ClHans

Ah, yes, the brutal regimes of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and others in Northern Europe!

where people aren't routinely bankrupted by medical debt, and don't enter adult life or the adult workforce straddled by terrible student loan debt, and workers have rights!

Obviously, the sort of inequality we have in the U.S.--now greater than that of imperial Rome--obviously that's the right way to be, and the only way society (or at least a tiny fraction of it) can thrive. Right? That's what you're saying, right?

Again, is the food comment--a very small part of what I said--the only thing you're quibbling with?

If I could retract that one small part of my original comment, what would you have to say about the rest? Anything good?

Of course we do.

There's a substantial and growing body of social science research that indicates that inequality leads to a whole host of social ills--see Wilkinson and Pickett.

There's also an intuited sense that when so very many people (1 in 4 children now!) are underfed, and so very many have no real access to medical care (1 on 6 americans), when education is becoming ever more inaccessible, and when the few institutions that have successfully defended workers from a hardscrabble life of hopeless poverty are virtually destroyed, AND there are a few people who don't really work harder (and certainly NOT billions of times harder!) than the rest of us, but enjoy quirks of market, law, and birth to amass vast wealth, that something might be wrong with the system that allows them to do that.

We're trapped in an economic system that concentrates resources and power, whose foundations we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to accept that we treat them as immutable laws of nature, rather than inventions to serve us--all of us, not just the ultra-wealthy. Laws of nature, we might be stuck with. Inventions of our own making, we might could improve upon.

Yeah, we'd like a more equal country.

Good luck. That looks like a terrible idea, but good luck all the same.

Please share whatever lessons you learn in marketing and promoting, of course--I know we could always use another perspective on that side of the challenge.

I'm wary of anyone who uses terms like "state-coerced" - it suggests that the author has bought into an ideology that is decidedly not reality-based. Too often, phrases like that run in packs with ideas like "taxation is theft" (it isn't, of course).

We used to have real pensions from companies, too. It used to be that, by working for a company, part of your benefit was that they'd pay four your retirement. Of course, this is bad for the bottom line, so they cut that.

Of course, the social safety net isn't generous. I'm not sure why you think that. Social security pays out enough to keep _some_ old people from abject poverty. For some unfathomable reason, you think that reintroducing that kind of suffering is a solution?

Oh, wait, I caught it - "if you want any sort of public assistance, you have to ___". On rereading what you wrote, I don't think you're interested in proposing honest solutions to solvable social problems (i.e. you're trolling).

(And...your second-paragraph rant suggests that you think that people are, by default, totally immune from advertising and group pressure. Do you really think that this is so, or is this also trolling?)

> This Is What A Computer Scientist Looks Like" is exactly the wrong way to "empower". It's a photo.

Fine, don't put yourself on the list. How others feel empowered and make community is not your call.

I note that he claims to have 29 sites, but hasn't listed them. A simple list of the 29 super-duper money-making sites...that shouldn't be so hard to provide...

My "privilege" rhetoric?

What exactly are you trying to say?

I'd upvote you a thousand times if I could. You've just modeled the kind of humility and maturity that can actually make the world a better place. Thank you for this..it hasn't gone unnoticed.

Cultural marxism?

Is that an attempt to discredit someone just by tossing out a scary-sounding label? What if we haven't been programmed to fear Marxism, and "cultural marxism" just makes you sound like an ignant fool?

In other, politer words, what exactly are you trying to say here?

Have you asked the women involved if they think it's patronizing?

Or is it just something you think?