I woke up this morning with the epiphany that all of the current Democrat platform is a form of NIMBYism. The design of their agenda items are either directly or indirectly to prevent others from accessing the pie and the pot of resources that Democrats want to claim and horde for themselves. Democrats desire a rigged game. I think because Democrat DNA is insecure about their ability to compete in the competitive private economy. Or they have developed an addiction to the soft money of government and are protective of it. The Dynamism of a robust private economy is a risk to them losing their advantage because they are not good at strategic thinking and planning to go with the changes. So, they are change-averse. And almost everything we can list can point back to some weapon to lock us into some mandated policy or social norm that is in direct conflict with freedom, liberty and the related economic dynamism.
I think being called a NIMBY is today one of the most derogatory of labels because it identifies the most selfish and greedy of humanity. People pursuing their own selfish interest without any accountability nor care for the harm it causes others.
“The real motive of liberals has nothing to do with the welfare of others. Instead, they have two related goals - to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives.”
Good column, John. Thank you for "borrowing" and running with this idea, you have made an interesting and thought-provoking list. It's also an indictment and a pretty sad reality of what's happening in our country, isn't it? I can't stand the ignorance and nihilism of it. The level of entitlement and childish "I want what I want, and I'm going to have a tantrum until I get it" explains the current government shutdown pretty well, doesn't it? The OBBB went through months of negotiations, the bill was passed by majorities in the house and senate, but now the Demonrats want to force changes via the 60 vote "veto" power. And, of course, blame SNAP money running out on racist Republicans. It's stupid, it's sickening; yet it's so typical of the Left, isn't it?
My wife and I earned degrees in science. We attended what was then a University in the top 10 nationwide for science research. We were taught to question everything, think critically, and only make claims that can be backed by hard evidence.
Today, it is woke and is no longer even in the top 50 for science research.
COVID demonstrated that science research and education in this country has become woke.
Man-made climate change has been universally accepted as a fact when there is no actual evidence for it. the little bit of evidence that many point to are the results of poorly done experiments and manipulated data.
Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is one of the weakest greenhouse gas. One of the worst is water vapor. The water vapor in the reason the Earth is warm enough to support life.
Carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated greatly during the history of Earth. Before the industrial age, carbon dioxide levels were low enough to significantly reduce plant growth. Agriculture yields fell to the lowest levels ever recorded. Plants need carbon dioxide. The rise in carbon dioxide levels resulting from the industrial revolution has significantly improved crop yields.
Federal funding has had a significant impact on research into climate change. Studies that assume climate change is real and plan to study its effect are funded. Studies to reseach if climate change is in fact real are not funded. NOAA has pushed out their climate scientists who question the validity of the data being used to support climate change. Many have used real temperature data to show that has been no real changes in the temperature of the Earth. The temperature flections we see are closely related to sunspot activity and the fluctuations in the distance between the earth and sun. Right now we are closer to the sun that we have been in a few centuries.
Second, I went to the local home improvement store to get what I needed tor repair our fence. It an intersection where one often finds homeless begging for money. There was a woman sitting in a chair and holding up a sign in front of her face so no one could see her. The sign said that the government owed her her SNAP benefits and if she does not get them soon, she will start stealing so she can feed her children. Eating is a right.
This is absolutely insane.
The homeless around here have been stealing so much for years that even the local grocery stores are locking up food items because they are on the list of items most likely to be stolen. I have stopped shopping near my home because I am constantly waiting for an employee to unlock what I want and then taking it to the front for me to pay and pick up. I shop in the community where I work because they have a large police force and do arrest criminals and prosecute them in their local courts. My community does catch and release.
I cannot wait to leave this h***hole called California.
If you don't arrest shoplifters, the people that pay the price at the ones who don't shoplift. Everything has to cost more to pay for it. People have to wait unnecessarily because things are locked up to it. There's no upside to protecting thieves.
You don't have enough prisons, and you already have the largest prison population in the world. Only an idiot would suggest that arresting more people is the answer to your problems.
Holding people accountable for crimes they commit is good for society, no? Also, you are a bit confused as arresting and prosecuting someone does not mean you are sending them to prison. Prison is for serious and/or violent crimes with longer sentences. “Jail “is for lessor offenses such as theft. And yes, we should send more criminals to jail who break the law, especially those who do so repeatedly.
Say there’s a 95% chance you’re right about climate change…
Isn’t it still a huge gamble to not do anything to about it? A 1 in 20 chance of this planet becoming unable to support human existence as we know it is still dangerous odds no?
Besides, do the drawbacks really outweigh the sacrifices needed to get us to carbon neutrality? We’re going to run out of fossil fuels eventually so we may as well invest where the future and innovation are.
There are so many benefits to a grid that uses a mix of renewables, batteries and nuclear over gas and coal. Think drops in air pollution in cities or energy independence from the individual all the way up to state level. We could be looking at one of the main causes of global instability being taken off the table. Isn’t that a compelling enough reason to invest in renewables/nuclear on its own?
If in the next 30-50yrs we can have a planet that runs on 100% renewable and nuclear energy then why is that worse than a future where we stick with fossil fuels?
I just don’t understand the opposition, could you explain?
The problem with the "climate change" crowd is their ideological posturing and shutting people down who even mildly disagree. Then the issues can't even be discussed.
I used to be solar/wind supporter, but no longer. I found out that the harms were never calculated before the (for example) giant turbines were forced upon everybody. And the scams run by all those fly by night companies who build a solar farm and then abandon it when the subsidies dry out... and so on. So yes, let's bypass the demagogues and talk about this, without fear mongering.
What harms are associated with turbines? I'm aware there is opposition to them but given some of those complaints centre on the aesthetics over functionality, I'd like to know what you think are the issues?
Are you opposed to renewables out of principle or do you just not think they're viable at the moment?
Also sure there's some ideological posturing, but then "drill baby drill" is posturing is it not? It's sadly another tedious front in the culture war, just like everything else.
There are many harms, from the mass killing of birds and bats, to them killing the night by constant blinking lights, and shaking the ground (I've driven through them in Oklahoma, felt so sorry for the people who live among them). Plus, of course, there are the esthetic issues. But my main objections are two-fold. One, the energy is intermittent and modest, and they cannot replace the sources that are steady and intense (and that's the kind of energy needed to manufacture them).
