I do think my conversation with Octopus (you can go now, I’m done, thank you) shows how dramatically conservativism has changed since Reagan. It is no longer, at all, based upon the Reagan-era economic and financial ideology my family used to build an exploitative business generating millions in profits for us on the backs of the poor and desperate, today’s conservatism is purely emotive, performative, and ultimately empty. Modern conservatism is nothing but anger, poor people exploited now, not for their financial needs like my family did, but for their emotional ones, ala, what the Trumps are doing.
And, as shown above, when one uses ‘conservative’ mindsets to see how one can rationally apply a value to a life lost… and trust me, there is a definable dollar amount which every life is worth, even if it does differ by person - anyone struggling with a budget, or trying to find a job, understands this implicitly… the modern conservative doesn’t even understand the question, even as they use the concept of a ‘$ value to human life’ implicitly in many of their anti-human arguments.
The above exchange is, to me, quite reminiscent of that time when I started the thread about the economic impact of Hurricane Ditka on this board, even going so far as to create a spreadsheet which modeled the financial impact of our Board use. Ooooh, boy, was Ditka mad! Couldn’t stand to have himself reduced to an economic unit, lol, even though many of his arguments depended upon old Reagan-era tropes as ‘affordability’ and ‘budget constraints’ and shit. ‘We can’t have universal health because people would use it too much and the system would be unaffordable’ argued the man who whined angrily when I calculated that his financial value to this Board was surely negative.
Anyway, my point is that Reagan is dead, Reaganomics is forgotten, and anyone thinking that anything but their anger is important to the modern conservative is, frankly, incorrect, as the above exchange shows.
