Can I come to yours?
I’ll bring the…whine.
It’s the long game. Conservatives have been doing their best to damage schooling so that people are less informed and able to make informed choices. It used to be that all you needed was a pair of hands and a 5th grade education to provide for your family (and being white and male and possibly straight, of course).
Now you really need some level of college education just to get into the game, so people are being left out. And the people being left out are the ones that are the least able to figure out why that is, what they can do about it themselves, and who is actually promoting policies that would help them.
Desperate people make poor decisions. They are easily convinced that it is is others that are causing them harm. IT is easy to make people losing their way of life xenophobic and bigoted, even easier when they have not learned critical thinking skills do to poor emphasis on academics.
The country isn’t dumb, if nothing else, more people voted for Hillary than Trump, so there’s that. Then you have the people who aren’t dumb, but they also don’t really give a shit about other people, and are perfectly willing to allow others to suffer for their profit. Then you have those who are not just willing to allow others to suffer, but that is their goal from the outset, they aren’t really dumb either. Authoritarians are a bit dumb, because they think that they are the ones that will get to be in charge if they vote in a fascist regime.
But most are just ignorant, and are easily lead astray. If reading isn’t something you enjoy, if it is a chore that you undertake until when absolutely necessary, then you don’t inform yourself about the world, you let others inform you. If you turn on Limbaugh when you are out driving, and turn on Fox when you get home, how will you ever know that you might be the “bad guys”?
I don’t know or a way to reach them, I can only hope that we can reach the next generation in time to give them the skills to make informed decisions.
He’s a riot here too. I can’t open a fucking thread anymore without seeing this horse’s ass crying about something new. At what point does this guy topic banned?
I politely request you stop engaging him (for your own sanity), but I’m begging you to stop quoting him. It renders the ignore function practically useless.
I bet the cantaloupe cretin will pull the country out of every treaty it’s entered into all the way back to 1783.
He’ll give Georgia back to the Cherokee? Will they accept?
Weren’t the Cherokee kicked out of Georgia and South Carolina by a president refusing to honor a Supreme Court decision? That looks like a precedent the carrot creep could cherish.
Assaulting reporters? Trump is fine with the Saudi Crown Prince assassinating an American reporter and explicitly encouraged his fans to do likewise.
Help me please on my entry for the 2019 Death Pool contest. (How much security do such progressive celebrities have?)
- Stephen Colbert
- Bill Maher
- Joe Scarborough
- Lawrence O’Donnell
- Anderson Cooper
I don’t think Trumpists would have particular qualms about killing women, but I’ll put them at the list bottom.
- Mika Brzezinski
- Rachel Maddow
I need five more names. Help? (I think red-neck Texans are likely to murder Willie Nelson out of spite, but you don’t get many Death Pool points when old people are murdered.)
It occurs to me, Septimus, that a list of names like that (add Alec Baldwin and a couple of others, say Brooks and Shields) are the canaries in the coal mine and maybe, as long as they’re still with us, were not heading down the dictatorial path that so many of us have expressed concern about.
I didn’t bet this list in the 2018 Death pool, did I? And I don’t predict Trump himself explicitly ordering these murders, or the Army or DHS obeying him if he did. The murders will be committed by the craziest among the millions of brainwashed “patriotic” Americans.
It’s hard to predict the exact nature of the coming dystopia and it might still be avoided altogether. The coming election, now just two weeks away, is critical.
It seems to me that if you wait until the names on that list are killed to start worrying about going down a dictatorial path it is far too late, because you’re already at the end of the path with nowhere to go.
Do you mean Khashoggi here? I thought he was a Saudi citizen?
The country is dumb? I didn’t see that being a complaint when the Dems were in power. Anyways, in a democracy where the populace has an average IQ of 100 dumb people voting is a feature.
You realize you wouldn’t need college level education if we didn’t outsource labor and import black market labor due to counterproductive wage floors?
Geez, I wonder why…
He was a US resident who worked for the Washington Post.
I know who he worked for. I was asking about the “American” status. But US resident, okay, that’s what I was wondering about.
“Counterproductive”? I definitely see the problems with outsourcing labor to impoverished grossly underpaid workers for starvation wages overseas and impoverished grossly underpaid workers for starvation wages in the domestic black market, but I don’t see how they would really be improved by allowing millions of homegrown impoverished grossly underpaid workers to compete for starvation wages legally.
Guess what? Some dollars and learning skills and traits that the market desires beats no dollars and idleness. Since labor is now a global commodity, an honest appraisal of “unintended” side effects is in order.
Is that what we’ve come to in the richest country in the world now? Well-to-do upper-middle-class folks tut-tutting because the peasants aren’t legally allowed to work for starvation wages?
Other developed countries have managed to avoid your false dichotomy of immiseration at starvation wages vs. total indigence as the only two choices.
I thought everybody had a job. Isn’t unemployment virtually nil?