It is unfortunate. Sam Stone used to be one of the best posters on these boards, and when he sticks to specific topics unaffiliated with partisanship he can still be very good. But despite not even being American and certainly owing no political allegiance to the Republican party, he certainly acts with what appears to be an investment in partisanship in them. It goes as far back as 2008, when he rushed to defend Sarah Palin when it was obvious how stupid and ignorant she was, and only got worse from there.
He could’ve easily simply stuck to the specific issues and not tried to become a general defender of the Republican party even as they descended into hatred, chaos, and madness, but apparently he did. I haven’t spent much time in GD in the last few years nor seen him much, so I don’t know exactly how bad he’s gotten.
But I’d like to say, without malice, as someone who had some degree of personal interaction with him, as someone who used to be a fan, it’s very sad to see him form some sort of partisan allegiance to a morally and intellectually bankrupt movement. And even if he’s trying to (what he sees as) fight the echo chamber around here, posting in bad faith to “rile up the libs”, well, that’s what Republicans do, so that’s not a distinguishing feature that indicates that you are not going down their partisan rabbit hole.
I never had any respect or hope for people like Shodan and his ilk because it was clear they were always lacking in substance and good faith and intellect, so there’s no disappointment seeing how bad they can become, but with Sam, it’s disappointing.
Confirmation bias. I post a small fraction of what I used to in great debates and politics. I say plenty of bad things about Republicans in general and Trump in particular, but I’m guessing that just slides by, but when I say anything even remotely counter to the current arguments against Republicans or Trump, it gets noted - and reacted to with rage and insults.
You know, it’s possible to hold several ideas at the same time. For example, I can be glad that Trump didn’t start any wars, that there is a middle east peace deal, that China is finally being held to account for its own economic imperialism, that at least some justice reform has been passed, that he appointed good (from my perspective) judges that might hold the line against government encroachment on freedom, and I can even credit Trump with some of it.
At the same time, I can recognize that Trump is a lying, criminal, obnoxious asshole whose personal failings make him unfit for office.
Ar the same time, even though I might believe that on balance Biden may be better than Trump at this time, that Biden is a political mediocrity who has been on the wrong side of almost every issue, who creeps on women, plagairizes from others, lies, is corrupt, and may be going senile. But he is at least within the norms of political behaviour, and Trump is not.
Biden is no doubt a better person than Trump, but that’s a really low bar to clear.
I think McConnell and co already do whatever they think they can get away with. Further, a 6-3 GOP court, and a senate that is overwhelmingly tilted towards rural white people, are the death knell of pretty much any and every progressive priority, including (crucially) voting rights. So the way I see it is to do some things that are legal but may feel a bit uncomfortable to some, or abandon all hope of good health care for all, abortion rights, gay rights, law enforcement reform, decent treatment of migrants, etc., for 20 years or more.
I’ve never started a Pit thread for you before, and I’m pretty sure I never even considered it. Only this time, when you, for some reason, latched onto a Trump poop tweet conspiracy theory, did it seem warranted.
This isn’t the kind of thing you normally post. This was much worse. Why not just consider that maybe it was really dumb and you should learn something from the response you got?
I agree with you here, 100%. It would be stupid, politically, for Democrats to pull punches now. The Republicans and the majority of the right have demonstrated time and again that they won’t hesitate to lie, cheat, steal, use every trick in the book, and invent some new ones, to oppose progressive Democratic policies.
The fact that you haven’t seen me do that before should be a big clue that I DON’T regurgitate Ttump’s tweets.
As I said in the OP, this one seemed different because it seemed to be a thing that, if not true, would immediately backfire on him. The difference was that he didn’t say he was going to do something, he claimed that he had already done it.
Again, I wasn’t the only one fooled. For example, this came up in my Canadian news feed from the National Post:
Newsweek:
US News and World Report:
ABC News:
Those are just from the first page of my google search for “trump declassifies no redactions.”
So, are all those journalists right-wing nuts? It was a totally reasonable thing to think at the time, given the way he phrased his tweet. None of those outfits have a habit of reporting Trump tweets as fact.
Those journalists AFAICT were reporting what Trump said. Not reporting that Trump saying this indicated a likelihood that this was true and accurate and likely to hurt the Democrats somehow.
You, on the other hand, assumed that it was true and accurate, and there was a decent likelihood of there being something significant behind it that could hurt the Democrats. And on the third hand, we just took this as more random poop flinging and ignored it. We’re not journalists, and we don’t have to report on everything Trump says.
The thing is, you didn’t ‘just ask a question’ - you reacted with what appeared (and what you claim now to be) genuine surprise that people did not take Trump’s blustering at face value. And when people like me responded by looking at the actual evidence in your link, you smugly berated them for not ‘understanding’ Trump’s claim, and kept on arguing that it was not possible that Trump was lying, and seemed surprised that anyone would have the least skepticism about his claims.
