Wow, annoying and self-righteous much?

http://theodysseyonline.com/author/alyssalast

No offence to you, Brainbomb, but your friend has been reading a bit too much Milton Friedman.

and Ayn fucking Rand, probably.

Yea the author isnt my friend. I meant a friend of mine shared this. Is this supposed to be the new feminism or something?

I dont agree with anything she said. None of it was backed up with any substance. This post is intetesting to me because it shows how simple minded republicans are. Especially republican women. She is so delusional she really thinks being a conservative is something to be proud of as a female.

Except none of you can refute what she said.

"Venezuela is broken. They are basically bankrupt. They declared a food emergency. They don’t have enough food to feed their population. There are six hour long lines for milk and flour, basic things you can get at any grocery store here in America. A trip to the grocery store incites violence, and people actually get injured.

Bottom line: Socialism does not work."

i have a good friend. he is not very smart. he is republican. bottom line: republicans are dumb.

Laissez-faire weakens economies because of the instability it causes, which is generally harmful. Fact is generally subjective, nuanced, and situational. Emotion ALONG with reason has kept man alive, for example fear serves an evolutionary purpose of keeping us alive in the face of danger. People don't leave solely for self-preservation, community and working with others have kept people alive for millennia, it's why societies form at all. Ayn Rand was an idiot.

Objectivism, at its heart, glorifies the psychopath (by the pretenses of having antisocial personality disorder/psychopathy) as a sort of ubermensch.

Oh, I think maybe what I said made it look like I think republican women are ignorant. While in some respects that might actually be a fact. What I really want to convey with this post is that I dont think the Republican party has womens best interests at heart.

I do not feel that this girl who wrote this is aware of wage inequalities and other obstacles she is dealing with. She says handle every day with an iron fist. Well yea, but dont we all? Its one thing to handle every day with a headstrong diligent attititude, but she seems to equate that the Republican party is somehow just "unpopular" as opposed to "flat out a bad choice for women".

Any way, my point is, I dont think there is any reason this girl should be proud of being a republican. There is literally nothing to be proud of at this point and all of her bullet points ignore the overwhelming problems with the Republican party in general.

As someone who isn't a socialist, I'm not going to argue this girl's second point, and I also agree with the third point that the American welfare system needs reforms. The first point, however, may be misleading. First and foremost, Denmark isn't socialist. They have an extensive welfare state, but that doesn't make them socialists. As well as money, an EXTRINSIC motivator and a SECONDARY reinforcer, does not make one happy. Having less of it doesn't necessarily mean you are less happy. There have been extensive psychological studies which have shown that money does not equal happiness.

People don't have to be assholes voting entirely out of self-interest, brainbomb. A lot of poor people vote Republican as well.

@ Leon: "none of you can refute what she said"

I can. I refute the suggestion that people in Denmark are unhappy. Denmark was #1 in the UN World Happiness Report in 2013, 2014 and 2016 and came in third in the 2015 report.

Alyssa offered only one argument on this point, which was the implication that high taxes make people unhappy. However she offers no evidence in support of her claim, and her claim is therefore easy to refute. Danish people pay high taxes and they're happy. Compared to the UK, for instance, Danes have a shorter working week, more paid holiday, and better civic facilities. They have free healthcare, free schools, free universities and government spending on children and the elderly is higher than in any other country in the world. Denmark has a safe, fair, supportive, happy civic society that other nations should envy.

Alyssa offers no evidence whatsoever for her stupid, unsupported claim that high taxes make Danish people sad. Her claim is bullshit and I have refuted it. Eat that.

An American evaluates foreign countries' happiness by their car ownership, as if the American obsession with cars is an objective standard. Why am I not surprised?

I will put it on record that I, as someone who earns more than the UK average, would LOVE to pay higher taxes if that tax revenue was used to fund a responsible civic society like they have in Denmark.

Fuck individual liberty. Abolish it. Wipe it out. It's a negative "freedom". Do as thou wilt? Sure, but *prove* that you'll harm none - and we're good.

^ I really like what you did there.

x-cost @ Leth I really like what you did there.

To be fair, it's not like the American car thing is irrational in itself. It's a big country, relatively sparsely populated, and the infrastructure was designed with cars in mind. But smaller places, more crowded places, places that work harder to accommodate walking/biking/public transit, can't be judged in the same way. Denmark has more than twice as much railway mileage as highway (whereas the US has ~5x more highway mileage), nearly as many bicycles as people, extended bus networks, and 4x the population per square mile of the US. Maaaaaaaybe they don't own cars because cars aren't as necessary in Denmark, rather than because Danes are secretly miserable.

(I wonder what the numbers would be if you compared Denmark to its nearest equivalent among US states. Come to that, I wonder what US state is most like Denmark, if such a comparison makes sense to begin with.)

@ Leth: If you took all the white people from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and gave them all the same heritage, you'd have roughly the same population and level of homogeneity as Denmark.

A car is usually an American's first big purchase. The author also looks to be right around the age of a newly legal driver. Put those together and it could explain part of the reason she uses car ownership as an example. The other part or the reason is because she is young, inexperienced and naive.

@trip, a female college student is not the average age of a newly legal driver. in the US women can obtain a car and drivers license at 16. lol

bb: your issue is reading comprehension.

It seemed to me her major complaint about Denmark was less about cars (or even houses, which she mentioned equally as often) than about taxation, which is what you would typically expect from a small-government and small-c conservative on both sides of the Atlantic. Her argument in Point #1 ends, rather emphatically, by denouncing state requisitioning of "*your* money" -- a rather irksomely selfish buzzphrase, but one that she repeats again during the course of the column and, I think, the main point of her argument there.

I'm mostly appalled, though, by the fact that she says she yells about the Steelers -- and not, I suspect, in support. Them's fightin' words.

@jamie
"Fuck individual liberty. . . . Do as thou wilt? Sure, but *prove* that you'll harm none - and we're good."
This isn't a problem restricted to individual liberty. Shift to the collective level and the same objection applies. This is no proof that individual liberty is desirable, but neither is your point proof that rejecting individual liberty is the way to go.

But high taxes is far more generally opposed here in the states than in Denmark. She just assumes money makes them inherently happier and it being taken away makes them sadder, when she can't prove that.

I suspect there's an intervening argument that more taxes means less freedom and less freedom means less happiness. But as you say, this chain of logic requires certain assumptions that are at worst rash and and best over-generalized.

The author wrote, "Denmark might be the “happiest” country, but they cannot afford anything." Nowhere does she say the Danes aren't the happiest country. She only says that she herself would be unhappy in such a country. As for why Danes, are so happy, small countries (high urban coverage) tend towards extremes. It's the same reason why Singapore has the smartest students.

Is that also why the two nations with the highest GDPs are also the third and fourth largest by area? Or why the best universities are mostly in the fourth largest country?

"Nowhere does she say the Danes aren't the happiest country."

She says it is, to her, one of the most miserable countries. So, you are correct insofar as she is free to define 'misery' as incoherently as she likes within her own worldview. But she isn't talking about how happy she would be there; she's talking about how unhappy she thinks people from Denmark should be according to her worldview.