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Is America Approaching A Golden Age Or A Deep Decline?
Re: Is America Approaching A Golden Age Or A Deep Decline?
Feels good like propaganda should. I prefer it when it meddles with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale:
Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems, and he died at eleven o'clock this morning of a heart condition, and woe is us! We're in a lot of trouble!
So. A rich little man with white hair died. What has that got to do with the price of rice, right?
And *why* is that woe to us? Because you people, and sixty-two million other Americans, are listening to me right now.
Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube.
Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation.
This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers... This tube is the most awesome God-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, and that's why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died.
Because this company is now in the hands of CCA - the Communication Corporation of America. There's a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy's office on the twentieth floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome God-damned propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?
So, you listen to me. Listen to me:
Television is not the truth! Television is a God-damned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business!
So if you want the truth... Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.
But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell.
We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win.
We'll tell you any shit you want to hear.
We deal in *illusions*, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know.
You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even *think* like the tube!
This is mass madness, you maniacs!
In God's name, you people are the real thing! *WE* are the illusion!
So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF...
Re: Is America Approaching A Golden Age Or A Deep Decline?
As unreal as that clip seems, it's how our body politic is decomposing. The victimhood narrative feeds it and this is practically an article of faith among a growing cohort. It dominates the mindset of those conservatives living in the states of the old Confederacy as it always has. But the poison is spreading nationwide. We're seeing evidence of it right here on our own pages.
The Republicans Are Now Officially the Party of White Paranoia
The rise of Trump obliterates all other issues — campaign 2016 is now almost entirely about race
Donald Trump currently has a negative 51 percent net unfavorable rating among Hispanic voters.Scott Olson/GettyABC News published an intriguing poll the other day, one that spelled out a growing racial divide:
"Nonwhites see Trump negatively by a vast 17-79 percent… That said, whites are the majority group – 64 percent of the adult population – and they now divide evenly on Trump, 48-49 percent, favorable-unfavorable. Clinton, by contrast, is far more unpopular than Trump among whites, 34-65 percent. So while racial and ethnic polarization is on the rise in views of Trump, it remains even higher for Clinton."
The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just 4 percent and 6 percent of black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to "make America great again" is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they're headed the same route with Hispanics. That's a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote as recently as 2004.
Trump's supporters are people who are tired of being told they have to be part of some kind of coalition in order to have a political voice. They particularly hate being lectured about alienating minorities, especially by members of their own party.
Just a few weeks ago, for instance, establishment GOP spokesghoul George Will spent a whole column haranguing readers about how Trump was ruining his party's chances for victory. He noted that Mitt Romney might have won in 2012 if he'd pulled even slightly more than 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Will blasted Trump's giant wall idea and even ridiculed the candidate's deportation plan by comparing Trump to Hitler:
"The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump's project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion."
It's not clear how forcing 11 million people to wear yellow patches saves money, but whatever. However it was supposed to be taken, the shock argument didn't work.
A few days later, in a rare episode of National Review-on-National Reviewcrime, blogger Ramesh Ponnuru blasted Will for his hysterics. He arguedRomney wouldn't have won even with a 45 percent bump in the Hispanic vote. "He needed more votes, obviously," Ponnuru wrote, "but he didn't need more Hispanic votes in particular."
Ponnuru was echoing an idea already expressed by the conservative commentariat. Hack-among-hacks Byron York said the same thing in theWashington Examiner back in 2013. He argued that even 70 percent of the Hispanic vote wouldn't have helped Romney, whose more serious problem "was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off… that they abandoned the GOP."
Rush Limbaugh bought what York was selling, arguing that Romney didn't lose because he failed to convince Hispanic voters that Republicans "like ‘em."
"The difference-maker was, a lot of white voters stayed home," Rush said.
Anyway, the night after Ponnuru ran his brief blog post a week and a half ago, Trump had Univision anchor Jorge Ramos tossed from a press conference in Dubuque, Iowa, sneering at him to "siddown" and "go back to Univision."
