I'm a landlord. I do my damndest to be a good one. When my tenant has problems and asks if they can be a bit late on the rent, I tell them of course. I answer emails/texts quickly. I take care of any repairs/issues right away. I'm looking at fencing in the yard because I know they'd like it - they have dogs - not because it will increase the property value.
And I don't raise the rent. Could I? Sure! The rental market where I am has less than 1% availability, so I could charge pretty much whatever I want. But my goal isn't to bleed tenants dry, it's to supplement my income to a reasonable degree, and provide someone with a good place to live.
Sure is good we've got Christians to teach us morals, with atheists like me around fucking things up.
I’m a renter, who fixes problems in the house on my own (I have a fairly broad skill set), and always pays my rent on time. Why do I behave this way? Because my landlord treats me like a person, not another income source. When we found this place, it was a gem renting below market value. We signed a one year lease. Following that, we asked for a five year. The landlord offered us three at current rent, followed by an option for two at an absolutely shocking increase in rent of 45 dollars a month ( again, after four years of occupancy below market.) We jumped on it. Why? Simple, our landlord is a good person. Guess what? He’s an atheist.
OT: Madison "Niedermeyer" Cawthorn's eligibility to run for re-election has been challenged by a group of North Carolina voters, on the grounds that his support of the insurrectionists last January- both on the day and afterwards- disqualifies him from holding office. There's a pdf link to the full document in the article; it's worth a read- articulate, well-reasoned, and well-supported.
Naturally, even though there is precedent for such challenges being made on substantially weaker grounds, I expect this to go nowhere (but will be very pleasantly surprised if it succeeds). Still, it's nice that *somebody's* making an effort to hold the slippery little shit accountable.
I have to give the actor credit, though, it takes some serious acting skills to play the asshole with such perfection! (unless, of course, he is a "natural")
That actor (Mark Metcalf) played the same sort of character (even uttering the same lines) in a couple of Twister Sister videos ("We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock.")
----In response, Cawthorn spokesperson Luke Ball pointed out that “over 245,000 patriots from western North Carolina elected Congressman Cawthorn to serve them in Washington”----
"Patriots". That kind of language isn't helping his case, does he know that?
“We”, the broad spectrum that is the Left, be it in Europe or in the U.S., have to reclaim and redefine patriotism, and what it means to be a Patriot. On what intellectual, cultural, historical, sociological, even economical grounds does the Right/extreme Right/Fascists/Nazis claim Patriotism, and the "definition rights" exclusively for themselves? They don't “own” Patriotism, and we shouldn't leave them the ground to do so!
Or just reject the term itself as too toxic. I've never identified as a "patriot" or "Patriot" and I see nothing in the definition nor the people who so identify most loudly to make me want to ever claim that label.
Here's the reason why Patheos is now ghost town central
"Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stop writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focus on how to live a good life within their own worldview. They left."
Yeah, it's been posted before recently, but I don't see why we weren't told in the first place. I'm not saying we necessarily have a right to know, but it would have been nice if we'd been told about this instead of everyone being so coy about only sky.
It's not like we were unaware of any problems between the New Management and the bloggers. The Nannybot was obviously causing distractions for the admins, and so was the flood of bots and spammers in the discussions. Not a healthy environment for intelligent conversation, but I suspect that we were considered expendable.
God reviews their white blood cell and hemoglobin counts weekly. When they reach the point where God decides they can survive, he sends a dream to the landlord showing him it's okay to evict now. That's how God operates health care here in 'murica. If you don't like it, go get yourself one of them socialist Obamacare plans where the gubment decides your fate.
Jesus was a couch surfer. He didn't own his own house, he lived with friends or family wherever he travelled. I don't think he would approve of raising people's rent.
Was he a carpenter, or a son of a carpenter? I don't remember the stories, but I don't think they had anything to say about his life between mouthing off at his bar mitzvah and starting his boy band at age 30-ish.
He built wooden furnishings for those homes as well as furnishings for Romans.
Jesus was called a carpenter in Mark 6:3. He was known as a carpenter's son (Matthew 13:55), which makes sense since Joseph was a carpenter and taught his son the trade according to Jewish tradition, making Jesus an apprentice.
