As someone who calls himself that:
“I am a liberal but the liberal want to go after the upper middle class instead of after the top 0.1%”
P.S: I’m from Switzerland, so don’t tell me about Trump. I knoe he’s a fascist and I would have voted against him. But here in Switzerland we have more moderate choices.
“I’m an uninformed idiot.”
Conservatives are fiscally reckless. Look at every conservative president’s deficit spending, and economic crashes. Look at the states most dependent on federal funds.
Even if you had zero morals and voted 100% on fiscal policies, the best choice is very clearly not conservative.
I link this article every time the discussion comes up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party
The first paragraph is a doozy.
Hence why republicans want to get rid of Wikipedia. For all of its faults they generally do a decent job of going slash and burn on any editors that cannot fully back themselves up or have clear political alegances.
Seeing the complete flopping of conservapedia, of course they want to get rid of it.
Poes Law very much applies, but I’m pretty sure Conservapedia is a troll. Just look at their list of “Greatest Conservative Songs”.
Anything that keeps a clear record of what people say or believe in, without that changing based on someone’s mood on a particular day is going to be a flop on that side of the spectrum.
I love yelling at my Facebook “friend” whenever gas prices go up a cent now. Under Biden it was all the damn time he’d cry about that but never acknowledged of it went down.
MUH EGGZ
it ain’t even edit protected
Is it guaranteed they’re voting conservative when they say that?
Don’t confuse “Republican” with “conservative”, especially on economic matters. Republicans are historically economically liberal, ie. they are for unregulated markets. A fiscal conservative likes to cut spending, yes, but not to cut revenue.
Not even economically liberal, just irresponsible and corrupt.
That’s kinda the inevitable result of economic liberalism, especially with the added zest of corporate personhood.
Does the fact that American “conservative” politicians are lying about it make it an invalid position to take?
Look, I think there is something to it, but you really have to give details. I’m good with free access to healthcare, good with people marrying whoever they want (over the age of 18), transgender rights, etc.
All of that. I love it all. But I’d rather not be taxed to hell and have those funds horribly mis managed. I’m okay with taxes but I know there is so much waste with my funds. That’s where I’d like improvement. I suppose in some eyes that would make me slightly fiscally conservative.
No, that means you just like a functioning government. That has nothing to do with fiscal conservatism.
If you were a fiscal conservative, you would be against spending any money on healthcare, let alone giving “free access” to everyone.
Having grown up in a conservative household in a red state (US), and having thought this as I transitioned away to more liberal stances as I learned more about the world, I have to say: Spot on. I was an uninformed idiot.
The worst idiots are the ones who never admit when they’re wrong. Having the backbone to admit an error, change, and and move on speaks volumes.
True, I went through that phase as well. It usually came with a side of insecurity. Just happy to have grown in more than just age.
They believe in the social policies of the Democrats and the financial policies of conservatives?
I mean I would ask follow up questions but at face value that would be what they meant no?
The democrats are fiscally conservative. The GOP believes in budget unbalancing tax cuts and are fiscally liberal.
So you’re of the opinion that somehow by making five hundred austerity cuts saving two million dollars each the GOP will shave a trillion from the budget? Is Trump going to increase or decrease the deficit in your mind?
I’m not an econ major and I have no fucking clue what is gonna happen with king Cheeto and his goons. I assume any time a politician says they are gonna do something they are probably not going to do that. Maybe half of what they say is true if we are lucky.
I saw we kill em all and start over.
So the person who says what’s in the post title is probably just a centrist Democrat. Which explains why they’re getting so much hate here.
I think we have countless words. We should use our words.
We all have a spectrum of social and economic and other ideals.
Those who want to lead us have theirs too, and they’re the ones who need us to commit and compartmentalize into ideologies and macro definitions that get twisted.
‘You’re lying to either me, yourself, or both. You’re a full on conservative and don’t want to admit it.’’
I’m someone who actually calls myself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, and that’s because my primary concern (in the terms of moral foundations theory) is the liberty/oppression axis. In other words, I think leaving people alone is a good thing, and while it’s not the only good thing and it needs to be balanced against other concerns, we should still be doing it more than we are now.
