Right-wing radio host/sentient ball of rage Michael Savage has a dream: that one day soon (right after the inauguration, in fact) little white boys will be able to join hands with little white girls without having to worry that the mean “interloper … phony .. monster” currently living in the White House will sell them into little white slavery.
In a recent episode of his radio show, Savage declared that, because of Trump,
I don’t walk around fearing that it’s all coming to an end. I don’t walk around looking at little white children seeing future slaves anymore. Did you know that? Did you know that that’s what I used to see? I’d walk around and look at little white children and I’d shake my head and I’d say, ‘If this doesn’t stop, these children will be slaves in their own nation.’
He also told his listeners that, because of the immense rage he feels towards his political enemies, it’s probably best that he isn’t running the country (or even a tiny portion of it) himself.
I would not want that power, because I would probably use it like a hammer on an anvil to get even with these people and what they’ve done to this fine country. …
I’m glad I have no power. I’m glad I’m only a voice on the outside looking in.
We are too, Mike! Which probably means that Trump will appoint him head of something, and that Savage will happily accept.
Here’s the relevant portion of his radio show, courtesy of Right Wing Watch.
H/T — Right Wing Watch, via Secular Talk
Mish, I’d be the first to tell him he is one of the 80% that is supposedly superfluous.
Others rather agree:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/amp/you-re-fired-buffalo-school-board-moves-oust-trump-ally-n701296?
@PeeVee,
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/da/da4f7af727012ae6498158b4432ba2f3404ac25edc046f806961dedf8eee4715.jpg
Perfect, Mish! Just PERFECT!!
@TreePerson….
Ha! Right on!
@Bina
Endemic inability to realize that their opponents don’t share the exact same goals and drives, but pointed in the other direction. “We want to do it to them, so it stands to reason that they want to do it to us, and so we must takes steps to protect ourselves!”
This sort of critical empathy failure is pretty common. It is one reason why right wing trolls on progressive websites out themselves so quickly.
‘$50 million dollar train station’
That’s a pretty good deal for a train station; I’ve just been given £100 million to renovate a station and I don’t think that’s going to get us very far.
@guest
Is there any possibility to “lose” about £1 million of that money? I’m broke. :/
Probably not, it’s not my money 🙁
I’m broke too, but I did not spend any money for five days, only spent a few pounds on drinks for friends yesterday, and am not going to spend any money for four more days, so hopefully that will compensate a little for the big expenses I’ve had over the last month.
So a vast underfed, underhoused, uneducated, unhealthy underclass (which will include alllllll the white folks who aren’t wealthy and their kids) is definitely the solution to the nonexistent problem of potential white slavery? That’s what I’m getting from this. Also getting so close to admitting that slavery is wretched but then just whizzing it because that racism is impossible to let go.
Also, Savage, if your imagination makes you so upset you admit that you’d exact bloody vengeance on anyone, you need to reassess yourself and also NEVER complain about the purported sensitivity of liberals/leftists again.
@guest
As I’ve been without income for quite a long time now, I’ve come to have that reaction every time I come across mention of a large sum of money, no matter what the money is for. :p
When I saw that a football player just signed a contract that would give him $1M/week, I instantly thought “what if he randomly decided to give one week of his pay to me? then I would be fine!”
When I see that the city has spent $40M to build a new stadium I wonder if anyone would notice if I could somehow take 5% of that money for myself.
When I see that Bill Gates is worth $84B, I think “would it kill him to give me just ONE billion dollars?”
@PI Joking aside, I think it’s a perfectly rational and worthwhile reaction (if not actually helpful to you in your situation)–it highlights the incredible inequality we’ve grown so accustomed to. It’s so easy, if you follow current affairs, to think about the sums of money we read about as if these are almost trivial amounts–I remember probably decades ago listening to someone who ran, I think, a women’s shelter, saying ‘people are constantly talking about hundreds of millions here, hundreds of millions there…I could make so much difference, and improve so many lives, with $10,000, but I can’t raise that much.’ And that’s NOTHING to these people.
I was hanging out a few years ago with someone who taught at the local university, and he was telling us about his recent get-together with someone he’d gone to school with. He’d become a professor, she’d become a banker. She was telling him she was thinking about changing jobs, and had two offers, but couldn’t decide which to take–one offered a little more money, the other had other advantages, blah blah blah–and he said the difference in salary between the two jobs she was considering was more than his entire yearly wage.
@IP: Yeah, that’s my reaction too. It’s always bizarre to try to compare the amount of money these huge projects cost into the amounts that we really need in our daily lives. The two are just on a different scale.
My father never tires of quoting a particular line he heard in a project meeting one day: “A quarter of a million dollars here, a quarter of a million dollars there… it soon adds up to money.”
IMHO one of the strangest things about a capitalist system is that, because all the employees are also consumers, the people who manage millions at work are usually also scrabbling for much smaller sums in their private lives. One can end up with a weird mental disconnect in which a thousand pounds is both pocket change and a very serious sum of money.
