Which wouldn’t have been necessary if every single Republican senator had refused to even consider the bill. That’s really message that every Democrat facing a Republican incumbent needs to hammer them on.
It was an awfully small one; from an awfully small hand…
Yeah, we call 'em ‘traders’ too; just with a harder ‘T’. I’m sure you’ll understand.
.
“Welcome to America. FUCK YOU!!!”
Small population maybe, but “small trading nation”? I don’t agree with that description. Canada is the second largest country, ranked 10th for GDP and command 2% of the world’s GDP. The GDP per capita is 24th out of 190.
And just because this is the pit…fuck, fuck, fuck…
I get someone is being called a traitor… Biden? Manchin? Thirty-seven million maple syrup swilling, beavertail chomping, hockey loving sauvages from wee little Canuckistan?
And just because this is the pit, your mother has a chancre on her nose.
Because you’re an asshole who TELLS us what’s wrong and we should do; the fact that your so-called positions and ideas are loathsome and evil is just icing on the cake. Shut the fuck up, you fucking smegma-eating moron. You’re so fucking clueless that even after you’re told something directly, you still don’t know it.
Well said. Far more eloquent than I cared to be at this hour.
Seriously.
Like I said: even when told something directly, he doesn’t know it.
Sam, if you’re “baffled” think about how shitty your communication skills must be, that you have given people this impression of you in all the years you’ve been here, and not the impression you wanted.
Prolly just gaslighting, tho.
It’s not that we think you don’t actually have any beliefs other than GOP talking points: for example, I just spent most of a long post pointing out why your shilling for the US conservative movement is at odds with a lot of your self-proclaimed principles, and you just spend about half of a long post proving me right about what you claim those principles to be.
It’s the contradiction between (most of) those theoretical principles and your credulity about US conservative propaganda that’s the irritating part.
No, you yourself are not a Trumpian or anti-vaxxer or climate-change denier or evangelical homophobe. Good for you, here’s a cookie.
But you are nonetheless incredibly, cluelessly credulous about so much of the other bullshit propaganda that is being spread around by the same conservative movement that’s also pitching all the conspiracy-theory lies that you claim to reject.
I mean, WTF dude: You can see with your own eyes that the US conservative movement is selling shit sandwiches and shit salad and shit pasta and shit pizza, but you decide just to take their word for it that the brownies and lasagna and potpies don’t have shit in them? How gullible can you get?
See, this is the exact sort of counter-factual idiocy I’m talking about. The liberals on this board and in the US aren’t Marxists, aren’t anything like Marxists, and are generally seeking a mixed-economy structure that’s well to the right of the systems in, say, Scandinavian countries, which are not exactly collectivist-tyranny hellholes.
I mean, you’re capable of detecting Republican mendacity about COVID protocols and climate change, for example, but you still fall for the lazy Republican doublethink about liberalism = Marxism?! It’s like your critical thinking ability has this randomly operated off switch that allows you to go on believing some forms of nonsense while rejecting others.
Same for all the “culture wars” bullshit about so-called “CRT” and “segregating college dorms”. For Ogsake, there have been multiple recent discussions debunking this hysterical fearmongering with actual facts, and you still go on mindlessly regurgitating it. You may smugly imagine that you’re not being influenced by “Republican talking points”, but dude, we can see that this is exactly the same bullshit.
No, as has been very clearly pointed out, the problem with you is that you are so often fighting on the side of malicious ignorance. Not just having opinions that a lot of other posters disagree with, but straight-up falling for conservative outright lies and propaganda.
And it’s especially annoying to have to keep fighting that credulous American conservative ignorance from a poster who isn’t even an American. Shit, dude, at least make up your own credulous conservative ignorance talking points to defend. We already have to deal with enough domestic versions of these ones without re-importing more of them from over the northern border.
You left off the part about how, every time his latest Gish Gallop has been thoroughly debunked, he simply ignores it, waits a suitable period and then repeats it as if nothing had happened. That’s not “having a different opinion”; that’s knowing what he’s posting is false and doing it anyway because it serves his agenda.
Conservatism once made some good economic points, but becoming a cult has repudiated its intellectual roots and sometimes reduced it to arguments of straw. The US is not communist by any measure. Identity politics can be taken too far - but the serious and widespread problems of genuine discrimination need to be discussed and dealt with fairly. Ignoring problems does not solve them.
Same here. I live here and I still haven’t figured it out. My thought is that since we elected a black man as president, that inspired all the loonies who used to stay in their hidden crawlspaces to emerge and run for office. If a black man can be president, anybody can.
The accounting firm I work for is international, and they have ties to Capitol Hill. Their reports differ from the headlines. Without needing to rely on sensationalism to get reads, they affirm that the craziness is an outlier, and bipartisan support does come through in matters of finance and economy.
So blame the media, I guess.
I agree that this is terrible; he should have had more confirmed:
I recall that in 2004, American Conservative magazine refused to endorse George W. Bush for re-election.