Two caveats:
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I’m socially liberal because a free society requires tolerating even the people you hate. This is hard, and even many people who consider themselves tolerant because they simply don’t hate a particular group aren’t (and often don’t want to be) tolerant in this sense.
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I’m economically conservative because the freedom to act without government interference even in an economic context has great inherent worth (but I’ll repeat here that I don’t value it to the exclusion of all else) but also because the free market usually does a better job than central planning at making everyone prosperous. I don’t care much about wealth inequality - a world in which I have two dollars and you have two million dollars is a better place than a world in which we both have just one dollar.
Edit: in practice I always end up voting for moderate Democrats at the national level, both because I think social issues are generally more important than economic issues and because neither party usually does what I would want regarding economic issues. However, I have more options at the state and local level.
It’s very interesting, I rarely see someone with whom I absolutely disagree with everything they just said, and whom I think their belief system will actually make all society worse and not better. But to put a clear example. It seems to me that you beliefs on the first caveat, are logically incompatible with the second. Your belief on the second caveat is antagonistic with your stated desires. A lack of government, or low scale of a government, without central planning, with a free market, with low restrictions and tons on inequality, is the prime condition that creates and fosters hate and intolerance. I read your comment and can’t help but to interpret it as “I hate poor people, and you should tolerate my hate because I’m very articulate when I express it”.
How do you feel about anarchism and/or libertarian communism? (just trying to see how much you think that way because of a sympathy for capital or because of a rejection of the state)
As someone who shares the views of the parent comment, I think anarchism is the end-road, utopia progression of these beliefs.
I think that conservatives are right to be skeptical of big government. Concentrated power always corrupts without fail. Whether that’s big government, big corporations, big religions, that remains true.
I think some pragmatism is required especially for things such as emergency services and common defense because market forces are kind of like Darwin’s evolution. It selects for the best chance of making the number go up and doesn’t specifically select the best outcome for all participants.
Bonus Analysis: (own section because my post was getting too long)
Republicans, in my analysis, however aren’t really that concerned about big government. The Republican Party is a big organization that has been corrupted, they are more concerned about feigning concern to further their own wealth and power. And thus the turn toward fascism.
We used to have a better standard of living. We used to have less depression. We used to have more membership in civic organizations and churches. Our country used to be far more distributed and decentralized than it is today.
It’s not surprising to me that all of those factors decreased and hate and division increased while power and wealth has became more and more concentrated the last 30 years.
I agree with you on most points, thanks for your analysis/opinion!
I’m genuinely curious about the fiscally conservative bit. When I hear that phrase I always assume people mean “I don’t want to pay taxes” but my immediate next question becomes how do you believe societal level infrastructure is constructed and maintained. Things like roads, police, military. I’ve never seen a society with private infrastructure for those things. An immediate second question, assuming you are OK with a small level of taxation to accommodate the costs of the three things listed above would be, what other society level services would fall into the bucket of things that should be paid from taxation vs things that should be privatised. Things like disaster recovery services, judicial services, child welfare services, national security, border protection. I’m going to also assume you object to education and healthcare being a taxation funded expense? What about currently public buildings like libraries? Parks? Town Halls?
I’m not one of those few completely uncompromising libertarians who don’t want public roads - I actually think the government should be doing all the things you list, and I pay my taxes. I do prefer individualistic ways of doing things, but I’m pragmatic and there are many problems for which the collectivist solution is the only practical solution. When I say I’m fiscally conservative, I mean that I think society should be more libertarian than it is now, not that it should be absolutely libertarian.
What about a world where we both have $2,000?
Having $2,000 is better than having $2, but in practice I’m usually skeptical that plans to achieve an outcome like that will work out rather than failing and leaving both of us with $1. The manner in which the outcome would be achieved also matters - some of the plans seem to me like proposals to just steal the money and I object to that on moral rather than economic principles.
