The Glade 4.0

This. I work for my money, I pay my taxes. I have insurance. I have a mortgage and a wife, and family.

I know that in this day and age, I'm entitled to nothing more than a big greasy corporate funded dick in my ***.

I would GLADLY pay the money we spend for "insurance" every month to a federal healthcare program. Get sick, go to the doctor. Done.

We got the bills from our hospital issues in July... even with insurance, they were something like 8k. All of the numbers added up to over $300k in "costs". There's something fundamentally wrong with that. My wife almost died, and we're lucky to have insurance, and family that helped us with the bills. People that *don't* have that, or can't afford it? There should be something other than "Well, just die or whatever I guess. Or go into crushing debt/bankruptcy for the rest of your life"

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Holy shitsnacks!

I know this is hard to understand, but its a reference to abrupt changes in belief, not whatever opposing viewpoint you happen to not like. Generational poverty is a thing, and is in fact related to the behavior of the people in poverty.



You know, I went to the hospital 4 times due to cardiac arythmia; any one of which could have been fatal. One got paid for by the Army, I had to pay (after insurance) for the other 3, which was considerable because of all the network rules, etc. 2 were on duty but didn't get paid for because workman's comp wanted you to "demonstrate" that it was related to working and not something pre-existing even though it never happened before.

You know what? I **** paid my **** and moved on. It sucked, but ultimately it was my health problem, my bills to pay, and no one else's. I got the insurance I signed up for; I could have had lower bills if I got a better plan - and there were some offered - but I tried to skate on the premiums and it didn't work out.

The only thing fundamentally "wrong" here is that you think there's something fundamentally wrong. The problem is people want to have nothing but disposable income. If they don't pay for a necessity, they want to trot out some sob story and pretend someone's screwing them over because they had to pay for something other than stuff they want.

You're living in better circumstances and greater luxury than the vast majority of other people in the world, to say nothing of the vast majority of human history. Just getting to get on the internet and pretend you're getting "corporate dick" already makes you unbelievably privileged. If you like living like this, you best understand that its a product of the system you're whining about. You're fortunate to live in a country where people will actually pander to this nonsense, not just outright ignore you or trace down your IP and send the secret police to your door (and save the faux worries that will actually happen - if those concerns were real, you wouldn't be doing so).

You were just talking the other day about how there's nothing for us in Aleppo - and you were right. There is nothing for us there. Getting to sit over here and not get involved in people getting the **** bombed out of them because it's not worth the cost is an amazing stroke of luck.

Maybe you should just lube up and start taking some "corporate dick", since you seem to be living all right. I'm pretty sure the hospital your wife was at didn't take a 500 pound bomb through the roof. The one I was in didn't. Yes, there's room for reforms and improvement, but the fact is that basically anyone in this country could have it a lot worse elsewhere.

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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."

Bullpucky. Republican identity politics isn't some belated reaction to decades of Democratic identity politics; it was there from the very beginning. When the Dems embraced Civil Rights in the 60s and the Dems' white, Christian, working and middle class base revolted, the Republicans immediately swooped in and started appealing to that demographic. Hence Nixon's "Southern Strategy". Ditto with the anti-war, counterculture left and the Republican's corresponding appeal to the "Silent Majority" on the right. Over the next decade you get the rise of the Moral Majority and "family values" Republicans, leading to the "Culture Wars" of the 80s and 90s. And that's been the basis of Republican identity politics ever since - an appeal to white, Christian, "real Americans" in the "Heartland" with their supposed monopoly on patriotism and traditional values (as opposed to the limousine liberals and coastal elites with their moral degradation and hatred of all things American). It's a direct line going back to the shift in the parties' respective bases in the 60s and 70s, not a post-1990 frustration with Democratic rhetoric.

Honestly, I think the truth is somewhat between both of your statements. There always have been the types of assholes that victimize other people or groups, and always will be. (These jackasses used to vote Democrat, before they moved to the Republican party.) However, I think Diamondeye is right that identity politics exacerbates the problem rather than making it better.

