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On September 10 2016 01:46 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2016 13:53 Danglars wrote:
Cruz, for one, wasn't there to "show up and lose." He was the most outspoken member of the Senate to pound immigration and conservative positions on the military and foreign policy. Trade policy is so wild with Trump in the mix that my only comment on him versus others is the author's "worse than imperfect." Trade policy should be America first, but the primary way to ensure that is to open free trade and work hard on labor laws and tax laws to not artificially hurt the competitiveness of the American worker and force American employers to keep money overseas for fear of the penalties for bringing it back home. He simply sweeps up many truths (insanity of nevertrump, hopeless optimism, intellectual conservative complacency with the status quo of losing--easily seen in national review & weekly standard) and imputes them to apply to every other candidate. Let's say that we had a President Cruz. What part of his platform would alter the course of the country on issues such as persistent trade imbalances, increasing wealth/income inequality, and a foreign policy that strikes precisely the wrong balance between intervention and isolation?
Push for military action on ISIS and a tougher line on Iran and the same style of tax plan Trump plans (they're both good and would spur growth). Trade imbalance as a topic in itself is the wrong approach. He'd work in reversing bad labor laws and policies that keep corporate earnings abroad (is it up to one or two trillion dollars now?)
You're asking me to contradict my own point and the author's: one presidency and one platform is insufficient to alter the course of the country. The current policies were built over very many years and through many exchanges in which capital letter do most congressional representatives ally behind. You're charging the cockpit now not even assured you won't die anyway. When the choice is Trump or Clinton, the choice is Trump. In the primary, the better pilot to get back in control of the plane is Cruz. Around 38% of primary voters thought it was Trump (counting up until Indiana)
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how exactly would trump/cruz's tax plans (cuts) spur growth?
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On September 10 2016 04:07 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2016 01:46 xDaunt wrote:On September 09 2016 13:53 Danglars wrote:
Cruz, for one, wasn't there to "show up and lose." He was the most outspoken member of the Senate to pound immigration and conservative positions on the military and foreign policy. Trade policy is so wild with Trump in the mix that my only comment on him versus others is the author's "worse than imperfect." Trade policy should be America first, but the primary way to ensure that is to open free trade and work hard on labor laws and tax laws to not artificially hurt the competitiveness of the American worker and force American employers to keep money overseas for fear of the penalties for bringing it back home. He simply sweeps up many truths (insanity of nevertrump, hopeless optimism, intellectual conservative complacency with the status quo of losing--easily seen in national review & weekly standard) and imputes them to apply to every other candidate. Let's say that we had a President Cruz. What part of his platform would alter the course of the country on issues such as persistent trade imbalances, increasing wealth/income inequality, and a foreign policy that strikes precisely the wrong balance between intervention and isolation? Push for military action on ISIS and a tougher line on Iran and the same style of tax plan Trump plans (they're both good and would spur growth). Trade imbalance as a topic in itself is the wrong approach. He'd work in reversing bad labor laws and policies that keep corporate earnings abroad (is it up to one or two trillion dollars now?) You're asking me to contradict my own point and the author's: one presidency and one platform is insufficient to alter the course of the country. The current policies were built over very many years and through many exchanges in which capital letter do most congressional representatives ally behind. You're charging the cockpit now not even assured you won't die anyway. When the choice is Trump or Clinton, the choice is Trump. In the primary, the better pilot to get back in control of the plane is Cruz. Around 38% of primary voters thought it was Trump (counting up until Indiana)
Cutting taxes for rich people and corporations does not increase growth.
Trickle down economics does not work. Never has, never will.
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On September 10 2016 04:13 ticklishmusic wrote:
how exactly would trump/cruz's tax plans (cuts) spur growth?
Voodoo economics. The magic of making rich people richer and then hoping they spend it.
