No shit?

He collected kickbacks in exchange for sending kids to for profit jails. If anything, 17 1/2 years was too light a sentence - it should’ve been life withour parole. Let the motherfucker rot in one of those prisons himself - it’d serve him right.

Or more precisely, Meta bought shares of Trump.

Mace actually sort of fascinates me.

Her hateful bigot piece of shit act is a bit too over-the-top, and I just don’t entirely buy it. I keep thinking at least some part of it is that she’s actually more of a greedy unethical piece of shit, and has figured out that hateful bigoted piece of shit is a profitable role to play, and she’s playing it to the hilt.

Not that it matters - she’s a piece of shit either way. It’s just an idea that wanders through my mind, a bit more solidly every time, whenever she sleazes her way into the headlines.

Funny… this is actually a different account than I was originally posting from - I switched to it because the entire thread has vanished from fedia.io.

And pretty much the first thing I see here is this response, which I didn’t even know existed before.

Not a good look for fedia.io.

Anyway…

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

I think she probably thought she did, but I also think she obviously didn’t even begin to understand it.

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism?

The glib answer would be because she didn’t even begin to understand rational self-interest.

The more likely answer, which somehow manages to be even more shallow, is because the USSR was nominally communist and she hated the USSR.

If not, isn’t she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean?

No.

Even if she was in fact the inventor of the concept, which she most assuredly is not, she still wouldn’t be the arbiter of its meaning.

Though she was such an egotistical authoritarian that if she were alive today, she’d undoubtedly be insisting that she was.

Doesn’t that mean you’re changing the definition to suit your needs?

Kind of.

While I really couldn’t care less what Rand envisioned, so certainly feel no desire to hew to her conception, I haven’t changed it to suit my “needs” per se. I’ve changed it as necessary so that it actually is, as far as I can see, what it appears to refer to - “rational” “self-interest.”

I think it’s a sound concept, and that Rand, blinded as she was by her emotions, her authoritarian habits and her gargantuan ego, didn’t grasp it.

Thanks for the response.

Oog - my little brother.

He’s a walking stereotype of a tech libertarian (which is to say, a shallow, bigoted, reactionary, right-wing IT guy who for some inexplicablec reason seems to think that all that’s necessary to count as “libertarian” is to rail against “the woke mob.”)

The first time I heard the term “mansplaining,” I knew exactly what it meant, because it’s his customary mode of communication. I already know that by about the third time I hear him say, " Well, what you have to understand is that…" I’m going to have to leave the room.

He likely won’t bring up politics directly - not surprisingly, he’s generally ignorant of both the philosophical side of it and the practical side of it. Instead, he’ll bloviate about whatever the right-wing/tech media bubble is bloviating about, so essentially political issues without the complication of political context.

It’s invariably awful, and it’s always a matter not of if but merely of when I’m going to have to leave the room because the only alternative is going to be a messy verbal explosion. And I presume it’s going to be worse than ever this year, since he’ll undoubtedly want to mansplain the mindless dogma he’s been fed about Trump and Musk and Ukraine and tariffs and immigrants and trans athletes and so on…