le_nelson_mandela_face posted:when you hear someone bitching apparently in all sincerity about how troops are social pariahs nowadays you should keep this in mind: every single person in the world who is the slightest bit political believes that they are being oppressed and victimized and that their oppression is, if not the worst experienced by almost anybody, at least in some way exceptional. in fact, one could define ones' political leanings by where one points the finger. troops, cops, MRAs, gamers, central park penthouse banker-wives, white supremacists, catholic hardliners, israelis, all claim to be cruelly victimized by totally unfair villains. people are self-absorbed crybaby assholes, the fact that someone claims that they are being oppressed counts for nothing in itself
who are you being oppressed and victimized by
littlegreenpills posted:le_nelson_mandela_face posted:when you hear someone bitching apparently in all sincerity about how troops are social pariahs nowadays you should keep this in mind: every single person in the world who is the slightest bit political believes that they are being oppressed and victimized and that their oppression is, if not the worst experienced by almost anybody, at least in some way exceptional. in fact, one could define ones' political leanings by where one points the finger. troops, cops, MRAs, gamers, central park penthouse banker-wives, white supremacists, catholic hardliners, israelis, all claim to be cruelly victimized by totally unfair villains. people are self-absorbed crybaby assholes, the fact that someone claims that they are being oppressed counts for nothing in itself
who are you being oppressed and victimized by
capitalism and humanity
Keven posted:(Barely choking out hate filled word) nnnnoooormmmiiieesssssss
This.
Palin noted during a political rally in Tulsa that her 26-year-old son had served in Iraq. “My son, like so many others, they come back a bit different. They come back hardened,” she remarked in a video published by Right Wing Watch.
...
“They come back wondering if there is that respect for what their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have given so sacrificially to this country, and that starts at the top,” she explained. “It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to question, have to wonder if they’re respected anymore. It starts from the top. The question, though, it comes from the top, the question, though, that comes from our own president where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedoms that have been bequeathed us?'”
“So when my own son is going through what he goes through coming back, I can certainly relate with other families who kind of feel these ramifications of some PTSD and some of the woundedness that our soldiers do return with, and it makes me realize more than ever, it is now or never for the sake of America’s finest that we’ll have that commander in chief who will respect them and honor them,” she added.
HenryKrinkle posted:Palin noted during a political rally in Tulsa that her 26-year-old son had served in Iraq. “My son, like so many others, they come back a bit different. They come back hardened,” she remarked in a video published by Right Wing Watch.
...
“They come back wondering if there is that respect for what their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have given so sacrificially to this country, and that starts at the top,” she explained. “It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to question, have to wonder if they’re respected anymore. It starts from the top. The question, though, it comes from the top, the question, though, that comes from our own president where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedoms that have been bequeathed us?'”
“So when my own son is going through what he goes through coming back, I can certainly relate with other families who kind of feel these ramifications of some PTSD and some of the woundedness that our soldiers do return with, and it makes me realize more than ever, it is now or never for the sake of America’s finest that we’ll have that commander in chief who will respect them and honor them,” she added.
read the thread before posting. User loses posting privileges for 3 days.
anyway like... i'd talk to liberal party members who were old professionals and they'd be like yeah i hate bush, he detonated those buildings in new york to hide evidence of the bankers controlling the world... or they'd be in a party for like demographic reasons or something and be like... 'yeah i'm a conservative christian... it's a crying shame that seniors get so little money... we need to really expand pensions...' and you'd sort of notice they held policy positions on every single issue contrary to the party but they'd never think of leaving because they are a "conservative".
this is also why most politicians are so bland today i think and talk about being "beyond ideology"... things are so depoliticized and try to suppress class talk so much that politicians feel safe by selling themselves as a sort of generic representative that is good at their job regardless if you agree with them on policy issues. like staffers know they get way more traction and potential for agreement when they say something like "harper is corrupt" instead of like "harper is wrong to cut taxes".
i think one of the good things of like bernie's campaign is that he offers people those sort of simple soundbytes they can use with their friends or at work, like people can say oh yeah the system is rigged or Wall Street are a bunch of crooks. a lot of them probably say stuff like that all the time anyway. and it's good that people can be like yeah that guy is saying true things. i don't know if that's actually how radical left should work though, because it's still in this very limited representative way where you're like hey if bernie wins then things might get better, and the way to help is to help bernie. i don't think that produces the sort of results they'd want.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i can't imagine being a high-level political operative with some modicum of comprehension who doesn't just have the utmost and most justified contempt for american democracy and voters. it's just unfathomable to me. i mean first you've already got them to buy into this game that's rigged in at least half a dozen distinct ways where the results barely matter. that's before you even do anything. then you show 12 focus group yahoos in a room a thing and if it works on them it will work on baboon gen-pop. "dirty tricks," ephemeral buzzword-laden speeches, and even what's considered legitimate political criticisms. i remember in 2007 when the media narrative that week was Is Obama Experienced Enough?. People who had never thought of this issue once in their life before and could possibly not explain why it was functionally relevant one way or another all of a sudden had very strong and angry opinions on it, opinions that ceased the moment the people on the TV stopped talking about it. how can you look at this happening week after week year after year and think: these people deserve to drive their own destiny
well because that's already like... a subsection of the middle class you're talking about. the average voter (not even talking about non-voters) thinks or talks about politics (any form) for like seven minutes in a week (for real). so of course most of their opinions are like passing ideas they heard from the news or whatever. the thing is that once you give people a concrete struggle they tend (majority-wise, not everyone) to quickly understand the situation way better than the middle-class politicos. like ask transit workers in a strike their opinion on how the economy works versus the guy in the washington post reporting on it. which is a source of hope.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:white people should not be allowed to...children
agreed
Edited by drwhat ()
aerdil posted:i met a really cute barista named allegra today but i dont think i could date an allergy medicine
its ok, i don't think you could date a really cute barista either.
