Ha! What a shock. Eh, @Sam_Stone?
Great post wolfpup, I only have to add that it was funny that when nuclear should be looked at (and it should BTW), a nuclear power plant in New England was being shut down because the energy company that managed found that natural gas was more economical than running the nuclear plant.
This happens because there is no carbon tax or cap-n-trade in place that would had made the nuclear plant to be still economically viable. But, because right wingers see those solutions as tools of the devil they are not in place to prevent such shortsighted moves by private industry. IIRC Sam did not participate on the thread were the right wing was trying to blame leftists for that nuclear pant closure. The funny thing was that Sam was in favor of a carbon tax if it led to a switch to Natural Gas power plants instead of Coal. Too bad that the Republicans in congress that he supports did oppose the tax that should had been geared to give incentives to keep nuclear plants going.
On the old board in response to the tired conservative trope that the left is against nuclear power I created a poll that asked people’s stance on it. I can’t see the poll anymore (can anybody?), but the majority response was that people supported regulated nuclear power. So either the trope is wrong (which is what I believe) or this board does not lean left (possible I suppose), but either way Sam is wrong with at least one assumption.
This whole thread and it’s genesis disturbs me. Sam was one of the more intelligent conservative posters on this board and it now clear to me that he has gone completely off the rails. The same is true with many of my conservative friends and acquaintances in real life; they believe completely crazy things and seem to be completely radicalized. My neighbors (who are otherwise nice, normal people) called Hillary Clinton “Killary” and constantly talked about Seth Rich. My well educated uncles (a civil engineer and lawyer) argued with me about Climate Change being a conspiracy of the vast majority of the world’s scientists (who all happen to be liberal???) . For the record, I am an instrument scientist that has spent the last 10 years of my career building instruments for NASA to study solar weather both at Earth and Mars. My cousin just posted something to facebook claiming that Obama executed the seal team that killed Bin Laden; I have no idea what that is about and am not about to dig further. Another neighbor, a veteran, when asked what he thought about the Russians reportedly paying bounties on American soldiers went off on a tear about what a great President Trump is and talked about Veterans Choice (a law passed by Obama). Don’t even get me started on QAnon; there are several people in my neighborhood that believe that garbage. The list goes on and on. These are not outliers, this is ubiquitous with every conservative I discuss politics with.
I am constantly trying to understand what happened. I relate to a lot of what conservative espouse. Not only that, but I relate to it due to discussions I have had with smart people like Sam. I can see how regulations can lead to perverse incentives (note: the tragedy of the commons still exists). I can see how capitalism leads to greater wealth for a society and is the best system in history for the reduction of poverty (but I believe poorly regulated capitalism leads to monopolies, capture of the government, and rife inequality). I am pro-gun because I believe that citizens need to be able to defend themselves (both from criminals and the government/police). But conservatives no longer talk about these things. They just talk about how the centrist Biden is a communist and crook (but Trump is draining the swamp!!!), Obama is a Muslim terrorist, and Hillary Clinton is a murdering pedophile. It is fucking whack-a-do and I just don’t know what we can do about. What happened Sam? Have you stood back and really looked at the shit you are believing these days? Have you ever really examined your sources of information? I agree we live in the time of Fake News and it is easy for me to see stories that are trying to rile me up with fear and hatred of conservatives, but the shit that the right wing media shovels seems to me to be SOOOO MUCH WORSE. Do you ever question your narrative Sam?
I spent many family vacations in Sarnia! And had fresh french fries with vinegar below the Bluewater Bridge!
Another story with the same theme:
Yesterday I watched a guy who identified as someone on the right. He contracted Covid and spread it to six of his immediate family members. They spread it to 14 others, 2 of whom had subsequently died. When asked why he did not take the necessary precautions, he seemed contrite but at the same time continued to insist that he did not trust the media to give him the correct information. The interviewer (CNN), said that they have been consistent in providing the most current medical and scientific data available and mask wearing and social distancing has been at the core of all the information provided since the beginning of the pandemic. Nevertheless, the guy kept insisting that the media could not be trusted to provide him with good information because it’s become so polarized. I can only assume that by "polarized’ he must mean that some media is telling him factual things he does not want to hear or believe, while media more aligned with his political views has caused him to contract, spread and kill some of his own family members. So he’s having to reconcile that but just can’t bring himself to believe sources he believes to be left wing media.
None of these things are actually non-liberal or anti-liberal positions. Liberals aren’t in favor of all regulations regardless of consequence; they’re in favor of rational regulations that achieve benefits. Liberals aren’t in favor of a command or statist economy; they’re in favor of measures that mitigate the negative consequences of capitalism.
Those issues were conservative issues for a time not because they had anything to do with conservatism, but because they served as cover for the only true conservative agendum: Maintenance of the status quo hierarchy. The same goes for reproductive rights.
To the extent that an issue can be used to achieve and maintain power for the (white, heterosexual, cisgender Christian male) ascendancy, it will be used. When it becomes unnecessary or a liability it will be discarded. That’s why conservatives don’t care about budget deficits or national debt when they’re in power. That’s why they don’t enact legislation that benefits people serving in the armed forces or the 9/11 first responders. That’s why they howl that their own health care plan is a socialist nightmare.
It’s not today’s conservatives that are the problem. The problem is conservatism itself. All rational balancing of policy questions can be adequately handled within the liberal mindset. Liberalism’s one true crime in conservatism’s eyes is insufficient respect for maintaining the privileges of the privileged.
This.
