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The mentality of a conservative

Chillfolks said:
Do you trust the government you have to do the right thing for its citizens?
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Today? No. Two years ago I mostly did. After 2020 I likely will again, but the road back will be long after the damage that has been done.
 
MrWonka said:
They're poor, I'm doing great.


I work on the medical database that helps Veterans Access their medical records. I pay taxes...Happily, so that the next generation of Americans can have the same opportunity that I had.


Again...I pay taxes. You see because I got a good education, I got a better job than my parents. That means I pay more taxes in. Over the course of my lifetime, I will easily pay more in taxes to the government than they have ever spent on me, and they will use that money to investing in the next generation as well. I grew up in one of the most liberal states in the country where they have high taxes, but they use that money to invest in education.

You see the only reason I got everything for nothing is that your boy Trump keeps cutting my taxes against my will. I'd much rather have that money contribute to healthcare so people like mother didn't have to work until she's 80 just to pay for her own.
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Glad to hear you worked to improve yourself and exceed the limits your parents endured. As to your last statement - there is no law, past or present, that prevents you form contributing more to the Government (i.e., the IRS) than you are legally obligated to pay! If you really want to contribute more of your income to help those who have no or cannot afford insurance - please do; I would applaud you!
 
MrWonka said:
That's not a reason to eliminate government it's a reason to move to Australia. When you have a bad girlfriend or boyfriend you don't take a vow of celibacy. You dump their ass and find a better one.
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There is such a thing as a good girlfriend. By definition, there cannot be such a thing as a good government.

If you care to argue the case for them, begin with your definition of good...and I'll show you where you're wrong. If you'd rather I do that, know that my moral philosophy is the non-aggression principle. That is the lens through which I judge if a thing is good or not.
 
MrWonka said:
Today? No. Two years ago I mostly did. After 2020 I likely will again, but the road back will be long after the damage that has been done.
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What a sad world you live in. Trump is a jerk - always has been, but he seems to actually be trying to help improve America for the best.
 
MrWonka said:
Today? No. Two years ago I mostly did. After 2020 I likely will again, but the road back will be long after the damage that has been done.
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So much for liberals trusting the folks to do the right thing during elections and trusting government.
Are you secretly a conservative and not willing to admit it or just another example of how full of BS the OP was?
 
MrWonka said:
Bad food and plastic straws are cheap and convenient. They have many short-term benefits but over time serious long-term consequences. When people are in competition with each other however they tend to take the easier path. They have little regard for the big picture of what happens if everyone thinks as they do. Some businesses may voluntarily offer better options, but usually at a higher price. As a result, the free market cannot fix the problem and even if it does it will take a very long time to get there.

Let me give you an example that really opened my eyes to the naivety of the free market. A while back my home state passed a smoking ban. They banned it in all public places including bars. Now even though I wasn't a smoker the libertarian in me was convinced that this was a bad idea. These were private businesses, and I felt like they should have the right to make this choice for themselves. If they wanted to allow smoking they should be able to. What I found out down the road though was that every person I knew that owned a bar actually had wanted to go non-smoking. Most of them had wanted to do it for years in fact. They were just afraid to do it because they had a lot of regulars who smoked, and they worried that if they said no more smoking their customers would get offended and take their business to the bar across the street. With no guarantee that they would get new regulars they were scared to make the switch. They had a working business model and if it wasn't broke they didn't want to try and fix it.

Well as it turns out the bar across the street was thinking the exact same thing. They too wanted to go non-smoking but were afraid they'd lose regulars to the first bar. They were in essentially the free market version of a Mexican standoff with neither wanting to go first and be wrong. When the government banned smoking though they were able to go to their customers and say, "hey sorry, you know if it was up to me I'd let you keep smoking, but that darn government is always ordering us around." The regulars got mad at the government, not the bar owners even though most owners were secretly happy about the change. The regulars didn't have another bar to go to so they mostly stuck around and went outside for a smoke now and then. Many bars even built patios for them. Business boomed because as it turned out there were a lot of people who avoided the bars specifically because of all the smoke.

Now it's possible maybe that someday a couple of bars would have taken the risk and tried to go non-smoking without the government. It's also possible that a new bar would have opened up and tried to go non-smoking as well, but nothing facilitated the change faster than the government, and all around it was better for everyone.



This is a forum for people to argue about politics. Obviously, the things discussed here are rarely so simple.
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Well said.. game theory is woefullly underutilized, if for no other reason that provides a mathematical method to understand decision making in the real world.

