ruraljuror

Was this response intended for me? I don't disagree with any of the points you're making, I was merely responding to Titanhog who tends to react negatively whenever anyone points out that Cooper was the more right-leaning mayoral candidate in the most recent election run-off. This particular topic has been well-trod on this forum and I would love to leave it in the past.

To be clear, I should add that plenty of Democrats and Independents joined the Conservatives/Republicans of Nashville in electing Cooper. They own Cooper just as much as the conservatives (and anyone else that voted for Cooper) do. But it should also be noted that the Dems and Indies that voted for Cooper (besides those voting strictly for change or against Briley) were disproportionately right-leaning Dems and Indies. How do I know this? Because Cooper ran to the right of Briley in order to attract that segment of the voter population, and it was a major success for him. I'll also add that Dean had plenty of right-leaning tendencies, too and Bredesen was a long way toward the middle relative to a far left Hippie. Thus the spectrum, and neither end of the spectrum is all good or all bad.

The people who voted for Cooper should own Cooper, Titanhog. You keep dodging that very obvious fact.

I didn't respond to the poster who said that Cooper "leans to the right" because that's exactly what Cooper did in his campaign. He positioned himself to the right of his opponent in a non-partisan election. If you (like most conservatives that I know) voted for Cooper, then it seems like y'all should be the ones that own it. I sure didn't vote for him, and I'll ask again (since you didn't answer last time) did you vote for him? I'm not sure what Davidson County's historical voting trends nor Coopers nominative party affiliation have to do with anything. As I noted, Left and Right is a spectrum - no candidate is generally all one thing or all the other. And regarding party membership - Donald Trump claims to have been a lifelong Democrat before running for president as a Republican. Do you think that Democrats should claim Trump or does it make more sense to give the credit to the voters who nominated him and put him into office? This doesn't seem to be all that contentious of a concept to me.

I feel like this debate has already been discussed on this board several times. Right and Left are spectrums (or a continuum maybe) but there's a lot of gray area that can lead to these kinds of confusion. Cooper was certainly to the right of Briley (and most of the field for that matter before the run-off) which is why some claim he's relatively to the Right. Others claim he's relatively to the Left because he's a Democrat (in name at least) and won in a fairly progressive city. Both are fair (albeit half-baked) analyses. Did you vote for Briley or Cooper (or none of the above), Titanhog? I voted for Briley, but I wasn't thrilled with the choice. Most of those who lean progressive that I know did the same (anecdotally), while most of those I know that lean conservative voted for Cooper (while not being thrilled with their choice either). This makes sense of course, because Cooper was the more conservative candidate while Briley was the more liberal candidate. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Well, the issues you're raising in this post are entirely separate and distinct from the issues you raised in your the last post where your concern was about what 'The American people were sold' regarding flattening the curve. That said, I understand both your frustration and your perspective on this. Nobody wants to be in this position. But you do realize that the 12,000 death's you're citing would be a lot higher if we weren't taking the drastic curve flattening measures that you're advocating against. It's not exactly a compelling argument when the data you're relying on runs contrary to the position you're advocating. That's like using data that shows that fewer people smoking cigarettes leads to fewer cases of lung cancer in order to promote the idea that smoking isn't as dangerous as it used to be and therefore more people should smoke. 12,000 people may die each year from falling down the stairs (I'll take your word for it), but in this situation we're all on one giant staircase together - and every person that falls has a good chance of knocking a couple more people down the stairs with them on their descent. If we don't give plenty of clearance between the people ahead of us and behind us on those stairs, then a lot more than 12,000 of us are going to get taken down in what could ultimately become a human avalanche.

