Uh, well, I don't know that. Let me turn it around for you:
How will we continue as a nation if this comes to pass? How will you, knowing in good conscience that fraud changed the results, claim to represent the people when you have discarded the votes of 80 million people?
You are presuming that your opponents knowingly commit evil. They feel exactly the same about you.
"In good conscience" is not just "I wish it to be true"; it also means you're satisfied by the evidence presented, and the arguments against it have been weighted.
Sure. Many millions of Americans are satisfied by the evidence presented, and the arguments against it have been weighted. They believe that an illegitimately elected person is about to seize power. They believe that you are gleefully dancing on the grave of democracy. They are wondering "How will we continue as a nation if this comes to pass?" right now. They'd like a fix for this nation-destroying injustice.
So you are basically answering the original question with "yes." Half the citizens in America have lost confidence in the electoral process, which is tantamount to saying that the nation is already doomed.
A lot of us are hoping that a significant number of Republican voters know the truth and are just playing hardball politics. That would be distasteful, but less alarming.
Likewise, a lot of us are hoping that a significant number of Democrat voters know the truth and are just playing hardball politics, not that it is much better.
You didn't want this result?
You should have thought about that when you supported weakening election security. Republicans aren't buying your excuses about the virus, or about black people being unable to get an ID card, or about anything else. You broke security on purpose. Any lack of evidence is because you purposely make it impossible to collect the evidence. (like a cop turning off his camera before doing evil) The result has been expected for months: a fraudulent Biden victory.
Next time, maybe cooperate on election security? Is that too much to ask?
Ink the fingers, since we're 3rd-world now. Have ID, just like India and Mexico do. All votes must be cast in person. Take extra pictures when voting (face, fingerprints, iris, retina), to better enable prosecution of misbehavior. No machine goes on a network. Every machine is observed by multiple unrelated people (don't know each other) for the entire time, starting from verification that it is empty and continuing until all recounts are completed. No excuses.
You asked for the current situation when you dismantled what little security we had. Expecting opponents to trust the result is absurd. You broke security because you knew that fraud in your favor would happen if people didn't have to worry about getting caught.
Overall, yes, but not for all seats. New Hampshire was untrustworthy in 2016, both for the presidential electors and for the senator. Some of the house seats, particularly in California, were untrustworthy. Florida was nearly stolen via Broward County, and then again for governor/senator in 2018. Numerous seats were stolen in 2018 and 2020, though I do believe that overall control of the House could be legitimate.
I think you're implying that fraud could reasonably go both directions. I call your attention to the fact that felons are 5 to 7 times more likely to vote for democrats than republicans. Election workers who are willing to commit crime are clearly going to favor democrats. That just isn't the law-and-order party.
In any case, if you had an issue with the 2016 results, you should have cooperated to secure the elections. You didn't, because you know that you benefit from insecure elections.
The situation with fraud evidence is like a cop found with a dozen dead people, all shot between the eyes, and his body camera turned off. He says they all attacked him, and he was just a really lucky man. There is no evidence otherwise, because he disabled the camera. Didn't do anything bad? Sure...
Causation goes the other way. Nobody thought felons should vote until democrats realized that it would tip elections.
Oh, my mistake on the law and order. I should go Burn Loot Murder, rioting every night. Seriously? Portland is not a republican stronghold. The most crime-ridden places vote democrat.
I'll grant that Kamala Harris loved to prosecute crack users with a law that Joe Biden introduced, and that Donald Trump reduced the penalty. I'm not sure you want to take credit for the law that locked up lots of black people, but you may.
> You should have thought about that when you supported weakening election security
It's difficult to take Republicans seriously when they didn't file a constitutional lawsuit against every state who implemented vote-by-mail in response to covid-19, just the four states that would need to be disqualified in order to make Trump the winner.
> Next time, maybe cooperate on election security? Is that too much to ask?