Free markets can be incredibly powerful. By reducing the complexity of the objectives and decision space of any given actor you can create a system that is robust and efficient. But as you noted free markets can be incredibly destructive and naive. Ignoring global constraints mean that an equilibrium can unthinkingly take the entire system off a cliff.
 
MrWonka said:
I've noticed this more and more lately and it's a very disturbing trend. It seems to be very pervasive among conservatives particularly Trump supporters. It's the mentality that everyone is bad so therefore it's okay for you to be. Everyone is self-centered, everyone is greedy, everybody lies, everybody does it so why not just embrace it? Nice guys finish last anyways right?

Thomas Sowell refers to it as a Constrained Vision. Essentially the idea is that liberals are optimistic about human beings and conservatives are pessimistic. Conservatives, therefore, believe more constraint is necessary to make sure people don't get out of line, and systems should be designed under the assumption that people will be evil. Liberals, however, have more faith in humanity and will, therefore, trust the majority of the people to do the right thing. Liberals, therefore, trust the majority of people to elect good leaders and are willing to put more trust in the government for that reason.

This is of course very fear-based thinking on the part of Conservatives, but more than that I see it driving the desperate need from conservatives to kill before being killed. Since they don't trust you they feel as though they are justified in their bad behavior because they just know secretly you're doing it too. They have no issue rigging elections for instance because they just assume liberals are too. They invaded Iraq thinking it was better to fight them there than here despite no real evidence Iraq had any interest in it.

Capitalism itself is based upon the idea that people are basically greedy so at least we should build a system where people can do what's in their own best interest and have it be what is reasonably in yours as well. In reality, though it is the people who have convinced themselves that everyone is greedy who are the ones causing most of the problems.
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Conservatives did not riot after Trump got elected. Liberals did.
Conservatives DID NOT riot when Obama was elected....twice.
Conservatives did not mill about in the street at night and scream primaly up at the sky one year after the 2016 election. Liberals did.
Conservatives did not riot to stop people from speaking on campus. Liberals did.
Conservatives did not assault a 16yo boy wearing a MAGA hat. A liberal did.
Conservatives did not make up false racial assault stories to the press. Liberals did.
A Conservative did not pretend to be a black woman and rise through the ranks of the NAACP. A liberal did.
Conservatives do not verbally assault people when dining in public with their families. Liberals do.
Conservatives do not call a huge voting majority of US voters "deplorables". Liberals do.
...and you are still doing it in this thread.

Get off your high horse. You are not fooling anyone. This is just another "Trump supporters are morons" thread, no matter how thick you lay on the icing.

I can see it easily and I am not even a Trump supporter.
When the election is over, I accept the results and move on.
Good advice.
Liberals have refused to accept election results since 2000, and it seems never will if they loose.
but then again...accepting what is real has never been their strong suit anyway.
ie...a man in a dress and wearing a wig DOES NOT make him a woman.
 
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Chillfolks said:
So much for liberals trusting the folks to do the right thing during elections and trusting the government.
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This government was not elected by a majority of Americans. The Republican party has lost the popular vote in 6 out of the last 7 presidential elections. They cheated their way into power by taking advantage of poor election laws and bad timing.
 
PleasantValley said:
Conservatives did not riot after Trump got elected. Liberals did.
Conservatives DID NOT riot when Obama was elected....twice.
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Umm...do you just not know what the Tea Party was?

PleasantValley said:
Conservatives do not call a huge voting majority of US voters "deplorable".
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No, they call them libtards instead right? Except unlike Hillary Clinton, they never apologize for it. Oh, and by the way, they're not remotely a majority, and it's not our fault that deplorable accurately describes them.
 
Anarchon said:
There is such a thing as a good girlfriend. By definition, there cannot be such a thing as a good government.
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You don't seem to know how definitions work and how subjectivity works. There are a number of different governments around the world today that I would consider good. I would also consider many iterations of the U.S. government to have been very solid particularly for their place and time.

Anarchon said:
If you'd rather I do that, know that my moral philosophy is the non-aggression principle.
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Nothing about a government contradicts such a principle. Arbitration is not aggression. It is basically the antithesis of aggression, and yet that is the primary function of a government.
 
MrWonka said:
Umm...do you just not know what the Tea Party was?
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Show me one TeaParty protest that rioted.

MrWonka said:
No, they call them libtards instead right? Except unlike Hillary Clinton, they never apologize for it. Oh, and by the way, they're not remotely a majority, and it's not our fault that deplorable accurately describes them.
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Hillary only apologized because it was politically expedient to do so. There was no sincere apology from her. In any case though, both sides always call each other names. Although Democrats do seem to use the worst ones the most. I don't see Republicans going around calling everyone that disagrees or has a differing opinion with them sexist, racist, xenophobic, Nazi's and every other ism/ist out there.
 
