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northshorebamaman
| Favorite team: | US Army  |
| Location: | Cochise County AZ |
| Biography: | |
| Interests: | |
| Occupation: | |
| Number of Posts: | 37707 |
| Registered on: | 7/2/2009 |
| Online Status: | Not Online |
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re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 5:49 pm to TenWheelsForJesus
quote:I didn’t say it was. I defined what populism is without attaching any moral judgment to it. If the definition feels like a “smear,” that reaction isn’t coming from anything I added, it’s coming from seeing your beliefs described neutrally rather than favorably.
I fail to see how this is a smear.
0
re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 5:48 pm to CleverUserName
quote:
We are approaching the definition of "expansion" from two different directions.
Tariffs, in the actual use and existence" in itself is not an expansion. No more than claiming that voting by touchscreen machine would be an expansion of the voting laws. Or semiautomatic weapons is an expansion of the second amendment. All covered under the original intent.
The "expansion" I'm talking about is stuff the founders would have obviously said "oh hell no!" to and you cannot pry out of the claws of government in any way, shape, or form. Again. Great society, patriot act, organization of the HHS department, etc. things that expand beyond the intent of the Constitution without having some judge wink and nod and say it fits.
Also, the people can vote out the imposition of certain tariffs in one election. Not so much the other examples. The imposition of policy changes through will of the people through a fair election is a staple of conservative beliefs. There is no voting out the Great Society. Apparently there is no voting out the Patriot act. But the 2020 election proved that you can alter tariffs in one election. It's still will of the people.
You’re trying to narrow “expansion” to “things the founders would have hated,” even though the question you actually asked was much simpler and unambiguous. Redefining it after it’s been answered doesn’t change that.
The request was for an example of conservatives supporting more government power than existed before, not whether the tool itself existed in 1789. Increasing the scope, rate, or reach of tariffs requires more federal authority, more enforcement, and more centralized discretion than before. By plain definition, that is an increase in government control, regardless of whether tariffs existed in principle at the founding.
The touchscreen voting and Second Amendment analogies don’t work. Those are about new means of exercising the same right. Tariffs aren’t a neutral mechanism; raising or expanding them is the government asserting more control over prices, trade flows, and private behavior than it previously did. That’s a change in degree, not form or technology.
Whether tariffs can be voted out is another non sequitur. Democratic legitimacy determines authorization, not whether power expanded. Plenty of expansions are electorally reversible and still expansions. Trump himself proves the point: he was elected and then rolled back regulations, reduced parts of the federal workforce, and cut programs that had grown under prior administrations. Are you prepared to argue those programs were never expansions just because they were later reduced?
I’m not arguing tariffs are unconstitutional or illegitimate. I’m saying they answer your original question cleanly: modern conservatives support higher and broader tariffs, and higher and broader tariffs mean more government control in that area. That’s the example you asked for. Everything else is noise.
re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 3:57 pm to CleverUserName
quote:This isn’t complicated.
Nope, not a dodge. But again. The imposition of taxes is a constitutional activity. Spelled out.. not some vague language some activist judge says is spelled out. Love it or hate it.
But you are saying "a current, popular conservative position that supports expanding government power. MAGA supports tariffs. Full stop."
It's not an expansion. It's an original government idea. The great society was an expansion. The patriot act was an expansion. The ""affordable"" care act was an expansion. Tariffs is not an expansion since it's a founders approved means
Two yes-or-no questions:
Do higher or broader tariffs increase federal control over markets through taxation and enforcement? Yes.
Do a large number of modern conservatives, especially MAGA, actively support higher and broader tariffs? Also yes.
If both of those are true, then conservatives are supporting an increase in government control. That’s the example you asked for.
Whether tariffs are constitutional is irrelevant. Lots of expansions of government power are constitutional. Your question wasn’t “is this allowed,” it was “do conservatives support it.” They do.
Appealing to the founders doesn’t rescue the argument either. The founders approving a tool doesn’t mean every use, scope, or expansion of that tool would earn their endorsement. They also approved armies, taxes, and surveillance in limited forms. That doesn’t mean every modern expansion of those powers ceases to be an expansion because the concept existed in 1789.
You can believe tariffs are justified. You can believe they’re necessary. But redefining “expansion” to mean “anything the founders once endorsed in principle” drains the word of meaning. At that point, “small government” just means “government actions I approve of,” which is exactly the inconsistency you're displaying here.
re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 3:32 pm to CleverUserName
quote:That’s a dodge, and a poor one.
