I don't think you understand how much I hate the Grand Old Party

The BBQ Pit
1

I don’t really hate individual Republicans as a rule. I don’t hate Bricker, I don’t hate Richard Lugar. I hate what the sadly misnamed “conservative movement” has done to people who are trying to be rational and law-abiding.

And a lot of it boils down to the failure to recognize that conservation of our society’s resources and capacities is the primary requirement of responsible government. I can allow that most of the people voting against sustainability laws are ignorant & misled; but I have come to believe that there is a terrifying evil at work in the leadership, not just avarice, but something darker & nihilistic the nature of which I can only guess at.

The day before. What’s the point of power if you can’t suck all the marrow out of life & see the last beautiful day, & then see the horror of a world with air unbreathable & die from CO[sub]2[/sub] toxicity knowing that there was nothing left for you to miss? You really don’t get extreme egomania if you think they intend the world to endure one second longer than themselves.

OK, I don’t know that. But that’s one possible explanation, and if I could find someone with the power, I could speculate he does think that way. But the GOP is a beast with multiple heads, & it’s hard to pin down.

Not that most GOP pols think that way, they’re usually pretty ordinary blokes who’d like to leave something to their children. They just believe what the think tanks tell them. I don’t know how the think tanks got that way.

This. I left the GOP in 2004 when I realized that they were lawless fascist fools. I wanted a realignment that hasn’t come and isn’t coming.

I think I’ll start a Jacobin party. Our platform involves disenfranchisement of anyone who is demonstrably an anti-conservation nut. Maybe with ordnance.

This is how bad I hate the party. And I was raised a Reagan Republican. “My party” is selling the world out for–what? It isn’t future wealth, that’s for sure. Pollution, mass extinctions, mass displacement of peoples with climate change, the impoverishment of the proles, no, there’s a point where it seems like they are choosing evil not for personal gain but from some misguided belief that they must.

I am coming again to believe the devil does exist.

2

Will you be taking donations? Of ordnance?

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It’s pretty hard to underestimate the level of hatred towards the GOP in general on this message board, or with specific posters such as the OP. I don’t think there are many people who don’t understand how much the OP hates the GOP. :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

4

I don’t really hate Democrats, they just have different political positions than me.

What I hate are Straight Dope style Democrats such as yourself who believe politics is about righteous causes and the opponents can only be motivated by evil.

Also, talking about CO[sub]2[/sub] toxicity makes you sound like a fucking idiot.

5

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the OP for taking such a bold position on this board of all places. You are a brave person, and I tip my hat to you.

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I agree with almost all of what you say, foolsguinea.

I wouldn’t change a word, though for any sober discussion of point bb, you’ll need GD, not BBQ.

But sure enough. In only ten minutes the post is misconstrued:

It sounds like septi, martin, and foolsg agree on [dd] (with the obvious Dem <–> GOP substitution).

But [ee] seems a big misconstruction. I’d say that most voters, commentators, and – yes – even many or most politicans are sincere. When one considers big funders, fund raisers, lobbyist mongers, and party leaders, there will surely be some evil of various sorts, on both Dem and GOP sides. foolsg was careful to agree that most voters, of either Party are not motivated by evil.

And BTW, in over 76.2% of the allegedly “evil” motivations, “greedy” would be a better choice of adjective.

As to righteous causes, to discuss them would be hijack OP’s thread. Hell, this is BBQ Pit and AFAIK hijacking is permitted: Do you support any righteous causes, Martin?

7

OP, it must be horrible being you. The pessimism and thinking the worst of your fellow man has to grind you down every day.

I’m genuinely sorry.

8

I consider myself to be a Burkian, philosophical, or a true conservative in that I am pessimistic about human nature and human potential, I am skeptical of the value of untested social theories, and distrustful of rapid changes in any direction.

Nevertheless, I find that it is the Republican Party that is the most susceptible to irrational enthusiasms for economic theories that are obviously bizarre. The most obvious of these is the notion that tax cuts generate more economic growth and even tax revenue than tax increases. No amount of contrary experience convinces Republicans that this is a delusion.

Another example is Republican enthusiasm for a national sales tax. We hear much of how much economic growth it would generate. The only thing we can be reasonably confident of is that it would be regressive.

The “conservatism” of most Republicans does not seem to extend beyond a hatred for taxes, gun control laws, and the government. This is why I very seldom vote Republican.

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I disagree. Does that make me evil? Do you know why I disagree? Or do you care?

So, those who do not agree with you are either ignorant and misled or pure evil. Yeah, I can see why you’d hate those kinds of people. Of course, this assumes that every one who disagrees with you is ignorant or evil. Maybe, just maybe, there are principled reasons to disagree with your views.

Na, that could never happen :smack:

Ah, so now it is the think tanks that cause all the republicans to be evil. Gotcha.

And I assume you get to decide who the nuts are, correct? So much for freedom.

Of course, if you do not understand that stance of those you disagree with the only possible response is hate. Because you will make up all kinds of reasons they disagree with you. Those reasons will likely make you look good and make them look evil.

For the record, I don’t much like the republicans either. I like the democrats even less*. As far as I can tell the political environment in the U.S. is such that principled, honest and trustworthy people never have a chance to get anywhere in either party.

So the nut jobs on both sides run further away from the middle and more hate is generated.

Slee

*Though the christian conservatives are by far my least favorite folks out there…

10

Well, you don’t not much on the CO2 issue too, that’s for sure. There is BTW a level were CO2 is declared toxic, but we are talking about 10,000 Parts Per Million and those levels are a concern if we are talking about being in enclosed locations.

http://www.inspectapedia.com/hazmat/CO2gashaz.htm

The current levels in the atmosphere for CO2 are 392.40ppm way too low to make us curl up and die now, but that is not the reason why we should worry.