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On September 10 2016 04:14 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2016 04:07 Danglars wrote:On September 10 2016 01:46 xDaunt wrote:On September 09 2016 13:53 Danglars wrote:
Cruz, for one, wasn't there to "show up and lose." He was the most outspoken member of the Senate to pound immigration and conservative positions on the military and foreign policy. Trade policy is so wild with Trump in the mix that my only comment on him versus others is the author's "worse than imperfect." Trade policy should be America first, but the primary way to ensure that is to open free trade and work hard on labor laws and tax laws to not artificially hurt the competitiveness of the American worker and force American employers to keep money overseas for fear of the penalties for bringing it back home. He simply sweeps up many truths (insanity of nevertrump, hopeless optimism, intellectual conservative complacency with the status quo of losing--easily seen in national review & weekly standard) and imputes them to apply to every other candidate. Let's say that we had a President Cruz. What part of his platform would alter the course of the country on issues such as persistent trade imbalances, increasing wealth/income inequality, and a foreign policy that strikes precisely the wrong balance between intervention and isolation? Push for military action on ISIS and a tougher line on Iran and the same style of tax plan Trump plans (they're both good and would spur growth). Trade imbalance as a topic in itself is the wrong approach. He'd work in reversing bad labor laws and policies that keep corporate earnings abroad (is it up to one or two trillion dollars now?) You're asking me to contradict my own point and the author's: one presidency and one platform is insufficient to alter the course of the country. The current policies were built over very many years and through many exchanges in which capital letter do most congressional representatives ally behind. You're charging the cockpit now not even assured you won't die anyway. When the choice is Trump or Clinton, the choice is Trump. In the primary, the better pilot to get back in control of the plane is Cruz. Around 38% of primary voters thought it was Trump (counting up until Indiana) Cutting taxes for rich people and corporations does not increase growth. Trickle down economics does not work. Never has, never will.
What I dont understand is how people continue to believe this. We have had almost 8 years of the top earners raking in money after the collapse of the economy in 2008. (I am not citing because i think this is common knowledge by now, but let me know if you want actual figures). And even with this situation wages continue to be stagnant and economic progress is tepid at best. How much more money does someone with 10B dollars need before they begin creating real jobs in the communities that actually need them? sure he could invest 1B in apple or some other company but how much of that will ever reach the communities in need? Millionaires dont invest in small potatoes, they invest in other millionaires and mega corporations, which will never reach the areas of the economy that need their seed money. top down doesn't work. Invest in the middle class and things will change, but as things are I just cant see it happening.
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Cutting taxes to increase growth is now Voodoo economics? Tax cuts don't have to be focused on the rich you know. Tax cuts do increase the fiscal deficit though. The voodoo of the Republican economic ideas usually lies in the fact that they want to increase revenue by cutting tax and increasing growth. This does not work (at least short term).
Reducing corporation tax increases growth for a very simple reason. It makes investments worth it which wouldn't get the required return with a corporate tax. You don't need a degree in economics to figure that out.
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On September 10 2016 04:07 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2016 01:46 xDaunt wrote:On September 09 2016 13:53 Danglars wrote:
Cruz, for one, wasn't there to "show up and lose." He was the most outspoken member of the Senate to pound immigration and conservative positions on the military and foreign policy. Trade policy is so wild with Trump in the mix that my only comment on him versus others is the author's "worse than imperfect." Trade policy should be America first, but the primary way to ensure that is to open free trade and work hard on labor laws and tax laws to not artificially hurt the competitiveness of the American worker and force American employers to keep money overseas for fear of the penalties for bringing it back home. He simply sweeps up many truths (insanity of nevertrump, hopeless optimism, intellectual conservative complacency with the status quo of losing--easily seen in national review & weekly standard) and imputes them to apply to every other candidate. Let's say that we had a President Cruz. What part of his platform would alter the course of the country on issues such as persistent trade imbalances, increasing wealth/income inequality, and a foreign policy that strikes precisely the wrong balance between intervention and isolation? Push for military action on ISIS and a tougher line on Iran and the same style of tax plan Trump plans (they're both good and would spur growth). Trade imbalance as a topic in itself is the wrong approach. He'd work in reversing bad labor laws and policies that keep corporate earnings abroad (is it up to one or two trillion dollars now?) You're asking me to contradict my own point and the author's: one presidency and one platform is insufficient to alter the course of the country. The current policies were built over very many years and through many exchanges in which capital letter do most congressional representatives ally behind. You're charging the cockpit now not even assured you won't die anyway. When the choice is Trump or Clinton, the choice is Trump. In the primary, the better pilot to get back in control of the plane is Cruz. Around 38% of primary voters thought it was Trump (counting up until Indiana)
What I'm asking you to do is to take a good, hard look at the current state of conservatism. Where are the big ideas? Where is the progress in thought? Where are the solutions to the truly big problems? As the author states in the article:
If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.
Your recitation of the President Cruz platform fits neatly within this description. Do you not see the problem with this? Or do you fall into the category of conservatives who, as the author argues, do not even think that there is a problem?