Conservative blogs and social media commentatorscheered Trump's decision to have "butthurt" Jorge Ramos "deported" from the press conference, thereby turning the whole thing into another brilliant piece of symbolic political theater for the Donald.
Whether or not it's true that a Republican candidate can win the White House with a minus-51 percent net unfavorable rating among Hispanic voters (Trump's well-earned current number) is sort of beside the point. The point is that Trump clearly feels he can afford to flip off the Hispanic community and win with a whites-only strategy. And his supporters are loving the idea that he's trying.
The decision by huge masses of Republican voters to defy D.C.-thinkfluencer types like George Will and throw in with a carnival act like Trump is no small thing. For the first time in a generation, Republican voters are taking their destiny into their own hands.
In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it.
Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they're about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates' charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs.
They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things.
They mostly don't care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It's about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation.
They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything.
They get everything from the Republicans because you don't have to make a single concession to a Republican voter.
All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who thereal Americans are. Call it the "Rove 1-2."
That's literally all it's taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base.
While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn't get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.
While it's certainly been fun laughing about the lunacies of people like Bachmann and John Ashcroft and Ted Cruz, who see the face of Jesus in every tree stump and believe the globalist left is planning to abolish golf courses and force country-dwellers to live in city apartments lit by energy-efficient light bulbs, the truth is that the voters they represented have been irrelevant for decades.
At least on the Democratic side there was that 5-10 percent of industry policy demands that voters occasionally rejected, putting a tiny dent in what otherwise has been a pretty smoothly running oligarchy.
Now that's over. Trump has pulled all of those previously irrelevant voters completely out of pocket. In a development that has to horrify the donors who run the GOP, the candidate Trump espouses some truly populist policy beliefs, including stern warnings about the dire consequences companies will face under a Trump presidency if they ship American jobs to Mexico and China.
All that energy the party devoted for decades telling middle American voters that protectionism was invented by Satan and Karl Marx during a poker game in Brussels in the mid-1840s, that just disappeared in a puff of smoke.
And all that money the Republican kingmakers funneled into Fox and Clear Channel over the years, making sure that their voters stayed focused onACORN and immigrant-transmitted measles and the New Black Panthers(has anyone ever actually seen a New Black Panther? Ever?) instead of, say, the complete disappearance of the manufacturing sector or the mass theft of their retirement income, all of that's now backing up on them.
The party worked the cattle in their pen into such a dither that now they won't rest until they get the giant wall that real-life, as-seen-on-TV billionaire Donald Trump promises will save them from all those measles-infected rapists pouring over the border.
Not far under the surface of Trump's candidacy lurks a powerful current of Internet conspiracy theory that's a good two or three degrees loonier than even the most far-out Tea Party paranoia. Gone are the salad days when red-staters merely worried about Barack Obama inviting UN tanks to mass on the borders of Lubbock.
Trump supporters have gone next-level, obsessed with gooney-bird fantasies about "white genocide," a global plan to exterminate white people by sending waves of third-world immigrants across American and European borders to settle and intermarry.
The white-power nerds pushing this stuff don't like the term RINO (Republican In Name Only) and prefer "cuckservative," a term that's a mix of "cuckold" and "conservative." Cuck is also a porn term that refers to a white guy who gets off on watching his wife take it from (usually) a black man. A cuck is therefore a kind of desexualized race traitor.
So you can see why the Internet lights up when Donald Trump tosses Jorge Ramos from a presser and tells him "mine's bigger than yours" (Trump was referring to his heart, but again, whatever). All of Trump's constant bragging about his money and his poll numbers and his virility speak directly to this surprisingly vibrant middle American fantasy about a castrated white America struggling to re-grow its mojo.
Republicans won middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn't know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch. They made sure their voters' idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.
Trump similarly is scoring points with voters who don't know the difference between feeling sorry for themselves and actually being victims. We live in a society that is changing for a lot of reasons, and some of those changes feel annoying to certain kinds of people, particularly older white folks who don't like language-policing and other aspects of political correctness.
