not familiar with what Facebook’s offices are like now. Maybe they’re fully integrated with all sorts of other industries. I kind of doubt it, though, since tech people tend to congregate together.
I have worked in California in the tech culture. From my experience the employees rarely left the office. It wouldn’t really matter what the office situation was, they just stayed there. That’s why most tech-related companies are big on providing food and play perks for the employees–so they’re happy and they stay and work longer hours.
I don’t think the out-of-office networking is going to change that much for them with the new building. I do agree, however, that office parks are isolating, people are siloed away in their little company, and it doesn’t lend itself to interaction and exchange of ideas. I think Facebook would suggest that you can do all that stuff online and don’t need the “meatspace” to do so.
Steeplejack
@geg6:
She compensates by mocking him in a way he is clueless to pick up on.
Maude
@Violet:
I agree. The problem is that is is abnormal to be in an office park. There was a phase when NJ and Connecticut were building a lot of office parks. They are about 5 miles from anything with people around.
Maude
@Steeplejack:
It gave us DougJ’s famous comment.
Steeplejack
@Maude:
Which one? I don’t remember.
Violet
@Maude: That’s a much larger problem. Our modern culture likes office parks at the moment. Gotta change that culture. I think it is changing somewhat, as people infill back into cities, public transportation is being more widely built/used, and live-work-play developments are being built.
I do like that Facebook is integrating this building into the mountain, so it’s not an eyesore. They’re going to have rooftop gardens and it sounds like they’re thinking about the environmental effects of their building. Environmental effects include how people interact. If you haven’t read “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, you might want to check it out. Fits right into the discussion of space, work, use, environment, etc.
MD Rackham
@Maude:
So engineers aren’t “regular people?”
I guess we’re just “you people,” to quote Ann Romney.
Harrumph.
Violet
@MD Rackham: Engineers are real people to me. I love engineers. They’re smart and thorough and generally pretty nice people.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
Mormonism is also very much a “prosperity gospel” religion.
Material wealth is a sign of God’s favor.
trollhattan
@geg6:
Best explanation, Bobo’s packin’ heat. Gail should bring a Taser and get the drop on him. YouTUBE of Bobo on the floor, twitching would be a reasonable hit.
trollhattan
@Violet: Have worked with them most of my professional life. Most are good, a few are incredibly vile and the dangerous ones think they know more than they do, leading to all sorts of havoc.
Smart engineers always know to hire scientists to do sciency things.
amy c
Loved this: http://www.eod.com/blog/2012/09/bugged/
Hal
I haven’t seen anyone address the most important question from the RNC as of yet.
How much fucking makeup was Mittens wearing? All the pics I’ve seen remind me of the queens on Rupaul’s drag race when they are getting ready for a runway show.
Sashay away Mitt.
Violet
@trollhattan: Yeah, there’s always a few bad apples. I like engineers because they generally want to make things work and they prefer real results over lies and PR speak and stuff you find in other fields.
Violet
@amy c: That is really good.
Spike
Pretty safe bet that anyone who finds a coal mine “adorable” have never been anywhere near one.
JR in WV
@Corner Stone:
Well fuck you then if you believe that most of the country is lazy and immoral!!
That’s hideous – what you claim is the truth about people in
America. I know people who work harder trying to make a living without being beholden to a boss than anyone you can point to making a ton of money.
America is mostly people who work as hard as they can, every day.
People who work 30 or 40 hours a week and then go to college to earn a degree in their “spare time”!
So Fuck you and your opinion about people who are all a bunch of lazy S.O B.s not trying to get ahead.
It isn’t true, and, worse, you know it isn’t true.
So vote for a Republican with no morals… it’s OK, you don’t have any morals either. So just do it!
Corner Stone
@JR in WV: Give us a break! If these so-called “hard working Americans” were really virtuous then they would have gobs of money. The reward of effort is riches beyond belief. We know this to be true by clear example.
It’s ridiculous on its face to try and make the claim that these poor, unconnected fools are somehow worthy of consideration in our society. They aren’t.
suzanne
@4tehlulz:
Yeah, I’m an architect, and some of my consulting engineers can barely contain their dripping disregard for me, but it hey hate me far less than they hate the interior designers. Last week, one of the structural engineers we hired made a disparaging comment about ‘interior decorators” to our client while the interior designer on the project was in the room, sitting right at the fucking table. Fortunately, my boss handed him his fucking ass. Extra hilarious considering that WE hire THEM.
Steeplejack
@JR in WV:
Uh, please adjust your snark-o-meter.
Starlit
@Maude: Rhetoricians call it Epistemic Closure, also known as the Echo Chamber. Once conservatives pair that up with Selective Attention, building a whole universe in the amoral part of their heads is easy.
SW
Only the good get rich. Like Carlos Marcello, and Santos Trafficante.
Suffern ACE
@Lyrebird: Yep. By “restoration” I guess they mean a return to the time where the world thought that. Before, you know, we spent all our energy shooting at lychee farmers in Vietnam and goat herders in Afghanistan to bring them democracy. But since Romney won’t be giving the world any silly optimistic goals except bringing more democracy for them and two jobs for us, we probably should skip the invoking the honorable heros of our past highlights.
TG Chicago
She might have closed the circle to mention something about how once the Republicans kill all the regulations, then the coal miners they love so much will suffer more black lung and cave-ins.
Nancy Irving
It doesn’t say how many miners this mine employs, but I’m willing to bet that whatever that number is, this means that many more votes for Obama in Ohio in November.
Chris
@Spaghetti Lee:
Way late response, I know, but –
To the true believer, the answer is “yes, of course.” These people believe in a small minority of elect; it’s hard to be righteous like them, it’s not for ordinary men.
Their belief in the righteous awesomeness of the 1% inside the United States is no less dumb than their belief that America is the only worthwhile country that’s ever existed and will ever exist.
Davis X. Machina
@Nancy Irving: Nope. They’ll vote 60-40 or better for Romney. “Self-interest” isn’t always “economic self-interest”. They’ll vote gender, and race, and religion, and tribe, like the rest of us, and the final result won’t differ that much from the overall. Since it’s SE Ohio, it might be 70-30 Romney.
Maude
@Starlit:
Thank you. I just know people who tell stories from fantasy land because of lack of input.
@MD Rackham:
LOL
xian
@Maude: that’s really not true. they are in the old Sun campus at the Menlo Park side of the Dumbarton bridge. Menlo Park is a town, not an office park. There is a fantastic tacqueria and a great carribean place about two blocks away on Willow rd.
One can criticize the open plan or bench seating trends in the tech world (no privacy, too many distractions, noise) but it’s not about siloing people. Zuck moves around the office all week, fwiw, sitting with the design team on tuesday, or something like that, etc.
Lots to criticize facebook for but the part of their campus that’s already built seems like a pretty pleasant working environment to me, last time I was there.
xian
@Violet: what mountain?