@Sam_Stone, this isn’t a big deal. You were gullible and now you’re getting mocked for it. Why not just own it, that you were pretty dumb in that thread?
I don’t know why anyone here even still reads this guy’s posts. I’ve had him on ignore for months. He is a bad faith poster and ought to be left to whither among the trolls.
Why do you think this is? Do you think that the moderation of the SDMB is hostile to conservatives and drives them off? Do you think that the demographics of the boards have changed such that a new flood of leftists have come to flood the board and unthinkingly drive conservatives away? And for that matter, why would they be driven away now when they weren’t 15 or 20 years ago? They certainly had plenty of opposition to their ideas then. Is there some critical threshold where they can no longer keep spreading their good ideas and arguing their points?
Or - can I propose an alternate explanation?
Right wing politics has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. Trump would’ve been laughed off the debate stage of the Republican primaries in 2000 or 2004. The Republican party of the time was not insane, not dedicated solely to the destruction of the enemy, not willing to rewrite reality to fit their narrative to the same degree they are now. That took a lot of work, and a lot of planning. That took decades of Fox News, facebook memes, chain letters, lies to your grandma, outrage fed every day, hassling the media, all that. The radicalization was deliberate and thorough. Arguably the greatest psyops/marketing campaign of all time, really.
The Republicans knew they had a demographic problem, that they were on the way out in a few decades, and they had two choices: broaden their message to appeal to wider demographics, or lean hard into stirring their existing base up so that they could drive up as close to 100% of their base as possible to being motivated and politically active, as well as the normal assortment of dirty tricks like gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.
Obviously we know which one they chose. It was more compatible with their main agenda of plutocracy. And they were wildly, improbably successful at it. The people who are most emotionally invested in millionaires getting tax cuts are a bunch of rednecks who get food stamps because they make $15000 a year at walmart. What a mindfuck they’ve accomplished
Now - Obama becomes president and they kick it into high gear. Absolute insanity every fucking day from the right wing talking points network that every conservative received their marching orders from. Tan suits to terrorist fist bumps. “Our only priority is to make Obama a one term president”, descent into madness, getting more and more blatant with dog whistles, leaning into science denial and reality denial.
Politics has MASSIVELY changed at this point. The right wing is told that this is no longer a disagreement between decent people trying to find the best way to run the country, it is a battle of good and evil, a fight to sustain everything you know and love. The right wing talking point network has convinced everyone that absolute loyalty to the party and the message was the only way to save America from those democrats who were ruled by Satan to try to destroy it. Daily outrage from made up bullshit was their tactic to keep their base consistently engaged. And they had to keep stoking that rage - they couldn’t just keeping saying the same things over and over again. They had to one up themselves continually. It had to get progressively more extreme, more detached from reality, more malicious, more obviously in bad faith.
They stoked so much outrage that when Donald Trump came along and said the quiet part out loud, the base was primed to be ready for it. Do you remember how terrified some of the Republicans were during the “never-Trumper” phase? They thought "oh shit, we’ve stirred up all this below the surface rage about bullshit, and now here comes a guy who’s just going to say it out loud and put on display everything we’ve tried to imply and control with dog whistles. He’s gonna put it out there, and there’s gonna be a massive backlash over how hateful our message has been, and we’re going to be fucked’
But, hey, it worked. Either the American people are dumber and more hateful than anyone thought, or their propaganda plan was masterful and crafted that stupidity and hatred. Most of those never Trumpers did what was politically expedient: “Oh wait, that worked? He’s gonna win? That’s what we are now? Okay, well, I guess I’m on board”
The prime example of this attitude was Lindsay Graham, who correctly called out Trump for being a piece of shit and completely unsuitable and worried that he’d destroy the Republican party to becoming his biggest fucking lapdog when he was surprised to see the way the winds were blowing and Trump was going to pull it off.
What does a principled, intelligent conservative do in such an environment? Do they stick with their partisan affiliation and come on and try to make sense of the bullshit? Defend what “their guys” are doing so that the can rationalize and it and live with it?
Yes, by and large, that’s what they did. They desperately tried to defend the increasing insanity of the Republican party. They knew, on some level, that this was a corruption of their own integrity, but they had to fight those liberals, like they’ve always been doing, because they’re good soldiers. They valued their tribal identity over their personal morality or intelligence.
But they paid the price in cognitive dissonance. They had to defend more and more things that were wrong. Both morally and factually. They had to put a spin on things that were further and further outside of what they considered their identity. It became painful to try to put a positive spin on the insanity of the Republican party. They became less engaged, had a harder time putting their heart into it, posted less, argued less, started to disappear, to engage less publically.
This is what happened to Bricker, for example, and I suspect to some degree this is what has happened to you.
