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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Radicalizate. Because all the relatively sane Republicans would probably have move to Democrat.
You know, despite Conservativism being stereotyped as the "Party of Order" both for themselves and it's adversaries. I personally like to say that Conservativism is ultimately a Ideology about leaving things in Chaos, so some few can rise to the top and screw everyone else.
I always have the personal issue in that, well. I act like a stereotypical conservative minus the bigotry. Which means that I'm not a conservative.
I'm a person obsessed with following the laws and that believe that a strong government is the best way to prevent people from harming each other.
Which is actually something that no conservative believe, given their love for Muh Self Determination.
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A radical can always be worse
edited 5th May '18 7:58:29 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
I think the current Republican party is a bunch of dogmatic reactionaries.
Generally conservative, small c, just means that you believe that change should be taken slowly and deliberately, and not just be change for changes; sake, not that they are opposed to all change on principal.
edited 5th May '18 8:20:29 PM by megaeliz
While we talk about how people view Trump, I couldn't help but notice that his approval ratings seem to be rising substantially at the moment, along with Republicans on the generic ballot (looking at Five Thirty Eight, anyway). They're still negative, but they are really rising.
This... really isn't filling me with hope for the midterms. Even then, I can't even see why approval is on the rise like this. I mean Trump just gave an NRA rally, but that literally just happened. The midterms are six months off yet, but things seem to be looking rosier for the GOP. How... nice.
We can choose to be better.That means just everyone that isn't wanting to attempt a new Communist Utopia again
Small C conservative means that Conservativism is so bad that you can be decent with it as long your sole role is just stopping Stalin 2.0.
Which is what actually bug me. Conservatives actively avoids order and regulations in order of Muh Freedom.
I'm the Law and Order guy, the person that really want keeps a orderly system.
Conservatives just wanna let everything in chaos and enjoy what they can get.
edited 5th May '18 8:26:24 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my countryChurchill was out before WWII even completely ended. It had absolutely no bearing on the British Empire by that point, but Japan hadn't surrendered yet, IIRC, and wouldn't do so for several months after. Heck, if I remember the timeline right, the US was still fighting pitched battles with Japan on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, two of the most intense conflicts of the Pacific War, when Churchill got the boot. (Of course, Churchill was by no means perfect on foreign policy, it could easily be argued that his refusal to consider the issues of the various colonies basically set the stage for a number of them to give up on trying to work with Britain and to instead look to leave after the end of the war, and Churchill and De Gaulle nearly got France and Britain at one another's throats at the end of WWII.)
To answer your question about how much foreign policy boosts a chief executive, ultimately, (at least in the Anglo-sphere) it often seems as though the answer is "not much, if at all." In the end politics will come down to what voters perceive is happening in their household and in their town. A lot of time, the way a large section of the population will react to a president or prime minister having a competent foreign policy seems to be resentment. Usually along the lines of "Why are you giving the foreigners all of your attention and our money?! Screw them and just take care of us at home!"
A few things I've seen throughout the last week or two while I haven't been posting in this thread:
From 538: Georgia's Gubernatorial primary has two Democratic contenders with extremely similar policies but who nonetheless highlight several different potential fault lines in the party. Do you get the votes you need by trying to grab ahold of moderate Republican votes or by getting the highest possible turnout of the Democratic base? Does the Democratic party do enough to support black candidates and minority concerns?
Democrats might mostly agree on policy, but that’s not true for politics. There is a broad debate among Democratic strategists about whether the party should focus more on winning so-called Obama-Trump voters (particularly white, working-class people in the Midwest) or try to maximize turnout among young people, college graduates and non-white voters (groups that are already more favorably inclined toward Democrats).
That debate is playing out in this Georgia race too. Abrams, while she was serving as House minority leader, created a group called the New Georgia Project that was focused, in particular, on getting more people of color to register to vote. She has been explicit in suggesting that Georgia Democrats are better off bringing new voters into the political process, rather than trying to woo people who might have backed Democrats two decades ago but have been in the GOP camp for several election cycles now. “What I am arguing is that we actually embrace the new reality of what the South looks like,” Abrams told The New York Times in December.
Evans, in contrast, told Reuters last year that “you are going to have to persuade some moderate Republicans to vote for you, if you are going to win in Georgia.”
It’s unclear who has the right theory, but both approaches have clear challenges. No Democrat has won a gubernatorial, U.S. Senate or presidential contest in Georgia since Zell Miller was elected senator there in 2000. So it’s hard to see Evans wooing enough Republicans to win — no other Democrat running for a major office has in almost 20 years. At the same time, Georgia has enough minorities and urbanites for Democrats to almost win there3 but not enough to get over the hump, so Abrams’s path looks perilous as well.
