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We can add not owning stocks to the list of RW life advice that includes not going to college, working at the nail factory, marrying an 170 pound woman, dumpster diving for yogurt, and not getting vaccinated.
https://x.com/L0m3z/status/1899623568650145985
(Yeah I know he's "joking" but what's the joke?)
The joke is that the market is collapsing and if you're like Buffet and liquidated everything into real assets you sold the top and get to laugh at the panicked moonboys.
It's trolling dressed in envy of a simple life and you took the bait.
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What is actually wrong with working at a nail factory? It’s not advice I would give to a bright young man, but, like, somebody has to be willing to work at a nail factory, and the continuing availability of nails is more vital to our civilization than further refinements in advertising software.
There are plenty of people who aren’t college material and aren’t cut out for the trades or the army. What would you have them do? A factory job is usually a step up from McDonald’s. It’s better than being a welfare parasite.
Bourgeois ethics are not constructed around how important one's work is to the maintenance of civilization but to how much it enhances an individual's self actualization.
If making nails was a prestigious endeavour or part of some social movement you could get away with it, but getting stuck in low tasks is a failure to raise one's social status and therefore contemptible.
The idea that people can not be college material is alien to this ethical framework. So is valuing family, religion or anything else over self actualization. Everyone can and must become a self actualized bourgois individual, axiomatically.
Apologies for the digression, but I feel compelled to point out there are legitimate economic reasons why certain jobs are valued over others that are in their totality more important to the maintenance of civilization. It is, at least, not purely aesthetic and cultural.
Imagine a society with two professions: farming and weaving. Of the two, farming is obviously the more important -- it doesn't matter how nice your clothes are if you starve to death. And, for the sake of argument, let's say that weaving is the harder of the two, requiring far more education/training/practice.
Farming is both more useful and easier. So everyone should be a farmer, right? Clearly not. If you have no farmers, adding one is massively valuable: he directly saves many lives. But if you already have many farmers, adding another one just increases variety slightly, or reduces produce prices. If you have no weavers, adding a weaver is pretty valuable. Less so than the first farmer, certainly, but the most important uses for cloth -- bandages, maybe, or protection from the elements in harsher climates -- are important, and obviously that's where the products of your only weaver will go.
So you want some of each. How many? Not an easy question, but here's an algorithm that should work: given X farmers and Y weavers, would X-1 farmers and Y+1 weavers be more valuable? Or the reverse? Swap one worker in the indicated direction and then repeat until neither change improves total utility. The average value of a profession decreases monotonically with worker count (if you cut one farmer, the rest will adjust such that only the least valuable farming work goes undone), so this simple algorithm should always find the optimal arrangement.
This is all just a long winded way to say that jobs (and all other goods) are valued at the marginal return rather than the average, and that's a good thing. The point of a wage is to incentivize workers to adopt a certain profession, and you want to allocate workers to where they can produce the most value given the current state of the market. If nail factory workers aren't paid well, that's because we already have enough nail factory workers. You don't compare the total value of nails to the total value of [some other better paid profession], you compare the marginal value produced by an additional worker in each field, because that's the number that indicates where the marginal worker should go.
If that poor wage results in a large exodus from the profession, fewer nails will get made and more and more important uses for nails will go unfulfilled... such that it becomes worthwhile to pay nail factory workers more. Everyone -- factory owners, consumers, and workers -- just need to follow their individual incentives and the result naturally maximizes total utility.
As for prestige: to some extent I think you're right that it's about self-actualization. Teachers and musicians and journalists are much higher status than their wage predicts, and petroleum engineers much lower. But these cases are interesting because they diverge from the baseline; wage is the baseline. After you've stripped away all the cultural/philosophical cruft, you'd still expect to see the observed phenomenon.
A valiant and praxeological critique of sociological Marxism!
