Lord Ratner

Well, I did just say she's the (D) version of Trump... So that was kinda the point.

She'll be popular due to a failure of our institutions to protect the American Dream for regular citizens, rise because she is willing to say politically unpopular things that alienate her from the establishment but ingratiate her with her base, use social media to bypass the usual structures and speak directly to her followers, lack any sort of real understanding of the system she wishes to change, continually say things that are factually wrong, not offer a face-saving route for her opposition to side with her, and ultimately fizzle out because she can't make the transition from activist to diplomat and appeal to a broad spectrum of voters.

At some point people will realize she's the (D) version of Trump. I suspect her political fortunes will be similar.

Barely missed? His own vice president shot him down. He lost in every court his legal team entered. It's amazing how we always seem to be on the precipice of catastrophe, yet never fall over the edge. Perhaps we're not as close as our emotions, and political puppeteers, lead us to believe.

I know, right? I was actually beginning to wonder if this was another Chang-level epic trolling, but I don't think so.

Bias and racism are not synonyms. If you are a police officer and the overwhelming balance of interactions you have with criminals are of a certain skin color, as a human you are going to develop a bias. That does not make you racist. We know this because minority police are subject to the exact same bias. Remember how stupid we all thought it was when TSA was patting down elderly white women in wheelchairs? This is a problem to be solved, but any solution is immediately precluded by calling the participants evil, which racism very much is. I think well meaning liberals gravitate towards this narrative because it is a much easier solution. With racism, you just go after the racists. People and policy, find and destroy. But the real solution is probably going to involve the breakdown of the black family unit, and the incarceration of young black men for decades. Nothing about that is going to be quick or easy. Or cheap. Affirmative action in colleges is another example of this phenomenon. The easy answer was to just twist the numbers to get more black people in college. But in many ways black people have paid the price of that ill-conceived solution. The real answer was always to fix black education at the elementary school level, and work up from there. But the results from that endeavor would not be seen for decades, whereas changing college admissions only takes four years to yield hypothetical results. Perception is not reality, but it guides how we act. The more we scream about systemic racism, despite the hard evidence, the more people will believe it. Just like election fraud. I find it almost amusing how each side sees the riots of the other side as inconceivable. I don't. I think the riots were unjustified and certainly immoral based on evidence, but I'm not surprised that they happened. a bunch of well-meaning citizens made the foolish mistake of taking what their politicians and media figures said as truth. What would you do if you legitimately believed that our democratic election process was being stolen from us? I hope that you would have your guns ready and march on the capitol. Likewise if you believed that the police were intentionally killing scores of black people without cause, based only on the fact that they were black, I would hope that you would take to the streets. I would.

Another stupid comment designed to make you feel better about your virtue. My station in life is completely unaffected by policing and black people. But I have an ethical interest in the matter. Misguided progressive policy, often based on gross misinterpretations of cause and effect, have a historical and frightening way of creating the problem they claim existed the whole time before failing to solve it. We all have an interest in preventing this.

Actually, they are both bullshit, that's exactly what I'm saying. You have a neat way of selectively picking which talking points "represent" a particular side, while conveniently ignoring the others. The fact of the matter is that overwhelmingly what was claimed during the race riots was bullshit. It's not even worth the time to pull up the nearly endless list of prominent leftists making claims as to the fatal nature of black people interacting with the police. But never numbers. When your cause can't be quantified in any way without discrediting the cause then the problem is the cause itself. These riots weren't about getting pulled over more, or getting side eye from a convenience store owner, or gang violence, hell they weren't even about the very real issues of incarceration impacting the ability of black communities to dig out of a very deep hole. Overwhelmingly they were about police brutality towards black people. And the most prominent cases, used as evidence of a systemic attack on black bodies, were misrepresented in ways that discredit the entire argument. And it was merely a continuation of the same lie, with different names and different cases fed into the narrative. Michael brown, trayvon martin, and now George Floyd. The bad old days of overt American racism are over. They have been for a while. The Civil Rights movement never required the mental gymnastics we see today to justify their protests, and yes, riots. It was plain to see for everyone, and because of such they were triumphant. The difficulties with race in 2021, and specifically within the black community, are much more difficult to address. There is no boogeyman, no villain to unify against. Not whiteness, not the police, not the system. But if I were to apply your logic to it then in fact the capital riots weren't about Trump or election theft, they were very legitimate protests against widespread yet nearly impossible to document election fraud, and just because a few crazies went a little too far, that shouldn't get in the way of the very legitimate and well-documented cause that they are supporting. There is no mortal threat to the black population in the United States from any element of the government, least of all the police. Minimize that claim all you like, but the rest of us don't need to be moralized over taking an argument at face value. One that was made over and over and over for a few years now. There was also no stolen election. Trump lost because Trump is a fucking moron, that's it. Yeah there are plenty of videos unequivocally proving voter fraud, but they are hundreds of votes out of over a hundred million. Neither statistic justifies the response, thus making the riots, on both sides, bullshit. It's completely chicken shit to tell everybody who disagrees with your narrative that they're just defending whiteness. I'm a fucking cuban jew, for Christ's sakes. You think I have a lot of cred in the white supremacist community? You can call out a lie for what it is without having an affinity for your own skin color.

