The BS being spewed regarding the financial crisis is pathetic.

[Odin2005]

I have never seen such a pathetic mix of economic ignorance, "Bush Family Evil Empire" conspiracy nuttery, and nihilistic "let the whole system collapse" rage. Nadinbrzezinski's thread in GD is a good example. Nadin is being reasonable while other posters are screaming "let the system collapse!" or "OMG, it's a CONSPIRACY!!!". :eyes:

[trotsky]

1. And the gold bugs are lovin' every minute of it.

What an odd little mix DU is sometimes.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Yes

Some people seem to know very little history - I would have thought there would be more widespread knowledge of the disastrous effects of the 1929 crash. And to be overly taken with the idea that any sort of shock to the system is a good thing, and any sort of change is better than the status quo. Cali came up with a good phrase on one of the threads; she referred to such people as 'secular end timers'.

[Odin2005]

14. "Secular End-Timers" That sums it up perfectly!!!

[beam me up scottie]

3. Between that and the hysteria about thousands of missing corpses and secret labs, I've had it.

I can't watch them salivate over each new disaster and fantasize about how they'll incorporate it into their paranoid conspiracy cult anymore.

I'm now thoroughly convinced that most people are stupid on purpose.



I'm staying out of the main forums today.

[dropkickpa]

5. Stupid on Purpose

That describes my feeling much more succinctly than I've been able to manage. Thank you!

[beam me up scottie]

9. The Great Epiphany should have happened when I was visiting in the dungeon a while back.

I got sucked into the cellar by the vortex caused by a GD post that went south, and a now ts'd poster mocked the graphic in my sig line.

When I lol'd that anyone could actually think that Cthulhu was Hello Kitty, she replied "I'm glad I don't know."

Her exact words:


"I'm glad I don't know."


That says it all, doesn't it?

[Odin2005]

18. Hey BMUS, I like your sig-line!

Ingersoll was the Sam Harris of his time!

[beam me up scottie]

20. Thanks!

I never get tired of reading Ingersoll, I wish he'd been with us longer.

[JitterbugPerfume]

29. Hey BMUS!

If I knew nothing about you except your sig line , you would still be a DUer to be respected.

Robert Ingersoll was a great Freethinker. That is the highest praise!

[beam me up scottie]

35. Why thank you!

I'm happy to see you've got your identity back.:)

[salvorhardin]

7. Yep. Willful ignorance is my personal definition of stupidity. n/t

[WoodrowFan]

15. WTF?

thousands of missing corpses and secret labs????

[beam me up scottie]

17. Yeah, it's that bad.

Katrina, the Sequel.

The people who believe that everyone is in on the conspiracy are something. I wonder if they realize that their neighbors, doctors, clergy, - almost everyone would have to be complicit in order for them to cover up that many dead.

[Odin2005]

16. I'm convinced that people find it more emotionally satisfying to blame and scapegoate people...

...even though it's mindsets and socioeconomic forces that are to blame, that is why such BS is so popular. It's part of the same innate tendency for anthropomorphism that lead early people to think there were supernatural people behind the natural forces of the world. Belief in the Conspiracy of BFEE is little different psychologically then belief in natural forces being the result of the machinations of the Gods of Olympus.

Great minds talk about theories.
Average minds talk about events.
Small minds talk about people.

[beam me up scottie]

24. The Blame Game is easy.

The pictures of the damage Ike did broke my heart, and I can understand why people are angry and want to blame somebody, anybody, but it's never that simple.

[LeftishBrit]

36. It's not the conspiracy theories that bother me so much here..

as the readiness to punish everyone, rich and poor. There have been posts to the effect that the posters would be willing to have themselves and their families starve in order to punish the Wall Street bankers, and to bring down 'the system'.

I think the system is pretty awful, and don't have that much faith in the idiots-in-charge working out an ideal solution, but tearing everyone and everything down is not the answer. Last time, not only did it directly cause horrible suffering and death for many, but it helped to bring Hitler to power. 'Shocks to the system' don't always work for good.