At the risk of opening a huge can of political economy, and bearing in mind that I agree with Mises a lot more than the average person, there is still legitimate criticism to be had of how will and whim can make work that is not necessary (in the economic calculation sense) look immensely valuable.
Indeed, economic analysis is sometimes blind to what is a far more valuable if difficult to measure commodity: power.
Why are NTY journalists who are literally on less than subsistence pay higher on the totem pole than your average chemical industry executive? Power. They can ruin that executive and make him kill himself if they round up enough of their colleagues. You can't buy that. Billionaires have tried and failed.
Now this isn't to say that wage isn't a primary factor in one's status or immensely correlated with power and prestige (we do live in a capitalist society to some degree), but it isn't the only factor, and other factors can supersede it given circumstance.
Economics is like nature, you can override it for a long time if you have the will to do so, albeit never forever.
In what universe are NYT journalists higher on the totem pole than a chemical industry executive? And even if they were, they don't have some magically independent power to conjure life-screwing facts out of thin air.
Kavanaugh was an example of life-ruining facts literally being conjured out of thin air. They didn't succeed, but that was due to notable external factors.
Could you elaborate with actual concrete examples how mainstream media did it? My memory is hazy, but if I recall correctly, even some of the more liberal magazines like NYT specifically mentioned that they couldn't corroborate certain allegations against Kavanaugh with other people they questioned.
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Maybe this time one is successfully disciplining their journalists.
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This is like saying that cop is more powerful than CEO, because cop can arrest the CEO not the other way around.
NYT can indeed "ruin" even otherwise rich and powerful people, but the decision to "ruin" someone is not made in any democratic way (by "rounding up" friends) and is made far above any "subsistence pay" regular journalist.
A charismatic colonel is more powerful than a CEO. It's all contextual, of course. My point is that status is not reducible to monetary value. That doesn't mean you can't make an economic analysis of it, just that it's a lot harder than looking at the numbers you do have.
Yes, it is all contextual. "Charismatic" colonels are few, most officers are cogs in the machine (just like most CEO's). Analogically, you can say that popular and well connected investigative reporter is rather powerful, but how many of these are in NYT of today?
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Agree with some of this. Having a self-actualizing career is very important in contemporary bourgeois society. This can be seen in the way the prestige of jobs is imperfectly correlated with income, being a college professor is higher status than being a restaurant manager even if the latter makes more money. But this part gets to a general problem I have with the Online Right:
The American bourgeois has a lower rate of divorce and a significantly lower rate of bastardy than the working-class. One of the reasons high-class people don't want their kids to work at the nail factory is because the nail factory is full of people from unstable families for whom that behavior is normalized. Plus other pathologies like obesity, criminal records, etc.
But the reason isn’t that they prioritize religious and family values above all else, or that they see the role of a family man as an end unto itself. It’s that their bourgeois social circle expects them to form stable marriages with children with members of the same social circle or a similar one that partially overlaps it, because it’s one important thing that confers social status and thus contributes to self-actualization eventually. On the other hand, failing to achieve this is a sign of high time preference, which they see as a personal shortcoming.
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Well sure, I’m not saying that kids who are college material should go work at a nail factory for forty years. This seems like a significantly worse life than being an accountant or claims adjuster or whatever other unglamorous white collar job. But we shouldn’t shame people whose abilities simply aren’t that great into going to college or bust. Society needs garbage collectors, it needs nail makers, it needs forklift drivers and ditch diggers.
As an aside, restaurant managers don’t really make more than full professors unless they’re top performers. Their pay tends to be performance based(health scores, keeping within budgets, and drive through times for fast food) and most restaurant managers are not towards the top.
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Don't get me wrong, this isn't a total criticism of bourgeois morality. Like every creed it has some value but is fundamentally flawed. I'm merely trying to elucidate why it produces such value judgements.
This sort of bourgeois universalism has produced much good and can work very well provided it is only applied to a homogeneous society of smart, pious and honor bound individuals.
