The Glade 4.0

"Fine, let them. Its not like those billions are doing the middle class any good anyway, what does it matter what bank they put them in?
Its not immoral in and of itself. Personally, I'm sick and tired of plutocrats running things and nothing changing for the better. The rich getting richer is not a thing that gets my dick hard. I'd rather have me some healthcare and affordable education."



So you're fine with that tax base leaving and fine with them moving company HQ's to other nations taking away jobs and buying resources in some other nation?

No it's not immoral in and of itself and there is a small minority who use their personal wealth to gain political ends, however it is these political ends which you dislike not the means by which they are enacted. Without an entity claiming the moral authority to punish people for violating it's 'rules' there would be no seeking to control the ruler's hand.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yep. Peace out ****. Those resources aren't doing the majority of Americans any good anyway. Its the equivalent of "Well, I'm going to take my ball and go home!" You don't negotiate with terrorists, economic or ideological.

And those political ends end up screwing those that aren't them. They abuse the system for their own gains, and the same small group of people remain in power as chosen by the media which is owned by the people in power. Its all very neat and tidy.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I would like to not only side with the Peace Out ****; but I would like to add in a side of "I hope it makes the whole thing come crumbling down, to let the next regime come to play"

Every politician regardless of affiliation is just going to go in and try to hoard their own power. They (collectively) do not care about us. The electoral college is a joke, the Democrats and Republicans are a joke. The Libertarians have good ideas that will never see the light of day because they are not polarized enough, it does not make good news, or good soundbytes: unless it is used to make them sound crazy.

We need the collapse, we are long in the tooth. Let the fires start and we can watch it all burn.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

equips [Invisibility Cloak]

I think Obama has done well and genuinely believes he is in it for the common man.

Hitler believed he was in it for the common man.

Intentions are useless. I'm sure Graham and Santorum both fully believe their crazyness and oppression and love of war making is good for the common man.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

No government contracts for corporations that flee the USA.

Heck, severely limit foreign contracts for all government purposes.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

My take on Bernie Sanders:

The Republicans have pulled off the amazing feat of making Jesus more offensive to the American people than Communism.

It is not a matter of the rich getting richer, as that's a direct result of Democratic shenanigans. More taxation and more legislation is not going to reverse that trend. Adding more byzantine layers of economic regulation will only create more opportunities for the wealthy to exploit the law for financial gain. We need only look at China for how this works out in practice - this is not an indictment of China, but simply acknowledgement that they are the world's oldest contiguous society and have had millennia to refine the art of government corruption.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Communism increases wealth inequality now?

People like this guy don't make a good case for leaving the rich alone. Why did I jack up the price of a 70 year old drug by 5,000%? Because I can, **** you, pony up if you don't want to die.

Honestly: this is why this dude should be the first to be put down like a dog when society collapses. he has done it more than once, he has proven he is a cancer on the population

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Study the history of the USSR during the latter half of the twentieth century to see how Communism increases wealth inequality.

Social justice is how you sucker stupid people into approving of bad government structure.

Moreover, wealth inequality is not inherently bad. Some people are more useful to society and therefore they should receive perks for their usefulness. Likewise, some people are interchangeable flunkies and can be replaced when they have outlived their usefulness. Our major problem is not that society doesn't provide opportunity, but rather the sheer volume of useless flunkies that we can't seem to get rid of without resorting to some sort of Great Leap Forward.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

My top two were Rand Paul at 78%, followed by Bernie Sanders at 76%. Mike Huckabee isn't far behind at 75%.

So seriously, the difference between your most polarized candidates is 3%.

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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
█ ♣ █

And we're not going to get rid of the "useless flunkies" and those useless flunkies are going to keep right on voting for people that tell them that they aren't useless flunkies and they're just oppressed people held down by white rich straight males and here's some free health care and food stamps and a phone number to complain about microaggressions.

