“She” didn’t lose. John McCain did. Palin would have had the same power as any other Vice President - almost none. And frankly, Kamala Harris is worse.
Ah, the old “science has been wrong before” meme. Which is total bullshit again. Most of the examples you cite, to the extent that they have any validity at all, are mainly an example of “some opinions” on a subject of uncertainty, and certainly not a broad consensus as with climate change. Yet conservatives (at least, American Republicans) have been pretty much unified on rejecting the latter despite the overwhelming evidence. Even granting the theoretical possibility where a broad scientific consensus may be wrong, it is certainly not going to be debunked by a bunch of conservative armchair analysts with no subject matter knowledge and a predisposition to believe nonsense when it’s convenient.
Thus demonstrating once again that you have no idea what you’re talking about, as @GIGObuster already pointed out. In the example that I mentioned, I presented evidence in detail, not just in one post, but in many lengthy posts over the course of months. There were some good-faith counterpoints and questions from the genuinely curious, and I addressed those. But mostly there was a torrent of scattershot attempts at refutation from the individual I originally mentioned and his Republican sidekicks, all of them derived from climate-denial websites, all of them wrong, and having so little coherence that some of them were actually mutually exclusive. There were also a few comments that my posts laying out the evidence for climate change were “too long to bother reading”. It was actually a spectacular example of the willful ignorance of the current generation of conservatives.
The truth is that the neo-conservatism that is Republican dogma has been losing its grip on reality and trending further and further away from any kind of fact-based belief. It used to be stuff like believing that cutting taxes on the rich will somehow increase government revenue and benefit the poor. And asserting that the “theory of evolution” was “only a theory” (misunderstanding what the word “theory” means in science) and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in school science classes. And of course climate change denial was always the mainstay of Republicans.
Today it has devolved into complete fact-free insanity: their orange-hued Great Leader lies with impunity every time he opens his mouth; the Capitol insurrectionists were mostly peaceful “tourists” (or else they were Democrat-supporting Antifa – Trumpists don’t care about consistency). And of course the 2020 election was “stolen” due to massive election fraud! And this is not just a fringe belief: lots of states – all Republican-led – have already passed draconian voter-suppression laws as a direct result. Republicans’ fact-free self-serving fantasies are now a direct assault on democracy itself. And most of them believe it was justified – despite the fact that virtually all of Trump’s election-fraud lawsuits – dozens and dozens of them – have been thrown out of court as completely without merit; despite the fact that there is clear evidence that it was Trump himself who tried numerous times to perpetrate what may well be criminal election fraud. Yet these morons still believe the election was “stolen” from Trump.
And these are the people to whom you feel I should “present evidence”, and thereby convince them of the facts about complex subjects like climate change through rational, evidence-based argument? 
You are either engaged in exactly the same deception and willful ignorance, or else you are a delusional moron.
The point, once again, is that Republicans, willfully or not, are strongly inclined to gravitate uncritically toward beliefs that support their pro-wealth pro-business agenda, and therefore (willfully or not) seem incapable of distinguishing reliable sources of information from garbage sources that happen to support their beliefs. To repeat what I said earlier but that you ignored, “It’s not hard, yet many Republican supporters and other right-wing types with a predisposition to disbelieve inconvenient truths are either too stupid to be able to make this distinction, or are exercising willful ignorance in failing to do so. As Upton Sinclair famously said, ‘it’s hard to convince a man to believe something when his salary [or his ideological world-view] depends on not believing it’.”
First time I hear that a Vice president would win even if the President loses… 
Of course I knew that, and besides being wrong about what I was thinking, you can only grasp at straws to keep going.
Worse at what?
You mentioned Tea Party Conservatives as “good Republicans”. Sarah Palin was a product/leader/example of that movement.
I brought her up to ridicule the idea that the tea party was any better than the current crop of idiots.
Obviously, Harris is much worse than Palin at being a deranged incoherent lunatic. I was going to add “far-right” to that description, but Palin is so incoherent that she basically defies any sort of political categorization.
