The Glade 4.0

Another in the same vein:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367903/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The solution to that?

"Remove your child, lose the benefits." Done.

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Holy shitsnacks!

That does, indeed, solve that problem. Now, what do you do about the conditions that cause that problem in the first place?

More importantly, what if you implement the same type of solution for similar situations involving minorities? Or what if the people pulling their child out are women? Now you're a racist or a misogynist who hates single mothers. Sure, on the internet we can talk about doing it everywhere; in real life it's very hard to do it.... in cities, for those reasons plus the fact that high concentrations of population mean high concentrations of votes, especially electoral votes.

This article (I should have made this more clear) is related to the first one in that this sort of attitude is what's promoted the rise of Trump. The left wants to pretend these people are gun-loving, racist, rednecks, then tries to appeal to them by backing unions that don't exist because the industries of that area are being regulated out of existence. The right, on the other hand, wonders why vague promises of general economic growth don't appeal to them, and just try to claw as many of them to the polls as they can by holding off the Democrats on gun issues.

Appalachia is the worst example of a MUCH larger phenomenon - poorer, mostly white people that are not social/religious conservative voters, not libertarians, and whom the appeals to the monied Republicans don't apply, and whom the left ignores because they don't belong to the right victim groups.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The conditions for this assistance are X and Y. If you do not meet x and y, you can still get assistance, but you need to also meet condition z. Provided you maintain the greater of x and y, or x and z, or y and z, you are still eligible.

If at any time, you willingly violate any of those conditions, you no longer are eligible for the assistance. If, through this program, you lose the qualifications of x, y, or z because the program has provided relief from x, y, or z, you may still remain eligible for a time such that the assistance can be more suitable to your conditions.

There are humane ways to taper people off from assistance.

By way of anecdotal explanation, section 8 housing. I worked with a girl (dated her roommate) that was eligible for housing assistance. The company wanted to promote her, because she was a good employee and had excelled at her job. She had to turn down the promotion/raise because the bump in salary would have put her over the eligibility limit for housing (by something like $80 a month or something silly like that). Because of that, she would have lost like $400 a month in living assistance and had to move to a new place.

That, to me, is fairly nonsensical. The all or nothing, hard limit on income keeps people trapped and unable to excel. Now, had there been a tiered assistance schedule, her raise would have reduced the assistance, sure, but she wouldn't have lost the whole thing all at once.

A LOT of reform needs to happen.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I don't fundamentally disagree with this. However, I think you should read the entire article and look at this in more context. "A lot of reform needs to happen" is entirely reasonable coming from you, but you are not running for President, or even Mayor in those areas. Coming from their political leaders, the same comment would be utterly dismissive.

The difference between your friend's situation - which in itself is ridiculous, I agree - and this one is that poor families are being given a generous benefit for a disability, and when the disability goes away that does nothing to improve the family's ability to pay for its basic needs. This is why they're fabricating the disabilities in the first place; it's not that it costs them $700 a month to have a kid with a "learning disability". It's that this is essentially free money they can get for having a kid underperform.

In your friends' case it's a matter of her getting a promotion and raise that doesn't cover the loss in assistance. In the case of these families there's no raise coming to offset; they just have a kid that can read better. It's very likely there's no job at all - and more importantly, almost no prospect of getting one. Most of the jobs are taken by the few locals with a decent education, and there's not enough economic activity to draw in new... opportunities for economic activity.

Now, there might be coal mining 2 counties over, which pays good, but is hazardous as **** and the family may not be able to buy a car to get there, to say nothing of the fact that it's mountainous and in the winter it may be hazardous as **** to drive there - and coal mining itself is certainly no champion in the safety department. In short, the "get a job!" approach may be literally impossible because of geography and stands a fairly high chance of quite literally getting you killed.

This brings us back to the benefits - the family faces the prospect of having its benefits taken away if the kid performs better, with no corresponding increase in earning power, nor decrease in costs. the problem is that the benefits are not tied in any logical way to the needs of the people receiving them, and they're available through a process that is ripe for abuse to people that have no alternative beyond doing so.