Tariffs have been enacted by the U.S. off and on since 1789. You wanna gripe at someone about the imposition of tariffs? Go shout at the graves of George Washington and the other founders. After all, the founders agreed that tariffs were the most efficient and politically agreeable way of raising public funds.
So that's not a Trump thing. That's a founders thing. And I tend to agree with them more than anyone else.
I never claimed tariffs were invented by Trump, or that they’re historically novel. Your question was for a current, popular conservative position that supports expanding government power. MAGA supports tariffs. Full stop. That satisfies your request regardless of whether George Washington also liked them.
And appealing to the founders doesn’t change what tariffs are: federally imposed taxes used to shape markets, enforced by the state, often expanded by executive discretion. Under Trump they were dramatically broadened and celebrated by the conservative base. That is conservatives supporting more government control in a specific area.
You can argue tariffs are justified. You can argue they’re good policy. But pointing out they existed in 1789 doesn’t make them “small government,” and it doesn’t answer the example challenge.
re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 3:27 pm to kingbob
quote:I actually agree with most of what you’re saying here, and I think this is where the conversation usually gets muddled by people talking past each other.
Even people who believe in small government believe in some government. There are certain things that even the most “freedom loving” among us believe is a fundamental function which government is supposed to do. One of those is police its borders and control who is allowed in. Another is ensuring that taxpayers dollars are not embezzled and wasted, but spent where they will provide the public good or service voters demand.
When you have flagrant flaunting of immigration laws combined with rampant fraud embezzling of taxpayer dollars, government action isn’t overreach, but necessary to prevent the loss of legitimacy. If government refuses to enforce its borders, and refuses to root out rampant, open, and obvious fraudulent spending of tax dollars, it will lose all legitimacy, and citizens will simply stop paying taxes or obeying their government entirely.
For this form of government to continue, it must serve its created function. It must enforce its immigration laws, it must enforce its borders, and it must punish corruption and fraud. To do otherwise is to utterly destroy itself.
Small-government doesn’t mean no government. It means limited scope, defined functions, and legitimacy tied to core duties. Border enforcement, fraud prosecution, and basic law enforcement absolutely fall inside that scope. A government that can’t enforce its own laws or protect its revenue base isn’t “small,” it’s dysfunctional.
That said, it’s still honest to acknowledge that when you expand agencies, increase enforcement capacity, add personnel, funding, and authority, you are literally growing the government. Sometimes that growth is justified. Sometimes it’s necessary. But it doesn’t stop being growth just because the function is legitimate.
I think a principled small-government conservative can support targeted expansion in specific areas where the state has a clear, limited mandate, while still opposing broad regulatory creep, economic micromanagement, or ideological social enforcement. The key difference is whether power is being expanded to perform a narrow, defined function, or expanded to manage society at large.
Where people get hung up is pretending those distinctions don’t exist, or redefining “small government” to mean “any use of power I approve of.” You don’t have to do that to make your argument. You can just say: yes, this is more government, and yes, it’s warranted.
re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 3:08 pm to CleverUserName
quote:That’s almost a trick question, because most of what’s called “conservative” today is conservative only in branding, not in its actual relationship to government power.
I guess I need an example of popular conservative thought that is wanting to give the government more control.
But tariffs.
Tariffs are the federal government directly intervening in markets by law. They are taxes set and enforced by the state, collected at the border, backed by penalties, and designed to coerce private economic behavior. It’s the government deciding which goods cost more and which industries get shielded.
Trump didn’t just tolerate tariffs, he expanded them massively using executive authority. Steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels, hundreds of billions in Chinese imports. That’s not small government conservatism. That’s centralized economic control justified as nationalism.
You can argue tariffs are worth it. You can argue they’re necessary. But you can’t argue they’re less government. They are literally higher taxes imposed by the federal government to manage markets.
re: What has happened to this country? Everyone now craves the control of big government?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/16/26 at 2:43 pm to UtahCajun
quote:Populism isn’t about simply “appealing to voters.” In political theory, populism has a specific structure: politics framed as a moral conflict between “the real people” and a corrupt or illegitimate elite, combined with the claim that only one movement or leader authentically represents the people. Institutions that mediate power, courts, media, elections, civil service, are treated as suspect when they constrain that claim.
all democratically elected officials, by default, must be populists or they wouldn't get the votes.
Populism is not universal. Plenty of elected officials appeal to voters while emphasizing institutional legitimacy, pluralism, compromise, and procedural limits. That is mass politics, not populism.
