Fencer reregistered wrote:Of the Traveling Wilburys, 3 are now dead ... and a 4th is a Nobel Laureate.
And the 5th is Jeff Lynne. Don't forget about Jeff Lynne, love that guy. Great producer and singer/songwriter.
VeryMuchWoke wrote:Captain_Caveman wrote:Look, man. I am a left-leaning moderate who has never spent a day registered to either party. I would vote Romney over Sanders without even blinking, but I have a low tolerance for bull **** falsehoods and you are spewing a lot of them right now. No idea how this Shapiro fool became the flavor of the week for conservatives, but I'm just gonna say that a guy who went to a $30k a year private school doesn't need to be lecturing the black community about how racism doesn't exist and that it's all just a problem of their culture's unwillingness to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Just the takes you have mentioned in this thread are deeply and unequivocally racist to the core, even if I suspect you aren't educated enough to grasp that.
Which brings me to my second point. A good friend is a campaign consultant for the GOP at the highest level. As in, one of the top Trump rivals in the GOP Presidential campaign in 2016. He brags openly about how easy it to manipulate the GOP voting base of uneducated white males. Just zero respect for his own constituents, and even he is in complete shock at how easily Trump can get his supporters to believe incredibly ignorant, easily disprovable falsehoods.
He says nothing loudly, and it speaks to the id of white males who know that they are falling into the ether of a global economy that they are neither educated nor skilled enough to compete in. They are fearful of their loss of status, and they should be. They are increasingly obsolete and believe in an outdated, discredited ideology that is on the wrong side of every major issue of our time. Rather than look within and try to take advantage of the unprecedented opportunity that exists for white American males, they need to blame other people. The government, blacks, immigrants, liberals... pretty much anyone and everyone but the people who are actually screwing them. They live in a zero sum game in their minds where others must lose for them to win.
Their bluster is not strength. It is fear and weakness, and again, easily manipulated. Again, I have no horse in the race and don't care for the nuts and bolts (aka fairly tales) of what hacks like Bernie are out there promoting, but let's be perfectly real about who the snowflakes are right now. For all the tough guy talk about "libtards getting triggered", there's no one in the history of Earth who gets triggered more easily than modern conservatives do.
Kneeling for anthems, protestors, emails, Benghazi, Black Lives Matter, who Obama's pastor is. They live in a constant state of fake outrage at manufactured scandals, false equivalence and non-issues. People like my friend can literally get conservatives to whine and cry about ANYTHING at the drop of a hat. And they do. They really do.
They are, without question, the softest people who have ever lived.
Psychology backs up much of what you're saying here.
Cave spits truth, no doubt, but man that article is a little off in its conclusions and kinda plays with definitions in an unsound way.
What the research about liberals and conservatives shows is that liberals score high in openness and low in conscientiousness. Openness is basically how willing a person is to explore novel things and situations, how curious they are and how much they engage their imagination. Openness correlates in a large part with intelligence btw, so um yeah liberals are typically both more intelligent and more educated (because intelligent people tend to stick with school longer). It also correlates with creativity, which is why almost every performer, artist, musician, writer is liberal. Basketball along with soccer is a highly improvisational sport where creativity is an important skill so typically basketball players (and fans) are more liberal than society as a whole.
Conservatives score low in openness and high in conscientiousness and disgust sensitivity. In other words, they like rules, they like following rules, they like the old ways and they get hella triggered by things they find disgusting or unsettling like rule breaking (the NFL plays to this base bigtime). Like Cave points out so well above, you can lead conservatives around by their nose by simply playing to their disgust sensitivity and love of rules.
Basically the diff between liberals and conservatives is how they view borders and definitions, how comfortable they are with ambiguity, etc...
In another post, Cave outlined the global forces at play, how things are changing at unprecedented pace, how this is generally good for the world (in terms of ending poverty, life spans, etc.) and how swaths of privileged whites are getting left behind and can't deal with it and can't recognize their privilege because doing so puts blame at their feet.
What I'd add to that is this: globalism's final end will be a pure information economy. In this economy, the very things that will be most valued will be the things that can't be outsourced or done by machines, i.e., non-repetitive, improvisational, creative work (whether that means coding, writing, managing people, what-have-you). In other words, globalism will swallow the rule-based, repetitive menial work that generally fits the conservative outlook. Sure, manual labor, carpentry, bricklaying, trade work will still be around to an extent, as will healthcare jobs, military work, but it won't be enough for everyone (or, as in the case with health aide workers, certain swaths of conservative men won't see it as a viable job because it's the traditional viewed as women's work). As Cave said, conservatives want to go back to the days of getting good pay to pull an effing lever for 8 hours a day. Not only are those days gone, but the days to come will increasingly value and pay for the things that are by nature the domain of the liberal mind.
Globalism is an existential threat to conservatism and we can't job-train or skill-train our way out of it.
Psychologists have tried for years to change various aspects of personality - but these aspects tend to remain stable across lifetimes. Funnily enough, the only thing that they can improve by any significant measure (one standard deviation, in fact) is openness....and that's achieved by dosing people with Psilocybin or LSD under clinical supervision.
So I guess what I'm saying is our only hope is for every man, woman, and child to trip their balls off...
threrf23 wrote:Single-payer healthcare is, at least for the foreseeable future, a false idealist notion for a number of reasons. It's the democrat's version of Trump's wall.
Single-payer and the wall are not equivalent in any way my friend.
Transitioning from a fee-for-service system to single payer will be a messy and painful transition, no doubt, there will be winners and losers, lots of job upheaval, unhappy doctors/medical providers (who will take a huge haircut on the deal), and a fundamental change in health care delivery that a certain set of people will dislike - but it's entirely feasible and almost inevitable given where we are right now.
The wall on the other hand is a vanity project that'd require a huge investment with few tangible returns on that investment. It's a BRILLIANT rhetorical device, however, because it plays right into conservative's love of borders (see above).
Trump is a quintessential American in that he can sell you crappy stuff you don't need and make you feel good about wanting it anyway. He's like the ultimate culmination of everything that was America in the 20th century.
And his presidency will be the jumping off point/rallying cry for our full transition into the 21st century. It's sucks, it's bad, it's gonna get worse and he might do something that can't be undone, but what comes after will be better. It's a weird rule of life, but bad things tend to lead to good things (if you can stay alive long enough).
The leaks are real...the news is fake.
I'm just here for the memes.