Mathew 13:55 btw. The gospels were written in Greek by Greeks who had most likely never been to Israel, and since they lived in wood houses, they just "assumed" the Israelis did too. Ever hear of the krister group called the Freemasons? Methinks they are onto something.
I didn't come to that conclusion by myself, I got it from a book (I can't remember which one) written by a biblical scholar.
"I did not displace the person out of that house if they can no longer afford it. The marketplace did. The economy did. The ratio of the income that they earned to their housing expense displaced them. I didn’t cause any of that."
Christians are so very good at finding reasons they are not responsible for the actions they take.
Working enough jobs to live on does not leave them enough time for the amount of prayer needed to get the attention of gawd so he is unable to hear their prayers of need, while those who already have the money are still able to pray for him to give them more.
Ah, but a poor christian obviously doesn't have enough faith to be able to afford to pay their fellow christians a profitable amount in rent, so should a good christian waste time on someone that god clearly doesn't love enough to have blessed with property of their own?
If they would have just had faith in god then he would have had a mansion reserved for them through PrayerBnB. It's their own fault really to be so poor that the barn was all they could get.
And traveling during the holidays, when everybody knows to get their reservation in early before they jack up the price and all the best places are filled.
"I did not not displace the person out of that house if they can no longer afford it. The marketplace did. The economy did. The ratio of that income that they earned to their housing expense displaced them. I didn't cause any of that."
Typical Christian. Point fingers at everyone else and take no responsibility for their own actions. Thus is it ever. Once again we see that "greed is good" is the purview of the religious.
"It's god's will that I raise the rent and force you out onto the streets, and it's also god's will that you give me money so I can pay my rent and not be forced to live with you losers."
The economy displaced that person because of landlords like him driving the real estate marketplace to absurdity. So yes, yes he did displace the person.
Because Ramsey is not wrong about raising rent not making him a bad Christian, being Christian does not make you a good person. Whether it interferes in being a good person or not is debatable, but it doesn’t lead to being good.
Let’s not forget that the market is artificially inflated because of incredibly bad actors in business, those rich people reading and exercising all the time. And when the rent is brought in line with the market, and all those people have to ditch their homes, the market will be corrected by force and folks like Ramsey will lose their hats. Unfortunately, those who can least afford the correction will be the first and hardest hit.
They’ll also blame all those “lazy shifters” who “move out to avoid paying the rent”, who waste money on “frivolities like food and healthcare” instead of working a fourth job to earn the money to pay the “more than fair” rent.
"...help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it---
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!"
It must be around 20 years now (has it really been THAT long?) that, out of curiosity, I started reading “Atlas Shrugged”. TBH, I couldn't get past the 7th or 8th chapter. It is just mind-asphyxiating boring, the whole premise makes little sense, the characters never come to “live”, and the condescending, arrogant tone of that scribble is kinda infuriating. Why this thing became so popular among certain people is hard to understand(well, not really) but it speaks volumes about them, that's for sure!
We Christians have similar books like "The Pilgrim's Progress" by Bunyan. I recall that it was such a pain to read and so boring that I often felt that I was in the "slough of despond".
"Christian Business(wo)man" is a contradiction in terms. Markets don't respond to "Christian" signals, they respond to price signals. Efforts to blame a tenant's poverty on a lack of godliness and to blame "the market" for forcing a rent increase is the typical abdication of individual agency by "Christian" businesspersons who hide behind the market to feed their greed.
A lot of what's called the "Protestant work ethic" seems to have more in common with Ayn Rand than with Jesus as material prosperity is considered a sign of virtue.
I simply pointed out that the PWE concept has a lot more in common with Rand's position than what Jesus said. I didn't mean to imply that the PWE concept was taken from Rand's works.
Got a spam call earlier. I’ve spent the last two hours calling their number 197 times before they blocked me. Every time they picked up I let them know that since they’d shown zero respect for me, I had no obligation to respect them, and they were reaping what they sewed. I’m home alone all day, on the Do Not Call list, and everyone that calls me from now on is getting the same response. Thanks for letting me vent.
I'm a landlord. I do my damndest to be a good one. When my tenant has problems and asks if they can be a bit late on the rent, I tell them of course. I answer emails/texts quickly. I take care of any repairs/issues right away. I'm looking at fencing in the yard because I know they'd like it - they have dogs - not because it will increase the property value.
