Next on ESPN: This 8 year old girl was denied a wheelchair from her HMO, but now she can compete to win one! Heart-warming!
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2021
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[deleted]
"Capitalist". Yes.
It's not even capitalist any longer (if it ever really was). It's reverted to a bizarrely-veneered version of feudalism.
It's capitalist feudalism. There's absolutely zero chance that the US isn't capitalist.
The sheer volume of government intervention to keep afloat rotting organizations that are "too big to fail" says that it's not capitalist. It's a bizarre form of welfare state for billionaires.
To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes by the great Rev. King:
"Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the rest"
Can you think of a time when capitalism was not deeply feudalist? If you think the wave of laissez-faire over a century ago was any different, think again: the "miner towns" and other private cities where you boss is your landlord and mayor tells a different story. And don't even get me started on colonial extractivism and how to massacre a culture/population then plant a corrupt overlord to extract another people's resources.
Capital was always supported by a strong centralized State, and even the libertarian utopians of Silicon Valley have always lived on Pentagon "welfare" money.
In the small capitalism can be non-feudal.
Scale it past, say, 300 people and it's a nightmare of feudalism and billionaire welfare state.
What you mean is not Capitalism, but a market economy. Even in small groups Capitalism will necessarily result in a concentration of capital in a few hands and the resulting effects via social stratification.
Personally, I am mildly amused at how little I care about this problem.
I have two school-age children. They do not attend public school. I would alter my life drastically to make certain they never attended public school even if the laws were to change to demand that. Occasionally I am asked what I think of private schools, and my answer is simple enough... they are merely more expensive versions of the public school experience. They use the same books, they hire from the same pool of college-of-education-trained teachers, and the same sort of people administer those organizations so how could they be much different?
When a public school teacher complains that they should be paid more, I have to wonder why I am supposed to do this when I've already made it quite clear that they have nothing I could ever want.
Public schools exist solely as government-subsidized daycare for children 6-18. That is their purpose, which is easily discerned just by observing how they operate. They could not be redesigned to do anything else... mass education for a country the size of the US requires millions of teachers. Most of those will be bad at teaching. Some significant fraction will be plainly abusive. Paying this same pool of workers more will not magically increase the quality of teaching. Giving them more money for crayons will not magically increase the quality of teaching.
If some of them are humiliated in this fashion, that seems just to me. Truly, if they want to educate children... if it is the most important thing in the universe to them, if it is a calling and a vocation, then they should have their own children and educate those kids instead. Smaller class size, budget goes farther, and everyone keeps their noses out of everyone else's business.
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TL;DR: These people are too crazy, don't give a chance to them. I appreciate your comment! (Sorry, my English is the worst)
"Parça", esses caras são tudo maluco, tão em todo lugar. Como já sabemos países como os deles só tende a ruir e ruir. Eles só querem atenção pra ter confirmação de algo que é impossível. Nem de atenção, no final quem estará certo somos nós. Enfim, acho que tu é BR né? Mals presumir isso, mas o "I live in a country where I don’t have to stop eating to pay medical bills" me pegou e fiquei "Hum, certeza que é BR" kkkjota.
People like you is what’s wrong with the US. But I’m OK with it, I live in a country where I don’t have to stop eating to pay medical bills.
I haven't needed to stop eating to pay medical bills.
but your country is on its way to implod
It is an accident of geography that I was born here. The government of the United States holds no special place in my heart, anymore than the Roman Republic or the Kingdom of Wessex. If it implodes, it implodes. Nothing important will have been lost.
If you feel differently for your country, whereever that is, how can you even love your family? Your country has become some sort of emotional surrogate for them. It's sort of fucked up.
[deleted]
Yes, because you are lucky enough to be able to afford an insurance. Lose your job and see what happens.
Just took a new job. The insurance is far worse than at the last job (pay is better though). Decided to not get insurance during open enrollment. My wife and I analyzed the options, and we decided that we'd be better off just squirreling away the cash than to pay premiums for shit insurance that covered little.
We don't have significant medical bills.
If you country implodes, you live in it.
It's been imploding since I was born. The 1970s were a wild ride, even if I only vaguely remember the last few years of it. The 1980s were little better, we did drills in school to crawl under our desks in the event of nuclear bombardment.
