We're all on the same page about Paladin, right?

Eh, there's always gonna be a world, and rich assholes are always gonna buy their way to luxury within it. Even if it's just a Snowpiercer train or the last remaining biodome in the Arctic dessert, they'll still be in the first class section.

The most unrealistic part of Ducktales wasn't the existence of duck people but a billionaire who actually did fun things with his money beyond screwing over poor people.

They did an episode where he lost all the money in the money bin, and he was excited because he could make it all over again.
And he did by the end of the episode.

If Bezos's money vanished tomorrow, he'd never stop sobbing.
They'd have to put him in a mental home.

I'm sure Richard Branson and his nieces and nephews will have all sorts of wacky adventures together once he retires.

And while he's not really a billionaire, Trump and his kids did seem to having fun with his money, albeit in their own cruel shitty way. The boys got to hunt endangered animals, Ivanka got to design handbags and clothes, and Donald got to berate and fire people in front of millions of viewers for a game show.


*I still love the anecdote about Trump throwing One Direction out the front doors of his hotel in the middle of the night (right in front of the waiting paparazzi) because they hurt Tiffany's feelings. That's the kind of petty shit I'd do to someone that insulted my kid.

Context?

@Paladin lost a lot of points in my book for his unprincipled, nakedly selfish apologism of the Trump presidency.

Nevertheless, Wordforge has gotten into the habit of rejecting right-wing opinions and voices categorically. It's making it rather dull around here.

There used to be a time when mainstream right wing thought was mostly rational. These days, there's sane and fucking nuts. I agree that doesn't make for a very stimulating clash of ideas.

I disagree. I think it's more an issue of Trumpism and paid trolls like Ben Shapiro pushing "conservative discourse" in such a cartoonish direction that most of the reliable right-wing voices around here find themselves being labelled as leftists by the true believers for opinions like "treason is bad" or "universal healthcare will not lead to nuclear armageddon."

I'm fine with dull if the alternate is jackals screaming slurs and who think ridings liberals like ponies is hilarious. I lost track of how many rep wars were launched by alt-right fuckstick against liberals or anyone who didn't follow conservative ideaology, but all the ones who depended on said rep as weapons jumped off the site like rats from a sinking boat the day Anc took over.

Apart from Rule 8, the board is still the same rule wise as it was in 2013. No one was gonna be banned, and no one who is making an attempt at good faith discussion is getting tossed. I'm not a fan of Paladin's politics, but he's not fucking Tasvir81 either.

Yeah.

We used to sincerely engage with posters like Storm, and it turned out they were actual just covering up their literal Hitler loving beliefs.

Tasvir had horrendous racist attacks on other posters tolerated way more than they should have been because there was a sense that deep down he must be joking or exaggerating.

Posters like Marso literally endorsed armed attacks on democratically elected governments for nothing more than them being Democrats.

Paladin doubled down with smugness about children in cages and made it clear that that there was no previously established line that he wouldn't happily ignore the crossing.

Oldfella made it clear that he would continually shift his boundaries of what was acceptable behaviour to accommodate what Trump did most recently, for no better reason than owning the left.

Poodle called women he didn't like sluts and whores and worshipped slave owners.

There was a time on WF when if people acted like cartoon villains they got the benefit of the doubt. Two decades of experience has shown that doubt was a mistake.

You win the Creative Analogy of the Week award.

Once upon a time, there were actual conservative intellectuals. People who arrived at their opinions through fact-based, logical processes. People whose reasoning and good intentions you could respect, even if you disagreed with them.

George Will was basically the model for this kind of conservative. Guess who he voted for in 2020?

There's right wing and then there's right wing. There have been conservative posters here who are what you might call old fashioned Republicans, people who were conservative, but they didn't get in your face, didn't condemn you to hell, and didn't treat you like shit because you were a particular color, creed, or orientation. Those people are either gone, or just post so infrequently as to appear gone. That leaves the moderates, liberals, and a few leftists on one hand, and a smattering of ultra right wingers on the other hand.

When you feel like you're up against a tide of opposing belief, how do you usually react? Some people demur, stay quiet and talk about other things, or they leave. Then there are those who get louder, and louder, and louder as time goes on because they know that whatever they're saying isn't going to matter to the group as a whole. Louder becomes bombastic. Bombastic becomes Trumpian. If no one's going to listen, why bother being civil, or if not that, why bother being grounded in realpolitik and instead why not have fun with it?

I see it all of the time on Twitter. My friends and I will be chatting in our little groups, and it never fails someone comes along and starts something, and it's not to convince anyone, they know they're not going to get anyone to change their mind just on their own, and they don't have much support, so they become trolls, one man wrecking crews. It's just to stir shit and dismiss ideas because, quite honestly, we've all had these same arguments, debates, and discussions a hundred thousand times before.

So why not spice it up?