But as basketball star turned pundit Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pointed outearlier this week, PC isn't a new thing, or even a thing at all. It's just an "emotional challenge every generation has had to go through." We get older, our kids correct our bad habits, it happens.
Not to Trump's supporters. They've turned some minor cultural changes into a vast conspiracy of white victimhood. They're eating up Trump's "Make America Great Again" theme (which one supporter hilariously explained must be his true goal, because "it's on his hat"), because it's a fantasy tale of a once-great culture ruined by an invasion of mongrel criminals.
For reasons that are, again, obvious to everyone but Republican voters, this "woe is us" narrative is never to fly with the rest of the country, including especially (one imagines) the nonwhite population. Few sane people are going to waste a vote on a sob story about how rough things have gotten for white people. But Trump supporters are clinging to this fantasy far more fiercely than red-state voters were ever clinging to guns or religion.
That leaves us facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country, and those who don't.
Every other issue, from taxes to surveillance to war to jobs to education, will take a distant back seat to this ongoing, moronic referendum on white victimhood. And there's nothing any of us can do about it except wait it out, and wonder if our politics only gets dumber from here.
Re: Is America Approaching A Golden Age Or A Deep Decline?
The battle for the Republican nomination currently:
Trump 24.8%
Carson 24.2%
Rubio 11.8%
Cruz 9.6%
Almost half of the Republican voters favor a black and two Latinos in a field of 15.
Carson is ahead of Clinton and Rubio is running even with her; the best showing by any Republican.
Trump loses to Clinton and also to Sanders. Trump is a carnival barker who will soon fade as voter recognize he can't win and he is poison. Fiorina is even tied with Clinton. Carly worked her way to success.
Meanwhile the Democrat candidate field consists of white males and a white woman who got there by marriage.
This tells you who is racist and who is not.
Even progressives agree that race baiting doesn't work:
"4. Stop playing the race card: I’m one of the most anti-racist people you’ll ever meet and I’m sick of someone playing the race card every time Republicans criticize President Obama or don’t support something that he does. Are some Republicans racists? Absolutely, but stop blaming every measure of opposition on race. Most Republican politicians and pundits are opposing him because he’s a Democrat. Remember what they did to President Clinton and the lies they made up about him and Hillary that still continue to this very day? Republicans are also more than happy to welcome blacks into their ranks like Dr. Ben Carson, who are fluent in the language of political derp and making Nazi comparisons. Yes, minorities are just as capable of selling out their own people and saying stupid stuff for a buck – so stop with the race card thing. It’s getting really, really old.
3. Enough with the Koch Brothers scare tactics: Like it or not, money in politics has been around since the beginning. This is an unfortunate part of the political process, but to pretend that the only big spenders in politics are Charles and David Koch is disingenuous and hypocritical. Look at this Super PAC list of receipts and expenditures for this election cycle, and you’ll see a lot of the money comes from liberal groups. Also, despite some well-circulated blog stories that even made an appearance on DailyKos, they don’t have a Nazi past. While their influence in politics has certainly been harmful and they’ve poured funds into supporting candidates that don’t have America’s best interests at heart, lies and half-truths don’t help the cause. Deal in facts, not scare mongering or the latest nontroversy involving political celebrities like the Quitta From Wasilla that don’t matter. That’s Fox News territory and we don’t need to stoop to that level."
