I have revised my opinion. I used to think Sam_Stone brought value to the board; he has worked hard to convince me otherwise.
Yeah, yeah, fuck you and Hurricane_D’Anconia. You’re not debating in good faith and you know it.
We do need honest conservatives willing to make evidence-based arguments from a different political viewpoint. And we have had a number of them over the years. Sam has never been one of them.
You’ve presented no reason or evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop story is “a big deal”. You’re just falling for conservative clickbait, yet again. A laptop with emails on it is about as mundane a story as can be. Nothing in the emails has been shown to be remotely newsworthy.
No, that can’t be right.
~Max
The honest conservatives no longer call themselves conservatives.
I used to I hold some conservative viewpoints, and might once have identified as a “centrist” (as conservatives will often do). But birtherism (specifically, seeing birtherism become mainstream among conservative and so-called “centrists,” even if only in a “Just Asking Questions” sort of way) was the push I needed to begin actually evaluating the truth claims of conservatism. I mean, I never was on board with birtherism, and the schism it created led me to reevaluate my footing on a range of issues I had previously taken for granted (eg: abortion, health care, the death penalty, the prevalence and enduring legacy of systemic racism, etc, etc).
I like to think I am as honest conservative now as I ever can be. Which is… not one.
But there is no such thing as an honest conservative viewpoint anymore.
I get it, there are plenty of conservatives that have repudiated Donald Trump and want to go back to the days when conservativism meant low taxes, small government and big military. You find those conservatives in newspaper columns. You find them on cable news and social media. They’re everywhere. Everywhere except a couple of places, and that’s holding elected office and running the Republican Party machinery. You know, the places that matter.
The Republican Party no longer has an official platform other than “We are enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump’s America First agenda. Democrats suck!” They can’t, because it’s a prime edict of Trumpism to never put anything in writing. There is no good faith Republican policy anymore, everything is transactional.
Remember how, for years, Republicans wanted to guarantee corporations the same right of free speech as individuals, up to deciding that corporations were allowed to throw money at them as long as they yelled “free speech” while they were doing so?
Well, just yesterday they introduced a bill to make it illegal for corporations to “advance left wing social policy”.
Debating policy is only useful if both sides genuinely believe in the policies they advocate for. Otherwise, it’s as stupid and futile as an honest debate between Warren Buffet and Bernie Madoff on investment strategies. It can actually be harmful if it legitimizes a falsehood or criminal scheme.
Do you think anyone should be listening to “honest debates” over who won the 2020 election?
If you want to pretend it’s 2011 and start robust debates on tax policy or health care, go for it, I guess. But there’s no one in any position of power honestly advocating for those positions anymore, except maybe for fleeting moments when it serves their own agenda, so I really don’t see the point.
Well, it turns out that conservatism was never really in favor of those things. They only advocated them to the extent that it served the only real conservative value—maintenance of the status quo hierarchy.
And liberalism was never really against those things. Liberalism values policy that works, not any arbitrary adherence to abstract values regarding policy tools.
Yep companies can be communists and left wing now. As long as they were only advocating for lower taxes and lesser regulations Republicans, for lack of a better term, were fine with “free speech” for companies. The moment they started saying “people are people and they are all welcome to spend their money with us, oh and BTW insurrections are bad for business,” all of a sudden its a problem.
It’s been argued elsewhere that liberalism has now also triumphed in the marketplace. Big Business is recognizing that diversity within is as valuable as marketing products. Rubio’s bill is a tacit admission that conservatism has indeed lost another one of the Seven Pillars.
It’s willfully ignorant to believe that parties including liberal parties promote policy for any reason other than to achieve power.
Here in the US, sure, there is a cost benefit from appeasing the progressive mob. Where the stuff is made corporations are helping to empower the most murderous state in history.
Are you drunk?
Serious question. Those are not the statements of a stable mind.
What part do you think was crazy? That corporations pander to the most vocal group, or that the same corporations will look the other way while their goods are made with slave labor in China, the country that killed the most people in the 20th century? The Communist party is still in power there, and they are responsible for somewhere between 50 million and 70 million deaths.
I agree with Sam, The sooner corporations are outlawed and the means of production restored to the workers the better!
Yeah, that has worked so well in the past. Prepare for bread lines.
Are breadlines better or worse than enabling a regime that’s killed between 50 and 70 million people?
Stalin did pretty well in the mass murder department, not to mention his successors. I haven’t seen communism done at a large scale that didn’t lead to a form of dictatorship. Different paths, same outcome? I do think that the communists take responsibilities like food, income, housing, eduction, healthcare, childcare much more seriously than we do. Some sort of middle ground would be great - like, oh, the Nordics maybe. 
I think virtually everybody in the United States, right and left, all agree that the Chinese government sucks. So what’s your point?