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Are conservatives just irrational people?

Cephus said:
Yeah, not so much. He may have said things that were INTERPRETED as racist by groups of people for whom race means absolutely everything. That doesn't make Trump racist. There's no such thing as casual racism. There are just people who see racism in everything whether it actually exists or not.
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I specifically said that Trump wasn't a racist. There are many things that he said, mostly as a candidate, that were undeniably racist: his comments immediately upon entering the race that "Mexico isn't sending its best people" and that they were rapists and criminals, his comments stating flatly that an American judge of Mexican heritage could not fairly adjudicate his trial because of his racial background, his call for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US (clearly intended to target Arab/North African travel in particular), his statements during the campaign about African-Americans living in "hell" and having no jobs, and his comments last year about all Haitians having AIDS and Nigerians living in huts. I also believe that there are people out there, mainly on the left, who will read racism into comments that aren't racist. The comments I listed just now though are racist in nature, and I can't see how any of those would be considered non-racist given the manner in which the comments were made.

One can, however, make (many) racist statements without being a flat out racist. As I said in my post, I think racists build their entire ideologies around race, which I don't think applies to the President (I don't think he has any coherent ideology whatsoever). His statements are indicative of racist attitudes he holds which are deeply ingrained in his character. He isn't a good person, in any sense of the word, as I think can be seen quite clearly from the long record of his public affairs, both business and personal. Still, that doesn't make him necessarily a racist, or his supporters racist.
 
RationalPolicy said:
I specifically said that Trump wasn't a racist. There are many things that he said, mostly as a candidate, that were undeniably racist: his comments immediately upon entering the race that "Mexico isn't sending its best people" and that they were rapists and criminals, his comments stating flatly that an American judge of Mexican heritage could not fairly adjudicate his trial because of his racial background, his call for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US (clearly intended to target Arab/North African travel in particular), his statements during the campaign about African-Americans living in "hell" and having no jobs, and his comments last year about all Haitians having AIDS and Nigerians living in huts. I also believe that there are people out there, mainly on the left, who will read racism into comments that aren't racist. The comments I listed just now though are racist in nature, and I can't see how any of those would be considered non-racist given the manner in which the comments were made.

One can, however, make (many) racist statements without being a flat out racist. As I said in my post, I think racists build their entire ideologies around race, which I don't think applies to the President (I don't think he has any coherent ideology whatsoever). His statements are indicative of racist attitudes he holds which are deeply ingrained in his character. He isn't a good person, in any sense of the word, as I think can be seen quite clearly from the long record of his public affairs, both business and personal. Still, that doesn't make him necessarily a racist, or his supporters racist.
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I don't know that they were undeniably racist, I'd need specific examples. There is a difference between someone being racist and someone being ACCUSED of being racist. This is especially true when you have people who, for ideological reasons, spend far too much time thinking about racism, or sexism, or whatever other -ism you want to include, and therefore think that EVERYONE is racist, just because they disagree. Unfortunately, when you get to the far left, you run into the Anita Sarkeesian effect, that everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic and these people are going to point it all out, whether it's defensible or not. When you find someone whose entire worldview is that everything is awful and all white people are terrible, you can't have an intelligent conversation with those people.
 
SonOfDaedalus said:
Trump's presidency has made me consider that all these years I've been arguing with fundamentally irrational people. Trump is obviously utterly and totally incompetent. Any rational person can see that. So, it's evident that we're dealing with irrational people.

But beyond Trump almost everything about conservatism is fundamentally irrational:

1. Anti-immigration irrationality. If one illegal alien or Muslim commits a crime they reason that if you banned all illegal aliens or Muslim that crime would not have occurred. That's irrational. All groups commit crimes. Plenty of American citizens go on shooting sprees. You're far more likely to be shot by a crazy non-Muslim American citizen than any Muslim. Moreover, you're more likely to be crushed by furniture or struck by lightning than die due to a Muslim terrorist. Over a million people come through the diversity lottery program, a couple commit terrible crimes and they reason, irrationally, that the lottery program is the problem.

