I took it to mean “very intelligent”, which I could see octopus being stupid enough to think is an insult.
Or Nazis piloting Dodge Challengers into crowds of innocent Americans?
And hey, HD makes it to the Pit! Did you take a wrong turn somewhere, asshole?
Victoria Iphigenia-Cite.
HD is an even bigger asshole by omitting that that poster that suggested using the military to put people in reeducation camps was criticized by subsequent posters.
He really does think that nutpick arguments will fly.
I thought this not reading thing was an act. It’s clear based on the thread that it means village idiot. This is sad.
coffeecat is presumably aware that conservatives were once more prevalent on this message board. In the early 2000s gun control opponents even had the upper hand.
What happened is that conservatives had a policy and intellectual collapse and Trump moved into the vacuum. But recall that in the 2016 election, mainstream Republicans (eg Jeb!, Rubio, Kasich) consistently polled around 30% combined. That was a first. The GOP always had had outsider candidates, but together they never summed to a majority.
And on the ground conservatives were in trouble. Bloomberg columnist and economist Noah Smith notes that the main conceptual pillars of the Reagan coalition have been smashed: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/936399704207667200
[INDENT] 3/The three pillars of ideological conservatism, dating back at least to the 70s, were:
- laissez-faire economic policy, especially tax cuts and financial deregulation
- Christian conservatism
- muscular, proud nationalism in foreign policy
4/In the 00s, what happened to laissez-faire economic policy?
- Bush tax cuts didn’t boost the economy
- Financial deregulation caused a crisis
- The middle and working class got screwed
- The stock market didn’t even go up
- People lost much of their wealth
5/In the 00s, what happened to Christian conservatism?
- Gay marriage won popular acceptance
- America started to become much more secular
6/In the 00s, what happened to muscular, proud, nationalistic foreign policy?
- The pyrrhic victory of Iraq
- Massive loss of American prestige
- The quagmire of Afghanistan
- Rising disgust with foreign entanglements on both the right and the left
7/In the 00s, all three pillars of American conservatism were smashed all at once. But the people who voted for conservatives didn’t go away. And the sentiments that had made them vote for conservatives didn’t go away.
8/The American right became like the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, when its head was shot off - a rampaging, aimless monster.
9/The worst, most regressive elements of the right - the absolute dregs, the white supremacists and the nativists and the faux-populists - have risen to the top because there was just nothing else to take the helm. [/INDENT]
Article length treatment: Noahpinion: Trump happened because conservatism failed
Today, you can’t argue for foreign interventionism at work without looking like an idiot. Laissez faire economic policy is a joke. So what’s left is nativism and racialism, complaining about immigrants. It’s a toxic mix.
At any rate if you define conservatives as “Change skeptics”, they have been fully absorbed into the center and left in general and the Democratic Party in particular.
Who remains among self-described conservatives? If you define them as supporters of Donald Trump, one is reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s characterization of those who supported various puppet regimes in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe: [INDENT] The Trilemma: Of the three features—-personal honesty, sincere support of the regime, and intelligence—-it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive… [/INDENT] h/t Brad Delong who was discussing GWBush conservatism c. 2007, after failures in Iraq and the economy: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/a_proposed_peck.html
To that we must add the toxicity outlined earlier.
We still have a number of change skeptics on this message board. John Mace is the most obvious example, but others include (IMHO) Little Nemo, Stranger on A Train, and Monty. It’s just a lot less obvious under a modern conservative regime that makes a habit of shelling democratic norms. As for myself, I’m a fan of colliding all policy proposals with data and empirical observation. That’s part of what we do here.
Hey, I was stretching to give you props on anything, anything at all, but no, you just threw it all away, like a [del]desiccated corpse of a toddler after Hillary drinks its blood[/del] used tissue.
I’m not entirely clear on what you mean by “change skeptics”, but for myself I recognize the purpose of democracy and the institutions that support it isn’t that it is inherently less prone to corruption, or that you get better governance by popular vote, or any of the other standard justifications, but that in allowing everyone the chance to express themselves and participate in the process you make it inherently less likely that enough people will participate in a revolt or uprising because they have more to lose by doing so. This also means that if you want to make an effective change, you can’t just pass a law and declare by fiat that the sky is green, but have to gain a degree of social acceptance, and while this is unfair to people whose rights have and continue to be violated, it gives time for social mores to catch up and have some measured, rational criticism rather than just name-calling and trash-talking. Gay marriage is a good example of this; twenty years ago it wasn’t even in the political mainstream to even consider it, and it is unfair that so many people were denied the legal protection of lifelong romantic partnerships, but the public debate and discussion over it revealed how empty the criticisms of it actually were while the advantages—not just to homosexuals but to society at large—are pretty evident.
