"If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

No, that’s what the grownups in the room are calling “selective quoting”.

Just for fun (what I like to call “Just for shits and googles”), try Googling “Rush Limbaugh out of context.” Then you can see what kids are calling it these days.

I’m too stupid to recognize selective quoting. Maybe it would be easier if I took the bone out of my nose.

I work in a small business. We ship packages every day, and almost all our mail goes through the USPS. The business owner complains about the USPS on a regular basis–they don’t care enough, they don’t handle the packages nicely enough, they don’t deliver very fast–but in the end it’s cheaper than FedEx and more reliable than UPS, so we use the USPS for almost all our deliveries.

I thought the point of the thread was “If you chop up this quote, it looks like Obama hates business.” Given the misleading quotes and argument in the OP, I’m surprised any other point has revealed itself at all.

This is a whoosh, right?

I think it is totally disingenuous for anyone to believe that I, Ravenman, am not the most important person on earth. I mean, there’s so many other people around, true, but they all just factor each other out: the smart ones are offset by the dumb ones, and once you cancel out all those variables, what are you left with? ME. I am the most important person, and you all should be doing a little more in the kissing of my ass department.

That part doesn’t surprise me: we’ve got a number of posters who’ve been on this board for a decade or more, but haven’t learned a thing during that time.

But even most of them have gained a clue or two about what will at least be treated as a tenuous basis for a debate, and what will be dismissed out of hand. I’d say the OP in this thread constitutes an exception.

It’s taking longer than we thought.

Okay, this is either a mildly funny brainfart or very, very clever.

The quote “selectively edited” my post–but without actually changing anything, so it’s within Board and Fox News’ rules, and right in the spirit of the OP. It lopped off the "Lastly, did the Feds have anything to do with helping me cram all this fail into one little post?! Did they?! " bit at the end. Partial quotation shifting the intended meaning … familiar? Again, could be a brainfarted oversight (and hence the incredulous you-can’t-be-serious question) or a wonderful bit of meta-elegance.

You know,we should also look carefully at what Romney said recently:

“I really like… Communism. I think that America… should be more like… China.”

I know what you’re thinking - there is more to that quote, and we should look at what was between the ellipses. Give it some context, so to speak. However, I am entitled to my interpretation, and if you interpret Romney’s quote in a more charitable way, you just do that because you’re biased towards Romney in the first place. So I am right.

Anyway, whatever Romney’s message was supposed to be in the quote above, I think you can all agree that he chose a very horrible way to frame it.

Since everything else is picked apart already I just wanted to point out two things:

  1. ARPANET (not APANET) had nothing to do with the creation of a secure military communications. The secure military communications project was RAND. So to inform your inquiring mind when Al Gore secured funding for Cerf and Kahn he was thinking of public communication and resource sharing, not the military. Cause that’s what ARPANET was.

  2. I think you’re the first person I’ve seen use that honorific for Al Gore. But just so you know for next time, you spelled it wrong. It’s an abbreviation for Peace be upon him.

Serious question - weren’t all the things that a business takes advantage of already paid for? The roads my packages are shipped on are paid for, and their upkeep is paid by gas taxes (mainly). My (theoretical) employees were educated by my property taxes that I’ve already paid. When I use the USPS, I pay per package, in addition to the tax dollars that go there.

I think what sticks in the craw is the idea that I should pay more for people who aren’t contributing much at all. They often get Earned Income Credit, which is a pay out above your tax obligation, they use “free” social services, they don’t pay their property taxes for years at a time and they don’t have cars, so they don’t pay gas taxes and the like.

I bootstrapped myself from a 19 year old single mother to a 35 year old woman with a stable life, two small businesses and a full time job. And yet, I am being told to give a little more, while lots of others do nothing. The secret is not roads and education, it’s getting your shit together, IMO. I don’t understand why people who believe that are considered fools and monsters.

I see you fell for the OP too. Shame, really.

Roads are never fully paid for, there are always maintenance expenses which as you say, your gas tax (and those of others) pay for. If you ship things via UPS air, you have a host of government agencies making that possible. The public subsidizes your shipping in a variety of ways, so it would be a mistake to say that you’re fully off the government dole.

