The Glade 4.0

Wouldn't you prefer it if George W. Bush had acted against his advisor's wishes and not gotten involved in Iraq?

There are some serious structural issues with the fundamental approaches to problem-solving taken by those at senior levels in government, and not in any partisan way. Trump may be unwise to ignore his advisors, but by the same token these are the same people who often have an overblown sense of their ability to influence complicated events without unintended consequences. The problem is not lack of education, intelligence, or information, but an issue of hubris and a degree of being trapped in the "policy-maker" mentality.

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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."

Trade deals are generally corporate protectionism that only serves a few people. You don't need a "deal" to trade.

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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

If everyone had a completely open trading policy as the baseline, sure, but in practice, it's the other way around. There's a whole web of tariffs, quotas, currency controls, and other restrictions on global trade that we cut deals with certain countries to reduce.

"a large chunk" sounds suspiciously close to Hillary's claim.

Undoubtedly there are racists and sexists who voted for Trump. Also, I'd say it's guaranteed that some Hillary voters are racist and sexist.

Personally, I object only to institutionalized discrimination. If it's not being imposed by the government, I don't care. The freedom (the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint) this nation affords it's citizens requires in large part that folks are able to change their positions on social issues by overcoming ignorance.

...and you don't overcome ignorance because you're attacked, mocked, ridiculed, demonized or marginalized. At least, I don't... perhaps you've changed your opinion on something 'cause of a verbal attack by someone impugning your character in a way you feel is unfair?

All that does is hardens folks opinions. If you try to impose your morality on someone you eliminate a person's opportunity to consider and change. You lock them into their ignorance by giving them a very real reason to object to how they're being treated.

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In time, this too shall pass.

It's not just that they're "not impacted by it" but that what you see as extreme forms are really what actually are racism and sexism. If we're going to use your definition of it, we need to start applying the same standards to women (feminists specifically) and minorities and their advocates - starting with the fact that anti-male sexism would be as seen from the perspective of men, and anti-white racism would be as seen from the perspective of whites. Oh, and while we're at it, no sarcastic comments about white/male tears or whatever (racism/sexism, you see) and no referring to statistical averages (it's racist to point those out).

Does that really seem attractive to you?

Trump's base is, by the definitions you're using, affected by racism and sexism, just that which is actually directed against them - and it is considerable. Pop culture is replete with examples of behaviors targeting whites and males that are instant causes for outrage if targeted at women or minorities. Public figures make ill-advised generalizations about "white America" and minority staff writers at major newspapers (wealthy and privileged people) blithely write condescending articles about "white people" who make little money but supposedly have all sorts of "privilege".

The Left has, for 2 decades, been trying to have it both ways - trying to call out discrimination that they don't like while excusing that which serves their purposes, but more importantly, trying to make "privilege" a marginalizing factor so as to have it both ways: make men and whites acceptable targets for the same behaviors they won't accept if aimed at women and minorities, while at the same time still claiming they're "privileged".

On top of that, there's been nonstop reminders to whites that whites no longer have the numerical advantage that once existed, and that whites will eventually be a minority (if perhaps a plurality) - but at the same time demands that whites "give up white privilege" and dismissal of any and all concerns as simply being fear of giving up this largely fictitious "privilege".

To working people - or people struggling to find a job or a job that pays enough - losing their "privilege" sounds very much like "we're going to take away what you have, then pretend you still have it." This is not without precedent either - women represent a larger and larger share of both the work force and college entrants, and every place that women have been introduced to has been forced to adapt itself to the preferences of the newcomers, right along with policies designed for the most vindictive new arrivals' benefit. Yet these changing circumstances do not stop feminists from inventing an endless list of fictitious new "oppression" ranging from vaguely related to the facts (the pay gap) to sheer nonsense (rape culture/campus rape crisis). There is good reason to think that if all tangible "White privilege" were eliminated, new intangible ones would be perpetually invented.

