Lord Ratner

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.

There are some key differences in your examples. GPS is peak government. Launch it and let anyone who wants to develop a use do so. But creating subsidies that heavily favor an existing company is easy to do and unfair. If the govt wanted to adopt a EV charging standard and install a network of charging stations across the country for any and all EVs to use, great. But increasingly the government is handing wads of cash to private companies while allowing them to continue the trend of making everything proprietary. Lets look at State and local governments that offer massive tax breaks to Amazon to open a new warehouse or data center. Sure... they might argue that anyone opening a 100,000 sq/ft+ data center could get the break, but when only one or two companies exist at the time of the tax break that can use it, that's targeted. It's also bullshit. Take a step back and think of the lunacy of providing tax breaks of any kind to a company as wildly successful as Amazon. It should be illegal for the government at any level to offer tax breaks to specific companies or industries. If you want to incentivize companies to show up, lower taxes for all business. It is absolute insanity that Amazon, one of the biggest corporations in the history of Earth, ran a beauty pageant where every major city in America handed over infrastructure and development plans while bidding for who could offer Bezos the lowest tax burden to open a new HQ. And after literally dozens of local governments prostrated themselves at the altar of Amazon for a chance to enhance their tech presence... who did Amazon pick? New York and DC. Fucking really? If you think it's just a coincidence that Amazon picked the business and government hubs as their surprise split decision, then I have a bridge to sell you. They knew from day one where they were going to build, but the data-driven company that's building a global distribution network got every city to give them their infrastructure roadmaps in the process. I'm a big free market advocate, but the theoretical perfect free market does not account for government. So we have to make changes that aren't purely free market. The modern capitalists, largely in tech but not exclusively, have mastered the art of using government to entrench their positions. Remember when Amazon suddenly supported collecting sales tax on all internet purchases because they could offer their payment services to small businesses that couldn't account for hundreds of different tax rates? Apple is pushing hard on right-to-repair laws. This is the modern version of telcoms making monopolistic agreements with city governments to lease telephone poles and prevent any other companies from competing. One electric provider, one gas, one phone, one internet and cable. Progressives (establishment, not voters) have always despised meritocracy, so their disregard for the miracles provided by the free market is no shock. But conservatives (establishment, not voters) have been blinded by the incredible wealth the new robber-barons have brought to their investment portfolios, and forgot that the free market can only function if it is perceived to be fair by the participants (voters, workers). Globalization brought us cheap clothes and TVs, but 30 years in and the cost turned out to be jobs and upward mobility for a huge swath of the country. The "democratic socialists" on the left were the first to lose faith, but they are few. Now the populists on the right, both of the Trump type, and the Tucker Carlson type are starting to lose faith too. It should scare you, because your kids, and certainly your grandkids will face a very different reality if the disenfranchisement continues to spread.

don't forget an incredible amount of government money in the form of subsidies. Tesla is, if anything, a great demonstration of exactly what's wrong with business in America. Only able to truly disrupt the system with Uncle Sam reaching into his pocket. This is a problem that the generic Democratic or Republican positions have been unable to adequately address. But it's going to get a lot worse as the fallout from 30 years of globalization and job transfer overseas starts to hit.

You're not considering what Weinstein is trying to accomplish. He doesn't feel any obligation towards the conservative party, because he's not a conservative. Much like flea, he's a moderate who sees his party departing reality. His goal is to save the Democratic party, or at least liberalism, from the progressive forces that are reshaping it. That's why almost all of his content covers the missteps of the left.