2. Climate change deniers. Why would you ignore what scientists are telling you? Even if half the scientists said there was nothing to worry about and half were warning us, wouldn't it make sense to err on the side of caution? What do we have to lose if we clean up pollution then later find out there was no man-made climate change? But consider what we have to lose if they were right and we didn't do enough. The irrationality is absolutely staggering.

3. Universal health care. Canada and all of Europe has moved to universal health care. None of them want to go back to the system we have. Even conservatives in Britain support universal health care. We pay more than anyone and costs are exploding and will eventually bankrupt us but conservatives are in complete denial of reality. If universal health care was so bad why aren't the citizens of Canada and Europe fighting to get rid of it? You can have basic universal health care and still have private supplemental insurance.

Finally, unless you're willing to let a homeless man die because he can't afford treatment, health care is always universal anyway. We just have a terrible universal system.

4. Nationalism. Flag worship and demanding Americans stand for the anthem is just irrational. How can you have a free country where people are forced to stand for the anthem? That makes absolutely no sense. It's the extremely authoritarian countries like North Korea where people are forced to show patriotism.

5. Gay marriage. If you don't like gay marriage then don't get gay married. Why do you care what others do? Whatever happened to freedom? I'm Christian but I refuse to impose my beliefs on my fellow citizens because I don't want them to do the same to me. Three conservative Supreme Court judges voted in favor of Texas' anti-sodomy law in a case where a gay man was arrested for having sex in his own home. This includes Scalia and Thomas. This is totally irrational.

6. Defense. We're deeply in debt. Our military is bigger than the next 10 militaries combined. Surely we can save some money by decreasing military spending, right? Not according to conservatives. Our military apparently isn't big enough! Are we planning to invade the world?

all-this-and-we-dont-even-have.gif


Now we have Trump, the leader of the irrationals building a wall to stop drug trafficking in an age where drug traffickers use drones.

We're just dealing with seriously irrational people. They're completely immune to facts and logic.
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And this is news why?


And this is news why?
 
Cephus said:
I don't know that they were undeniably racist, I'd need specific examples. There is a difference between someone being racist and someone being ACCUSED of being racist. This is especially true when you have people who, for ideological reasons, spend far too much time thinking about racism, or sexism, or whatever other -ism you want to include, and therefore think that EVERYONE is racist, just because they disagree. Unfortunately, when you get to the far left, you run into the Anita Sarkeesian effect, that everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic and these people are going to point it all out, whether it's defensible or not. When you find someone whose entire worldview is that everything is awful and all white people are terrible, you can't have an intelligent conversation with those people.
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I completely agree with you with respect to the far-left folks that see negative -isms in everything, from commercials to political statements to video games, but occasionally the boy who cries wolf actually sees a real wolf. The statements I referenced in my post were specific instances of racist statements coming from Donald Trump, either as a candidate or as President. I linked to an article that includes those specific examples and the contemporaneous news descriptions of those instances. There's definitely a difference between being accused of racism and actually doing/saying something racist, but I would still state with no doubt in my mind that the specific comments I mentioned in my previous post were racist in nature. Too many people are smeared with the racist brush for no reason (Ben Shapiro being one of those who I think is unfairly demeaned on that count), but I don't think the President has earned the benefit of the doubt given his long prior history.
 
FastPace said:
Black liberals are increasingly opposing increased immigration as well. Or that being the logic if 3 jobs are available in the USA 5 out of work blacks and 2 out of work whites are looking for jobs, then why bring in 3 or 7 immigrants. It's f__n math.

Personally, I don't care if the USA becomes 40% Latino and 30% Muslim. Would be perfectly fine with me. But I hold Judas (Americans) the betrayers (Democrats and Republicans) in contempt. A pimp claim his w*ore is to be loyal to him but not he to her. You can keep that one sided patriotism stepping. Either that or pull out the guns. I hate those that hate me.