That doesn't make it right, but it would explain why this behavior has become so prevalent post-Trump.

Just my two bits, though.

It's probably worth noting that the change in Wordforge's "average opinion" comes not just from conservative posters leaving or liberal ones joining, but also from a number of people who have been here all along becoming more liberal over time.

That, too. Nova was pretty far right in the 2000s and life circumstances pulled her to the left. I've heard Tex used to be far right but he's since become a leftist. And most of us still left have become more open to some form of UHC and/or UBI in recent years.

The ones like Paladin and UA who haven grown not a single bit from when I joined here as a teenager are the exceptions.

I originally signed up because there was a better crop of conservatives here than in TNZ. I remember browsing before I registered and seeing a thread about illegal immigration. Some leftie threw out the classic "let them sneak in, they're just coming here to do the jobs Americans consider beneath them" line I'd been hearing for years, and some conservative destroyed them with the rebuttal that supporting undocumented immigrants just so they can exist in America as a de facto untouchable caste was abusive and inhumane. It blew my mind.

What's labeled "conservative" thought these days is nothing of the kind. The nihilism currently dominating the Republican party is a radical disconnect from the limited government ethic that used to be one of its lynchpins. We see it in places like Florida and Texas where state governments are steadily encroaching on what used to be local government prerogatives. Here in Idaho, the legislature has forbidden local governments from even considering local option tax increases. Talk about the tail wagging the dog...

Yeah, but we observed for quite some time the "no big government" ethos was cast aside all the time for bedroom stuff, and womb stuff, and condom stuff.
Conservatives have always liked big government that does what they like.
Just like they like "legislation from the bench" when it fucks the poor, minorities, women, and strengthens corporate influence.
This has been a behavior pattern for awhile.

I can't even believe we ever had that quality of conservative here, to be honest. I'm sure you're right that it happened, but I couldn't hazard a guess as to who could have made such a reply.

Exhibit A:

https://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/a-feel-good-immigration-story-for-the-holidays.56359/

God, that entire thread is peak cringe.

I really think that this is a misframing of the issue. I can remember reading a post in a FB group where someone talked about what they called a "Libertarian solution to ending poverty." The goal should be, to end poverty, and it doesn't matter what political philosophy you're talking about, if the evidence shows that it works in the majority of cases, then that's what should be done. In the cases where it doesn't work, then some other method should be used. And the example they gave (which the evidence seemed to indicate would work) was one where I could easily make arguments from a variety of political perspectives as to why it shouldn't be done (even though it demonstrably reduced poverty). If your goal is the betterment of all human life (at the very least) then you should be less interested in a solution that conforms to a certain political ideal, and more interested in what produces verifiable results. Sadly, however, there are ample people on all sides of the political spectrum that prefer the ideal over what the evidence shows.

And? Boehner voted for Trump in 2020, this is despite the fact that Boehner hates Trump and Cruz. Will's been a stuffed shirt for decades, who liked to talk about all kinds of things, but never seemed to do anything. Contrast that with Trump who promised to fuck people up who weren't in his base. If you think that all a government does is fuck people, who are you going to vote for? The guy who blathers about shit, or the guy who says he's going to spend most of his time deliberately fucking people who don't look like you? I mean, you know he's going to fuck you, but he's definitely going to fuck people who don't look like you even harder, so he seems like your best option.

'07 is when I fucked off to Richard Dawkins for awhile, and made my Facebook friends.

Now I'm reminded why, this place really was fucking toxic waste.

The problem is that a lot of right-wing opinions here as of late have been based on easily disproven lies (e.g., CRT and race relations in general, trickle down economics, defense of Trump, genocide, etc.). I think there is room for reasonable disagreement based on informed opinions, but when RightForge is buying the CRT and Trump propaganda hook, line, and sinker, it's just not fun.

Edit: and I say this as a recovering libertarian.

Did you really hate Family Feud that much?

Yes.

^

"Recovering Libertarian" is a pretty good phrase.

It is a hell of a drug.

It was very enticing for a long time. It was a lazy ideology which didn't take a whole lot of thinking. Which, if one is already inclined to not think, is a great endpoint. Luckily I continued learning and thinking.

Unlike @Paladin, @Uncle Albert, and @Federal Farmer.

If conservatism has intellectuals, why do they keep trying to steal Thomas Paine and Eric Hoffer?
Either-
A. They don't have intellectuals.
B. They do, but don't have enough of them.
C. They do, but don't have good ones.
D. B and C.
E. Because of D, A in practice.

"That government is best which governs least" is an enticingly clean and simple proposition.

Much cleaner and simpler than realizing that government is a tool, that nearly all tools can be used for good or ill, and that simple answers are rarely adequate to deal with a complex reality.

Because the people who used to count as conservative intellectuals are no longer willing to associate themselves with the flaming pile of fetid trash that the conservative movement has become.