Second, and this is key. I once asked Ugo Bardi, one of the go-to academics regarding green energy, to point me to the calculations that show that a wind turbine produces more energy than it consumes. He could not.
Mining, smelting, steel works, blade manufacture etc., the transportation, and building (they require vast amounts of concrete to anchor them). Then there is maintenance, and in the end dismantling, and either recycling or junking (recycling has massive issues). Do they really pay for themselves over the 25 years and produce extra significant amounts of energy before they have to be replaced?
I think it's a useful technology in areas of steady and strong winds, but that's it.
That’s interesting and I take your points. I do think there’s a big discussion to be had about the actual production of renewables equipment and infrastructure and whether the benefits outweigh the initial outlay.
Still here in the uk 30% of our energy comes from wind and specifically 17% from offshore. Obviously that’s due to it being an island, but still that’s significant is it not?
Would you be more in favour of offshore wind where it’s viable?
Re: the intermittent nature of it, that’s precisely why we need reactors, after Fukushima I was dead set against nuclear but like you I changed my mind on something and realised that there’s no path to clean energy that doesn’t involve a reactor or two.
I’m not convinced we’re anywhere close to batteries being a serious part of our energy mix, but we will get there with it, even if it takes the next 20years.
TBH I’m more bullish about clean energy than I am on any other environmental issue be it overfishing, deforestation and recycling to name a few, like I said earlier renewables are where the innovation is, what more can we do with coal, gas and oil, especially given the international security trade offs?
I don't know if pushing giant wind turbines into deep water is a good idea. I favor testing some areas for untoward impacts on the marine ecosystem. There are always nasty surprises with high tech solutions. What I object to is going whole hog before we have the calculations I spoke of above. If it all depends on subsidies, and cannot stand on its own, what then? Islands have a more favorable profile due to strong and steady winds. Here in Colorado, they still build them though our winds are neither steady nor strong -- we have intermittent gusts instead that do a number on the turbines. Nuts. It's politics. The people's electricity fees go up and up so that the ideologically captured elites can play in their "green energy" sandbox.
I agree with you, all points to reactors. I was against. Now I am thinking it's inevitable. Just think... we could have been far ahead in the research, maybe thorium etc. if the gazillions and efforts had not gone toward wind. In Colorado, the ideologues are for shutting down natural gas too, though it's plentiful and relatively clean. I am sick of the politically correct bullshit. Here we also could have been ahead if instead they pushed passive solar houses. Our local wealth is in sunshine. But noooooo.... :-(
I have 95% faith in our collective intellect to solve our greatest problems through free market enterprise, not government regulations and programs. We all want a clean olanet and there is googles$$ of incentive for clean energy. Furthermore, the earth is a giant inertial system and your feared carbon is spread around the globe. So expedient, measurable progress is extremely unlikely and getting everyone on board through mandate is not happening. The solution is getting everyone on board through competition, that is moving to clean energy to be more competitive. IMO as cleaner lower cost energy technologies are discovered and developed they will be very rapidly adopted. In the meanwhile, carbon is nothing more than a political tool.
Great list. I’m sore all of us here could push it to 100 but the point is made. One thought, we view these as crazy because most people want there country to be safe and prosperous and law abiding, want everyone to succeed at work, have a fair shot at life (including sports), etc.
Leftists will say these support all of these goals but what they truly want is the destruction of America and the American dream, as well as western civilization. Hence, they default to supporting anything that leads to chaos and anarchy, anything that tears down the producers and props up the looters, and anything that tears apart our social fabric like traditions and religion.
21) Lawbreaking isn’t cool, I agree. Do you know that shoplifting costs Americans $45 billion a year? That is really awful. So I assume you’re also even more angry about the $50 billion in wage theft per year and the $175 billion in workplace injuries as a result of OSHA violations that take place every year? Because man, those big employers really needed to cut those corners in order to do their patriotic duty of creating jobs, right?
22) The problem with immigration laws is that they’re so broken and the people you’re talking about as illegal immigrants have gotten such a mixed message that there is genuinely something structurally unfair about mass deportation. However, on the merits I think you’re basically right.
23) Liberals understand the difference between skilled and unskilled labor and also between a criminal and not. Don’t be absurd.
24) I 100% would prefer to mail my letters using the post office than a private corporation, would prefer the regulations on my car to be run by a government I elect than by a corporation I don’t, and would very much like health care companies to stop randomly billing me massive amounts of money. Insurance companies are an unnecessary parasite business that bankrupt people. National health care works better everywhere it exists. This is a non-debatable topic.
25) I think some liberals really do think half the country is evil, because a lot of conservatives seem hellbent on defending cruelty as a value and calling it religion. Liberals find intolerance and hate repugnant. In general, they care more about fairness and harm than they do about other values. Personally, I do not think conservatives are evil, but they are extremely misguided in ways that to me seem very obvious. I respect, for example, that conservatives are sad about Charlie Kirk’s death and am disgusted by violence as a political tool, but I don’t understand him to be an example of a person I’d want to emulate.
6) Liberals very much believe that high taxes on wealth and income are a good idea, because it is a good idea. Higher taxes on those things are, in American history, associated with higher general prosperity and lower inequality. Education, Health Care, Housing, Public Works, Public Health, etc. could all use a lot more public investment and the billionaire class is very invested in treating those things as private goods. I’m with Carnegie on this - Billionaires should either give all their money to creating public goods or they shouldn’t be allowed to have the money. Also inheritance taxes should be much higher.
7) Free speech is a problem for both the right and left. I read a poll the other day saying that Trump voters in general didn’t believe that trans rights activists should be allowed by law to speak on college campuses, while leftists didn’t think that anyone arguing against gay marriage should be legally allowed to do so. Charlie Kirk was making lists of professors with inappropriate beliefs. Trump is trying to censor speech on campus. Leftists keep getting people fired for saying things that don’t align with the One True Narrative. In general, people who take a principled stand on Free Speech get attacked from all sides. This is a major problem for America but it’s a plague on all houses.
8) No leftists believe this
9) Manmade global warming has been scientifically proven. Making arguments that confuse the climate with the weather suggests that you just don’t know what you’re talking about on this issue. The existence of global warming, its origins, and its potential risks are not in doubt by anyone who knows what they’re talking about (or isn’t being paid by an oil company). However, the appropriate response is a real debate. Most liberals I know think that transitioning towards renewable energy and building infrastructure that produces less carbon is a good start.
