What.
I find that Clothahump is most intellectually honest conservative on the SDMB, and excellent example of America’s conservatives today and never fails to inspire my laughter. (I find a lot of what Bricker, who is smarter, does is intellectually not so honest and to be trolling.) I give Clothahump the Five Adaher award.
As for Obama, Jon Stewart gave him a wonderful raking over the coals last night for prosecuting more whistle blowers under the 1917 espionage act than all previous administrations combined. And I agree with Jon Stewart on this matter.
Heh.
I’m going to engage seriously with you on this subject.
There aren’t a whole lot of conservative posters on this board, but let me call out a few who I believe are well-informed, articulate, and insightful. To name just a few, Bricker is a seriously smart dude. adaher certainly meets all three criteria (but I’ve often criticized him for being a very lazy debater). There’s others I could name, but I have no intention of turning this into a “but I have black friends too!” type of post.
You just don’t meet any of those three criteria. When you post on political topics, its as if you rip the headlines off the New York Post and expand a little in your own words. You can’t be well-informed if you give every appearance of only seeking news from rather shitty sources: it isn’t even like you’re ripping off the WSJ editorial page, for example.
You aren’t articulate. You don’t put forward a convincing case on any current events topic. It’s just blather. Correctly spelling “I can’t believe Obama is so stupid” is not being articulate.
And finally, you don’t have any interesting insights on current events. There has never been a single post (and I’m excepting your posts on martial arts, which is the only other subject I tend to notice you posting on) you’ve written that has made me stop and think for even a second. Like I said, your political commentary seems to consist of taking a half-baked partisan news story and adding a few rhetorical flourishes. Shit, even Magiver, who has gone way off the deep end of thinking he’s an expert in Special Operations raid techniques because he works in the shipping industry, applies more creative thinking to subjects than you do.
Let me conclude by saying that I know it is common for members here to dogpile on conservative posters. In your case, you are not a victim. Your posts on political subjects aren’t being ridiculed because of your views on Obama, they are ridiculed because they are very poorly thought out.
To put it another way, let’s say a six year old girl takes a bunch of fingerpaint and dumps it on a canvas, and then tries to sell her art for $15,000. People laugh at her. Do you suppose that people are laughing because she has no talent, or because she’s a girl and being subject to gender-based discrimination?
In this thread, you are the six year old girl.
Oh that’s real fucking mature.
No, it’s actually true.
How much do you think it will make energy cheaper? Not much if at all.
If Canada is likely to get their oil here anyway, the impact on jobs would be minimal. In fact, how about the truckers and rail personnel that would lose their jobs to the pipeline?
Unless there is a tech breakthrough, yes, we likely will use up all the oil on Earth. Making it take longer is a good idea though, since the Earth sequesters carbon.
To sum up: 35 jobs. Minimal or no effect on energy prices.
Aren’t you the hysterical twat that thinks his layperson’s ignorance is as good as a PhD?
35 Jobs. You’re being manipulated by, and lied to, by people who think you’re nothing more than a gullible ignoramus that they can anger enough to ensure your vote.
Keystone XL would not establish a new pipeline from Alberta to Houston: the pipelines that handle that route already exist. XL is merely a shortcut, the flow would go across ND, SD, NE, KS and OK instead of across AB, SK and MB and down MN, IA, MO, AR and LA. How much is gained by the shortcut?
Cite?
Dude’s the most educated wizard alive. He opened a portal to another world. He knows that evil is always afoot because they’re shitty fliers. He’s got magical drawers in his plastron, for fuck’s sake. That alone give him a lifetime pass in my book.
Washington DC is considering a major new sewer system. It would take many years and God knows how much money to build. In the end, the new sewer probably would eliminate jobs that are needed for maintenance of the current system.
If opponents to the project bandied about that zero jobs would be created because of that infrastructure project, would you find that convincing?
Remember he was casting for an engineer and got a janitor.
But a stoned janitor. Guy’s a genius, I tell ya.
Ok, show me that the societal and civic benefits of KXL are comparable to those of an upgraded sewer system, and I’ll honestly buy this argument.
(Seriously, I swear; I’m really on the fence on this one.)
I view it as positive that conservatism has spread its basic message so well that the average conservative voter understands what the ideology is basically about.
It’s a negative that it means more mouthing off about things they don’t understand. The conservative movement is long on concise talking points, short on understanding of complex issues and there are few conservative intellectuals these days and a ton of conservative blowhards. There’s more balance on the liberal side.
However strange the words look, I agree with you, adaher. Modern American Liberalism (which is actually better deemed “Moderatism”) has a more…nuanced message, which resonates with a few very strongly and most kinda weakly. They lose midterms and win bigger elections because of it. The new Conservatives have message which appeals like a big plate of pot roast and potatoes, but nothing deep behind it.
Maybe we can cut to the chase and agree that the main issues in evaluating an infrastructure projects ought to be cost, utility, and risk? The question of permanent jobs is barely relevant, and may in fact measure the wrong thing. For example, if road design A creates 10 permanent jobs, and B creates 1,000 jobs, I’m going with A as the better deal. Why should an army be needed to upkeep the road? On a similar point, would the pipeline be better if it created 10,000 jobs for plumbers to keep it from leaking?
I don’t really think that’s it. Conservatism and liberalism both have strong intellectual traditions. And both sides’ politicians have more often than not succumbed to simplistic thinking(Let’s declare war on a social ill and spend lots of money! It’s a surefire plan!) It’s just that right now liberalism is dominated by an intellectual elite and conservatism by populist blowhards. The result is a conservative movement with a lot of amateur populist blowhards and a liberal movement with 1 intelligent discussion board poster for every 10 Democratic voters who can’t name the three branches of government. But they at least know they can’t name the three branches of government, so there’s that. The problem with the hyperefficient spreading of the conservative message over the last couple of decades is that it’s given average conservative voters the impression that by listening to Rush every day they can now debate the issues.
That’s fair enough.