The Glade 4.0

This man speaks for America. Get ready for your next president.

Yes. He bet me $10 on this and is now 8 years delinquent.

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The Dude abides.

Ironically, I do actually want Bernie to win the Democrat nomination for several reasons:

A) As much of a moonbat as he is, he appears to be a relatively honest and sincere moonbat
B) Almost anyone is preferable to Hillary Clinton, who has been acting as though the Presidency belonged to her since November 3rd, 1992 and all she was doing was being made to wait. Off the top of my head I can't think of any female LESS deserving of the title of "first female President", especially after staying with the philanderer-in-chief for decades and targeting his accusers lest it ruin her own political ambitions
C) He's likely to send moderates running screaming to the Republicans and might even allow the Republicans to capture enough seats to override vetos
D) His policy proposals are so absurd that, if actually implemented, they would pretty much cure the public of any appeal for socialism for at least a generation, maybe more. Free college, with no ability testing, no performance standards, and no requirement not to major in what amounts to "being a liberal" would be ruinously expensive and annihilate the value of a college education in the process. His social expansions while at the same time planning to annihilate the fossil fuels industry and the revenue they provide are even more in the realm of fantasy - Many European countries with robust social programs fund them with fossil fuel revenues, Norway in particular. Not even Europe contemplates such fantastically incompatible social ideas.
D) Disregarding the above, he's just not likely to actually win a general election.

That said, Khross does make a good point about Sanders being far more serious and having a stronger game in the South than people are giving him credit for. If he even pulls within a few points of Hillary in South Carolina, her "firewall", he may run the table after that. Even the protests that "but Clinton has a firewall in the South!!" are a tacit admission that Hillary has to rely on a firewall to beat an aging lunatic that wasn't even a Democrat before this campaign.

Also, referring back to our "DPRK Twitter feed" (time stamp is a tad out of date), a remarkably apt description of the Iowa Democrat results:



"Braying she-ass" is the best description of Hillary Clinton, not to mention the feminist portion of her supporters, I've ever heard.

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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."

Bernie will start to lose after NH.

Hillary will be nominated. Either Cruz or Rubio will be nominated. I don't think Cruz can beat Clinton.

Therefore, either Rubio or Clinton will be the next president.

If Cruz were still pushing the social conservative stuff heavily, I'd agree with that. I had expected him to do so, and be an also-ran candidate but he did not, to his advantage. He is a phenomenally skilled debater and a far more astute politician than people have given him credit for. He is very skilled at remaining calm under pressure and at laying out a case in easily-understood language; he embarrassed Trump badly on the Canadian thing. Clinton's "condescending ***** and pretend your opponent is sexist" schtick won't do well against him.

I'll be more confident in predicting Cruz's chances after NH, NV and SC are out of the way; I want to see if he backs off the social conservative stuff again where he needs to. He's very wisely not making stupid promises about repealing the decision on same sex marriage that he almost certainly can't keep and that it was Huckabee - not him - that showed up to defend Kim Davis. He's argued Constitutional cases before the USSC before and knows what can and can't be done - and he also has enough respect for jurisprudence not to try.

It's more clear now why he took so many unwinnable fighting stands in the Senate - he knew he'd lose. They were an intentional play to make his fellow Senators loathe him, and it worked. He has legitimate claim to being an outsider in the Senate because no one can stand him.

Still, I am not discounting your opinion; it's entirely possible that you are correct.

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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 "free college" thing is especially a problem in the US because like it or not the US uses ability to pay as the main weed out factor that keeps too many people from going to college. The easy access to school loans has already really eroded the value of a degree because now everyone can get one. In countries with free college either the admissions exam is absurdly difficult, like in South Korea, or the government essentially tells you what you're going to major in. Germany does this, its possible to effectively lock yourself out of ever being a doctor, lawyer, or other high paid white collar profession as early as age 12. Do poorly on the standardized test at that age and you get put into a school that directs you towards the trades, and which universities won't accept applicants from unless your grades are absolutely exceptional. In the US you can fail at school all your teenage life and still get into a good college, just get a decent ACT score then do 2 years of community college and transfer over.

Oh look... People are here making dopey arguments in favor of socialism again.

I thought that era of Glade history had passed us by.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I'd love to see Sanders elected. I want the US dollar back down... It makes vacationing cheaper.

