**** Elections thread *****

[CoccoBill]

Agreed. Wuf, you should have a serious self-reflection on why you switched from liberalism to conservatism, and why you switched from Cruz to Trump. These are btw not questions that I need answered by you, just putting them out there. Is it perhaps a need to be on the winning side? Are your discussions here about gaining knowledge or proving everyone, not least yourself, that you're right, that you're winning the arguments? You can have clever and compelling ideas, but for years I've among others complained how you don't provide proper sources of proof for your claims, nor do you explain why you've reached the conclusions you have. Instead of trying to provide those, you've now decided to stop giving any kind of justifications or explanations at all, since people haven't been convinced. Of course they haven't, people need proof, not just anecdotal evidence and appeals to emotions and authority. It is very hard to take you seriously nowadays. Sad.

[Jack Sawyer]

It is very hard to take you seriously nowadays. Sad.

Bibi thinks the same, and laughed. Twice.

[wufwugy]

you switched from liberalism to conservatism

To provide an explanation:

The switch was from authoritarianism to libertarianism. That happened a few years ago, and it happened due to studying economics and history.

The labels used in modern political discourse are very messy, so messy that some are flat-out wrong (example of the wrong: fascism is right-wing). "Liberal" and "conservative" are super misused in modern discourse. Even though I know better, I still do it. Regarding what "liberal" and "conservative" actually mean, I am both and I will always be both. Those ideals are directional pressure on an ideology, one being keeping things traditional and the other being incorporating new things. You can be liberal or conservative under any political ideology. You can be a liberal communist (one who wants to expand what communism is) or a conservative communist (one who wants to rely on tradition regarding communism).

The reason the "conservative" descriptor is more appropriate for me these days is that the pressure towards liberalism of society has gotten too out of hand. I believe people are better served now to be conservative about things. That wasn't the case during some parts of the Bush administration, and it won't be true at some point in the future. Remember how during the 00's Christian conservatism went too far by forcing their views on everybody else so intensely that they even got online poker banned? That was a time when there was too much conservatism and we needed more liberalism. Liberalism was the source of freedom then. Today, it's flipped. Liberalism of America is so extreme today that it's anti-freedom, and if somebody wants to promote freedom they do so by having conservative views.

It's like Milo said. He's a tailor-made liberal. But liberalism is so out of hand today that in order to defend things like freedom of speech, religion, etc., he has to be conservative.

and why you switched from Cruz to Trump.

Because Cruz lost.

I was always going to vote Republican even if I had to hold my nose for Crust Crustie. I have a hard time finding anything in the Democratic Party's agenda that is not at its core about authoritarianism under government. In the GOP, there is at least some semblance of liberty from government.