Why do people argue about politics so much nowadays?

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If you don't believe the world is your oister it won't be. Soros uses governments to get a leg up and it isn't hard to be in Hollywood. If all you do is complain and say it's impossible to pay for 80k debt then your a loser and will live life as such. There is no oppression.

Is it possible for you to post without personally insulting people, or is that the only way you know how to discuss issues? Because if it is the only way you know how to function, you won't last long on this forum.

I'd call it an arms race. Of course I want my doctor to have an MD and I wouldn't want to get in a car / plane / train that wasn't designed by someone who had an engineering degree. For many professions, college is a nessessity.

For the rest it's an arms race. If you're hiring for a job that doesn't require a degree but you favour the one applicant who has a bachelor degree, a few years later they all get bachelor degrees to keep up with guys who got one to keep up with the first guy, then a few years later some applicants have a masters degree so everyone else has to get one to keep up with those guys, and so on.

It's bad for the economy if it keeps more people out of the workforce for more years, spending money rather than making it. As you said, more demand increases the price. A shortage of professors means professors gets higher wages and the students pay for it.

You can raise the level of education but you won't increase the number of people who fit in the top 50% or the top 10%. Simplified example. There's a town of a hundred people and two employers. One employer will hire the top 50% most educated and one employer will hire the top 10%. So now we have 50 people who could work at the first company and within those 50, 10 people who could work at the second company. Now everyone in town of 100 people gets twice as educated, there's still 50 people who could work for the first company and 10 who could work at the second.

It's like in a race. Only 3 people get on the podium and even if everyone ran twice as fast, it wouldn't double the number who get on the poduim. Specific degrees are great for specific careers but hiring people who have any degree because it means they've proven themselves just means that you have to pay to prove yourself when formally, you'd prove yourself on the job.

Not just pay with money, for someone like me who works 40 - 60 hours per week I'm time poor. I could afford to go to college if it was a matter of money but me and a lot of people can't spare the time. I'd be far more worried about removing myself from the workforce for four years and not earning a salary than I would be about paying a few $10,000s. Not working full-time for four or five years would cost more hundreds of thousands, much more than the cost of the degree.

You, sir, is why I loathe all political persuasions.

Even though I worked my keister off in high school, in addition to 2, and sometimes 3 part-time jobs, I was lucky to earn a 2.5 GPA in high school. No, I didn't drink, smoke or party, let alone socialize. The mantra was "Work you ass off until you drop dead, then immediately get back up and start working, because there is NO rest for the weary. Lather, rinse, repeat." The only activity I was allowed was the school band (we didn't have enough money to let me participate in anything else). The band director was one that expected his students to be professional at all times, else you never played in any instrumental groups in the school from that point on.)

Ditto with college. I was lucky to graduate with a 2.05 GPA. This was back in the late '70's, so there were absolutely, positively no support systems in place for those of us on the spectrum, let alone those of us that were mental cases. My academic advisors NEVER, in either high school or college sat down and discussed the options. To make matters even worse, my parents were dead set against me going to college. Other than have them fill out the forms for FAFSA, and me begging for spending money every week, they told me college is on your dime, and we want nothing to do with it. I may be somewhat liberal, but I sure as hell know what hard work is, especially after working for over 30 years at 1 full time and 2 part time jobs at an average of 70 hours a week. It's part of the reason I'm on food stamps (at $16.00 a month) and SSDI (and my relatives still consider me to be a lazy mother f!cker and a useless bum for even collecting that!)

Don't even getting started on how political campaigns have been negatively run since time immemorial.

Who works harder? The poor kid who works 2 or 3 jobs in school and gets a 2.5 GPA or the middle class kid who works 0 jobs in high school and gets a higher GPA?

Same for college. Do the rich expect people to work their way through college and be able to devote the same amount of time and attention as students who aren't working?

Less time to study for those who must work is one of the many factors of the poverty cycle. Ignoring this factor gives us a false meritocracy.

Time is not the only scarce resource when working your way through college, there's also energy. Some who works will be more tired in class. The brain didn't evolve to run flat out all day.

Speaking of the brain, some people just have perfect memories. Some people are very fast learners. I've known people with bad memories who struggled in college because even though they studied their butts off. They did not spend their time cracken beers and smoking bowls. But that's what peoples will say about them.

Last edited by RetroGamer87 on 27 Jun 2017, 6:01 pm, edited 3 times in total.

People argue about politics, because material success is a popularity contest, not a meritocracy.

I can accept inequality. I can accept that material success is not always a meritocracy.

If some people are just born smarter or more tireless than others I don't mind the smart guy getting paid more.

I'm not bothered by inequality, I'm bothered by people who act like we all have the same start in life or we're all born with the same learning ability.

In other words the false meritocracy bothers me more than the lack of meritocracy.