I probably should have been more clear in my last post: To flatten the curve essentially 'means' to buy time. Flattening the curve is just a statistical concept that makes no claims about virus eradication, for example. In fact, if the x-axis plots time, then a flatter curve by implication is probably going to have wider upward and downward sloping tails and will therefore take longer than a sharp rise/decent. In the context of the pandemic, it just means taking measures to make the infection/death growth rates grow more slowly, essentially turning a steep mountain peak into a wider, rolling hill (or more likely, hills). That said, I can understand your confusion given the fair amount of conflicting information that was being passed around in February and early March (which seems like a lifetime ago). Hell, back then even the president was pushing the idea that cases 'would soon be zero' - which ultimately may not even be an incorrect statement depending on how one defines 'soon'... All that to say, most of the credible information I was seeing in the lead up to the lock down gave no indication that the process of flattening the curve was going to be over very quickly. There was a lot of talk about how it would take 2 weeks to see if our measures to flatten the curve were even working, but there was no indication that even a successful flattening of the curve would mean that we would then get to immediately return to some semblance of our normal lives. In fact, most of what I was reading/hearing at the time led me to believe that our lockdown measures likely wouldn't be sufficient, and we could expect to see increasingly severe lockdown rules implemented about every two weeks for a while to come thereafter. Obviously that hasn't happened, of course, (thankfully, I guess) and couldn't really happen in an environment where we lack adequate testing to truly know the degree to which we've effectively flattened the curve thus far. Without those tests, we're all still just playing a guessing game, which ties one hand behind the back of those promoting quantitative assessments and solutions to the pandemic, which (not coincidentally) is an advantage to those who would like to push agendas and 'solutions' that conflict with the cold hard math. That dynamic alone probably accounts for a significant amount of the public's misunderstanding of the situation. All that to say, who was it that 'sold' you and the American people the idea that flattening the curve would be a quick process? I'm genuinely curious. In any case, whether it was politicians, particular media outlets, or friends/family/neighbors that planted that seed in your brain, I recommend finding other supplementary sources when seeking pandemic info going forward, because it seems like you're right that you were sold a bad bill of goods.

If you don't trust government scientists because of perceived private influence (by Big Pharma, etc.) then I assume you don't trust scientists in the private sector either, since that private influence would be even more direct. What does that leave you with - academics? That doesn't really help since almost all of them rely on public and/or private grants to fund their work. I'm genuinely curious, what scientists do you find to be credible? Regardless, obviously Dr. Fauci doesn't make the list of scientists in which you're willing to place your trust, which is fine so long as there are other credible scientists whose expertise you are willing to rely on. That said, I do think it's a bit unfair to blame Fauci for the depleted national PPE stockpile since he wasn't in charge of his budget over the years, for one. Also, that stockpile has only been in existence for about 20 years (Bill Clinton era) and we did give almost 18 tons of it away to China in February I believe - which was a decision announced by the State Department as opposed to Fauci's NIAID, though I have no idea whether he supported or opposed that decision (if he was even consulted). You also skipped over the role of the CDC (their budgets) and other prominent positions in our government where scientists once (but no longer) held sway...but if you think it's better to listen to people who have no scientific or medical expertise, you're unfortunately far from alone in making that particular calculation. Just be aware that those non-scientists in which you're placing your faith are often encumbered by conflicts of interest from the private sector too, right? It's all the baggage with none of the knowledge, which seems like a bad plan to me. All that said, I agree with you about the Schedule 1 issue - though it would be a lot simpler to reclassify pot via congressional action (overturning the Nixon Era Controlled Substances Act) as opposed to doing it through the FDA, which is a much more complicated process that would require a lot of coordination with the Attorney General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Point being, the scientists aren't the ones getting in the way of federal pot reclassification, it has primarily been an issue of lack of political courage in the legislative and executive branches on both sides of the aisle.

Shelter at home recommendations/orders were not only about flattening the curve so that hospitals don't get overwhelmed, they were also about buying time so that doctors and scientists could work on vaccines, testing, treatment tech & best practices, and prophylactic/preventative drugs, etc. Also, we needed (need) as much time as possible to ramp up production on safety materials and equipment for currently known treatments (i.e. PPE and ventilators) while beefing up the production and supply chain capacity for when vaccines, tests, treatments, and prophylactics are ready for mass production. Point being, it was never all about flattening the curve. As to the political weapon, I hear what you're saying - just about everything (justly and/or unjustly) is used as a political weapon these days. That said, there were political decisions (made by politicians) that have very much defined our governmental response to this pandemic, starting on the federal side with cutting CDC budgets and eliminating infectious disease experts from prominent positions in our national intelligence chain of command - and that was all in the pre-pandemic days. There have also been a number of political decisions that were made after Covid-19 was identified, including when/how various travel bans and shut down orders were implemented, decisions about when/how and when not to activate the defense production act, how economic relief efforts should be focused and allocated, federal v. state resource procurement issues, and testing rollout - as well as a considerable number of other issues to say the least. Point being, undoubtedly both sides of the political aisle will do their best to use the political issues that surround this pandemic to their advantage, but it seems to me that these are some pretty important issues that we very much ought to be discussing right now in terms of who we want leading us and handling these kinds of issues going forward. As it turns out, who we've got running our government is pretty important and can have a major impact on how we as a country manage the issues that we face, for better and for worse. I'll also note that Dr. Fauci announced today that there is some very promising work being done on the treatment front, so buying time to that end has been effective. I'll also note that despite only having 60k deaths formally attributed to the virus thus far in the US, we're over 100k deaths beyond the normal, rolling average death range for the last 6 to 8 weeks (and that is with significantly reduced deaths from motor vehicle accidents) so the virus is doing a lot more damage than we currently have the testing capacity to track. The curve has surely flattened to some degree as a result of our efforts thus far, but we are a long way from being out of the woods in terms of making sure that our hospital systems don't become overwhelmed. I hope those temporary beds/tents won't be needed, but that horrific scenario is still a very real possibility in many places. I wish this nightmare were over as much as everyone else does, and we all certainly can't stay in lockdown mode forever, but political calculations should have no part in perpetuating the shutdown nor should they be used to justify a premature re-opening. Epidemiologists and the statisticians in their support staff are the ones we ought to be taking our cues from for the time being until we have sufficient testing and tracking capabilities in place nationwide at a minimum - in the meantime most everything else is noise.