The whole thing goes far beyond Sam believing a Trump Tweet. He believed that this Tweet meant that documents that showed that Russian interference and collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign were invented by Hillary Clinton. He believed this in spite of a mountain of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
He believed that arrests of senior Obama administration officials over this matter was going to be Trump’s October surprise. This Qanon type thinking. Next step is shooting up a pizza place.
Believing Trump’s Tweet was just the cherry on top of an enormous bullshit sundae of Sam’s own construction.
I’ve heard of QAnon in relation to Trumpists who wear big Q’s and such, but I never knew anything about them until Youtuber Folding Ideas dedicated the 2nd part of his Flat Earther video to them a month ago and… wow. Just wow. (BTW click link here and here for great video of the Albertan Rocky Mountains)
It’s a nexus of political grifters to the mentally unstable to the religiously fanatical to the violently impressionable/gullible to the extreme right-wing LARPers to real life elected politicians who opportunistically exploit these people.
Trump, the man who started his political career on the conspiracy of Obama not being an American, ran his presidential campaign on threatening to imprison Hillary on unspecified charges, administers daily conspirator attacks on the Press, lies every second on every issue as to be incomprehensibly vague and incoherent, scapegoats/attacks public health officials on every (in)action he makes, drops coded conspiracy (“deep state”) messages in his speeches, he actively lies/cultivates/triggers conspiratorial events so that dedicated supporters (like @Sam_Stone did now) can flood daily political discussion with pointless manicured scandals like with this declassification event, Trump writes and retweets straight garbage and lies that threatens the lives of real people and misleads millions.
Trump is no longer the problem as I do think Americans won’t re-elect him, but he has been enabled and allowed to do so much damage and havoc that I feel a serious cognitive reckoning must be undertaken with the way politics are run and manipulated in the US. Another Trump is just one election away. It happened, so yes it could happen again (and much worse).
Thanks for this, @SenorBeef - I hope @Sam_Stone will read this post along with @RickJay’s and @Northern_Piper’s posts about how the Republicans have changed over the years. I would have described myself as a right-leaning centrist a decade ago, but I see very little worth defending in the current Republican party and am disappointed to see Sam go to bat for them to the extent that he does, as I also have valued his conservative viewpoint immensely throughout the years (mostly lurking) on these boards.
Yes, exactly! That is my problem. It is not just one data point, but the whole shit sundae that is the problem. It does not matter how many times you show them the mountains of evidence and documents on these subjects (Climate Change, Russia gate, Benghazi, COVID-19, veterans choice, the Ukraine fiasco, etc…) they don’t give a shit. My veteran neighbor still contends that Veteran’s choice is due to Trump even though I proved to him that Obama signed the bill. I have another friend who was crowing about how low their taxes were due to the Trump cuts. This was at a BBQ sometime around April 2018 and he was talking about the reduction of taxes he was seeing in his 2017 taxes. I proved to him that the cuts had not gone into effect yet and he would not see a tax decrease until he filed his 2018 taxes. Later at the same BBQ I overheard him crowing someone else how low his 2017 taxes were due to the Trump tax cuts. It was insane. By the way, the guy is not well off and probably gets a bunch of government assistance. He was in section 8 housing at one time, don’t know if he was them.
The whole shit sundae… When I was younger, I always thought the Republican party was the party of rationality, science, evidence, etc… I don’t remember why I believed that because I can’s see any evidence of it being true. Ever.
Do you need help?
One minute read time. One topic read. You must be very unfortunate to have coincidentally wandered into this thread. I look forward to your contributions to this board.
A person of few words.
A quick google turns up that Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Spain, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden all have (well, had as of 2018) nuclear power plants. It seems odd that all of the ‘socialist’ countries would have nuclear power plants if opposition was that strong of a left-right thing.
The voting base of the Republican party hasn’t changed though. The immovable, scared, willfully ignorant 40% of voters who still support Trump voted for Bush Jr., Bush, Reagan, etc. It’s not like it’s a huge movement of youth energized a shift of the Republican party. The things we see now (party over country, barely contained hatred for libs, large streaks of white supremacy, voter suppression as a major part of their platform) were always there. It’s the 10% of the party that is more moderate (who almost all call themselves fiscal conservatives) that has lied to themselves for decades about what the Republican party truly is.
Think of it as black mold. These things have always been a part of the Republican party (since the Southern Strategy at least), it’s just that now the drywall has fallen and we’re seeing it for ourselves.
Recent US data for those interested:
The public, however, is evenly divided over whether to expand nuclear power (49% on each side).
[…]
More Republicans (59%) than Democrats (41%) support expanding nuclear power plants; support for nuclear power is stronger among conservative Republicans (63%) than among moderate or liberal Republicans (51%).
There are real differences, but it’s not a strongly binary issue.
I think it’s just a left vs right thing in Canada and the United States. We used to have a lot of very visible opposition to nuclear power in Canada, but I imagine people finally switched off of it because of more visible problems like acid rain, air pollution, and climate change.
Basically, it’s that you have environemental groups that are against nuclear. They kinda piss me off, as any speech that contains global climate change needs to include nuclear, IMHO.
However, these groups do exist, and they want a reduction in use of power, a reduction in our footprint overall in the world, even a reduction in population.
And these groups are on the left, as they certainly are not going to find any sympathy from the right.
The real problem with nuclear is that it is expensive, and will require a large investment from the government in designing and building new generations of plants. That investment is what conservatives are against, and they can point across the aisle and over our heads to try to place the blame for their own inaction.
Taxing carbon emissions is also another thing that would make nuclear far more viable, but that is also something that the Republicans are dead set against.
Not necessarily:
That’s just polling the general public. When it comes to R congress critters actually voting for meaningful policies, YMMV.