Labor Day Tribute to the Grotesque Old Party

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1. Well, as a republican (small r) I don’t believe that we should have a monarchy at all. People argue that they bring in tourists, but they come to see the buildings not the people. Abolishing the monarchy won’t mean we have to pull down the palaces.

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2. The royal establishment are misogynists, and only view their women as breeding stock, seeing their prize heifer with a coloured man made them very angry indeed.

   What the fuck?

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3. @Surplus: Sheogorath is the Daedric prince of madness from the Elder Scrolls series of games. I include him in my pantheon as a way to help cope with mental illness.

   It’s a way for me to have someone to pray to when the anxiety/depression/whatever I got gets too much for me to handle.

   Hence: “Sheogorath is kicking my ass” usually means “I’m having a bad mental health day”.

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4. @Virgin Mary

   Well, as a republican (small r) I don’t believe that we should have a monarchy at all

   There’s plenty of real stuff about the british monarchy that’s bad. You don’t need to invent fairy tales to justify your position, nor should you try to use your political leanings to justify believing in fairy tales.

   @Moggie

   It’d be nice if we could leave the weird conspiracist thinking to the right wing. Living in reality rather than fantasy will help us defeat the right.

   Also, the old rule about it being pointless to try and argue someone out of a position they weren’t argued into probably applies. I’ll leave it there, I think 😉

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5. Talking about Labor Day and valuing labor and the working class, I have a story about something that has been niggling at me for a while now.

   I have a friend that is approaching “Extreme Couponing*” levels of buying activity. They are always trying to get me to download an app, print/cut coupons, etc. Now it’s cash-back shopping sites. This friend likes to brag about getting stuff for free PLUS rebates and “sticking it to the man.”

   I side-eye this stuff** pretty hard. I’ve never seen an in-depth look at how these things work, but I strongly suspect “the man” is the last one to be giving up anything and the ones that get the short end of the stick are the employees of these companies (both manufacturers and retailers.)

   I told my friend about my misgivings and I think I made them mad. I hope not too mad to have a think about what I said, but I did get a bit exasperated because I’m just tired of being told (not in so many words, but still) that I’m being stupid/lazy for paying full price for stuff.

   *a cable TV show where people spend an inordinate amount of time obtaining/filing/clipping coupons and redeeming them in huge shopping trips where they buy and then hoard huge hauls of groceries for tiny amounts of money. To be fair, some of them donate all/part of what they buy for the show.

   **I want to be clear that I don’t have a problem with people who do this to make ends meet. My friend is one of these people.

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6. @Virgin:
   Well, I thought the Bush administration was really bad because they started the Afghan and Iraqi wars to disastrous results, bungled the Katrina response, and caused the Great Recession by deregulating Wall Street. I don’t need to also believe they orchestrated 9/11. People can dislike institutions without resorting to conspiracy theories about them.

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7. [Oops, wrong thread]

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8. @Hambeast
   If I might ask, why does your friend think these sites and apps and such do what they do? Surely, they’re not paying em to shop outta the goodness of their hearts? What’s the catch? I legit don’t know how these things operate either, so I’m curious

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9. Axe – Friend thinks that because they can go to Wal Mart and buy certain items there with coupons and/or rebates and pay nothing out of pocket that the money isn’t going to Wal Mart somehow. I don’t understand why they think that their patronage isn’t enriching Wal Mart anyway. A misunderstanding of fungibility, I guess.

   All I can find as far as what the mechanism is for this is from Nerdwallet.com:

   How they do it

   For example, take a site with an offer for 7% cash back at Sears. If you click on this offer link before shopping, it will take you to the Sears website to complete your purchase. On a $300 TV, you would get back $21. So where does your cash come from? Cash-back websites develop relationships with retailers and get paid to refer customers. The sites then share a portion of their referral revenue with their members who shop.

   “Each of these retailers, we’ve worked out commission arrangements with them,” Lal says of BeFrugal. “If one of our members shops at these retailers, the retailers pay us a commission, and we pass that on to the consumer in the form of cash back.”

   Husbeast speculated that the manufacturers use marketing budgets to do this, but where does that $$ come from? Not the stockholders or execs, I recon.

   I also think that they depend on people buying more than they need/want to get rebates.

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10. I don’t remember if I mentioned this here, but a couple months back I had the pleasure of going to John Cleese’s one-man show. The final part was questions fielded from the audience, one of these questions being “What was the dumbest question you’ve been asked on this tour?”

    His response:

    During a show in Florida, a smartly-dressed middle-aged woman stood up and asked me very seriously, “Did the Queen kill Diana?”

    There was an awful hush in the auditorium broken only by the sound of my laughter. After taking a few moments to compose myself I gave her my answer: “Well, obviously not with her bare hands….”

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11. Reading this thread, I’m reminded of that Hellblazer issue where Constantine winds up a reporter about the Monarchy being lizard people. I think Warren Ellis wrote it. I can’t remember if it was pre-or post-Diana death, I suspect the latter.

    @Nequam
    Dumbest question I was ever asked on a tour – and I got it frequently – was ‘how many undiscovered caves are there in Derbyshire?’

    Generally my answer was 5.

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12. @NiPBW

    Pretty sure that was indeed Ellis, though given the number of weird British writers who made Hellblazer the fantastic series that it was, it’s hard to pin down.

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13. @nequam

    During a show in Florida, a smartly-dressed middle-aged woman stood up and asked me very seriously, “Did the Queen kill Diana?”

    Why would someone think John Cleese had special knowledge about Princess Diana? Were they friends? Does he moonlight as a consulting detective for Scotland Yard?

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14. I’d like to discuss that the labor party is NZ appears set to crush the ruling right-wing party.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/08/jacindamania-soars-anew-as-new-zealand-pm-sprinkles-stardust-on-rival

    Im looking forward to the romance between Jacinda and Justin.

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