re: #296 b_sharp

Corps spend billions every year making sure the average person feels like shit because they don’t have the latest doodad. In a species where memories can be inserted into the mind with a little work, it is ridiculously easy to trigger a feeling of loss.

Companies like Walmart are manipulating people into buying what they don’t need.

He’s just trolling. Claiming that the bankers weren’t responsible for the financial meltdown? The people who purposefully packaged mortgages as non-risky investments, intentionally lying about the amount of risk they contained, and setting up a tranche system to buffer themselves further? Killgore’s not stupid, he knows that the fiscal meltdown didn’t happen because a lot of people couldn’t pay their mortgages, it happened because those mortgages had been turned into securities by the banks. A mortgage meltdown would have sucked, but the complete disaster was 100% because of how the banks packaged those mortgages, sold them, and disguised the risk on them.

This isn’t even getting into how his ‘blame the saps’ argument could be used to blame the clients of loansharks or patent medicine quacks, too. It’s basic glibertarian whargble, blaming people for not having perfect information.

It’s just more Killgore performance art, like claiming to abhor violence while squirming with glee while watching women get pepper-sprayed.