Once you start trying to enact its universalism away from just Englishmen of good character is where nature comes to ruin the party.
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This ethical framework is retarded. Do they expect their cushy laptop job to cause nails and potatoes and sausage and paper to spontaneously generate as maggots were once thought to? Do they expect a college degree to make the garbage spontaneously vanish and power lines to repair themselves? Do they think being 'actualized' will make ditches form out of the ether, complete with sewage pipes that then cover themselves? Will it pave the roads? Build the houses? Slaughter the chickens? How do they expect the chores of maintaining a civilization to get done?
There's a reason communism is the bourgeois ideology par excellence. Because it proposes to solve this question through the sheer power of technological progress.
Machines will do it. Pay no mind to the forced labor, it is merely transitional. Food comes from the store. And if it doesn't, we shall make it so by force.
Now one might criticize the feasibility or merit of abolishing scarcity, but one must recognize that it is the project. Star Trek is the bourgeois utopia, where free from lowly material concerns, we are then free to pursue the true purpose of humanity: self actualization.
There is some irony in the ultimate goal of commercium to abolish itself, which even Marx remarked on and in some ways personified. But I digress.
As a linguist, this is one of the best examples of linguistic drift I've ever read.
The 1800s communists and bourgeois would have obviously disagreed with this sentence (because communism was about stripping the bourgeois of their power and giving it to the working class).
But you're not using these terms how Marx and his contemporaries used them. The way I'm reading you is that: the bourgeois is idealized by the DINK couple who works an email job and got a degree in "gender-studies"; communism may-or-may-not be the traditional purely economic theory, but it likely has incorporated a lot of generic social leftism (that we would expect to be taught in a gender-studies program).
Is it really "drift" though?
Even in the 1800s, communism tended to be more popular amongst students, intellectuals, and the idle rich than it was amongst farmers and factory workers.
Lenin (yes that Lenin) laments this in his own writing and cites it as one of the reasons that a vanguard party is neccesary. You see, the problem with giving power directly to the working class is that they will use it to persue thier own interests rather than those of the revolution. The implications of the interests of the proletariat differing from those of the revolution appearing to have been either lost upon or intentionally side-stepped by Lenin and subsequent communist thinkers.
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Incorrect, I am using these terms in the same ways Marx and communists in general originally used them. I am however saying something that communists sought to hide about themselves for tactical reasons.
Marx and Engels themselves were of bourgeois extraction (the latter the son of a wealthy factory owner, no less), and most of the original communist intelligentsia were too. Communist social theory seeks to abolish such class distinctions through a unification of all of society into a classless whole. It isn't inherently against the bourgeoisie (Marx himself says as much).
However, Marx saw the victimisation of the proletariat as a powerful force ready to be captured, which is why he and his contemporaries designed polemics against bourgeois rule (really capitalist rule) because they thought that a proletarian revolt would be the best vehicle for their revolutionary social engineering project.
However however, Marx's original predictions that the proletariat would be amenable to his revolution has proven false, and thus communists have had to seek different strategies, most famously abandoning the capture of economic classes for socio-cultural minority causes. But the original verbiage has stuck and become contradictory.
Your typical gender-studies student attacking "the bourgeoisie" which she ostensibly belongs to is engaging in an ancient lie devised for a defunct political stratagem. Meanings change, symbols don't.
In all this, a neutral observer of communism will notice a pattern emerging of a revolutionary vanguard made of educated bourgeois counter-elites that is looking for a popular coalition to drive against their internal class enemies. And this makes communism, in a bout of irony that would have immediately sent me to the worst of gulags, a bourgeois ideology. Perhaps the most bourgeois ideology. One would have to argue whether it is more or less characteristic than Liberalism, its progenitor, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Interestingly, the points I'm making were at one time part of Soviet politics, Bukharin and the NEP supporting "right" were really supporters of the peasantry against the cities whose more influential urbanite population is quite literally what the term originally designates.