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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
█ ♣ █

Free college is one of the biggest lies told by and to liberals.

First off, "other countries" don't offer free college to everyone just for breathing. Some people aren't good enough and don't get to go, or they get kicked out. If you miss your chance to go to college at 18 for whatever reason that's it for you. There's always another crop of fresh high school graduates just around the corner, and you're locked into whatever blue collar job you can find for yourself.

The United States has a system in place for free college already. It's just that the majority don't qualify, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Now, perhaps our selection criteria could use some work. I'm amenable to that sort of argument. However, the overwhelming majority of people clamoring for free college really had no business even going to college in the first place. They have to pay for it, and it's really not that hard to pay for college. I'm sorry, but it's not.

***** about the cost of college is all fun and games until you find someone who paid out of pocket. And since I went for an engineering degree, mine was actually more expensive because it was worth more after graduation. I paid extra tuition to subsidize all of the liberal arts majors that would never pay off their student loan debt. I'm sorry your degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on, or that you're too financially irresponsible to pay off your debts, but that's your problem. You're a grown adult. It's time to **** act like it.

Some people really deserve to go, society would benefit tremendously from them having a collegiate education, and it's a shame that circumstances prevent them from achieving all that they're capable of. You are not one of those people. Get over it and move on with your life.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It goes deeper than that - leftists largely have control of both the coursework and the college environment. Part of the plan is to expose young people to an environment where anything other than leftist ideas is not presented, or at least presented at arms length so as to perpetuate the idea that leftism is "more educated."

It helps that there are entire fields of "academics" now that are basically "being a leftist" such as women's studies, black studies, ethics, a few others. Most are neither art nor science and if carefully examined actively reject science. Making available departments that totally lack academic rigor, cater to specific viewpoints, and which host the sort of student known for making the campus hostile to anyone not of their orthodoxy is a component of this as well.

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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."

Kaffis once proposed, either here on GTalk, that he might support free college if STEM or medical fields were mandatory. I think that's a decent starting point.

Of course, there is still the issue of a de facto caste system that punishes teenagers for not getting good grades in high school.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I've had the same thought - I don't recall if I ever mentioned it here or not. This would have to be very carefully policed though or the definition of "science" would rapidly include things that are pretty clearly not science, and we'd find sociological statistics rapidly becoming "math".

Interestingly, some of the finest engineering schools in the country are entirely free and come with a guaranteed, well-paying job afterwards, but mandated that a large portion of each class study STEM. Of course, athletic participation is mandatory and there's no extra semester or 5 year program.



I don't think some sort of de facto caste system is avoidable. It's just a matter of what the criteria are.

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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."

Access to a limited resource must be gated somehow. We, as a society, are in the process that deciding that doing it by cost is not fair and equitable. Fine. So do it by merit.

You can either have college for anybody who can afford it, or free college for anybody who can get accepted. Proclaiming in the halls of Congress that education is a right for all will not magically produce more facilities, teachers, and staff to make it happen. Unless we start drafting college faculty (and college-facility-construction-workers) and press-ganging them into service, or start increasing the resources directed at colleges to hire more faculty and build more facilities, which is what's been causing the cost-spiral of the last thirty years that everybody's complaining is gating access and an undue burden on graduates.

Or we can lower the quality or quantity of education provided to increase access. Stop requiring graduate degrees of professors and you can afford to hire more from a broader pool of less demonstrably qualified applicants who have less debt to recoup over their careers. Or, reduce the amount of coursework that goes into a degree and you can churn more people through the system by dint of them taking fewer resources over their college career per individual.

Gosh, this looks a lot like the free health care debate. You can let the market gate access via cost or you can lower quality standards to provide it more universally, but either way declaring something is free doesn't magically make it abundant to meet the increased demand.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Not only does it look like the free health-care debate, it looks like the $15 minimum wage debate. Throwing more money at people does not magically produce more stuff for them to buy with that money. Making the minimum wage $15 an hour is the best way to utterly **** someone making $20 an hour or $35 an hour.

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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."

Meh, that sounds ripe for unintended consequences. I'd rather people pursue their passion, pay for it, and take responsibility for their choices then push everyone into STEM. I see potential for a bunch of musicians trying desperately to be engineers and getting ****, a sudden shortage of history teachers, etc.