A final note - Trump did not do as badly with any minority, and especially not with Hispanics, as he was projected to, actually doing better than Romney did with them by ~2%. Much of the garment-rending over the state of minorities is really the panic of white liberals at the realization that they've burned their argument out. There have been numerous articles in sources such as the NYT, WaPo, and New Yorker pointing out that perhaps it was unwise to deploy such histrionics against people like Bush, McCain, and Romney and then not have them carry much weight when Trump came along. Now would be a very good time for the Left to learn that simply reassuring minorities that they're victims is not an endlessly-sustainable strategy.

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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."

As a matter of fact, I didn't. That's you shifting the goalposts, just like you changed from lives lost to percentages. And if you're going to start shifting the scope to number of lives lost due to war efforts, well, neither number nor percentage favors Obama over Bush.

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The Dude abides.

I haven't shifted. From the start I said SAFETY. This is about the ability of you and your children to grow up and live your full life free of fears of death by violence. And it's true of both total numbers AND percentages. And yes, America (and the world) was safer under Obama than Bush. But that's not Bush's fault, nor is it due to Obama's confidence. Despite everything, it was safer under Bush than Clinton. And safer under Clinton than Bush Sr. And safer under Bush Sr. than Reagan. And safer under Reagan than Carter. And safer under Carter than Ford/Nixon. And safer under Nixon than JFK. Do you see the pattern? America (and the world) is getting safer. It should continue to get safer. Barring Trump being as much of a diplomatic buffoon as worst case fears, I expect it to become safer under Trump as well, as well as under whoever replaces him in 4 years.

Terrorism is horrible. It's also almost a non-issue. It represents a few dozen deaths a year around the civilized world, and yet we act like we're at war. it's like we don't even remember real war. It's like we don't remember the million (give or take a bit) allied soldiers and civillians that died in Vietnam over a 20 year span, so we think that the few thousand that have died since 9/11 are a catastrophe. And even Vietnam was an improvement: to anyone that lived through world war 2, they'd think people were pussies for complaining about Vietnam deaths.

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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
█ ♣ █

There is nothing about the trend down in violent deaths that makes itself perpetually self-sustaining, and in fact no reason to think it is even getting "safer". Safety is not just about how much or how severe the bad events that do happen are, but what circumstances exist that make it likely an unusually serious or catastrophic event will occur. Rates of death are affected by things that have nothing to do with "safety", such as improvements in medical technology.

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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 have ideas about what has driven the trend down in recent years.

I don't think it's necessarily self-sustaining, either, but it does seem to have momentum. I believe most of human society is losing the appetite for conquest and domination we've had in decades past. We're advancing technologically as a species, but we're also advancing socially at a similar rate. The same ideals that cause us to want freedom rather than a strong autocrat, to want equality for all regardless of differences, and to prize human life so highly are antithetical to a warmongering culture.


There are some notable exceptions driven by religious or ideological extremism...but fortunately most of those cultures are pretty much desert barbarians. Unfortunately, they have oil, and we seem to need 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 don't necessarily disagree with this. But humanity felt this way before and then there was the shot heard round the world.

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The Dude abides.

I think I made some similar arguments about the terrorism threat in the context of what was going on around the Iraq/Afghan war, but I think things have changed a bit. If a new normal became ISIS or people influenced by jihadist shooting up places, it'd be an issue, even if your chances of being caught in this is low. Although, I've been through San Bernadino a few times... In the Iraq context, you have Muslims being targeted by the state, but its ineffectual and makes less sense. (The time to worry about muslimophobia came and went. People on the left today are too late for that party IMO.)

Whether the US wants to recognize them or not, ISIS is a state. They collect taxes and make their own Time magazine called Dabiq. (Which you can look up a PDF online and be filled with horror.) We know what they want. It's no loose collection of sectarians and varying amounts of Al Queda ties. If an uptick of people starting making terror attacks with ISIS goals in mind, maybe we should do something.

All that said, I don't know who understands how to actually deal with ISIS. I do, but no one will like it. If you read through a copy of Dabiq and your lizard brain doesn't at least tickle, you may already be dead. Like it's a **** monstrous set of ideas. We can not win their hearts or minds. They only understand one language.