So we can at least agree that the BLM race riots started in May were based on a lie and fueled by lies, and directly in conflict with the reality of society in 2020. Just like the Capitol riots were based on a lie and fueled by lies, and directly in conflict with the reality of the 2020 election. So why is it then, when it's the best time to be alive, including if you're a black man or woman in America, do people on both sides of the political spectrum feel like the situation is so dire that they must literally set fire to the streets? I suspect it's because of the people we are meant to rely on to tell us the truth, politicians, scientists, media figures, and intellectuals, have decided that winning is more important than honesty. It used to be that Republicans were always on their back foot in this game, because there was a line they didn't seem willing to cross. The Trump era has put an end to that. It seems like the only differentiation between Republicans and Democrats anymore is which lies they fight over.

Quite the contrary, I'm saying that Biden represents anti conservativism. If you must add Trump to the equation, he is certainly more conservative than Biden, while not being particularly conservative. But that doesn't change the fact that Biden is the opposite of conservatism. Which is why I pointed out other voting possibilities consistent with conservatism. But voting for the politician and party that is anti-conservative is not one of them.

Not great at reading what others write? Where am saying otherwise? You aren't conservative if you vote for the opposite of conservatism. Also, I meant to say Jo Jorgenson, not MJ Hagar. My bad.

I didn't say that. I said if you voted for Biden, you aren't conservative. Voting for no one, or Jo Jorgenson, or writing in an honest candidate, all that is consistent with conservatism. Voting for Biden because you can't stand Trump is not.

How? Am I the only person who saw politicians for the duplicitous villains they always have been? The problem I have with your argument, and the Never Trumpers in general, is that it really sounds like "I can look my kids in the eye and support someone as long as they aren't so obvious about their immorality." It would be one thing to disown Trump and only support moral, consistent politicians. But Biden, Harris, Bernie, and the others are anything but. If a conservative voted for a liberal because of Trump, I'm not sure they were really conservative. If they didn't vote at all, that is a completely understandable and consistent position. This is why nothing is real and everything is a riot. Because the masses, unwashed as we are, are very good at spotting an inconsistency. Everything that was said of Trump was completely and totally true of his supposed betters. He's enriching himself in office? Lol. He's kicking positions to family and friends? That's new... He's a liar? He cheats on his wife? His kids are a mess? He plays too much golf? And before Trump, good, decent, honest people were immolated with bullshit. Romney and Kavanaugh are just two obvious examples. So hating Trump for the odious pig he is, gotcha. But don't moralize if your solution is to support a more-polished turd. Trump was just politics without the makeup. If you (not Homestar specifically) didn't realize that until now, I have a bridge to sell you. We agree on Crenshaw. *If* he can keep his head on straight, and doesn't wait too long to run, he would make an incredible president. We need term limits and age limits. I've never heard anyone say they wished they had an 80 year old involved in their project, yet somehow they are running the country.

Yikes. There's a whole lot of "I told ya so" that'll come from that clip.

There's a reason I don't watch cable news very much. I could direct you to plenty of clips from his podcast or radio show, which it seems you do not in fact, listen to. But it's not worth the time. I said you need to listen to his stuff to understand the intellectual position of the right. A cable news clip is not quite the research I had in mind. Both sides do this, but right now we are in a cycle where the left is doing it more. Obviously there are racists, and they're going to wear racist t-shirts and wave racist flags. But like all things, you have to assess the prevalence of a problem to determine if the problem is in fact relevant. White supremacy is quite simply not relevant in 2021. It's certainly not relevant to the scale of nation wide rioting, nor is it relevant to the scale that justifies the Democratic push for overtly racist "equity" policies. Yes, the US was once a racist nation. Now it is not. Shapiro focuses on the broader strategy of the activists, some in elected positions, who are lying to the American people about "systemic racism." That can't be done on a 5 minute guest spot on Fox News, but I get why he does it anyways. That's where the eyeballs are. Racism and white supremacists have been the preferred misdirect of the professional left since the Obama administration. At some point they realized that their rebranded socialist/Marxist policies, which are very much real, and very much being taught in universities and corporate conference rooms (even if you are unfamiliar with them) were not palatable to the general population, Republican or democrat. So instead of making the case their preferred system, they are instead undermining the present system such that when it fails from a lack of support from the population, they will be ready to jump in with their "fixes." I've talked about this here before, because many of the left leaning posters in this conversation seem completely oblivious as to the intellectual engine driving their party. There's not a single professional Republican who is supporting White supremacists, because the extremists commonly associated with the right are cartoonishly easy to identify. But the extremists on the left are far more dangerous if only for the fact that liberal voters are almost comically unwilling to admit they exist or matter. Go read anything by Ibram X Kendi or Robin DiAngelo. Look at what "the squad" has to say about our country and way of life. Read the endless stream of BLM propaganda (being hunted, massacre, crushing black bodies, genocide) over 2020 and try to find the part where only *fewer than 20* unarmed black people were killed by the police in 2019 or 2020. Out of 40 million. These are not fringe activists. No one on the right is hosting Richard Spencer or the proud boys at their events. The professional left is fully embracing their radicals, while telling the voting left that the they are still the party of Bill Clinton. They aren't. I think the voters on the left will figure it out eventually, but I don't know how much damage will be done.

