He’s a Republican. So he’s more likely to be a stupid evil asshole.
Bro, the modern conservative movement is defined by being stupid and greedy.
It costs less and produces better results to have universal healthcare. But because conservatives are stupid and greedy, they want to spend more to have worse results.
ETA: Conservatives aren’t inherently wrong, but they specifically choose to do wrong things, at least recently. Tell me what national policy conservatives are pushing that’s a good idea?
Do you think it still makes sense for the Republicans to support Trump when he still insists and still pours gasoline in to the fire with his talking point that he won the election?
When the other side embraces conspiracy theories about stolen elections, then there’s no nuance that needs to be understood. I reject the idea that I should be open-minded about all positions; I should be open-minded when someone attempts to argue and explain a position in good faith. I remember when more conservatives at least tried to do that. Being open-minded is a virtue, but not when that virtue is repeatedly assaulted with a tsunami of lies.
I can prove anthropomorphic climate change is real. I can prove that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. I can prove that there’s not a child rape room in the basement to Comet Pizza in Washington D.C.
When people talk about how the Republican party has lost it’s mind, they’re not talking about rent control.
I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this; I disagree with dishonest arguments about voter fraud in an attempt to try to keep people from voting.
If someone wants to claim that the US has a moral responsibility to take down a brutal dictator who potentially destabilizes an economically important region of the world, I can listen to that argument – hell I basically bought into it myself. But Republicans went further, lying about weapons programs and connections to terrorists that were outright falsehoods.
If someone is philosophically opposed to single-payer medical insurance, that’s not being unreasonable. Claiming that it will lead to inefficiencies and lower quality care is a fair argument to make – I wish conservatives could be satisfied making those kinds of arguments. Instead they deliberately lie by claiming it will lead to the creation of a bureaucracy that decides who lives and dies.
Politicians from both sides frequently over-sell and even outright lie to push their agenda, I agree. The difference is in the degree and the frequency with which Republicans do it. Republicans have given up on winning the war of ideas; they’ve instead used gerrymandering, dark money, lies, procedural warfare, the courts, and legislative power grabs to claim power wherever the Constitution is silent. They are an anti-democracy party. They shouldn’t be listened to; they should be resisted with every fiber of our being.
Exactly. The only question left worth asking is, how can conservatives possibly justify continued support of the Republican Party? You can’t all be Lindsey Graham.
All I can do is observe that only one of them killed Hitler.
The Republican Party. Brought to you by Tax Cheats!
They sided with a virus against their fellow citizens and the rest of humanity on Earth. Their hatred and desire to harm their enemies makes them, by any useful definition of the word, evil. Fucking evil.
And don’t go (not you, of course, but the “enlightened centrists”) and say that there are some good ones out there. There aren’t. The good ones left. What remains remains because they are motivated by hatred.
I have family, most of my family in fact, that still follows that path, and they are absolutely motivated by hatred. I am surrounded on all sides every day by republicans and trumpists, and they are completely full of hate.
More of your bothsidesism here? Democrats criticize democrats all the time. We do acknowledge flaws and work to alleviate them, as best as can be done with such a loos conglomeration of competing goals.
Those were exactly the examples of the “reasonable” discussions that we no longer have. To then go and say that Democrats or Dopers take the position of being against those is evil is simply wrong on your part.
What we now have is questions as to whether COVID is real or not, or if it’s actually just a chinese plot. If global warming is real or not. If the fucking election was stolen or not. These are facts, not opinions.
You think you can prove to most people that the Earth isn’t flat? Try it with a flat earther. They will lie and they will equivocate and use every bad faith argument in the book to try to keep from accepting the truth.
Same with Republicans and climate change, COVID, or the election. You acknowledge that these are things that are true, that they are factually true, correct? Try to go convince a Republican that they are true. You will have the same experience trying to convince a flat earther that the earth isn’t flat.
No, what’s lazy is declaring that both sides are the same, it’s easier to just declare both sides just as wrong in everything rather than see that THEY FUCKING AREN’T.
I know where they are coming from. They are coming from a place of ignorance and hate.
Like what? There are some historically conservative positions that I can get behind, but the current Republican party? Fuck no.
Why bother, when both sides are just the same?