17) If America made it legal for everyone to have their own tactical nuclear bomb, and 99% of the nuclear bomb owners were responsible but 1% set off nukes, the consequences would be bad enough that it would, in retrospect, have been better to have never made nuclear bomb ownership legal. America’s gun laws are not sufficiently restrictive, which means that crazy people and criminals keep getting guns. Where there are stronger laws, there are fewer gun deaths on the whole and per capita. It is not at all crazy to want those laws. However, most liberals I know think the ideal rules would basically just involve licensure, insurance, and registry, which are the rules we use for cars. I cannot understand why conservatives are so obsessed with the idea that they need secret guns that they cannot be held accountable for.
18) This is a thing a lot of liberals believe that I don’t understand. I don’t understand land acknowledgement. We’re not giving it back, so why is this happening? But it is true that the US did a lot of shady unpleasant things to Indian tribes and it is worth remembering that.
19) Here’s the thing. Liberals do not believe that. They mostly believe in prison. But the thing is, people who go to prison mostly get out of prison. So if we’re going to have prisons, they need to be a kind of place that, after you have gone there, you won’t do another thing that causes you to go back. Right now, our prisons and jails are generating more criminality than they’re preventing. That’s a problem.
20) Liberals are the compassionate good guys on the right side of history. Women’s rights? Civil rights? Gay rights? Worker rights? Consumer rights?That was all liberals. In general, liberals are on the side of more people counting as full people and full citizens and opposed to exploitation and oppression. If you like weekends, thank a liberal. If you don’t think 8-year-olds should work in mines, thank a liberal. If you’re glad people think the Klan is disgusting, thank a liberal. That’s us. American conservatives were on the wrong side of all of those and they’re mostly on the wrong side of everything now. Liberals also don’t think everyone who disagrees with them is a Nazi, but if somebody appears to believe that because of national identity, traditional values, racial characteristics, and their personal capacity for violence they should get to tell everyone what to do and that democratic norms and even laws are less important than that general idea - that there are some people the law should protect but not hold accountable and some that the law should hold accountable but not protect - well, that person is a fascist, and they deserve me calling them that.
13) I feel like there’s a lot of weird hypocrisy around immigrants in America. There are definitely liberals who just don’t care about immigration status or borders at all, which seems like a dumb point of view because then what does it mean to have a country at all? On the other hand, there are liberals like me who care quite a lot about national identity and borders but are also aware that the presence of illegal immigrants is the direct result of economic patterns going back decades running up against thoughtlessly-designed policy. Given that the US wants an immigrant work force, we need to create a better-designed temporary worker program and use e-Verify systems, but weirdly it’s conservative business groups that usually prevent those things from happening because they don’t like being regulated. One way in which illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and citizens of the US are alike is that we’re all people and nobody deserves to be exploited.
14) This is the reverse of “Conservatives think they care about life but they support the death penalty knowing that there’s a 100% chance innocent people will be killed by the state if the death penalty is legal”. I tend to get in trouble for my position on abortion, which is that abortion is only morally acceptable to the extent that a fetus isn’t a person. Most liberals make the argument that because women should have the right to control their own bodies, abortion should be legal 5 minutes before delivery, which is an argument that I personally don’t support or understand. As for the death penalty, unless you can guarantee that no innocent people will be executed I simply don’t think the state can be trusted with that power.
15) Masculinity and femininity are social constructs but you can’t just construct them however you want; given that they work differently in different cultures it’s kind of obvious that there are both biological and sociological components. I don’t think many liberals except at the very far end of the spectrum would say otherwise.
16) This is the reverse of “if we just cut taxes enough, the rich will finally be able to create enough jobs to fix everything”. Fiscal policy is complicated. You don’t want to overregulate or underregulate. We need to tax. We need to be providing for social goods like schools and libraries and health care and making sure kids aren’t going hungry and cops and roads and a military and things. In general, Democrats want to spend more money because the US has kind of screwed up on the way it does a lot of things - health care is the best example, where Americans waste a TON of money on bad care because conservatives oppose single payer. But the idea that “government is always bad” is just kind of lazy, and the idea that concentrating wealth in the hands of a few people is very obviously wrong.
10) Yeah, the gender pay gap issue is much more complicated than it is made out to be. I definitely know some liberals who talk about it as though it is literally the case although it clearly isn’t. It is still the case, however, that there are structural ways in which the economy favors men. In general, fields that are understood as “masculine” pay better than fields considered “feminine”, and if the connotation switches, the pay does, too - look at the history of computer programming if you want an example. The other issue is of course child birth - the United States offers terrible support for mothers. In countries with better parental leave laws there is greater equity in female leadership in business.
11) This is actually just legally true, but I can, as a liberal, see why it seems both unreasonable and unfair. Probably better not to have sex with drunk people or while drunk.
12) The evidence that diversity is a strength is that the US Military - which I would think would be a pretty good source on what is and is not strength - says that diversity creates broader skill sets, helps with retention and recruitment, builds trust and morale, and helps unify soldiers around the idea that a set of ideals - not personal identity - is the core of what makes them American. I mean, there’s also a lot more evidence, but that should be enough to refute your thoughtless claim.
3) Chattel slavery and Roman slavery are wildly different things on a number of levels. America should not feel uniquely guilty about racial slavery, because other European countries also practiced it…but the US kept it going longer than anyone except Brazil, but the United States enslaved more people on the basis of race than any other country in history and then tacked on another 75 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, disfranchisement, etc. That’s not crazy, that’s just what you find out if you bother to learn history.
4) I don’t know any liberals who think we need to put tampons in men’s rooms, but I imagine some exist. That feels like a kind of niche complaint.
5) This is a genuine thing some liberals believe and it really is stupid. Policing works to reduce crime. Very few people in high crime areas want less policing, although they might want more community policing as opposed to broken windows policing and they might want a more rapid response. As a liberal, I get very angry when liberals say “we have no evidence that policing reduces crime”, because we definitely do have that evidence, it’s easy to find, and people on the far left really really need to stop saying this.
3) Many experts say there are more slaves today than at any time in history. Only about 3% of all of the slaves brought to the New World came to what would later become the USA.
4)The Democrat candidate for Vice President put tampons in boys bathrooms.
