Quote:
Originally Posted by Playfair
Just an observation I’ve made. I have lurked on this page for awhile. Post a little bit. But it’s interesting how the dynamic of this page, which was once far more conservative, has become quite liberal. Also being located in Alberta seems, at least to my observation, out of sync with the rest of Alberta. I may be way off base, and it is a very generalized view, but it is what I’ve observed. Maybe because the definition of “liberal “ and “conservative “ has changed drastically since I joined. Maybe the changes in society in general. I don’t know. Forgive me if I shouldn’t have posted this but it is something I’ve been observing over the years.
Nevertheless I always have appreciated this page and all of you.
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I've argued for a while that it's hard to even call it conservative anymore, I think Libertarian is a much fairer title.
I think this site skews way further towards progressivism and social welfarism than most of Alberta. But I also think that is part in parcel to have real conversations about topics, outside of pure economic cynicism it's challenging to defend challenges to a lot of progressive ideals without admitting there is a large subset of society you just don't care about, and people generally want to be seen as caring, even if they don't care all that much.
I'm actually pretty sympathetic to a lot of the cynical economic arguments, but the problem is the right wing has completely abandoned them, and creates policy almost exclusively in the mold of short-termism and anti-wokism rather than seriously thinking about how to create enduring economic policy.
Conservativism has become a tenuous alliance of those who just understand themselves to be on that team still, those who want to milk the system for what it's worth in the short term, and those who believe there are short-term easy answers to economic problems. Actually taking the time to talk about the ideas in a forum like this hallows them out pretty fast, so the right wing has moved incredibly far from good discourse like we often have here.