Shorter Gary Johnson: keep the hedge fund guys and corporate behemoths paying really low taxes while we gut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Not that I support the excesses of SOPA, but, in general, f**k the Internet, f**k social media, f**k handheld devices. They’re destroying civilization (remember books?), destroying privacy, destroying jobs. The Left used to worry about workers being replaced by technology, but 21st-century “progressives” don’t seem to let it trouble their Twittering consciousness. It’s easy to complain–in the abstract–about joblessness, not so easy to look into what’s causing it.

Re SOPA, David, you might at least consider that there are great numbers of not very highly remunerated workers in industries whose products are essentially being stolen online. When they join the 99ers, is their fate just going to be forgotten by the Internet-uber-alles crowd? Is technology innovation some sort of god that we’re supposed to bow down and worship without regard for the human consequences? Are you aware of how many secretaries and recptionists–just to cite one example–have been pushed prematurely out of their jobs because of BlackBerries and iPhones? Technological innovation is dazzling and has resulted in leaps of productivity in the workplace–marvelous, and the result has been untold numbers of people simply dumped on the sidelines. Are we just supposed to ignore this human fact?

BackEast has a pretty strange attitude for FDL–of all places to have that prick point of view toward people making less money than oneself! Maybe my sense of irony is deficient today.

Thanks for the info about Mankiw’s course. Bravo for those students. We know how much pressure is on students at the expensive schools–and which aren’t, now?–to be “pragmatic” and look out for their own futture financial survival.

Occupy the goddamned Harvard Business School! That’s the viper’s nest that has sent so many little writhing snakes on their way to Wall Street to manipulate finance and game the bubble-and-bust system. Also, for a grounding in these issues, read David Harvey’s books and the late Peter Gowan’s articles in New Left Review. The business schools have been the petri dishes for this unprecedented looting of public wealth–and there they sit in the midst of these universities where the most articulat outrage should be being voiced. Think of Columbia in 1968–why the hell should nothing be happening in Cambridge in 2012?

Elected Stalin. That’s very funny.

Kabuki Show. It’s the trope of tropes on FDL. If you saw a sunrise you’d be convinced that the PTB had orchestrated a laser show simulation of a sunrise just to trick you. The similarities between the anti-Obama right and the anti-Obama left are getting creepier by the day. Heap all the scorn on O you like for being the pet of Wall Street etc. etc., but this turn-the-other-cheek pooh-poohing on the part of DD and others toward the Saudi rich boy theocrat killer is sickening.

Right, now I get it. If we keep this absurd, convoluted discriminatory policy in place, then the U.S. will become a lamb on the international scene.

Nations have military institutions. Permitting discrimination in those institutions is a separate matter from whether the military is being used by a given nation in a warmongering, unjust fashion. I don’t see how the fact that Obama has been such a disappointment to his progressive base should lead you to dismiss this advance toward equality by gay people. I despise the banks–that doesn’t mean that I think a bank ought to be able to use my being gay as a reason for not hiring me as a bank teller if I want to be a bank teller.

We need to start approaching people such as Sherrod Brown to challenge Hopeless for the nomination in 2012. Enough talk & complaining. Time for action.

Don’t see anything on the Time homepage about a Person of the Year poll. How is it found?