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[Goldwater]

When you find out the reasons behind his removal of the threads, you will understand why he did it. Scott is a good guy, a friend, and most of all, a Freedom Fighter.

[RFayette 🇻🇦]

High tariffs = horrible.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I fully confess in my time on the forum that I've been rather harsh, perhaps unfairly, when it comes to Evangelicals.

One of the things that really bothers me about so many Evangelicals in America is their utter disregard for modern science.  I know many Evangelicals think the theory of evolution is a "joke" and act as if science can be merely laughed off or disproven with Biblical passages. However, I really want to see what the best possible justifications for young-Earth creationism are.

It would take a mountain of evidence to convince me the Earth isn't billions of years old given scientific consensus, but I am curious what the best non-Biblical arguments are in favor of a young Earth and/or against evolution.  Maybe I'm just missing something (as creationists call, "the missing link") that makes their worldview more reasonable, but I have yet to find it.

[rpryor03]

Languages have basic rules. You can't pick and choose which ones apply to you. Proper writing/speaking is the basis of all civilized discourse.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey/Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas - 516 Electoral Votes
Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin/Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts - 22 Electoral Votes

[Mechaman]

They wouldn't have a baby, because Wendy would abort it.

[Negusa Nagast 🚀]

How is William Henry Harrison 'conservative', and Martin Van Buren 'liberal'?  Do you have some sort of definition for these terms for antebellum America?  

I think he meant it in terms of policies that favor the working class (mostly small farmers and urban immigrants at that time) vs policies that favor the elite (industrialists, merchants, large farmers, etc).

tl;dr, but it sounds like someone is just making things up so that they can make the seemingly anti-slavery man a liberal even though he was Jackson's right-hand guy economically. Jackson was a classical liberal, but they don't want credit for him because of the Trail of Tears. (Edit: Did read now - I didn't realize Mechaman was making the post. This isn't the reason, but it still seems like a weird comparison as the beliefs don't line up.)

Meanwhile the Whigs were founded to implement big government. American System, anybody? Tariffs, Centralized government (Except state's rights on slavery for WHH - and from what I have read on here from HST, it seems like he tried to expand it?), and massive improvements and taxes. Subsidizing businesses doesn't make WHH not to the left of Van Buren. Obviously, he's not a leftist in the forum sense, but isn't that in line with what most centrist/centre-left Democrats would do today.

Obviously Van Buren wasn't completely opposed to slavery either, just opposing the spread of it, but being the nominee of the Free Soil Party legacy has helped his legacy a ton, especially on here.

My histtorical analysis of Martin Van Buren has very little do with his anti-slavery views.  It had more to do wiith Antonio V's conclusions.  Slavery was too much of a grey area issue that involved everyone from moralistic Puritans to Know Nothings to German Marxists.  Any objective historian should mention the Puritan work ethic (hardly a liberal philosophy) alongside the "Commuunist Manifesto reasing radicals" when discussing it.

In regards to big government vs. small government I believe that is an oversimplification of old school politics.  You ask any random Democratic politician why they are Democrats I doubt very many of them will say "well because they happen to be the liberal party at the moment."  Very few people go into politics thinking that their political party could "change sides" at any moment (blue dogs and "moderate" New Englanders are the exceptions, not the rule).  If you asked most Democratic officeholders why they are Democrats you will more than likely hear something along the lines of "the Democratic Party is the party of the working class", "Democrats fight for the poor", etc. etc. etc..  This is the point that gets missed alot, but what has changed over the past hundred and fifty years is not the ends of liberalism, but the means.

You have to rememberr that for the vast majority of human history that oligarchial rule had been the rule and not the exception.  In Old Europe monarchs and their Parliaments (which were generally used to expand the influence and authority of rich landowners) used the power of government to institute regressive taxation to keep the poor in perpetual poverty (one of the causes of the French Revolution).  Further, laws like the Penal Laws used big government laws to disenfranchise and strip millions of people of many things we would consider basic political rights like free speech, the right to own property, the right to marry, and the right not to swear allegiance to the Anglican Church.
Government intervention was used far more on the side of the wealthy and powerful than it was to advance the cause of the disadvantaged up to that point in history.  Thus why small government back then was often viewed as a liberal view more so than a conservative one.  This attitude would be dominant in liberal psyche until about the early 20th century when liberals started adopting the socialistic (emphasis) arguments in favor of turning the "tool of the rich" against them.  It should be noted that as late as the 1910s that labor unions were skeptical of government intervention into the workplace (something that showed up in the aftermath of that New York City fire that the Democratically controlled (emphasis) New York Assembly passed workplace safety laws on).

As it regards American politics, policies like high tariffs were generally viewed as "the rich milking the poor" for good reason.  Free Trade has only become a conservative view in recent times due to the international workplace and globalization where any rich first world country can move operations overseas.  Back in the day it took months for trade shipments to reach port and the third world working conditions were happening in Lowell and not Laos (very hard to blame low tariffs for low pay in other words).  Factory workers were paid barely survivable wages while working inhumane hours while their robber baron bosses made hand over fist.  Protectionism in theory benefits the entire community, but the Gilded Age revealed it to be little more than a scheme for rich industrialists to force everyone poorer than them to buy their overpriced goods while providing very little benefits or pay improvements for their laborers (and thus why no sane economist recommends returning to it).  Free trade had such a strong following among the working class due to the idea that free and fair competition between domestic and foreign companies (remember, this was before globalization) would force domestic owners to increase worker wages in order to motivate labor to produce the best product at the lowest price possible (something Cleveland and Bryan agreed on).  Basically, the concept of perfect competition.