Not sure what you listen to, because Shapiro was all over the riots at the Capitol. I suspect what you're really looking for is someone on the right to criticize the right in the same way that someone on the left would, but that's a silly expectation. Conservatives can only be compared to other conservatives, in this case, and when you compare someone like Shapiro or Weinstein to, say, Fox news, the difference is obvious. It's not like Trump has some sort of endless laundry list of problems. He's immoral in his personal life, uneducated on the issues, bad with his hiring decisions in many cases, and a terrible communicator to most of the electorate. I listen to Shapiro go off on those regularly. And there's zero comparison between the right and left insofar as defending their extremists. Democratic politicians tied themselves in knots doing everything in their power to minimize criticism of antifa and rioters over the summer. I've seen no such reluctance on the right to criticize white supremacists and rioters on the 6th. But part of this is that if you think government is the solution to many of our problems (leftist), you're going to find fault in any conservative message, and conservatives are going to seem very similar to you. Same goes for the right.

It'll be white people. Trump was a nice little gift to the marxists who are during the race war for reasons unrelated to race, but they have had their obvious bad guy long before Trump, and they will go right back to that.

You guys getting bent around the axle over the huge number of republicans believing in a stolen election are missing the forest for the trees. How do you know that there isn't a breathable atmosphere on the moon? With the exception of very few people, it's because you were told. There are a whole lot of obvious truths that are only obvious because no one disagrees with them on any meaningful level. With Republican politicians seeming to resign themselves to a world where truth is a political liability, I think we're going to see a whole lot more surprising beliefs spreading through the population. The anti-vax movement, even before the coronavirus, showed that for a subset of the population even a minute level of support for a counter narrative is enough to believe the conspiracy. Even when the supporters and supporting information for the prevailing narrative, in this case the vaccines are largely safe and effective, a certain number of people will choose the conspiracy. For the stolen election conspiracy, the fucking president was supporting the conspiracy. That's way, way, way more support from prominent figures than any flat earth, chemtrails, or anti-vax conspiracy ever had, so it should be no surprise that a huge portion of the population believes it.

Agreed, but there's a lot of that going around these days...

There is definitely an element of Truth to that, and conservatives do their argumentative service to pretend like it's not a factor. But you can go back to George W Bush, Mitt Romney, and Brett Kavanaugh, to see examples of people who were I know rational measure bad people, that treated quite differently than their Democratic counterparts. Just like conservatives who deny the difference you cite with Trump immediately posture their liberal counterparts to ignore the remainder of their argument, liberals and listed the same effect from conservatives and they deny a very obvious and measurable bias immediate coverage between conservatives and liberals.

Go spend some time in Mexico, South America, the Middle East (I'm assuming you have), Africa, or East Asia and tell me America isn't a meritocracy. I'm sure you're being somewhat hyperbolic, but the difference between the Western meritocracy and real nepotism, which most Americans have not experienced, is vast and shocking. Ivanka Trump was an advisor, not the Secretary of State. Hunter Biden was just milking some spare change from his Dad's name, he wasn't the Secretary of Commerce. We are not nepotistic country.

This is what happens when the party, and to a large extent, the voters don't know what they believe anymore. The activists with very clear, but very niche goals take over. I'm amazed by how many democrat voters I talk to don't know what their party is pushing. This topic is literally one of the examples I'm thinking of. Americans are spending more time than ever attacking their political opponents and defending their allies, yet almost no time thinking and discussing what they actually believe. This is not by happenstance.

This problem will solve itself. It's a bridge too far for many, and will illicit a response from more people than there are trans athletes. Politicians take the path of least resistance. This move will flip the resistance equation. It's also an obvious States-rights domain.