And I don't raise the rent. Could I? Sure! The rental market where I am has less than 1% availability, so I could charge pretty much whatever I want. But my goal isn't to bleed tenants dry, it's to supplement my income to a reasonable degree, and provide someone with a good place to live.
Sure is good we've got Christians to teach us morals, with atheists like me around fucking things up.
I’m a renter, who fixes problems in the house on my own (I have a fairly broad skill set), and always pays my rent on time. Why do I behave this way? Because my landlord treats me like a person, not another income source. When we found this place, it was a gem renting below market value. We signed a one year lease. Following that, we asked for a five year. The landlord offered us three at current rent, followed by an option for two at an absolutely shocking increase in rent of 45 dollars a month ( again, after four years of occupancy below market.) We jumped on it. Why? Simple, our landlord is a good person. Guess what? He’s an atheist.
Do you and CageGirl know each other? ;)
OT: Madison "Niedermeyer" Cawthorn's eligibility to run for re-election has been challenged by a group of North Carolina voters, on the grounds that his support of the insurrectionists last January- both on the day and afterwards- disqualifies him from holding office. There's a pdf link to the full document in the article; it's worth a read- articulate, well-reasoned, and well-supported.
https://apnews.com/article/north-carolina-elections-madison-cawthorn-57cf6e5bdf41585cc5e068a26568d4e1
Naturally, even though there is precedent for such challenges being made on substantially weaker grounds, I expect this to go nowhere (but will be very pleasantly surprised if it succeeds). Still, it's nice that *somebody's* making an effort to hold the slippery little shit accountable.
We thought that Amaud Aubrey's killers might get off and they all had the hammer of justice dropped on them.
So who knows? Justice might prevail yet again.
That’s how they usually get away with literal murder.
He's unqualified without his support of the insurrection. But that's a different story. : )
"... Madison "Niedermeyer” Cawthorn...”
ISWYDT ;-)) ;-))
"Killed in Vietnam by his own troops."
Bwahaha! ;-)) That line is just pure movie gold!
I have to give the actor credit, though, it takes some serious acting skills to play the asshole with such perfection! (unless, of course, he is a "natural")
That actor (Mark Metcalf) played the same sort of character (even uttering the same lines) in a couple of Twister Sister videos ("We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock.")
Here's the vids with Metcalf's performances. Damn he's good at playing unhinged :)
We're Not Gonna Take It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9AbeALNVkk
I Wanna Rock
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRwrg0db_zY
I don't.
https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Doug_Neidermeyer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_House
https://youtu.be/ep-xgd_eETE
----In response, Cawthorn spokesperson Luke Ball pointed out that “over 245,000 patriots from western North Carolina elected Congressman Cawthorn to serve them in Washington”----
"Patriots". That kind of language isn't helping his case, does he know that?
245,000 patriots no, 245,000 neo Nazis yes.
“We”, the broad spectrum that is the Left, be it in Europe or in the U.S., have to reclaim and redefine patriotism, and what it means to be a Patriot. On what intellectual, cultural, historical, sociological, even economical grounds does the Right/extreme Right/Fascists/Nazis claim Patriotism, and the "definition rights" exclusively for themselves? They don't “own” Patriotism, and we shouldn't leave them the ground to do so!
Or just reject the term itself as too toxic. I've never identified as a "patriot" or "Patriot" and I see nothing in the definition nor the people who so identify most loudly to make me want to ever claim that label.
There are more than a few current GOP elected officials that have earned similar actions being taken against them.
It is an infinitely shorter list to list those who DIDN’T earn such action being taken against them.
Here's the reason why Patheos is now ghost town central
"Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stop writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focus on how to live a good life within their own worldview. They left."
https://religionnews.com/2022/01/04/what-happened-to-the-nonbelief-channel-at-patheos/
So, the edict was something like, "you can believe and discuss anything you like, as long as I agree with it?"
btw, I didn't get to bring my name with me, but I did get to Like your comments.
Yeah, it's been posted before recently, but I don't see why we weren't told in the first place. I'm not saying we necessarily have a right to know, but it would have been nice if we'd been told about this instead of everyone being so coy about only sky.
It's not like we were unaware of any problems between the New Management and the bloggers. The Nannybot was obviously causing distractions for the admins, and so was the flood of bots and spammers in the discussions. Not a healthy environment for intelligent conversation, but I suspect that we were considered expendable.
