Yeah, I don't know what the other guy is talking about, but when you look at the birth of Truancy laws, it becomes obvious that state schooling was instituted so that you would believe the lies and indoctrination of the state over the wisdom and care of your family and community.
If schooling was about making it so people aren't tricked, why do they have you say an national anthem (that used to be called a prayer) pledging allegiance to the flag of the empire?
Its a very sick view of the world to think that the government is who has your back and cares about you and is the person you can trust, rather then your own flesh and blood family and community.
There haven't been any good options for president in a long time. Democracy is mostly an illusion. Nearly every politician has been corrupted and co-opted by corporations, the military industrial complex, deep state, and perverse special interests. Obama was a huge disappointment, infamously bailed out Wall St and arrested zero bankers over the GFC, ACA was a massive giveaway to the private health insurance corporations, expanded mass surveillance, presided over the persecution of whistle blowers, engaged in widespread drone bombing and regime change wars in the middle east...
Biden was a senile career politician. His administration pushed for confrontation with Russia over bringing Ukraine into NATO, and did nothing about Israel's genocide in Gaza. When it became obvious Biden was effectively brain dead, much like Mitch McConnell now, the DNC appointed Kamala without a primary -- another glaring example of their subversion of touted democratic principles. She was yet another empty suit, incapable of expressing original ideas, and would have done basically the exact same things as Trump like allowing Israel to expand theirs wars of choice in the middle east.
This is accurate but most people will not recognize it that way because it's designed that way.
Prior to 'democracy' the peasants revolted and that occasionally had some very nasty consequences for the ruling class. Now when the peasants have the urge to revolt - you just remind them them to do a better job at 'voting'.
Like they say in a democracy: Consent is manufactured.
>There haven't been any good options for president in a long time.
that does not justify voting for the worst candidate for this office in as many decades.
this argument immediately pops up. and it's easily refuted: just don't vote for the guy convicted of felonies and with a long history of boorish behavior and grift. it's really not that hard.
Just a big brain effort to wash their hands of any responsibility.
Democracy is not just voting and expecting things to fall your way. You have to convince. You have to organize. You have to nourish the civil society through sustained effort. You need to have reasonable expectations and make choices, not whine and wish you had you cake and eat it.
Of everything he mentioned, your TDS causes you to only care that he voted for the 'other' teams star player? Our country (the U.S.) is doomed and deserves it.
It's especially funny since he didn't even mention who he voted for. A mere hint of criticism of the preferred party triggered an attack mode right away.
Frankly, a lot of what he said wasn't that far off from reality, so I only responded to the thing which stood out the most. Nothing I said was an attack, and I'm really not sure how you could read it that way. It seems really clear that Trump has done things which Harris would never have done, like the frankly stupid trade wars, or the even stupider war in Iran. I doubt any other Republican candidate would have done those things either, they are uniquely Trump.
I have no love for the Democratic party, and you appear to be reading things that I never said.
You are quite right and I did jump the gun with my comment, my apologies.
To comment on Trump vs Kamala, Harris might not have done what Trump has done, but I suspect she would have done a lot of other things that Trump would not have done. I am not even sure about that stupid war - it depends on whether you believe that the President is more than a mere figurehead.
Completely delusional comment. If Harris - or Biden, or Obama - had done one tenth of what Trump is doing, there would be an insurrection from the Republicans.
Just imagine Biden boasting about taking dementia tests and changing the answer every time. Or Obama sending "his" DOJ to arrest a Republican lwmawmaker a few days before an election. Just take anything Trump - or his cabinet: just imagine Obama's secretaries and guests just fluffing him all the time, calling him the greatest and brightest non-stop - are doing and imagine for a second the violence of the outcry if any Democrat had done it.
You reach for "TDS" when Trump and his cronies can't stop talking about "Sleepy Joe" and "Barack HUSSEIN Obama". What the fuck, man. Trump is deranged, not us.
We are now discussing which President is worse, not which one is better. That's ironic.
