General News Thread

[Zear0]

11 minutes ago, Lionator said:

If Trump genuinely did just decide to invade and annex Greenland, would Denmark fight back? Would we do anything?

No and no

[Md9]

11 minutes ago, Lionator said:

If Trump genuinely did just decide to invade and annex Greenland, would Denmark fight back? Would we do anything?

Surely there would be someone that would have to step in and stop him? Not sure who but surely someone can. Why do people let him do what he wants he is just a bat shit crazy old man who thinks he can have what ever he wants 

[Md9]

Next up is the trump class warships 😂ffs 

[Lionator]

26 minutes ago, Md9 said:

Surely there would be someone that would have to step in and stop him? Not sure who but surely someone can. Why do people let him do what he wants he is just a bat shit crazy old man who thinks he can have what ever he wants 

It’s an American strategic interest so they wouldn’t. It would probably kill off nato though as it shows they don’t trust an ally. 

[Zear0]

F**k me just saw the Trump Class "speech".  He's genuinely gone.

 

Rubio looks like he wants to just disappear.

Edited 22 December 2025 by Zear0

[Sampson]

5 hours ago, Zear0 said:

F**k me just saw the Trump Class "speech".  He's genuinely gone.

 

Rubio looks like he wants to just disappear.

Genuinely think he’s got Alzheimer’s and is basically a puppet at this point. Crazy how a bunch of 70-80 year old men are running the US, Russia and China

[leicsmac]

Related to the above:

 

In 1952, Adlai Stevenson’s supporter shouted that every thinking person in America would vote for him. Stevenson replied, “I’m afraid that won’t do. I need a majority.” The crowd laughed. Seventy years later, no one is laughing. The joke became prophecy, and thinking itself became the disqualification.

 

The scholar sat in the corner of the Iowa diner, nursing cold coffee while a local farmer explained why the university professor running for Senate was exactly what was wrong with America. Not because of her policies. Not because of her voting record. But because she had a PhD.

 

“These people think they’re better than us,” he said, gesturing with his fork. The irony hung thick in the air: he was dismissing expertise while trusting his crops to agricultural science, his health to medical research, and his smartphone to quantum physics he couldn’t begin to explain.

 

We have arrived at a peculiar moment in American political history. Education, once the great promise of democracy, has become democracy’s alleged enemy. The path from Jeffersonian ideals of an educated citizenry to our current suspicion of anyone who stayed in school past 22 deserves examination, because it reveals something far more troubling than simple anti-intellectualism.

 

The transformation began quietly in the 1970s, when economic opportunity started diverging sharply along educational lines. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1979 the wage gap between college graduates and high school graduates was 47%. By 2021, it had grown to 62%. College graduates pulled away from their non-college peers in earnings, job security, and geographical mobility. What had been a moderate distinction became a chasm, and the working class watched their children compete for service jobs while the college-educated competed for careers.

 

This economic sorting created cultural sorting. College-educated Americans increasingly clustered in the same neighborhoods, married each other, and developed shared cultural markers that had nothing to do with actual intelligence or worth. They shopped at Whole Foods, listened to NPR, and spoke in the careful language of institutional credentialism. The non-college educated noticed. They noticed hard.

 

Conservative media strategists, brilliant in their cynicism, recognized the exploitable resentment and systematically weaponized it. Rush Limbaugh pioneered the template in the 1980s: mock the “liberal elite” and their fancy degrees while never mentioning that most actual elites, the ones with real power and real money, were busy cutting taxes and shipping jobs overseas. Fox News perfected the formula, creating a parallel information ecosystem where education became evidence of corruption rather than qualification.

The strategy worked because it contained a grain of truth wrapped in a mountain of misdirection. Yes, many credentialed professionals had become insufferably self-satisfied. Yes, meritocracy had calcified into a hereditary aristocracy of test scores and résumés. The Brookings Institution found that 70% of children born to college-educated parents now earn college degrees themselves, compared to just 10% of children whose parents lack degrees. Yes, institutions of higher learning had priced themselves into irrelevance for working families. But the conclusion drawn was deliberately backwards: the problem wasn’t that education had become a class barrier, but that education itself was suspect.

 

By the 2000s, the equation was complete. Intelligence became smugness. Expertise became elitism. Knowing things, particularly knowing things through systematic study rather than gut feeling, became practically un-American. A 2019 Pew study found that 59% of Republicans believed colleges and universities had a negative effect on the country. We arrived at the absurd spectacle of politicians boasting about their ignorance as proof of authenticity.

 

The Obama presidency accelerated the collapse. Here was a constitutional law professor, articulate and measured, whose very eloquence sparked rage. His competence felt like condescension to millions of Americans who had been told for decades that educated people looked down on them. Trump’s victory completed the circuit: a billionaire who lived in a golden tower convinced working Americans he was one of them, partly by performing ignorance so convincingly that it read as honesty.

 

The consequences have been catastrophic. We sneer at epidemiologists during pandemics, dismiss climate scientists as the climate shifts, and treat economists as partisan hacks while wondering why our policies fail. We’ve created a political culture where being wrong confidently beats being right carefully, where complexity is weakness and certainty is strength.

 

The cruelest aspect of this transformation is how it has poisoned the well for working-class kids who do pursue education. They get caught in the crossfire, accused of abandoning their roots by their communities and never quite trusted by their new peers. Social mobility, the very promise education was supposed to deliver, now comes with a price: cultural homelessness.

 

So what happens to a democracy that treats knowledge as conspiracy and education as treason? What becomes of a republic where expertise is the enemy and ignorance the credential? How do we solve climate change when scientists are dismissed as alarmist? How do we manage pandemics when epidemiologists are ignored? How do we build an economy when economists are just another special interest?