http://www.forwardprogressives.com/5...win-elections/
4. Stop playing the race card: I’m one of the most anti-racist people you’ll ever meet and I’m sick of someone playing the race card every time Republicans criticize President Obama or don’t support something that he does. Are some Republicans racists? Absolutely, but stop blaming every measure of opposition on race. Most Republican politicians and pundits are opposing him because he’s a Democrat. Remember what they did to President Clinton and the lies they made up about him and Hillary that still continue to this very day? Republicans are also more than happy to welcome blacks into their ranks like Dr. Ben Carson, who are fluent in the language of political derp and making Nazi comparisons. Yes, minorities are just as capable of selling out their own people and saying stupid stuff for a buck – so stop with the race card thing. It’s getting really, really old. 3. Enough with the Koch Brothers scare tactics: Like it or not, money in politics has been around since the beginning. This is an unfortunate part of the political process, but to pretend that the only big spenders in politics are Charles and David Koch is disingenuous and hypocritical. Look at this Super PAC list of receipts and expenditures for this election cycle, and you’ll see a lot of the money comes from liberal groups. Also, despite some well-circulated blog stories that even made an appearance on DailyKos, they don’t have a Nazi past. While their influence in politics has certainly been harmful and they’ve poured funds into supporting candidates that don’t have America’s best interests at heart, lies and half-truths don’t help the cause. Deal in facts, not scare mongering or the latest nontroversy involving political celebrities like the Quitta From Wasilla that don’t matter. That’s Fox News territory and we don’t need to stoop to that level.
The battle for the Republican nomination currently:
Trump 24.8%
Carson 24.2%
Rubio 11.8%
Cruz 9.6%
Almost half of the Republican voters favor a black and two Latinos in a field of 15...
Then the GOP by turning their nomination process into a freak show sticks us with 8 years of Hillary and Bill Clinton. Put that on their tombstone right next to the plot for the Whigs.
The GOP's entire deck is a race card. That and dog whistling, it's all they have to sell to a demographic that is dying by the thousands each day.
Hey, don't feel too discouraged. There's always a military coup. The GOP rank and file in which you show such confidence is all for it.
Republicans (43%) are more than twice as likely as Democrats (20%) to say that they could conceive of a situation in which they would support a military coup in the United States. Independents tend to say that they could not (38%) rather than could (29%) imagine supporting a coup.
As for the advice of fowardprogressives or whatever, who cares? Here's their esteemed masthead. Never heard of them.
Last edited by Woodsman; November 11, 2015, 02:19 PM.
As unreal as that clip seems, it's how our body politic is decomposing. The victimhood narrative feeds it and this is practically an article of faith among a growing cohort. It dominates the mindset of those conservatives living in the states of the old Confederacy as it always has. But the poison is spreading nationwide.
The victimhood narrative as you put it is a real and growing phenomena as internet boards and university groups wall themselves off from opposing viewpoints. It is becoming impossible to participate in discussion unless you either belong to an approved victims group or support their blind hatred of boogeymen like southern white men.
We're seeing an entire generation that has gown up where everyone gets a medal and there was more concern that the precious snowflake might be offended than actually teaching them anything. They've been told their entire lives how great they are. Of course they're outraged that aren't rich or famous. It can't possibly be their fault. Imagine the disappointment that life doesn't give out participation awards.
We're seeing evidence of it right here on our own pages.
Certainly, Itulip is an interesting microcosm. Most of the other message boards I used to frequent have devolved to represent a single viewpoint and any dissent is dealt with not by reason but personal attacks which have escalated in intensity dramatically over the last couple years. Once this happens I find the board is really not worth reading as it has lost it purpose because it no longer fosters discussion and seeks only to reinforce it's dogmatic viewpoint through various cognitive biases.
I hope Itulip can retain some sense rationality.
Last edited by radon; November 11, 2015, 02:37 PM.
...I hope Itulip can retain some sense rationality.
And folks like you get to decide what's rational and what's not. Just like you get to decide who is the aggrieved and who is not. Whose suffering is worthy and whose is not.
Meanwhile the Democrat candidate field consists of white males and a white woman who got there by marriage.
This tells you who is racist and who is not.
No. No it really doesn't. Back in 2008 I was sitting around a table with a man who took me in during some troubled teenage years when I had few places to go. He's a thick-necked, red-faced, big Boston Catholic union guy with huge working-man hands forever curled around a tiny-looking 12oz can of Budweiser that disappeared into his palm. Anyways, I owe the guy a lot. He doesn't make too much. His wife made much less than that. These are blue collar people in a blue collar neighborhood. But he gave me a roof when I needed one. So I go by and say hi now and then.