They couldn’t resist. All those “unsaved” heathens, just WAITING to be proselytized at…
OOOoooOOO!! A castle wedding! Awesome!
“Am I going to evict someone in the middle of chemo? No.”
I call BS.
God reviews their white blood cell and hemoglobin counts weekly. When they reach the point where God decides they can survive, he sends a dream to the landlord showing him it's okay to evict now. That's how God operates health care here in 'murica. If you don't like it, go get yourself one of them socialist Obamacare plans where the gubment decides your fate.
He's going to wait until they're done with chemo.
Probably insist on weekly updates from the doctor.
Hourly.
But didn't God give him cancer in the first place? That wasn't YOUR fault, Ramsey. Raise that sucker's rent!
“Listen. I wait for you to leave, THEN I change locks.”
Does making people homeless make a bad christian?
Don't know enough about christianity to say much about that, but it sure as fuck makes you an evil mother-fucker.
Isn't there a story about a shelterless couple, her pregnant, him out of work that had to take refuge in a stable ... ...
Something something the least of them something….
Jesus was a couch surfer. He didn't own his own house, he lived with friends or family wherever he travelled. I don't think he would approve of raising people's rent.
Dude didn’t even have a job.
Well, a miracle here a miracle there, you can get by.
Well, he was a carpenter before he began his ministry.
Still can't get over the irony of a (former) carpenter being put to death with wood and nails.
That's a cross he has to bear.
Really nailed that joke there.
Hard to get a pun thread going at Substack.
You have to hang around for a long time.
Really hammers in how much we depend on Disqus' "New Replies" function, doesn't it?
Was he a carpenter, or a son of a carpenter? I don't remember the stories, but I don't think they had anything to say about his life between mouthing off at his bar mitzvah and starting his boy band at age 30-ish.
According to Jewish tradition, he would have been his father's apprentice, as Joseph supposedly would have taught his son the carpentry trade.
IIRC he was a day laborer who built houses; therefore, he was a mason. Houses in first-century Israel were stone.
Makes absolutely ZERO sense for someone who was supposedly visited by an angel at his birth and gifted expensive trade goods by three strange men.
Especially since the transition from son-of-god to carpenter/day laborer to prophet was not gradual but sudden.
He built wooden furnishings for those homes as well as furnishings for Romans.
Jesus was called a carpenter in Mark 6:3. He was known as a carpenter's son (Matthew 13:55), which makes sense since Joseph was a carpenter and taught his son the trade according to Jewish tradition, making Jesus an apprentice.
Mathew 13:55 btw. The gospels were written in Greek by Greeks who had most likely never been to Israel, and since they lived in wood houses, they just "assumed" the Israelis did too. Ever hear of the krister group called the Freemasons? Methinks they are onto something.
I didn't come to that conclusion by myself, I got it from a book (I can't remember which one) written by a biblical scholar.
Dang! Missed typing a '5'. Meant Matthew 13:55. Thanks for the correction. Have edited.
"I did not displace the person out of that house if they can no longer afford it. The marketplace did. The economy did. The ratio of the income that they earned to their housing expense displaced them. I didn’t cause any of that."
Christians are so very good at finding reasons they are not responsible for the actions they take.
But why can't their all powerful imaginary fiend give them a better income?
Working enough jobs to live on does not leave them enough time for the amount of prayer needed to get the attention of gawd so he is unable to hear their prayers of need, while those who already have the money are still able to pray for him to give them more.
Ah, but a poor christian obviously doesn't have enough faith to be able to afford to pay their fellow christians a profitable amount in rent, so should a good christian waste time on someone that god clearly doesn't love enough to have blessed with property of their own?
I wonder what Ramsey would have made of Jesus who "had no place" and whose parents couldn't even afford a room at an inn in Bethlehem.
If they would have just had faith in god then he would have had a mansion reserved for them through PrayerBnB. It's their own fault really to be so poor that the barn was all they could get.
And traveling during the holidays, when everybody knows to get their reservation in early before they jack up the price and all the best places are filled.
"I did not not displace the person out of that house if they can no longer afford it. The marketplace did. The economy did. The ratio of that income that they earned to their housing expense displaced them. I didn't cause any of that."
Typical Christian. Point fingers at everyone else and take no responsibility for their own actions. Thus is it ever. Once again we see that "greed is good" is the purview of the religious.