The thing is you don't need to get rid of them; what you need to do is instead of calling them useless flunkies is exploit the fault lines among them - the Democrats have a coalition of incompatible groups held together by fear of the Republican boogeyman - to show them how the Democrats are constantly upping the minimum of bread and circuses and handing it out, when if they do it YOUR way they could have better bread and more circuses than some other flunky that they don't even like in the first place.

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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."

In that case - and what I'm about to say is not to be read as "DE likes Trump"; I have no intention of voting for Donald Trump - you should absolutely love Trump. He goes directly after the media, directly, and in person and the usual tactic of acting scandalized and demanding apologies to get rid of people the media doesn't approve of when they make an inevitable verbal gaffe does not work on him.

There's a reason - Trump does not need the media and he does not need the donors or the party backing the media tries to frighten off when they don't like a candidate. He is too rich. A Presidential campaign allegedly costs around $1 Billion; Trump has 10x that in his personal wealth. The media has no choice but to cover him and pay attention to him because their competitors will, but they cannot marginalize him in the ways they have done to other candidates in the past.

And before you go talking about how he's just another rich guy gaming the system, I guarantee you that there are ARMIES of private investigators and probably more than a few official ones as well, scouring Trump's records to look for some scandal to get rid of him. so far nothing has come up. It still might; but it is unlikely. Donald Trump is a shrewd businessman and he said himself in the first debate he uses the law to his advantage - but he is also one of those types of businessman that realizes it is ALSO to his advantage not to incur the costs of going outside the law. Donald Trump may be a rules lawyer, but he (probably) is not one to break or even really bend the rules.

The media absolutely hates this - and it was quite evident in both debates. Megan Kelly (who is un uninformed, incompetent bully anyhow, and is only on FOX to get men to look at the hot blonde) went straight after him, and rather than handling her with kid gloves he gave her attitude right back to her (her male counterparts weren't much better, although they were somewhat less obvious about it.) FOX dislikes Trump just as much as the other networks, although for different reasons; they want a "true Conservative" as the nominee to get their viewers turning in to hear good things about their favorite nutballs and ultimately I don't think they really care if a Republican actually wins - Obama in the White House is a gold mine for them because the hard right tunes in for its daily dose of outrage, and for non-hard-right people it's either FOX or the liberal love-fest.

The second debate was no better, and only slightly more subtle with the majority of the questions being "Mr. Trump would you please argue with so-and-so about this issue where you have referred to him as an ignorant shitlord?" or "Mr/Ms So-and-so Mr. Trump has said X, would you kindly disagree with him and tell him what a dumbass he is for our viewer's entertainment? The very first question of that debate was the most astoundingly stupid debate question I have ever heard and amounted to "Ms. Fiorina, Mr. Trump said something not very nice about your face; do you therefore think this means he will START A NUCLEAR WAR?" Fiorina missed a golden opportunity there to tell the fool moderating that no, she does not think insulting comments by her competitor means he is bent on worldwide destruction and that it was insulting to the viewer's intelligence to even ask. The rest of the debate was hardly an improvement and the best moment of the night was John Kasich pointing out that the viewers would be well served to just stop watching.

So while again, I have no intention of voting for Donald Trump, I like the fact that Trump is running in this race because he is driving the media absolutely nuts. The media thought, once again, that they could simply designate Hillary Clinton the Democrat nominee and have her run against <insert fairly pedestrian Republican here> because Hillary Clinton could just say "Vote for me because Vagina". Then the conservatives would stay home and the election could be once again carried by getting out the vote among people who believe that the Republican's desire to throw somewhat less money at them than the Democrat means he hates them and wishes they would all die.

On the off chance that the Republicans nominated a "true Conservative" like Huckabee or Cruz then all the moderates and about a third of the Republicans would flee straight to the democrats or stay home - including me because if I had to choose between Cruz and Sanders I'd probably be asking Taly if me and the wife and kids could maybe crash at her place until 2020 at least - because while Cruz's positions are nothing special on 90% of the issues, on the other 10% he sounds like a complete lunatic and guess which positions he talks about the most?