That's not a "conservative" program either but a left leaning one. The host is a lesbian by the way.

Does the title of the video below sound like something conservatives preach? No.








Eh... putting Republicans aside (roaring fires of hell await many of them), as you know they are absolutely useless in helping resolve problems of children dying of curable diseases around the world, or homelessness etc., Democrats that run the City of LA can fix LA's homeless problem on Skid Row. But I'm supposed to believe the combined IQ power of liberal all across planet earth can't solve the tiny, microscopic, problem of homelessness in tiny (relative to the globe) LA but liberals can stop the oceans rising?

Liberals across planet earth can unite, all these scientists and countries can unite, to stop children in developing countries of dying of curable diseases.

So, why are immigrants and the US Government moving immigrants into Florida if in fact they are convinced due to "Climate Change" Florida is going to be plunged under water in the near future? Answer: they are full of sh*t.

So-called "Climate Change" is as 100% true as the once believed fiction of the "gay gene." By the way it is cold as hell in Wisconsin right now. Per usual. I don't see any Palm Trees sprouting up and women running around in bikinis. Kiss my a__ with this Climate Change. I wish and hope Climate Change happens and Wisconsin no longer goes into freezing periods? Florida? Well like the Beverly Hill Billies I guess Floridians better pack up, get in their Southern trucks, and drive the f__ North. Or maybe Florida's state government can create a massive government funded job program, building a bunch of modern day Noah's Arks? Better safe than sorry right? And it would create jobs in the mean time.
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Irrational post proving the op correct.
 
RationalPolicy said:
I completely agree with you with respect to the far-left folks that see negative -isms in everything, from commercials to political statements to video games, but occasionally the boy who cries wolf actually sees a real wolf. The statements I referenced in my post were specific instances of racist statements coming from Donald Trump, either as a candidate or as President. I linked to an article that includes those specific examples and the contemporaneous news descriptions of those instances. There's definitely a difference between being accused of racism and actually doing/saying something racist, but I would still state with no doubt in my mind that the specific comments I mentioned in my previous post were racist in nature. Too many people are smeared with the racist brush for no reason (Ben Shapiro being one of those who I think is unfairly demeaned on that count), but I don't think the President has earned the benefit of the doubt given his long prior history.
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And when they do, that boy has to prove they saw the wolf, especially if they have a long history of telling tall tales. Again, you haven't produced any examples of Donald Trump saying anything that is OBJECTIVELY racist. It's only how you are interpreting it. So the question is whether Trump or anyone else INTENDED it to be racist, or is the listener simply TAKING it as racist. Because I don't care how you INTERPRET things, I only care how things actually are. And that's a question that really needs to be asked and examined.
 
Cephus said:
And when they do, that boy has to prove they saw the wolf, especially if they have a long history of telling tall tales. Again, you haven't produced any examples of Donald Trump saying anything that is OBJECTIVELY racist. It's only how you are interpreting it. So the question is whether Trump or anyone else INTENDED it to be racist, or is the listener simply TAKING it as racist. Because I don't care how you INTERPRET things, I only care how things actually are. And that's a question that really needs to be asked and examined.
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You really don't consider then-candidate Trump stating that the judge who was hearing his Trump University case, who is an American by birth, was "very hostile" and "should recuse himself because he’s given us ruling after ruling after ruling, negative, negative, negative,” followed by remarking that “What happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great. I think that’s fine," racially biased at all? Even Paul Ryan called that "a textbook example" of racism. To think that a federal judge cannot be unbiased based solely on his ethnic heritage, which should have zero bearing on anything, is absolutely racist. That really isn't an interpretation on my part, but objective reality.

You can mince words when determining whether other moments Trump has had were racist in nature, like when he called out a black man in one of his rally crowds as "my African-American", but there really is no legitimate way to defend the Curiel comments. I'm not at all someone who sees racism when it isn't there, but the comments about a judge born in Indiana being "Mexican" and therefore biased are absolutely racist in nature.
 
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