**That **is the reason why one should have contempt for the current GOP, almost all have decided now to not only ignore the science, not a big problem there, the big problem is when they make legislative moves to actively deny that there is a problem.

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/154445-house-votes-down-climate-science-amendment

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It is?

12

First, labeling each point of someone’s post with notations such as [aa], [bb], [cc] etc is the most pointless, annoying, stupid thing I have ever seen. I have seen much posting behavior that annoys me on these boards. Some individuals feel the need to respond to a long post with 20+ quotations of the long post instead of simply composing an answer, that I find annoying.

Some people quote the entire text of a long post when the content of their post makes it obvious to what they are responding, that I find annoying.

This is a whole other level, and honestly if you do it with one of my posts again I’ll not respond to anything else you say in this thread because of its stupid and pointless nature.

Now, to the point of your post. I will correct myself, you are right that the OP does not believe the only motivation for her opponents to be evil. I will thus amend my statement and say that the OP believes all Republicans are either evil (if they’re the leadership) or stupid sheep (all other Republicans.)

What I especially love is that idiots like the OP have taken a genuine concern such as concern over the future of the environment and has run away with it. It is now the primary concern of humanity? Bullshit. We have much more immediate concerns. Additionally, protecting natural resources does not trump say, protecting the liberty of the citizenry. Without a free society the environment is actually far more exposed to abuse because the government will treat the environment essentially based on whim. With a free society if you convince a majority that the environment should be a major priority, it will become one. The reality is we do engage in some unfortunate pollution, it is causing some small levels of warming and actually many other problems that don’t get near the attention of AGW and are probably more damaging to human beings. The other reality is there is no chance whatsoever our current behavior is going to destroy the entire planet, kill all life on earth, turn the planet into Venus, cause the entire atmosphere to boil away or anything like that. Talk of the world not existing even a second after the death of [insert GOP leader here] is foolish. No person with meaningful knowledge of the subject can possibly believe there is any chance of such an apocalypse in the lifetimes of anyone on these boards or even the lifetime of anyone on these board’s grand children.

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Of course we do, but it is really dumb to act like if it will never become an immediate concern.

Not when the information the people gets is manipulated by professional doubters.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40652.html

Of course the OP is indeed in alarmist mode, and what he is saying is discredited by the science, however, assuming that the risk is low is also a mistake.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40652.html

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It must be awful to be a [del]liberal[/del] [del] whiny bitch [/del] progressive. You are so much sadder than conservatives, and you complain all the time (Exh A being the number of pit threads and their subjects).

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I wish we could just dig up Dwight Eisenhower, stick a couple bolts in his neck, winch him up to the roof, and wait for the lightning.
I would totally vote for FrankenIke.

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I agree, but we aren’t talking about what will become immediate concerns but what are immediate concerns.

A worker will most likely retire some day. Having enough money so that they can support themselves while not working during retirement is an important concern they should address throughout their lifetime, but is not an immediate concern. Keeping the utilities in their home running, buying groceries, vehicle repair etc are immediate concerns.

Just like our situation, the worker’s retirement concerns will eventually become immediate. So he should deal with it throughout his life, but he can’t do so at the cost of not dealing with his immediate concerns.

Risk of what? All I’m saying is the risk of the entire population of the Earth being wiped out by CO[sub]2[/sub] toxicity any time in the next oh, say, few hundred years, is essentially zero. In fact, without knowing very much about the science, I actually wonder if such a thing could even happen at all without some sort of insane external event, and I would additionally wonder if the Earth could get to such a state that it was uninhabitable because of CO[sub]2[/sub] toxicity without some other lethal condition having already wiped out the population. I don’t know the answer but I would wager if the Earth got to the point that the air was toxic because of too much carbon dioxide humans would have probably already died from other things long before then since anything leading to such a situation would create many more terrible things prior to that point.

I also additionally said the risk of all the Earth’s life being destroyed by runaway global warming, the atmosphere boiling off and etc are essentially zero over the next few hundred years. To be honest if you held a gun to me and made me speculate further I’d be comfortable speculating much farther out than that on those things, but I’ll keep it to a few hundred years since the framing of the OP was much more immediate in time frame, just based on the wording (such as talking about how GOP politicians don’t care about anything that happens the day after they die–it suggests there is some real possibility of the Earth’s population being wiped out in the time frame of current politician’s personal life times.)

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Funny, it’s almost like our world sucks because of you.

Imagine someone saying, “It must be awful to be a liberal whiny bitch abolitionist. You are so much sadder than conservatives, and you complain all the time.”

Yeah. You I don’t like. Die.

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I know that general atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] toxicity is not an imminent threat. I didn’t say it was.

I was talking about the sort of psyche it takes to, in Try2B Comprehensive’s words, feels, “that a world which becomes uninabitable they day after these guys die is okay with them.”

I was speaking of what kind of mind it takes to want that, & how different radical selfishness on a diabolic level really is. And I stepped back and admitted it was imaginary.

Of course, the GOP won’t live that long. The displaced nations whose lands were drowned and droughted by global climate change will start mass migrations, which will lead to war, & in the horror to come, few will be able or willing to save a Park Avenue asshole with no sense of noblesse oblige.

So spare me the posturing that, “Oh, no, the world isn’t being destroyed that way.” Yeah? And in what way is the world being destroyed that the GOP is remotely trying to stop?

Madame Guillotine, she comes for you.

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As for liberty being more important than the environment, tell me this: Whom exactly is it supposed to console, in the refugee crisis once the sea drinks Bangladesh, that the citizens of a rich Western power had a freer market?

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i was obviously talking about political, not economic, freedom. Are you stupid or just incapable of reading?