The right and the Republicans are guilty of ignoring these people; the left is guilty of creating them. It has created these benefit programs, in the form they exist, with no more appropriate alternatives for impoverished rural areas, and is busily trying to regulate out of existence the few good jobs that remain, all the while entertaining the idea that these people are racist rednecks with white privilege.

That's why Donald Trump exists. Most of the people he's appealing to don't have it as bad as Appalachia does, but the problems are basically similar. One side wants to shoehorn them into irrelevant categories of its "base" and the other side expects them to jump on the benefits bandwagon while at the same time constantly describing them in terms that make it abundantly clear they're expected to vote for politicians that hate them for entirely mercenary reasons.

And now we're faced with the possibility of a President that can appeal to these people but has literally almost no idea what he will actually do if elected.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The plan?

Seriously?

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Holy shitsnacks!

What do you mean "seriously"? Do you actually think leftist political strategists don't notice the opportunities granted by controlling the educational establishment, with majors in their viewpoints being accepted fields of study - with no scientific rigor whatsoever - while ideas that oppose them are summarily removed as "racist" or "sexist" or whatever?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I think he questions it as an organized, conscious conspiratorial strategy. Which I tend to agree with -- while I believe the system to be hopelessly corrupt, i don't generally consider politics to be as remotely sinister as such a conscious strategy would indicate. There's no evil socialist thinktank trying to devise ways to deceive people into putting their system into place. It's simply a matter of a societal version of natural selection - positions that cause more people to vote left remain active for the left, because they are working.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That was my take. Referring to it as a plan, as if there's that much cohesion and forethought, seems a bit grandiose.

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It's not a conspiracy, but it definitely is an organized strategy among the people that work in political strategy for a living.

The left's political strategists - in the U.S. people who are professional Democrats and leading Democrat politicians - are just taking the opportunity presented to them. They didn't create the leftist universities intentionally; that happened over time. It's not a conspiracy; it's a tactical move to take advantage of the present situation for long-term benefit. It helps a lot that the leftist portion of academia is among the least rigorous and provides an easy path to success at the free degree programs they're proposing.

In point of fact, they actually may have waited too long to act because they're doing it right at the point that the campus leftists are going totally off the rails. Again, it's not a conspiracy and the leftist momentum on campuses may have gotten beyond their control - a lot of people, even the center-left may look at the outrageous policies and behaviors of college students and faculty in the past year and wonder if there's any actual education going on for tax dollars to support. Again; not a conspiracy; the politicians are trying to exploit an existing condition but may have missed their optimal window to do so.

The right's political strategists have their own tactical plans and moves in various areas but they have been far less adept at implementing them because they've misread their own base and done far too much reacting to the left on the issue of what discourse is acceptable and what isn't, rather than actually trying to counter it - incidentally, opening a window for Trump in the process, who in part exploits the very large part of the voting public that is tired of being told what ideas are and are not acceptable from such a one-sided perspective.



It's a plan amongst the very limited field of major Democrat/left politicians, strategists, and such - in the sense that they've recognized an opportunity and attempted to exploit it in the current election cycle. It's not dissimilar to illegal immigration in that way. Being the champion of people living here legally is aimed at down the road being the party of choice for those peoples' citizen children. It's not an overarching grandiose conspiracy, just a recognition of existing conditions and attempting to use them in a favorable way.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Wait... you're suggesting that us 'leftists' (a ridiculously pejorative term btw) want a well educated populace because they tend to vote left? No, we just prefer a well educated populace because we like a society that is populated by critical thinkers. Which direction they think is not a goal, only that they do think.

Sorry if the path through higher education and complex analysis of social and political issues tends to lead away from sound-bite politics that seems to be the way of the political right.

There is something to be said for people getting useless degrees and then ***** that they're in a ton of debt. But there are those of us that have useful degrees and a ton of debt that could use some assistance.

50k in debt with a non commercially viable degree in "Bullshit Studies"? No pity. 50k in debt with a useful degree? Ok, you should have some help.