In any event, in 2008 I was there when the union gave him a call. He joked with them, "Nah, after 30 years, I think I'm gonna suddenly switch to Republican!" But they persisted on the phone. They were afraid that him and the rest of them wouldn't go out and vote for Obama. His response was characteristically racist and screwed up, "Nah, me and the boys were talking, and we've got it all figured. We're going to vote for the guy with a nice tan."
The color of the candidates means little. Even if you vote for them. It doesn't mean my dear friend doesn't have a racist streak to him. That doesn't mean he's 100% a terrible person either. It also doesn't mean we won't call him out on it. But he's so set in his ways, he'll never stop calling brazil nuts by their racist nickname, etc.
Besides, these things are not so monolithic. A couple of Repulbican Cubanos is not surprising at all, and probably won't impress many Guatemalans or Mexicans or Puerto Ricans or Dominicans. I mean, it's kind of like saying the Irish should have been all backing Nixon like they did Kennedy because of his Ulster Scots ancestry. It ain't the same thing. Not even close. Or maybe it's somewhat like saying that Portuguese-Americans should be happy that Scalia was the first Italian-American appointed to the Supreme Court...it's all southern-Europe and romance languages, right?
If there's one big conceptual difference between the northeast and the south regarding race in the US beyond all of the obvious ones, it is this in my mind: Things are much, much more black and white in the Southern mind and much more muddled in the Northeast. When Southerners talk about a "race war" or "the white race" or anything like that, we tend to have little idea what they're talking about. Are the Irish and the Italians going to join with the Portuguese and Polish to fight the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans? Why in the hell would that happen? Who would side with whom? Where's the "white" line, exactly? I grew up going to school with guys named Giovanni whose grandpa came from Sicily who were often darker than guys named Carlos whose father came from Puerto Rico. Of course, the other Carlos whose father came from the DR was black, but not in the same way as the kids in Roxbury, etc.
The problem with Carson is the same problem with Cain in my mind. Way too crazy for the general public. Way out of step. Too overt with the evangelical beliefs, and not dog whistle-y enough. Cruz can dog whistle. Carson just comes right out with lines that make folks around these parts roll their eyes and call him a "damned fool." The 10% tithe plan is just as nutty as 9-9-9. His policy platform is nutty enough alone without the 5,000 year earth, Joseph's bible pyramid grain storage, and a weird redemption story based on series of unconfirmed statements about stabbing people, and swinging hammers at his mother, and having guns pulled on him in line for popcorn chicken. It makes for a decent Cuba Gooding movie. But that born-again story stuff don't play up here. If you took a hammer to your mom, that's a black mark against you, not some wonderful thing to have overcome. All things being equal, we'd rather the guy who doesn't proudly tell stories of his violent psychosis. Carson might play somewhat in Iowa and South Carolina. But he will lose badly in New Hampshire. Yankees don't suffer fools. And he could have 3 MDs, 2 JDs, and a PhD. It doesn't matter. The neurosurgeon thing won't help him. The things a man does and says are what show a man to be a fool or not.
Rubio and Cruz are real candidates. We'll see where they end up. I have the feeling Cruz will pick up the Carson vote as Carson flames out. He could suck up a chunk of the Santorum and Huckabee vote too. Trump will probably hold onto his 20-30%. Whether anyone can beat him will all depend on how many drop out between now and then. Rubio might be in a decent spot to pick up the Bush and Kasich and Fiorina and Christie vote. But Bush at least, and probably Fiorina and Christie too, have the resources to go the long haul on this one if they want to.