‘One can end up with a weird mental disconnect in which a thousand pounds is both pocket change and a very serious sum of money.’
Haha yes–‘dude, it’s only going to cost £100K, let’s just do it and stop arguing!’
Also, that was (allegedly) Everitt Dirksen:
‘A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.’
‘Although often quoted, it seems Dirksen never actually said this. The Dirksen Congressional Research Center made an extensive search[dead link] when fully 25% of enquiries to them were about the quotation. They could find Dirksen did say “a billion here, a billion there”, and things close to that, but not the “pretty soon you’re talking real money” part. They had one gentleman report to them he had asked Dirksen about it on an airflight and received the reply: “Oh, I never said that. A newspaper fella misquoted me once, and I thought it sounded so good that I never bothered to deny it.”‘
For whatever reason, a few days ago I was looking up the highest paid athletes in the world. Because their salaries get thrown around frequently I usually tune it out and don’t really comprehend the vast sums these guys get paid. About halfway through the list my brain finally turned on and short circuited. I just couldn’t fathom the amount of money they got every year for playing a sport. And I love sports! But there could be actual good done with that money instead of giving it all to one person. The same goes for anyone making that kind of cash, it just usually isn’t published like sports stars.
guest:
“Right, let’s move on to item two on the agenda: catering for the office party next month”. Two hours later, the meeting breaks up, still undecided. See: Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, aka “bike-shedding”.
When I was buying my flat, by far the largest amount of money I had ever spent on anything, I realised that I was putting less care into it than I would on a purchase one-fiftieth the size. I tried to counter this by imagining how many Mars bars I could buy with that money, and the amount of space these would take up. Sort of the Egon Spengler approach, but I’d never seen a Twinkie.
Daniel Kahneman talks about this kind of ‘monetary optical illusion’–someone will throw in an extra £100 addon to a car or computer without thinking and the next day drive across town to buy a £2 pen on sale for £1. I try not to allow myself to be fooled by this illusion–both realising how much actual money I’m spending when buying something expensive, and realising that my time is worth more than how much I’ll actually save on the ‘50% off sale’ down the street.
I’ve known a few people who measure money in pints, to get a more realistic sense of magnitude, and one guy who unfathomably did the same in units of haircuts.
I measure money in terms of my pro-rata’d hourly salary. “I had to work for X hours to afford this” really does put things into contrast.
@guest:
Thanks for sourcing that to Dirksen and telling me that it’s apocryphal. I’ll take it up with my father.
@EJ I didn’t know about the ‘allegedly’ part until I looked it up.
Everette Dirkson was a pretty colorful character.
We really only think about discretionary spending on a daily basis.
Discretionary spending is roughly a third of your income if you’re middle-class US and not saving much (i.e. most of the country). So to understand salary-sized amounts for a day, you need to multiply what you normally think of as a big expense and triple it. Double it again because there’s overhead (managers and cleaning staff and administrators and accountants and lawyers and HR and IT and…) Now you have an amount that is going to pay one worker for one day.
On a daily basis happens thirty times in a month. So you take the number previously calculated and multiply by 30, and now you have the cost to pay one worker for one month.
When you’re building a train station, that construction project will employ hundreds of people. So multiply by say 300, and you have the cost to pay workers to work on the train station for one month.
But it’ll take a year to build once you break ground. So multiply by twelve again to get the labour cost of the train station.
Oh but you need to buy construction materials and you need to buy or rent tools and machines, so double it.
OK, now you have the cost from breaking ground to finishing the construction: 2 * 12 * 300 * 30 * 2 * 3 = 1,296,000 times as much as what you normally think of as a kind of expensive thing to buy.
You thought $40 was a purchase to have a decent think about before jumping on it. The train station is $50M. That’s *actually fair*, and is just because so many middle-income people are involved.
That said, some individuals make completely unfathomable incomes. I was able to not work for three years — and in fact to fund some employees for a year — on account of 6 years of savings, and still be comfortable. I think that’s at the upper limit of what any society should allow an individual to amass; ideally it would allow the result to happen *without* letting an individual amass that sum. And I’m far from what actually rich people build up.
@numerous
Not even close to a majority of the U.S. has 1/3 of their money as discretionary income. This is one of the big problems I. our economy in fact.
@Kitty Cartel
I agree in principle, but in reality if the actual athletes weren’t paid that money, it wouldn’t go to do any good for anyone, it would just add some extra zeroes onto the (probably offshore and untaxed) bank accounts of the teams’ owners.
@Eddie, I’d love to agree with that, but I think his supporters will just find some way to blame Democrats, immigrants, LGBT+ people, Muslims, and God knows who else for any lack of progress under Trump.
Even when you give these people facts, they assume everything is biased unless it tells them what they want to hear. They’re deep in denial.