(I don’t mean to imply that people I disagree with think that stealing is OK, but rather that they and I don’t agree on the definition of stealing.)
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“I’m discriminating towards poor people”.
“Fuck the poor but I do like to smoke weed”
They do not want anyone to have authority over them in an capacity. They want to fuck who they want, do what drugs they want, shoot what they want, exploit financially anyone they want, hire and fire anyone they want, control and manipulate markets however they want. They do not want any limitations placed on them by law, regulation, ethics, or morality. They feel no responsibility to anyone but themselves, do not value others that do not benefit them directly, and see society only as a means to serve their interests. They are the definition of narcissists.
Likes lgbtq, doesn’t like spending money.
opposite of me I guess
It depends what country they are in
That they’re a Democrat
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the quote IRL, but I’ve known libertarians and they’ve seemed fine. If all you disagree about is the particulars of economic theory it’s not really worth getting worked up about.
I imagine this person being young and male, and possibly liking cryptocurrencies.
I have. Most people who say this IRL are very Libertarian and very not libertarian. If they like cryptocurrency, it’s something new so they can feel smart.
Public service announcement that crypto isn’t intrinsically dumb, but that the most popular cryptos are, and most of the fans definitely are.
The most popular crypto is one of the few that’s p2p and well-tested.
Bitcoin? It’s a first prototype that unnecessarily guzzles computing power, and has no privacy features whatsoever. We don’t drive the Model T anymore.
They’re all p2p, I don’t know what you’re talking about there.
Yes.
That computing power is necessary to secure the network, without introducing security holes or economic rent. And the rate of production gets cut in half every 4 years. The alternatives you’ve been told about are inferior.
The Lightning Network has onion routing like Tor, and drug dealers have been using mixers for literally a decade. If there’s an inflation bug in Monero (like the value overflow incident), then that will be invisible too.
We still use steam power quite a bit, and aren’t replacing it simply because it’s old. Most new cryptocurrencies are like a Tesla, solving problems they didn’t care to understand.
If you think every cryptocurrency is peer-to-peer, then I am literally begging you to slow down and look at how they actually work before investing more. They frequently have centralized issuance, security, development, governance… you name it. It only takes one centralized part to bring down a project.
I haven’t been “told about” shit. I actually have a math background and know cryptography, and I’ve read more than a few whitepapers.
Monero does it better with actual privacy. Ripple does it with the least overhead of all. Eth changes so much I’m not even sure what all they have going on.
Mixers give a very false sense of security, relative to actual cryptography. People seem to think if you mix enough it’s the same, but actually there’s like a million holes in that, not to mention the trust in whoever’s doing the mixing.
They frequently have centralized issuance, security, development, governance… you name it. It only takes one centralized part to bring down a project.
So? Anything worthy of the title is open source, so if someone goes evil it just forks. Monero itself started as a fork of something else IIRC. The actual algorithm isn’t centralised in any of the big cases I can think of, not counting vapourware scams.
I believe that you’re extremely qualified in math and cryptography. But thinking that cryptocurrencies are all p2p, and that Bitcoin dominates the market because they don’t know this one simple thing, are both telltale signs of a novice. They’re mostly centralized scams, and the concerns you’re bringing up have been discussed to death.
Monero is a great example.
You’re correct that it was originally forked off of Bytecoin, which had a premine. So Bytecoin was not peer-to-peer, because one user (the issuer) had a different set of rules than everyone else. If you had invested in centralized Bytecoin, you would have lost money because it was not p2p. They had to start over!
The problem with relying on “actual cryptography” for privacy is auditability, like I mentioned above. When there was a bug in Bitcoin that allowed someone to give himself a bazillion BTC, we were able to catch and revert it immediately. If there is a bug like that in Monero, we won’t know until after it’s circulated as much as the premined Bytecoins did.
They pine for the Blue Dogs and haven’t updated their policy preferences since the early 90’s.
“I haven’t thought about politics for more than 30 seconds in my entire life but I don’t want to admit that and don’t want to sound like a complete asshole” is about the most charitable way I can translate that sound bite.