Thanks again for the reply. While I appreciate how much thought you've clearly put into this, I fear that we've veered into the realm of political science fiction. I still see some holes in your rationale (which I will address shortly) but even if you'd concocted an airtight governing system (in your estimation) that achieved all of its purported goals with maximum objective morality (as you define it), you still would have no way enacting anything even close to resembling this system in the real world unless you were starting from scratch or unless you were the global god-emperor and could get it all done with a snap of your fingers simultaneously. To be clear, I do think it's an interesting thought experiment, but when you start letting your abstract philosophy bleed into your real-world political expression, I think you're creating a tangled web that muddles the point of the exercise. For example, when I said I think we should tax the rich more - I very much mean that in a practical, real-world sense. But when you reply that doing so would be enacting more violence on people and is therefore immoral, your response hinges on this very extensive fantasy scenario in which the way you wish that government would function (as opposed to how it actually does function) is foundational to your argument. Obviously in the real world, even accepting your premise that taxation = violence, clearly there's no more violence committed in the collection of a larger amount of taxes than there is in the collection of a small amount of taxes, which renders your point moot. This is where I think you may have gotten caught in the web between what actually is and what you believe could be. To that point, in terms of confusing reality with your personal ideals, I think it's a somewhat dangerous game to play, because doing so would allow you to freely profess things like 'taxes are thievery' and might even inspire yourself or others to vote for political candidates in the real world who most closely adhere to that philosophy, but in doing so you would be neglecting all of the other aspects of your ideal governmental system that would make such a 'no-tax' governance arguably moral. A government that would collect less/no taxes is an interesting concept, but if that same government doesn't also enact the end of limited-liability for corporate actors and shareholders in accordance with your design, then that government would in fact be LESS moral than the one we currently have. Also, as a practical matter, ending limited-liability as you have proposed isn't necessarily a bad idea in the abstract, but it's a good example of the kind of provision that almost definitely is never going to happen without the global god-emperor powers I referenced above. Beyond those general issues with your framing, I also think there are a couple weaknesses in your specific arguments/policies. For example you state that monopolies "only come about when created by government regulation" as though that's an unimpeachable fact, but I actually think your assessment is pretty far off base here. Historically, monopolies have come into existence for any number of reasons unrelated to government regulations: geography can create de-facto monopolies, as can exclusive contracts within supply chains, and access to limited resources. In fact, without strong regulations against collusion, price-fixing, and bribery, history shows that monopolistic practices will be incredibly common - which is why anti-trust laws and these kinds of regulations were enacted in the first place. Further, even without patents and intellectual property protections, trade secrets about processes, materials, and engineering can and will still enable the existence of monopolies - only now those monopolies could potentially go on forever instead of only for the life of the patent. And that's just one example. In addition to these practical concerns, I think the governmental system you've cooked up will run into some moral issues beyond what you've acknowledged, as well. It's fine to lean on volition when entering into contracts as your safety net to assuage concerns about moral hazards, but indentured servitude (and to a lesser degree, child labor) were already entered into voluntarily for the most part. We still outlawed/regulated those practices despite that they were voluntary transactions, because people recognized the power imbalances that were often involved in those transactions, saw their logical outcomes, and deemed them to be immoral. If I'm starving and have no shelter from a blizzard, I'd gladly sign away 20 years of my own slave labor for a pot roast, a roof, and a blanket if the alternative is most likely death. In order for a choice to be voluntary, there has to be a meaningful alternative, which is why we've outlawed coercion and invalidated transactions that are objectively deemed to be unconscionably harsh. All that to say, I do think this is some pretty interesting stuff to discuss (though I'm sure more than a couple of our fellow UPers have grown quite tired of it taking up space in this thread). And as long as you don't start promoting some of these ideas as piecemeal solutions to real-world problems, I think it's a great philosophical exercise to consider. Just don't make the mistake of forgetting that the system you've devised (even for all of its flaws as I see them) is still greater than the sum of it's parts and the structure cannot hold without the entire foundation in place. All the same, I would love to see how something like your system would play out in a giant simulation - I'm sure we'd both learn a lot. Thanks again for the reply in any case!