There was a reason why Trump has won, and it is not because half of the country is stupid like people on this forum like to claim, but because they were sick of the status quo. But of course voters were duped, again.
There would not be any insurrection from the Republicans because both parties are one and the same. Marx was right about that. I don't think I'll bother dragging my ass to the polls anymore. My prediction - every president will be worse than the one before.
See? It is possible to answer without getting personal, calling the other guy delusional and using foul language. I can do that, and so can you.
>See? It is possible to answer without getting personal, calling the other guy delusional and using foul language. I can do that, and so can you.
Yeah, you just have to imply without proof that there is a massive conspiracy by all of "them".
>But of course voters were duped, again.
At what moment where they duped? Trump has been known for decades as a liar, crook, conman and narcissist. The truth is that people who voted for him are either idiots or complicit but thought he would screw the "others", not them. "Leopard eating faces party" and all that.
In the end you are the best argument as for why democracy doesn't work and you are worsening the problem: never taking responsibility (like Trump!). "We were duped". No. You made the wrong choice despite having all the relevant information at your fingertips and you are rightfully punished for that. If you aren't happy with what the two parties are offering, have you tried voting in their primaries? Have you canvassed for an alternative candidate? Oh, you are outgunned by big donors? Don't you know there are organisations and candidates who want to put caps on dark money and PACs? Have you done anything to support them?
You don't like what democracy has to offer? Well, democracy doesn't "offer" anything, you are supposed to be a member and actively participate. Democracy gives the power to the people. When did you think you would have power without also having the responsibility? Garbage in, Garbage out.
Thus Trump is the supreme "representative" of the American people. He represents your hate, your greed, your apathy, your grievances, your violence, your selfishness and so on. 77 million Americans were fine with that and made the effort to go to polling places and cast their vote for him.
You still don't believe me? I am more than forty years old. I perfectly remember how Americans were out for blood after 9/11 and how they viciously attacked anyone who didn't support the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq. "French surrendering monkeys" and so on. I am not talking about politicians but about most Americans outside of "liberal" cities. Fucking Art Spiegelman, one of the greatest comic artist , Holocaust survivor, being silenced for very mid criticism of the bellicism.
Now the same people wail about how it was all a lie, no more foreign wars, yada yada yada. Has there been any reckoning of how hate blinded you? Any reckoning the few left-wing Democrats who were against the war were right? Nope. "We were lied to". No, you loved the lie.
But...Yawn. Yes, it's quite sad that people have to turn to a crook with the hope of getting things changed because the other side hasn't delivered either.
You can save your "you" and "your" self-righteous rhetoric btw. I didn't vote for the current boss, and you won't be teaching me how to live either. A great example of political discussions being a waste of time. We are done here.
The self-righteousness is dripping from all your posts from the very beginning of this thread, dear Enlightened one who saw through the illusion of democracy.
There's a large amount of evidence of an increase in mental illness, anxiety, depression among the youth and young adults. Jonathan Haidt attributes it primarily to social media and ideologies on the internet. I would imagine economic precariousness is also a major factor.
A majority of young people across the world also believe their future will be significantly worse, either due to climate change or other causes like globalization and AI.
Speaking as a member of Gen-Z (26) I can confirm that most of my anxiety is not from my hippy parenting, but from an increasingly chaotic world (I mean this in the sense of information overload, not ratio of peaceful times to war time) and dwindling economic opportunity.
I do think that millenial-style parenting has many flaws and is guilty of messing of kids in novel ways, but it's dishonest to say that it's more guilty than social media, stagnating wages, etc.
The world has always been chaotic. I would wager that most people are better off now than they were before. There is something new in that we are straddling young people with massive amounts of student debt for a college degree that was overpriced and oversold on its benefits.
I agree with what you last said, it's not necessarily entirely hippy parenting, but it does seem like hippy parenting at best did not prepare people for the real world or hasn't had a material improvement. Maybe each previous generation laments of the next generation's parenting style.