Let's use an example:

You have a disadvantaged group of black people, who in the past have been at first enslaved, then highly discriminated against by many white people. Over time they won the same rights and freedoms as white people, primarily because most white people disagreed with how those black people were treated. So time passes, and many black people are still in poverty, and therefore commit more crime per capita than white people. They do still receive some discrimination and racism, without question, but not from the majority of people, and not from the establishment. But then these black people start to band together against oppression. Rather than assimilate with the white people and becoming just another american but with black skin, this black man sets himself apart from white americans, and screams about oppression and giving him his due and righting past wrongs. Suddenly, you have groups of people protesting and rioting because some violent gang-banging thug (who happens to have black skin) was shot dead in the streets for doing what violent gang-banging thugs do. This will turn far more white people into racist assholes than it will convince them to side with the protesting black people. This attitude perpetuates and exacerbates a cycle of bigotry and oppression rather than helping to resolve it. It certainly does not win over the hearts and minds of the people who already have racist inclinations.

What you have here is a false dichotomy, "Either intolerance is caused by victim identity politics, OR victim identity politics are caused by intolerance." The correct answer is "Both of these are true." Both make the other worse, and it will get worse until one side or the other (preferably both) back down. But one thing is obvious -- the democratic party does NOT WANT it to ever get better. It's their primary platform -- it's what they campaign on. Take away their victim politics, and they might have to deal with real issues.

Donald Trump is the Republican party's attempt to play the same game the Democrats were already playing. A candidate like Trump only gets traction because people are upset with victim identity politics. If that trend continues, the republicans will become just a nastier mirror of the democrats. Neither side will want it to end-- they feed off of it.

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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
█ ♣ █

I think you're misunderstanding my point a bit, Taly. I'm not saying that Trump and the Republicans are appealing to racism. I'm saying they're appealing to a particular sense of identity - i.e., white, Southern / Middle American, working / middle class, Christian traditionalist - and that they've been appealing to that identity since the 60s when the Dems stopped appealing to that identity. In short, it's primarily a product of the party realignment that took place in response to Civil Rights and the anti-Vietnam / counterculture movements of the 60s, not to the political correctness overreach of the 90s and 00s.

The only bullshit here is the idea that some generalized white, middle, working class Democrat demographic revolted. That was true in the south, particularly those states that voted for Geore Wallace but it was not true of those voters in general. Not even remotely. That's why West Virginia was reliably Democrat until the 2000 election, 35 years after civil rights, just as an example. The Democrats were, at the time of civil rights, still comfortably the party of workers, especially union workers and those voters cared a lot more about that than civil rights. This fantasy that whites ever formed some unified identity group is just that - fantasy. That didn't start becoming true until the 1980s and 1990s. Heck, Texas went Democrat in 1958 and again in 1976. The entire, South, in fact, when Democrat in 1976 - it was the West that went almost all Republican. Significant portions of the South went Democrat in 1992 and 1996. Apparently, the candidate being from the South matters a lot more than whether he's appealing to who you think he's appealing to.



Exactly. "Southern strategy". That was an appeal to the south, not to whites generally, and those voters were going to go somewhere. Tricking Wallace voters into going Republican was, in the short term, pretty astute. It wasn't like the Republicans were going to even try to reintroduce segregation.



Except that it isn't, in large part because "white" and "Christian" aren't even remotely related to each other in that context. The "CHristian" portion of that appeal resonated with a large portion of Hispanics, and it was something many Blacks were sympathetic to, even if it didn't lure them to the Republicans.

Furthermore, that demographic you're complaining about the Republicans appealing to was the one Democrats were targeting as the boogeyman to try to unify everyone else under one banner even if they had contrary views. It was essentially impossible for the Republicans not to appeal to those people - and it's part and parcel of Democrat nonsense to pretend those appeals were something sinister, when the Democrats were just using earlier versions of the "basket of deplorables" argument.

Heck, you just seriously tried to make the argument that whites in general had some unified "revolt" against civil rights, when clearly nothing of the sort happened. This fantasy that the Republicans jumped right on the identity politics bandwagon is precisely that - fantasy. A lot of the voters you think they were appealing to were voting reliably Democrat well into the 1990s. Places like Youngstown, Ohio, were Democrat strongholds less than 2 decades ago. Some of these people are only going Republican now, and it's because they've finally realized the Democrats don't actually care about economic issues or workers any more and haven't in decades; they care about pandering a bit, then turning around to demonize these people to secure the urban areas in the big-electoral-vote urban centers of the largest states.

