Things we'd be talking about if the forum wasn't deadFollow

I'm curious (and a bit confused). Are you accusing the people who are complaining about others wanting free stuff of saying "stupid things"? Or are you saying that the people who are calling for free stuff are saying "stupid things"? It's not super clear from your post, but given that you say you like Sanders, I'm going to guess that you're casting that label at the people complaining about those wanting free stuff. And I suppose you'd have a small point here, but then we do see things like this article. And we see constant calls for things that certainly seem like "free stuff" to me. Do some people exaggerate this? Sure. But there's certainly at least some truth to it as well.

It's a pretty common pattern to notice that usually the guy asking us to all share what we have is the one who will benefit from the process. Whether that fully amounts to demanding free stuff is a matter of degrees IMO.

Edited, May 4th 2016 2:07pm by gbaji

It's a little of both. The article above regarding maternity leave for all women because margaritas and bffs with boyfriend problems is outright retarded. Just like the people who argue day in and day out that electing Bernie Sanders amounts to giving college students a free big screen TV and repeatedly insist that Bernie is somehow promising no one will have to work anymore is even more retarded. Thankfully I'm not referring to anyone here, lest you decide to reveal yourself as one of those people-- though I doubt it. They're mostly Trump supporters.

I wouldn't say "free big screen TV" or anything that absurd. Obviously, you're dealing with some exaggeration, but I think we can (and maybe should) make a distinction between what a politician or party says they will do and what those who support them say they want. While we can certainly parse Sander's statements and conclude that he didn't actually say he'd give free this or free that, it's pretty clear that there is a mindset growing among young people that want free this and free that, and are looking for a political system that will give it to them (and the woman in the article is a great example of this).

I think that the fear here is that while Bernie wont say those things directly, a decent amount of his support does come from people who expect to get more back from their government than they put in, and having elected people into positions of power, may begin to demand such things, regardless of the specific parsed statements of those people when they ran for office. Which is a problem, since for every dollar they get back more than they put in, someone else is putting in a dollar more than they get back. It's easy to say "but we need good health care, and good education, and good housing, and transportation, etc, etc...", but it's not wrong to notice the pattern among those who most demand those things. It's easy to demand those things when you know you're the one who will benefit most from the process used to pay for them. Whether we want to call that "free stuff", or just "subsidized stuff", is a matter of semantics. It's still not wrong to observe that the biggest support for such things come from people who are young and aren't yet paying sufficiently into the system. For them, while it may not be "free", it's certainly "less expensive". And at least part of that motivation is selfishness. There's a reason why, most people, upon getting a few decades older, and shifting from the portion of the population that gets more than they pay for and into the portion that pays more than they get, their opinions on how wonderful these ideas are also tend to shift.


I'd also suggest that, while "free stuff" may be an exaggeration, it's no more so than people talking about how voting Republican means you want "tax breaks for the rich", or "military killing people around the world", or any of a number of similarly exaggerated and overly simplistic statements. Both sides use such rhetoric. I think the trick is to step back and examine what the likely outcomes are when supporting or opposing any given politician, party, or platform. And then make a choice. Not based on one thing, or a bit of rhetoric, but the whole picture.

Well, that makes sense. Still kind of stinks there won't be a Hanshotfirst Museum. I tend to avoid touristy sites, but even I'd check that out.

What Chicago needs is not a tourist site in area that already is developed for touristy things, but to put it in a area were people need jobs and better law enforcement.

Really one of the problems in large cities, is that we tend to think we can only have events and museums were we think that people will be comfortable coming to. I had friends who don't want to drive me home, because they don't see other white people in my neighborhood. I love my neighborhood as it has roots going back to the civil war, as it developed around the cemetery that was started for the burial of soldiers who died in the conflict. Some who died as Confederate POW's at Ft. McHenry, were my great-g-g grandfather served manning the guns pointed at the city.

Come visit sometime and ask Jonwin to give you a tour of the city. He is a certified tour guide of Baltimore.

So that a child can witness his parents murder coming out of a gala event in this poorly policed area, and that child will grow up to be, not the hero we need, but the hero we deserve!

Toh-may-toe, -toh-mah-toe

We now have a gunman on the loose in Montgomery Co. Maryland. Maybe the one that killed his ex wife yesterday and wounded guy trying to help her. We know that two people killed at Mall were trying to help the 3 victim.

Folks here were wondering if he was trying for suicide by cop. We get too many of those in Maryland, specially in the counties that have large government presence. I wonder if all the secert facilities here have something to do with that.

How is he even still alive?

There's a JFK joke to be made.

In the months after Treyvon Martin was shot, people were threatening to kill me just for being white. Granted, I worked in a liquor store in an almost entirely black neighborhood barely an hour drive away from where it happened at the time. It was even worse when Zimmerman was acquitted. There just seemed to be an extreme amount of anger and aggression boiling over in a lot of people's minds. People are killed around here for much, much less. --and from what I've heard, all Zimmerman does these days is strut around bragging about what he did with his droves of white supremacist enablers. I'm not sure where he lives now, but he's definitely has a violent death coming to him in the not so distant future barring witness protection or something equivalent.

I'm, let's say "skeptical", that $65mil is a serious bid that will be honored.