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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28212 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Okay wait, am I reading this right? Is 1 million times $20,000 actually TWENTY BILLION?

Good Lord, well I guess if you're going to give a naked bribe don't go small. But still. That is an INSANE amount of money to just casually throw out to a small part of the populace...

isn't that only 0.3% of the US federal budget. it's just a rounding error :)

I don’t know if tongue in cheek but I hard a discussion with someone on this esteemed website where I pointed out that rounding errors add up. If you can kill 15 of these kind of projects that’s 300b and real money.

Some rounding errors are positive, some are negative. So if you add them all together, in the limit the expected mean error is zero, so this program is effectively free!

I had the same thought at first, but if you read carefully, the language implies that these "loans" will be available to others. Which others, it doesn't say--all entrepreneurs? Racial minorities? Women? Who knows? But it is a sneaky bit of rhetoric--"we will be giving $20 billion to black men and others!" allows her to make the same claim to several groups separately while only actually committing a single pile of $20 billion.

Not that it's a small amount of money even then. This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels. When it comes to buying votes, no corporation in the world can outspend the U.S. government.

This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

What do you mean by this? What camels did it swallow?

https://biblehub.com/matthew/23-24.htm

Semicommon idiom. Jews have religious laws against bug eating, and so they were very fastidious about straining out bugs from drinking water. Jesus was contrasting this focus on very small things while letting a big thing (i.e. a hyperbolic camel) get through.

In this case, corporate money allowed by CU is the gnat, while federal spending is the camel.

How did CU allow for increased federal spending on elections? I thought it only barred the government from restricting private organizations from exercising free speech.

I thought it only barred the government from restricting private organizations from exercising free speech.

In the 30 days preceding a primary and 60 days preceding an election, specifically. Citizens United was an incredibly narrow decision that had really very little effect.

See also: “to see the mote in your brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in your own”

“And why beholdest thou the motte that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the bailey that is in thine own eye?” — Jesus (or something like that)

(gestures to my username)

My small-child self always read that as laser beams…

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