Short of a shooting war, there's very little the "implosion" can do to me that I haven't seen. And if that happens, I plan on being somewhere else entirely about 12 months before the first bullet flies. Even have some gold stashed away to bribe whichever border guards need bribing. Fake passports are getting harder to come by though, that's worrisome.
Any attempt to emotionally take me hostage and attempt to fix the unfixable is going to fail. They're all monkeys here, and you just have to accept that monkeys fling shit. It's even kind of funny to watch, if you learn to duck the turds.
US individualism is killing its people
Possibly. But it's not killing me and mine. In fact, it's saving me and mine, when the non-individualism has so many whining about how their welfare checks are too small and flipping burgers isn't a salary career with living wages. I've got a better deal, and you're trying to talk me into taking the worse one.
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Then why do you still live in such a country?
I have to live somewhere. I don't know of any that are better, just different kinds of "bad". You seem to believe "living better" is an objective thing, but it is subjective of course. And you and I don't want to live the same way. If you bothered to see things from my perspective, you'd understand how silly your question is.
You have the wrong idea of what having a public welfare service means. I don’t need welfare checks to live here
You have lived so long in the system that it's invisible to you. The welfare no longer looks like welfare. It's just an entitlement to you. You deserve it. You've earned it. Just by being there. They owe it to you. Once you've adopted that mindset, how can it ever be welfare again? But from the other end, how can your government even engage in charity? For them, you have become livestock they have a duty to keep fed.
And my children will be able to study in any university even if I don’t earn enough money to pay for it
It used to be the case in the US. But somewhere the politicians got the idea that sending 100% of the population to university was not just an ideal or even a goal, but an absolute requirement.
Opportunity costs being what they are, the price skyrocketed. It actually costs more than twice as much to send twice as many kids to college. And so the price rose. And colleges became more competitive for those dollars, but to stay competitive they have to be nicer colleges with nicer dorms and nicer campuses and nicer amenities. But those things cost more, so the costs were passed on to the students who were indoctrinated to believe that if they didn't go they'd be losers. And then bankruptcy for student loans was rescinded, and grants turned into loans that can't ever be defaulted.
Perverse incentives are a removed.
I can't tell which European country you're from, and you don't have to tell me, but all students don't go to university there either. We can be honest, can't we?
The problem with public Education is not just that teacher's pay is too low. Sure, it's a drama when teachers in one of the richest countries on Earth live in their cars and don't get medical assistance because they can't afford it. But such is the condition of many more workers throughout the world.
The problem is public schools were never designed either as places of Education nor, as you say, as daycare centers for older children. They are centers of indoctrination where precarious workers under a lot of pressure/control prepare the next generation of cannon fodder for the military and the big industries. There's contrary pressure for the teachers: on the one hand they're told and explicitly asked to form the next generation of citizens asking questions and learning new things, on the other hand they're given the conditions to do the exact opposite, and if a teacher starts to teach a little critical thinking they're going to be put on the side or otherwise reprimanded.
They don't have resources: it's ok, just give them time and space and you'll have some teaching done. But no there's no time and they've got to teach 40 kids at a time. It's literally impossible to teach anything in those conditions and the best you can do is "teaching" to recite by heart, which is the opposite of Education.
I don't know too much about the history of public schools in the US (although i did read Teaching to transgress by bell hooks which was really interesting) but in France there is a complex history of Education:
- during the revolution (1789), different factions had different views about Education: of course those who advocated for actual education were hunted down during the terror and soon the first republic collapsed and let me tell you Napoléon cared little about popular education (he has other plans for using young people to try and colonize all of Europe) ; during that time "public instruction" is a branch of the ministry of interior
- free, secular and mandatory school (1881) was setup by Jules Ferry, a racist and colonial warmonger who was on paper mayor of Paris during the Commune (1871) and went to great lengths to ensure the Commune would be crushed in blood; to this day he is revered by French imperialist propaganda as a progressive, but his schools have in fact been used as a tool in the colonial enterprises of France (kids who would speak their own language in schools would get beaten by the teachers)
And mandatory primary education in Prussia (which seems to be the more commonly referenced origin of public schools), was largely a reaction to the French revolution and subsequent changes in inter-state warfare.
But I think solely analyzing today's schools under these historical terms falls short, and the description of day-care centers for older kids seems to ring true. I think especially the reaction about school closures during the current pandemic drives the point home that it has become a day-care center mostly (with negative psychological effects on the children being stuck at home being a distant second argument against school closures).