Sure, no problem. Fund the FEC and make it their mandate to find every eligible citizen and issue them a free election ID card. If your answer continues to be 'make it a state ID, and by the way we will make it so DMV is only open one day every two weeks for a couple hours in this black neighborhood over here' then it just looks like continued attempts at voter suppression.
You can't try to pretend you are acting in good faith when it is so obvious you aren't.
Nobody sane would waste money on a lawsuit in a state that doesn't matter.
It's just plain racist to suggest that black citizens don't have ID. It is required for guns, which are actually a constitutional right unlike voting for president. It is required to buy beer, rent an apartment, use most government benefits, or get a job. It's even required to enter many campaign events for democrats! So, that doesn't sound like good faith at all.
Funding the ID is fine. Some bullshit election ID card is no good. It needs to meet the normal standard, as specified by the Real ID Act of 2005. The US passport would be acceptable; let's make those free. The military ID would be acceptable.
Say, want to bias it against republicans who never travel to foreign countries? Make a US passport the only valid identification. I'm fine with that.
At this point in time, it's too late. Step 1 of the steal was the intentional security reduction. It prevented most evidence from being collected, and this made it easier and less scary to commit the crime. (we did get a horrifying Georgia video and then some absurd excuses, plus the Minnesota ballot purchase video, plus the Texas Judge with the pile of fake ID, plus the Texas door-to-door coercion, etc.)
As I wrote above, for future elections:
"Ink the fingers, since we're 3rd-world now. Have ID, just like India and Mexico do. All votes must be cast in person. Take extra pictures when voting (face, fingerprints, iris, retina), to better enable prosecution of misbehavior. No machine goes on a network. Every machine is observed by multiple unrelated people (don't know each other) for the entire time, starting from verification that it is empty and continuing until all recounts are completed. No excuses."
There was no legitimate excuse for destroying what little election security we had. You wouldn't have done that if you wanted to hold a valid election, but you wanted to "win" at any cost.
Some ominous words slipped out of Biden's mouth when speaking to voters in Michigan: "I don't need you to get me elected!"
Any widespread fraud (and it would need to be widespread indeed, without the benefit of hindsight) would leave ample evidence. The conspiracy required to pull it off is mind-boggling, and keeping that a secret essentially impossible.
Ironically, Biden supporters have a better argument for believing in fraud conspiracies, given that Trump over-performed significantly compared to expectations in both of the last two elections. One man's "oh the polls must all have been wrong" is another man's "there were millions of illegal votes."
This is a scary time for the country. I sincerely hope this is just a personality cult and will fade along with Trump. Garden variety issue politics are at least halfway rational.
True. Why would China wait until 2024 and have to hope their interference tactics will work again with another virus?
McCarthur had it right that nukes were the only option to end the conflict in Korea once China began to attack us there, but that we were spread too thin to be able to hold her if we neutralized her that way (so instead we pacified her).
I’m afraid the only option with Taiwan now is to evacuate it as the new Administration will have no appetite for the kind of military action needed to save it. America has plenty of land for them, though not all of it is an island paradise. Start the evacuation with the 3-6nm fabrication plants please!
Sure, it's easy. Count how many lines of code they write per day. Likewise, aeronautical engineering productivity can be measured by counting kilograms of mass added per day.
"more walkable and friendly to the elderly" are very separate things, usually in conflict. The elderly face disability like arthritis, poor body temperature control, uncertainty about lower leg position or pavement contact, bad vision, bad hearing, confusion, and numerous other troubles. No normal or reasonable amount of "more walkable" is going to work.
They need family members who care. The family members need parking spaces. The fewer steps from bedroom to car, the better. A nice goal would be to have less than 50 feet from bedroom to car.
Personal mobility devices like walkers, wheelchairs and scooters mix well with pedestrian traffic, not so much with vehicular traffic.