MrWonka said:
First, the rules on straws have as far as I know only been leveled at the state level.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to limit governmental overreach to only federal government.

MrWonka said:
But so long as a state like Texas or Florida, for example, refuses to make a point to eliminate the unnecessary use of plastic the choice of a state like Vermont is irrelevant. Vermont's choice isn't enough by itself to save the planet so long as Texas and Florida continue to pollute. Furthermore, the special straws in Vermont are costing people and businesses in Vermont more money because they're not being effectively mass produced. This ends up hurting the people of Vermont even they're doing what is in the best interest of the planet while benefiting the people of Texas for destroying it.
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Thanks for the most powerful demonstrating of the pseudo-argument for government overreach I've seen in a long time.
MrWonka said:
This is what Nash Equilibriums are all about and why they're such a fundamental part of Economics. Straws may seem like a trivial example, but when 300 million people are all throwing an average of 1 per day in the trash the cumulative effect is enormous.
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LOL, yeah, the ocean is full of red herring.


MrWonka said:
It is True. Welcome to the Democratic Party.
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Might explain why even with a pathetic candidate such as Trump and Her Royal Highness promising "Obama's third term" she got slammed dunked. Please spare us the "popular vote" mantra. And why over Obama's term The Democratic Party lost nearly a thousand seats at all levels of government. (this is where you sputter back over dem victories in a HALF-DOZEN special elections).
 
MrWonka said:
This government was not elected by a majority of Americans. The Republican party has lost the popular vote in 6 out of the last 7 presidential elections. They cheated their way into power by taking advantage of poor election laws and bad timing.
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You are sounding more and more like the type of person you are agianst in your OP and proving how off you were.
 
MrWonka said:
I've noticed this more and more lately and it's a very disturbing trend. It seems to be very pervasive among conservatives particularly Trump supporters. It's the mentality that everyone is bad so therefore it's okay for you to be. Everyone is self-centered, everyone is greedy, everybody lies, everybody does it so why not just embrace it? Nice guys finish last anyways right?
Click to expand...

I've notice this more and more lately and it's a very disturbing trend. it seems to be very pervasive among liberals particularly well all liberals. It's the mentality that everyone has to think like them and there for if you don't think like them that well you are a bad person. They fail to realize that people in general are decent people but since they don't adhere to what liberals think they should believe that well they are bad people.

Thomas Sowell refers to it as a Constrained Vision. Essentially the idea is that liberals are optimistic about human beings and conservatives are pessimistic. Conservatives, therefore, believe more constraint is necessary to make sure people don't get out of line, and systems should be designed under the assumption that people will be evil. Liberals, however, have more faith in humanity and will, therefore, trust the majority of the people to do the right thing. Liberals, therefore, trust the majority of people to elect good leaders and are willing to put more trust in the government for that reason.
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Sowell should stop project himself and his views onto other people. that is the most common problem with liberals. they project their bad behavior onto everyone else. Yes that is why liberals are always pushing for a bigger nanny state and conservatives less of one because they feel the need to make sure people don't get out of line. where does this moron come up with this stuff? If liberals honestly believed that then they would keep their faux outrage and frankly abusive behavior to themselves. yet they don't. don't conform to the liberal mentality and they will howl and scream for days and months on end.
This is of course very fear-based thinking on the part of Conservatives, but more than that I see it driving the desperate need from conservatives to kill before being killed. Since they don't trust you they feel as though they are justified in their bad behavior because they just know secretly you're doing it too. They have no issue rigging elections for instance because they just assume liberals are too. They invaded Iraq thinking it was better to fight them there than here despite no real evidence Iraq had any interest in it.
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This of course drives the liberals fear mongering. they are clearly afraid of free thinking people that will not and refuse to conform to their stupidity and mentality.
that i why they cannot actually debate on merits, actually address what is being discussed, and constantly deflect every time the talking points they spew are refuted.
Everything liberals do are now wrapped up in appeal to emotion fallacies just like this one.

Capitalism itself is based upon the idea that people are basically greedy so at least we should build a system where people can do what's in their own best interest and have it be what is reasonably in yours as well. In reality, though it is the people who have convinced themselves that everyone is greedy who are the ones causing most of the problems.
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The fact you don't know what capitalism is tells us all we need to know about the rest of your post.
it can simply be ignored.

The only greedy people are those that attempt to take what they did not earn and scream "It's not fair."
 