Then there's racial tension — Abrams is black, Evans is white. I don’t think this necessarily tells us much about who will vote for them, as Evans is trying to win black voters (about half of the Democratic electorate in Georgia’s 2016 primary) and Abrams is courting non-black voters. But if I were Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, I might be rooting for Abrams to win this primary — for the sake of party unity.
No black woman has ever been elected governor in any state. So the candidacy of Abrams and the potential for making history in this race have excited Democrats both in and out of Georgia. And Abrams’s candidacy comes as the Democratic Party is facing some criticism from activists for taking black women’s votes for granted. African-American women tend to vote for Democratic candidates at much higher rates than most other demographic groups (Clinton received 94 percent of their votes in 2016 according to exit polls, compared with 82 percent among black men) and tend to turn out to vote at higher rates overall than black men. But they aren’t in many high-profile roles in the party.
Abrams is, by any measure, extremely qualified — she is a Yale Law School graduate who returned to her home state and became the leader of her party in the statehouse. If Evans wins this primary, there will likely be some strong criticisms of the national Democratic Party for not doing enough to promote black female candidates like Abrams.
My personal thought is don't give up on the white working class, but put the majority of your focus, by which I mean the vast majority, on increasing the turnout of your base and voter registration. And no, the party doesn't do enough to either support or listen to its minority candidates and members.
For all the whining by Republican politicians, so far the only one who could be argued as violating the Iran deal is Trump himself
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There’s an irony here. For all of the drama surrounding Trump’s decision to decertify Iranian compliance with the deal, there’s little doubt that Iran is complying. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said so nine times. America’s European allies have said so. So has Trump’s own defense secretary, James Mattis. This very month, Trump’s State Department issued a report declaring that “Iran continued to fulfill its nuclear-related commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the technical name for the nuclear deal. (The deal’s opponents often cite the two times Iran narrowly exceeded the agreement’s 130-metric-ton cap on heavy water, which is used in nuclear reactors: In both cases Iran shipped the excess out of the country, and it remains in compliance with the deal.)
The more interesting question isn’t whether Iran has been complying with the nuclear deal. It’s whether America has. American journalists often describe the agreement as a trade. In the words of one CNN report, it “obliges Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the suspension of economic sanctions.” But there’s more to it than that. The deal doesn’t only require the United States to lift nuclear sanctions. It requires the United States not to inhibit Iran’s reintegration into the global economy. Section 26 commits the U.S. (and its allies) “to prevent interference with the realisation of the full benefit by Iran of the sanctions lifting specified” in the deal. Section 29 commits the U.S. and Europe to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.” Section 33 commits them to “agree on steps to ensure Iran’s access in areas of trade, technology, finance and energy.”
The Trump administration has likely been violating these clauses. The Washington Post reported that at a NATO summit last May, “Trump tried to persuade European partners to stop making trade and business deals with Iran.” Then, in July, Trump’s director of legislative affairs boasted that at a G20 summit in Germany, Trump had “underscored the need for nations … to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.” Both of these lobbying efforts appear to violate America’s pledge to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.”
The Trump administration may have committed other violations as well. Section 22 of the deal specifically obliges the United States, subject to some restrictions, to “allow for the sale of commercial passenger aircraft and related parts and services to Iran.” To do business with Iran, any U.S. company—or even any foreign company that gets more than 10 percent of its components from U.S. companies—must get a permit from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). OFAC must certify, for instance, that the transaction isn’t with an Iranian company designated under other U.S. sanctions programs such as those targeting terrorism. And under the Obama administration, OFAC began issuing these permits, albeit slowly. In November 2016, for instance, OFAC allowed the sale of 106 planes by Airbus to Iran Air.
But since Trump took over, notes Al-Monitor, “requests concerning permits to export planes to Iran have been piling up … OFAC has not responded to aircraft sales licensing requests since the first of such licenses were issued during the Barack Obama administration.” Erich Ferrari, a lawyer in Washington who works on sanctions issues, told me there’s “definitely been a shift. Certain transactions that we’ve seen licensed in the past under the Obama administration are now being denied.”