Your first point is what I was trying to convey in my parentheses, which is that the world is more peaceful than ever before and yet it feels like it's closing in on us increasingly so due to the vast amount of information thrown at us with no viable way to process it. This, paired with the ever increasing amount of things we are expected to fit in with no reasonable way to do so leads to burnout _Fast_
There is indeed a Frank Wilhoit you're thinking of (died in 2010, active in political science and a professor at Drake University)
The Frank Wilhoit quoted in parent is just some random dude who posted a pithy comment on a blog post. so good news, you can engage with the quote without any Kissinger or CIA baggage.
I enjoyed most of my math classes like multivariate calculus and differential equations, though I pursued my BS and MS degrees in CS later in life, and was already independently wealthy so didn't need to take out student loans. I also took many of the core STEM courses first at a California community college, which were honestly quite rigorous, and not obviously lower quality education than what I got at UCSD. The idea that students must go into vast debt attending an expensive 4 year university is dubious.
It's also easy to condescend and indict the students who may not necessarily love every single class they're forced to take. They're also not going to be using most of the concepts they're required to learn. In my personal career I've worked in software engineering, computational biology, machine learning, and quantitative finance, yet I don't think I've ever had to explicitly use Stokes' theorem or Cauchy-Euler equations. There are various tools I've used which I'm sure relied on these mathematics, yet it's really only at the frontier of advanced research that people will be using anything more complex than algebra.
It's human nature to be "racist" since people generally prefer to be with others similar to themselves. That can be multi-dimensional, ranging from values, cultures, tastes, but race is the most obvious and one of the major principal components of human experience.
Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are effectively ethnostates and they've not had the cultural enrichment yet that America or Europe has faced. Notably, there is rising anti-migrant extremism in the West, because the Great Replacement Theory is becoming increasingly obviously not just a theory.
What dimension of genetics? Race is not genetic. If you try to cluster people by genetic similarity the end result does not look like people's idea of "race" at all, and different (even closely related cultures like the UK and the US) have different classifications of race. http://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different
In the days of racial science (so up to the 1950s or so) some east Africans and South Asians were classified as "caucasian". Textbooks and encyclopedias from the time say so.
Race is not highly correlated to religion. Christianity is followed by numbers of Europeans, South Americans, Africans, and Asians. Islam by semitic, African, South Asian, South East Asian people. Buddhists are most commonly, South Asian, SE Asian or East Asian - still multiple different "races". The same with cultures. I do not see how race correlates to politics at all. There are weak correlations with culture and language, very weak within countries.
"Race" as used in this sense is almost uniquely an USA thing, exported to right-wing movements elsewhere.
A white USA citizen will have more in common culturally, religiously and politically with a black USA citizen than any white European, Australian or New Zealander.
That's just ridiculous. We have words for everything. Multiple words for everything. Having a word for "people who live in a country that isn't where they grew up" doesn't then mean that everyone else is inherently racist.
The US, UK, and Western powers have been waging information war for far longer than 2016. Look at Canadian PM Mark Carney's latest speech at Davos, he admits the 'Rules based international order' was a fiction, and the US has had a very long history of covert operations, 'enhanced interrogation', destabilization campaigns, funding of terrorists, propping up of dictators, bombing and invading of many countries...
To be specific consider how many lies have been told by the American mainstream media around the narratives of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Syria, Libya, etc. Israel has the most surveilled and well defended border in the world, the Mossad is sophisticated enough to launch pager attacks to decapitate Hezbollah leadership, yet somehow they got caught with their pants down and Hamas combatants could raid their country for 12 hours without a response. The US also had funded Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, knew Al Qaeda was plotting another attack on the WTC, and the Neocons in the Bush administration wanted a new Pearl Harbor as outlined in the Project for a New American Century.
Russia is not uniquely or even particularly evil here, it's entirely rational for them to not want a major neighbor to join an enemy alliance. Look at how America has treated Cuba for decades. People should stop being so naive.
