My bully, my best friend: At first, I thought it was a joke when John called me "gay." By the time the school intervened, no one was laughing

davidreiss666 · 2012-05-26T13:34:00.871568+00:00

All the man wrote is the kid needed to get a backbone.

Yeah, and that's really something that "added to the conversation". Not. It's not a helpful or insightful comment in any way. It's about as helpful or insightful as telling someone who suffers from depression to "just get over it", telling someone who's long-term unemployed to "just get a job," or someone who's in an abusive relationship, "just hit back". None of those answers either address or understand the situation at hand, or contribute to understanding or resolving it. Hence probably the downvotes.

davidreiss666 · 2012-05-26T13:32:39.407515+00:00

Pretty much anyone who is physically and mentally able to stand up for themselves will do so, when faced with such bullying. The problem is that it's too hard for some. When you already have a low self-esteem, when you're already confused, and then are confronted with a group of bullies who outnumber you and humiliate you and make you feel shit about yourself and/or simply make you afraid -- you're often not able to "just stand up for yourself". And that's why bullying is unforgivable - because all too often it targets people who do not have the resources to fight back, or who have gotten to lose those resources by the bullying.

almodozo · 2012-05-26T13:11:07.741986+00:00

I would have gone with Sabbahi, but the run-off now is just awful .. Shafiq vs Morsi was pretty much the worst case scenario in my opinion. :-(

almodozo · 2012-05-25T22:49:58.321217+00:00

Maybe the housing bubble hit harder in the areas that had seen a lot of recent in-migration? I know that Las Vegas, which was among the cities that had been growing at the most rapid clip in the 90s and 00s as ever more people moved from the old cities of the northeast to the rising economies in the southwest, was one of the very hardest hit cities when the housing market collapsed.

Wallyj16 · 1 day

I think OP realizes this and pussied out of his AMA.

I count about 15 answers from him.. is that considered too few? Seems like a good-faith effort.

drew3000 · 1 day

No. But it's interesting to see the geographic disparities - that's the point of a map.

karnovichvalua · 1 day

I'm with Elizabeth Warren:

"You built a factory out there? Good for you [..]. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."

"Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

almodozo · 1 day

The effort to tie in a storyline about Romney's electoral chances is a bit thin in substance, but the bit of history involved is interesting, I thought.

DrJulianBashir · 1 day

But other than the discussion about the ways she regularly if informally pressed on politicians to act on her will, but did not do so here, she certainly could have donated a hell of a lot more than 2,000 pounds, could she not? The comparison with one of her banquets having cost 5,000 pounds is very damning, as does the pressure on the sultan not to out-donate her. She was a wealthy woman, what stopped her from donating ten times that, if not more still?

Bab5crusade · 1 day

No anarchist myth. Many of the inmates in the first Gulag camps (which were, yes, established under Lenin) were socialist-revolutionaries, Mensheviks and anarchists.

One interesting tale is that of the elections of 1918. Yes, the new Bolshevik rulers still allowed elections which were already planned to take place, and they were even fairly free. Unfortunately, they lost them, getting just a quarter of the vote while the socialist-revolutionaries won half. So what happened? On the first day of the newly elected parliament's session, troops surrounded the building - and many of the newly elected delegates were arrested right there and then.

karnovichvalua · 1 day

Privatizing profits and socializing losses

karnovichvalua · 1 day

Germany had free education until, I believe, some five years ago or something. Didn't bring them to the brink of financial ruin. Even now, in the middle of a global economic crisis, Germany is staying relatively strong - and it still has modest tuition fees compared to America.

EDIT: Huh, even now, or at least in 2010, public universities in most German states do not charge tuition fees.

karnovichvalua · 1 day

It has to do with incentive .. as well. [O]nce you destroy the incentive for profit through work, knowledge, creativity, and ambition, you destroy the standard of living for the entire society.

However, you don't in any way need the kind of inequality where the wealthiest 1% is hundred times richer than the bottom 10% for that incentive to be there. You could have a maximum [picks random numbers], say, 10:1 proportion and, in combination with people's thirst for status, professional recognition, the pride in one's work and the admiration of others, the human psyche would work in such a way that those who are ambitious would be just as ambitious as they are now.

Just look back into history. Back in the 50s, when even under Eisenhower the top income tax rate was 90%+, the difference in income between the top layer and the bottom layer was much smaller than now. It was still a decade of hard work, high hopes, professional pride and almost unprecedented material and technological progress.

Some examples:

In the 50s, under a Republican President, in a capitalist system, the very, very richest, the top 0.01%, earned some 150 times more than the average income of the bottom 90%. Sounds like a lot? By 2006, they earned 976 times as much. Did it make them harder-working and more productive?
In the 1950s, the top 10% earned, even including capital gains, some 33% of the national income share. By 2006, it was 50%. Was the top 10% in the 1950s less motivated, less hard-working, than now?
In the early 80s, under Reagan, the top 20% earned some nine times as much as the bottom 20%. By 2007, it was fourteen times as much. Did it make them more incentivized?

Et cetera. Some level of wage difference between top and bottom (on top of other, real incentivizers such as pride, status etc) does provide an extra incentive, and it's a choice whether to approve of it because of that. (Even communist countries had some differentation, as you point out.) But you still heard the incentive argument used as a defense of why taxes on the top 0,1% or top 1% should not be raised, for which there really just is scarce logical justification. Earning 1,000 times the average instead of 100 times the average isn't going to make most people work a lot harder, and it certainly won't make them work 10 times harder.

karnovichvalua · 1 day

The total bullshit part he means is people thinking it was just their hard work that got them the success.

DrJulianBashir · 2 days

I know nothing about that history myself, but /r/islam had an interesting link a while ago about the Irish famine ... unlikely? Yes, but the story was that the Ottoman ruler wanted to donate far more than £2000 to fight the famine, and was told not to by the British court because it would be embarrassing for the Queen if he gave more than she did. He did end up sending a boatload of food, contrary to the Brits' wishes, and a grateful Irish city still has the Ottoman crescent in its coat of arms.

See: http://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/srek1/ireland_thanks_ottoman_caliphate_for_humanitarian/

The blog post that the submission links too looks a bit sketchy, but some further Googling showed that it basically just brings together what a bunch of other bloggers had unearthed about the episode, hence the uneven styles of the different parts.

MrTulip · 2 days

Some, of course. But it's the notion that the persistent existence of an underclass of young blacks is a reflection of still-entrenched structural racism as well, and not just a question of stereotypical irresponsible/angry/bling black culture, that tends to get you the haters here. (Fortunately, this time my comment was buried deep enough.)

I mean, I dunno. Overall I like Reddit's outlook, more or less, sort of. But if I were black, I would feel uncomfortable here - or I would just start to avoid any discussions about race. Come to think of it, I would feel less at ease if I were a woman too - some of the stuff that's posted here, damn.

Mind_Virus · 2 days

Car insurance requirements are to protect society

Sure, but if you're going to include broader arguments about how laws that protect people from themselves also serve to protect broader society as a whole, that goes for the student debt epidemic too. It's not good for society, or the economy, as a whole when bright people are scared away from quality education by seeing the endless and enormous debts it results in.

almodozo

TROPHY CASE

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