The Trump administration still issues licenses for routine personal divestment transactions: for instance, people who want to sell off their property or close their bank accounts in Iran. But as far as Ferrari can tell, the Trump administration has issued few, if any, licenses for commercial transactions. That’s hard to verify: There is no public database of OFAC licenses, and the Treasury Department didn’t respond to my request for comment. But in recent months, two close observers of the Iran deal have echoed Ferrari’s observation. As the pro–nuclear deal National Iranian American Council’s Reza Marashi reported earlier this year, “To hear senior Western diplomats tell it, the Trump administration has not approved a single Iran-related OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) license since taking office.” If true, this too likely violates the Iran deal.
We’ve seen a version of this movie before. In 1994, the Clinton administration signed a nuclear deal with North Korea. Pyongyang promised to freeze its nuclear program. In return, the U.S. promised to provide “heavy fuel oil” to compensate for the electricity North Korea would lose by shutting down its plutonium reactor; to help build an entirely new, “light water” reactor; and to move toward normalizing relations. But that November, Republicans—many of whom were skeptical of the deal—took control of the House and Senate. And in the following years Congress hindered both America’s promised delivery of fuel oil and its promised help in building a light-water reactor. The North Koreans warned that if the U.S. didn’t abide by the deal, they wouldn’t either.
And they didn’t. While North Korea mostly met its promises not to build a bomb using plutonium, it secretly operated an alternative nuclear program based on enriched uranium.
Whether North Korea cheated in response to U.S. cheating, or intended to cheat all along, is a subject of debate. Either way, the Bush administration in 2002 confronted Pyongyang about its uranium-enrichment program. North Korean officials conceded its existence, while falsely claiming the deal covered only the plutonium route to a bomb. And they proposed a new, more comprehensive agreement, which would also cover uranium enrichment and require the U.S. to recognize North Korea, stop threatening it militarily, and lift sanctions. But the hawks in the Bush administration, who had opposed the 1994 deal from the beginning, refused to negotiate seriously. As John Bolton explained, the uranium-enrichment program “was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
Now Bolton is back, and looking for another hammer.
This is why that asshole Bolton should never be given the position of dog catcher, let alone one that would have the potential to change the direction of the nation and the world.
There are three groups that have emerged as players in the island’s power struggle, and each played a role on Tuesday. There were the people facing off against officers from the Puerto Rican government: mostly workers, youth left behind by the mass exodus to the mainland after Hurricane Maria, and students. There was the government itself, whose chief representative, Governor Ricardo Rosselló, criticized “vandalism” from the protesters and said that the mayhem “damages the good name of Puerto Rico.” And then there was “La Junta,” a financial oversight and management board created by Congress in 2016 to solve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and with whom residents and local government alike are currently at odds.
It was the oversight board’s new fiscal plan for Puerto Rico that set the stage for the violent clashes. In mid-April, the board approved the regime, which is supposed to help the island get out from under billions of dollars in debt; satisfy municipal creditors; stabilize the power infrastructure; and handle the ongoing recovery from Hurricane Maria, which made landfall last September.
That plan contains a number of provisions that have proven highly controversial among Puerto Ricans. On the labor side, the board’s plan takes steps to reduce employer costs; decrease work in “informal” markets, like street vending; and push workers into formal work arrangements—namely, tourism. It would immediately slash territory-mandated employee benefits, including sick leave and vacation pay; and it would cancel the mandatory Christmas bonus that firms currently have to pay most employees. To offset some of the losses to employee pay and benefits—the Christmas bonus alone is required to be somewhere between 2 percent and 6 percent of annual wages—the plan would increase the minimum wage for workers over age 25 by 25 cents per hour, a bump that could be ratcheted up if enough Puerto Ricans enter the formal workforce. It would also implement an earned-income tax credit.
Additionally, the new scheme would create a work requirement for Puerto Rico’s food-assistance program for people in or near poverty. It also targets a major driver of Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis: nearly $50 billion in unfunded pension obligations to public employees. The plan would save over $700 million over six years through a combination of freezes and reductions to those pensions.
Beyond the labor-law changes, the regime makes a number of alterations to the structure of Puerto Rico’s governance and economy. Currently, the island is managing the ongoing process of a structured bankruptcy and the privatization of Prepa, the island’s publicly owned (and deeply indebted) power company. Relatedly, the board wants to expand renewable energy sources and cut government funding to the University of Puerto Rico and individual municipalities by at least $451 million a year. It says the reductions can be offset by raising tuition at UPR, cost-cutting across the board, and more efficient local tax collection.
In all, these developments amount to a deep austerity program for one of the poorest places in America. Almost 200 schools across the territory have closed since last year, with an additional 280 planned to close this summer. The University of Puerto Rico agreed to a tuition hike that will more than double the average cost per credit per student. Many teachers, students, and university professors expect to leave their respective institutions over the next few months, as the fiscal plan slashes retirement benefits for teachers and professors, and cuts the safety net for young adults without increasing pay.