 

The farmer in that Iowa diner and the professor running for Senate are not enemies. They never were. But someone profits from the lie that they are, and that someone is counting on us never asking who benefits when Americans stop trusting the people who know things. Ask yourself: in a fight between the educated and the uneducated, who wins? Not either side. The fight itself is the point, and while we’re busy fighting each other over diplomas, the actual elite, the ones with the real power, the ones who are neither farmer nor professor but predator, they’re laughing all the way to their offshore accounts.

[leicsmac]

And the worst thing is that the consequences of the above may not just be as mentioned in the article. They may well be absolute. 

 

The Earth has shown through its history that it doesn't tolerate either the selfish or the clowns running the circus for long. 

Edited 23 December 2025 by leicsmac

[Trav Le Bleu]

The headline part of this is that people are voting for Trump, not Republican ideals necessarily. Scary.

 

What the underwhelming Epstein files release means for Maga - BBC News

 

https://share.google/f0SFCKRwn5op7CDVG

 

[Trav Le Bleu]

8 hours ago, Md9 said:

Surely there would be someone that would have to step in and stop him? Not sure who but surely someone can. Why do people let him do what he wants he is just a bat shit crazy old man who thinks he can have what ever he wants 

I'd have thought a Viking coalition at least.

 

Saab Viggen v F-18 would be interesting.

[leicsmac]

1 minute ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

The headline part of this is that people are voting for Trump, not Republican ideals necessarily. Scary.

 

What the underwhelming Epstein files release means for Maga - BBC News

 

https://share.google/f0SFCKRwn5op7CDVG

 

Yeah, it's a cult of personality above all. 

 

That, however, is good in a way because it means that if you neutralise the cult leader(s), then you by and large neutralise the cult. 

 

Here's hoping that happens before too much damage is done. 

[Md9]

So Clinton’s team has come out and said to release all the files he has nothing to hide ( probably does but would rather take people down with him who knows) That will sh** all over maga again and now they had to release a message saying they have released more files but the ones about trump are untrue . 

[Zear0]

9 minutes ago, Md9 said:

So Clinton’s team has come out and said to release all the files he has nothing to hide ( probably does but would rather take people down with him who knows) That will sh** all over maga again and now they had to release a message saying they have released more files but the ones about trump are untrue . 

Fake news mate

[bovril]

Does anyone really care about the Epstein files? All seems a little frivolous. 

[Zear0]

3 minutes ago, bovril said:

Does anyone really care about the Epstein files? All seems a little frivolous. 

Not sure I'd describe covering up human trafficking and child abuse by the global elite and the lengths they're going to bury it as "frivolous".

[leicsmac]

Clinton: "I'm going to hell but I sure as shit am not going there by myself".

[bovril]

4 minutes ago, Zear0 said:

Not sure I'd describe covering up human trafficking and child abuse by the global elite and the lengths they're going to bury it as "frivolous".

Well yeah if you put it like that...

[Zear0]

15 minutes ago, bovril said:

Well yeah if you put it like that...

Which is obviously my main concern and not me being a nosey twat looking at salasious gossip... 

[Md9]

28 minutes ago, bovril said:

Does anyone really care about the Epstein files? All seems a little frivolous. 

There is some disgusting people that need locking up and they are just playing games like it doesn’t matter and using it to point score agains each other instead of actually doing anything about it 

[FoxesWalk]

Doesn’t imply any wrong doing? 🤣

[Parafox]

11 hours ago, leicsmac said:

Yeah, it's a cult of personality above all. 

 

That, however, is good in a way because it means that if you neutralise the cult leader(s), then you by and large neutralise the cult. 

 

Here's hoping that happens before too much damage is done. 

 

There's not one individual or group of brave and vocal dissidents that are going to stand up against him now (or in the future). 

 

There's no realistic challenge to him at all. 

 

And the worry is that, if/when he succumbs whilst in power, his VP will take over and be just as dictatorial and nasty. Vance has been chosen for that very reason.

[leicsmac]

10 minutes ago, Parafox said:

 

There's not one individual or group of brave and vocal dissidents that are going to stand up against him now (or in the future). 

 

There's no realistic challenge to him at all. 

 

And the worry is that, if/when he succumbs whilst in power, his VP will take over and be just as dictatorial and nasty. Vance has been chosen for that very reason.

I think that Vance would not inspire the same kind of perverse bullheaded loyalty, but I do see what you mean here. 

 

I guess that we'll find out in due course  I hope that you're wrong, but I fear you may not be.

[Parafox]

3 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

I think that Vance would not inspire the same kind of perverse bullheaded loyalty, but I do see what you mean here. 

 

I guess that we'll find out in due course  I hope that you're wrong, but I fear you may not be.

 

And I think you're correct in what you say about Vance, He hasn't the egotistical bullishness of Trump but he is a dedicated follower.

[danny.]

2 hours ago, bovril said:

Does anyone really care about the Epstein files? All seems a little frivolous. 

It’s absolutely huge because of who is involved. But just like the list of Westminster pedophiles in the 1980s it will be “lost” and never see the light of day. They certainly will never publish more than a load of blacked out papers. The people on there are extremely powerful and influential and they will protect themselves. 

[bovril]

3 hours ago, Zear0 said:

Not sure I'd describe covering up human trafficking and child abuse by the global elite and the lengths they're going to bury it as "frivolous".

 

2 hours ago, Md9 said:

There is some disgusting people that need locking up and they are just playing games like it doesn’t matter and using it to point score agains each other instead of actually doing anything about it 

 

20 minutes ago, danny. said:

It’s absolutely huge because of who is involved. But just like the list of Westminster pedophiles in the 1980s it will be “lost” and never see the light of day. They certainly will never publish more than a load of blacked out papers. The people on there are extremely powerful and influential and they will protect themselves. 

Ok you've convinced me