getfiscal posted:well because that's already like... a subsection of the middle class you're talking about. the average voter (not even talking about non-voters) thinks or talks about politics (any form) for like seven minutes in a week (for real). so of course most of their opinions are like passing ideas they heard from the news or whatever. the thing is that once you give people a concrete struggle they tend (majority-wise, not everyone) to quickly understand the situation way better than the middle-class politicos. like ask transit workers in a strike their opinion on how the economy works versus the guy in the washington post reporting on it. which is a source of hope.
yeah white first worlders don't understand politics because they don't need to. they might be technically voting against their interests in some specifics but broadly none of the choices available to them are going to make a meaningful difference in their lives, there are no drastic consequences for them so there's no impetus to learn. that doesn't mean they won't think it's the end of the world if the wrong team wins the superelection, but there is of course no causal connection there to anything real.
and the pressure of all these people with a bizarre alienated relationship to the political process warps public discourse creating a desert barren of meaningful information, a huge barrier to learning anything for marginalized people who actually do have an immediate and life-threatening stake in the game. almost as if there's some kind of deliberate strategy at work... REally Makes You Think
getfiscal posted:good joke but let's respect the fact that aerdil is a known sexhaver here
im planning my pilgrimage to the tomb of the unknown sexhaver
shriekingviolet posted:aerdil posted:i met a really cute barista named allegra today but i dont think i could date an allergy medicine
its ok, i don't think you could date a really cute barista either.
yikes, i haven't been owned this hard for awhile. well it was fun while it lasted but i dont think i can show me face round these parts anymore, farewell rhizzone
aerdil posted:shriekingviolet posted:aerdil posted:i met a really cute barista named allegra today but i dont think i could date an allergy medicine
its ok, i don't think you could date a really cute barista either.
yikes, i haven't been owned this hard for awhile. well it was fun while it lasted but i dont think i can show me face round these parts anymore, farewell rhizzone
farewell
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:PALIN: My son, like so many others—they come back a bit different. They come back hardened. They come back wondering if there is that respect for what it is that their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military so sacrificially have given to this country. And that starts from the top. It’s a shame that our military personnel have to wonder, have to question if they are respected anymore.
lol of course he was a fucking Troop
And not just any troop, he was also best friends with famous troop Jeremy Morlock who is serving 24 years in military prison for hunting Afghani civilians for sport along with the rest of his unit
http://theweek.com/articles/599577/how-obscure-adviser-pat-buchanan-predicted-wild-trump-campaign-1996
(...)
For decades, people have been warning that a set of policies that really has enriched Americans on the top, and likely has improved the overall quality of life (through cheap consumables) on the bottom, has hollowed out the middle.
Chinese competition really did hammer the Rust Belt and parts of the great Appalachian ghetto. It made the life prospects for men — in marriage and in their careers — much dimmer than those of their fathers. Libertarian economists, standing giddily behind Republican politicians, celebrate this as creative destruction even as the collateral damage claims millions of formerly-secure livelihoods, and — almost as crucially — overall trust and respect in the nation's governing class. Immigration really does change the calculus for native-born workers too. As David Frum points out last year:
The Center for Immigration Studies released its latest jobs study. CIS, a research organization that tends to favor tight immigration policies, found that even now, almost seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans are working than in November 2007, the peak of the prior economic cycle. Balancing the 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans at work, there are two million more immigrants — legal and illegal — working in the United States today than in November 2007. All the net new jobs created since November 2007 have gone to immigrants. Meanwhile, millions of native-born Americans, especially men, have abandoned the job market altogether.
The political left treats this as a made-up problem, a scapegoating by Applebee's-eating, megachurch rubes who think they are losing their "jerbs." Remember, Republicans and Democrats have still been getting elected all this time.
But the response of the predominantly-white class that Francis was writing about has mostly been one of personal despair. And thus we see them dying in middle age of drug overdose, alcoholism, or obesity at rates that now outpace those of even poorer blacks and Hispanics. Their rate of suicide is sky high too. Living in Washington D.C., however, with an endless two decade real-estate boom, and a free-lunch economy paid for by special interests, most of the people in the conservative movement hardly know that some Americans think America needs to be made great again.
In speeches, Trump mostly implies that the ruling class conducts trade deals or the business of government stupidly and weakly, not villainously or out of personal pecuniary motives. But the message of his campaign is that America's interests have been betrayed by fools.
The huge infrastructure of the conservative movement in Washington D.C. is aghast at Trump, and calls him an economic illiterate for threatening China with tariffs. They can't understand that this is not primarily an economic measure, but a nationalist one. It's a signal to voters that one man is here to fight for them, not to school-marmishly tell them that capitalism is helping them when in fact it manifestly helps others a lot more. Trump has attracted his coalition of supporters among those who are the most-weakly attached to the Republican Party as an institution.
(...)
Trump embodies this in nearly every letter. He doesn't have people from the traditional Republican power structure advising him. He doesn't say he'll direct the existing members of the managerial class to make a little tweak here or there; he says he'll send his friend Carl Icahn and threaten China with a tariff wall that could repel a tsunami of cheap goods.
What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump's success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn't need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don't need them, and you're better off without them.
thirdplace posted:pretty sure plenty of people have made fun of the dumb names sarah palin gave to her kids
that is literally all i remember about the 2008 election cycle. she named her daughter after the town where espn is headquartered! Lol~!
thirdplace posted:pretty sure plenty of people have made fun of the dumb names sarah palin gave to her kids
Wrong. I'm the first one to do this.