But to be honest, to me it seems like Taibbi is right to some extent...at least some percentage of Trump voters are racists. They revel in the idea of redoing Operation Wetback. Don Black came right out and endorsed him. So that's Stormfront at least. Various KKK chapters have as well. In fact, these are groups that formerly backed Ron Paul. And you see a shift of maybe 10 or 12% support go from Rand to Trump around the time Trump makes his announcement speech. And I think that was really the white-nationalist vote. I mean, the Aryan Nation and KKK dudes have to vote for someone. They're out there. And it wouldn't shock me if they and their friends were 10 or 12% of likely Republican Primary voters. That's a narrow cut of the overall population...maybe 2% or something...considering most people and even most conservatives do not vote, etc. But it's a real cut. And there really are white supremacists backing Trump. In fact, I'd venture to guess that they comprise about half his overall support. Hell, even in my old stomping grounds, we had white supremacists committing hate crimes in the name of Trump.
Still, I think Trump can read a poll. Especially early on, he was pretty solid at threading a needle of giving the polls what they want. He has since come back much more conservative on economic issues, with a tax plan that is all about cutting taxes for billionaires like everyone else, and a new stance against the minimum wage (which now only Santorum on the Republican side supports raising by any amount ever, even just to keep up with inflation) and I think that will damage his broader potential support base. Because polls show a modest increase in the minimum wage is actually popular with Republicans.
Actually, VT, you want the Republicans to win very badly, so I'm going to give you a couple free pieces of advice, and you can pass it along to anyone you want on that side of the isle. 1) Stop demanding more troops on the ground in the middle east. It has been 30 years of Iraq/Iran/Middle East wars. From Contra Scandals to Desert Storm to Desert Shield to Desert Fox to Iraqi Freedom to whatever we're on now, it never frigging ends. It never gets better. Nobody wants another Iraq War. Nobody wants more boots on the ground. ISIS be damned. A new trillion dollar crusade against Iraq might play among Republicans, but it will lose you independents. 2) Stop demanding the conversion of Medicare or Social Security into vouchers or 401(k)s or something. This is a guaranteed way to piss off retirees, near-retirees, and independents all at the same time. It disproportionately hurts the working class and middle class. And slashing retirement benefits for the poor and middle class in conjunction with granting new huge tax cuts for the rich is just mean.
These were Romney/Ryan's 2 big mistakes. The polls were more dovish in 2012 than they are in 2015. So maybe you could get away with #1 with less collateral damage in 2016. We'll see what the mood is like then. But the polls about Medicare and Social Security are even more against voucherization and cuts and the polls about income and wealth inequality are even more against giving huge tax breaks to rich people and slashing entitlements than they were in 2012. Almost every front-running candidate has so far been willing to reach out and grab that third rail. Don't be surprised when they get fried for doing it.
And folks like you get to decide what's rational and what's not. Just like you get to decide who is the aggrieved and who is not. Whose suffering is worthy and whose is not.
Nice how that works.
I think we can both agree that personal attacks are certainly not rational or conducive to any sort of constructive debate.
Last edited by radon; November 11, 2015, 02:47 PM.
I think we can both agree that personal attacks are certainly not rational or conducive to any sort of constitutive debate.
And do you think discounting the experience and concerns of whole populations are not taken personally? You think black people, Latin people, gay people, poor and working class people, you think they don't take this sort of stuff personally? Do you think they're not smart enough to know when someone is cutting their legs off? Too stupefied to understand the code words people on the right use against them?
You begin with the premise that the demands and concerns of these people are illegitimate, evidence of some defect of character or cognition, and at best impractical, unwise or unnecessary. Once that is established, then the rational and constructive debate can begin. Is that about right?
Re: Is America Approaching A Golden Age Or A Deep Decline?
The premise is that identifying yourself as a victim, real or imagined, doesn't make your viewpoint automatically valid, but you might think that it does because no other opinion is tolerated. And yes everyone seems to want to be a victim noways. The internet is saturated with it and so are college campuses. I merely pointed out a possible cause which you never really addressed. Do you think that never telling children that they re wrong or that certain behavior is unacceptable leads to well rounded productive individuals? As these children grow into young adults their maladjustment to the struggles of life creep up everywhere.
Last edited by radon; November 11, 2015, 03:49 PM.
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