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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

It doesn't have any existence of its own at all. It's a function of events, not an entity.



That's not really what did it. What did it was the amount of damage we could inflict, and the lack of land left to conquer without inflicting that damage. We (as in the world at large) started to notice it with the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War, and it came into strong view with WWI - actually, it sort of spiked there because the exact technology WWI was fought with combined extreme casualties with a lack of meaningful progress. In WWII it came back down again, although it remained very high.

That is, until August 6, 1945. On that day, it became clear that the ability to inflict damage had suddenly climbed so many orders of magnitude that a major world war afterwards became essentially inconceivable as a deliberate policy move - the fear throughout the cold war was always focused on sudden escalation, things getting out of control before leaders could react. But it demonstrated that deterrence worked, and worked well. Both sides went to extreme lengths to make sure that never happened. There would be no wars of conquest because there would be nothing to conquer and no means to hold it afterwards.

The dangers of drawing down to levels where a disarming strike is possible notwithstanding, that remains the case today. Ash Carter recently spoke about this,specifically that an adversary cannot expect to escalate out of a conflict as long as we maintain effective deterrent.

What Russia and China have done is develop a new strategy of incrementalism - they have decided to make small pushes in areas where it is not worthwhile to fight them, and do it slowly, so in the agregate they will make signficant gains, but it will be very hard politically to oppose them.

As it goes to your point though, this is why conquest has disappeared. But if we ever expand beyond this planet significantly it will likely return. There's a reason we don't bat an eye at Honor Harrington flinging 40 megaton missiles by the thousands all over the galaxy.



We've largely remedied that in the West, fortunately, although by no means completely either.

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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."

From time to time, the left needs to be reminded that they, too, are a cancerous blight on society.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Aye, I feel the same way.

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Raell Kromwell

Well, there were a lot of people who tucked their tails between their legs, fell in line, and voted for Hillary Clinton like whipped dogs.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Johnson was the only one I could see supporting. He didn't have a snowballs chance in hell but I gave him my vote.

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Raell Kromwell

We don't welcome illegals, but we have a very strong legal immigrant policy as well as a large asylum seeker program. We also provide universal healthcare to those who come to the country via legal means. I believe we only just settled a bunch of Syrian refugees recently, who came through the proper channels.



Around early 2017 our new house will be complete and we'll have guest rooms, you're more than welcome to visit in Sydney and I'd be happy to offer a place to stay if you'd like to. Of course you'll have to put up with 3 loud little ones and a very inquisitive dog.

There is a huge US/Canada presence, as well as a large European presence here cause it's easy to stay. Landing visa is 6 month and extension is usually easy to obtain. My husband's Canadian, and apart from the occasional spider/snake which he's very eager to take pictures of, he's happy with the place. Tasmania is very beautiful, and really great for food.

Not sure if you can exchange early, but you may want to consider if you're serious about visiting.

You live in Sydney? ****, I want to come.

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Raell Kromwell

The one really weird thing I remember out Sydney was that one of the streets we traveled on changed names about every three blocks. I'm fairly sure my hosts took me down that road to confuse me.

When I get to Sydney I'll be happy to take you up on that offer. Three little ones already Lydiaa? Time flies.

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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

I did the same. I'm disappointed that the Libertarians didn't get to 5%; I really thought they had a chance of at least creating a 3-podium debate in 2020.

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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."

Lannister gold tends to get people to bend the knee.

It doesn't seem to work well enough on the Wildlings to keep them on their side of the blue wall though, evidently.

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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."

Wasn't so much the Lannister gold, than the threat of the White Walkers out of the South.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Nice.

I too think a good thing is to constantly remind black people that they are all under the oppressive boot of whitey no matter what they do until they start saying things like "I have no choice but to assume all white people are racist" and other good, healthy things like that.

Clearly, this strategy was vindicated by the outcome of losing the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and more than half the governorships and state legislatures. No doubt you've got the Republicans right where you want them.

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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 know it's not real, but if it was, I would pay good money to hear him say that.

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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."