[Warpy]

4. The potential for a serious collapse is there

but certainly not from where "teh BFEE conspirasy" people are coming from.

I've tried to tell them that the fat cats not only haven't engineered this one but are absolutely appalled that their economic bullshit hasn't worked. Again.

[dropkickpa]

6. Yeah right!

I can't believe that thing that didn't work before still doesn't work!! We're doing everything the same!!!

[salvorhardin]

8. It's amazing

I actually heard NPR's economic wonk saying something remarkably like, "We had no idea all this would blow up. The fact is that these new financial instruments are so new we don't really know how to use them. We're like adolescents playing around. But don't blame us!"

[Orrex]

10. Someone on Washington Journal this morning

Identified himself as an investor with some 45 years of experience, and he said that anyone who was watching the market should have been able to call this collapse at least ten years ago. He went on with a number of reasonable points, but his underlying theme was that people who should have known better, for whatever reason, simply chose to act as if they didn't know.

Maybe it was greed and easy money, maybe it was simple short-sightedness.


Or maybe it was those Jooz again, with their claws dug deep into the World Bank and all of its lovely gold.
(okay, the caller did not make that last claim...)

[Warpy]

11. I started to predict it in the late 70s

when wages were aggressively held down after the oil shocks and credit cards were being used to fill in the gap.

If you want to know where an economic collapse comes from, follow the debt.

[Orrex]

23. Did you use a pendulum?

If you want to know where an economic collapse comes from, follow the debt.

Solid advice!

[onager]

25. CBC did a good documentary on that--"The Debt Trap"

CBC also points out that wages have not kept pace with inflation (or anything else), leading people to fill in the gaps with credit.

The situation in Canada seems identical to the U.S. Not surprising, since the docu notes that Canadian banks do the same sort of sleazy credit marketing as their counterparts across the border.

As always, the interviews with average people are eye-opening. One couple bought their dream house, then realized they couldn't afford it, even though both earn comfortable professional salaries. There are hints that financial troubles threatened their marriage. They put the house back on the market at a loss and considered it a bargain. A college student was given a credit card and got into deep trouble, etc.

The same sort of stories you hear in the U.S. Except the CBC seems more willing to point the finger at the right culprits.

[TZ]

12. Ha. I have my share of debt....

So I AM responsible! (well not really, my ARM mortgage is actually okay--and still cheaper than renting here!).
But what I do know, is that they have been forcasting this for YEARS, even when the housing market was at the hottest. Being kind of an economic idiot I did not understand the warning, but they were right on the button, the predictions I heard..

[Orrex]

22. Years ago, a broker advised me

To take my money out of whatever it was invested in, stuff it into my mattress, and keep it there for the next twenty years or so.

"That's what I do," he said.

That was in 2000, shortly after the tech collapse but long before the true horror of Dubya's administration came to light.

[trotsky]

13. A component too, no doubt...

is full awareness that the crash is coming, but self-assuredness that one will be able to "bail out" right before it hits.

[Orrex]

21. Yes, very true

There's no incentive to rein in your bullshit accounting practices, if you know that the tax payers will happily write you a check once you've driven your business into the shitter.

[Odin2005]

19. EXACTLY!!!

This crash is more about the short-sighted ideological stupidity of the Have-Mores then anything else. If anything the actions of the Fed and the Treasury are making it clear that Bush and Cheney are NOT in control. Bernanke's statement that he has "lost control of the dollar" is truely frightening. It's in Congress's court now and they seem paralyzed about what to do. IMO the problem has NOTHING to do with some conspiracy, and it has EVERYTHING to do with Neo-Classical "Market Fundamentalist" conventional thinking. That was why FDR was so successful, he didn't care about conventional thinking (or even gave it much thought, he hated Economics in his college days) and so was open-minded enough to just try things.

[onager]

26. American business is amazing, isn't it?

Full-bore capitalists when times are good. But when their wonky ideas blow up in their faces, they turn into the biggest bunch of socialists you ever saw and happily line up for government handouts.