But then, higher education should be less expensive, if not free. At least a 2 year degree in a basic field. You want to get that masters in Bullshit Studies? Go right ahead. You want to get a BS in Physics? Ok, that's useful here's assistance.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I just addressed this. I'm referring to the left's political strategists - i.e. the professional staff of the Democratic party and its politicians and their staff, not the average everyday liberal.

Furthermore, no, you don't prefer a population of "critical thinkers" - the near-total allergy to critical thinking is precisely what's produced situations like the one at Yale or Mizzou. The near-constant clamoring for "safe spaces", not to mention the profusion of students bewailing the fact that they feel physically unsafe if exposed to viewpoints they disagree with indicate that indeed, leftist academia has been passing off its own dogma as "education" and "critical thinking" for so long now that it has created a monster it can't even control - one that drives administrations into abject surrender to absurd demands, resignation, and allows students to be physically bullied in libraries.

Students are arriving and expecting to simply be handed a degree while they pursue causes they made up their minds on as adolescents and professors let them.

This is to say nothing of the outrageous sexual assault policies colleges are adopting at the behest of a DOE ruled by feminist propaganda.

It is the job of professors and administration to reign this in and actively go out and diversify their faculty and staff precisely to challenge people and get them to think critically, but the simple fact is that the left is addicted to thinking that anything they deem too far to the right is beyond the pale.



If by "complex analysis of social issues" you mean that done by social sciences academia that's almost entirely an echo chamber of leftists? Yes, it's amazing how if you completely drive competing viewpoints out of a particular arena, all the "complex analysis" tends towards one side of the spectrum.

The left certainly has no shortage of sound bites of its own, nor is the right short of well-reasoned positions. The simple fact is that the left takes it upon itself to decide what's educated and even what's acceptable, and then just repeats its own faux outrage over bigotry that hasn't had political meaning in 25+ years - in those sound bites you think the right uses.

The fault of the right lies in endlessly retreating before this - on every issue except guns. Interestingly, the left tries to portray the NRA as extremists there, but the NRA actually hold form and don't retreat to make themselves more palatable to people that hate them.



That doesn't work for the left for 2 reasons:

A) Useful degrees don't lend themselves to either side of the political spectrum
B) It doesn't serve the purpose of reducing the usefulness of a basic degree

There's a large number of moderate-use degrees, such as finance and business that are more practical than whiner studies, but less useful than say, engineering.

Amid the BS studies degrees there will be much larger numbers of business majors than, say engineers.

If you can drive the semi-useful degrees down to the level of a high school diploma, you just increased the dependency class that much more. People with degrees like that are widely serving coffee at Starbucks as it is.

TR's problem is that he's bought into the BS of his own political class. The ostensibly stupid right that loves sound bites has rejected them in favor of Trump - not because he doesn't use sound bites, but because he's trampling all over everyone else's sound bites.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

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The Dude abides.

Grrrraaaarrrrrrrggggggh.

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---Resurrect & Re-elect---
Abraham Lincoln
----------in 2016!---------

I'd vote for him.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Yes, seriously, "The Plan." While others have raised excellent points regarding the feasibility of an organized attempt by liberals to seize control of universities, the fact remains that universities in the United States have almost without exception instituted policies that resemble the tactics of Joe McCarthy.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

They only have lists of communists because those are their attendance records.

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The real issue is that college degrees are becoming more and more interchangeable. There are basically two tiers of undergrad degrees right now, those that require 4 semesters of Calculus and those that don't. Beyond that, employers don't really care what your degree is in anymore, just that you have a 4 year degree in something on the appropriate tier. This has made stuff like majoring in gender studies actually somewhat viable, because there's not much difference in employability between this degree and all the other non-math degrees.

That's precisely because of too many degrees in total hogwash; a situation we probably should not exacerbate.

It doesn't help that so much of the PhD level academic community has revealed itself to be unable to discern total hogwash in its own field even when that hogwash is expressly created for the purpose of making fools of them.

Both of those links are some pretty amusing reading if you have the time.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Well, I just voted for Bernie. It's mostly because I care about the environment more than other issues though. And I'm pro-immigration.

I can't vote in the primaries (PA is not an open primary state, so independents are screwed)...

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?