So, being an open discussion forum in which sanity and decency is valued, it became a hostile place to what the Republican party was becoming. This was not some sort of systematic bias, or injustice, or evidence of a liberal conspiracy. This is the natural outcome of an open, good-faith, intellectual discussion forum in the age in which conservatives overwhelmingly attach their partisan hitches to the Republican party, and the Republican party goes hateful and reality-denying as a tactic.
The SDMB is not the only place that has seen this sort of transition. On reddit, right wing politics were never dominant, but there used to be places where there was a relatively healthy back and forth. But now /r/politics as an example is entirely anti-Republican (I don’t want to say left wing, because that’s different). This was not by design, this was because there’s nothing to argue to defend the Republicans in good faith or good conscience or of sound logic anymore. You simply can’t hold your own ground when you’ve decided you’re going to defend bad faith actors who are hateful, malicious, or insane. Trumpists cannot withstand open, good faith debate.
So they retreated to their own echo chambers. /r/conservative on reddit now requires that you “prove you’re a reliable conservative” to enter the discussion there. Trump fan subreddits banned people the first time they had a post that was not North Korea-level praise for their leader. Even neutral posts that they thought might somehow be indirectly critical of the God Emporer got the posters banned.
There is no giant conspiracy, no massive demographic shift, no plan for the leftists to edge out conservative posters from message boards.
Part of being conservative is valuing your own in-groups vs out-groups. This is not a randomly assigned trait, equally spread throughout the population. If you have an “us” vs “them” mentality, you are far more likely to become conservative. I’m not saying that the attitude is exclusively conservative, so a counterexample does not prove me wrong, but it is very well established that this is a trait far more common in conservatives. And so they’ve rallied around their group identity even as their group changes to be the opposite of what good and decent and intelligent people stand for.
That’s why people are puzzled over you. People who have made being Republican for so long, who reflexively defend Republicans, are choosing their in-group partisan identity over their own personal sense of right. But you’re not even an American, so you certainly cannot be a Republican. And so it is puzzling and very sad that you’ve somehow fallen into giving them your partisan allegiance.
Oh, sure, you’ll say you’re not a Republican and you think Trump is shitty and all that - you certainly aren’t the most partisan Republican defender - but you always approach an issue from “how can I justify what the Republicans have done here” or “how can I prove the anti-Republicans wrong”, which is why you get caught trying to defend stupid, evil republican shit so much.
There was another route. You could simply not be partisan, not try to reflexively justify Republican policies, not reflectively disagree with anti-Republican policies, stick to the issues that you know, that you’re competent in, that you can morally support and feel good about supporting. You would’ve found receptive people if you said “I’m not going to try to defend Republican bullshit, but here’s why your liberal economic ideas are flawed” and stuck to positions that were justifiable, good faith, and intelligent. There is no obligation for you to provide “balance” on these boards by attempting to represent and defend the republican position. All it does is undermine your credibility and damage your reputation for when you do post something worthwhile.
Some of what you post makes me think that you can’t see this, even though it’s entirely obvious, which is bizarre to me. You are clearly very intelligent, and the transition of the Republican party in the last 12 years or so is not subtle, not at all. It is massive and unmistakeable and in your face. But you still act as though Republicans are somehow still the standard bearers for conservatism, and therefore your group. You still act as though they act in good faith and should be reflectively defended. You still act like you need to defend against the liberals and other anti-republicans even when you should know better. I have a hard time believing that you’re blind to what they’ve become, because it’s not at all hard to see. You’ve chosen on some level to side with them over your own principles.
We’ve spoken before outside the SDMB. I learned a lot from you when I was younger and more active on the boards. You know I’m not just some partisan liberal who is trying to attack you. I’m not saying this out of maliciousness. I genuinely hope to spark some introspection. I want you to take a step back and see what you’ve become, because I know you can be better than this.
The big difference is that the Republicans HAVEN’T cheated. They are certainly playing hardball, but appointing a judge in the last year of a Presidency has been done something like 16 times before. They are actually following precedent.
Packjng the court is on a whole other level. It would essentially destroy the legitimacy of the court, and i vite Republicans to do the same if they get back in power, which would further destroy the court.
If Democrats hold the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, packjng the court with partisans to essentially nullify it could trigger an uprising of states, a constitutional convention, or a civil war. It’s a step WAY beyond what either party has done before.
To do it, the Democrats would also lkkely have to abolish the legislative filibuster, which would result in massive swings in government policies every time the senate flippedvby one vote. It would raise the political stakes on every election, and make things much worse.
You criticize Trump for breaking norms, as you should. If you advocate packing the court, you’d be guilty of breaking norms Trump never dreamed of. You might as well set fire to the Constitution while you are at it. And prepare for what comes next, which will not be pretty.
Your concerns are unconvincing. Trump and McConnell already want to crush us by any means they can get away with. Using entirely legal means to fight those efforts seems entirely warranted to me.
Expanding the court has historical precedent. I know it will cause an imperial fuck-ton of Republican furor, but it’s not cheating or illegal if done lawfully.
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