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As someone who will be personally negatively impacted by this tax raise I just want to say that there is more to the tax raise than just plutocracy. Conservativ
by ravar 9y ago
As someone who will be personally negatively impacted by this tax raise I just want to say that there is more to the tax raise than just plutocracy. Conservatives are raising complaints about what is happening in the academy, and if members of the academy do not want to be personally hurt maybe we should try to understand the kernel of truth in their complaints.
At the very least members of the academy could selfishly try to come to some harmony with the people who control our budgets rather than blindly lash out against them.
- make3 9y agothe people who control the budgets are corrupted by the requests of their billionaire donors and of the anti intellectual thoughts these billionaires promote in the poor population. I'm not in academia; we all benefit from having research being accessible, instead of more money going to the billionaires.
- ravar 9y agoI partially agree with this assessment, industry for whatever shortsighted reason sometimes implements bad academic policy, as was seen in the Harper administration in Canada. However it is fully well possible that in a complex world such as ours that there could be more than one serious threat to the very large set of institutions which is academia. It is also possible that one of the threats, lets say the internal threat, could be used as a smokescreen by a second threat, lets say these nebulous billionaires. We do not need to be worried about either threat at the exclusion of the other.
- make3 9y agothe nebulous billionaires are really just a illustrative term to signify the disproportionate effect of very centralized money in general in the American system. I think you'll find very few honnest knowledgeable people to dispute this. if common good is your objective, then there is no doubt that controlling individual & corporate political donations is essential. right now, political corruption is straight up legal. entities can freely trade money for future political measures, and politicians can't live without that money, because otherwise their opponents outspends them, getting a statistically higher chance of winning.