BTW, I still remember having some discussions with right-wing nutjobs on another board (the same one with all the climate change deniers referenced previously) – this was back when McCain-Palin was the Republican ticket – who claimed that the reason that liberals were so hostile to Palin is that they were afraid of her! I think it was something about the combination of her mighty intellect and universally charismatic appeal, promising to make her an unstoppable political force, that caused liberals to quake in their boots!
As usual, perceptive and analytical conservatives, carefully and objectively assessing the evidence, totally nailed it! 
Your commitment to factually recounting history is impressive.
I WILL allow as to the thought of her being a heartbeat away from the presidency gave me the willies…
Fuck off you lying, racist, Qanon spouting piece of shit.
I was curious, so I looked it up. An author really did move in right next door while writing an unflattering book about her. What shitty behaviour.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/books/joe-mcginnisss-the-rogue-on-sarah-palin-review.html
Pro-tip: Lying is not a subject where “both sides” is a viable argument. Trump kinda broke that toy for you. You need to find some new Bullshit.
I also looked it up and the same author also wrote a unflattering book about Ted Kennedy which was widely panned by the mainstream media, including the Times and Washington Post. The author claimed in an interview that he was the victim of the liberal whatever.
It looks less like a liberal hack job on Palin than a bad author.
Yes, this is also a big problem. Black and white thinking where there are only two possible positions, and if you don’t agree with every aspect of one you must be secretly endorsing the other. I think this was also a factor in the lab-leak theory. People rejected the idea that Covid was an accidentally released bioweapon, which really was implausible, and treated anyone who made the much more plausible suggestion that it was a natural virus that escaped while being studied as if they were secretly supporting the bioweapon theory.
Cripto-deniers are mostly lukewarmers; crypto-deniers are the ones mostly coming from an already poisoned well, because in reality, they constantly avoid serious cost benefit analysis.
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/climate-mitigation-could-yield-trillions-economic-benefits#gs.7b8479
Failing to meet climate mitigation goals laid out in the U.N. Paris Agreement could cost the global economy tens of trillions of dollars over the next century, according to new Stanford research. The study, published May 23 in Nature , is one of the first to quantify the economic benefits of limiting global warming to levels set in the accord.
The agreement commits 195 countries to the goal of holding this century’s average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above levels in the pre-industrial era. It also includes an aspirational goal of pursuing an even more stringent target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. To date, the economic benefits of achieving these temperature targets have not been well understood.
Even before that, I cited in previous discussions to the work of a former economist that was president of an American Economist group and who won the Nobel Prize. Then, even the mild proposals made as a result of his research were seen by many contrarians as extreme. They willfully ignored how costly it will be to not deal with the issue properly. Now several economists and other researchers are noticing that Nordhaus missed a lot that points now to the need for bigger action to prevent worsening outcomes, like the Stanford research noted.
So, not “a reporter moved in next door to spy on her” then?
Yes, I remember that. I’d read McGinniss’s true crime book, Fatal Vision, years before that, so the story stuck in my head.
It was kind of creepy.
And, as I remember it (sorry, the Times story to which you link is paywalled), McGinniss was either the source of or simply repeated some fairly scurrilous stuff about Palin’s family. And I’ve always thought that the children of public officials, or celebrities (and Palin seems to prefer the celebrity life to a life of public service) should be off-limits.
And I think that’s true whether those children’s names are Palin or Obama or Trump (with some of the Trump offspring being a special case, since they were least influential in policy-making and in one case actual White House staff).
@wolfpup, sadly I’m totally lacking in psychic powers, and am therefore only able to reply to what you’ve actually written - which notably did not include any of the above,
And I apologise, but I really can’t summon the will to respond to yet another rant about how bad Republicans are. I get it: they’re terrible people, and I’m glad they live on a different continent to me, and if Americans could just stop spreading their retarded culture war to other countries, that would be great.
“Retarded”
Stay classy, there. Wow.
I had started a thread almost 2 years ago asking Dopers what they considered “good conservatism” to be (as far as the Dope was concerned.) Some replied that conservatism is fine as long as it’s based off of reasonable fact or logic. And others said things like, “Anyone who supports Trump is a bad person, period.” And then there was the usual debate about how classic old conservatism doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m not sure we’re any nearer a consensus today than then.
What do you think is good conservatism? And what’s bad conservatism?