This is also why Donald Trump's poll numbers are all so high, even among people that normally want a "true Conservative". It's because Trump is taking on the press, defying political-correctness conventions, and saying the right things on illegal immigration, where despite the complete impossibility of his "deport them all" and impracticality of his "wall" plans he is at least pointing out that these people are all breaking the law and not falling all over himself trying to say "well, they're breaking the law but really it's ok and we need rules that make that sorta kinda ok because otherwise someone will call me a racist."

* Fiorina, Carson, and Rubio also get special handling by the media for a different reason - the woman/minority shield about them (Cruz not so much, his last name notwithstanding) and the press has been used to treating such candidates, mostly Democrats, with kid gloves because their tactic with white male candidates (most of them) is to go after them for allegedly prejudice against these groups. When someone wants to target a minority candidate (Herman Cain) they dig up something relating to their interactions with women. With Republican women they've been lucky enough that the previous one (Michelle Bachmann) had such a questionable grip on reality that they didn't need to bother. (In Sarah Palin's case it was difficult to distinguish what she said from what Tina Fey said she said, but she clearly was going to talk herself right out of any race even if Tina Fey never existed)

** Sanders, despite being a politician is independent enough to represent a gigantic "**** you" to the press and the Democrat powers-that-be that think because Hillary appeals to them and because they don't get that even the average Democrat is getting tired of hearing about how they should support her because vagina. It helps a lot that Sanders is putting his money where his mouth is in not having a Super PAC or large donors and has told the 2 Super PACs supporting him on their own to basically knock it off and stop helping him. In that regard Trump is actually the next closest, also not having a Super PAC directly affiliated with his campaign but he is not turning away the informal support of the independent ones that favor him.

Sanders wins points in terms of personal character and relative honesty, but his actual positions range from barely tolerable to downright suicidal. It is, however, hilarious that the left is pushing harder and harder for an old white man at the expense of their female candidate while on the right the woman, the Hispanic, and the black guy are doing very 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."

That is not actually what that means.

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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 doesn't even sound like a conservative to me, he sounds like a liberal who really, really hates illegal immigrants for some reason.

His xenophobix economic protectionism is very similar to Bernie's.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

That reason may be that he's sick and tired - or at least knows a lot of Americans are sick and tired - of a lot of people claiming they have a right to break our laws because it's to their benefit to do so.

His gun policies and tax policies ought to be a conservative wet dream too.

However, in many areas you're correct - his policies are fairly liberal.

That, also, is part of his appeal. Social conservatives can stay home all they want; Trump can get tax conservatives and gun votes out to the polls with those policies and he can appeal to the middle with things like his positions on gay marriage, health care, and a few others. He's even found a way to neutralize the "it's a tax cut for the rich!" argument - yes it is, but when you are eliminating income tax for the lowest incomes in America it only makes the press and your opponent look foolish to claim it is not trying to help the poor.

The left likes to believe and advertise that the Republican base is a bunch of gun-loving tax-hating religious conservatives, but the reality those (and a few other components) are really three separate groups with a certain degree of overlap and Trump has found policies that will appeal to all of them EXCEPT the social-values-only portion, and when you cut them off from the anti gun and anti tax portions, they're a lot smaller and you don't need them any more. A lot of values voters are suddenly less concerned with values when they suddenly might stand to gain economically - and a lot of them also are ones where the gun vote has a real bearing on what they will be able to eat next year.

My biggest beef with Trump is that I don't think he has any real grasp on foreign policy or the military - he knows nothing whatsoever about those issues; his answer to "how would you handle Russian involvement in Syria" amounted to "Putin would respect me" which is not a policy or a course of action. The problem with Donald Trump's polices aside from that is mainly that they're held by Donald Trump and I question his ability to transition from the showmanship of the campaign to the actual work of being President. Obama couldn't; he campaigned for his second term his entire first term and his press conference yesterday after that shooting indicated he's still campaigning.

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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."