That’s not what makes you immune to reality. I don’t know what does, but your post demonstrates that you only have the most passing familiarity with it.
Yes, indeed, the conservative position is usually simple. It is a simple answer to a complex problem, and it is almost always wrong.
The nuance is on the side that recognizes that it’s a complex problem, that realizes that there is not an easy fix, the is willing and determined to not just write legislation to ameliorate problems, but also to come back and update that legislation as events dictate.
The nuance is not on the side that calls those actions being inconsistent, flip flopping, talking out of both sides of their mouth, or moving the goal posts.
Hatred.
That’s why my family supports the Republicans. They hate liberals. There are no good liberals in their book. I’m family, and they openly show their hatred and contempt for me, simply because I believe in reality.
And normally, Democrats do not censure or threaten impeachment when someone disagrees with them.
The issue isn’t the policy positions, it’s the arguments.
The Republicans aren’t trying to convince their voters that cutting their employers taxes will result in the employers passing along the saving to their employees. That’s the kind of political argument I enjoy engaging in.
They’re trying to convince their voters that their Democratic voting neighbors are going to burn down their houses, drag them into the street and beat them up and steal all their stuff while Joe Biden cheers them on.
Maybe if you didn’t live in a swing state you didn’t see the campaign ads I did, but every Republican campaign ad I saw featured photos of violent protesters burning buildings (photos that, incidentally, turned out not to be of this summer’s protests but violent protests in other countries), with dialogue about how if this candidate wasn’t elected, these people were coming for you and there would be no police to help.
It’s a dangerous tactic that carries a risk of putting me, personally, in danger of physical harm. And people believe it. My nephew’s employer had him carrying a firearm in his truck, convinced he was in danger from “Antifa” because the truck was painted with an American flag design.
I would’ve thought this risk would be obvious to you by now, but apparently not, or maybe you’re comfortable ignoring it because you think it doesn’t affect you?
What would make you get it? If someone actually kidnaps and murders AOC or Gretchen Whitmer, will you get it then? If a Trump mob “proactively”burns a minority neighborhood and kills all the residents, would you get it then? I though January 6th would be enough, but for some reason you’re still nattering on about tax policy and abortion rights like it’s twenty years ago.
Now, I don’t think individual Republicans are all evil. Some of them are just brainwashed. The best way to understand the modern Republican Party is to recognize that it’s a cult and apply those paradigms. Not every cult follower is evil (although the leaders are), some of them are just gullible and brainwashed. And some of them are just perfectly normal people that are immersed. This happens when a cult is large, cohesive and generational.
For example, there were* people in the FLDS cult that believed that their leader, Warren Jeffs, was President of the United States. These people were not mentally ill, they just lived in a world where that was taught in their schools and homes, and they had no access to any contradictory information.
This kind of immersion in false information is dangerous, and it seems to be the primary goal of the Republican Party.
Republicans do indeed poop rainbows. Well, not entire rainbows. Just the green region of the spectrum.
https://images.theweek.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/7_wexler.png
From this collection of editorial cartoons about Trump’s showing at CPAQ:
https://www.theweek.com/video/969819/7-scathingly-funny-cartoons-about-trumps-cpac-appearance
“Anthropogenic”.
Useless pointless nitpick, except I’m trying to support your excellent points about Democrats holding themselves to higher standards than Republicans concerning factual truth and accuracy.
Also the notion of anthropomorphic climate change gave me a good chuckle. Maybe we’d make more progress with Republican climate-science denialists if we anthropomorphized the phenomena? “Auntie Jetstream is getting more wobbly in doing her laps because the warmer air is making her weaker!”
Goddammit.
And make them get gay married. Don’t forget.
It’s not like such things haven’t happened.
And they still don’t get it.
But they are brainwashed to be evil. They may no longer have agency, but they still wish harm upon others. They still carry out evil acts.
And they made the choice to become brainwashed, as it was easier to give up agency than to exercise it.
Sure, lots of brainwashing, but also curious to be a fly on the wall WRT the frequency and type (with deets, man!) of death threats that Republicans, like Pence, have been getting. Also wonder to what degree that factors into their demented fealty. We’ll never know the answer to that, but even if that is a factor, still - fuck’em.