Chillfolks said:
You are sounding more and more like the type of person you are agianst in your OP. More and more you keep proving how off you were in the OP
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when you look into the abyss the abyss looks back.
 
MrWonka said:
This government was not elected by a majority of Americans. The Republican party has lost the popular vote in 6 out of the last 7 presidential elections. They cheated their way into power by taking advantage of poor election laws and bad timing.
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the election laws are perfectly fine.
and the fact that liberals can't put up a non-kook of a candidate is well
their issue and no one else's.
 
Kal'Stang said:
Show me one TeaParty protest that rioted.
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White Christians own everything already. Why would they smash their own windows and steal their own stuff? There are countless examples of white Christian terrorists in the United States. In fact, there have been more terror attacks committed by white Christian extremists than Muslim extremists over the last three decades.

A liberal didn't blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City.
A liberal didn't shoot up a black church in Charleston, SC.
Since Trump's election, there has been a dramatic increase in a hate crime committed by whites across the country.
When Obama was elected White Supremacy groups saw a surge in recruitment.

Kal'Stang said:
I don't see Republicans going around calling everyone that disagrees or has a differing opinion with them sexist, racist, xenophobic, Nazi's and every other ism/ist out there.
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That's because it's very obviously not accurate, but they still do it. They mostly just claim it's reverse sexism, reverse racism, anti-American hate, and claim anti-fascist protests are themselves fascist. If you don't like Liberals playing these cards then stop dealing them to us by being sexist, racist, xenophobic Nazis.
 
Chillfolks said:
You are sounding more and more like the type of person you are against in your OP and proving how off you were.
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You are mistaken. You see I firmly believe that the majority of Americans should get to decide our leaders, not an extremist minority.
 
MrWonka said:
You are mistaken. You see I firmly believe that the majority of Americans should get to decide our leaders, not an extremist minority.
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Ok I gotcha now. You want to change the system because you dint trust the people. The only person mistaken wa you in Your OP and every post after
 
MrWonka said:
White Christians own everything already. Why would they smash their own windows and steal their own stuff? There are countless examples of white Christian terrorists in the United States. In fact, there have been more terror attacks committed by white Christian extremists than Muslim extremists over the last three decades.

A liberal didn't blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City.
A liberal didn't shoot up a black church in Charleston, SC.
Since Trump's election, there has been a dramatic increase in a hate crime committed by whites across the country.
When Obama was elected White Supremacy groups saw a surge in recruitment.
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So...you went from accusing the TeaParty of riots to anecdotal evidence of single instances not even related to the TeaParty and a vague claim that white supremacy groups saw a surge in recruitment. And to top it all off you made the whole thing about race and religion. Shows that your argument is crap.

MrWonka said:
That's because it's very obviously not accurate, but they still do it. They mostly just claim it's reverse sexism, reverse racism, anti-American hate, and claim anti-fascist protests are themselves fascist. If you don't like Liberals playing these cards then stop dealing them to us by being sexist, racist, xenophobic Nazis.
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Thank you for proving my point.
 
So way then is it the liberals passing laws on everything from what our kids eat in school, to plastic straws, how many women are on a corporate board, to forcing people to buy a product from a private company? Just a few examples by the way.

Copied the above from your longer post. What's wrong with regulating what kid of lunches kids eat in (public) school? Plastic straws are a minor issue, but what do we lose by cutting down on waste that doesn't degrade like paper?

I dont understand "forcing people to buy a product from a private company." What's that all about?
 
MrWonka said:
You don't seem to know how definitions work and how subjectivity works. There are a number of different governments around the world today that I would consider good. I would also consider many iterations of the U.S. government to have been very solid particularly for their place and time.



Nothing about a government contradicts such a principle. Arbitration is not aggression. It is basically the antithesis of aggression, and yet that is the primary function of a government.
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Government doesn't arbitrate. It governs. That is, it forces. Force is aggression.

And, it doesn't matter if you consider governments to be good. Either your criteria for being good are internally inconsistent, and/or your application of those criteria to reality is fallacious.
 
MrWonka said:
Umm...do you just not know what the Tea Party was?



No, they call them libtards instead right? Except unlike Hillary Clinton, they never apologize for it. Oh, and by the way, they're not remotely a majority, and it's not our fault that deplorable accurately describes them.
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Doubling down on your insults I see.
Us "deplorables" are going to kick you ass in yet another election because you can not see your own "deplorable" and elitist behavior.
Keep it up, we like winning elections.

One day you will realize the country does not revolve around NYC and SF.
...but not this year, as you clearly posted.

Two years down the pike and you guys have not learned one thing from your defeats.
You just double down on the behavior that caused you to loose.
 
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