My grandma was very feeble at the end of her life and the biggest pain point for her was getting her in and out of the car. If we could get her in her wheelchair and just roll her down the street for brunch, she would have gone out so much more. Instead we had to get her to the car, then pick her up to get into the car, buckle her down, fold up her wheelchair, drive somewhere, then do everything in reverse. Then do it two more times on the way home. She disliked the entire process so much she usually didn't want to bother leaving the house.
From what I've seen with older relatives, if you're able to stay mobile, you'll stay mobile longer and have a better quality of life. I don't think it's impossible to have housing and shops together and still have parking within a reasonable distance -- for example a town center with parking lots a couple blocks from the main street.
This is how we got where we are now.
Making things more difficult for cars seems to increase the quality of the experience for those not using cars. Making things easier for cars increases the problems cars cause.
It’s a huge subsidy that society pays to have cars around. There is a huge cost due to the space dedicated to cars, parking them, driving them and keeping them from killing people.
I think at this point, you can say he is not conservative by the typical meaning. What happened? By mid-2017 every American should have loved Trump. (understandable to have doubt before then) Was your dad just following the anti-Trump news sources like Fox, Drudge Report, and Facebook? (nothing like Breitbart, OANN, RSBN, or thedonald.win) Did he have a personal conflict of interest, such as a job outsourcing American jobs?
Also, do you have an answer to my question about which topics would be different between trump supporting and non-trump supporting conservatives? I know trump supporters who could fit all three of these categories. Not to mention there are probably other categories and people who fit into multiple categories.
The pro-America types want tariffs and less immigration. The business types disagree strongly.
The religious types have had complaints about LGBT. Again, the business types disagree strongly.
So there you have the business types being almost libertarian, fighting against the rest of the party. They won't get tossed out because they bring most of the money.
Sometimes the religious and pro-America types are at odds over immigration. Mormons and Catholics are particularly fond of immigration.
Supporting Trump or not is partly a matter of priority. The business types more concerned with regulations will support Trump. The ones trying to run factories in America will support Trump, but the ones trying to outsource production won't. Mormons see that Trump made the first openly gay appointment (ambassador to Germany) and built over 500 miles of wall, so they aren't too happy despite liking the supreme court appointments.
And yes, there is style. Some people like the smooth-talking political dishonesty that we've had for decades. There is the idea that that is somehow proper. Trump fans hate that stuff.
> By definition, a conservative is a slow-motion progressive
No, they aren’t. A conservative is an anti-progressive. (Classically, an anti-liberal, but that’s less clear these days, because while classical liberalism was a progressive position for its time of origin, “liberal” has been overloaded to refer to defense of the status quo elites established by the success of classical liberalism and continued progress in the direction laid out by classical liberalism, with the latter use sometimes more specifically narrowed to be “at a slower pace than is described by ‘progressivism’”.) The former sense overlaps with conservatism, the latter sense with (possibly specifically slow-motion) progressivism.
> Ignoring that technicality, there are 3 types of republican:
I would say more than that:
1) social conservative (often, but not always, for religious reasons; this group was basically drawn in as a side effect of targeting group #5 with the southern strategy)
2) libertarian (as a distinct faction, really drawn as strategists realized that it was easy to adapt the decentralization and States Rights rhetoric that was classic dogwhistles for group #5 along with a lot of the anti-business-regulatory rhetoric designed to give mass appeal to the interests of group #3 to appeal to this group and reinforce the Republican coalition)
3) corporate neoliberal capitalist (the oldest major faction of the Republican Party, it has been a major factor since very close to the founding of the party, and was dominant from about the time the slavery issue was settled until the 1960s Southern Strategy)
4) American nationalist (there’s actually a lot of these in both major parties; some late cold war issues, though, gave Reps an advantage here.)
5) White supremacist/nationalist (historically a strong Democratic consistuency from the founding of the Democratic-Republican Party with occasional rifts that healed because they had nowhere else to go (like the 1940s Dixiecrat split) until Johnson signed on to the Civil Rights Act and then the Republicans targeted this group heavily in the Southern Strategy (preventing that from being another temporary rift.)