[TZ]

27. Yep.

And it appears the Bush gov is trying so desperately not to be the next Herber Hoover (stand by and do nothing while the country falls into depression) that they are totally changing their behavior of the last 8 years.
McCain I see is already blaming Obama, while its clear that de-regulation that him and his repuke friends were so fond of contributed greatly

[Pale Blue Dot]

28. There's a good reason people are believing these stories.

That's because smart people have seen this coming for some time and nobody did anything about it. These smart people did not think it was going to happen because they were anti-capitalist conspiracy theorists, but because they did what all good skeptics are SUPPOSED to do: they analyzed the data and used it to come to a (frankly, rather obvious) conclusion.

I'm pissed. I've been warning co-workers and DU about this for a couple of years now, only to be met with blank stares or accusations that I'm a "chicken little" or that I "wanted the economy to fail" by people who HAD NO DATA TO BACK UP THEIR ROSY ASSERTIONS. What they had was cognitive dissonance. Yesterday in a meeting with co-workers the economy came up one of my colleagues said "Patrick warned us about this a year ago". Well, yes I did, and no one listened (I didn't say that out loud, by the way. "I told you so" does us no good right now and it doesn't make me feel any better).

Over the past couple of years I have seen the most UNscientific reasoning applied to the markets and the American capitalist system. Several months ago one poster said that he could prove that there was actually no recession because he could open up his door and hear the sound of people going to work. Many, many people said that a collapse could never happen because, well, this is America and that won't ever happen here. All utter bullshit and wishful thinking. Cognitive dissonance.

If, as skeptics, we are going to heap our outrage on those few that see a massive conspiracy in this instead of looking at the facts and heaping the outrage on those that truly deserve it (such as our Congress, who will likely approve this massive phony-baloney "bailout"), then I fear that we've learned nothing and lost everything. As skeptics, I believe our chief enemy is cognitive dissonance; it keeps us from living in the real world and from interpreting data objectively. Nobody wanted this to happen, so no one would let themselves believe that it COULD happen. It could and it did and it's about to get worse. Where will we, the skeptics, be in this fight?

[JitterbugPerfume]

30. they privitize gains and socilaize losses

we are FK#D

[skepticscott]

31. Economic knowledge in this country

is and always has been at a disgracefully low level. Students are required to take classes in American history and civics, but not economics, despite the fact that a solid grounding in econ would do at least as much to make them better citizens and more knowledgeable voters as memorizing how a bill becomes a law. A little late now, unfortunately...making 11th graders take econ would only make them suicidal, when they discover they have no freaking future...

[realisticphish]

32. one problem

is that every econ 101 class, where most students stop, if they start at all, is not even basics. It's broad, theoretical "supply and demand" models. It doesn't actually look at the complex systems that we really have to deal with on a day to day basis. I don't know if you can really do that in a quarter, but econ classes in college are pretty useless until you get to upper level classes

[skepticscott]

33. True, but it'd be a start

And I'm really talking about requiring it in high school. Yes, quite a few of the classes might be bullshit, but a lot of the American history classes are too. Anything would be better than what we have now. Economics is just too important a subject to ignore it completely.

[dropkickpa]

34. I'm currently trying to get more debt

I've applied for a credit card, I'm barely making ends meet now and I haven't even gotten a winter gas bill yet. If I had a home, I'd put it in hock (equity loan) but, since i rent, amorphous floating debt is the best I can do. My pay does NOT go as far as it did a year ago, and I earn more now than I did then!

I think it all does boil down to wages doing a dismal job of keeping pace with inflation, as evideced every time I shop for groceries. I used to spend roughly $200/month for 2 people, now, to get the same stuff, it's more like $300, and I'm not even counting non-edible consumable necessities and highly perishable consumables such as milk, eggs, and bread. I buy lots of staple items, cook from scratch, etc, but the cost is still up. My dogs food, at least for the time being, has remained the same.

[semillama]

37. My raises are not tied into anything like inflation or COLAs

so for the last few years, I've slowly been making less money, too.

[dropkickpa]

38. Mine supposedly is

2-2.5% of it, at least (varies by year, COLA). Anything above that is considered merit, never above 5% total. I'm getting less and less bang for my buck every year.