TheAgitator.com
Louis C.K. Speaks Truth. Sweet, Hilarious Truth.
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009The fun starts at about the two minute mark. I don’t know if Louis C.K. has libertarian sympathies, but this rant is pretty righteous. We tend to lose sight of just how damned far capitalism has gotten us.
I believe Louis has more socialist leanings, actually. But that doesn’t matter to me. He’s still easily one of my favorite comedians ever. Go out and get the DVDs Chewed Up and Shameless if you haven”t seen the specials already.
His old show on HBO, Lucky Louie, was probably one of the funniest, short-lived sitcoms on television.
He was very good. We do forgot how far we have come.
tons of great youtube stuff…
If anything he sounds liek Schumpeter talking about how capitalism will destroy itself by creating a class of the spoiled and entitled. And he perfectly summarizes the sense of entitlement in society right now which explains the support for the stimulus – gimme gimmme gimme.
Absolutely, we forget. I still own a rotary phone. My cell phone has more memory and functions than the first PC I ever used. And I, too, am guilty of bitching when modern conveniences don’t function as the should or as fast as I think they should.
When these things happen I just try to remember being in school when I thought an LED calculator was the best thing ever.
Hey Radley. This is totally unrelated but here’s a random music recommendation – http://www.myspace.com/danauerbachmusic. Check out the last tune :)
That was great
[...] Just look around you. Via Radly Balko. [...]
When you used that credit card, they had to pull out a book with credit card numbers to see if yours was valid! They had to physicaly check against a hard copy book (which I think was sent to every merchant every month).
Yikes!
And the advances in porn speak for themselves.
Thumbs up to #1 & #2: Louis C.K. may be a dyed-in-the-wool Maoist for all I know, but he’s one of the funniest stand-ups around.
Incidentally, that last bit he did about being a crappy dad… my dad explained the death of the sun to me in much the same way when I was about six years old.
He makes some great points, but he does start the rant with saying capitalism is to blame, essentially.
I also object to the statement that we should be so amazed to fly – reverent maybe, to those that figured out the problem, and to the human ability to do so (especially when unleashed by capitalism) – but the implication is that it’s nearly miraculous as opposed to a product of the abovementioned things.
@Mister DNA “Shut up and eat your french fries!” :D
Pong.
According to wikipedia, his dad was an economist.
Wow go figure, a person of the older generation complaining about us young whipper snappers complaining all the damn time. He might as well have said “get off my lawn”. The funny thing is, he’s complaining about a rotary phone. His grandpa could then apply the same line of thought and say ‘well in my day, rotary phones were a thing of the future!’. Another funny thing: Us young people will be the ones that will be supporting the ‘older’ generation because they decided to buy a condo in Miami rather than save up for retirement.
Boyd Durkin:
Hmm. Are you saying that pornography comes with sound, too? I wonder how they use it? ;-)
“Can you give it a second…it’s going to space!”
Just hysterical.
Yeah, I remember when we used to have to look through back issues of National Geographics to see pictures of boobs.
We had a black and white TV that was driven by vacuum tubes. Each tube had a heating element and some arcane mechanical device inside. Collectively, and without the aid of computers or software, these tubes were able to collect and reconstruct video and audio.
Wielding slide rules and watching ‘computer monitors’ that were actually just connected to cameras looking at documents, people were able to put men on the moon. If a catastrophe happened… like the oxygen tank on the spaceship constructed from metal, wires, switches, and relays and steered by looking at a stick stuck to the window exploded… these men were able to pull together and McGyver an air scrubber from what was available.
I tell people to git off my lawn all the time!
Doug Stanhope is quite libertarian
He’s also right about duck anuses.
Now I feel like shit for being such a depressing whiny-ass complainer.
Well I, for one, welcome the oncoming apocalypse. Apocalypses always get such a bad rap, probably from their constant negative portrayal. We’ve tried everything else; why not give the whole marauding-motorcycle-gangs thing a chance?
