Might I suggest to you(and others that shut up to keep the peace) that if they can openly talk politics of hate while you are forced to nod politely in silence, that you are not “getting along great with these folks”-you are surrendering your equality to them.
They’re so stupid and badly-informed that you can’t dazzle 'em with salesmanship?
Got to admit, though, “blue collar billionaire” is a bit of PR genius. Sort of like “unblemished leper” or “compassionate conservative”.
Nope. Because they are not listening to anyone except Breitbart, Fox “News” and most especially, their equally stupid and uninformed friends on Facebook.
Must be a Western thing. My SO’s boy is actually named Levi.
Am I the only one who sees this weird country cultishness? Why do country folks love Chevys so much when you see way more Toyotas around? It’s like you have to own several guns you never use or you turn in your testicles. But hardly anybody wants to shell out $100/season for a hunting license.
Speaking as a native Texican, it is just possible that they were joking. Many Texans are ruefully aware of a reputation as the very epitome of knuckle-walking ignoramuses, and enjoy “playing the part”. Though, as well, you have those who think a “metrosexual” is someone who wants to fuck a city bus.
Levi’s is headquartered in San Francisco and has stated anti-gun positions, so there’s a boycott going on by the brotherhood of the perpetually offended.
I have a plan the Republicans can use to replace the Affordable Care Act.
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Copy the Affordable Care Act verbatim.
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Rename it the Totally Responsible Universal Medical Provisions Act.
Saddest part is, that would actually work. Democrats would support it because it actually helps people, and Republicans would support it because they’d actually believe they’ve “won” something.
That would help people, and they hate helping people. So they won’t do it.
But it would be called the TRUMP Act. People would love the TRUMP Act, and Republicans daren’t vote against it!
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There’s also a few hundred years of the rich playing “let’s you and him fight” with the poor whites and the slaves and later freed blacks, and then whatever immigrants showed up. Divide and conquer is not anything new, but we rarely seem to see our way around it.
I’m a die-hard lifelong liberal, but I’ve started following some never-Trump conservatives like Evan McMullin and John Weaver on Twitter. Those guys are the sort that can be reasoned with, and I wish there were more of them.
That would be a shit sandwhich with wilted lettuce and no mayo. And I would eat it. Because people have been and will suffer needlessly. The jury isn’t out on “socialized medicine”, the shit works. All around the world, countries with far less resource and money do it, and it works.
So, sure, fuck it, go ahead. Do the right thing and steal the credit. Just do it. Just once.
ASIDE addendum: Am I the only one who noticed this? Remember how every few weeks or so, you’d get a local news story about some poor shmuck who got hit with some major medical, and his insurance company ferrets out some loophole and sticks it to him? Been a while since I heard one of those, lately. And I think I know why.
And I think you do too.
My feelings exactly. Fuck them.
Fuck them, okay, but you can’t fuck them without fucking a whole lot of innocents too.
I do hope the Republicans will remember that the people *like *everything about Obamacare except the name. They don’t really dare repealing it unless they replace it immediately with something that will be essentially the same damn thing - not surprising, since it was their own fucking idea to begin with.
Did not politely nod in silence. I was not sure which person said it, and I was just passing by. My wife gave her sister a ration of shit about an email that the sister sent about Trump being sent by Jesus to rescue us. :smack:. They don’t want to talk to us about politics now. For good reason, they can’t back up their choice.
We are able to enjoy their company, so we do get along. I don’t have to start a debate with everyone in my wife’s family.
As an outsider to American politics, it seems fairly obvious to me that Republicans are simply better at communicating. Things like this -significant numbers of people dependent on Obamacare voting for the repeal party- really illustrates that.
The Republicans are simply better at making intuitive sounding little memes that together make a coherent narrative. Democrats are way more concerned with accuracy and truth.
Democrats are simply going to have to get better at this.
Like they say, for every problem, there’s a simple answer that is wrong.
So, the question is, do we communicate the simple and wrong answer, or the more complex answer that requires some level of effort on the people that will actually make an improvement?
It does seem like people chose simple and wrong (a great way to describe Trump).
Do you have an thoughts on how to get people to choose the harder path? Do you have any ways of simplifying the messaging in such a way that it is still true, but people will not balk at it because of its complexity?
Yep. Every other civilised country has been able to institute socialised medicine. But we’re ‘exceptional’. In this case, we’re exceptional in being too stupid to figure it out.
The quoted bit is basically what I was going to post when I started reading the first paragraph of your post. It seems that half of us are incapable of critical thinking. I’d say at least a third of us reject facts when they contradict beliefs. I mean, we have legislators trying to teach Christianity as Science!
This is a big country. We’re not exposed to other cultures to the extent that Europeans are. And we have a couple of oceans to protect us, and the last time we were invaded was in 1942, and that was in the Aleutian Islands before Alaska was even a state. We’ve had it pretty easy. So we haven’t really been exposed to complex political situations and wars as much. We seek simple answers to complex situations.
So Democrats try to explain, 'The oscillation overthruster is out of alignment, due to a damaged flux capacitor. To fix the problem, we need to tear down the powerplant, replace the flux capacitor, and ensure the oscillation overthruster is properly aligned. There are other things that can be done while the powerplant is disassembled, that will ensure the problem does not happen again. The Republicans say, ‘Just hit it with a hammer,’ and the lumpen say, ‘Ah! Right!’ Hitting it with a hammer doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem, but it’s easier.
EDIT: Or what K9bfriender said.
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My feeling is that the choice between simple and wrong versus complex and right (or functional) is a poor one. Simple is not necessarily wrong. I’d try for simple, catchy and not wrong. Complex is always going to lose, right or wrong. People won’t choose the harder path as things stand today.
But I suspect every issue is going to have its own distinct balancing point.