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On September 10 2016 04:31 RvB wrote:
Cutting taxes to increase growth is now Voodoo economics? Tax cuts don't have to be focused on the rich you know. Tax cuts do increase the fiscal deficit though. The voodoo of the Republican economic ideas usually lies in the fact that they want to increase revenue by cutting tax and increasing growth. This does not work (at least short term).
Reducing corporation tax increases growth for a very simple reason. It makes investments worth it which wouldn't get the required return with a corporate tax. You don't need a degree in economics to figure that out.
Yes. Cutting taxes to increase growth only works if the extra money is spent on things and not saved. And the Republicans don't want to cut taxes across the board. They majority of their cuts befits the richest tax bracket and it has been shown that those cuts rarely lead to those people spending that money creating jobs. We have done this like 3-4 times in the last 30 years and every time it does nothing but make the rich more wealthy.
It was sort of like when GW Bush sent everyone in the country $600 to stimulate the economy and most people used it to pay down debt or cover their rent for the month, saving the rest. People only spend when they are confident and feel secure.
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re: generically commenting on stuff from xdaunts post, not necessarily in reply to him though.
I wonder what's the state of big ideas and progress in thought in the liberal counterpart to that; and how they compare.
I wonder if the central tenets of conservatism are themselves flawed, or if some of them are. I'm not entirely sure what the tenets all are.
I prefer a pragmatic/scientific approach to governance.
Trump doing a speech right now; it's on in the background cuz I was watching cnn. I don't like what I'm hearing, but that's no surprise given his target audience; and some questionable claims of facts are nothing of surprise.
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On September 10 2016 04:52 zlefin wrote:
re: generically commenting on stuff from xdaunts post, not necessarily in reply to him though.
I wonder what's the state of big ideas and progress in thought in the liberal counterpart to that; and how they compare.
I wonder if the central tenets of conservatism are themselves flawed, or if some of them are. I'm not entirely sure what the tenets all are.
I prefer a pragmatic/scientific approach to governance.
One of the central tenets of conservatism, or at least social conservatism, is a strict appeal to tradition. Throughout history, social conservatism has never once been on thr right side of history. It is practically defined as "never making a lasting impact, but making things take longer". Abortion, gay marrisge, blood transfusion, interracial marriage are all ideas essentially being flight against by the same people throughout history. Some stuff is playing god and some stuff is an erosion of culture. However they label it, they have never won. It's a timeless, ultimately lost battle they insist on playing over and over.
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On September 10 2016 04:31 RvB wrote:
Cutting taxes to increase growth is now Voodoo economics? Tax cuts don't have to be focused on the rich you know. Tax cuts do increase the fiscal deficit though. The voodoo of the Republican economic ideas usually lies in the fact that they want to increase revenue by cutting tax and increasing growth. This does not work (at least short term).
Reducing corporation tax increases growth for a very simple reason. It makes investments worth it which wouldn't get the required return with a corporate tax. You don't need a degree in economics to figure that out.
Cutting taxes on the middle class works because it lets them spend more on goods (providing they don't save it instead) which creates demand and demand leads to growth.
Trump however mostly wants to cut taxes for the rich and for big corporations (flat tax benefits bigger companies more).
If you give corps more money they general don't use it to create more jobs, history has shown us this. Therefor it merely gives the corp more profit and not more growth.
Tax cuts for small companies could cause some growth but you still need the demand to be there for them to actually sell something.
Its much better to create demand for goods (by giving people more to spend) then by giving corps/rich people money and hoping they spend it on jobs that may or may not even be needed.
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Chat with Igne if you want to hear about liberalism's shortcomings. He's been railing against them for a while now.
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Igne's on a weird philosophy streak, too hard to read.
bah, sad that people that say so many untrue and unsound things as trump does are running for president 
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 10 2016 05:00 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2016 04:52 zlefin wrote:
re: generically commenting on stuff from xdaunts post, not necessarily in reply to him though.
I wonder what's the state of big ideas and progress in thought in the liberal counterpart to that; and how they compare.
I wonder if the central tenets of conservatism are themselves flawed, or if some of them are. I'm not entirely sure what the tenets all are.
I prefer a pragmatic/scientific approach to governance. One of the central tenets of conservatism, or at least social conservatism, is a strict appeal to tradition. Throughout history, social conservatism has never once been on thr right side of history. It is practically defined as "never making a lasting impact, but making things take longer". Abortion, gay marrisge, blood transfusion, interracial marriage are all ideas essentially being flight against by the same people throughout history. Some stuff is playing god and some stuff is an erosion of culture. However they label it, they have never won. It's a timeless, ultimately lost battle they insist on playing over and over.