Don’t think the wealthy use government services? Seems to me that they use the air traffic controllers more than the average guy, as well as the embassies abroad, etc. Can you conceive of a business that gets by with no government run infrastructure? Maybe. But the vast majority use what society has provided them.

:rolleyes: :dubious: No, sir, any ideological idiot who thinks the small businessman is a self-reliant island, or tries to give any rhetorical impression to that effect, is being chastised here, and rightly so.

Getting your shit together won’t help if you’re living in Somalia (unless you aspire to be a warlord). Roads and education do help just a little bit, don’t you think?

As far as roads, I’m not sure about the funding, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it comes from more than just gas taxes. And gas taxes don’t pay for the police patrols that protect those roads, or the military that protects the borders, or the enforcing of the rules that maintain the economic system that enables you to succeed.

Certainly you deserve the fruits of your hard work, and you deserve praise for your success, but you did not get there solely by yourself.

I assume you treat your employees well, so this next thing is not aimed at you personally, but many of those people who “don’t contribute much at all” aren’t able to do so because of employers who get wealthy by exploiting them and paying them as little as possible. To then ask them to pay more than they do for the roads etc. that they’re employers benefit from doesn’t seem right to me, does it seem right to you?

And yes, I do realize that there are parasites who milk the system. That’s a problem that none of us like. Unfortunately, it’s an inevitable problem. Maybe more could be done to reduce it, or maybe not, I don’t know, but, in any case, using them as an excuse not to pay our own obligations seems a little bit disingenuous to me. “There’s evil in the world, therefore I’m not going to contribute” seems to me to be a counterproductive attitude.

This seems remarkably short-sighted, both temporally and in terms of the scope of the benefits that we all take advantage of. If you had to pay for these things all yourself, you’d call it an investment, and you’d do it until it became too great for the business to be profitable.

But sure, right now, this minute, stuff has been paid for. It continues to exist into the future, however, so there will continue to be costs, right? People continue to be educated, roads continue to be built, packages continue to be delivered to rural addresses, the legal system continues to enforce contracts and punish theft, we continue to prevent ourselves from being overtaken by hostile other countries, and so on and so forth, by collectively participating in America. That means that there is a moral obligation to help ensure that the next person who needs to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is able to do so.

I’m really coming to understand the conservative mind better and better every day. For instance, the problem with TANF isn’t all the people who benefit from temporary assistance to a needy family, it’s the idea that someone somewhere may be unduly benefiting. My cousin knows this guy who totally is ripping off the Medicare system, so we shouldn’t support Medicare.

If you can make an argument that the number of failures outweigh the benefits of the overall system, go for it. Otherwise, you seem to be saying that if a system doesn’t perfectly prevent all mistakes, it should not be supported.

More broadly, the thing is that America is great. Collectively, we are strong and we provide a very fertile soil for lots of great stuff. Collectively, we’ve also decided that we prefer to provide a safety net for people. Some of those people may yet pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Heck, they may not even appear to recognize that they were given any kind of assistance as they did so. But providing that makes our country stronger.

Inevitably people who say this have failed to recognize that their bootstrapped efforts were in fact given lots of support along the way. It may not have all been from the government. If you had an aunt who could look after your child, or a room over someone’s garage, these are benefits you didn’t come to solely on your own. The thing is that not everyone has that aunt or knows of a room over the garage somewhere. Collectively, we’ve decided that we ought to do something for folks like that.

“Getting your shit together”? Was that easy for you? If it was hard, was there a point at which you may have failed to get your shit together? If it were possible to have failed, was it entirely your own doing that prevented failure? If some circumstance were varied slightly, might you not have succeeded? If you really don’t recognize that circumstances may vary for people, you are seriously in the wrong. Being monstrous is being wrong like that and willfully consigning others to suffer as a result.

Further,

Sateryn76, Sicks Ate et al.:

Do you think it is heroic for a member of the military to die in service to America?

Not as a generalization, however one may die performing a discrete act of heroism.

Just want to see where this goes.

I don’t follow your qualification. Can you explain when giving your life in service to your country is not heroic?