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Opioid of the Masses

Discussion in 'Too Hot for Swamp Gas' started by philnotfil, May 14, 2024.

  1. philnotfil

    philnotfil GC Hall of Fame

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    I ran across this (older article) while reading about JD Vance showing up in the Manhattan courtroom to support Trump in his trial. I'm always a little surprised when I'm reminded that Vance is a Trump supporter. He seems to see things pretty clearly and recognizes that Trump isn't going to provide a solution to any of the problems that Vance has clearly laid out. Is he just riding the MAGA wave, hoping that when the tide goes out he will be able to stay in office and finally get some things done?

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/opioid-of-the-masses/489911/

    Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.

    What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

    The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.

    I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
     
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  2. duggers_dad

    duggers_dad GC Hall of Fame

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    Part and parcel of the same mass-psychosis that amplified in 2020.
     
  3. ThePlayer

    ThePlayer VIP Member

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    "I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter."

    Is someone delusional or wut?
    They better check the recent polls on exactly how voters feel about Biden.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2024
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  4. gatorchamps960608

    gatorchamps960608 GC Hall of Fame

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    There are so many factors that allowed this charlatan criminal to be in this spot.

    --The gaping wound of global trade that decimated blue collar lifetime careers
    --The ever increasing ignorance (think Idiocracy movie) of the electorate
    --Limited civics classes in school
    --The ever shrinking American attention span
    --The Russian sponsored op known as "The Apprentice"
    --The Russian disinformation psy-op laser focused right on rural America
    --Racist dog whistles from the GOP going back to the 80s

    On and on it goes.
     
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  5. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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  6. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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    BTW, while searching Twitter for the quote above, I can across this one that I was not previously aware of. Also apropos

     
  7. Trickster

    Trickster VIP Member

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    That day occurred in January, 2017. If he is reelected, it will occur again in January, 2025.
     
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  8. GatorFanCF

    GatorFanCF Premium Member

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    Yeah, Left leaning politicians never promise whatever panacea their followers want :rolleyes:

    “we are …a few days away from fundamentally transforming the USA…”

    Im shocked, really, a politician promising better times? SHOCKED.
     
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  9. Gatorrick22

    Gatorrick22 GC Hall of Fame

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    When Trump threatens to cut off the huge Congressional grift of free money they will fight back to keep that free tax-payer money (like funds supposedly going to the Ukraine) spigot wide open. The RINOs and the Communist-Dems are all in on this free money scam.

    That is really what all this Trump hate is about. That is the real pain and everything will get back to normal after a few grifters are shown the door into a prison cell.. that includes dirty lawyers... judges, and that includes elected officials in the state, local and federal levels.

    Limit the amount of lawyers we can graduate national wide an that is a good start. Lawyers will hate that kind of limitation on their ever growing population. They need more lawyers to gain even more power over our citizenry.

    Diminish the number of lawyers nation wide, and we diminish the threat to our freedoms.. Liberty and way of life.

    This is what Trump and like minded people need to do... before we're all replaced and overrun by these refugees from the south invading our sovereign country. The leaches are out of control...

    Stop the lawfare... stop the madness.
     
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  10. GatorJMDZ

    GatorJMDZ gatorjack VIP Member

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    If you are tired of being one of the least educated people you interact with, wouldn't the better response be to further your own education rather than attempting to limit the education of others? Education is NEVER a bad thing, unless you're MAGA.
     
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  11. GatorFanCF

    GatorFanCF Premium Member

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    Brilliant. Those Ivy League students have demonstrated how Education, er, Indoctrination, can indeed be a bad thing. $80,000/year to be a useful idiot.
     
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  12. gatorjo

    gatorjo GC Hall of Fame

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    LOL. "I'll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it."
     
  13. Gatorrick22

    Gatorrick22 GC Hall of Fame

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    We need about 1 million less lawyers in our country to function properly and a Constitutional Republic again. I love how the Liberals laugh at this proposal of less lawyers like they're whistling past the grave.

    It's going to happen again... just like when the Bolsheviks took over Russia... they shot and killed everyone in the cities that had suits on thinking they were lawyers. We are could very well be heading to that end.. I do NOT want that to happen.

    Why even talk about the minutia... the number of lawyers IS the problem.

    The only "opioid" that will fix our nation is the one that limits how many lawyers we can have in the U.S.A.. I say cut the number to 350,000 total... nation wide. That's about 1 million fewer lawyers.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2024
  14. Emmitto

    Emmitto VIP Member

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    The article is from 2016.

    Now Vance is in one of the courtrooms with kneepads.

    This is the point of the thread.

    Also why I never bought his elegy act.
     
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  15. Gator515151

    Gator515151 GC Hall of Fame

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    Following the lead of one of our more active liberal posters this morning I am going to post this even though I know media bias/fact checkers are generally left slanted themselves.[​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
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  16. Gator515151

    Gator515151 GC Hall of Fame

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  17. Emmitto

    Emmitto VIP Member

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    JD Vance is the author of the article.
     
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  18. danmanne65

    danmanne65 GC Hall of Fame

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    Didn’t Shakespeare write first we shoot all the lawyers. Look up the actual quote.
     
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  19. BLING

    BLING GC Hall of Fame

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    Gatorrick goes full commie. Wow.

    How did you arrive at this 350,000 figure comrade? Do you have math to support this as the optimal number of lawyers, or do you just have a bloodlust for killing lawyers as the communists and revolutionaries did? 1 million of them, apparently.

    Seems to me in a free market system, the number of lawyers that exist (or that actually practice law) would be exactly as the market demands. If there were an “excess” of lawyers, this would result in lower pay for lawyers, thus pushing fringe lawyers to work in areas outside the practice of law. I’m sure that happens with some frequency for those who graduate from bottom tier law schools.
     
  20. BLING

    BLING GC Hall of Fame

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    These were JD Vance’s words back in 2016. Now he’s basically a Trump bootlicker.

    Just shows how full of shit some of these folks are. His article was just a more eloquent and wordy version of Lindsey Graham’s “He will destroy is, and we will deserve it”.
     
    Last edited: May 15, 2024
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