Thanks again for the response! This is mostly good stuff and provides a lot of context for your perspectives that I was missing previously. As a result, I agree with a lot (if not most) of what you're saying here, but there are still some major differences where we part ways. This is the key to my understanding of where you are coming from. I was under the impression that you were discussing your beliefs about how government DOES work, not your beliefs about how you WISH government would work. These are very different issues. That said, I really only have two problems with the ideas you presented in your last post. 1. I still think you ought to put an asterix next to your statements that taxes are collected by force/violence. You're right that almost all laws are ultimately enforced by violence, but taxes are an exception because (as noted) you can avoid most of them by voluntarily renouncing your citizenship and/or not engaging in behavior/commerce that falls under constitutionally sanctioned taxable activities. For example, if you're a business owner and don't want to pay payroll tax, then incorporate your business outside the US. If you're a consumer and don't want to pay sales tax on your new TV, then you can go buy it in Montana or New Hampshire where there is no sales tax. If you're an income-earner and don't want to pay US income tax, give up your citizenship and conduct your business from Germany and pay German income tax or go to the Bahamas and pay no income tax at all. None of those options will end with the US government inflicting violence upon you, which undermines your premise. 2. You're desire for the legitimate functions of government to be limited to 'the prevention of violence' is the other area where I have to majorly disagree with you. Even as a purely philosophical exercise this idea is more full of holes than the world's largest piece of Swiss cheese. For example, under your 'violence prevention paradigm' how could governments justify property rights? Seems to me that I could burn down your house with no repercussions so long as I did it while you were at work or on vacation when nobody would get hurt. Better yet for me, what would prevent me from moving into your house while you're at the store if there's no legitimate prohibition against breaking and entering or squatting on another's property. How could you remove me from the premises without resorting to violence yourself? And if there's no government property records to track and enforce deed ownership, what would prevent me from simply claiming that the house was mine and locking you out? Even if you wanted to sell me the house, how could we ever conduct that kind of transaction without a court system to enforce the validity of the sales contract and without banking regulations that make credit and loans possible. If banks had no means to legally enforce payment on loans and/or to foreclose on property, that would put an end to the housing market (or really most any market, for that matter) overnight. As you can see, such an oversimplified paradigm of legitimate governmental functionality becomes messy really quickly - it's would be a 'finders = keepers' society that I doubt any of us would ever want to live in, and that's just the beginning of it. I haven't even begun to touch on some of the real-world examples that we've actually experienced prior to building out a regulatory infrastructure that obviously goes well beyond your philosophical ideal. Labor rights like the prohibition of child labor and the creation of the weekend and overtime/hazard pay come immediately to mind as good examples of how workers can be exploited in market-based systems where no governmental oversight exists. Environmental regulations are another easy example since almost all of us were alive back when aerosols ate a hole in the ozone layer and lake Eerie used to spontaneously catch fire with unfortunate regularity. When companies are allowed to dump their toxic byproducts into our waterways at almost no cost, it's hard to blame them for doing so, and who could stop them? Market forces were not enough, otherwise the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts would never have been necessary in the first place. Even if you want to take a really abstract and broad view of what constitutes 'violence' in order to give the government justification for keeping our water systems free from the industrial pork farms manure pipeline or the leather tannery's runoff, you're still going to encounter a million problems with anti-competitive monopolistic behavior, bribery, company stores/indentured servitude, extortion, and piracy of copyrights and patents...and that's just off the top of my head. The last point about patents alone would pretty much up-end our entire pharmaceutical industry, and the absence of an FDA would certainly deal the final blow. I for one have no interest in drinking any traveling salesman's snake oil. And all of that addresses only the prohibitive functionality of government, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. Under your philosophy, we'd also lose the proactive/productive aspect of government functionality that built our interstates/infrastructure and includes R&D that created the internet and MRI machines as a couple not-so-minor examples. I could go on for days here, but I think you get the gist. Your philosophy about the limitations of government might seem good in the abstract, but I don't think most of us would like the reality very much to say the least. I don't disagree that there are a lot of stupid and pointless laws on the books, but the presence of stupid/pointless laws in no way negates the importance of the laws/regulations and government services that do serve very practical and necessary functions that go well beyond 'decreasing violence'.