That's only true if you selectively look at every liberal policy idea that ultimately won out. There were many, many more that died because the conservatives of the time were successful in quashing those policy ideas.
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Since April, advisers never named in [Trump] campaign press releases have been working in an Alexandria-based office, writing policy memos, organizing briefings, managing surrogates and placing op-eds. They put in long hours before and during the Republican National Convention to help the campaign look like a professional operation.
But in August, shortly after the convention, most of the policy shop’s most active staffers quit. Although they signed non-disclosure agreements, several of them told me on background that the Trump policy effort has been a mess from start to finish.
“It’s a complete disaster,” one disgruntled former adviser told me. “They use and abuse people. The policy office fell apart in August when the promised checks weren’t delivered.”
Three former members, all of whom quit in August, told me that as early as April they were promised financial compensation but were later told that they would have to work as volunteers. They say the leaders of the shop, Rick Dearborn and John Mashburn, told many staffers that money was on the way but then were unable to deliver. Dearborn is Sen. Jeff Sessions’s (R-Ala.) chief of staff, while Mashburn is the former chief of staff for Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C).
Washington Post
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Trump has a contempt for reality that baffles the News media, making him hard to interact with. He still seems unclear on when the authorization vote for the Iraq war took place or even when the war started. But he truly believes he was against it from the start.
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/22/6166.full
I heard about this study and a few other a while ago and all I could think of was Trump when they was recently discussed. That the act of being untruthful causes us to forget the act itself over time.
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On September 10 2016 01:39 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2016 13:33 Introvert wrote:On September 09 2016 12:43 xDaunt wrote:On September 09 2016 10:32 Introvert wrote:I've been pretty busy (good thing, because this election cycle sucks) but I thought I'd comment on that Claremont piece because apparently it got a lot of play. I read the first few paragraphs one night and, not seeing anything of value, went to sleep. But it lists so many of the pro-Trump positions and lights a truly magnificent fire to a field of large and imposing strawmen. I will skip around but I have made a good faith effort to not leave anything out that would be important for the arguments being made. 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
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If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff. This is in fact histrionic. Every presidential election we are told that this is it. That was said in conservative circles in 2012 for sure. It was less pronounced in 2008, but I think that's because few really knew Obama and it seemed like whoever came after Bush was going to lose (and the cherry on top was that McCain was/is terrible to conservatives). Well, in my estimation this is not the end. I could comment on why, but I think it should be obvious that, even if you disagree, one could understand why someone else (such as myself) doesn't see this as being "it." Indeed, why is this it? What makes this election different than the one eight or four years ago? Hillary will certainly continue to the progressive policy implementation, will continue to expand the power of the executive branch, and will make a mess of the world. But that doesn't mean this is it. One must keep in mind that the progressive project has been in the works for over a hundred years.To say that this election will be the final touch or the only chance to reverse it is wrong. It might take a hundred years to undo. Indeed, we are headed for a cliff. But we aren't at the edge yet. I agree that the author is histrionic in the opening paragraphs, and it's my least favorite part of the article. Keep in mind that he is the first to admit that he's a pessimistic outlier among conservative intellectuals. But I think that he is directly on point in that last paragraph in the passage that you cite. If you're a social conservative who holds socially conservative values, you absolutely will see the country as being already off the cliff and on the express elevator to hell. Traditional sexual morality is all but dead. The pro-choice vs pro-life debate is over; all that's left there is the beating of a dead horse. Traditional Christian values are on the retreat across the board. There's no way around the fact that social conservatism has been routed. Its Judeo-Christian foundation is in shambles. And I've only mentioned the social issues. You can pick any of the other items on that laundry list, and the unavoidable truth is that the country is either rapidly moving away from the conservative position, or at best, conservatism is holding its ground. Critically, there is no advancement of a conservative agenda anywhere to be seen. The exceptions to this are in trade policy and military policy, which the author reject as still being good for the country (and I agree with him on this point). But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.
Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.
Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others. This is a very large strawman. There is lots of urgency. This is in fact why conservatives held their nose and voted for McCain and Romney. This is how the GOP gets their money and support- from conservatives convinced we are fast closing the cliff-road gap. This part is so dishonest. Now there may be some intellectual who would rather have their sweet think-tank bubbles, but this is not the view of the majority. I myself have expressed, shall we say, displeasure at the current Republican party for all that it does (or, often, does not do). But this case he makes sounds exactly like the case made by GOP politicians every time an election comes around. I disagree. I think the author is right on point. And I think that you're missing his point. His concern in the article is not a specific set of republican politicians or candidates (nor is it really about Trump). Oh no, his indictment is far more damning than that. What he's really arguing is that mainstream intellectual conservatism -- the very foundation of the republican party itself -- is intellectually bankrupt on account of the utter failure of conservatives to both 1) create an agenda that actually tackles the large problems that the country is facing, and 2) even advance its own, highly-limited agenda over the past generation. The author is making the big picture argument. More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The answer—which appears to be “nothing”—might seem to lend credence to the plea that “our ideas haven’t been tried.” Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been tried,” who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising “entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit? Indeed, there has been precious little done besides slowing the advance. This is a common alt-right argument, which refuses to recognize that conservatives have been out for power for those 20 years. It isn't the same as the "dorm-room Marxism," because, imo, conservative ideas have been tried, and do work. So let's get back to the author's point: How many times must traditional conservatism be rejected at the ballot box before we question its political legitimacy and viability? At what point does it become a failed ideology? One thing to say at the outset: I analyzed the article as though the author was chastising and attempting to convert people aren't voting for Trump. Even if that isn't his only focus, it is certainly his biggest point. He both starts and ends with it. Yes, the author begins and ends with an argument as to why conservatives should vote for Trump, but he's clearly using that argument as a foil to blast the present state of mainstream conservatism in general. Show nested quote +I am a generally pessimistic individual, so I agree that on many issues we are gone for the foreseeable future. But Trump does nothing to advance any of those principles. In fact, I argued that he undermines them. You yourself have said that if Trump wins, it is probably the end of conservatism as we have known it. While it may be dead for now already, I'd rather not shoot it again to make sure. And I don't think it's dead. It appeared somewhat in the 90s, and stopped amnesty dead once in the Bush years and once in the Obama years, which I think Trump voters should appreciate. But I don't mean to keep score. Multiple people now have likened 2016 to Dunkirk, not Flight 93. I lean more that way. Clearly this isn't the same country as it was in 1984, but I'm not sure that's the failure of the ideology instead of those trusted to advance it (though I think I know what the liberals in this thread would say). Being a good conservative, I would place the blame squarely on those who had the power to move forward an agenda. I don't think that the "arc of history bends towards justice." I don't think it "bends" at all, except by an outside force. I would rather work to advance conservative principles than throw them out. I'd be willing to make electoral compromises to win elections in the meantime (e.g., Romney). But Trump isn't going to advance any version of what I believe, so why vote for it? "Well, he's not Hillary." Again, an incredibly persuasive argument. But I think, as I said before, that it is better to make clear the differences with Trump then it is to acquiesce. If I thought Trump was just Romney 2.0, I'd probably vote for him. But while Romney was a bland, forgettable placeholder, Trump could actively make conservatism worse. If I thought we merely had a different perspective on trade... but that's not all. And finally, I find him a detestable human being. But that's just the frosting on the cake. So in summary, I think rather than preserving (or ion fantasy land advancing) any conservative principles, Trump actively undermines them and makes them harder to move forward in the future. I don't mean to sound smarmy, but I'd rather not have the orange letter. I don't think Trump is reliable enough to take the risk. + Show Spoiler +Now, Trump has been acting slightly better lately (Putin love aside. And that's a big aside). I've never said I was "NeverTrump" because I'm not. He could still convince me, but at this point he has a lot of ground to make up. Trump isn't a traditional conservative, and the author doesn't argue that he is one. The point that he's making is that conservatism needs to evolve given its lack of efficacy in recent history. But even if you are a traditional conservative, I think that it's pretty clear that you should be voting for Trump if for no other reason than his immigration policy. Demographically, conservatives are permanently fucked if anything resembling the Democrats' version of amnesty passes.
Hey, the LTE is working again.
I don't know what you mean by "evolve." Conservatives like to say they learn lessons of history. But on that count Trump fails again. Protectionism as an example.
In the same vein, I don't think Trump saves anything. It's.more than just not being a conservative. It's actively undermining it.
