Subj : Re: Travel Ban?
To   : Aaron Thomas
From : Dan Cross
Date : Thu May 28 2020 01:49 am

On 26 May 2020 at 05:55p, Aaron Thomas pondered and said...
 
 AT>  DC> way, you shouldn't use the word "we" when talking about
 AT>  DC> conservatives, since you aren't one if you support Trump.
 AT> 
 AT> I've heard this before; people don't know what is meant by conservative
 AT> vs liberal. I took World Politics 101, and the course taught me that
 AT> conservatives don't want to waste money, and they put the USA first,
 AT> while liberals do want to waste money, and they want to be governed by
 AT> international law.

Wow, your "World Politics 101" professor wasn't very good.

What you're describing is nationalism.

Classically, a Liberal is someone who believes in the
perfectibility of humans: that is, that we can be greater
than that that are.

A conservative, by contrast, is one who believes that we
are fundamentally corruptible and must be placed into a rigid
structure to curb our baser instincts, for our own good.

Liberals favor freedom and work for the common good.
Conservatives favor structure and limiting the individual
for the common good.

This has morphed, of course; now, Liberals are still about
freedom, but also about using the state as an apparatus to
support that as well as provide for general equity.
Generally, liberals want to see society evolve to be more
inclusive and egalitarian.  They do not feel fettered by
the confines of tradition as a motivator, or adherence to
a rigid social structure.

Conservatives are about limiting the role of the state, and
slowing the rate of social change.  They see tradition as
the model for future growth, favoring individual discovery
of better ways of being by working within the confines of
a existing, strongly proscribed social order.

There is much to be admired in this _true_ conservative
ideal.  Certainly, being careful and introspective with
sweeping social change is, on its face, laudable.  Limiting
the role of government in lives is useful as an aspiration,
as well.

Unfortunately, classic conservatism has been usurped by
right-wing forces that favor authoritarianism and want to
halt, not just slow, social change.  Liberals have long
recognized that the fundamental problem with the conservative
approach is that, very often, there's just not all that much
that's good in those rigid social structures and traditions:
too often, they exist to maintain a status quo in which one
group dominates another to the enrichment of the former and
great detriment (including, yes, loss of freedom) of the
latter.  True conservatives can recognize this and discuss it
rationally and acknowledge that, yes, these corrupted traditions
should be discarded wholesale: the right-wing, however, sees
them as an opportunity to gain power and enrich itself.

So ... that's what you really are: a right-winger, not a
conservative.  Don't believe me?  Well, you support Trump:
remember that one of his campaign planks was to pump a
trillion dollars into the economy to build up our infrastructure?
Since when is government funding on such a massive scale a
conservative ideal?  And that's just One example.

 AT> I used to be a college kid. I wanted to see limits on greenhouse gases,
 AT> and I wanted to be friends with all the nice Islamic people. But then I
 AT> graduated & got a feel for the real world and noticed that the USA is
 AT> wasting tons of money on crap like the WHO, losing tons of money on crap
 AT> like the Paris Accord, opening itself up for attacks by foreign
 AT> extremists, and letting career politicians fool weak-minded people with
 AT> propaganda.

Seems like you're the one who's weak minded and bought the
propaganda.  When I see extremism in this country, I mostly
see its own citizens, particularly the right-wingers.  Who
shows up to rallies with guns and all tac'ed out like some
third-rate SPECOPS wannabes, or maybe just a bunch of
never-served losers doing military cosplay with ARs?  These
are the same people who "prep" by buying a bunch of cheap
Baofeng UV-5r HTs and stuffing them into Pelican cases, but
who have no idea to maintain them after they break the first
time they drop them.  What a bunch of posers.

It's funny that you think we "lost" a bunch of money to the
Paris Accord.  How so?  Seems to be that there were 4x as
many people working in clean energy (solar etc) when Trump
came into office as were working in coal, but what'd he double
down on?  We _could_ have opened new markets and become the
world's leader on something that is clearly going to be hot:
instead, under our "conservative" leadership, we went in for
something that was already getting its ass kicked in the market
on its own lack of merits.  Really smart.  We just handed that
market to China while we cling to our dying assets.

The WHO was giving us an inside look into COVID-19 early this
year via its backchannels; we should have gotten ready, instead
Trump ignored it and downplayed it while he golfed, tweeted,
and held rallies.  He's so dumb he even retweeted a picture
of himself fiddling, alluding to Nero fiddling as Rome burned.
But that's what you get when you elect a president who doesn't
read and doesn't listen to actual experts.

And I noticed you again ignored my question: what has Trump
done for you, specifically, that's so great?  What are his major
accomplishments as you see them?

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