What's the evidence for the mega-rich NOT controlling the government?

Any reason?
Because that's what my online dictionaries are telling me. I assumed it traced to the DSM (or some specific psychologist's theory/work).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/delusionary

"Delude" and "delusional" etymologically precede the discipline of psychiatry:
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/deluded-delusional.html

So if it's not the DSM thing, my simplest guess is that it is intended to add a dimension of imperfect tense to "delusional"; suggesting, maybe, that someone who is delusional might only be that way temporarily, or about a certain thing, whereas "delusionary" suggests one has a tendency to always gravitate towards that mindset, with everything, or alternatively to do so in perpetuity.
 
there's no evidence...

it's why marijuana is still illegal federally, and gay marriage took so long to get passed...

Politicians, CLEARLY, don't care about their constituencies and their views but that of their donors....
Haven't Senators from both sides said they spend 60-75% fundraising.....there you go.

I'm with you except for the bothsideism.

The Democratic party, while being a pile of shit in comparison to almost everything, is a chocolate sundae compared to the Republican party.

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Your original statement was that "most Americans use the acquisition of wealth as their metric for communal success." I understand the argument you're making about this view on evolutionary psychology not really applying in the modern world. I'm just not sure that it's answering the question either.

Your statement seems to be something along the lines of "Americans are motivated by money as a means of defining success." Would you agree?

If so, I might argue that point. Our society definitely rewards and admires wealth, but it also admires all sorts of other things as well. The best example is celebrity. We devote attention to people who are famous for all sorts of reasons, regardless of how much wealth they have attained. Similarly, we judge athletes by talent, championships, and personalities, not the size of their contracts. We celebrate many politicians who vie for power over material wealth (honestly, these folks scare me significantly more than those who vie for wealth). I'm just not sure that success in America is viewed in such a reductionist way.

We admire many things, we judge success by money. We might admire a talented athlete but we don't hand out equal amounts of prize money. Boxers don't split the purse 50/50 - the more important guy gets the bigger cut. MMA fighters don't get paid the same as their opponent, even if they're fighting for the same belt. The bigger draw gets a PPV cut and the lesser guy doesn't. Even in team sports, once you step away from the all time greats, a guy knows he's better than the other guy by if he's getting paid like he's better. If he's better and he's not getting paid like it then he expects his next contract to clarify the matter.

Celebrity is no different. There's a reason for Q scores and it's so we can determine the economic value of these various individuals across their industries.

I could go through each of those but there's no need. Your need to highlight such exceptions proves the rule. You didn't say - we judge your everyday teacher's success by how many students lives they've changed...because we don't and neither do they. They measure their value by their asked for compensation, we measure their value by how much we're willing to pay them. I'm trying to think of a single field where the measurement of success isn't dictated in terms of compensation between the upper and lower ends.

It is reductionist but sometimes things are very simple at their root.
 
Because that's what my online dictionaries are telling me. I assumed it traced to the DSM (or some specific psychologist's theory/work).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/delusionary

"Delude" and "delusional" etymologically precede the discipline of psychiatry:
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/12/deluded-delusional.html

So if it's not the DSM thing, my simplest guess is that it is intended to add a dimension of imperfect tense to "delusional"; suggesting, maybe, that someone who is delusional might only be that way temporarily, or about a certain thing, whereas "delusionary" suggests one has a tendency to always gravitate towards that mindset, with everything, or alternatively to do so in perpetuity.

Got it. No, I've never heard it from her or from anyone in a mental health field although, given how much random shit I read, who knows where I picked it up.
 
We admire many things, we judge success by money. We might admire a talented athlete but we don't hand out equal amounts of prize money. Boxers don't split the purse 50/50 - the more important guy gets the bigger cut. MMA fighters don't get paid the same as their opponent, even if they're fighting for the same belt. The bigger draw gets a PPV cut and the lesser guy doesn't. Even in team sports, once you step away from the all time greats, a guy knows he's better than the other guy by if he's getting paid like he's better. If he's better and he's not getting paid like it then he expects his next contract to clarify the matter.

Celebrity is no different. There's a reason for Q scores and it's so we can determine the economic value of these various individuals across their industries.

I could go through each of those but there's no need. Your need to highlight such exceptions proves the rule. You didn't say - we judge your everyday teacher's success by how many students lives they've changed...because we don't and neither do they. They measure their value by their asked for compensation, we measure their value by how much we're willing to pay them. I'm trying to think of a single field where the measurement of success isn't dictated in terms of compensation between the upper and lower ends.

It is reductionist but sometimes things are very simple at their root.
I think it's as simple as "We admire many things and judge success by the parameters of thing that we're looking at." To use your sports analogy, let's look at football. The quarterback almost always makes more money than the a defensive end, but we don't say the sub-par QBs are better athletes than they are. Across sports, I don't think you would say that someone making more money in one sport that pays more is more successful than his counterpart who is considered better but makes less money in another sport. We would all agree that it's apples and oranges, probably calling the one better in his sport the more successful one. MMA is a good example of this. Years ago, back before there was money in this sport, we all lauded Chuck Liddell and BJ Penn as some of the best, giving them credit as huge successes. I would still call them more successful than other pro athletes that have accomplished less but are better paid.

Sure it is. More famous =/= more money. We judge celebrity by the fame they've achieved, not the money they make.

Money is often used as a metric, yes, but it is not the only metric. We use that metric when we don't have other meaningful metrics. For janitors, how do we measure how good a janitor is? I don't walk into buildings to see how clean they are, nor do I know stats on how many toilets one guy can clean in an hour versus how many another guy can. Since we don't know what qualities a good janitor has, we use money as a means of comparing him to other professions where we don't know what the qualifications are to be exceptional. Money is a metric as a proxy for other things that we can more easily identify.
 