But the position the OP takes is incredibly privileged (probably a well educated significant other staying at home full time taking care and educating the children?) and also not a good way of how the important labor of education should be distributed in a society.
I am happy to be "privileged". My children benefit from that, whatever it is. If you or others hope to shame me into feeling bad about it... the joke's on you. I was the kid on welfare his entire childhood, mercilessly bullied and the public school didn't give a shit about that.
Whatever connections to other people that most have, that they find so important that they'll do anything (hell, in the Middle East they'll murder their own daughters in "honor killings"), well, I don't have those connections. You and I are a different species. I have no connection to you, and I only feel low-intensity satisfaction when you try to shame me.
and also not a good way of how the important labor of education should be distributed in a society.
Definitely! Your children should definitely be herded into a locked room with 25 other same-calendar-age children and a college-of-education flunky so that they can be force-fed indoctrination and the educational equivalent of junk food. Something like 70% of them will get a mediocre education, and the other 30 percent will be on one side of the curve or the other and ruined. Those are good odds.
If education was so important to you, you'd do like I do. Not try to figure out how to get out of personally and to foist it off on a minimum-wage government bureaucrat.
I am not into shaming others, that was simply a neutral observation that many, maybe most, can not afford to educate their children at home (or are even able to do so due to lacking education of their own).
About the second point... yes I agree with you (and I think others in this thead too)... the status quo of public education is atrocious. But there is a wide range of other options between the two extremes you offer here. And monopolizing the education labor on your own children is not a very efficient way to do education in a society.
Honest question: have you considered inviting some less fortunate children to your home to be educated together with your children? Up to a smaller number (5?) that should only marginally effect the educational outcome for your children, while probably massively improve that of the others.
Honest question: have you considered inviting some less fortunate children to your home to be educated together with your children?
No. While I would consider the children of family (I teach my children that their cousins might as well be brothers and sisters) and close family, none of them are significantly less fortunate. I give when it puts me at no disadvantage, and seeing even the children of strangers do well might make provide some minor satisfaction, the risk that their presence would interfere with my own children's education far outweighs that.
If I have to choose between my children, and some strangers' kid, I will choose my own and not give it a second thought. You're all expendable compared to them.
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I know of many systems. Systems are inhuman things, created by engineers to manipulate things.
Humans are not things, and belong in no systems. Saying "but this other system is better" just misses the point.
Most if not all the other developed countries have good quality public services
No, they have just succeeded in convincing their populations that these are good. That's not the same thing. I don't need my children in a "better public school" where better just means "they do the same things, but more successfully". I need them far away from such things, distances measured in astronomical terms.
Europe is dead. It does not know it yet, it will keep limping along for another century at most. What's the fertility rate again? Everything about its culture is killing it, and it can't escape that fate.
The opinions of dying people don't do much to sway me. My descendants will tell spooky stories about the place that whined itself to death.
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mean… we’re a social species. We’ve evolved to live in systems called societies.
Sure, if you want to stretch the definition to meaningless. I named my house "society" therefor I live in one too!
Why do you consider you live better in the us then? And with such hate towards other people
I don't. There are things I have to work around even in the US, if I moved, there would be different thins to work around. The US has fewer of these than some places, but not substantially more than other places.
I don't hate anyone. Hatred is a peculiar emotion that I have felt in the past, directed towards specific individuals (low count). I hold no hatred towards any group of people, whatever the manner of grouping.
I mostly have indifference for humans in general. I make exceptions for people I like. As for public school teachers, even the ones who were cruel or didn't give a shit to me personally... how can I blame them? My mother didn't do anything about it, kept sending me back. If someone should have done something, surely it was her don't you think? But public school teachers continue to behave stupidly, continue to make poor life choices (their career, in case that's obvious), and will even scuttle around on the ground picking up dollar bills like an over-aged stripper at the nudie bar.
If they are humiliated, how is it anything other than they doing this to themselves?
About Europe, the fertility rate is not very different from the US.
Anything below replacement is eventual extinction. And it's so far below that that it's absurd. Children growing up seeing everyone around them have one child, or none at all... they internalize it, think it's normal. Then they grow up to have one or none themselves. Which math says means it goes even lower since the ceiling was set but not the floor. Sure, you can pretend that some day 80 years from now one of those little girls will wake up and say "I want to grow up and have 2.1 children!"... but it really has to be all little girls who say that. If it's just one in 10, then those girls have to say "I want to grow up and have 21 children!". Neither of those is plausible.