MAGA, for example, maps onto the core features almost perfectly. It explicitly divides the country into “real Americans” versus elites and internal enemies, treats unfavorable institutions as rigged or illegitimate, and centers representation in a single figure or movement that claims to speak for the people as such. You can strip away any ideology entirely and the populist structure is still there.
When you define populism is so broadly that every elected politician qualifies simply for seeking votes, the term stops distinguishing anything at all. At that point it no longer describes a political style, only the existence of elections. You're just "category flattening."
re: Military operations vs. Iran - not happening (for now)
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/14/26 at 11:16 pm to BigD43
quote:Maybe they think they have a shot at bogging us down in a messy, asymmetrical conflict where they can slowly bleed us as our politicians prioritize short-term political wins over any coherent war strategy. And over time, public support turns against our involvement due to years of slow bleed and the lack of a coherent strategy despite us inflicting devastating, lopsided casualties on them the entire time.
Is the Iranian government so delusional that they think they can take on the US in a war?
I know it sounds ludicrous, but it’s a possibility.
re: Some admirals seem less than thrilled about the new battleships - slow motion mutiny
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/13/26 at 6:54 pm to hawgfaninc
quote:That already happened.
Forget Mark Kelly,
re: You don't need breakfast, America
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/13/26 at 6:27 pm to real turf fan
quote:Let me try to restate what you’re claiming to make sure I have it right. You’re arguing that because calorie count is determined by literal burning, they only meaningfully apply when the body breaks chemical bonds in a burn-like way. Simple sugars fit that model because they’re easily oxidized, while protein is mostly converted into other molecules rather than “burned,” so its calories aren’t equivalent in practice.
A calorie is a thermal unit. A food calorie was measured burning (a flame, not, repeat not) a body function) to take down that food item. To burn a simple sugar or fructose doesn't have a lot of bonds to break and faster consumption.as well. To burn a complex protein is a whole different take down, and it's not a burn it's a conversion to other usable things on a cellular level..
Is that your argument?
If so, a calorie is just a unit of energy, like an inch is a unit of length. It’s defined by physics, not digestion. Yes, calories are measured by burning food in a lab and your body releases energy through chemical reactions instead, but the math still works out the same.
Sugar, fat, and protein are processed differently and affect hormones differently but fat still has about 9 calories per gram, carbs and protein about 4. Protein being used to build or repair tissue doesn’t erase its calories, it just means some of that energy is lost as heat along the way. Energy in vs energy out still applies.
re: You don't need breakfast, America
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/13/26 at 5:22 pm to BestBanker
quote:I agree you framed your experience as personal. My original reply wasn’t aimed at that part. It was aimed at the general claim that breakfast "offers value" to kickstarting metabolism, which you presented as broadly true rather than “this works for me.” Once you phrased it as a general mechanism, it ceased being an anecdote and became nutrition advice, and the physiology doesn’t support your claim. :cheers:
Agree. In my post, I referenced what works for me and didn't apply to the masses. My body reacts different than others, as it should.
quote:Insulin sensitivity isn’t something that suddenly becomes relevant once someone crosses an “overweight” line. It exists on a spectrum in everyone, lean or not, athletic or sedentary. The reason those terms entered common vocabulary later isn’t because they only matter to “fat people,” it’s because prevalence changed and measurement got better. Plenty of lean people have impaired glucose handling, and plenty of overweight people don’t.
Glucose and insulin resistance (that you referenced) had to be introduced into our fat society's vocabulary. Growing upon the 70s and 80s, there was no talk of being overweight. Thankfully, I'm not overweight and haven't had to focus attention there.
.
For what it’s worth, I’m not overweight or diabetic either, and being aware of glucose regulation and insulin dynamics makes it much easier to stay that way. It isn’t just about treating disease. It's better to prevent them in the first place.
re: You don't need breakfast, America
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/13/26 at 4:54 pm to real turf fan
quote:
It may not be as simple as "It’s calories in vs. calories out." because all calories are not the same.
A carb calorie takes , let's say, one heat calorie to burn
A protein calorie takes ten
A fat calorie might take 50.
Calories are a unit of energy, not a material that behaves differently by source. Macronutrients do differ in digestion cost and hormonal signaling, which affects how much of that energy is ultimately usable or stored. It changes the efficiency of energy handling but it doesn't rewrite thermodynamics. :lol:
re: You don't need breakfast, America
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/13/26 at 1:58 pm to BestBanker
quote:The idea that breakfast “starts the metabolic burn” is mostly leftover diet folklore. Your metabolism doesn’t go dormant overnight and need food to switch on. It’s regulated by total energy balance, hormones, and activity, not by whether you eat at 6 am.