Would I be an engineer if someone paid me to go to college for something else? Maybe not.

I'm not sure whether that wasn't me that Coro's thinking of or whether I said something similar in a different context. But I don't think I said make STEM or medical fields mandatory for free college.

I might have said something about free college being a terrible idea because we're going to see a bunch of useless modern feminism majors on the public dime. I might have said that we need to do a better job (free college or not) with helping incoming students understand the employability of the majors they're choosing, because STEM and medicine folks get snapped up at good salaries and don't seem to have the problem paying off their loans that everybody complains about...

But I don't remember saying what Coro said as explicitly as he did.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

History teachers are fine. They can pay with their own money. If you want me to pay for college for you, you're going to major in what I tell you to. I don't know you from Adam.

I may have heard the mandatory STEM comment from DE instead of Kaffis. I've had similar conversations with both lately. Or perhaps I proposed it and Kaffis didn't argue against me.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I can agree that there's definitely reason to fear unintended consequences, but part of the problem right now is people pursuing their passion when that passion is patently useless outside very narrow applications, often at ruinous expense to themselves, their families, and the taxpayer.

Or, in other cases, they aren't pursuing much of anything beyond a degree for the sake of a degree because they've bought into the idea that you have to have one. I bought into this mistake; to this day I regret switching to psychology with the promises of easier classes and more girls in them. I was lucky in that I had a guaranteed job when I got out of college.

The problem with people pursuing their passions is that a lot of passions are pointless and terrible in terms of making a living. A lot of areas of study are pretty much useless beyond a few narrow opportunities and their own academic edifice. Even ostensibly useful ones like teaching suffer from a hefty injection of young people that either don't know what they're getting into, or aren't sure what else to do and we get a glut of teachers. My wife is like that; she got a teaching degree because her mom had one, "little kids are cute" and she didn't know what else to do. Unfortunately, she doesn't actually like teaching very much.

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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 seem to recall discussing it with you at some point; I have no idea if Kaffis had the same ideas or not.



This is part of what I was thinking. A big part of the problem is that there are entire academic fields that amount to the study of How To Take Umbrage At Things which, in addition to being ideological echo chambers, provide no actual skills.

My mom was a ballet major - an irony in that it's a singularly useless degree yet requires a very high degree of both academic and physical discipline; it's essentially an athletic program and an academic all rolled into one. My dad majored in Electrical Engineering. I asked her once about protests and such in the 60s on college campuses and she told me that neither my dad or her ever paid much attention - they had work to do.

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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."

Most study of the civil rights movement of the '60s heaps praise on college students for being the movers and shakers. With the culture of activism that exists in public education, it is very likely this is the main draw of college. Teenagers are told that they'll Make A Difference and they go off with big dreams of being the next civil rights legend. I wonder if someone thought they were going to transform society by bringing up an entire generation of liberal activists? Based on the reactions of older liberals to the Yale Halloween costumes debacle, it sounds like that plan blew up right in their faces.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Well, they're not only told they can Make A Difference, they get a very one-sided picture of he social situation and history of this country the entire time they grow up. Heck, that was already being done 30 years ago. Not only are they told they can Make A Difference they are told precisely what difference they are going to make. Then, when they take it to an illogical extreme as young people are wont to do, the liberal educators are surprised it blew up in their face.

As for the 1960s, the college students weren't the ones making a difference, it was the kids getting their asses shot off in Viet Nam - because they had voting parents at home wondering why their son got his *** shot off while some other kid got to smoke weed at college and pretend to be making a difference by listening to terrible music and not showering. The Viet Nam war was a very effective military action at proving we should not fight that kind of military action, and especially not in that fashion.

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

Also, Caucuses are idiotic. They want me to go stand in a room for hours with a bunch of people to take a headcount of people that want to vote a certain way.

What is this 1350? Can I just cast a freaking vote on a paper or a card or a computer or some such thing?

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Holy shitsnacks!

Or in my case, where I screwed up in college. Definitely wouldn't be where I am now in a no-forgiveness atmosphere.

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The Dude abides.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426611/poor-white-deaths-american-cultural-ills



The rest of the article may or may not have merit, but this paragraph is important for one reason - the last 2 lines sum up the success of Trump.

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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."