Dead. The US might be too. Certainly heading that way. Wouldn't that be a hoot?
you’re as dead as
I don't identify as my country though, unlike yourself. You see yourself as a citizen of X, one of many, collectively acting like some gigantic robot made out of people. One that can die even if some of the individuals survive. Me? I'm just me. My existence in this country is an accident of geography.
Anything below replacement is eventual extinction. And it’s so far below that that it’s absurd. Children growing up seeing everyone around them have one child, or none at all… they internalize it, think it’s normal. Then they grow up to have one or none themselves. Which math says means it goes even lower since the ceiling was set but not the floor. Sure, you can pretend that some day 80 years from now one of those little girls will wake up and say “I want to grow up and have 2.1 children!”… but it really has to be all little girls who say that. If it’s just one in 10, then those girls have to say “I want to grow up and have 21 children!”. Neither of those is plausible.
Your argument has one glaring logical error: The overall population of Europe is growing and not shrinking. Yes, this is due to immigration, but with a well managed immigration that ensures the new-comers are integrated into society this is no problem at all and in fact a positive outcome for all involved. Now arguably immigration isn't that well managed in Europe, but at least it is mostly managed better then in the US (lately... they used to be better at it).
Your argument has one glaring logical error: The overall population of Europe is growing
Yes. One of us has a glaring logical error. It is not me. Populations can (temporarily) grow, even as the fertility rate goes below replacement. Just as a car that runs out of gas can coast along for awhile on momentum. Sitting in the passenger seat, you taunt me with "I've invented perpetual motion". I just smile and nod.
Yes, this is due to immigration
Those countries the people come from... what's happening to their fertility rates? Aren't those declining? Are the rates of decline decreasing or increasing? Do you see any evidence of it bottoming out at all? Will it bottom out at 2.1, or go lower?
They have the same problem you do. You just have a head start.
this is no problem at all
This is laughable. I am not a racist. Assume each immigrant magically integrates instantly and perfectly... you'll just run out of them is the problem. Or, more accurately, the problem is that you'll run out of them and that you're somehow deluded enough to never notice that you'll run out of them. The fertility rates are declining even in the countries where the immigrants come from, with no signs of slowing down at all. They'll hit 2.1 and keep plummeting further. What will you do then?
Or, if we want to dig deeper, you don't even know why it's falling. You bandy around sophistry like "when women are educated they have fewer children" and just leave it at that. You can't explore the ideas, for some instinctive fear that you might discover double secret misogyny or something.
Children internalize the norms they grow up with. Every immigrant child in Europe is internalizing your childlessness norms. You're converting them to be like you in that regard, not just the other stuff, the positive "integration" stuff. And you're converting them far faster than their great numbers can hope to overcome.
In your collective psychology, there is something that makes you all feel as if you're bad. So bad that you shouldn't exist. And your wish will eventually come true. Personally I'm not surprised, it is the continent that gave us a century of world wars, pogroms, holocausts, and other villainous acts of barbarism. Maybe you guys have the right idea.
Listen to the stuff being said to me in this thread. That I'm privileged and hateful. You want me to feel miserable with you. To be ashamed, embarrassed, and to change. Why would I want to become what you are?
You're already all dead. You just haven't noticed yet.
but at least it is mostly managed better then in the US
No argument there. We should let in anyone who wants to be here... whether they want to stay and be citizens, or just stay awhile and go back home. Anyone smart enough to want to come here is an asset, and it's sort of crazy that their home countries would let them leave. No strings, no gotchas... if they haven't been convicted of a felony or have untreated tuberculosis, let them in. Bricklayer or PhD.
Uhmm, you realize the world population is nearly 8 billion people and still growing fast? We will not run out of "them" anytime soon, and even if we do at some point (far in the future) that is probably a good thing as the world is way over-populated as it is right now already.
Sorry, but your logic really doesn't hold up there at all.
Uhmm, you realize the world population is nearly 8 billion people and still growing fast?
Let's imagine a simpler scenario, for those who might read our comments but are bad at math. We won't use humans (too much baggage), but little aliens we'll call zoops.