Breakfast offers value to starting the metabolic burn of fuel. My body operates better with breakfast, light lunch, and little to no dinner. I gain weight or hold weight if I skip breakfast.
Skipping breakfast and staying fasted until lunch keeps glucose and insulin lower for several additional hours, improving fat oxidation and makes appetite regulation easier later in the day. You’ll still find plenty of doctors repeating the breakfast mantra, but most of them have very shallow nutrition training and are just echoing outdated guidance.
If you personally feel better eating breakfast, great. But that’s individual response, not a general metabolic rule. There’s no credible evidence that eating early confers some special metabolic advantage that outweighs the benefits of delaying intake and keeping glucose low longer.
re: When will the “Supreme Court” “rule” on tariffs?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/13/26 at 1:40 pm to BigTigerJoe
quote:Your problem, like many here, is you seem to have a foundational misunderstanding on the purpose of SCOTUS and its functions. How, specifically, do you think the courts were supposed to rule on those issues?
The courts did practically nothing to stop the Biden administration from wrecking the economy and allowing 20 million unvetted illegals into the country while treating the constitution as toilet paper.
What case do you think should have been before them, brought by whom, under what legal theory, with what standing?
Courts don’t intervene because something is harmful or unconstitutional in the abstract. They rule on concrete challenges to specific actions. On immigration, states and other parties did sue, mostly under administrative law. Some got temporary relief, some lost on standing or timing, and most never presented a constitutional question that would force a Supreme Court review. The court dealt with procedure and statutory limits, not “stop the policy.”
On the economy, it’s even simpler. Courts cannot rule on “wrecking the economy” or "strike down inflation. Those aren't justiciable claims. Bad outcomes aren’t illegal by themselves. Unless Congress clearly limited agency authority or someone could show an actual violation of statute or constitutional text, there’s nothing for a court to strike down.
The Supreme Court isn’t a supervisory body that steps in whenever policy goes badly. It reacts to viable cases that survive standing and jurisdiction. If you think the courts failed, the real question is where the cases were supposed to come from and why Congress left so much discretion in the first place.
re: Explain, if you allow.. Everyone here is 130+ IQ
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/12/26 at 8:18 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:I mostly agree with you, but I think the deeper problem isn’t ignorance of facts so much as a near universal inability to parse arguments. People don’t seem to understand what claim is actually being evaluated, what facts are relevant to that claim, or which questions are downstream versus foundational. It doesn’t feel like posturing either. It feels sincere, which is honestly worse.
Well politics has gotten really popular for people who don't know anything about politics and got a degree from Twitter/X university, but who, in their most Dunning-Kruger, are infinitely confident that they have real insight. So just getting into the BASICS without USING CAPS to OWN THE LIBS is largely impossible.
Most of the people posting on the poli board don't have a fundamental understanding of the topics being discussed. Sadly, lots of people who DO, who have a history of being non-idiots on there, have devolved greatly into the conspiratorial and/or black pill mindset. Due to reliance on either mindset you can't have a productive conversation with those people, either.
Good recent examples are the SCOTUS case threads about whether Trump’s tariffs were issued under legally valid authority. Roughly 90 percent of the politards argue as if the case is about whether tariffs themselves are legal. You have people sincerely responding with things like “so it’s fine for other countries to tariff us?” or “why didn’t anyone complain when JFK tariffed rubber dog shite from Nepal?” None of that is even adjacent to the question before the court. SCOTUS wasn’t weighing the wisdom of tariffs or their historical use. They were evaluating whether the specific statutory authority invoked to impose them was lawfully applied. That critical, foundational distinction is currently sailing over the whole fricking boards head.
When people can’t separate “is this policy allowed in general” from “was this authority properly exercised in this instance,” what the frick can you even talk about? At that point you’re not debating, you’re stuck teaching basic claim structure to people who don’t even know why it matters, and who interpret any attempt to narrow the question to logical foundations as evasion.
That, more than ideology or conspiracism, is what makes the board functionally retarded most days.
re: Explain, if you allow.. Everyone here is 130+ IQ
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/12/26 at 7:43 pm to drizztiger
Never took an IQ test, but I did alright on the ole ASVAB. When I got my GED, they sent me a certificate saying I had the top overall score in the state in 1997 and invited me to speak as the “valedictorian” at the big annual GED graduation ceremony. I skipped the ceremony, but I’m still irrationally proud of it and work it into conversations when possible.
re: What’s the latest it’s considered “polite” to show up to a restaurant before close?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/11/26 at 12:30 pm to northshorebamaman
And as always in these threads, I have to point out that the public wildly overestimates how often cooks spit in or otherwise frick with food. As a disclaimer, I’ve never worked at Burger King or Denny’s, so I can’t speak for that end of the spectrum. But if you’re eating at a halfway reputable place, there’s almost zero chance anyone has touched your food in a malicious way.