Modern day slavery is very bad but it's completely different. One reason for the "there are more slaves now" argument is that there are way more people now than in 1860. There were about 1 billion total people then and 8 billion total people now. In the United States, 89 out of every 1000 people were enslaved in such a way that they could be sold away from their families and subject to any form of abuse imaginable at any time, with a guarantee that their children would suffer the same fate. In the modern world, only North Korea and Eritrea can claim similar numbers, and I don't think any reasonable person would argue that being morally equivalent to either of those places suggests that the United States should not feel deeply ashamed. Also in 1860, the United States held 4 million slaves, 9% of its population. No other country had anywhere near that many enslaved people. Brazil had 1.5 million and Cuba had 350K. The reason the US only held 3% of the total kidnapped population is that they relied on "natural increase", much of which involved slave owners raping their slaves. That doesn't make it better.
There's no such thing as a "Democrat" candidate for anything. The Democratic candidate for VP signed a law that said that there should be tampons in bathrooms used by students that didn't say anything specific about gender. "Republic" party folks like to harp on trans issues a lot, and I get it, trans folks are the most defenseless, kinda-weird, vulnerable group that Democrats want people to be inclusive of, and it's good politics to generate as much "us" vs "them" hatred as possible, but the reality of the situation is that best solution is just to put the tampons in the gender-neutral bathrooms, which only have room for one person at a time and therefore allow for greater privacy when needing a personal hygiene product anyway. I do have to agree that Democrats pushing on this point are setting themselves up to be attacked and that it isn't really worth the argument.
Congratulations on catching the reason why there are more slaves today than 400 years ago. Lots of people are not good at math.
The other reason the United States, or land that later became part of the United States, only imported 3% of all of the African slaves was that compared to the slaves in most of the New World, US slaves had it much better.
Slaves on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands and Central America were worked to death at an astonishing rate. Thus the constant need to import more slaves.
Yes, slaves were certainly raped in the US, but slaves also married and had children.
The slaves that were brought to the New World were going to live their lives as slaves whether they got sold and shipped to the New World or not.
If they hadn't came to the New World they would have lived their lives out as slaves in Africa.
So for a slave to go to what would later be the US, they got about the best situation they could hope for as a slave.
Slaves did not marry. They weren't legally allowed to do that. You're right about the sugar plantations, that was also very terrible. I agree that not being worked to death within 3 years is better. However, again, between 1619 and 1865, about 12 million people total were abducted from Africa and taken the Americas. About 7 million people were enslaved in the United States during that time. The only rival to the US was Brazil in terms of total numbers. Arguing that slavery in the US isn't a source of shame for the country because of the special treatment American slaves got seems pretty messed up to me and I don't think you'll convince many people, but it depends what you think "shameful" means. Enslaved people who remained in Africa were not trapped in slavery because manumission was legal and common, unlike in the United States where it was outlawed, and because inherited slavery was less common. Going to the United States was absolutely not the best situation people could hope for; staying in their homeland would allow them to retain their language, kinship ties, traditions, etc. This is some pretty wild cope, imo.
Fun! Here’s why you’re wrong about much (but not all) of that!
1) Nobody believes that. The people who are the furthest left on gender identity think you can realize that your assigned gender identity is wrong and that that process is fairly personal, profound, and time-consuming.
2) This is framed in a bizarre way. Reducing the number of people on government assistance is a bad thing if it causes people to starve or be homeless, because assistance is both more efficient and less immoral than letting people starve or be homeless. But ideally there would be fewer people who need direct government aid, which is why liberals support policies that make food, healthcare, and housing more affordable and also why liberals support policies that make it harder for employers to pay subsistence wages, deny benefits, or arbitrarily fire people. We have a country right now where people who are working full time still require SNAP benefits. If you don’t think that’s a problem, I don’t know what to tell you.
Genuine question here - and I don’t know the answer which is why I’m positing it - how many of those people working full time and needing food stamps are working at jobs that were never meant to support a family or mortgage? I keep reading about people demanding they make a “living wage” but the jobs they are referring to are generally entry level with no education or expertise required, thus the lower pay. These jobs used to be stepping stones to better ones. Anecdotally the only people I know who are on food stamps now, are trying to make a living out of a low wage job. That’s never going to happen and I don’t believe it was the case decades ago either. Perhaps the issue is lack of education combined with less manufacturing job opportunities that pay well. We used to have far more manufacturing jobs that paid those without a college education very very well. That’s all gone now. So if you don’t have a college degree, what are you going to do? There’s no manufacturing jobs throughout the country so you’re left with doing low wage retail, restaurant and service industry jobs (to name a few) for very little.
This question has a flawed underlying premise, which is that there should be jobs you can work at for 40 hours a week without being able to pay for basic needs. In most wealthy countries (and the US is the wealthiest country by a lot), labor laws like minimum wage make it true that you can work in the service sector and afford housing and food. The reason you think of manufacturing jobs as being "good" jobs is that they had strong unions, which the service sector has largely been able to prevent. There is no such thing as a job that "was never meant to support a family". It's also not true that some jobs were always stepping stones to better ones. The history of this country is a history of labor divided by caste; for example, sharecroppers were never supposed to be anything but dirt poor, and now mechanized farming has simply eliminated the need for them altogether. Wages are also gendered - the New Deal, for example, deliberately excluded fields primarily worked by Black people from its labor laws, and fields seen as "women's work" - education, for example - tend to pay less even though they are difficult and require a high level of training and skill. I'm also very skeptical that most people working 40 hours at McDonald's (and most of those people work multiple jobs) have a mortgage. We're in a country where around 30% of households make less than $40K a year. SNAP benefits kick in for people at $20K if they're single, but if you have 3 kids you could be making $40K, which is a management position in retail, and still be on SNAP. We are not paying people enough for their labor.
No rage bait? Hmm. Im a left-winger and fail to connect with a single one of these. Keep strawmanning if it makes you feel better. I'm sure you can find someone to defend some of these nonsensical ideas but none of me or my friends do.
Just once I'd love to see a right wing think piece that doesn't rely on strawmen and hyperbole. On the other hand, conservatism is so intellectually bankrupt that I don't think it can articulate an argument without resorting to fallacy.