And I don't believe what Trump says on immigration, so that isn't a reason to vote for him. He will do amnesty. He will whine when Congress blocks his "big, beautiful wall." then he will do nothing.
You simply trust him more than I do. I'm not sure he's even going to bat .100
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WikiLeaks release excludes evidence of €2 billion transfer from Syria to Russia
A trove of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks in 2012 excludes records of a €2 billion transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank, according to leaked U.S. court documents obtained by the Daily Dot.
WikiLeaks has become an ever-prominent force in the 2016 presidential election through its publishing of tens of thousands of emails, voicemails, and documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee by hackers that U.S. authorities and cybersecurity experts believe are linked to the Russian government. The transparency organization, which boasts of a commitment to use “cryptography to protect human rights” against repressive regimes, has faced criticism from supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and praise from Republican opponent Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The court records, placed under seal by a Manhattan federal court and obtained by the Daily Dot through an anonymous source, show in detail how a group of hacktivists breached the Syrian government’s networks on the eve of the country’s civil war and extracted emails about major bank transactions the Syrian regime was hurriedly making amid a host of economic sanctions. In the spring of 2012, most of the emails found their way into a WikiLeaks database.
But one set of emails in particular didn’t make it into the cache of documents published by WikiLeaks in July 2012 as “The Syria Files,” despite the fact that the hackers themselves were ecstatic at their discovery. The correspondence, which WikiLeaks has denied withholding, describes “more than” €2 billion ($2.4 billion, at current exchange rates) moving from the Central Bank of Syria to Russia’s VTB Bank.
Source
Now Assange couldn't possible have an agenda right? /s
Putin's hand is so far us Assange's ass he's working his mouth.
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There are also reports that Wikileaks threatened reporters who were looking into the story with reprisal if they published.
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On September 10 2016 01:39 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2016 13:33 Introvert wrote:On September 09 2016 12:43 xDaunt wrote:On September 09 2016 10:32 Introvert wrote:I've been pretty busy (good thing, because this election cycle sucks) but I thought I'd comment on that Claremont piece because apparently it got a lot of play. I read the first few paragraphs one night and, not seeing anything of value, went to sleep. But it lists so many of the pro-Trump positions and lights a truly magnificent fire to a field of large and imposing strawmen. I will skip around but I have made a good faith effort to not leave anything out that would be important for the arguments being made. 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.
Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.
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If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff. This is in fact histrionic. Every presidential election we are told that this is it. That was said in conservative circles in 2012 for sure. It was less pronounced in 2008, but I think that's because few really knew Obama and it seemed like whoever came after Bush was going to lose (and the cherry on top was that McCain was/is terrible to conservatives). Well, in my estimation this is not the end. I could comment on why, but I think it should be obvious that, even if you disagree, one could understand why someone else (such as myself) doesn't see this as being "it." Indeed, why is this it? What makes this election different than the one eight or four years ago? Hillary will certainly continue to the progressive policy implementation, will continue to expand the power of the executive branch, and will make a mess of the world. But that doesn't mean this is it. One must keep in mind that the progressive project has been in the works for over a hundred years.To say that this election will be the final touch or the only chance to reverse it is wrong. It might take a hundred years to undo. Indeed, we are headed for a cliff. But we aren't at the edge yet. I agree that the author is histrionic in the opening paragraphs, and it's my least favorite part of the article. Keep in mind that he is the first to admit that he's a pessimistic outlier among conservative intellectuals. But I think that he is directly on point in that last paragraph in the passage that you cite. If you're a social conservative who holds socially conservative values, you absolutely will see the country as being already off the cliff and on the express elevator to hell. Traditional sexual morality is all but dead. The pro-choice vs pro-life debate is over; all that's left there is the beating of a dead horse. Traditional Christian values are on the retreat across the board. There's no way around the fact that social conservatism has been routed. Its Judeo-Christian foundation is in shambles. And I've only mentioned the social issues. You can pick any of the other items on that laundry list, and the unavoidable truth is that the country is either rapidly moving away from the conservative position, or at best, conservatism is holding its ground. Critically, there is no advancement of a conservative agenda anywhere to be seen. The exceptions to this are in trade policy and military policy, which the author reject as still being good for the country (and I agree with him on this point). But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.
Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.
Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others. This is a very large strawman. There is lots of urgency. This is in fact why conservatives held their nose and voted for McCain and Romney. This is how the GOP gets their money and support- from conservatives convinced we are fast closing the cliff-road gap. This part is so dishonest. Now there may be some intellectual who would rather have their sweet think-tank bubbles, but this is not the view of the majority. I myself have expressed, shall we say, displeasure at the current Republican party for all that it does (or, often, does not do). But this case he makes sounds exactly like the case made by GOP politicians every time an election comes around. I disagree. I think the author is right on point. And I think that you're missing his point. His concern in the article is not a specific set of republican politicians or candidates (nor is it really about Trump). Oh no, his indictment is far more damning than that. What he's really arguing is that mainstream intellectual conservatism -- the very foundation of the republican party itself -- is intellectually bankrupt on account of the utter failure of conservatives to both 1) create an agenda that actually tackles the large problems that the country is facing, and 2) even advance its own, highly-limited agenda over the past generation. The author is making the big picture argument. More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The answer—which appears to be “nothing”—might seem to lend credence to the plea that “our ideas haven’t been tried.” Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been tried,” who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising “entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit? Indeed, there has been precious little done besides slowing the advance. This is a common alt-right argument, which refuses to recognize that conservatives have been out for power for those 20 years. It isn't the same as the "dorm-room Marxism," because, imo, conservative ideas have been tried, and do work. So let's get back to the author's point: How many times must traditional conservatism be rejected at the ballot box before we question its political legitimacy and viability? At what point does it become a failed ideology? One thing to say at the outset: I analyzed the article as though the author was chastising and attempting to convert people aren't voting for Trump. Even if that isn't his only focus, it is certainly his biggest point. He both starts and ends with it. Yes, the author begins and ends with an argument as to why conservatives should vote for Trump, but he's clearly using that argument as a foil to blast the present state of mainstream conservatism in general. Show nested quote +I am a generally pessimistic individual, so I agree that on many issues we are gone for the foreseeable future. But Trump does nothing to advance any of those principles. In fact, I argued that he undermines them. You yourself have said that if Trump wins, it is probably the end of conservatism as we have known it. While it may be dead for now already, I'd rather not shoot it again to make sure. And I don't think it's dead. It appeared somewhat in the 90s, and stopped amnesty dead once in the Bush years and once in the Obama years, which I think Trump voters should appreciate. But I don't mean to keep score. Multiple people now have likened 2016 to Dunkirk, not Flight 93. I lean more that way. Clearly this isn't the same country as it was in 1984, but I'm not sure that's the failure of the ideology instead of those trusted to advance it (though I think I know what the liberals in this thread would say). Being a good conservative, I would place the blame squarely on those who had the power to move forward an agenda. I don't think that the "arc of history bends towards justice." I don't think it "bends" at all, except by an outside force. I would rather work to advance conservative principles than throw them out. I'd be willing to make electoral compromises to win elections in the meantime (e.g., Romney). But Trump isn't going to advance any version of what I believe, so why vote for it? "Well, he's not Hillary." Again, an incredibly persuasive argument. But I think, as I said before, that it is better to make clear the differences with Trump then it is to acquiesce. If I thought Trump was just Romney 2.0, I'd probably vote for him. But while Romney was a bland, forgettable placeholder, Trump could actively make conservatism worse. If I thought we merely had a different perspective on trade... but that's not all. And finally, I find him a detestable human being. But that's just the frosting on the cake. So in summary, I think rather than preserving (or ion fantasy land advancing) any conservative principles, Trump actively undermines them and makes them harder to move forward in the future. I don't mean to sound smarmy, but I'd rather not have the orange letter. I don't think Trump is reliable enough to take the risk. + Show Spoiler +Now, Trump has been acting slightly better lately (Putin love aside. And that's a big aside). I've never said I was "NeverTrump" because I'm not. He could still convince me, but at this point he has a lot of ground to make up. Trump isn't a traditional conservative, and the author doesn't argue that he is one. The point that he's making is that conservatism needs to evolve given its lack of efficacy in recent history. But even if you are a traditional conservative, I think that it's pretty clear that you should be voting for Trump if for no other reason than his immigration policy. Demographically, conservatives are permanently fucked if anything resembling the Democrats' version of amnesty passes.
No. There is no real reason that the conservative message cannot appeal to blacks or latinos. It's just that over the past few decades the GOP has really gone out of its way to court white people in such a way that precludes a multicultural society. Trump is definitely not helping with that either. But a LOT of Latinos are socially conservative, and I think plenty of blacks could get behind smaller government; eg starting with reforms of police to reduce excessive violence.
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