Perfect logocentrism example! That dragonwriter chose to split-hairs a little more finely doesn't make this statement into an improvement, or even a clarification, since the splits are (and always will be) a projection of the splitter's perspective, value-system, and goals.
Speak with a member of one of dragonwriter's phyla, and listen while the hair-splitting continues. Expose this 2nd-order hair-splitting to someone more aloof, and they will see it as an argument between insane people.
In troubled times, we have to stifle the narcissism of small differences, make a few concessions, and pick a side. knaq was close enough to begin with:
> Libertarians have their own party separate from Republicans.
Yes, pretty much every conceivable ideology in the US [0] has its own party (or more than one!) distinct from the two major parties for those adherents who don’t understand the futility of third parties under normal circumstances in the US electoral system, or who care more about ideological purity of association than acheiving policy goals through the political system, or who think that we are on the edge of a party shift where their preferred party could plausibly replace one of the two major parties (its happened twice before in US history, your party could be next!).
That doesn’t mean that many of those ideological factions that have their own parties don’t also have substantial (often, much larger) number of adherents within one, the other, or sometimes both of the major parties.
[0] For instance, a non-exhaustive list for the other factions I’ve identified as substantial Republican constituencies:
(1) Social/religious conservatives: Christian Liberty Party, Constitution Party
(3) corporate neoliberal capitalist: Unity Party, Moderate Party of Rhode Island
(4) American nationalist: Constitution Party
(5) White supremacist/nationalist: American Freedom Party, American Nazi Party
"...acheiving policy goals through the political system"
Some of the roadblocks we face now are the result of our two party system.
But getting back to the actual question... what is the differentiating topics between a trump supporting conservative and a non-trump supporting conservative?
The point I was trying to make with the question is that you could potentially find a trump supporting conservative and non-trump supporting conservative that share the same opinion on a specific issue. These theoretical classifications (in some cases built on stereotypes) really aren't helping anything. For example, you could have a trump supporter in any of the categories you mentioned.
It's a great insight that "You cannot defend a system by destroying its foundation."
Continuing along that line of thinking: the "good side" can't possibly be the one participating in a cover-up, trying to brush aside all the evidence of fraud.
The people who want to retain our republic have to defend it.
I see that nobody here (currently: czep, froasty, throwaway0b1, chaganated, core-questions) has any contact info in their Hacker News profile. Usually for political stuff that means a conservative working in the Bay Area, hiding in fear, though czep claims to be liberal.
Plain old phone numbers might be best for this.
It could be too scary with all the hostility. Given how the tech industry is, not many conservatives will be willing to reveal themselves. Performance reviews could suddenly turn sour for no apparent reason, and lots of conservatives have family to support.
I created this account on the idea that it would probably be more productive to have political discussion separate from (unrelated) technical discussion, and probably be beneficial on the privacy front as well.
Phone numbers might work, but I personally would prefer something text-based, as I like to think through things before I say them. Again, though, I could see why some people would prefer the opposite.
I'd also like that thank czep for the idea, though - I find myself in a conservative echo chamber in my personal bubble and generally liberal echo chambers online, neither of which are especially receptive to good discussion.
I'm my own boss in a red state, so more concerned about getting pounded by spammers and weirdos than professional repercussions. Just don't see much point to the pen pal project.
Lift regularly, free yourself from the HR fatties, start a business, spend half the day filling out forms for every nickel-and-dime tax/license under the sun, and you will also want to get a helicopter license (to celebrate Pinochet's birthday in style!)
I don't think I have any intention of giving away any actual contact information to participate in this. We need some more anonymous forum for it. Nothing I have to say is beyond the pale, but there are people out there who would see my family destitute for daring to have counter-cultural opinions about things.
How will we continue as a nation if this comes to pass? How will you, knowing in good conscience that fraud changed the results, claim to represent the people when you have discarded the votes of 80 million people?
You are presuming that your opponents knowingly commit evil. They feel exactly the same about you.