Excellent choice, sir. [hands you shit-and-glass platter] I’ll be back in four years to see if you want dessert.
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I wish I knew, I’ve been looking for it as well. That screenshot was sent to me by a friend who said it was by Sedaris and from the latest New Yorker; I apologize if it’s not.
From 2008. But it was Sedaris.
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Sedaris is funny. But it would have been more poignant had it been from this election.
Wow, that’s prescient. I imagine Sedaris reading the news and saying “dammit, I should’ve saved my shit-platter metaphor for when it counted!”
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It’s almost as if the Republican candidate is always shit.
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I also, am:
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I can afford t buy congress people to raise or lower my tax burden.
Can you?
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That issue is only relevant because of his candidacy.
It’s a disqualifier. You can pretend otherwise, you seem good at that.
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Let’s try a metaphor here.
America is ~ 300,000,000 train cars, all tied together, all headed through across the frozen plains for that great train station in the distance called the American Dream.
At the head of the train are the locomotives with the biggest engines and the biggest loads of coal, and they’ve been placed there because the best place to pull is from the front. And in exchange, they get to pick which switches to throw, and thus, which tracks to take to get to their destination. And sometimes they choose very odd detours, and after a few years, the train finds itself no closer to (or, somehow, further from) its destination. Their cars are toasty warm, just from the radiant heat of their engines, but they burn more coal than they need to because heat is a great sign of status!
Further back are the smaller locomotives; they help out as much as they can, but the coal that they don’t contribute to pulling the train forward is just enough to keep their car warm enough to be barely comfortable, and to keep their wheels from freezing and derailing. They’re one boiler malfunction away from dropping to the back of the train, and they can hear the bolts rattling.
And then there are the train-cars, which barely have any coal at all. They can’t contribute anything at all to pushing the train forward, but have to use all of their supply of coal to keep from derailing. Their cars are freezing cold, and they sometimes have to beg the front cars for some extra coal to keep from dying from exposure.
And then, at the rear, are the boxcars, their cars in disrepair, and their wheels frozen and off the rails. Their weight is dragging the train backwards: a problem easy to fix, if they just were given enough coal to thaw their wheels and warm their hands to the point where they can fix up the boxcars. But no, they are left to drag and freeze, because “they deserve it” for being unable to contribute. Never mind that the front cars are spending more coal to drag the cars than it would take to get them back on the rails and being pulled freely.
Now, one locomotive car tries to move its way to the very front, to be in the position to pick the tracks that the train will be using over the next four years, the speed at which they will reach their destination, and the distribution of coal throughout the train. And when they take a look at that car’s coal, the car has been hoarding its coal, not contributing at all to pulling the train.
These cars towards the back, they have been told for years that the reason that they don’t have a say in where the train is going is because they’re not contributing anything towards making it go forward. And you’re saying that this other car, the one that has piles and piles of coal but can’t be bothered to fire up its engine, can move to the front, and the cars at the back “don’t have room to complain” because, well, they’re not pulling either! Even if the car trying to move forward has railed, for years, about those cars at the back not doing their part to pull the train!
To paraphrase a very old book: It’s more fair to judge someone, not by what they contribute, but by how much is left in their purse after they contribute. Someone who has little, and contributes much of it, is sacrificing more than someone who has much more, but contributes the same amount as the person who has little.
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is that a snowpiercer analogy? Should I digest that bit of pop culture?
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That was the most depressing episode of “Thomas the Tank Engine” I’ve ever seen.
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I’m sure that the details I have absorbed about Snowpiercer, despite not having seen the film, have informed the metaphor somewhat, but it wasn’t intentional.
I just needed some reason why the lack of coal would cause the cars, not to just fail to contribute, but derail entirely, and to be much less comfortable for those who have a bit of coal but still can’t contribute.
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Very agreed.
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If Trump is truly as on the up-and-up with his taxes as he would like us to believe, you’re correct, and he has absolutely nothing to lose by releasing his returns, especially now that there is potentially damning evidence that he’s loopholed his way out of his basic civic responsibilities for almost 2 decades. The fact that he’s not releasing his returns in response to this story does two things: First, it keeps the story alive simply by virtue of not offering a refutation. Second, it makes you wonder just how much worse his financials actually are if he’s willing to take the heat for this rather than release his returns to clear the story up.
I forget if it was here or somewhere elsenet, but I recently read an article which argued that Trump isn’t actually a billionaire at all. Instead, he may in fact have next to no funds to his own name, and he gets by through corporate expense accounts and mooching off of his “charitable” foundation (it’s not Trump’s charity, it’s a charity for Trump). His tendency to use his foundation to pay for - and receive - things, and his failure to personally pay into his foundation for almost a decade only reinforce this possibility in my mind. Considering that his (unverified) enormous personal wealth and self-proclaimed unparalleled business acumen are a crucial part of his brand and his sales pitch to voters, any evidence that would contradict those claims is infinitely more damaging to him than this news that he hasn’t paid taxes in almost 20 years. As others have said, him not paying taxes isn’t harmful to his standing in the minds of people who also hate the IRS. Quantifiably proving that he’s lied to them about how great he is… that might be a heck of a lot worse, which is why he’s probably going to just try and ride this story out like every other “would doom any candidate in a normal election year” bombshell that’s been thrown at him.
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It was okay… a bit heavy handed. The visuals were neat and of course Tilda Swinton was excellent.
Honestly, I like the way that the hunger games series dealt with inequality a bit more… But it’s worth watching.
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Could you consider High Rise to be Snowpiercer but vertical instead of horizontal?
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I still haven’t seen the new film, but it’s a classic Ballard novel, which predates both the comic and the film Snowpiercer, so I can see the other way around being true.
I love Wheatley, though, so I’m super excited about the film. I think he’ll do Ballard right.
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