Altruism is for suckers. And wingnut welfare is for Koch-sucking legacy hires. Same as it ever was.

If Home Buffet ever raises its prices, then Jonah might discover a cause worth abandoning his family for.

Altruism is for suckers. And wingnut welfare is for Koch-sucking legacy hires fuckers. Same as it ever was.

Rhyme pays.

This site isn’t the place for a serious question unsnarkily asked, but

What cause/belief is worthy of his (or George Will’s, other any other Villager’s of any stripe) sacrifice?

The New York Post did a real hatchet job on this woman. Her Facebook wall tells a different story, as I explain on my blog.

Defending our Nation’s Appleby’s Soup-n-Salad Buffets!! Where REAL Merikuns live!!

Now doncha know? Sacrifice, like taxes, is only for the little people…

Thanks rcade, for doing the extra digging; a very different story indeed. We all should assume a skeptical stance as a default condition, whenever big media is concerned. That goes double for the matter of OWS; major media made clear whose side they are on quite early in the game.

If I were the spawn of Lucianne Goldberg’s, uh, loins, I guess I might find solace in becoming a highly paid shill for the 1%. It’s no wonder that Goldberg cannot relate to someone like Hessler who actually walks her talk and does something real to deal with life as she sees it.

Goldberg wouldn’t know reality if it hit him upside his coddled, cossetted fat head. Thanks for your lack of service to Team USA, fuckstick.

The NY Post? Discerning canaries refuse to crap on that birdcage liner.

Yeah, yeah, but think about all the lives that were saved by not having him go over there.

It’ll be all hands on deck at NR to character assasinate and marginalize the OWS movement and the people who are aligned with its goals.

Their paymasters demand it.

Someone alert the USO; their favorite deadbeat bettor just surfaced.

I’m thinking it’s time to recall the Yellow Elephant campaign……

Kind of reminds me of what they did relentlessly to Bradley Manning, who was convicted without a trial by the national press.

The national press did their best to discredit his personality, suggesting unsavory motives and smearing Bradley Manning’s name. They also avoided any discussion of the war crimes he allegedly exposed, thus protecting their paymasters. So we should not be surprised when they try to smear a “good mother” who makes a difficult moral choice for altruistic reasons.

Where do I TOKE UP?!

Don’t forget, the big 0 also convicted him. 0 is probably just waiting for the time he can send a drone to Ft. Leavenworth to do what drones do best.

Any time jonah is attacking something, you can probably bet that he is on the wrong side.

Goldberg is hardly an intelligent person. He’s a posturing shyster.

Placing that aside, I don’t know that the wife of a banker indulging in a little marital rebellion with her banker husband is a good poster child for OWS.

What I’d like to see media focus on in terms of the people in the various crowds in the various cities camped out is not:

1) College girls.

2) Neo-hippy girls. (See Charles Blow today for example)

3) Willfully underemployed young male dilettantes.

4) Ivy League student radicals.

5) Aging hippies.

6) Genuinely weird if not outright nutty people.

In other words, everyone mass media has painted as the face of these protests.

These people I characterize are on, let’s just say, the fringes of the 99%.

You don’t see many interviews with labor activists. You don’t see many interviews either with normal, adult men who have dealt with the consequences of the he-cession. Oddly, the only mature figures you see media outlets like NYT interviewing in these protests are women, part of the “spotlight on women” fixation existing in mass media right now.

My understanding is that in the past eras, such as the period of activism that led to the development of labor unions, mass media as it existed characterized the activists as political radicals, monkey wrenchers, and dangerous subversives. That would be better than today, where we can only seem to get a portrayal of the activists and protesters as this weirdly effeminized fruits’n'gallery, along with, objectively, college students on vacation.

My reading in the last few months tells me that women have been hit especially hard by this depression we are living through. Most of them have children.

“…sacrifices are required of the little people not us swells …”(speaking for Will, et. al.)

That’s damn good! Thanks for the laugh.

With respect, Mr. Bogg, your post has left me where perhaps you intended to leave us, somewhat at a loss as to your actual position. And indeed you seem to have attracted less than savory responses, but I leave that to you to determine.

Do you yourself actually believe that altruism is for suckers? I ask this, because it does seem to be the position of Anytus in Plato’s dialogue, The Meno, where Socrates is asking Meno if virtue can be taught. Anytus, you may remember, is of the PTB and becomes angry and threatening when Socrates gives examples from history which prove that it is not teachable.

I may be simplifying too much in equating virtue with altruism, but I think it is a worthwhile subject to pursue, being that what we have in OWS is something akin to the example of the slaveboy in The Meno – untutored (many of them) altruists, whom I think you accurately compare to young people enlisting and putting their lives in danger for what they perceive as the greater good.