Long story short, more generous benefits and a stronger welfare state doesn't turn people into sloths who sit at home soaking other taxpayers. What sidelines workers, by and large, is automation eliminating the positions of low to middle skill workers who used to earn a solid middle class wage, the refusal of our government to become more involved in training people for the jobs of the future, and also its unwillingness to equalize educational opportunity. Since schools of all levels are funded differently and teach to different standards not only on a state by state, but county by county and city by city level, access to quality education varies wildly everywhere, even places within a few miles of each other. And it's always the poorest areas where people get the least opportunity, (especially when local school districts are being funded by property taxes) resulting in large chunks of the population that are forever going to be either underemployed or flat out sidelined in our current system.
Lastly, every time you hear a regressive complain about how mean and disrespectful liberals are to them, remember that no liberal will ever be as mean to a conservative/regressive as they will be to one another should they dare to buck the party line
. Erick Erickson, a right wing extremist who had been adored by those caught in the right wing media bubble, had been well liked for his extremist comments (such as comparing gay rights activists to terrorists) but got a very different reaction when he refused to embrace Trump.
Over the course of the campaign in 2016, we had people show up at our home to threaten us. We had armed guards at the house for a while. My kids were harassed in the store. More than once they came home in tears because other kids were telling them I was going to get killed or that their parents hated me. I got yelled at in the Atlanta airport while peeing by some angry Trump supporter.
We got harassed in church and stopped going for a while. A woman in a Bible study told my wife she wanted to slap me across the face My seminary got calls from people demanding I be expelled. And on and on it went. When I nearly died in 2016, I got notes from people upset I was still alive. When I announced my wife had an incurable form of lung cancer, some cheered. All were directed from supposedly evangelical Trump supporters convinced God was punishing me for not siding with his chosen one. For a while, given the nature of what we were getting in the mail, my kids had to stop checking it.
When my Fox contract came up, not only did I not want to stay, but Fox made clear they had no use for me. I had jumped from CNN to Fox with a number of promises made, none of which were kept and then wound up hardly ever getting on. After saying I could not support Trump, the purpose of my Fox contract became more about keeping me off anyone’s television screen than putting me on.
What is there to say? Erickson is no hero by any stretch. He’s a conservative extremist in many crucial respects. For him to be on the receiving end of this level of harassment and viciousness from Trump’s cult of personality is all you need to know about them.
And Right Wingers are killing each other again. While they aren't killing minorities
This is why we need genuine order.
edited 5th May '18 8:29:06 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my countryThis just reads more like you deliberately trying to frame conservatism (any flavor) as badly possible, than being passed on any actual, solid reasoning. Because you made a very large jump there without an actual explanation.
Every person with a brain know that you can't apply random ideas just because. I dunno how that's inherently conservative.
I like the idea of calculating the risk/benefit of all the new options but it seems that is not a Conservative only thing.
I'm the person that would like to be a conservative, I actually think that it does sounds better than Liberal. But I still don't find a way that Conservatives are uniquely good or necessary.
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I want to find a inherently good idea of Conservativism.
I like the idea of keeping a status quo but the actual conservatives seem to be focused on keeping things in chaos.
edited 5th May '18 8:41:51 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my countryReport: McCain's inner circle planning on not having Trump for McCain's eventual funeral.
Oh boy, Trump is really The Friend Nobody Likes
That's...actually quite heartwarming honestly.
edited 5th May '18 8:53:21 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country"'d categorize it as Regressivism. Make American Great again"
While is true there is a sense of regresion to a better past, that slogan is also polarizing once you know the meaning: the idea that it is the left who is crapping in america by make them weaker and soft, and asociating the best terms in america with right wing ideas of politicians.
Is pretty much "Make america us again".
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"I feel the current Republican party is just an enormous scam. It has nothing it actually supports and all of its politics are meaningless attacks on minority issues (gays, transgender, abortion) that are there to rally the base to get them re-elected so they can sell their votes to the highest bidder. The Tea Party was a major threat because it had people who actually believed. Trump is now safely in office as their version of Aerys II with them as Tywin.
Or so they think.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I mean, yes there is a lot of "let return to 1950" kinda of thing but also is clear they sai the left is responsable for not being mighty and powerfull, trump side himself and is crony with the great of america.
Which means of course, someone is going to be the small and evil.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

Both, I feel they will feel they stole the election from them(because it is clear republicans dont like trump, but they like the election he brings) but kinda glad they got rid of him.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"