Timex
5893
So then you fucking leave the area.
This idea that people can’t move is bullshit. People move. Fucking deal with it.
“Oh wah, it’s hard to move. It costs money. Wah.”
Yeah, life’s hard sometimes, deal. We’re not even talking about moving and then finding work… we’re talking about getting trained for a better job, and then moving to a place where you are already hired for that job.
(Note, this isn’t directed at you… just this persistent notion among some that moving is some great impossibility)
KevinC
5894
I don’t care anymore. Fuck those people. If I can’t have @Timex’s deadly traps, I can at least have that.
I can’t even tell what’s satire anymore.
Cut Cut Cut Act? WTF?
I understand, and I sympathize to an extent. I know people from areas where that mentality of “I’ve been a blank worker since I was 17, my daddy was a blank worker, and his daddy learned blank work when he was 15 from my great granddaddy, my family ain’t never done anything else, and why should I be the one that has to change?”
My answer to those people is “so that your son/daughter has a future, because blank is dying”. If you’re not going to do it for yourself, do it for your kids, and for the love of God, do it NOW while you still have the opportunity to do it for free or for next to nothing thanks to these Federal and State programs that will assist you, because nobody knows how long those will last. It IS scary, and it IS difficult, but in the end it’s a hell of a lot better than working in the mine for damn near McDonald’s wages and keeping your children in an environment where their potential for education and opportunity is next to nothing.
You should care though, because when things reach that point the “economic anxiety” will cause those people to vote for something even worse than Trump. At that point they will literally prostrate themselves to anyone who promises to help their desperate situation, and in the ultimate irony those promises will be in the form of handouts and bailouts, which these people who routinely rail against “liberal socialism” will snatch up because it’s not socialism if “society owes you for taking away your job” even after society offered you free job retraining that you refused for years.
Timex
5898
Yeah, so the response to their plight is to offer them free god damned training so that they can have good jobs and live productive lives.
And they said, “Nah. We want magic beans.”
On some level, the answer is just for them to fucking die and have it be done with, because if they want the impossible, and reject you trying to help them, then it’s fucking on them.
I really depends on your age. The median age is 38 in the country. I was 2 during the Cuban missile crisis a far more serious event than this but I don’t really have memory of it. I do remember the height of Vietnam in 67 and 68, with riots, assassinations, and mass protest. There was serious talk of civil war. Today is not as bad as then.
Watergate was another time of national crisis, as was 9/11, and the great recession. I have vivid memories of all those events. I think you can make a case that the Trump Presidency is as grave a threat to this country as any of those times. So I think it’s not unreasonable for anybody under the age of 50 to agree with that statement.
Timex
5900
Yeah, while the economy isn’t worse than it was in 2009, I don’t recall ever thinking in 2009 like we were potentially watching the end of our democracy, or that we were on the verge of nuclear war.
You know who is willing to move to improve their lives? Immigrants and refugees.
Except for Sept 29th when the House rejected TARP, and I (far more importantly folks like Hank Paulson, Tim Geitner, and Jamie Diamon) thought the economy might collapse, I am far more fearful today than I was back then, despite watching my assets shrink by $10,000s of dollar each day.
Nesrie
5903
No worries. I didn’t take it that way. I’ve heard this sentiment even from people of my generation. When I was part of the almost 99ers, I had my things packed in boxes, literally ready to move to the east coast where one of my sister’s live. I was going to leave almost everything I knew behind, go where the jobs were, was ready to jump back into apartment living and work in a huge ole city. I was already to go, telling her I didn’t have a move date because I had one application / interview I was waiting to hear back from. My family was mad. My friends surprise, and I kept telling them the same thing… there are no jobs here. I have to go. I have to find real work and not some local business that wants to pay 10 dollars an hour for someone with a 4 year degree… but I got the job and stayed.
It was a hard choice, and I had made it right when someone told me to try for this other thing. The people I referring to, they think they are worthless, that they can’t cut it in anything else and as soon as they hit that point, where they start to realize their fear, it shifts to anger, like it’s someone else’s fault.
I am fairly realistic about the job market here. It sucks. I took a risk going remote because the opportunity came up and the local business gave me the experience i needed. I gave them over 4 years and just kind of recognized they weren’t really giving room for advancement for most the implementation team. It’s scary to change, when you know you are worth something, and I do know what it’s like when you think you’re not worth anything too.
Free training… that’s awesome. Hell I finished my degree after losing my job in another industry that died earlier too, call center work.
Deeply disturbing Dave Roberts piece. I imagine this is what the nothing matters crowd fear.
Timex
5905
On some level, the fact that less than 40% of the country approves of this asshole president should have some impact.
This is exactly what will happen. I still think we’re headed for Civil War, and I think the right will win.
Keep in mind the relative size of Nazi and anti-Nazi rallies even in the stinkiest buttholes of the Confederacy.
Keep in mind that right wingers have no morals and are itching for opportunities to kill people. The left has no appetite for conflict, the right wants to run you over with their car because you have pink hair.
Exactly. I’ve been saying this since the election, and been warning of the danger of Conservative Media long before then. What started as a movement to court more voters to the GOP base by appealing to their questionable-at-best ideals and ideas has morphed into a multi-billion dollar industry that now holds total power over the party that created it. The tail is wagging the dog when it comes to Conservatives…the more misinformation Conservative Media feeds the base, the more they tune in to devour it, and the more convinced they become that ONLY THEY can be victorious, that any attempt at reconciliation or bi-partisanship is admitting defeat. Conservatives have been at DEFCON ONE since midway through Obama’s second term when it became clear Killary was the likely Democratic nominee for 2016. The rest of us are still fucking around thinking we can somehow talk Conservatives back to the table, reason with them, or waiting for “moderate” people within their own party to self-correct the problem. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
Unless Trump freaks himself out so badly that he has a stroke or a heart attack in office, the Mueller Investigation is going to prove beyond a doubt that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia, and that the 2016 election was a travesty. And nothing will happen.
Enidigm
5910
That’s the exact thing i warned about a few days ago in this or some other thread.
But the real epistemic crisis is one of on which the basics of enlightenment era democratic systems are founded - equality (or maybe égalité in a more philosophically minded mode). That everyone is capable of having an equal voice is increasingly becoming an unsustainable view to those watching the contemporary political events.
What we’re likely to see over the next decade is a great deal of intellectual water-carrying for, essentially, the inability of normal consumers to participate in the democratic process forcing the conclusions, by reason and justice, to lead to restrictions on the voting franchise. They’ll couch it and frame it with less onerous and more paternalistic terms, but that’s essentially what it will mean. And, after all, that’s the end point of a certain strain of technocratic pan-globalizing view of the world anyway - there are those who write the algorithms, and those influenced by them, and not the least of which reasons is that these anti-intellectual movements all seem antagonistic to globalized socioeconomics.
Timex
5911
They’re also old, cowardly, and dumb.
Not really the most effective combination if the rubber ever hits the road.
You people are nuts. A series of events coincided to sweep this guy into office, and only barely then. he’s holding on by his fingernails now and the only people who are really fired up by him are rednecks and coal miners. I don’t know where Mueller’s case is going but civil war? Really? You all need to ease off on the Mad Max movies.