Believe it or not, most professional chefs and line cooks take as much pride in what they put out as you do in your own work. Even when a customer is annoying, the line doesn’t turn into a revenge fantasy. People want the plate to be right, clean, and done properly, because that’s the job and because our professional reputation matters to us even if the public perception is that we're degenerate dirtbags (which, while mostly true, doesn't carry over to sabotaging our own work).
Also, if you're an average polite person you are vastly overestimating how annoying you are and underestimating how annoying some other people are. Chances are you didn't even get noticed by the kitchen.
Believe it or not, most professional chefs and line cooks take as much pride in what they put out as you do in your own work. Even when a customer is annoying, the line doesn’t turn into a revenge fantasy. People want the plate to be right, clean, and done properly, because that’s the job and because our professional reputation matters to us even if the public perception is that we're degenerate dirtbags (which, while mostly true, doesn't carry over to sabotaging our own work).
Also, if you're an average polite person you are vastly overestimating how annoying you are and underestimating how annoying some other people are. Chances are you didn't even get noticed by the kitchen.
re: What’s the latest it’s considered “polite” to show up to a restaurant before close?
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/11/26 at 11:08 am to DustyDinkleman
As a cook, I don’t really mind a couple two-tops or three-tops rolling in up until close. What drives me nuts are late parties that don’t call ahead and then get pissed, stiff the servers and/or write a review about how we ruined your cousins birthday because half the menu had already been 86’d for the night.
We don’t fire, prep, or staff on the off chance that a random twelve-top walks in 15 minutes before close on a weeknight. Doing that would mean wasting food and labor most nights, because nine times out of ten it doesn't happen.
If you’re coming in with a group, you should really always call ahead, but if you’re planning to show up within an hour of close, it’s not just polite, it gives the restaurant a chance to actually be ready to serve you instead of setting everyone up for a bad experience.
We don’t fire, prep, or staff on the off chance that a random twelve-top walks in 15 minutes before close on a weeknight. Doing that would mean wasting food and labor most nights, because nine times out of ten it doesn't happen.
If you’re coming in with a group, you should really always call ahead, but if you’re planning to show up within an hour of close, it’s not just polite, it gives the restaurant a chance to actually be ready to serve you instead of setting everyone up for a bad experience.
re: Trump to sign EO before the midterm election eliminating mail in ballots and voting mach
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/9/26 at 3:36 pm to SlowFlowPro
quote:Yes and no.
Even with your questionable framing, yes.
We don't have national elections in the US.
Congressional elections? Limited within states
Senate elections? Limited within states
Presidential elections? You vote for the EC within a state.
Even the Amendment process is focused through state-based or stat-elected reps. There is no national referendum.
Yes, elections are run through states. But no, that does not make fraud a protected “states’ rights” issue in any meaningful sense. States control the process. They do not control the legitimacy of federal outcomes. That authority ultimately sits with Congress, with courts stepping in only on specific legal violations along the way.
re: Pretty Cool Video of British Family Reaction to Life in America After Leaving the UK
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/8/26 at 3:46 pm to Funky Tide 8
quote:The whole “react” genre is cringey as frick. I’m not picking on the OP or this video in particular, and yeah, the average Brit probably is blown away by American houses. But most of it is just “Black guy hears Kenny Rogers and is BLOWN AWAY” or “No one told me the U.S. military is so badass.”
The whole fad of Brits posting videos on youtube of them visiting America and being smitten by the culture and lifestyle is interesting. I enjoy some of them for the most part, but its just a peculiar thing that these people are tapping into. These folks get a ton of views and subs,
It’s pure self-validation fuel. People watch it to hear a stranger say that the thing they already like is awesome.
re: RIP MTv - it was a huge Gen -X staple
Posted by northshorebamaman on 1/8/26 at 3:34 pm to HogPharmer
quote:They were already leaning hard into bullshite reality programming before YouTube showed up, but once on-demand video existed the old model was finished. There was no path back to profitability. Why sit around waiting for something to come on when you can just type it in and watch it immediately?
Who knew that nobody would want to watch 13 hours of Ridiculousness a day rather than watch MUSIC Television?
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