I woke up this morning with the epiphany that all of the current Democrat platform is a form of NIMBYism. The design of their agenda items are either directly or indirectly to prevent others from accessing the pie and the pot of resources that Democrats want to claim and horde for themselves. Democrats desire a rigged game. I think because Democrat DNA is insecure about their ability to compete in the competitive private economy. Or they have developed an addiction to the soft money of government and are protective of it. The Dynamism of a robust private economy is a risk to them losing their advantage because they are not good at strategic thinking and planning to go with the changes. So, they are change-averse. And almost everything we can list can point back to some weapon to lock us into some mandated policy or social norm that is in direct conflict with freedom, liberty and the related economic dynamism.
I think being called a NIMBY is today one of the most derogatory of labels because it identifies the most selfish and greedy of humanity. People pursuing their own selfish interest without any accountability nor care for the harm it causes others.
T Sowell
“The real motive of liberals has nothing to do with the welfare of others. Instead, they have two related goals - to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people, and to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives.”
Good column, John. Thank you for "borrowing" and running with this idea, you have made an interesting and thought-provoking list. It's also an indictment and a pretty sad reality of what's happening in our country, isn't it? I can't stand the ignorance and nihilism of it. The level of entitlement and childish "I want what I want, and I'm going to have a tantrum until I get it" explains the current government shutdown pretty well, doesn't it? The OBBB went through months of negotiations, the bill was passed by majorities in the house and senate, but now the Demonrats want to force changes via the 60 vote "veto" power. And, of course, blame SNAP money running out on racist Republicans. It's stupid, it's sickening; yet it's so typical of the Left, isn't it?
My wife and I earned degrees in science. We attended what was then a University in the top 10 nationwide for science research. We were taught to question everything, think critically, and only make claims that can be backed by hard evidence.
Today, it is woke and is no longer even in the top 50 for science research.
COVID demonstrated that science research and education in this country has become woke.
Man-made climate change has been universally accepted as a fact when there is no actual evidence for it. the little bit of evidence that many point to are the results of poorly done experiments and manipulated data.
Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is one of the weakest greenhouse gas. One of the worst is water vapor. The water vapor in the reason the Earth is warm enough to support life.
Carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated greatly during the history of Earth. Before the industrial age, carbon dioxide levels were low enough to significantly reduce plant growth. Agriculture yields fell to the lowest levels ever recorded. Plants need carbon dioxide. The rise in carbon dioxide levels resulting from the industrial revolution has significantly improved crop yields.
Federal funding has had a significant impact on research into climate change. Studies that assume climate change is real and plan to study its effect are funded. Studies to reseach if climate change is in fact real are not funded. NOAA has pushed out their climate scientists who question the validity of the data being used to support climate change. Many have used real temperature data to show that has been no real changes in the temperature of the Earth. The temperature flections we see are closely related to sunspot activity and the fluctuations in the distance between the earth and sun. Right now we are closer to the sun that we have been in a few centuries.
Second, I went to the local home improvement store to get what I needed tor repair our fence. It an intersection where one often finds homeless begging for money. There was a woman sitting in a chair and holding up a sign in front of her face so no one could see her. The sign said that the government owed her her SNAP benefits and if she does not get them soon, she will start stealing so she can feed her children. Eating is a right.
This is absolutely insane.
The homeless around here have been stealing so much for years that even the local grocery stores are locking up food items because they are on the list of items most likely to be stolen. I have stopped shopping near my home because I am constantly waiting for an employee to unlock what I want and then taking it to the front for me to pay and pick up. I shop in the community where I work because they have a large police force and do arrest criminals and prosecute them in their local courts. My community does catch and release.
I cannot wait to leave this h***hole called California.
If you don't arrest shoplifters, the people that pay the price at the ones who don't shoplift. Everything has to cost more to pay for it. People have to wait unnecessarily because things are locked up to it. There's no upside to protecting thieves.
You don't have enough prisons, and you already have the largest prison population in the world. Only an idiot would suggest that arresting more people is the answer to your problems.
Holding people accountable for crimes they commit is good for society, no? Also, you are a bit confused as arresting and prosecuting someone does not mean you are sending them to prison. Prison is for serious and/or violent crimes with longer sentences. “Jail “is for lessor offenses such as theft. And yes, we should send more criminals to jail who break the law, especially those who do so repeatedly.
How about eliminating them in other ways, then.
What is?
Say there’s a 95% chance you’re right about climate change…
Isn’t it still a huge gamble to not do anything to about it? A 1 in 20 chance of this planet becoming unable to support human existence as we know it is still dangerous odds no?
Besides, do the drawbacks really outweigh the sacrifices needed to get us to carbon neutrality? We’re going to run out of fossil fuels eventually so we may as well invest where the future and innovation are.
There are so many benefits to a grid that uses a mix of renewables, batteries and nuclear over gas and coal. Think drops in air pollution in cities or energy independence from the individual all the way up to state level. We could be looking at one of the main causes of global instability being taken off the table. Isn’t that a compelling enough reason to invest in renewables/nuclear on its own?
If in the next 30-50yrs we can have a planet that runs on 100% renewable and nuclear energy then why is that worse than a future where we stick with fossil fuels?
I just don’t understand the opposition, could you explain?
The problem with the "climate change" crowd is their ideological posturing and shutting people down who even mildly disagree. Then the issues can't even be discussed.
I used to be solar/wind supporter, but no longer. I found out that the harms were never calculated before the (for example) giant turbines were forced upon everybody. And the scams run by all those fly by night companies who build a solar farm and then abandon it when the subsidies dry out... and so on. So yes, let's bypass the demagogues and talk about this, without fear mongering.
What harms are associated with turbines? I'm aware there is opposition to them but given some of those complaints centre on the aesthetics over functionality, I'd like to know what you think are the issues?
Are you opposed to renewables out of principle or do you just not think they're viable at the moment?
Also sure there's some ideological posturing, but then "drill baby drill" is posturing is it not? It's sadly another tedious front in the culture war, just like everything else.
There are many harms, from the mass killing of birds and bats, to them killing the night by constant blinking lights, and shaking the ground (I've driven through them in Oklahoma, felt so sorry for the people who live among them). Plus, of course, there are the esthetic issues. But my main objections are two-fold. One, the energy is intermittent and modest, and they cannot replace the sources that are steady and intense (and that's the kind of energy needed to manufacture them).
Second, and this is key. I once asked Ugo Bardi, one of the go-to academics regarding green energy, to point me to the calculations that show that a wind turbine produces more energy than it consumes. He could not.