Apparently, this is what passes for being "informed" among elites these days. Never mind that the inaccuracy of this view can be dispelled with a quick trip to Wikipedia, but nothing can be allowed to challenge the mantra of "racism". Verily, I say unto thee.



The problem is that the identity group you're talking about is really very tiny, (the individual pieces are sizable, but the overlap is much smaller than you think) and internally contradictory. "White working class" meant Democrat as, or more, often than Republican until the 1990s. "Christian traditionalist" could mean any racial subgroup; black civil rights leaders were "Christian traditionalist" until just recently and made up entire theologies conveniently suited to the imaginings of their congregations just as well as segregationist preachers might. "Middle America" and "South" have never been the same thing - the rural Midwest, mountain west, and southwest are not culturally the same as the south, nor religiously the same, and have never had the same attitudes towards civil rights. This is why you see the south going Democrat in 1976, 1992, and 1996 - this identity group is only half there - it relies on the overlap of a bunch of smaller, contradictory identities. The left likes to think it's just like "black people" with a "black community", and there is no such unity or commonality at all. The "White America" black leaders like to pretend causes their problems does not actually exist.

The sense of identity you're talking about didn't even exist prior to the 1990s. The Republicans could not have "appealed to it since the 1960s" because it did not exist at that time - and don't waste your time trying to pretend it did unless you're going to show me where the Republicans made major appeal to the unions, or unions jumped on board with them. They would necessarily have had to do that if they were targeting their own identity group rather than just reacting to the identities the Democrats had already staked out. Those voters are going for Trump; they didn't vote for Romney.

I don't tihnk you quite get, either, that I'm not paying the Republicans a compliment here. The Republicans were able to ignore a lot of this until the 1990s by focusing on the Soviet Union. They had no political plan for what to adopt after that, and in many ways still don't, which left them vulnerable to Trump. This is exactly the same situation the Left is in now; it's utterly focused on identity politics, has lost stalwart supporters who finally figured out the Left ceased caring about them, and is terrified of its political sword rusting if people figure out identity politics is nonsense ( and it IS nonsense - people do not pretend to be black to jump on the bandwagon in nations where blacks are actually oppressed ).

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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."

Trump marks the end of the Republican party as we have known it for some time. The Evangelical faction lost power some time ago, but some Dems seem to assume everyone belongs to that group of conservatives...

IMO, it's hard to say, but The Lizard Queen has the support of the system. Even the Republicans don't like Trump. He's not a member of the political class. He's not one of them. He's a self aggrandizing blow-hard, but he did speak some truth to power, even if it was on accident.

These candidates are a symptom of a greater problem. It's kind of like how a corpse doesn't smell immediately. I think it's starting too reek in here. The US may be a good place to live now, but for how long will that last?

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Trump's nomination is absolutely about identity politics. Trump's nomination is rooted in decades of xenophobia. Racism is part of this, but it's definitely not the root of all of it. This sentiment is rooted in a belief that US culture and values are so great and superior, that literally everyone else is so backward, that it's actually dangerous to let people in from anywhere. This is not just directed at Muslim countries or Hispanics or Chinese people. It's directed at basically everyone else, including the rest of the first world.

Going back all the way to literally Nixon's Presidency, something like 60%+ of the country has wanted the federal government to better control the borders. Of this group, a minority is only concerned about illegal immigration, but a majority of this group wants either no immigration whatsoever or an incredibly small amount of it, something like a tenth of the people we currently admit legally or less. This is the reason that the H visa cap still sits at 65,000 per year, and has not been touched since 1966. Even many Democrats in Congress don't dare touch this topic because even suggesting an increase to this is political suicide for them.

Basically every administration, R or D, since Nixon, has ignored this sentiment. Both Reagan and Bush implemented widespread amnesties for illegal immigrants. Literally 90%+ of legal immigration to the US is currently based on the executive inventing creative exceptions to the rules in order to let people in. Trump's nomination is this group literally saying, "I don't **** care who he is or what his positions are on literally anything else, I'm voting for the closed borders candidate." Trump has basically admitted to this with his comments about how he could outright shoot someone in public and not lose votes.