Intelligence and book-smarts are vastly overrated in terms of what it takes to be "successful" in the real world anyways. University may be a requirement for many jobs, but it does not prepare you.

Also the notion that typical minimum-wage jobs are "easy" for everyone is total BS. I know I would not be able to deal with the rote-memorization involved in being waitstaff at a restaurant, for example. My mind tends to wander to more interesting subjects so I really just can't focus enough on menial tasks. The pressure of constant social performance in any type of retail job is also exhausting. I don't believe I am "better" than people who do these jobs as I am not an elitist s**t, but I know I actually find higher-paid jobs easier. I would therefore have to "work harder" at the lower paid jobs. So much for simplistic meritocracy thinking.

I did not say there was a conspiracy of oppression. That is the Trump supporters and SJW's things, not mine. I said hard work helps, having the right connections is most important. The two are not mutually exclusive. Talent is important. If you are a midget no matter how much your dream is to play in the NBA and no matter hard you work at it, is not going to happen. If you are not born into right connections and you have no networking talent like most on this board the world will not be at your beck and call not how hard you try. Again, if you try hard to learn networking skills and work hard at using them you will likely do better then if you say f**k it I can not do it. You might even have a decent life, but the world will not likely be your oyster. If you have the little talent the world is not likely to be your oyster unless you were born into the right connections. If you were not born into connections and there is little or no demand for what you are good at, and heavy demand for what you have a little natural talent for (like networking and teamwork skills the days) the world most likely not be your oyster. That has nothing to do with you being a lazy, whiny, bastard but the bad LUCK of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yeah, luck/ randomness whatever you want to call it, it exists. The real world is not a computer where you program it and it does exactly what you instruct it do.

Hollywood easy? Speak for yourself and the Hollyweird actors who have everything handed to them. It would be excruciatingly difficult for me to be successful in Hollywood with all the social obligations needed. I am sure it took a lot of hard work for Soros to figure out how to use governments, that does not make him conservative.

There are a lot of issues in the world nowadays and people have different opinions on how to handle it. Unfortunately, sometimes people argue instead of talking it over peacefully.

Even if you are successful in Hollywood, there are roles that require you to work 16 hours per day (particularly episodic TV). Actors work harder than people give them credit for.

I see very little actual "arguing" from certain people. Instead I see a lot of tired ad hominem BS.

I was about say, it's not like people haven't been arguing.

How will you know, when you have won the argument?

I think someone else here earlier said that people have always been arguing about politics which to a certain point I think is true. However, I think that the political environment nowadays is much more explosive (which leads to more political food fights) and for several reasons:

1. People get much of their information from crappy media. Social media in general isn't very good in its quality and a lot of people blindly follow it. Social media often consists of someone taking a news story from the old-school media (like the AP) and twisting and reinterpreting it in their own way. Given that most people are too mentally and intellectually lazy to do any fact checking or skepticism trash news stories become the 'truth' to a lot of people.

2. People are politically stupid as a whole. Most of the stuff that people discuss in politics simply doesn't work or is historically inaccurate. A lot of people push for laws and policies that simply due to human nature won't be effective or are such absurd laws that you can't enforce them or even define whether a crime has been committed or not. It's like Congress passing a law that bans gravity; nothing in that Constitution prohibits Congress passing such a law but good luck enforcing it. Again, people are mentally lazy as a whole. Furthermore, whenever someone identifies or calls themselves a liberal/moderate/conservative/totalitarian/whatever I'm under the impression that the person isn't very bright. You have to follow some crowd of sheep instead of thinking on your own?

3. A lot of the political compromises and promises made in decades past are falling apart. What worked in the 1990s simply won't work today, for example. You have a government that isn't the best in the world to begin with and a lot of institutions aren't working in the 21st century. There was corruption galore back in the day and it's coming back to bite a lot of people on the rear; you can't run a country by graft and fraud. The whole thing will eventually crash down on top of people's heads.

4. Some problems are exaggerated or distorted to look more problematic than they really are. Also, you'll always have people who gossip, complain about the price of rice, whine about the younger generations, whine about how they didn't get their favorite law or pet project passed, the list goes on and on. The media and society are full of this. There is no shortage of control freaks and wannabe rulers of the world and they are the ones who complain the most!

5. It draws a crowd. It's basically cheap entertainment. There are a lot of people who are fascinated by watching two or more people completely lose their marbles/blow a fuse/short circuit over some political argument or comment. Sometimes it's obviously someone baiting another person online into a BS argument. Lots of blogs and online forums do this all the time, it gets viewers to the site. Look at 'reality TV' and how it attracts an audience. Look at the caliber of that audience and you'll see why.

At least, this is my theory. Don't let the political BS get you down.

^ Who needs pro wrestling when we have political theatre?