What destroyed the American conservative MIND?

[SkyBubble]

That’s why you see so many efforts to chip away at public education because an uninformed ignorant population with weaker critical thinking skills is easier to influence.

Exactly the opposite. Public schools are failing way too many children, and there is zero relationship between funding and performance. But it works really well for the teachers unions, who give lots of money to your party. No wonder your cult wants to keep kids in public schools.

Dollars should follow the student, not the school district. What we want is the best possible education available for every child, whether public, private, religious, or homeschooled.

 

[Chernosoth]

Exactly the opposite. Public schools are failing way too many children, and there is zero relationship between funding and performance. But it works really well for the teachers unions, who give lots of money to your party. No wonder your cult wants to keep kids in public schools.

Dollars should follow the student, not the school district. What we want is the best possible education available for every child, whether public, private, religious, or homeschooled.

I see an inverse relationship. Education is deeply in the negative returns phase, when more money buys worse performance. Make Education Great Again.

 

[SkyBubble]

I see an inverse relationship. Education is deeply in the negative returns phase, when more money buys worse performance.

That's often true. Not universally.

 

[JohnEngelman]

He reduced spending all around. We need to do that now, without sacrificing readiness.

Every item in the domestic budget has a powerful constituency to protect it. The largest and most expensive programs are the most popular. The Federal Government grew in response to popular demand.

 

[PintlerMan]

well it wasn't from funding the kkk and nazi's like the DNC did.

 

[rgraham666]

When Movement Conservatism got started in 1964, its public faces were at least pseudo-cerebral types like William F. Buckley and George Will.

But it is a very long time, now, since American conservatism has been able to rise above the intellectual level of a claymation Christmas special. It is a very long desclension from Buckley and Will to Beck and Carlson.

Why IS that?

The answer is simple. Information.

For a long time the American public received its information from mass media, especially news. This was governed by The Fairness Doctrine. This required broadcasters to present multiple viewpoints without hyperbole or falsity.

That doctrine was killed around the start of cable TV. So news, presented in a balanced manner, vanished. Many broadcasters presented only the information they wanted to present. Falsehoods or exaggeration could be presented as factual.

Once the internet became a common thing it got worse. Any emotionally unbalanced fool could start a website to spread their ideas, no matter how absurd. This allowed foolish and cruel ideas to spread without any contradiction.

As a result a large fraction of the American public now suffers from information disease. The world is perceived through the information in the human mind and when that information is of a single and particular type an individual can no longer view the world without fear or anger.

And here we are.

As a final word my beef with 'conservatism'* is not that it is stupid but that it is cruel.

*Most 'conservatives' these days are either authoritarians or barbarians who have stolen the label to hide their motives, goals, and actions.

 

[rgraham666]

i believe in personal freedom and in economic freedom.

In my experience most people don't understand freedom and when they do they don't like it very much.

Why?

Freedom gets in the way of power.

 

[YDB95]

Taht's completely untrue.

Saying it STILL doesn't make it so.

Spending bills start in the House, and the leadership has a LOT of control, and no, the balance of power was *NOT* supposedly "conservative" Democrats. Other than Larry McDonald, I can't think of one.

1. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires the president to submit a budget for the House to consider. That is where the first Reagan budget - which produced record-level deficits - came from.
2. Yes, the balance of power was conservative Democrats. Larry McDonald was not a conservative, he was a right-wing extremist. There used to be a difference. The Democratic caucus in the early '80s included a lot of older Southern Democrats who had been in office for decades, and some younger ones who later became Republicans, notably Phil Gramm and Bob Stump.

False, false, and false.

Nope. They were all intelligent, well-respected senators who lost their seats to notorious dummies. I doubt if you even knew that was what I was referring to, though. My point was and is, it's a very nice idea to think electing more intelligent people to high office would help, but it's not that simple.

 

[SkyBubble]

Every item in the domestic budget has a powerful constituency to protect it.

True -- but we need to be rid of most of them. Most of them are not constitutional and most have outlived their usefulness. Now they exist to keep bureaucrats employed.

 

[SkyBubble]

As the great Senator Barry Goldwater said, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

 

[SkyBubble]

So why didn't all that happen already?

Because the regulatory structure and the tax structure make it more and more difficult. Bill Gates has said that he couldn't have created Microsoft in today's environment.

 

[SkyBubble]

Lol. I was once a good Republican. The conservative intellectual writers of the past espoused the same ideals in which I believed. And for which I served this country.

There are none left.

This is a lie. I cited one in Victor Davis Hansen. There are plenty of others. Check out TheImaginativeConservative.org for example.