In regards to internal improvements, Democratic opposition to such improvement was widely based on the knowledge that said improvements would be made at the cost of the poor (crippling taxes and tariffs rarely felt by domestic industry but definitely by the poor farmer and laborer) for the benefit of the middle and upper classes (remember middle class is much smaller).  Further, working conditions on such projects were far from humane, as the several hundred strikes by Irish work gangs before the Civil War would show (and further note here, the Know Nothings largely got their numbers from people who used to ID as National Republicans and Whigs, are they "liberal" because they supported big government expansion and centralized government?  I don't think so).
A comparison with the Keystone XL Pipeline could be made re: environmental impact.  Just because something is sold as "improving people's lives" don't mean it's "liberal".

Martin Van Buren, a master of New York machinery, an advocate of freer trade, who blamed the failings of the economy on a rich elite class of bankers, was hardly conservative.

[JerryArkansas]

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And the religious bigotry continues.

What is bigoted about this post? The cult remark?

There is evidence to support that claim: Mormonism does not fare well under the BITE model or Robert Lifton's 'Thought Reform' criteria. It doesn't help that Mormonism's foundations, and it's significant claims relative to other branches of Christianity, become lot more dubious when placed under critical examination; nor does it enjoy the obfuscation by the weight of history that Islam, Judaism, and other mainline branches of Christianity enjoy.

Moreover, I can critique its political structure, or it's belief systems, without passing judgement onto the average believer.

[Antonio the Sixth]

OK, the idea that Gay men and Women can't procreate is absurd.  Have you ever heard of Surrogate mothers.  Many gay men are using them to have children of there own.  Gay women are using sperm banks.  So you biggest argument has a huge hole in it.

[TDAS04]

Who gives a sh*t.

[IceSpear]

Cuomo still sucks.

[RFayette 🇻🇦]

Support (not an old man)

[Antonio the Sixth]

And here's a little more food for thought
Matthew 7:21-23
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’


Let that sink in.

[rpryor03]

The Lego Movie is definitely worth remembering.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Maggie is my Queen.

[RR1997]

It is.

[Maxwell]

Not surprising at all. Here's my theory for this. Most liberals are young. Young people are less likely to use TV, thus they use online sources for their news. This is not good for liberal MSNBC. While most conservative voters still use TV, which is good for conservative Fox News.

[TDAS04]

Jack Conway isn't "for" anything. The man was against the Bush Tax Cuts before he was for them.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Second.

[Mr. Illini]

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party. As a communist, I cannot in good conscience vote for them. This isn't really all that difficult to understand, and yet I'm constantly harangued by liberals for not backing a party with which I have no ideological commonality. This would be the equivalent of someone haranguing DC Al Fine for not supporting libertarians. Sure, both are on the surface right-wing, but beyond that there's no real commonality of interest. Similarly, while the Democratic Party is undeniably going to position itself as the left-wing, it does so as the left-wing of the ruling class. It's not interested in really doing anything that would disrupt that system, undermine it, or overthrow it. It's fine with capitalism and always has been. I'm opposed to capitalism, and as such, I'm opposed to any organization that is openly (i.e. right-liberals) or tacitly (left-liberals) pro-capitalist or that thinks capitalism is the best that we can do or that we should compromise with capitalists (social democracy).

You don't get it. It's not that your attitude is difficult to understand. In fact, it is so grotesquely simplistic than even a 5-year-old would understand it. The issue is that it is an incredibly stubborn and ineffectual strategy that, throughout history, has constantly crippled the progress of left-wing values and policies and is responsible for the failure of countless parties.

[IceSpear]

Write-in: Karen Lewis

You realize that CTU endorsed Garcia, no?

Yeah but Garcia is a Democrat and I have a strictly 'no Democrat' policy when it comes to voting.

So you're not willing to vote for a Democratic candidate, but you are willing to write-in a person that endorsed the Democratic candidate, and is considered to be a Democrat as well?

I know you have a disdain for the Democrats because in most of the country they aren't as far left as yourself, but in Chicago, some of them get close. There isn't a Democratic and a Republican Party. There's a Democratic Party with a center-left/establishment wing and a far-left wing. You should be appreciative of this since it means that some of the candidates have views that are considerably to the left of any mainstream Dems on the national stage, but of course that would require giving up your edgy abstention from anyone that is a Democrat, no matter how the political system in that jurisdiction is laid out.

But at least your write in vote would still assist in sending a Democrat to a runoff.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Republicans look to have a better chance taking a Senate seat in Colorado than defending Pat Toomey.

I'm pretty sure people have already explained this, but for Senators who are mostly anonymous, that approval rating metric doesn't work. It might work for Senators who have very high name recognition.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The use of this particular 'art style' and the 4chan/Reddit format with the 'tiers' and whatnot make it a Horrible Image irrespective of its content.

[Mechaman]

Well, I just finished season 2, so it seems like the -real- stuff is about to begin.

Besides a few good episodes like "Q who", the season's ending was pretty dull. The last episode in particular was an utter mockery. It's easy to see they had to rush in to complete it.

But anyway, now I'm looking to be impressed.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

From the Opinion of Daniel Webster thread:

A preening elitist dick who didn't even have the balls to fight slavery (thus doing away with the default Forum defense of northern conservative elitists).  I fail to see how he is an FF in the context of his times.  I shudder to think what some of you moderate heroes think about the Know Nothings just because large numbers of them also liked internal improvements and tariffing the hell out of the subhuman criminal class that was flooding the urban areas.  Hell, if Webster had lived long enough he might've preferred such folk, given that he viewed secession as some sort of grave moral danger.