The Glade 4.0

Come on, man... We've had a year of this on all sides. Please dial it down a bit and give people a chance to get over the initial sting.

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The Dude abides.

Why would you think that his pattern would change? He doesnt listen to anyone except the voices in his head.

Then by all means, lets get over it and dispense with the bullshit lectures about "Actual threats to their well-being."

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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."

By the only measure that matters: counting lives lost rather than media headlines.

There is no crisis. There hasn't really been a crisis since WW2 ended. The sky was never falling.

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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
█ ♣ █

Your comment sounds like hyperbole, no?

Look, I'm not a fan of the guy, but I'm also willing to wait and see what his actions will show us in the coming weeks and months. He certainly seems a brash character, but he's not a complete idiot. He knows how to work an audience which implies some degree of performance aptitude, in my mind. Remember, he's been a Democrat as recently as 2009 and donated to candidates from both major parties in the past, so I don't fully believe in this fire-breathing ultra-Red picture of Trump that some folks are wetting themselves over.

If I could have waved a wand and dismissed Clinton and Trump from this race a year ago, I would have, but that's not how it works.

Maybe not the "voices in his head" but its been very clear that he's acted against his advisors instructions again and again.

And yet neither are threatening the world at large, and won't.



In 1999, the GDP per capita of the USA was 34,600, which is approximately $49,800 in today's dollars.
In 2016, the GDP per capita of the USA was 51,500.




...not going anywhere. School campuses are idiotic, but they are also not society at large.

The only significant change in freedom in America over the last 8 years was in the providing of equal rights to LGBT people.



None of which are a threat to the people of america. Also, the first three were inevitable after the decision to invade Iraq, which was made 13 years ago, not within the last 8.



This kinda sucks. You need a single-payer system. Unfortunately, Obamacare was all he could get through.



I have no idea what this is.



That whole smear campaign was bullshit. She's a shrill, bad candidate. She's no more criminal than any of the previous presidents.



Which has nothing to do with the Obama administration.


Look, I'm not saying the left doesn't do it as well... Thinking about it over time, Bernie Sanders was actually a worse candidate than Hillary. Like Trump, he campaigned on fear and anger. He promised meaningful change to a system that is one of the best the world has ever had. It's not that things can't be improved, there are always ways to get better, but to listen to these people, on either side, you'd assume that America was always under assault and that the world was always ending. It's not. Things are constantly getting better. Ultimately, I expect Trump to be a setback to this, but the upward trend will likely continue over the long haul, as long as he doesn't do something incredibly stupid, then nothing will happen that can't be undone.

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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
█ ♣ █

RE: 1st Amendment problems.

This law was passed by Congress when Democrats had supermajorities in both houses, and Obama signed it. The impetus for passing this law was because a Muslim sued an American for defamation in a European court for criticizing Islam. Despite the fact that decrying things as Islamophobic is part and parcel of Democrat identity politics, the result of that was still a law that might as well read, "**** off, Europe" repeated 10,000 times. The 1st Amendment is not realistically in danger here.

I have an aunt, who was married to a man in my younger years. She cheated on him with another man, who was also married and cheating on his wife. This went on for a substantial amount of time.

Ultimately, they divorced their spouses, and married each other (he's now a pastor, so...yeah).

Putting aside questions of morality, I have never been able to square this in my mind. I understand human beings are imperfect, often contrary creatures. But how could you possibly ever trust your spouse under those circumstances? Your very relationship, the only thing that ties you together, was born of betrayal.

This is the quandary I see when I look at Donald Trump and the "values voters". I've seen many say "Well, we're not electing a pastor," or "God used David," or that Trump is a "baby Christian" and he should be cut "some slack". Their overriding goal was to control the Supreme Court; the presidency was largely irrelevant. So I get the attraction on their part, that he said he'd repeal Roe v. Wade, overturn the gay marriage ruling, etc. But my question is...how can you possibly believe him? As Ulfynn notes, only a few years ago he was saying the exact opposite. Hell, in 2013, he was praising Clinton to the heavens. My question to those voters is...why believe him now?

This person? The one who gave this speech last night? I don't like him, but he's a damn sight better than the one that ran for president. I hope that he's the one we're getting. I hope beyond hope that there's sincerity here. But again I ask...what has he done to even hint at that being the case?

So lives lost at Fort Hood, the Boston marathon, Little Rock (Arkansas), Garland (Texas), (and others I'm forgetting) don't count? Okay, maybe Fort Hood can't be labeled a terrorist attack because that was on a military base, but it was on US soil. If you want to argue safety hasn't changed since Bush, I might concede that point. But safer? Not by a long shot.

