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I’m Better Off, but Not the Country
This is the tale of two questions:
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Is this a contradictory outcome? No, it is not. It seems to me that the answer is evident: President Trump was elected and has done pretty much what he promised to do and generated the results that have benefitted so many people. But important segments of the country have persistently opposed the President through fair means and foul. They have stirred up antagonisms that few countries can survive. It is an open question whether our country can survive it. The President’s opponents have told America that there is no peace so long as President Trump remains in power. The opposition to Clinton/Obama was never this shrill or threatening.
The average American knows that policies pursued by President Trump have been good for them personally. The threats of the opposition portend things that are not good for the country. The people have what may seem a hard choice to make: reestablishment of prosperity or peace. I hope they choose prosperity.
Published in General
One reason I left Arizona was that it was increasingly difficult to live around neighbors who were so dumb. But that was just one part of Phoenix, and those people had lived there for decades. Since they were apparently always dumb, it’s hard for me to understand how Arizona overall could have been so conservative for so long. Maybe it was always the more rural areas holding back the cities, and now the cities have gotten so big that the dumb city people hold more sway?
Literally moments I read your post I was thinking about dumb everyone was. I don’t just think it’s Arizonans. I think humans are on average very dumb when it comes to politics.
I look forward to reading it.
And yet those dumb people seemed to do a lot better on their voting, in the past. What explains the apparent change? Is it about virtue-signaling? Does that actually require voting for bad candidates, rather than just SAYING you voted for them but really voting for good ones? Maybe so, if dumb people find it difficult to remember that they should SAY they voted for bad candidates, even if they really didn’t… I suppose even for dumb people it’s easier to remember and say what you actually did, rather than keep the cover in place.
Universal suffrage, get out the vote campaigns, and ballot harvesting?
Knowing how much the lefties hate the notion of conformity, I have been using that term to describe them and their group-think. They are really the ultimate conformists. Not a single independent thinker among them. There’s a reason they’re called NPCs.
Huh. This doesn’t bode well for my plan to escape this blasted winter hellscape and move to Arizona. But at least I’ll increase the average intelligence.
Well yes, but I was thinking more recent. It’s true though, the shift really began decades ago.
Just remember the saying about arguing with a stupid person: they drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience.
My own experience with the neighbors I’ve mentioned previously (as well as my benighted mother still in Oregon) reminds me of this bit:
Well I thought Arizona was a good escape from Oregon, for about 30 years. Then I got tired of the heat. But it’s possible to escape that without even being very far from a major city with its amenities. Black Canyon City might suit you, for example. But I find it’s too difficult to remain anonymous in a small town, and if the small town is whack-doodle crazy, that’s a big problem for me. It might be different for a home-OWNER in BCC, but in my relatively short time (about a year) living there, I never got that far.
And I’m in a small town again now, but I’m a home-OWNER again, plus as mentioned before this county voted over 75% for Trump in 2016 and very likely will be even higher this time, which helps a lot.
The ones who do think independently are called alt-right and kicked out. Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein are… lets say irritating in much of their leftism but they are honest men.
I think it has to do with our degraded educational system and the decaying state of our family. It used to be that educated parents tried hard to educate their kids instead of just abandoning them to the school system. When the school system became innervated by leftism, that was it.