Mining, smelting, steel works, blade manufacture etc., the transportation, and building (they require vast amounts of concrete to anchor them). Then there is maintenance, and in the end dismantling, and either recycling or junking (recycling has massive issues). Do they really pay for themselves over the 25 years and produce extra significant amounts of energy before they have to be replaced?
I think it's a useful technology in areas of steady and strong winds, but that's it.
That’s interesting and I take your points. I do think there’s a big discussion to be had about the actual production of renewables equipment and infrastructure and whether the benefits outweigh the initial outlay.
Still here in the uk 30% of our energy comes from wind and specifically 17% from offshore. Obviously that’s due to it being an island, but still that’s significant is it not?
Would you be more in favour of offshore wind where it’s viable?
Re: the intermittent nature of it, that’s precisely why we need reactors, after Fukushima I was dead set against nuclear but like you I changed my mind on something and realised that there’s no path to clean energy that doesn’t involve a reactor or two.
I’m not convinced we’re anywhere close to batteries being a serious part of our energy mix, but we will get there with it, even if it takes the next 20years.
TBH I’m more bullish about clean energy than I am on any other environmental issue be it overfishing, deforestation and recycling to name a few, like I said earlier renewables are where the innovation is, what more can we do with coal, gas and oil, especially given the international security trade offs?
I don't know if pushing giant wind turbines into deep water is a good idea. I favor testing some areas for untoward impacts on the marine ecosystem. There are always nasty surprises with high tech solutions. What I object to is going whole hog before we have the calculations I spoke of above. If it all depends on subsidies, and cannot stand on its own, what then? Islands have a more favorable profile due to strong and steady winds. Here in Colorado, they still build them though our winds are neither steady nor strong -- we have intermittent gusts instead that do a number on the turbines. Nuts. It's politics. The people's electricity fees go up and up so that the ideologically captured elites can play in their "green energy" sandbox.
I agree with you, all points to reactors. I was against. Now I am thinking it's inevitable. Just think... we could have been far ahead in the research, maybe thorium etc. if the gazillions and efforts had not gone toward wind. In Colorado, the ideologues are for shutting down natural gas too, though it's plentiful and relatively clean. I am sick of the politically correct bullshit. Here we also could have been ahead if instead they pushed passive solar houses. Our local wealth is in sunshine. But noooooo.... :-(
I have 95% faith in our collective intellect to solve our greatest problems through free market enterprise, not government regulations and programs. We all want a clean olanet and there is googles$$ of incentive for clean energy. Furthermore, the earth is a giant inertial system and your feared carbon is spread around the globe. So expedient, measurable progress is extremely unlikely and getting everyone on board through mandate is not happening. The solution is getting everyone on board through competition, that is moving to clean energy to be more competitive. IMO as cleaner lower cost energy technologies are discovered and developed they will be very rapidly adopted. In the meanwhile, carbon is nothing more than a political tool.
Great list. I’m sore all of us here could push it to 100 but the point is made. One thought, we view these as crazy because most people want there country to be safe and prosperous and law abiding, want everyone to succeed at work, have a fair shot at life (including sports), etc.
Leftists will say these support all of these goals but what they truly want is the destruction of America and the American dream, as well as western civilization. Hence, they default to supporting anything that leads to chaos and anarchy, anything that tears down the producers and props up the looters, and anything that tears apart our social fabric like traditions and religion.
This is a good start to listing the many examples of "Liberal Logic".
Such as Liberals believe all cops are racists that drive around looking for innocent people of color to murder for the fun of it.
And then in the next breath say that common citizens shouldn't be allowed to own guns, only the police and military should have guns.
Good one! Hillarious and spot on!
21) Lawbreaking isn’t cool, I agree. Do you know that shoplifting costs Americans $45 billion a year? That is really awful. So I assume you’re also even more angry about the $50 billion in wage theft per year and the $175 billion in workplace injuries as a result of OSHA violations that take place every year? Because man, those big employers really needed to cut those corners in order to do their patriotic duty of creating jobs, right?
22) The problem with immigration laws is that they’re so broken and the people you’re talking about as illegal immigrants have gotten such a mixed message that there is genuinely something structurally unfair about mass deportation. However, on the merits I think you’re basically right.
23) Liberals understand the difference between skilled and unskilled labor and also between a criminal and not. Don’t be absurd.
24) I 100% would prefer to mail my letters using the post office than a private corporation, would prefer the regulations on my car to be run by a government I elect than by a corporation I don’t, and would very much like health care companies to stop randomly billing me massive amounts of money. Insurance companies are an unnecessary parasite business that bankrupt people. National health care works better everywhere it exists. This is a non-debatable topic.
25) I think some liberals really do think half the country is evil, because a lot of conservatives seem hellbent on defending cruelty as a value and calling it religion. Liberals find intolerance and hate repugnant. In general, they care more about fairness and harm than they do about other values. Personally, I do not think conservatives are evil, but they are extremely misguided in ways that to me seem very obvious. I respect, for example, that conservatives are sad about Charlie Kirk’s death and am disgusted by violence as a political tool, but I don’t understand him to be an example of a person I’d want to emulate.
I don't agree with all, but lots of good points throughout Ryan.
6) Liberals very much believe that high taxes on wealth and income are a good idea, because it is a good idea. Higher taxes on those things are, in American history, associated with higher general prosperity and lower inequality. Education, Health Care, Housing, Public Works, Public Health, etc. could all use a lot more public investment and the billionaire class is very invested in treating those things as private goods. I’m with Carnegie on this - Billionaires should either give all their money to creating public goods or they shouldn’t be allowed to have the money. Also inheritance taxes should be much higher.
7) Free speech is a problem for both the right and left. I read a poll the other day saying that Trump voters in general didn’t believe that trans rights activists should be allowed by law to speak on college campuses, while leftists didn’t think that anyone arguing against gay marriage should be legally allowed to do so. Charlie Kirk was making lists of professors with inappropriate beliefs. Trump is trying to censor speech on campus. Leftists keep getting people fired for saying things that don’t align with the One True Narrative. In general, people who take a principled stand on Free Speech get attacked from all sides. This is a major problem for America but it’s a plague on all houses.
8) No leftists believe this
9) Manmade global warming has been scientifically proven. Making arguments that confuse the climate with the weather suggests that you just don’t know what you’re talking about on this issue. The existence of global warming, its origins, and its potential risks are not in doubt by anyone who knows what they’re talking about (or isn’t being paid by an oil company). However, the appropriate response is a real debate. Most liberals I know think that transitioning towards renewable energy and building infrastructure that produces less carbon is a good start.
