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mikesez · 04-26-2022, 09:04 PM

(04-26-2022, 07:33 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: There's always a decline, even if it doesn't look like a cliff, the fall is often fast and hard. Last year, what were conservatives saying about reckless spending. What did they say would happen? Oh yeah... inflation. What happens? Inflation, but it's just a coincidence... the war in Ukraine caused this problem. What about becoming energy dependent on other nations. What would happen then? Oh yeah, gas prices would rise dramatically. But nope, that's just because OPEC randomly decided to change their prices. It's not a supply or demand thing, is it? What about lockdowns and the damaging effect on the economy? Oh, yeah, it's going to stunt our economic growth and hurt mom and pop shops. What about defunding the police? More crime. Shocker. Mail-in ballots; massive cheating (that one didn't happen, lol). I could literally do this for an hour.

Dennis Prager was on Real Time with Bill Maher 3 years ago, when he said the left was saying men could menstruate. He was laughed off stage. Conservatives know your radicals better than you do. The news you consume doesn't show you the flaws in progressive ideology like it should. This is why you don't care. You don't see it. And, because you buy the lie that conservatives cause this mess, you don't do any proper self-reflection on what's being sold to you. It's sad. It doesn't matter how many "coincidences" there are. You still fall for it. Just compare blue run cities to red ones. It's obvious who has destructive policies. This happens over and over, but you and your ilk buy every lie sold to you by the mainstream media.

To be fair, conservatives are the same with abuse by corporate America, fake foreign wars, deregulation, and taxes. One-way censorship, low wages, job losses, and a rigged stock market is starting to make some of them realize that maybe corporate America isn't their friend. Even that's not enough.

And look, I am not a conservative that things liberals have no place in this country. We need regulation. We need a voice for the poor and disenfranchised. We need to explore new options and avenues for growth, opportunity, and unity. However, giving that voice to the progressive community is a disaster. Those things cannot occur without liberalism, and the progressive circle does not care about individual liberty in the slightest.

I think we agree more than we disagree.

Some of what you're saying is simplistic though. The world isn't so simple that one side is always right.

Conservatives beat the inflation drum starting in 2008. The inflation didn't come until 2021. They were wrong for 12 years. They also had power for 4 of those years, and actually increased deficits with an overzealous tax cut during that time.

We got more energy independent during both the Obama and the Trump administrations. Then COVID happened and Trump actually *made a deal* with OPEC in April 2020, to stabilize oil prices. That was probably the right move at the time, but that deal definitely caused oil prices to rise in 2021.

The lockdowns were necessary at first, I think we agree, because at a bare minimum the decks needed to be cleared in the hospitals for a potential surge of infections. PPE needed to be stockpiled, etc. But once we were locked down other voices started coming in saying we needed to stay locked down and all COVID cases are avoidable, etc. The damage of the initial lockdown was substantial but justifiable. That damage looks much worse now because the lockdowns went on for too long and because so many people decided, of their own volition, to work from home or not work at all. That probably doesn't change even if the actual mandated lockdown was shorter.

Comparing "blue" cities to "red" ones is BS. New York City has a lower crime rate than Jacksonville. And in any case, city elections are never about the same issues as state elections or national elections. A city council in the US is no more a model for how to run the US federal government than the Canadian Parliament is. Perhaps even less.

I don't believe conservatives caused this mess. I'm not going to belabor the point but "the mess" is due to technology. The malevolent actors were always there. The new tech gave them the tools they needed to disconnect people from real community that really listens and really corrects and really finds consensus, and plug them into fake communities where everyone gets to shout down viewpoints they don't like and We are never wrong.