Yeah, I almost reworded that, I didn’t mean to imply that Snowpiercer predated High Rise.
I saw the film last week, really liked it. I thought they did a good job of adapting the book. I thought you might already have seen it since I know you’re a Wheatley fan.
I still haven’t no! I also went through a huge phase where all I read for a year or two was Ballard and he’s still one of my favorite writers of all time. I can’t think of a better director to adapt Ballards weirdness into a film. It’s hard to capture without devolving into tropes or too weirdness.
It’s on the old netflix queue, so I plan to watch it soonish, for sure. Time is not often my friend on such things.
I pay taxes, and I tick the checkboxes to donate extra to the PECF so I pay more in taxes than I have to, and don’t complain. Still, even if I didn’t there are reasons to consider this news relevant.
First, he’s a flaming hypocrite (not hard to find many, many more in this vein):
he’s publicly condemned his own behavior in others.
Second, he’s worked diligently to hide his taxes, so news and information on this front’s relevant.
Third, his self-serving tax plan exacerbates people like him paying nothing in taxes while he falsely claims he’s going to fix a problem he’ll make worse.
The bare fact that he doesn’t pay taxes in isolation from all context isn’t notable. The context makes it very, very significant.
Let’s say two people engage in gay sex. Let’s say I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being gay/bi. Let’s say one person is a firebrand minister condemning homosexuality, while the other’s just a regular gay person. Same act, and it’s fine by me if people do it. But it’s still notable when the former does it. Context matters.
Lost you right there. My 12 y.o. is more coherent while in the middle of a pubescent, testosterone-fueled, sleep-deprived rant than the Grand Cheeto is at his most lucid.
I guess if that tax laws say “you can do X” and he did “X”, then he did nothing wrong. That might be an unpopular opinion here, I know, and if you look at my history you can see I am not for Trump at all for many many reasons. I for “not Trump”. He could have handled it in a mature way that makes him look less worse. Not better, just less worse. Note - I’m guessing there’s a lot of creative accounting in play here on top of this billion dollar loss.
It’s not just that he takes every legal deduction. If that were the case, he’d still be paying at least close to 15%, more in the Mitt Romney (embarassing and out-of-touch but legal-ish) zone. It’s that he’s pro-actively structured his personal and corporate incomes in such a way as to obfuscate where and how much money he’s made, to the detriment of the public valuation of the company(s), shareholders, and employees. That’s why he’s under constant audit.
Venturing a guess as to the real reason he doesn’t want to release recent tax returns: the auditors only have so much manpower, so he can stay ahead of them by years before they catch up to his avoidance process. He can pay minor fines by the time they figure it out, and change the game for the next cycle. Now imagine the effort crowd-sourced - his structures would be quickly dissected and every violation would be front-and-center in the public eye.
So, any takers on what Assange has planned?
This is what blows my mind about how much things have shifted. I remember nostalgically how disgusted people were when they found out that Mitt had planned to install a car elevator in his new house. Trump cheerfully poops in a gold toilet and spends charity money on portraits of himself, and half the country thinks that’s just swell, somehow.
Hard to tell, though he did just tweet this today:
Lying again about Bob Beckel being a Clinton strategist (and using a Fox News video to take a dig at CNN). His last few big reveals have been duds (Chelsea Clinton used… an alias!), so hard to know if it’ll be damaging or more self-promoting BS.
From what I have seen, the people supporting him (friends on FB and friends of their commenting) are more for “not Hillary” than anything else. It’s sad, really. But a huge portion of the population this go around is for “anyone but [him|her]”.
The most perplexing argument is this one loose friend who keeps commenting on how out of touch Hillary is with working Americans. I don’t comment on public posts, otherwise I’d ask him if he’s suggesting Trump is more in touch with working Americans. Because that is just shithouse rat crazy town talk.
Except that the accountants of the Trump Foundation appear to be neither. Why would his personal accountants be the “B” team?
Exactly, and to my mind, the most blatant example of his hypocrisy is that one moment he talks about how we need to “create more taxpayers” while the centerpiece of his tax plan is that low-income citizens would literally send in a piece of paper that just says I WIN on it and pay nothing.
That’s nonsense. Raping your underaged slaves used to be legal.
Anyway, if he really thinks he “did nothing wrong” then he should own it, proudly. He hasn’t been forthcoming with his finances because he KNOWS it makes him look like a shitty oligarch, and the public would demand fairer tax laws if they knew what people like him got away with.
[quote=“Poppinjay, post:146, topic:86622”]
Don’t put words in my mouth, I didn’t call anyone stupid.[/quote]
Quite right, the word was from @carlkingman, but the intent is from anyone defending Trump on the grounds that he was just taking advantage of the law.
But yeah, if you’re not paying taxes, I’m not sure you have room to complain.
@Wanderfound has room to complain because s/he isn’t running for President.
We are about to decide who is going to be the most powerful person on earth. The 2-party system means we didn’t get a full choice of who that person will be, but we do have a choice of who that person will not be. It is completely reasonable to use a standard higher than “not yet in jail” when making that choice, and his cynical use of tax loopholes, even if technically legal (which we don’t actually know at this time), is to me strong evidence of unfitness to be president. This is just part of a long record Trump has of sailing at the edge of the law to avoid civic responsibility: from his suspicious draft exemption to his bogus charities to these tax dodges, we see a man who has never been willing to go the extra mile to serve anyone in the country not named Trump. This makes him unusual among presidential candidates, and unique among the two contenders.
And, perhaps more to the point, the central plank of his campaign is “Make America Grate Again” (I’ll just let the question there go begging). The reason it currently isn’t perceived to be great by him and his followers is because of colostomy waste like him not contributing to the commonweal. In otherwords, he’s using his own fucking abdication of responsibility as the reason he should be given the keys to the kingdom.
Cognitive dissonance, thy name is “GOP voter”
Things that have been explicitly permitted by law in various times and places: slavery, marital rape, children working in coal mines, violently kidnapping random people and forcing them to crew a warship…
Again: legal and ethical are orthogonal.
But if his grave is unmarked, how will I know where to dance?
I’m guessing his personal accountants and tax lawyers are the best on the planet, and maybe the only people he’d never stiff on the bill. I mean, they saved him a billion dollars in this one case. That’s a solid day’s work.
Who even knows if the Trump Foundation has accountants, to speak of. They pretty clearly never expected it to take on real significance in the presidential campaign, or they’d have cleaned it up a long time ago and made sure that Trump himself was actually still giving to it. By all accounts (including what the Trump campaign said last week) it’s run as sort of a personal wallet for nuisance income and nuisance expenses. $400K in Comedy Central money? Park it in the foundation. $180K for charity-related lawsuits? Take it from the foundation. Even the worst case scenario for the Trump Foundation is fines and penalties and embarrassment, not Leona Helmsley-style jail time the way he’d be looking at if he’d bent the rules on the $916,000,000.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not putting anything past Trump. But given that the billion-dollar tax dodge can be done perfectly legally, it stands to reason that it was. At Trump’s level, tax cheating is like trying to break into a jail cell.
I don’t know. Given his contempt for contract law, I wouldn’t put tax fraud beyond him.
I would be rolling in schadenfreude if Trump has to drop out of this election because he got Ca-pwned.