17) If America made it legal for everyone to have their own tactical nuclear bomb, and 99% of the nuclear bomb owners were responsible but 1% set off nukes, the consequences would be bad enough that it would, in retrospect, have been better to have never made nuclear bomb ownership legal. America’s gun laws are not sufficiently restrictive, which means that crazy people and criminals keep getting guns. Where there are stronger laws, there are fewer gun deaths on the whole and per capita. It is not at all crazy to want those laws. However, most liberals I know think the ideal rules would basically just involve licensure, insurance, and registry, which are the rules we use for cars. I cannot understand why conservatives are so obsessed with the idea that they need secret guns that they cannot be held accountable for.
18) This is a thing a lot of liberals believe that I don’t understand. I don’t understand land acknowledgement. We’re not giving it back, so why is this happening? But it is true that the US did a lot of shady unpleasant things to Indian tribes and it is worth remembering that.
19) Here’s the thing. Liberals do not believe that. They mostly believe in prison. But the thing is, people who go to prison mostly get out of prison. So if we’re going to have prisons, they need to be a kind of place that, after you have gone there, you won’t do another thing that causes you to go back. Right now, our prisons and jails are generating more criminality than they’re preventing. That’s a problem.
20) Liberals are the compassionate good guys on the right side of history. Women’s rights? Civil rights? Gay rights? Worker rights? Consumer rights?That was all liberals. In general, liberals are on the side of more people counting as full people and full citizens and opposed to exploitation and oppression. If you like weekends, thank a liberal. If you don’t think 8-year-olds should work in mines, thank a liberal. If you’re glad people think the Klan is disgusting, thank a liberal. That’s us. American conservatives were on the wrong side of all of those and they’re mostly on the wrong side of everything now. Liberals also don’t think everyone who disagrees with them is a Nazi, but if somebody appears to believe that because of national identity, traditional values, racial characteristics, and their personal capacity for violence they should get to tell everyone what to do and that democratic norms and even laws are less important than that general idea - that there are some people the law should protect but not hold accountable and some that the law should hold accountable but not protect - well, that person is a fascist, and they deserve me calling them that.
13) I feel like there’s a lot of weird hypocrisy around immigrants in America. There are definitely liberals who just don’t care about immigration status or borders at all, which seems like a dumb point of view because then what does it mean to have a country at all? On the other hand, there are liberals like me who care quite a lot about national identity and borders but are also aware that the presence of illegal immigrants is the direct result of economic patterns going back decades running up against thoughtlessly-designed policy. Given that the US wants an immigrant work force, we need to create a better-designed temporary worker program and use e-Verify systems, but weirdly it’s conservative business groups that usually prevent those things from happening because they don’t like being regulated. One way in which illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and citizens of the US are alike is that we’re all people and nobody deserves to be exploited.
14) This is the reverse of “Conservatives think they care about life but they support the death penalty knowing that there’s a 100% chance innocent people will be killed by the state if the death penalty is legal”. I tend to get in trouble for my position on abortion, which is that abortion is only morally acceptable to the extent that a fetus isn’t a person. Most liberals make the argument that because women should have the right to control their own bodies, abortion should be legal 5 minutes before delivery, which is an argument that I personally don’t support or understand. As for the death penalty, unless you can guarantee that no innocent people will be executed I simply don’t think the state can be trusted with that power.
15) Masculinity and femininity are social constructs but you can’t just construct them however you want; given that they work differently in different cultures it’s kind of obvious that there are both biological and sociological components. I don’t think many liberals except at the very far end of the spectrum would say otherwise.
16) This is the reverse of “if we just cut taxes enough, the rich will finally be able to create enough jobs to fix everything”. Fiscal policy is complicated. You don’t want to overregulate or underregulate. We need to tax. We need to be providing for social goods like schools and libraries and health care and making sure kids aren’t going hungry and cops and roads and a military and things. In general, Democrats want to spend more money because the US has kind of screwed up on the way it does a lot of things - health care is the best example, where Americans waste a TON of money on bad care because conservatives oppose single payer. But the idea that “government is always bad” is just kind of lazy, and the idea that concentrating wealth in the hands of a few people is very obviously wrong.
10) Yeah, the gender pay gap issue is much more complicated than it is made out to be. I definitely know some liberals who talk about it as though it is literally the case although it clearly isn’t. It is still the case, however, that there are structural ways in which the economy favors men. In general, fields that are understood as “masculine” pay better than fields considered “feminine”, and if the connotation switches, the pay does, too - look at the history of computer programming if you want an example. The other issue is of course child birth - the United States offers terrible support for mothers. In countries with better parental leave laws there is greater equity in female leadership in business.
11) This is actually just legally true, but I can, as a liberal, see why it seems both unreasonable and unfair. Probably better not to have sex with drunk people or while drunk.
12) The evidence that diversity is a strength is that the US Military - which I would think would be a pretty good source on what is and is not strength - says that diversity creates broader skill sets, helps with retention and recruitment, builds trust and morale, and helps unify soldiers around the idea that a set of ideals - not personal identity - is the core of what makes them American. I mean, there’s also a lot more evidence, but that should be enough to refute your thoughtless claim.
3) Chattel slavery and Roman slavery are wildly different things on a number of levels. America should not feel uniquely guilty about racial slavery, because other European countries also practiced it…but the US kept it going longer than anyone except Brazil, but the United States enslaved more people on the basis of race than any other country in history and then tacked on another 75 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, disfranchisement, etc. That’s not crazy, that’s just what you find out if you bother to learn history.
4) I don’t know any liberals who think we need to put tampons in men’s rooms, but I imagine some exist. That feels like a kind of niche complaint.
5) This is a genuine thing some liberals believe and it really is stupid. Policing works to reduce crime. Very few people in high crime areas want less policing, although they might want more community policing as opposed to broken windows policing and they might want a more rapid response. As a liberal, I get very angry when liberals say “we have no evidence that policing reduces crime”, because we definitely do have that evidence, it’s easy to find, and people on the far left really really need to stop saying this.
3) Many experts say there are more slaves today than at any time in history. Only about 3% of all of the slaves brought to the New World came to what would later become the USA.
4)The Democrat candidate for Vice President put tampons in boys bathrooms.
