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"...but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate." It's just rhetoric. Anything can become a debate, suc

"...but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate." It's just rhetoric. Anything can become a debate, such as who won the 2020 presidential election, if one side is willing to make up facts and repeat them over and over. Proponents of the Big Lie are super-informed, insofar as they have a lot of lies they can say with a straight face that act as stand-ins for actual information. And if they keep asserting those lies, the other side is forced to respond, hence a debate. There is still no merit to the Big Lie, but now it must be discussed as if there was. THAT is why there is a live debate. And then there is this nonsense: "overall political climate was much more right-wing in the 1990s." That is so outrageously false I'm not sure why anyone is supposed to think this person is worth reading. Just think of how many mainstream politicians will swear up and down that the election was stolen in 2020. I guess if you pretend "right wing" is about policy you could craft a convoluted argument that today's Republicans are less conservative (as the author does), but that's not what the right wing is about. The right wing is about the Big Lie, it's about illiberalism, it's about demonizing the media and institutions and political opponents - all the policy stuff is just window dressing.

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election. Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate issue. Many also believe it's a problem that our election processes are so insecure and that we need more election security. That's separate from believing the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that provably illegal voting activity swung the election.
- standardUser 5y ago
  I'm not asserting every single conservative fits this mold, or that you can't cherry-pick pundits who still play fair. But most of what the right wing is oriented around today is attacking the free press, stifling public education, making voting more difficult for urban citizens and pretending, loudly and constantly, that the last election was stolen. Where are the policy proposals? What major legislation did conservatives pass during the previous Republican administration when they had a trifecta? What was the Republican Party platform in 2020? And why is the RNC choosing not to allow a debate in 2024? This is not a party with lots of ideas ready to fight for the hearts and minds of voters.
  - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
    Yes, and I'm asserting that 90+% of conservatives don't fit the mold you are casting. That was the point of my response. You can find crazies on both sides of the political aisle. One of trump's failures is that he isn't a good statesman and so failed to unite his own party, which caused a lot of failures in the legislative process as people like John McCain voted against him just because they hated him. I sincerely wish Trump doesn't run in 2024, not because I think he would do worse than Biden (he would have been 100x better than Biden), but because his greatest strengths are also his biggest flaws, and I don't think he can lead the country effectively. The general platform of conservatives is: "this is the greatest civilization in history we've inherited. Please stop screwing it up so badly!" That may be different from the RNC platform, but Republicans at least align with conservative values more closely than democrats, so we don't have much choice but to vote for them. Unfortunately, conservatives have rarely been dominant even within the Republican party, and many anti-conservative measures have been perpetrated by Republican presidents. I agree we need new and better ideas to go mainstream in the party, though not that these ideas don't exist. Among the weaknesses of the Republican party in the past decade have been the unwillingness of the party elites to sense the times and pay attention to their constituents or to the looming culture wars. As it is most of the time, the strongest argument to vote for a party is not that that party is great, but that the other party is worse. I have no solution for that.
    - jamincan 5y ago
      Doesn't a majority of Republican voters believe the 2021 election was stolen? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-2020-election-poll-trump-biden https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...
      - bavell 5y ago
        The poll you are citing looks like it asked if Republicans thought trump was the "true president". I could see a lot of republicans responding flippantly just to poke fun and see some feathers get ruffled. Also, N = ~750 Republicans polled over 2 days but they extrapolate the results to the entire country? Not exactly rigorous science here.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Does "more election security" mean less black people voting? I mean the Republican party has argued in court that it should be legal for them to prevent black democrats from voting as long as it targets them as Democrat voters, rather than by race, so it's not like this is a big secret conspiracy or anything. https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
  - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
    Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time. https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541645634 https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow... In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to vote less than others, that doesn't make the law discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU article, I see nothing to convince me that voter ID laws are bad. Many of us here are programmers and understand there is a tradeoff between usability and security. Our current voting process errs far too heavily on the side of usability at the expense of security.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      I don't really see how that applies to a well documented history of voter suppression? Yes, in theory, you could have a color blind system and some random change could have a negative impact on some group randomly. That's not what happened in reality though. "In theory, I might not have killed him" isn't a great argument for someone found standing over a body with a knife, you're generally looking for something a bit more concrete. Someone standing on top of a giant pile of bodies and saying "As I've said for decades, I theoretically might not have killed them" is even less convincing.
      - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
        Similarly, I don't see how "a well documented history of voter suppression" applies to increasing election security. I don't see that phrase in your first link, but I found it here: https://www.studioatao.org/post/understanding-the-u-s-government https://www.studioatao.org/post/understanding-the-u-s-govern.... From there I found a link to the evil Brian Kemp who dared to purge voter rolls! https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-suppression-black-voters https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-s... Many believe that one of the greatest opportunities for fraud come from outdated voter rolls. We need more effort to purge them, not less. Again, I am not hearing a single thing from you that convinces me laws like voter ID laws are more harmful than beneficial. If this weren't a deeply partisan issue for an insanity-driven culture of divisiveness, there would be little argument against voter ID laws in this day and age. Lastly, it is very partisan to focus on efforts of republicans to suppress democrat votes while ignoring democrat efforts to continuously game the system in their favor, like: * Making Washington D.C. a state, which makes zero sense unless you just want to win. * Stacking the supreme court, which, again, makes zero sense unless you just want to win. * Abolishing the filibuster, which completely undermines the purpose of the senate. The founders of the constitution purposely did not set up a pure democracy and they had many good reasons for it. * Federalizing election laws, obviously in ways that favor democrats, even ignoring the complete unconstitutionality of the law. if anything is obvious about the democrats, they see the constitution as an obstacle more than as a founding document. * Purposely not enforcing existing immigration laws (this should be illegal and Biden should be in jail for it), and then fighting to allow non-citizens to vote (this is already legal in NYC), or to grant citizenship to illegal entrants. Fortunately, the Hispanic vote seems to be shifting right, so we can hope this evil strategy will backfire against the democrats. * Gerrymandering that rivals or exceeds republican gerrymandering efforts. But, when it's the democrats doing it, the corporate media like to call it "redistricting". The democrats have long ago made it clear that they will fight as dirty as possible to win. If anything, Republicans need to start fighting dirtier back.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  > disgracefully Amazing all the words that some come up with to discount what was a violent attempt at staying in power after losing an election.
  - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
    It was just one word, actually. And, as we are learning now, Hillary Clinton's team paid to infiltrate into whitehouse servers as part of efforts to delegitimize Trump's election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-clinton-campaign-paid-tech-company-to-infiltrate-trump-tower-white-house-servers-durham-says https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-clinton-campaign-pa... We also know now that the russian collusion hoax was entirely fabricated by Hillary's team: https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-creation-of-russiagate-out-of-absolutely-nothing/ https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-cre... I don't agree with what Trump did, but what he did was rile up a crowd of people that had zero capability of actually usurping the government, and then waited too long to ask them to leave after they went too far. Politicians on both sides do worse things than that all the time, including our friend Hillary. What she did was worse and far more diabolical, and helped undermine our democracy for four years. What Trump did was to just provide fodder for the democrat party to milk for 2 years in hopes of it saving them from a coming midterm election sweep. Our government was under zero actual threat on that day. Even the left's own polling shows that moderates aren't buying their narrative: https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-buries-poll-results-showing-most-americans-of-both-parties-think-jan-6-was-a-protest-that-went-too-far https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-buries-poll-results-showi...
    - cgriswald 5y ago
      Your argument is that Trump attempted a coup and failed to interrupt it, but that is okay because it wasn't a serious coup and other corruption exists.
      - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
        I am legitimately not convinced he was attempting a coup. I am willing to admit I am wrong on this. I've read accounts from leftwing media sources and from their wording it sounds like what Trump did was really bad. I've read accounts from rightwing sources and from their wording it doesn't sound bad at all. I have not done a great deal to try to reconcile the two and decide where the truth lies. Right now, I believe Trump legitimately thought the election was stolen and he wanted Pence to de-certify the election to give time for his lawsuits to go through the courts and show the evidence of the fraud. I absolutely do not think Trump was in any way encouraging people to riot in the capitol, much less stage a coup. I also believe that no such fraud was ever found, putting Trump in the wrong, most likely. If I am wrong, let me see the evidence.

PathOfEclipse 5y ago

I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election. Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate issue. Many also believe it's a problem that our election processes are so insecure and that we need more election security. That's separate from believing the 2020 election was stolen in the sense that provably illegal voting activity swung the election.

standardUser 5y ago
I'm not asserting every single conservative fits this mold, or that you can't cherry-pick pundits who still play fair. But most of what the right wing is oriented around today is attacking the free press, stifling public education, making voting more difficult for urban citizens and pretending, loudly and constantly, that the last election was stolen. Where are the policy proposals? What major legislation did conservatives pass during the previous Republican administration when they had a trifecta? What was the Republican Party platform in 2020? And why is the RNC choosing not to allow a debate in 2024? This is not a party with lots of ideas ready to fight for the hearts and minds of voters.
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  Yes, and I'm asserting that 90+% of conservatives don't fit the mold you are casting. That was the point of my response. You can find crazies on both sides of the political aisle. One of trump's failures is that he isn't a good statesman and so failed to unite his own party, which caused a lot of failures in the legislative process as people like John McCain voted against him just because they hated him. I sincerely wish Trump doesn't run in 2024, not because I think he would do worse than Biden (he would have been 100x better than Biden), but because his greatest strengths are also his biggest flaws, and I don't think he can lead the country effectively. The general platform of conservatives is: "this is the greatest civilization in history we've inherited. Please stop screwing it up so badly!" That may be different from the RNC platform, but Republicans at least align with conservative values more closely than democrats, so we don't have much choice but to vote for them. Unfortunately, conservatives have rarely been dominant even within the Republican party, and many anti-conservative measures have been perpetrated by Republican presidents. I agree we need new and better ideas to go mainstream in the party, though not that these ideas don't exist. Among the weaknesses of the Republican party in the past decade have been the unwillingness of the party elites to sense the times and pay attention to their constituents or to the looming culture wars. As it is most of the time, the strongest argument to vote for a party is not that that party is great, but that the other party is worse. I have no solution for that.
  - jamincan 5y ago
    Doesn't a majority of Republican voters believe the 2021 election was stolen? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-2020-election-poll-trump-biden https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...
    - bavell 5y ago
      The poll you are citing looks like it asked if Republicans thought trump was the "true president". I could see a lot of republicans responding flippantly just to poke fun and see some feathers get ruffled. Also, N = ~750 Republicans polled over 2 days but they extrapolate the results to the entire country? Not exactly rigorous science here.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Does "more election security" mean less black people voting? I mean the Republican party has argued in court that it should be legal for them to prevent black democrats from voting as long as it targets them as Democrat voters, rather than by race, so it's not like this is a big secret conspiracy or anything. https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-sheet https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time. https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541645634 https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow... In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to vote less than others, that doesn't make the law discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU article, I see nothing to convince me that voter ID laws are bad. Many of us here are programmers and understand there is a tradeoff between usability and security. Our current voting process errs far too heavily on the side of usability at the expense of security.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    I don't really see how that applies to a well documented history of voter suppression? Yes, in theory, you could have a color blind system and some random change could have a negative impact on some group randomly. That's not what happened in reality though. "In theory, I might not have killed him" isn't a great argument for someone found standing over a body with a knife, you're generally looking for something a bit more concrete. Someone standing on top of a giant pile of bodies and saying "As I've said for decades, I theoretically might not have killed them" is even less convincing.
    - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
      Similarly, I don't see how "a well documented history of voter suppression" applies to increasing election security. I don't see that phrase in your first link, but I found it here: https://www.studioatao.org/post/understanding-the-u-s-government https://www.studioatao.org/post/understanding-the-u-s-govern.... From there I found a link to the evil Brian Kemp who dared to purge voter rolls! https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-suppression-black-voters https://newrepublic.com/article/151858/americas-relentless-s... Many believe that one of the greatest opportunities for fraud come from outdated voter rolls. We need more effort to purge them, not less. Again, I am not hearing a single thing from you that convinces me laws like voter ID laws are more harmful than beneficial. If this weren't a deeply partisan issue for an insanity-driven culture of divisiveness, there would be little argument against voter ID laws in this day and age. Lastly, it is very partisan to focus on efforts of republicans to suppress democrat votes while ignoring democrat efforts to continuously game the system in their favor, like: * Making Washington D.C. a state, which makes zero sense unless you just want to win. * Stacking the supreme court, which, again, makes zero sense unless you just want to win. * Abolishing the filibuster, which completely undermines the purpose of the senate. The founders of the constitution purposely did not set up a pure democracy and they had many good reasons for it. * Federalizing election laws, obviously in ways that favor democrats, even ignoring the complete unconstitutionality of the law. if anything is obvious about the democrats, they see the constitution as an obstacle more than as a founding document. * Purposely not enforcing existing immigration laws (this should be illegal and Biden should be in jail for it), and then fighting to allow non-citizens to vote (this is already legal in NYC), or to grant citizenship to illegal entrants. Fortunately, the Hispanic vote seems to be shifting right, so we can hope this evil strategy will backfire against the democrats. * Gerrymandering that rivals or exceeds republican gerrymandering efforts. But, when it's the democrats doing it, the corporate media like to call it "redistricting". The democrats have long ago made it clear that they will fight as dirty as possible to win. If anything, Republicans need to start fighting dirtier back.
fortuna86 5y ago
> disgracefully Amazing all the words that some come up with to discount what was a violent attempt at staying in power after losing an election.
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  It was just one word, actually. And, as we are learning now, Hillary Clinton's team paid to infiltrate into whitehouse servers as part of efforts to delegitimize Trump's election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-clinton-campaign-paid-tech-company-to-infiltrate-trump-tower-white-house-servers-durham-says https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-clinton-campaign-pa... We also know now that the russian collusion hoax was entirely fabricated by Hillary's team: https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-creation-of-russiagate-out-of-absolutely-nothing/ https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-cre... I don't agree with what Trump did, but what he did was rile up a crowd of people that had zero capability of actually usurping the government, and then waited too long to ask them to leave after they went too far. Politicians on both sides do worse things than that all the time, including our friend Hillary. What she did was worse and far more diabolical, and helped undermine our democracy for four years. What Trump did was to just provide fodder for the democrat party to milk for 2 years in hopes of it saving them from a coming midterm election sweep. Our government was under zero actual threat on that day. Even the left's own polling shows that moderates aren't buying their narrative: https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-buries-poll-results-showing-most-americans-of-both-parties-think-jan-6-was-a-protest-that-went-too-far https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-buries-poll-results-showi...
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    Your argument is that Trump attempted a coup and failed to interrupt it, but that is okay because it wasn't a serious coup and other corruption exists.
    - PathOfEclipse 5y ago
      I am legitimately not convinced he was attempting a coup. I am willing to admit I am wrong on this. I've read accounts from leftwing media sources and from their wording it sounds like what Trump did was really bad. I've read accounts from rightwing sources and from their wording it doesn't sound bad at all. I have not done a great deal to try to reconcile the two and decide where the truth lies. Right now, I believe Trump legitimately thought the election was stolen and he wanted Pence to de-certify the election to give time for his lawsuits to go through the courts and show the evidence of the fraud. I absolutely do not think Trump was in any way encouraging people to riot in the capitol, much less stage a coup. I also believe that no such fraud was ever found, putting Trump in the wrong, most likely. If I am wrong, let me see the evidence.