That, as I say, compares favorably to the slave boy example in The Meno, where the boy can intuit that the area of a square drawn upon the ground doubles in one certain way and not in another. (This, incidentally, is why I prefer Plato over Aristotle, who begins his Politics with the statement that some men are born to be slaves.)

However, the manner in which you describe the occupier in question at the beginning of your speech, and even in which you describe your ‘opponent’, Mr. Goldberg does lead me to infer that your heading, ‘altruism is for suckers’ is indeed what, with Anytus, you believe.

I hope I am wrong.

In terms of non-anecdotal evidence the now-proverbial “mancession” has been characterized by employment losses particularly heavy in male-dominated areas of employment: see “construction” for example. Residential and commercial real estate crash = construction crash.

This has been covered and covered in mass media. Pundits (including feminist pundits) have punditized over this reality for a long time now. Some wags (and wag-ettes) have even gone so far to declare this economic decline an end to some sort of “era of men” and the beginning of an era of de facto female superiority or power.

Reality may not overlap completely with the writings of Plato.

I could be doing wishful thinking, but, based on the contributions that Tbogg has made here, I think that the title is unmarked snark. He uses goldberg to show that people of that ilk seem to think that of OWS. goldberg is a safely ensconced chickenhawk, part of the heavy caliber keyboard battalion making the world safe for the 1%. The OWS threatens his way of life and he will do all he can to protect it.

As for the woman, her life and relation to her family is up to her. In most cases the OWS people should say as little as possible because the msm will certainly try to twist their words out of context.

For sixgill@25

Ah, I do beg to differ.

Thank you, BearCountry. The order in which you address Mr. Bogg’s use of his examples is an interesting one. Based on this post, which is how many will know the subject, I think my comments stand, and that is how they are meant. Unmarked snark is very difficult to analyze, and it does hurt me that vulnerable issues with respect to supposed weak links in the OWS movement are and will be more and more the subject of attack upon it. We who are not there could be helpful in giving those folk some armor in which to face such, rather than exposing them further, even in a snark.

My father lives in Deland, which is a boring suburban sinkhole with only the bright lights of Orlando an hour away for distraction.

Hell, I’d run away to New York city, too.

My advice to Mrs. Hessler from a former newspaper publisher.

Sue for libel. You’ll win, and you’ll deserve the money.

Yeah, I’ve been to Deland too. A semi-clean tent 900 miles away sounds like a big step up to me.

If you followed the link about the personal sacrifice it would all make sense.

Jonah Goldberg, who is being snotty about the mom, is one who never sacrificed despite being one of the biggest chicken hawks in a position to do real damage.

The bankers wife, on the other hand probably has a nice life, but she’s out there- so others might have a opportunity too.

Speaking of sacrifice, theres a story on stripes where the government is slashing marines tuition assistance by 80% and are willing to start cutting into healthcare bennies.

Which has everything to do with this:

Police, teachers, the corporate press, mental health professionals – the guards of the system – are given small rewards to pacify and control the population.

“In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers. . . . They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.”

—Howard Zinn, from “The Coming Revolt of the Guards,” A People’s History of the United States

For those of us who have demonstrated and marched in the Occupy movement, it is obvious that the police and the corporate press serve as guards—buffers between the vast majority of the American people and the ruling “corporatocracy” (the partnership of giant corporations, the wealthy elite, and their collaborating politicians). In addition to the police and the corporate press, there are millions of other guards employed by the corporatocracy to keep people obedient and maintain the status quo.

Even a partial revolt of the guards could increase the number of protesters on the streets from the thousands to the millions. [...]

If you are comfortably at the top of the hierarchy, you reward guards to make your system work. In addition to the police, the corporate press, mental health professionals, and teachers, there are clergy, bureaucrats, and many other guards in the system, all of whom are given small rewards to pacify and control the population. …

Howard Zinn predicted the revolt of the guards would occur when guards recognize that they are “expendable.”

Historically, the elite’s strategy is to pay what is necessary to fill guard jobs, and when the time is ripe, reduce the rewards of guards and ultimately eliminate the guards. Union teachers—similar to union prison guards who’ve been replaced by non-union guards in for-profit prisons—have discovered that they too are expendable.[..]

Thank the FireGods that our overlords don’t read history, or perhaps panchetta and obomba, being upstarts and not hereditary offspring of the elite didn’t imbibe this.

Oh, exactly. If you read nothing but Politico’s coverage, you’d think that the OWS movement was so hated in NYC that Noo Yawkahs were thisclose to storming the park and slaughtering the protesters, when in fact most NYC residents are quite supportive — if anything, they’re pissed at the cops for throwing up commerce-killing barricades everywhere, barricades that are utterly unnecessary as the protesters aren’t hurting anyone or anything.

Yeah, I know. Mine used to look at me and go, “Why? It would be redundant.”