Zoops have two biological sexes that procreate together. There are two specimens, a Y and a Z. They have two offspring, also Y and Z. The population has doubled, but the fertility rate is at exact replacement level. When the two older zoops die, there will be only two. Zoops have no incest taboos, and so the second generation procreates twice.
In this way, the population has reached a steady state. But what if, instead, they only procreated once? This population is dead. Period. Sure, it will hang on a little longer, and sure, you'll scream "but their population increased by 50% in just minutes" as some sort of lame argument that overpopulation is a concern. No, that was never a concern, instead extinction is the real risk.
We are in the period where humans are just having the one offspring per two parents, and since the parents don't immediately die, it looks to you as if the population is "still growing fast".
We will not run out of “them” anytime soon
You will indeed run out of them within 25 years. Within your lifetime. This will be about the time that you personally are relying on them to be the nurse's aids in your nursing homes and to wipe your geriatric ass.
and even if we do at some point (far in the future) that is probably a good thing as the world is way over-populated as it is right now already.
No one growing up in this world you imagine will think "ok, the population has fallen enough now it's time to start having 2.1 children again".
You belong to a death cult. Suicidal at the species level.
I don't know where you get your figures from, but the global fertility rate is still above replacement level, and that in sub-saharan Africa is easily twice that.
Also even at a slightly below replacement rate (where the global fertility rate is heading indeed) it will take centuries or even millennia before the global population will have shrunk significantly.
It is moot speculation what society will look like in a thousand years or so, and yes maybe people will decide to get more children again then.
I don’t know where you get your figures from, but the global fertility rate is still above replacement level,
Only when including several regions where fertility remains high (mostly Africa). If those are excluded, it's extinction-level. But hey, you say "that's how averages work".
So let's look at Africa. Their fertility rate is above replacement, but is dropping rapidly. We can measure how fast it is dropping. We know approximately when it will fall below replacement levels. And we don't see any reason why it should remain above them, when it didn't remain above replacement (or even just at) anywhere else in the world. It's natural, and even smart, to assume that the same sociological forces that made it drop elsewhere are those making it drop in Africa, and that they will work the same as elsewhere (since Africans are human like everyone else). It'd actually be sort of racist to assume that it would work differently there wouldn't it?
Once we have considered the places it's below replacement, and the places that it's above replacement but dropping, where else is left at all? Nowhere.
You don't even understand the phenomenon. You don't want to understand it. And you're claiming that somehow it's not even happening. It's bizarre.
Also even at a slightly below replacement rate (where the global fertility rate is heading indeed) it will take centuries
No. The effect actually picks up speed the longer it occurs. Children internalize norms. If the 5 children who see everyone around them childless (excepting their own parents who have one), then don't grow up to have one child also, they'll have on average 0.2 children or something like that. Each generation shrinks faster than the last.
And if that somehow still translates into "it will be centuries before the last centenarian dies!"... how is that a counter-argument at all?
It's bizarre that you are so stuck to your pet theory of human extinction that you try to ignore the facts that global fertility rate is above replacement rate, and will stay so for quite some years still. And even if you extrapolate the current trend it will not drop significantly below replacement rate anytime soon. There is literally zero data suggesting otherwise.
Oh and there is no evidence that people (on average) have decided to go totally childless. They usually only get one or two children, which does indeed drop the average fertility rate below replacement, but only slightly so. This means in turn that the population will at most shrink very slowly.
With 8 billion people world wide (and still growing above replacement rate right now!) it is simply absolute non-sense to talk about human extinction due to birth-rates dropping below replacement rate. Even assuming the trend will last for thousands of years (nothing in human history has ever lasted that long!) we will not go anywhere near extinct.
It's bizarre that your theory is that we haven't run out of gas when the speedometer still says we're doing 100kph.
And even if you extrapolate the current trend it will not drop significantly below replacement rate anytime soon.
Soon for me is "anytime in the next 200 years". Soon for you is "next 2 minutes". We do not have the same "soon".
Oh and there is no evidence that people (on average) have decided to go totally childless.
It wouldn't have to be average. All it has to do is nudge things below replacement.
They usually only get one or two children, which does indeed drop the average fertility rate below replacement, but only slightly so.
And children who grow up in that world internalize it as a social norm. That becomes their ceiling for how many children to have someday. They then have the same number. Or fewer. The ones that go for "fewer" just nudged the rate down lower still. Iterate that through 30 generations, see what happens.