You're right that there's a lot to say about the linguistic drift of the term, but it went the other way around of what you're thinking. Marx's politics made the term for urbanite (bourg literally meaning city) which he used into a political category and epithet. In moving to designate email-job "coastal elites", it is merely returning home.
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- Aristophanes, Women in Parliament (391 BC)
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Undocumented migrants.
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I first thought he meant don't own a single 'stock award'. It's standard financial advice to not correlate your investments with your work.
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This is a pretty good example of a low-effort "boo outgroup" post. From the rules:
I think I have heard the name "Lomez" before. I have no idea who they are, or why they are a good representative for the "Right Wing" generally, or why this meme tweet is indicative of "Right Wing Life Advice". I think it's probably possible to describe a coherent category of "Right Wing Life Advice" and describe central examples of that category; I do not think "not going to college, working at the nail factory, marrying an 170 pound woman, dumpster diving for yogurt, and not getting vaccinated" would be a reasonable summation of that category, but if that's the argument, you should put some effort into proactively providing evidence to support it.
...and due to my "e" key being broken, @self_made_human beat me to it. Consider his warning seconded.
The fact that a moderator here doesn't know who Lomez is gave me a brief pause. But I guess that shows that there is no one way to be extremely online, and even if the bubbles are coterminous, they're information bubbles nonetheless.
So for everyone's convenience:
Lomez, also known as *looks it up* Jonathan Keeperman, is a person from the BAP's sphere of influence, mostly known for Passage Publishing, a serious attempt at a right-wing publishing house. Unlike earlier attempts at "thing, but anti-woke" by e.g. Vox Day, this one seems to be of a decent quality: they have a mixture of compilation of texts by extant writers associated with the right like Land, Moldbug or Sailer, reprints of classics both high and middlebrow, and some new publications.
And sometimes, the tongue is planted firmly in the cheek.
Personally, he seems like a more decent person than his associates: BAP and Zero HP Lovecraft, although he'd probably resent being described this way. The worst I could say about him is that he takes it upon himself to sane-wash the pointless cruelty of the other two.
Are you sure that isn't a made-up name?
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high ... middle... new... are all the same link
Corrected, sorry about that.
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That would be pretty funny if done on purpose.
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He's most famous for getting doxxed a while back:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-guardian-doxxes-my-editor-unveiling-him-as-cultured-witty-athletic-handsome-family-man/
Nail factory:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GkFn4c0WkAA7NyX?format=jpg&name=medium
170 pound woman:
https://x.com/ScottMGreer/status/1898109126024007903
As far as I’m concerned, I’m willing to concede that in certain narrow social circumstances it’s advisable to move to a small Illinois town if you find work at the local nail factory. But these are indeed narrow.
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Aside from the other criticisms of your posts (which are substantial) something that i find consciously absent from this discussion is the discussion of height.
170 lbs on somone who is 4 foot 6, is very different from 170 lbs on somone who is 5 foot 8. Maybe the the whole being-an-incel problem would resolve itself if you were just willing to ask a woman like Brooke, Annsley, or Marinna here out, instead of pining after Twitch thots and OnlyFans Starlets while bitching about having to live in a society.
5 foot 8, 170 pound women are rather rare, aren't they? Also they are rather unlikely to be attracted to the sort of men who follow such advice in the first place. These are just statistical facts.
Also, keep in mind that such a woman very easily becomes a 200 or 220 pound woman after childbirth(s).
Not in my experience no.
You, @AlexanderTurok, and others are talking about a hypothetical 170 pound women as if you are imagining some barely mobile walmart scooter jockey when the reality is much closer to the picture i just linked.
"Post Childbirth" also implies, children and all that entails which renders all the concerns about incel-dom, finding a mate, fertility, etc... moot.
