Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:
7PM: The Stranger Hour with Josh Feit
The Stranger’s Josh Feit and Jonah Spangenthal-Lee join us for a recap of the week’s news, and a look ahead to what’s coming up. Do Seattle police tase first and ask questions later? Are Eastside Republicans a dying dead breed? Will the Legislature once again ignore Josh’s advice? All that and more, plus your calls.
8PM: Did Brian Boshes have a Ha Ha Hanukkah?
Brian Boshes says he grew up in a stable household with parents who still love him, and yet he grew up to be a stand up comic. Go figure. He’s performing in the Ha Ha Hanukkah show at the Mainstage this week (Dec 20-22), and joins us in studio for the hour. We’ll be chatting, and giving away tickets.
9PM: HA rides/derides the SLUT!
HA has always been fair and balanced, as evidenced by bloggers Will and Paul opposite take on the South Lake Union Trolley. Both Will and Paul join me in studio for a no holds barred review/debate of Seattle’s idea of a mass transit system.
Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).
Goldy: Nothing on the IPCC conference?
When the conference brought the developing nations on board this made it possible for the U.S. to join. But when I went to all the other libbie MSM sites I couldn’t find much about this development!
How can riding a slut not be fun?
A Brief History of Transportation
In the Early Times, if a man wanted to go from one place to another, he walked; and if he had to transport cargo, he picked it up and carried it.
Soon, mankind learned to harness beasts of burden to these tasks: Dogs, mules, horses, and women. Here, primitive concepts of property and ownership came into play, for a man was expected to ride his own dog, mule, horse, or woman; and there were severe penalties for expropriating another man’s dog, mule, horse, or woman.
Eventually, dogs, mules, and horses were supplanted by mechanical beasts of burden, powered at first by steam, and later, by gas. (For some reason, though, men continued to ride women.) By now, concepts of property ownership were well developed, and primitive justice had been supplanted by lawyers, courts, and jails; whereas a man used to be hanged for stealing a horse, he was now merely jailed for expropriating another man’s car, except men still were shot for riding another man’s woman.
With improvements to transportation technology, man was no longer content to ride his mule, horse, car, or woman around on his own farm; he now set his sights on far horizons. However, only a few people could afford their own highways. Consequently, man devised new schemes of pooling the resources of many men to build community-owned highways on which anyone could drive his car. To pay for these highways, each car owner was required to pay license and fuel fees, in amounts sufficient to defray the cost of the community highways.
These concepts reached the pinnacle of perfection with the attainment of community-owned ferry systems. Private enterpreneurs having failed to make a go of the ferry business, the state took over their ferries, and to make up the capital and operating deficits that had perpetually afflicted the private operators, devised the ingenious idea of redefining ferries as extensions of highways, which thereby furnished an excuse to lift money from the community highway fund for this purpose. This was the beginning of transportation socialism, an ideological construct designed to legitimize that which for ages past had been unlawful and punishable — to wit, making someone else let you use his dog, mule, horse, woman, car, or ferry.
Today, we see the ultimate in human progress — the creation of whole new classes of transportation socialism, in which a man gets to use transportation infrastructure almost entirely paid for by someone else. These consist of light rail, streetcars, and bike lanes. If this experiment works, dogs, mules, horses, and women will be added later.
Hey Pelletizer (TM) #3: “Soon, mankind learned to harness beasts of burden to these tasks…”
You forgot to add: “like Goldy’s use of malleable minded liberals on HorsesASS”!
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Golly Pelletizer (TM): This diatribe in #3 kind of reminds me about this: http://www.truthbook.com/UrantiaBook/FTOC.htm. Similar facts.
Now did you just break a “tenet” of the HA Comment Blog Police, Perfesser Darryl, Threadmaster?
Navigate to Page 81 and see some of this in writing.
This is a lefty blog, Tom. Goldy and his crew make the rules, not you. Unfair, ain’t it? Now go away and masturbate to the Bushies’ christmas video. My friends heard the noise last night……
@5 Why don’t you just post pertinent excerpts here, with appropriate quote marks and attributions, and the usual “fair use” legal disclaimer? You don’t expect a lazy rabbit to wade through 81 fucking pages of rightwing tripe so you can make one little point, do you?