In pandering to this group, Trump has directed hateful rhetoric against basically everyone else in the world - with the notable exception of Russia, because unlike everyone else in the world, Russia is an actual military threat, and to this group, that's the only metric that matters when dealing with the damaged backwards peoples that inhabit the Earth.

This is probably the most ridiculous post I've seen you make and shows either a complete inability or unwillingness to listen and consider the opposition's perspective.

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The Dude abides.

Not wanting unneccessary, illegal immigration is not "xenophobia" or "racism". Labor is a market, and even uneducated people understand supply and demand conceptually.

Trump's nomination is about identity politics in the sense that the Left has played identity politics for decades, then cried foul if the right does the same. Trump's success is due to people being tired of the hypocrisy. You simply cannot build an equitable and fair society by creating a permanent state of special privileges based on discrimination that's already been outlawed. At a certain point you have to either admit the privileges are either not working and no longer needed, or not working and no longer needed and 5 decades is FAR more than long enough.

Or to put it more simply. if you unironically use the word racism it's a clue you don't deserve to be taken seriously.

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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, please work out, tia.

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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 dunno what to tell you here, I've talked to a lot of Trump supporters and I always ask if, say, Rubio wouldn't have been far more preferable than the current choices. The response is almost universally no, they want a completely closed borders, anti establishment, tariff/embargo everyone else in the world candidate. In general they don't even like the idea of birthright citizenship even if the parents are legal immigrants, and want that gone too.

Fortunately, the anecdotal views of whatever Trump supporters you happen to have personally met as filtered through your lens of what you think they're saying is not actually representative of anything.

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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."

Other than his experience, the one thing every human being bases their first principles on, and the thing most people use when engaging in conversation.

None of us are universally right - not you, me , or Xeq or RD or scree, but that post reads to me like 'i really don't give a f what you say or experience', which seems to me to be pretty negative for a discussion community nearly on its last legs.

Maybe I'm just having a bad day.

Funny, and here I am wishing we had a "Rec" button around here.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I'm not sure what's hard to understand about "Xeq's personal experience is not a reliable indicator regarding the average Trump supporter."

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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."

If my personal experience is the opposite, does it cancel out and destroy the universe?

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In this lady's personal experience, all Trump haters are human garbage. Because if you get your kicks off assaulting and looking down your nose at a homeless person, you are a garbage human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN-kh7M6fLA

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'd like closed borders too - in the sense that I want the amount of people jumping it significantly reduced. Most Trump supporters I've talked to want legal immigration fixed and a secure border. It has nothing to do with xenophobia and all to do with knowing who's coming in and making sure that we minimize the amount of felons coming in and ensuring OUR OWN citizens near the border can feel safe and not have their property continually damaged. You want to bring a lot of Mexicans or El Salvadorans in? Fine. Let's make it easier for them to get in legally and let's make sure we're letting the right ones in.

All the Democrats want to do is grant blanket amnesty and let the current border problem continue while assuring us the border is fine.

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The Dude abides.

As far as illegal immigration goes, I don't disagree with the general sentiment that they should be removed but I find Trump's proposed methods to be absolutely ridiculous. Deport them all within two years, and damn the consequences? It's insanity. Not to mention the idiotic wall.....the bottleneck in deporting illegals is NOT that we can't locate or catch them. The bottleneck is that people facing deportation have due process rights and get to have a hearing before a federal judge before being deported, and there are only so many federal judges.

However, when Trump supporters talk about "fixing" legal immigration, they invariably move to talking about "fixing" H-1B abuses. The fact is that H visas are the way the majority of legal immigrants establish a foothold here, and the program actually IS being abused.

There's a statutory cap of 65,000 H visas issued per year, yet something like three quarters of a million are actually given out. This is because every administration since literally Nixon has been creating creative, really dubious exceptions to the rules in order to admit more people. They have done this because if the law were actually enforced strictly and as written, we'd have basically no legal immigration that doesn't result from foreign marriages to US citizens. The cap itself can't be changed because it's political suicide to even suggest it, any proposed cap increase will get spun by right wing media into being an "amnesty" even if the net result is less immigrants. Seriously, they've done polls on this and H-visa cap increases usually end up with something like 60-70% of respondents against it, it's simply unimplementable.