 

[SebastianHolt]

Because the regulatory structure and the tax structure make it more and more difficult. Bill Gates has said that he couldn't have created Microsoft in today's environment.

That is interesting ... we all know that Democrats are retarded when it comes to business and the group that they have in office now are only good for starting race riots. look at how the left has failed in all regards in A.I. and in all ways

 

[JohnEngelman]

As the great Senator Barry Goldwater said, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

Goldwater lost to President Johnson in a historical landslide.

 

[SkyBubble]

Goldwater lost to President Johnson in a historical landslide.

Your point?

 

[JohnEngelman]

Your point?

I made it.

 

[SkyBubble]

Did you? Then how come nobody understands it?

 

[YDB95]

Because the regulatory structure and the tax structure make it more and more difficult. Bill Gates has said that he couldn't have created Microsoft in today's environment.

Lest we forget, Gates' big break was when his mother told the CEO of IBM about how her son had a new company that might be able to do some things for them. In today's environment, well-connected people can still grease the wheels for one another.

Did you? Then how come nobody understands it?

I think most of us probably did understand it. More to the point, though, Goldwater was not a constitutional scholar. He was the heir to a department store fortune, and never even finished college. You might want to find a better source for conservative arguments about constitutionality.

 

[SkyBubble]

Lest we forget, Gates' big break was when his mother told the CEO of IBM about how her son had a new company that might be able to do some things for them. In today's environment, well-connected people can still grease the wheels for one another.

Gates himself says today's regulatory environment would not allow Microsoft to become Microsoft, but I guess you just know better, right?

I think most of us probably did understand it.

You're delucional.

Goldwater was not a constitutional scholar.

He understood the Constitution very well and was as faithful to it as he could be. The Constitution is pretty clear.

 

[YDB95]

Gates himself says today's regulatory environment would not allow Microsoft to become Microsoft, but I guess you just know better, right?

I don't claim to know anything about being Bill Gates. What I do know is, people like him have been saying things like that for over a hundred years. They said it about minimum wage laws (I mean any minimum wage at all) the 40-hour work week, child labor laws, safety regulations...if any of it were true, Gates wouldn't have been able to found Microsoft in the first place, as all those arguments were being made decades before he was born.

He understood the Constitution very well and was as faithful to it as he could be. The Constitution is pretty clear.

Correction: he understood the Constitution in the way you want it to be understood. And the first thing anyone who really is an expert on the Constitution will tell you is, it is NOT "pretty clear". There was a lot of disagreement on what should go into it, the framers themselves said at the time that none of them was fully satisfied with what they ended up with, and there were parts where they had to be fairly ambiguous just to achieve consensus. Anyone who thinks it's "pretty clear" has a lot to learn about it.

 

[Sean Renaud]

I am curious what exactly Gates said. Just for perspective.

 

[YDB95]

I am curious what exactly Gates said. Just for perspective.

Good point. SkyBubble does tend to read things wrong.

 

[JohnEngelman]

He understood the Constitution very well and was as faithful to it as he could be. The Constitution is pretty clear.

The Constitution is vaguely written so that people project their concerns into it. What is "cruel and unusual punishment," for example?

 

[Sean Renaud]

I'm not sure what constitutes cruel as that is clearly subjective. Unusual however should be a math equation no? Like regardless of if you think its just or not if I sentenced Bob to watch every Episode of Grey's Anatomy and write a report on character growth as punishment for vandalizing my property that would be. . .seriously that show is old enough to drink. I'm a sadistic bastard but you get my point.

 

[PaxNurgle]

One quick answer to "What destroyed the American Conservative Mind?"

This gem from Hisarpy posing a question "Why do the Democrats fund the KKK." This really says it all.

I mean, you could sum up "What destroyed the American Conservative Mind" with that one post right there. It was in a different thread; I don't feel like linking to it, but I read this kind of utter nonsense all the time and it never ceases to amaze me what some of these gullible idiots can be led to believe.

If people are so ill-informed, so caught up in their rabbit holes of mis-information as to actually believe nonsense like this, then it does not speak well for the American conservative mind. Failure to fact-check simple information, gullible and stupid enough to believe the most outrageous and inflammatory nonsense, no regard to actual real evidence or truth, only falling for blatant mis-information provided by fringe bloggers who basically make up whatever "Facts" they want.

Gullibility, lack of critical thinking, avoidance of verified facts in favor of fringe speculation and made-up "Facts" to support an ever-growing fringe of anti-social beliefs- THIS is destroying the American Conservative Mind.

And to those conservatives still able to think critically, and discuss things rationally using hard verified facts and honest truths, I salute and support you, even if I might not agree with everything you say.