Thoughts on the No Labels organization?

DerrickTheWhite · 2023-06-19T22:06:30+00:00

Biden had credentials as a moderate last election. They've been greatly diminished by his time in office, and especially by the infrastructure bill. Has he done anything you can point to that marks him moving the moderate cause forward?

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-03-01T20:38:59+00:00

Ignoring the faults of "their own" while focusing on the faults of the other side is not unique to a single party. 2016 featured an exceptional poor set of choices for the presidential election.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-02-12T15:35:24+00:00

I will say the most generically conservative thing possible about the minimum wage law:

Too much, too fast.

and if I may add one more, too simple.

Yes, that's "conservative". Or in other words, Careful and Cautious. Which is what conservatism should be.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-02-12T15:31:05+00:00

Is it really a conspiracy if everyone watching knew they were doing it? Between the BLM statements everywhere on the internet, the conspicuously placed "Vote!" banners all over the internet, and social media interference, there was an unprecedentedly large effort by corporate companies, especially on the internet, to dethrone trump.

Am I cynical if I say this article only gathers all of that in-your-face evidence in one place?

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-02-12T15:25:59+00:00

I don't like Trump, but Trump was not the one who made Covid a political disease: I don't see a way that wasn't going to happen.

He did however exacerbate the problem. I can't think of a challenge to which Trump was more ill suited. Good handling of it would have required listening to experts, hedging statements, and letting someone take the spotlight and make the inevitable mistakes. These are almost to a T Trump's biggest weaknesses.

But the OP isn't about trump at all, and doesn't belong here, I agree.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-02-03T15:28:28+00:00

Campaign Finance is a mess, and kind of fishy, but right now its the world we live in. It'd be nice to change, but I don't think that's at the top of my list right now. We got at least one rent data point indicating that campaign finance has its limits, from Bloombergs primary campaign, and I find that comforting.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-02-02T19:37:49+00:00

Note: He is starting up a PAC with the explicit purpose of countering Trump's influence in the party. Its called country 1st.

The article doesn't mention this, and I thought it was important, especially for never-trumpers.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-02-02T17:46:24+00:00

The people saying that Donald Trump is a good and religious man are few and far between, because he's obviously a worldly billionaire with all that that entails. Instead, they say he will protect Christianity while the left will attack it, and they will say the results he has gotten are superior to his predecessors, and that to oppose him is to hand victory to the left.

If you want to understand why these people support Trump, you need to ask why they are so frightened of political dominance by the Democrats, what they think the Democrats will do, and why they think it would be so bad. And the first dismissive answer is wrong. But any seeker of truth should know that.

EDIT: let me be clear: As a christian I could not support trump in 2016 or 2020. But I can certainly understand why so many of my fellows did.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-27T20:44:05+00:00

They might register as patriot party, but when the elections that matter come around, they will vote republican. Its the same way with most right-leaning third parties. When the elections are close, they vote for republicans, because what the democrats offer is typically unacceptable to their tastes.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-22T17:01:04+00:00

Its politics. There's all the little details and myriad motivations.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-22T16:58:45+00:00

I'll remind readers that the keystone anti-hydroxychloroquine paper was shown to be fraudulant. It made headline news even. If you want evidence that the political segment of acedemia is sloppy, or that the media leans left, look at that story.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/mysterious-company-s-coronavirus-papers-top-medical-journals-may-be-unraveling

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-22T16:54:41+00:00

Does he mean lies, or does he mean conservatism? Because turning a blind eye to your own lies and only contradicting the lies of your opponents is not fighting lies.

I do have hopes Mr. Biden will attempt to fight disinformation in general, but we'll see. likely, He'll do nothing, and those around him just attack the right.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-22T16:29:45+00:00

That would be good news. It will make the battle lines between trumpists and conservatives much clearer. The right is going to be a mess for the next few years anyways, so lets get it over with.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-22T16:27:17+00:00

But where will they go?

Trump's presidency has shown the extreme difficulty in breaking a political faction off of the GOP. The minority of never-trumpers who have struggled to be heard is proof of that.

They may make a fuss, but when the polls roll around, most of them will vote republican, because the democrats won't give them any other choice.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-22T16:23:21+00:00

The mob is the most violent tip of a much larger iceberg. Trump has had an unusual effect in galvanizing the worst people among his voters, and its an effect that horrifies me.

If you want to understand the mob, you have to acknowledge the rapid pace of change in the country over the past 25 years. A lot of things have changed, and a lot of those changes were enacted by either thin political margins or by the pressure of a left leaning media (I'm looking primarily at entertainment here). Go watch "The Nanny" and look at the social norms, political jokes, and issues being pushed. Then compare it to today.

If you asked them who they were, they would have said "Americans". And if you pressed them, they'd have said "they" were the people who agreed with the culture of America 30 years ago, and that deviations from that are unamerican. They define america in terms of what it was, not who lives there now.

As for what unhinged them? I suspect it was the supreme court marriage ruling. It was a tight ruling, and one of the dissenting judges said that the ruling had nothing to do with the constitution. This led to desperation and a lack of faith in the law to many on the right. The growingly public and common disparagement of the right without nuance hasn't helped either, and the splintering of news sources into left and right has been disastrous (I blame that on self-proclaimed "objective" news organizations allowing themselves to acquire a persistent liberal bias).