Here, I’ll save myself the trouble, and I don’t need help from any stupid wingnuts to figure this out.
When you drive a car, you pay for the car. When you fly on an airplane, you pay for a ticket. When you ride a horse, you either buy the horse and pay its feed, farrier, stable, and veterinarian bills — or you rent the horse, usually by the hour, and horse rentals aren’t cheap (as you know if you’ve ridden a horse recently).
But people who ride ferries expect to be subsidized by people who don’t ride ferries, and cyclists expect to get millions of dollars of bike lanes for free, paid for by people who drive cars, whom they hate. And the people championing buses, light rail, and monorails — like cyclists — want their favorite mode of transportation subsidized by taxes on other people, too. In fact, I suspect these folks and the cyclists are the same folks.
I suppose you could make an argument that things like public education, libraries, police, and courts are “socialism” because they’re supported by general taxes instead of user fees. My reply to that is, if that’s so, then the biggest socialists of all are the rightwingers who want lots of military spending, and frankly I think we’d have fewer unnecessary wars if the military had to be supported by user fees on those who want to use it for such purposes.
What I’ve been trying to point out in these comment threads is the starkly simple point that mass transit options that depend on taxpayer funding are fundamentally different from the way we’ve historically funded transportation.
Transportation is a core activity of human civilization, and one of life’s big expenses, like education and housing. Historically, it’s an expense that’s been borne privately, by those who use it — whether the transportation consists of a oxen-drawn covered wagon or an SUV and the gas-tax-supported highways it drives on. Mass transit is fundamentally different because Group A pays for it so Group B can ride on it free or at low cost. That is a radical departure from what we’re used to, and has broad social and economic implications. I’m not saying there’s no place for taxpayer-supported public transportation. We’ve had that for a long time. What I’m saying is some folks want to rush headlong into a massive expansion of the scale and scope of community-financed transportation … and, generally, they’re folks who plan to send the bill for all this shiny new infrastructure to someone else.
@6 It sounds like he wants Darryl to delete my posts when they depart from the liberal party line and wander into the anti-tax realm, as they do occasionally.* I didn’t realize pudwhacker cares so much about the ideological purity of this blog. If he keeps this up, I’ll acquire a new respect for him.
* This has nothing to do with political philosophy. It’s purely pragmatic. I can’t afford to pay for all the shit that liberals want to spend my money on. Their collective daydreams are bigger than my bank account.
Of course, I have this problem with rightwingers, too. They don’t spend less public money than liberals do; they simply spend it on different stuff. At least you get something useful when liberals spend your money; Republicans take your money and blow it up in shithole countries simply because they enjoy pushing other people around.
7 As a matter of fact, the biggest “expansion of public transportation” in this country is probably the construction of the Interstate Highway system. Among other things, that led to tremdous growth of the long-haul trucking industry, which in spite of its other inefficiencies, was able to make use of the publicly-financed freeways, thus able to compete against the railroads which have to run on their privately-owned and -maintained trackage. Furthermore, it faciliated the construction of large quantities of suburban housing and enabled people to live much greater distances from where they worked. This was happening against a backdrop of metropolitan streecar lines (which were originally private) being put under public ownership, shut down and replaced with busses, spurred on be a great deal of lobbying and marketing by General Motors and the oil companies.
Transportation is indeed essential to the function of any sort of post-medieval society, but it would appear there have been forces at work to arrange for the need for it to be maximized at every turn. The primary force has undeniably been the profit motive.
Freddy Krueger@6: I know. Pelletizer (TM) never let’s us forget.
Pelletizer (TM): How do I know you didn’t visit it? You claim in another thread to sit on your fat ass all day. I would be then no one would expand their horizons.
@11 That’s not a claim, it’s a fact. Why shouldn’t I? I worked for 45 years, and fought in a war. That’s enough. Now it’s my time to sit on my fat ass. If you don’t like it, put a nickel in the Help Roger Rabbit Live Like A Republican Fund box.