You'd have to listen to Shapiro's podcast to know that. He regularly and repeatedly calls out the right. He's the most honest and consistent voice on the right by far, and if you only listened to one conservative, it should be him. Tucker Carlson is second on the list, but a distant second. Not because he represents the intellectual justification for conservatism, but because he is the best voice for the populist/conservative hybrid that is growing within the right. Unfortunately most of his work is on cable news, which is a garbage format. But he does appear on podcasts where his views are far more digestible. Check out him and Shapiro talking about self driving trucks. It's an eye opening exchange to a self-driving-car-evangelist like myself.

A lot to cover, but a very good conversation. GPS. The point stands, it was released in a way that was not exclusionary to certain players or industries. It's a delicate balance. If the government has instead given a bunch of money to Garmin, we'd have something closer to Tesla. If the government decided it liked a certain technology, let's say satellite radio, and started giving tax credits to anyone who buys a satellite radio, knowing damn well that only one satellite radio company stands to benefit, that would be even more like Tesla. Now Tesla is an established giant, and the subsidies are going away… but those subsidies were necessary for the formation of a viable electric car maker, so how will the competition develop? I agree with you in some ways, I love what Tesla is doing and I want that type of innovation supported and encouraged. But it has to be done in a way that doesn't undermine our belief in the fairness of the system. As you said, if the system no longer seems fair, "then the only alternative is a violent overthrowing of those that are controlling the market unfairly by the people oppressed by that market." Even if you take Tesla as a .gov success story, let's look at some examples of the more likely outcome: Affirmative action: Favoring black students provides limited benefit to some black students, but overall creates an even deeper divide in outcomes: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action Get more people into home ownership: Home owners are correlated with all sorts of desirable demographic outcomes, so let's promote it at the government level, right? Along comes 2008: https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/05/19/how-the-government-created-a-financial-crisis/?sh=661ac0e821fb Higher education costs: In a comically stupid misreading of cause and effect, the government decided that going to college meant more success later in life. Incorrect. Being smart and joining professions that required additional education meant higher success. But that detail was ignored, so the .gov has been pushing college, which has created a wildly unsustainable student debt crisis, and made college costlier than ever: https://www.mercatus.org/publications/government-spending/government-policy-and-tuition-higher-education Not to mention the laundry list of failed companies that only lasted as long as they did based on infusions of government cheese. These aren't just ideas that fail, they often cause devastating long-term effects that are completely opposed to the original goals. The tolerance and coddling of homelessness, to include building shelters and finding supplies that make the lifestyle possible, is going to suck when we end up paying for the lifetime institutionalization of tens of thousands of people whose brains are irreparably fried from years of drug abuse. The embrace of critical race theory has resulted in the predictable rebirth of white supremacy. The American role of world police has resulted in a Europe without any form of military defense, and thus they are helpless to make even token gestures against the aggressions of Russia and China. Government, as a result of the perpetual change of power, must act quick, so instead of attacking the root causes of a problem, which is a slow process, they attack the manifestations/symptoms of the problem. Feels good, but doesn't help. Liberals are similar, but mostly because they are sensitive to the emotional toll of disparities and not inclined towards solutions that allow the impact to persist. They have almost no consideration for second and third order effects, and even less patience. Sports Arenas: Completely against it. For all the reasons listed above. Business is not stupid, they don't build arenas where there is no profit. All the subsidies in the world will not bring an arena to Columbus, MS. I understand the intent, but how many times must an intent be abused before you see it for what it inevitably is? I think the stadium for the Seattle soccer team was denied government assistance by a very tenacious city council member. Surprise surprise, the stadium went up anyways. Here's something similar, and there are plenty of studies showing the questionable returns of stadiums: https://www.insidesources.com/seattles-tale-of-two-stadiums/ Greed and power: Government by a different name. The free market struggles with monopolies in the real world. The government is the ultimate monopoly. Using that extreme monopoly to pick winners is the antithesis to a free market, no matter how much you like the technology. The challenge isn't policing private monopolies, it's using the government to police its own power. The heavy regulation of chosen winners such as utilities is indeed an example. This type of regulation is not present on the new era of chosen winners. Your power company analogy is flawed. The second power company is restricted not because the first power company won't share their power lines, but because the city won't allow the second company to construct their own. That restriction on the second (and any other) company is why the first has an advantage. Heavily regulated, this arrangement can be made close to fair (including regular rebidding for which company gets the monopoly), but it is onerous, deleterious to innovation, and should be used sparingly. Electric cars do not meet the threshold IMO. Keeping the city free of a million power lines from a dozen competitors crossing every street does. Meritocracy: you can't argue that socialism benefits from meritocracy; the two concepts are literally opposed. Of course socialism benefits from not being socialistic. In fact, progressivism is even more opposite to meritocracy than socialism. In a theoretical perfect socialism, the most capable/merited are elevated to positions of power (though it never, ever happens that way). From each according to his abilities. With progressivism, positions of authority are selected based on group-identity-based disparities. You'll get no disagreement from me on nepotism. Bad for any system. I think I hit everything. Great convo.