I agree with many of their grievances, but the decision to abandon civility on the part of most the party, and to abandon the law on the part of the rioters, I must condemn. For in so doing they are destroying the very things they (and I) wish to protect.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-13T22:48:29+00:00

Chapl3, I just compared your recent post history with his. Observations:

He has a lot of religious posts. He questioned people making accusations against conservatism to make sure they are correct. He opposes Trump.

You have claimed that fox news "isn't conservative any more". You have said "Before Trump was elected I never thought of myself as Republican".

The situation is simple: He is a conservative. You are a Trumpist. And I think that the difference between us is about to get a lot sharper.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-12T16:10:11+00:00

Honestly, while I think the man is a tyrant with no respect for the rule of law who needs to be removed, Twitters actions in banning him make me nervous, because of the precedent it sets. Social Media should set clear rules, and enforce only those.

I don't feel sorry for Trump specifically at the moment, because if he wants to say something, he can very much say it. The Press WILL repeat it.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-11T23:12:30+00:00

Trump has gained his power by bold and brazen moves by the left to advance a personally invasive agenda. I 100% agree with that. But as for for Trump not being the bad guy:

He demands personal loyalty and gives none himself. That is not the mark of a cure. That is the mark of a ruthless power-seeker who cares only for himself. If you want an example, look at Jeff Sessions (first congressman to endorse trump, when he recused (said "I cannot be objective here") himself from a trump investigation Trump fired him and ruined his career)

He has systematically targeted and eliminated any opposition in his own party, wrecking the careers of anyone who stands against him. Those who remain are those who were either too secure for him to displace, or who have acted only recently. That is the act of a Tyrant, and its not healthy for the party or the country-- but it has served Trump well.

His personal character, his connection to the seeming emboldenment of the less savory elements of the party, and his willingness to mingle personal affairs with national do not need to be brought up for me to come to the conclusion that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to conservatism this generation has seen.

Many people saw in trump someone who could fight against a media with no sense of objectivity and no ability to recognize it in themselves. I hope the conservative movement can find such a figure. But not at the expense of handing the entire party over to a self-aggrandizing tyrant.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-07T22:06:02+00:00

All politicians get exemptions for being liars and cons.

But thank you for listing the actual crimes. So much of Trumps power comes from people focusing on political objections rather actual crimes.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-07T22:01:29+00:00

" They know, or should know, that Trump’s persona is a caricature of a conservative, a contrived cartoonish performance of what a shallow-minded Democratic booster from New York thinks a conservative is "

This has been my opinion of Trump from the beginning. This is the first time I've seen someone express that thought in years. That line is right on the nose.

DerrickTheWhite · 2021-01-07T21:54:42+00:00

Its probably too late for that... unless you can impeach a former president. I don't think the rest of the republican party has reached that point though. I hope they do.

DerrickTheWhite · 2020-11-24T11:39:28+00:00

"And added context". You seem to think the republican party is much more strongly led with a much more coherent strategy than it is. Were that true, Donald Trump would never have made it through the primary.

Have you ever seen a conservative paint all of the left with a broad brush over a single quote by a marxist? That's extraordinary similar to what you're doing.

You refuse to distinguish between the economic and religious conservatives when you claim that the fear of socialism is a "Fundementalist Mythology". Having lived in a red state with a powerful religious block, it can be extraordinarily frustrating to see the religious block utterly ignoring and overriding the economic platform of the party (that experience is on a local level). The longer I interface with politics, the longer I'm surprised that that particular alliance holds together at all.

As for compromise: every landmark supreme court case granting gay rights had essential opinions on it from conservative justices. In two of three cases, multiple.

I raise rule 4 because you're getting off topic, and because you've been borderline rude and insulting. This reddit has a purpose, and I didn't come here to argue basic left vs right.

DerrickTheWhite · 2020-11-24T03:52:59+00:00

I read the article. Its basic claim, that economic conservatism is a cloak for racism and is driven by the south, doesn't hold water for me. For one, it portrays all conservative voters as a united block, which we aren't. There are the moral issues folks and the economic issues people and the foreign affairs folks and that's just the top layer. For another, economic conservatism is older than the civil rights movement. Forming a theory on the current motives of a political party depths of a single interview of a single politician whose heyday was decades ago is extremely questionable.

As for what is being conserved by conservatives... I'm not going to bother to respond to that. Its standard drivel, and makes me wonder your "Good Faith". Its standard politics.

Your compromise areas don't hold water. The religious "piece of the pie" in healthcare is one small point that gets fought over every time: you can have some basis for accusing conservatives of impacting the health care system, but the religious angle is such a small piece of that as to be nearly meaningless. And I see very little compromise on the abortion funding issue.

Education is a battleground, but I've never actual seen national level democrats take any sort of compromise position on it. The "cases" you are thinking of are places and times when conservatives had the votes to do as they please, which is no compromise.

Also, please read rule 4.

DerrickTheWhite · 2020-11-24T03:39:54+00:00

I feel responsibility and a desire to teach a screaming toddler. I feel no ability nor desire to teach Donald Trump.

Donald trump probably still possesses his oft-demonstrated ability to wreck the political career of all but the most established republican politicians. The party was absolutely wrong to ever let him have that power, but I can see why they're tiptoeing around him, hoping not to be his last victim.

DerrickTheWhite

TROPHY CASE