That's hardly a niche.
Modern day slavery is very bad but it's completely different. One reason for the "there are more slaves now" argument is that there are way more people now than in 1860. There were about 1 billion total people then and 8 billion total people now. In the United States, 89 out of every 1000 people were enslaved in such a way that they could be sold away from their families and subject to any form of abuse imaginable at any time, with a guarantee that their children would suffer the same fate. In the modern world, only North Korea and Eritrea can claim similar numbers, and I don't think any reasonable person would argue that being morally equivalent to either of those places suggests that the United States should not feel deeply ashamed. Also in 1860, the United States held 4 million slaves, 9% of its population. No other country had anywhere near that many enslaved people. Brazil had 1.5 million and Cuba had 350K. The reason the US only held 3% of the total kidnapped population is that they relied on "natural increase", much of which involved slave owners raping their slaves. That doesn't make it better.
There's no such thing as a "Democrat" candidate for anything. The Democratic candidate for VP signed a law that said that there should be tampons in bathrooms used by students that didn't say anything specific about gender. "Republic" party folks like to harp on trans issues a lot, and I get it, trans folks are the most defenseless, kinda-weird, vulnerable group that Democrats want people to be inclusive of, and it's good politics to generate as much "us" vs "them" hatred as possible, but the reality of the situation is that best solution is just to put the tampons in the gender-neutral bathrooms, which only have room for one person at a time and therefore allow for greater privacy when needing a personal hygiene product anyway. I do have to agree that Democrats pushing on this point are setting themselves up to be attacked and that it isn't really worth the argument.
Congratulations on catching the reason why there are more slaves today than 400 years ago. Lots of people are not good at math.
The other reason the United States, or land that later became part of the United States, only imported 3% of all of the African slaves was that compared to the slaves in most of the New World, US slaves had it much better.
Slaves on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean islands and Central America were worked to death at an astonishing rate. Thus the constant need to import more slaves.
Yes, slaves were certainly raped in the US, but slaves also married and had children.
The slaves that were brought to the New World were going to live their lives as slaves whether they got sold and shipped to the New World or not.
If they hadn't came to the New World they would have lived their lives out as slaves in Africa.
So for a slave to go to what would later be the US, they got about the best situation they could hope for as a slave.
Slaves did not marry. They weren't legally allowed to do that. You're right about the sugar plantations, that was also very terrible. I agree that not being worked to death within 3 years is better. However, again, between 1619 and 1865, about 12 million people total were abducted from Africa and taken the Americas. About 7 million people were enslaved in the United States during that time. The only rival to the US was Brazil in terms of total numbers. Arguing that slavery in the US isn't a source of shame for the country because of the special treatment American slaves got seems pretty messed up to me and I don't think you'll convince many people, but it depends what you think "shameful" means. Enslaved people who remained in Africa were not trapped in slavery because manumission was legal and common, unlike in the United States where it was outlawed, and because inherited slavery was less common. Going to the United States was absolutely not the best situation people could hope for; staying in their homeland would allow them to retain their language, kinship ties, traditions, etc. This is some pretty wild cope, imo.
You do realize there are still millions of slaves around the world. Maybe your "bother to learn history" needs revisiting......
Fun! Here’s why you’re wrong about much (but not all) of that!
1) Nobody believes that. The people who are the furthest left on gender identity think you can realize that your assigned gender identity is wrong and that that process is fairly personal, profound, and time-consuming.
2) This is framed in a bizarre way. Reducing the number of people on government assistance is a bad thing if it causes people to starve or be homeless, because assistance is both more efficient and less immoral than letting people starve or be homeless. But ideally there would be fewer people who need direct government aid, which is why liberals support policies that make food, healthcare, and housing more affordable and also why liberals support policies that make it harder for employers to pay subsistence wages, deny benefits, or arbitrarily fire people. We have a country right now where people who are working full time still require SNAP benefits. If you don’t think that’s a problem, I don’t know what to tell you.
Always amazing how much time lefties have to make comments...
Genuine question here - and I don’t know the answer which is why I’m positing it - how many of those people working full time and needing food stamps are working at jobs that were never meant to support a family or mortgage? I keep reading about people demanding they make a “living wage” but the jobs they are referring to are generally entry level with no education or expertise required, thus the lower pay. These jobs used to be stepping stones to better ones. Anecdotally the only people I know who are on food stamps now, are trying to make a living out of a low wage job. That’s never going to happen and I don’t believe it was the case decades ago either. Perhaps the issue is lack of education combined with less manufacturing job opportunities that pay well. We used to have far more manufacturing jobs that paid those without a college education very very well. That’s all gone now. So if you don’t have a college degree, what are you going to do? There’s no manufacturing jobs throughout the country so you’re left with doing low wage retail, restaurant and service industry jobs (to name a few) for very little.
This question has a flawed underlying premise, which is that there should be jobs you can work at for 40 hours a week without being able to pay for basic needs. In most wealthy countries (and the US is the wealthiest country by a lot), labor laws like minimum wage make it true that you can work in the service sector and afford housing and food. The reason you think of manufacturing jobs as being "good" jobs is that they had strong unions, which the service sector has largely been able to prevent. There is no such thing as a job that "was never meant to support a family". It's also not true that some jobs were always stepping stones to better ones. The history of this country is a history of labor divided by caste; for example, sharecroppers were never supposed to be anything but dirt poor, and now mechanized farming has simply eliminated the need for them altogether. Wages are also gendered - the New Deal, for example, deliberately excluded fields primarily worked by Black people from its labor laws, and fields seen as "women's work" - education, for example - tend to pay less even though they are difficult and require a high level of training and skill. I'm also very skeptical that most people working 40 hours at McDonald's (and most of those people work multiple jobs) have a mortgage. We're in a country where around 30% of households make less than $40K a year. SNAP benefits kick in for people at $20K if they're single, but if you have 3 kids you could be making $40K, which is a management position in retail, and still be on SNAP. We are not paying people enough for their labor.
No rage bait? Hmm. Im a left-winger and fail to connect with a single one of these. Keep strawmanning if it makes you feel better. I'm sure you can find someone to defend some of these nonsensical ideas but none of me or my friends do.
Just once I'd love to see a right wing think piece that doesn't rely on strawmen and hyperbole. On the other hand, conservatism is so intellectually bankrupt that I don't think it can articulate an argument without resorting to fallacy.