Since you gave a response I decided to not be lazy and converted 5 foot 8 to centimeters after all. I'll concede that you have a point. Still, I'm pretty sure that most 170-pound women are shorter than that, and the ones that are indeed that tall get, I guess, usually quickly snapped up by high-status big men specifically seeking out women of such proportions.
The pictures you posted are blocked by Cloudflare, so I can't comment on them.
Regarding inceldom, again, I don't know who this Lomez guy is or what the wider context was of him giving the advice of pairing up with 170-pound women. I suspect this advice boils down to "ignore the factor of sexual attraction when looking for a mate", which I find questionable at best.
The linked post wasn't his. It was from some guy called "Labrador Skeptic".
I've got to say, I find this whole discussion kind of hilarious, now that I've done the maths (not American, so I don't think in pounds), as I find (average-white-height) women of that weight quite attractive.
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Do American leftwingers think that men should be allowed to shun fat women? I mean legally yes, but morally. From my understanding of American discourse around fat women, the 'fat pride movement' (I do not remember the exact term) is left coded.
If I am correct, then attacking rightists for normalizing fat women is kinda meaningless, if both sides do it.
Such an annoying way to think...
Don't post low-effort comments whose only purpose is to express disagreement or your low opinion.
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Uh, I can give a confident “no” to that question.
Do you mean merely shunning fat women should be banned?
The question already excluded that.
My bad.
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Traditionalist-progressive thought posits that the only worth women have is their beauty (and it is the social role of men to offer the highest price for this service). Progressivism privileges women at the expense of men, so reducing the quality of the service men are forced to accept while not reducing the price for such means, in a zero-sum society/economy, more power and resources for the more beautiful. QED.
I understand what you mean, but i resent the use of the term "traditionalist" to describe this tendency, when actual tradition explicitly rejects the idea that beauty is of primary importance in favor of motherhood and homemaking.
There used to be a whole genre of fiction praising men who choose plain moral women over femmes fatales, and this general wisdom is so hard to kill that it even bubbles up in modern fiction (to wit, Knives Chau's obvious moral superiority over Ramona Flowers).
BAPism and other such Nietzchean ersatz reject in part this wisdom in favor of more base passions, but they needn't do so and the devil is in the details. The whole internal contradiction of that movement is a known problem that they haven't managed to deal with yet, mostly bursting out as that constant tension between Christians and neo-pagans.
Hence I believe it important to name things accurately given how tricky this philosophical entanglement is.
Kind of like actual progressivism, which also explicitly rejects the idea that beauty is of primary importance in favor of the exact opposite of those things.
I'm aware of the steelmen on both sides; I'm also aware of what they tend to mean in practice when the rubber of ideology meets the road of rational self-interest.
Which is why BAPism and other such Nietzchean ersatz are full-bore "don't bother with the plain girl who actually gets along with you, go for the hottest chick you can" (which is exactly how progressives treat men, but replace "hottest" for "richest"). The childhood friend never wins in anime partially for this reason.
And I'd actually say they're correct to do so for a significant subset of women who share the same level of self-interestedness. Married couples were seldom friends- and I'd actually say that, for a lot of people, the suggestion that they should be is an outright lie (which comes from the liberals, not trads/progs). A set amount of challenge (in a predictable and well-defined way) in a relationship can be healthy.
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Although in the movie Knives Chau gets tossed and the Good Ending involves Scott getting Ramona. My take on the movie (I haven't read the comic) is that the screenwriters want to, but don't explicitly, condemn the Scott-Knives relationship as inappropriate because she is still in school and he isn't.
Also, I don't think Ramona is supposed to hotter than Knives in the movie - her most prominent feature apart from being taller than Knives (who IIRC is tiny) is her electric pink buzz-cut hair - this is not something that is attractive to most hetrosexual men. Ramona is supposed to fun (unspoken subtext - slutty) in a way which an Asian-Canadian middle class teenager is not.
It’s a good comic, especially for someone starting college. Fun, funny, and thematically cohesive. I highly recommend it.