I think my views have become far more in line with progressivism, especially as I’ve observed how hollow and hypocritical to the extreme that many self-identified conservatives and libertarians actually are (which is no suprise since so many of them worship at the alter of Objectivism and Ayn Rand, who was a dispicable and hypocritical **** of a person as well as being one of the worst authors to be widely published). Where I break from progressives like Bernie Sanders is the lack of specificity in their proposals, and particularly in how to pay for them from public money that they often assume to be a bottomless purse. History is rife with examples—some of them very recent—with well-intended socioeconomic experiments that are poorly managed and result in economic devastation. On the other hand “fiscal conservatives” who whinge on over spending on basic health care or education but refuse to discuss campaign finance reform or ending massive military development programs with budgets larger than many other Cabinet-level departments are the apex of duplicity.
I’d like to see genuine conservatives express reasoned concerns and criticism in response to such proposals because there are large segments of the population who share those concerns and deserve to be heard. But what we have now in the GOP is partisan hackary, controlled by dark money and Fox News propaganda that isn’t even distantly related to reality. The Democrats—including the “liberal-progressive” wing of the party—have had their own problems with corruption and dishonesty, but it is nowhere as systematic in efforts to dismantle essential elements of democratic norms.
Stranger.
What can we do to rid ourselves of mansplaining, non-tipping, Trump defending Britons?
“When they came for the mansplaining, non-tipping, Trump defending Britons, I went out for pizza and beer”.
I actually do invite anyone who mentions that there are some good, intelligent conservative voices that we are missing to point them out. Surely they are saying this because they’ve seen them elsewhere online. So point them out.
Because I have not encountered them. And I do hang out in places where conservatives show up. I even get downvoted a bunch on Reddit by conservatives. But thats’ becasue none of them can make a decent argument and my skills are enough to overwhelm them. (And I’m not the best arguer.) I hang out on Philip DeFranco’s channel a lot, where a ton of conservatives hang out. It’s all talking points and garbage.
I’ve been into r/the_donald. I don’t respond, but I did go in to try and understand them. Not a single bit of intelligence there.
Honestly, I think we have the smartest conservatives here. At least, the smartest I’ve run into online.
Ha ha. Czarcasm is worth a hundred of you if you kept your mouth shut. Ten thousand of you with it open.
All the decent Republicans I know became Independents except for the ones who became Democrats. I know some decent people who voted for Trump and might even do it again, but they are as ignorant as dirt. They are kind, but stupid. If they had different people to tell them how to think, they’d think another way, because they are too intellectually lazy or incompetent to do any mental work independently.
You are one of my favorite posters and a serious guy, so I’m inclined to take you at your word.
But you say your views, “Have become” more in line with progressivism. I’d agree with that. But in my mind I’m running a counterfactual where, say, the GOP tacked back towards the center after Reagan, and Gingrichism never existed. Think about the Bushes before Reagan or Gerald Ford. Or hell, Richard Nixon who reigned over the establishment of the EPA.
I imagine that on Earth-2 you might be sympathetic to a party that was progressive like Teddy Roosevelt say, but wanted to reign in the excesses of Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders or other leftist enthusiasts.
(I have a different take, btw. Margaret Thatcher presided over a vastly more generous welfare state than the US had in Carter’s America. So we could go quite a bit further left without hitting serious efficiency problems. Quite a few Americans (solid majorities I think) would balk at the establishment of, say, a Scandinavian welfare state, and that’s a debate where I could have quite respectful disagreement. You get a vote, I get a vote, the guy down the street gets a vote and we’re good.)
This sounds a lot like wool-coat Republicanism, something I frankly have zero problem with. Mostly because it’s firmly rationalist.
Wool-coat Republicans went extinct long ago. Their successors were absorbed into the Democratic fold by Bill Clinton, who boasted of going over the budget, “Line by line and dime by dime.” Whatever the accuracy of that marketing claim, it speaks to the sort of coalition he was trying to lead.
Once again, I have to say I enjoy your cogent posts on all topics.
I read National Review in the '60s and early '70s. None of those people would support Trump and his racist rabble. WFB came out against the John Birch Society when that wasn’t all that easy to do.
The only one of that crowd left is George Will, and he quit over Trump, showing that while he might be wrong he still has some morals.
I’m not mad at all Trump voters - many got conned by a master conman. Anyone still supporting him after what has happened - the kissing of Putin’s ass, the corruption, the weakening of America, is a moron and unpatriotic.
How about Clothahump? His reasons, so to speak, for voting for Trump were: 1. He’s not Hillary; 2. He’s pro business; 3. He’s plainspoken.
You know, the problem is, there really were “decent” supporters of Adolf Hitler. By that I mean, friendly, congenial, God-fearing, person-loving, polite Deutschvolk. There were many followers of Adolf Hitler who wouldn’t have dreamt of setting fire to Jewish businesses or cheered as German soldiers rounded up victims and massacred them before burying them mass graves. Nazis - true Nazis - were a minority. They always were. Nazis came to power not because they were the majority, but because the majority were indifferent and tolerant of thuggery.
Kinda like you.
In the OP BPC mentioned dopers, so I figure Bone should contend as a reasonable, fair-minded slightly-right-of-centre type. One other one, which I’ll remember probably after the 5-minute edit window.
A sadly unanswerable question?
There is evidence against him: Professor Ford’s sworn testimony is evidence.
Whether that would be sufficient to result in a conviction is a different issue.