I don’t have an issue with conservatism. But the Republican Party has not been conservative in decades, and it baffles me why anybody who considers themselves to be conservative would still associate with the GOP - a party that spends wildly, refuses to invest in the nation, and instead spends its time engaged in reckless nation building (Afghanistan, Iraq), developing big government bureaucracy (Homeland Security, TSA, Space Force…) or trying to micromanage people’s lives (who you marry, what you ingest, what you learn, how you act…)
I’m reminded of Marxists (especially Trotskyists, of whom I once knew a fair number) in the past that defended the old U.S.S.R. as a ‘deformed worker’s state’. It wasn’t what they considered a good example of a communist worker’s paradise because of the pernicious effect of Stalinism. But it was still better than the capitalist West because at least they mouthed the right homilies about enlightened collectivism and theoretically at least it was farther along the path towards a better tomorrow.
Where do social conservatives go? The Republican party is still the bastion of social conservatism. Indeed it is arguably more the bastion of social conservatism than ever before because in the past the Republican leadership had a much larger business conservative lean that promised much to social conservatives but only occasionally delivered.
Economic conservatives? Well, you heard Sam above. While he is IMHO ridiculously hyperbolic with even passingly equating even the left-wing of the Democratic Party with collectivism and Marxism (I know from real Marxists - they utterly despise Democrats and “soft socialists” like Bernie Sanders), he’s not wrong that the DP is not exactly a bastion of Hayekian economic thought. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times from libertarian friends and acquaintances - “we’re moving in the right direction socially and Republicans can’t do much about it, so I always vote Republican because of economics.” Which I think is very wrong, but I get the logic.
Or at least I got it once upon a time. Most of my old libertarian friends have since abandoned the Republicans because, y’know, CT insanity.
But even if you disregard the low-information voters, it IS as real conundrum for informed but very conservative voters. It’s easy to say abandon the Republicans and build a new, saner conservative party. But even if possible (and it probably isn’t) that necessitates a tear-down, which means time in the political wilderness.Time out of power, when the side that holds values you abhor gets to run wild marrying dogs and cats in the street for however many years. For social conservatives in particular, fearful folk to begin with for the most part, that’s virtually a non-starter. For fearful 2nd Amendment nuts it’s scary. To the haters of the welfare state it’s terrifying.What if something they loath gets enacted and is too hard to reverse?
So they get stuck trying to think their way out of a box and hey, those low information voters don’t give a single shit about informed conservatives’ mental agonizing anyway. They’re not gonna go along with reforming jack-shit. So best to just put your head down and go with a good old traditional value - loyalty to the Party.
It’s fucked up and those people are wrong, but I get the existential crisis at play.
The truth is that economic views in a more libertarian direction than the moderate side of the Democratic party are not nearly as popular or influential as people think.
The thing libertarians get when they vote Republican at least on the federal level is a government that taxes the rich less for some social programs and has less regulations on the fringes in some realms like the environment or financial fraud, generally in the context of industries that generally receive a ton of support from the federal government on a bipartisan basis. And libertarians can’t be dumb enough not to realize these points of agreements are much more based on corporate influence in the GOP than any actual ideology.
The idea of the GOP being an economic libertarian party during and after Reagan has basically been a failure. I think you could argue that “starving the beast” (i.e. cutting taxes but spending like crazy as a libertarian position because it would eventually force the government to shrink) was a reasonable position in Reagan’s time, but now it’s pretty clearly backfired (if that ever was really the motivation for those policies).
It seems to me like libertarians just don’t want to accept that they are already in the wilderness.
People like the idea of small government. I think you could make a fair argument that in theory, many on the left wing seek less governmental interference in social affairs, and many of those on the right wing seek less government interference in economic affairs.
However, in practice, people still seek advantages to win elections and at business. Everyone wants to prosper and succeed. Some hope to do this at the expense of others rather than at a societal level. Things are not zero sum but some disagree.
For all this handwringing and hysteria, precious little of it matters. The younger generation is already largely convinced of the values of LGBQT rights and against discrimination and they are the future. With regard to the former, self identified Democrats and Reps under the age of thirty differ on support of the issue by a scant 12%. Young Republicans are not Old Conservatives and do not have the same values on the importance of the climate either. They certainly view discrimination and free speech differently, and in fairness people often grow a little more Conservative as they age.
After all, they are the ones who also will feel the effects of future pandemics and climate issues as they turn out, regardless of whatever one might wish. This is not an argument for a specific view or action - but the demographics will speak eventually.
Not to say they aren’t important but I think LGBT issues are a bit of a red herring. I think immigration and racial issues are wars that could legitimately be won by social conservatives in America.
Even separating some of the specific things in America - like the GOP embrace of anti-immigrant views and the possibility of further democratic erosion, eco-nationalism is almost guaranteed to come as a response to climate change.
Fair enough; it was the statistic I remembered from a very recent article showing the difference on many issues between younger cohorts of both parties. Other differences are bigger but not always by much.
TL; DR: Young people in general are concerned by climate and widening rights. This does not change how many think nor the real risks of increasing social conservatism. Biden is at risk of further struggle in the midterms and needs to get something big passed somehow. He has several months.
As said before, if you were a hive-parrot you’d get no grief. Their nativist ire is because you don’t conform to the group think.
Absolutely brilliant masterstroke of a Da Vinci Code post, Octo.
You cracked it! Got right to the bottom of everything in one, concise, fell swoop of undiluted awesome. ::fapping::