It’s also not a rom-com.
Characters comment on how the age gap makes Scott kind of creepy from the beginning. This is not moralist condemnation, because this is a comedy. Scott is being set up as goofy and likable but also pathetic and self-absorbed. From this springs the entire plot.
Likewise, Ramona is supposed to be fun and hot and a walking red flag. Yes, that includes the hair (which you might be misremembering). If you don’t think her look would be catnip to the Scotts of the world, you’re delusional.
There’s a particularly good bit near the end which may or may not have made it into the movie. Scott, during his dark-night-of-the-soul, hits Knives up knowing she used to have a thing for him. “Would you care for some…CASUAL SEX?” It’s awful. Pathetic. Naturally, she’s long over him, and he has to actually figure out what he wants to do with his life rather than paper over it with hedonism.
And that runs directly into the finale—people actually expressing agency. Scott doesn’t pick Ramona over Knives. Knives was never a real option. Once he knows what he wants he actually has to work for it rather than remain in a stasis of rebounds and second choices. Extended adolescence. That’s how Scott completes his arc from a loser to a functional adult. It’s not a rom-com, but a coming of age story.
Link.
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I do not believe most heterosexual men are going to classify her haircut as an explicit turnoff.
Ramona's danger hair definitely classifies her as casual sex material rather than wife material; she is not the kind of girl you bring home to mom.
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It isn’t that attractive today because it has culturally barber-polled down to having lots of low status associations. Back when the comic was made, having electric pink hair meant you were a cool/hot alt-girl.
Regardless of the colour, the buzz cut is unattractive to heterosexual men in the vast majority of times and places.
I think the distinction between "cool/hot alt-girl", "fun" and "slutty" is one without a difference. I mean this girl is in her mid-twenties and has already had seven messy breakups.
Movie Ramona is mid by the standards of female characters in Hollywood movies. I assume this is deliberate on the part of the filmmakers.
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The film tries to make Scott/Knives into something creepy and bad, but my point is that it fails. You'll easily find plenty of people online who find the alternate ending where they stay together superior.
Like many, I have problems with the morality of Scott Pilgrim's universe, but it is a useful and genuine piece of art that gives access to millennial mores in a way few others do. And I see its failure to depict slutty mature fun as superior to naive true love as the weight of tradition (in the sense of perennial moral necessity) reasserting itself. Scott is a terrible person, and what he gets is actually the bad ending.
I'm sure this isn't a consensual opinion given how hot button age gap discourse has become, but it's how I see it.
Let the record show that @IGI-111 plied me with multiple gin-and-tonics, held me down, overpowered me, and forced me to read this opinion. I will be preparing a long and detailed Tumblr post, with accompanying YouTube video, detailing my accusations. Users here will be harshly scrutinized based on how fully and unflinchingly they believe and signal-boost my story.
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This is not what we're looking for when it comes to a top level post in the CWR thread.
We ask that such posts be substantive and have a semblance of effort put into them, and if you're going to link to something, we except you to provide your own commentary. Pointing and laughing doesn't count.
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Boo outgroup
I feel like we're in the position the Left was with wokeness in 2004. They told themselves it's just some performative radicalism in the ivory tower, not impacting the real world. And then it went from too insignificant to comment on to too strong to suppress. Now they're wishing they had strangled the baby in the crib.
So I think it's worth talking about.
I mean, this happened with the Right during Obama's second term. We've been undeniably living with it since 2016.
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This is probably a true statement about the leadership of the Democratic party. It definitely isn't true about "the Left" unless you've started using that word to refer to libertarians for some reason.
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It is worth talking about! There’s a lot you could say about the role that the stock market plays in the right wing imagination, its relation to anti-elitist attitudes, etc. You could turn that into a great post. But you have to actually write that post. You can’t just post a bare twitter link and say “take a look at these jackasses”.
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