"It's god's will that I raise the rent and force you out onto the streets, and it's also god's will that you give me money so I can pay my rent and not be forced to live with you losers."
The economy displaced that person because of landlords like him driving the real estate marketplace to absurdity. So yes, yes he did displace the person.
It's god's will, OTOH your sinful way of life is totally free will and will bring you straight to Hel*.
*Not a typo.
Ramsey is using the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition Tomas a base for his Christian wealth scam.
"Blessed Exchequer forgive us- your children have gone astray." - Quark
That’s how televangelists and megachurch pastors operate too.
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi_Rules_of_Acquisition
Because Ramsey is not wrong about raising rent not making him a bad Christian, being Christian does not make you a good person. Whether it interferes in being a good person or not is debatable, but it doesn’t lead to being good.
Let’s not forget that the market is artificially inflated because of incredibly bad actors in business, those rich people reading and exercising all the time. And when the rent is brought in line with the market, and all those people have to ditch their homes, the market will be corrected by force and folks like Ramsey will lose their hats. Unfortunately, those who can least afford the correction will be the first and hardest hit.
when the market corrects I hope it is where he wears his hat that is lost.
They’ll also blame all those “lazy shifters” who “move out to avoid paying the rent”, who waste money on “frivolities like food and healthcare” instead of working a fourth job to earn the money to pay the “more than fair” rent.
Ah ... Seems like there is no hate quite like Christian kindness either then.
"...help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it---
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!"
From Mark Twain's "The War Prayer"
And what makes it worse is that they pat themselves afterwards on the back for being so virtuous.
Of course it does! His God is Ayn Rand!
She was a hypocritical hack who realized her lousy writing skills couldn't pay her medical bills.
So what did the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" lady do? She took both Social Security and Medicare under her husband's name.
It must be around 20 years now (has it really been THAT long?) that, out of curiosity, I started reading “Atlas Shrugged”. TBH, I couldn't get past the 7th or 8th chapter. It is just mind-asphyxiating boring, the whole premise makes little sense, the characters never come to “live”, and the condescending, arrogant tone of that scribble is kinda infuriating. Why this thing became so popular among certain people is hard to understand(well, not really) but it speaks volumes about them, that's for sure!
We Christians have similar books like "The Pilgrim's Progress" by Bunyan. I recall that it was such a pain to read and so boring that I often felt that I was in the "slough of despond".
Also, the bible.
Naw, just when he knells down to his altar to her.
OT for us oldies...
Actor Dwayne "Dobie Gillis" Hickman died yesterday from complications due to Parkinson's. He was 87.
You boomers with your Dobies and your Gillis', I'm guessing it was a buddy cop sitcom or something similar? =)
Dobie went on to start a band with his brothers. ; )
His best role was Uncle Jed in Cat Ballou.
The show gave us our first look at Bob Denver, then playing Dobie's beatnik buddy Maynard G. Krebs. :)
"Christian Business(wo)man" is a contradiction in terms. Markets don't respond to "Christian" signals, they respond to price signals. Efforts to blame a tenant's poverty on a lack of godliness and to blame "the market" for forcing a rent increase is the typical abdication of individual agency by "Christian" businesspersons who hide behind the market to feed their greed.
This is why I try to avoid patronizing businesses that use Christian symbolism in their marketing efforts.
I use it as a warning to back away quickly.
Those who worship at the Church of the most holey St. Ayn Rand.
A lot of what's called the "Protestant work ethic" seems to have more in common with Ayn Rand than with Jesus as material prosperity is considered a sign of virtue.
I simply pointed out that the PWE concept has a lot more in common with Rand's position than what Jesus said. I didn't mean to imply that the PWE concept was taken from Rand's works.
OT - Did gawd really create the universe? Find out in this week's, definitely NSFW, Oglaf.
https://www.oglaf.com/strongly-discouraged/
Don't forget to mouse-over for additional text.
Got a spam call earlier. I’ve spent the last two hours calling their number 197 times before they blocked me. Every time they picked up I let them know that since they’d shown zero respect for me, I had no obligation to respect them, and they were reaping what they sewed. I’m home alone all day, on the Do Not Call list, and everyone that calls me from now on is getting the same response. Thanks for letting me vent.
Hah!