Even assuming the trend will last for thousands of years (nothing in human history has ever lasted that long!) we will not go anywhere near extinct.
Depends on the "we". If by "we" you are excluding myself and my descendants, then you most certainly will.
If you are including me, then no. But the subset of humanity that is like yourself, you're goners. Along with most of your ideology.
With 8 billion people world wide (and still growing above replacement rate right now!) it is simply absolute non-sense to talk about human extinction due to birth-rates dropping below replacement rate.
I forgot. Only climate science is allowed to think long term. The one true science. Measured in human generations, any one of which lasts no longer than about 100 years, each generation staggered with the next, and with a growing sentiment that having children is wrong, dangerous, and unfashionable that we impress upon youth... you people have less than a couple hundred years. Someday, when it becomes impossible to ignore, those of you still alive will look back to times like now, when something might still have been done about it.
Apparently you are absolutely fact resistant. But try to do the math at least once: 8 billion people and a fertility rate of 1.8... how long will that take to human extinction? or 1.5 or even 1.1... just calculate it. In each case it will take thousands of years.
Sure you can claim it will go even lower then that, but there is literally zero evidence that people will stop having children all together. Z-E-R-O.
And claiming to know what will happen with the fertility rate in the next thousands of years is just bullshit. It might as well go up again in a few hundred years, who knows...
Apparently you are absolutely fact resistant.
Which fact am I resistant to? I'm resistant to your conclusions, which aren't worthy of being called facts.
But try to do the math at least once: 8 billion people and a fertility rate of 1.8
I'll wait 20 years until it's 1.3. Or 40 years until it's 0.3. The rate's not constant. You get that right? It's provably not constant. It's provably not going up, or fluctuating back or forth, but continues to go downward. That's not so hard to understand.
Maybe that's the fact I'm resistant to. Maybe the fact that it's currently 1.8, and that you imply there it will stay without anything to corroborate the idea. But also that you only imply it, because to assert such a thing sounds so absurd even you can't possibly say it with a straight face.
Sure you can claim it will go even lower then that, but there is literally zero evidence that people will stop having children all together. Z-E-R-O.
There's plenty of evidence that the downward trend continues to accelerate, as it has for a century. There's plenty of evidence that children internalize such things as social norms, and not alot to suggest that this isn't at least the cause, in part, for the downward trend.
They don't have to stop having children. It just has to fall below replacement. At that point you are, as a species, effectively dead. It never recovers.
And claiming to know what will happen with the fertility rate in the next thousands of years is just bullshit.
I used to say the same thing about climate. But the difference there is that we're supposed to believe such things about holy climate science, and disbelieve those things which contradict the dogma of our ideologies.
It might as well go up again in a few hundred years,
Magically? Like, your ideology already makes some assumptions about why it went down in the first place. And I'm not saying you are wrong... what makes you think those assumptions won't continue to hold, when all the statistics say that they are doing just that?
Dead.
Your arguments are how soon-to-be dead people think. I'm not unhealthy, so what if I've put on a few pounds. Sure, it was a heart attack, but just a mild one and with medicine now days. And I'm too old to do the fitness thing anyway, the medications are a better bet. Maybe they'll invent whizbang medical technology to make me immortal and I'll vacation on Neptune! Just dead.
The current global fertility rate is 2.4. Well above replacement rate (fact).
There is no evidence that the rate will fall below 1 (fact). You just claim that this is a linear trend to the bottom, but it isn't. People still get plenty of children and the "norms" you talk about are about getting less (i.e. one or two) not no children (fact). Claiming that getting less children automatically leads to getting no children is factually incorrect. All sociological data shows that people still want to get children, just not as many as before (fact).
And if you actually did the math you should know by now that it means next to nothing if the global fertility rate falls to something like 1.8 in the fear future.
And your climate analogy also does not hold up at all. All the models only forecast until 2100, because the uncertainty on a longer time frame is so high that is would be ludicrous to extrapolate anything from it. Which is exactly what I am saying about forecast on fertility rate hundreds of years into the future.
You can claim as much as you want that your pet theory is right, but the facts are clearly on my side of the argument.
Lets not call each other insane, please.
I think the view expressed here is incredibly cynical and with such a cynical view the negative outcome for a society is a forgone conclusion, but I don't think it is worth imposing my more optimistic view on other people (and it would not convince them anyways).