And yet, you're on to something very important. The most prominent voice on this phenomenon on the right is Tucker Carlson. He rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but he's dead-nuts-on here. Republicans, conservatives, capitalists, free market advocates, and libertarians generally stress a very hands-off approach, and usually cite creative destruction. I think the problem in the modern era is that creative destruction works exceptionally well in a closed system, and very poorly in a lopsided open system. It would be one thing if automated trucks put a few million (mostly) men into the unemployment line in a country rich with opportunity. But a phenomenal amount of labor has been sent to other countries, and while that has resulted in decades of cheaper goods (and massive economic growth for the foreign countries), eventually the accumulated wealth from previous generations runs out, and it doesn't matter how cheap your phone is if you don't have a job to pay for it. I think we are hitting the point where a few decades of outsourcing is finally coming back to bite us in the ass. And the biggest impact may very well be that it has starved our country of the necessary professions and positions to absorb the creative destruction of something like automated semi trucks. There's also an aspect to creative destruction that I don't often hear addressed, which is the pace. It's helpful in this case to use an extreme as a thought exercise. If automated trucks replaced all commercial drivers over the course of a hundred years, it's reasonable to assume that those drivers would be able to find other employment. But what if it happened in one day? Truck driving is the number one job for men in america, and many of them are single. The economic system may be well equipped to handle such destruction, but can the social system? I doubt it. Yaron Brooks (ultra libertarian, and head of the Ayn Rand club) used this metaphor for anti-competitive behavior: If there are two shoe stores, and one of those stores is able to lower their prices to absurd levels because a rich uncle is subsidizing the business, you as a consumer shouldn't care at all. As a consumer you should only care about where you get the goods for the best price, and if the other business goes under, in the long term the system will balance itself out. The subsidized company may even force the unsubsidized companies to creatively adapt and thus provide the consumer with an even better value. The problem is, while we may not care about a shoe store going out of business, if you take the metaphor and apply it on a national level, where the United States is the shoe store playing by the rules, and China is the shoe store subsidized by a rich uncle, sure, in the long run the system will stabilize, but in the short run our country goes out of business. That's unacceptable. Conservatives have long been against the cosmopolitan dream of one planetary society. Yet they are the strongest defendants of one planetary economic system. I'm not so sure you can have one without the other, and we're starting to see just how unsustainable it is for the world's most powerful country to rely on everyone else for their labor.

I wouldn't argue it's been for nothing. Automation and outsourcing have a strongly deflationary effect. Incidentally, printing trillions of dollars and dumping them into the system has a strongly inflationary effect. It may very well be that the two forces have been hiding each other for the last 20 to 30 years. However, we are approaching a point where outsourcing is no longer the free labor it used to be. Sure, it's a lot cheaper than having American workers make t-shirts, but as the third world countries we've relied on for manufacturing modernized, their workers began commanding steeper wages. Now automation is doing what outsourcing once did, providing the deflationary force to counter inflation from monetary policy. But for how long? The deflationary effect has been so strong over the years that it has also compensated for the complete stagnation in middle-class earnings. People don't make more, but the goods kept getting cheaper because of outsourcing and automation. We may be entering a period where the impact of automation and outsourcing diminishes. Given the eye watering amount of money printing, I wouldn't be surprised to see a return to '80s level inflation. Wanna guess what happens when the Federal reserve is forced to raise the interest rates that they have relied on to keep the lending markets, and as a secondary effect, the stock market afloat?

Number one way I can tell a movie/TV show is going to suck: dead characters coming back. When the producers and writers get attached to the actors instead of the story, the story inevitably crumbles. Just look at Game of Thrones. GRRM loved the world and the story, not the characters, so they died when it was best for the plot. As soon as the source material ran out, we got two seasons of steamy horse shit, because regular ass Hollywood writers and producers took over, and they just know how to stick to the formula. WW84 is just another casualty.

Exactly dude, that's a realistic view. Do you really think that's the narrative espoused by the left (political class, not voters)? You think your view led to riots?

I was specific in what I said. Election fraud and the systemic persecution of black people in the new millennium were both false narratives. 19 unarmed black people were shot by police in 2019. Are you going to pretend like that was the narrative this summer? I can spend the time quoting the many public leftists who fanned the flames with a false premise, but maybe we're just misunderstanding each other's point? If you think the protests over the summer were based on reality, spend the time and read the opposing side, you don't need me to Google it for you. Heather MacDonald has five great work on the subject. If you've done that and still buy the vision of a racist america in 2020, we'll just be stuck in different realities.

Just like anyone who thinks America is a racist country where innocent black people are being massacred by the cops is being gaslighted. That's the whole point, and the real tragedy. The Republicans now have their own false reality (election fraud) to live in. So both sides no longer know what's real. Great.