I think it's as simple as "We admire many things and judge success by the parameters of thing that we're looking at." To use your sports analogy, let's look at football. The quarterback almost always makes more money than the a defensive end, but we don't say the sub-par QBs are better athletes than they are. Across sports, I don't think you would say that someone making more money in one sport that pays more is more successful than his counterpart who is considered better but makes less money in another sport.

We would all agree that it's apples and oranges, probably calling the one better in his sport the more successful one. MMA is a good example of this. Years ago, back before there was money in this sport, we all lauded Chuck Liddell and BJ Penn as some of the best, giving them credit as huge successes. I would still call them more successful than other pro athletes that have accomplished less but are better paid.

We do this every day. I don't spend as much time in the heavies as I used to but I assume the A-level athlete conversations still take place? The conversations that some sports pay better because it's harder to be elite in them due to the amount of people competing. The NFL is a more successful sport because it can pay individual athletes better than MMA or cricket or whatever. I think I just saw the A-Level athlete thing around Greg Hardy recently.

We don't say sub-par QB's are better athletes but we do pay QB's, even subpar ones, better than almost everyone else on the field and assign a greater percentage of the blame/credit of the team to the QB.

Sure it is. More famous =/= more money. We judge celebrity by the fame they've achieved, not the money they make.

We only judge celebrity fame so that movie producers and companies selling products can accurately predict how much money the celebrity can generate. And the celebrity collects a bigger paycheck for the film or for the endorsement based on their level of fame.

Money is often used as a metric, yes, but it is not the only metric. We use that metric when we don't have other meaningful metrics. For janitors, how do we measure how good a janitor is? I don't walk into buildings to see how clean they are, nor do I know stats on how many toilets one guy can clean in an hour versus how many another guy can. Since we don't know what qualities a good janitor has, we use money as a means of comparing him to other professions where we don't know what the qualifications are to be exceptional. Money is a metric as a proxy for other things that we can more easily identify.

Yes, money is the metric. And because so many things in our modern society entail qualifications that most people do not understand, most people use money as the metric for whether or not someone is good at what they do, ie successful.

Which what I said...most people use money as the metric for communal success.
 
Let me guess, you have a pet unicorn?

No I just work in a govt related field and see how things actually work vs having an opinion on something I know nothing about
 
We do this every day. I don't spend as much time in the heavies as I used to but I assume the A-level athlete conversations still take place? The conversations that some sports pay better because it's harder to be elite in them due to the amount of people competing. The NFL is a more successful sport because it can pay individual athletes better than MMA or cricket or whatever. I think I just saw the A-Level athlete thing around Greg Hardy recently.

We don't say sub-par QB's are better athletes but we do pay QB's, even subpar ones, better than almost everyone else on the field and assign a greater percentage of the blame/credit of the team to the QB.
But we don't. Most of us would agree that the top fighters, especially champions, are better athletes than low-level pros in other sports that pay better. Want another example? Look at soccer. American soccer players go play in Europe for lots of money, but we don't call those athletes as successful as football players, even though international soccer is probably more competitive. They're different sports that value different attributes, and we judge them differently, not based on finances.

We only judge celebrity fame so that movie producers and companies selling products can accurately predict how much money the celebrity can generate. And the celebrity collects a bigger paycheck for the film or for the endorsement based on their level of fame.
No, you're talking about ROI on an actor. But there are plenty of celebrities that are famous for seemingly no reason, such as the Kardashians. There's wasn't any ROI there, just fame.

Yes, money is the metric. And because so many things in our modern society entail qualifications that most people do not understand, most people use money as the metric for whether or not someone is good at what they do, ie successful.

Which what I said...most people use money as the metric for communal success.
We use money to compare between fields where individual contributions to the field mean very little, such as janitors or fast food workers. We value an assembly line worker over a janitor because we assume that the barrier to entry is higher for the assembly line worker than it is for a janitor (which is why one is compensated more), not on the simple basis that one makes more than the other. We assume that the doctor has to be smarter than the bus driver in order to enter into the field, and what we value is the intelligence and the utility of that body of knowledge. The salary difference is a byproduct, not the root cause.
 
I see a lot posted about SJWs and millennials, race, sex, gender, religion...

But at the end of the day, I don't think these things really seem to affect society that much. Those same people of such a variety of political, philosophical, existential, and identity beliefs get up every day; go to a boring job they hate (at least a lot of us); and are getting financially screwed more and more as time goes on (wage stagnation and financial requirements for retirement).

I read financial articles about this quite a lot these days, and people who care about investing and their finances are well aware of some of these changes. The problem is that this information doesn't seem to get any real majority traction publicly, or at least it doesn't stay in the public eye very long.

So my questions are, why is the government so evil, but these corporations controlling the government aren't? Why do some people think there is this big separation between a corrupt government and a corrupt financial system? Even more so, why are some people so adamant about protecting and supporting these mega-rich billionaires who are scheming daily to pay the average American less?

I just gave my copy of a People's History of the United States to someone I would call a SJW.

The truth is that Zinn's book in many ways is the core of the SJW movement, but it has been bastardized.

The core message of that book is economic, not social. He argues that social injustice is directly motivated and shaped by economics.

It is truly sad to see Zinn's message weaponized against the very people he meant to inform.

SJW's are tools of the elite. It is simple divide and conquer.

Just as the vast majority of issues on the right are meant to divide, so the people can be conquered. It is the illussion of choice.
 
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