The sky isn't falling. But don't go burying your head in the sand that people are threatening us and people have successfully carried out attacks to make good on those threats.

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The Dude abides.

Fair enough.

Sure they count. But they don't add up to more than we've seen before.

Over your entire lifetime, your odds of dying in a terrorist attack are less than 1 in 20 million.

The odds of dying a natural death in your old age are better for every generation than the one previous. That's true regardless of skin color or sex. (BLM should take note.)

That's the very definition of safety.

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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 hope the irony of this, with respect to HRC, is not lost on you.


I didn't vote for Trump, and I don't necessarily trust him either. But at the same time, he at least espouses a platform those on the right can hope for, whereas Clinton supports a platform they know they will hate. Clinton has flopped on so many things during her political career as well. Why does she get a pass for evolving and being trustworthy, whereas Trump supporters should not grant him the same leeway?

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The Dude abides.

And prior to 9/11, they were even less than that. Obama has done nothing to improve that number, although he probably hasn't done much to make it worse. Keep shifting the goal posts all you want. The amount of attacks and deaths haven't changed significantly, which means we are not safer.

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The Dude abides.

You missed the part where any given member every single generation has a lower risk of dying a violent death than the previous generation, pretty much since the end of WW2.

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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
█ ♣ █

This won't be true forever. And I see more and more of the campus insanity bleeding into the main stream. Professors in Canada have some serious problems if they go against the grain and before you know it everyone outside the schools will too. Bad ideas are becoming more popular.

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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

This is a complete waste of money. Everybody knows that they'll just open the gate and politely step aside whenever somebody knocks.

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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

Watching people cry and weep for "a dying world" upon hearing that Trump won is delicious. The tears are amazing. There was even a suicide watch for Clinton supporters.

Finally, America has a president it really deserves.

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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 think it comes down to those people being insulated from and somewhat oblivious to the effects of racism, sexism, etc., so except in the most egregious cases, they don't have a visceral negative reaction to them, they don't see them as disqualifying moral flaws (assuming they see them at all). They think of "real" racism as the KKK having lynching parties and "real" sexism as the Taliban throwing acid in women's faces, so Trump's comments and actions on race and gender are seen as overly blunt, even boorish, but not "really" racist and sexist. As a result, they can look past those things and vote on the basis of other issues.

*The KKK hasn't been a political power in a long time. Race relations have improved since I was a wee lad, but the progressives are doing everything they can to ruin it and convince everyone that we live in an oppressive white-cis-patriarchy or some stupid ****. The divisive group politics of the left are more violent and harmful than anything in a long time. They have literally dehumanized Trump supporters and other enemies to a degree that they think it's totally ok to do anything to them.

All politicians are liars, Hillary is a **** criminal.

He did not commit sexual assault. They were talking about how some women let stars (you know rock stars, sports stars and stars in general do anything to them) It was crass and dumb, but it was just him trying to brag to some guy. It's not assault.

Hillary is backed the plenty of bad people. Just because on a ven diagram someone overlaps, you can't consider them to be that person. The other stuff is simply you changing the narrative to how you see fit.

There is an immigration problem, even if his solutions are dumb.

Becoming a US citizen isn't a right that the rest of the world has. I don't think it's beyond the pale for a US elected official to think of what's good for Americans first. America and it's economy has changed since we got that Statue in NY. Perhaps we should import STEM and not workers. US colleges are full of non-STEM idiots ATM.

We're not a manufacturer anymore. We're a service economy. Technology has improved and in a few years all those truck drivers on the highway will be robots. We need to prepare for that future, not live in a past where we made ****.

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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

Welp....

So much for the stock market fear mongering...

Repeatedly disqualifying differing opinion by claiming "-ism's" have desensitized folks. You're going to need to come up with a different attack vector. You've over-used your closing argument by applying it to so many cases.

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In time, this too shall pass.

No one even knows what the stock market is, generally speaking. But when it goes down or up they make it out to be some huge sign. like a comet to someone from the middle ages.

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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 don't disagree, in a general sense. I'm usually arguing the "that's not actually (or at least not necessarily) racist/sexist" side when I post comments on social justice sites. However, I do think that in addition to that "boy who cried wolf" effect, a large chunk of Trump's base is blind to / unconcerned by racism and sexism except in its more extreme forms in part because they just aren't that impacted by it.

Yeah, the immediate freak out was premature. If Trump really does start to blow up trade deals come 2017, though, we'll see some serious impacts then.