Huh, that’s actually not a bad campaign slogan. Have to shorten it — too hard to fit on a button.
Doug Stanhope is quite libertarian
Shame he isn’t very funny.
He’s right about the coins, though…having a pound coin rather than a pound bill was a lot better. Of course it doesn’t work here because the cotton industry has a lot of lobbyists and the cotton industry makes a lot of money off of selling cotton for bills, so the government will never abolish the dollar bill. Even though it would save millions per year.
Not me. I’d much rather carry a few grams of paper than several pounds of metal.
The only way you’d be carrying several pounds of metal is if you had a couple hundred dollars worth of coins…which would be your own damn fault for not turning them in for banknotes. :) They still have notes for 5, 10, 20, and 50 pounds. The only coins for pounds are for 1s and 2s.
The GAO released a report that noted that if we just got rid of the one dollar bills, the U.S. would actually save $522 million per year in printing costs. That’s how much cotton lobbyists convince politicians to suck out of the economy just so we can keep paying for a bill that lasts less than 2 years instead of a coin that lasts for 30.
Of course, the government would probably then just use that savings to create a subsidy for all the cotton farmers to offset the loss of business and buy their vote anyway, so I suppose it’s kind of pointless to debate it.
(sigh)
I listened to his appearance on O&A the other day and heard the audio from this clip and thought “right on.”
I don’t think he is being crotchety, really, just observing that in general, people are very comfortable and entitled, and have been for a very long time. Bailouts are being enacted because people do not want to give up these comforts – and quite probably, many people might not know how to hack life without a lot of the material goods upon which they’ve come to rely. They would learn, of course, over time. If we were truly thrown into a 1930s-era type of depression, how many suicides would we see, as people melt down over the loss of their stuff/status?
On O&A, Louis compared the US to the Yankees of the 90s. The Yankees were on top, but rather than nurture their young talent and invest in the future, they spent top dollar on seasoned players that nevertheless couldn’t deliver after awhile, and then the Yankees would fire the manager. They were not content to NOT be #1 for a few seasons while they trained a new generation of talent. America did the same thing: our obsession with being #1 in everything and blaming our leaders when things turned sour kind of got us in this mess. We were not content to sit back and regroup from time to time, and the quest for dominance blinded us to looming problems. I am not doing the best job of explaining the analogy, but when I heard it, I got it, and I agreed with it. You can find the show on Audible.com, go to Opie and Anthony and download the March 2, 2009 broadcast.
Louis does have liberal/socialist leanings but I can’t help thinking there’s a huge kernel of libertarianism in his make-up.
Amy,
Well, as Ron Paul once said, everyone’s born a libertarian…it’s just that the public school system beats it out of them. :)
no kidding, UCrawford. I am a public school teacher and find myself fighting uber-left thinking, anti-drug policy, etc. etc. line-toeing on a daily basis. I teach 10th-12th grades, kids old enough to be bored with the standard curriculum, know their own minds, and ready for a challenge, yet school continues to pound nonsense into their heads, and prosecute them when they dare show individual or contrarian thought.
Yet I teach so I can help teens accomplish their (possible subconsciously) subversive activities. I find it satisfying to encourage their rebellious streaks. Perhaps that makes me a bad teacher. But it helps me enjoy my job.
Now if I can get tenure and continue to resist joining the NJEA…that’s a toughie.
Amy,
A bad teacher is one who doesn’t care what the students think about, as long as they’re doing whatever the teacher says and checking all the blocks the system says they need to check.
So no, I don’t think you’re a bad teacher…in fact, the best teachers I had were the ones who pushed me to think for myself like you do with your kids.
I don’t see what any of this has to do with capitalism. Lack of gratitude, maybe, but who deserves our gratitude? Capitalism? Capitalists? Rich people? Come on.
Also, doesn’t this analysis that capitalism is under-appreciated leave out the essential point that part of what consumerism does is create perpetual dissatisfaction (via advertising, planned obsolescence, etc.) to drive sales?