Now I certainly can't prove that a majority of Trump supporters nationwide are actually aware that shutting down the granting of H visas over the cap is functionally equivalent to almost completely shutting down legal immigration entirely and are OK with this outcome, but in my personal experience they absolutely are. They want no immigration and want to embargo the **** out of everything. Trump seriously proposed a 40-60% tax on East Asian imports (essentially an import ban) and got tons of support for it.

H-visa holders are not immigrants. H-class visas are non-immigrant visas.



We don't have any legal immigration at all from the H-visa program because these people are nonimmigrants, not immigrants. They're guest workers, and the visa eventually terminates. If they remain after that time, they're a visa overstay, and while that makes them turn into an immigrant, it also makes them an illegal immigrant by being out of status.

The "right wing media" is not going to "spin" an increase in the cap for guest workers into some sort of amnesty - that doesn't make any sense. These people don't become immigrants until after they've already violated status, so the visa they just overstayed or violated can hardly be a form of amnesty for them. You can't "spin" visas into being an amnesty because even people with little understanding of he system get that people with valid visas don't need amnesty - a visa is for entering the country legally in the first place.

60-70% of people are against H-visas precisely because they're guest worker visas. Even uninitiated people understand that a "Guest worker" is not an immigrant, any more than some family here for 2 weeks to go to Disney World. This doesn't prove that people are against more legal immigration; it means they're against temporary workers coming here and taking jobs from Americans.



You can't prove it because H visas are not immigration, and because it isn't "functionally equivalent" to anything. Even with the system as oriented as it is on families, a third of legal immigrants are not based on family status, and annual legal immigration is around 1,000,000 people per year.

The problem here is that you're basing your suspicions on Trump supporters on a fictitious idea of how immigration works in the first place. Maybe you think that being an immigrant yourself that means you're familiar with the system, but you're not, any more than having cancer makes you an oncologist.

Furthermore, given the efforts of Democrats to cater to illegal immigrants and advocate for their "rights" and a path to citizenship, Trump supporters are rightly suspicious that advocacy for more immigration is a plan to import future Democrats, and make sure they keep voting Democrat by just pretending all opposition is based on "racism". I have news for you, if people were importing poor Irish people and getting them on benefits and claiming everyone hated Irish people (again) that Trump supporters would not suddenly be ok with it.

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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."

Yes, H visas are nonimmigrant visas but as a general rule, companies do not do immigration sponsorship for people that aren't already working for them so some kind of temporary visa that allows them to work in the US is required first.

I'm even supportive a of some amount of amnesty. People with families for instance. But doing nothing is a non-starter. Especially when it creates a sub-class of people that exist outside of the system, are paid less, and can be mistreated due to hesitancy to report. I mean, don't call the cops when someone steals your cocaine rocks.

I don't think Trump will get anywhere, with his ridiculous plan, but maybe something better than nothing will happen. Hilary and her party just wants votes. They don't give 2 shits about the people in this country or any other country.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The company I used to work for did precisely this with 6 Indian programmers: hired them (granted based on friend recommendation) and then moved them out to Tucson for a year.

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The Dude abides.

That's a matter of the policies of the companies; it is not a requirement of the immigration system. If companies felt they needed immigrant workers and H visas were less available, they would do what they needed to do to get those workers.

Workers on H visas cannot easily change employers; that's why companies like them so much. It gives them a cheaper employee they have more control over. This is one of the reasons they back the anti-corporate left; they're more than happy to let people believe it's "hurf durf racism" when in fact people (even if they don't know the particulars) know that companies want guest workers because it's better for the bottom line.

What the average person does not want is A) immigrants that don't want to assimilate, or don't want to actually be Americans, B) companies using immigration, legal or illegal, to get away with hiring cheap foreign labor when not absolutely necessary and C) people flouting the immigration laws, then trying to argue their way around it. People make all sorts of arguments about immigration law and why it's really ok to break it that you can't make for any other law. It's just a form of special pleading.

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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."