Posted the last one too soon! You keep saying that all taxes are taken by force, but repeating it won't make it any more true. Unless your only point is that all laws are enforced (pun intended) by force, in which case you're right that tax laws fall under that umbrella to a degree as well. If that's your point, however, you're either arguing against the right of the government to make and enforce laws, or (more likely it seems) you just think that the government should only be able to enforce the laws that you agree with. In either case, you're still ignoring the fact that you have the option to elect lawmakers and judges who agree with you and/or renounce your citizenship, which undermines the 'taxes taken by violence' premise that you seem to be stuck on. You're leaving out the part about 'taxation without representation' which was pretty crucial to the argument that our founders were making and (once again) undermines the very point you're trying to make here. You have representation, you just don't like it apparently. I'm not sure where you got the idea that the only legitimate function of government is the "Defense from Violence" but I happen to disagree and so does the constitution (See the commerce clause, Bill of Rights, or the General Welfare Clause - which happens to fall under the Taxing and Spending clause - just as a few examples). That said, as noted above, you're in luck that the constitution is a living document and we're not bound to the decisions of previous generations on these matters. Be the change you want to see in the world!! That said, I will not be signing your petition. To be clear, I'm not against raising hotel taxes - my point (from the last conversation) was that hotel taxes aren't the only taxes that we need to be raising. Further, in terms of taxing rich people more, there are certainly more targeted ways to do it than through hotel taxes, which apply to everybody who stays in hotels regardless of wealth/income level. Happy to discuss that more if you're interested, just let me know! In any case, that was an interesting conversation - as I said, it's always fun to get a peek behind the curtain. Thanks for your participation!

Thanks for the response! It's always interesting to get a peek behind the curtain of another's thought process if nothing else. Just to be clear, you're right that future generations are not bound by all decisions made by previous generations. That said, it takes more than disagreeing with those previous generations' decisions in order to overrule them, of course. The constitution can be amended, for example, and both statutes and common law can be corrected and overwritten on a daily basis if necessary - but the key is there is a process for making those revisions that's encoded into our legal system. It's not enough to simply say that you disagree that the government has domain over a given issue, therefore those laws are invalid. What you can do to correct laws you don't like is work on an amendment campaign and elect lawmakers and judges who agree with your philosophy. Failing that, as mentioned in my previous post, you still retain the right to renounce your citizenship thereby unbinding yourself to the decisions of previous generations of Americans. Beyond these remedies however, you're kind of just left spitting into the wind - but that's an option you're free to exercise as well, of course.

That's interesting, because you should know my thoughts on this exact issue, because you and I discussed it in the Soccer thread last October. Here was my last comment on the matter copied and pasted...to which you never responded. I can't fathom why... Here is my biggest dispute with your response and philosophy in general. I can not agree that taxes are taken by force from citizens. We hand over those tax dollars voluntarily - maybe not in accordance with an agreement that we personally/explicitly have made - but it is in accordance with an agreement that our ancestors made that we continue to reap the benefits of through the heritage of citizenship. Also, keep in mind that you can in fact renounce your citizenship should you decide that it's no longer worth honoring the agreements made by your ancestors. Thinking of taxes as federal theft is similar to viewing HOA fees in your apartment building as theft. You can try to elect a new HOA board to reduce or eliminate those fees. Failing that, you can move into a new building with lower (or no) fees. But to conflate those fees with some organization picking your pocket removes your own agency and accountability in the process, which is substantial. That said, your point about the fixed-income granny buying shoes is well taken. I do believe that said granny may benefit from the new MLS team in ways that even she may not appreciate, but these are the kinds of exceptions and carve outs that make tax law complicated. We ought to do everything we can to make sure that these granny's aren't among the 'losers' when crafting new policies, but we can't raise new hotel taxes to cover literally everything, and sometimes people don't even realize when they're actually among the 'winners' group despite themselves (e.g. the fairgrounds new expo center crowd). In any case, thanks again for the very solid reply - I appreciate it!!

That's true, good point. The very skills required to actually be an expert/intellectual are the same skills that are required to accurately verify expertise/intellectual capacity in others. I guess that's the crux of it - same as it ever was, I suppose.

Sure, good example. Of course you could've also gone with Socrates, Galileo, Einstein or any number of other intellectuals including most of those who brought about the scientific revolution. And speaking of revolutions, there's been more than a few of those on the social/political fronts as well - without which we'd probably all still be bowing to one king or another (not to mention the disparate body counts among the revolters and those being revolted against). Still, it seems clear to me that intellectuals should be listened to more, and the rich should be taxed more, but we're all in agreement neither group should be jailed/persecuted/murdered. Glad we're on the same page here.

To paraphrase the late, great George Carlin: 'Think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of us are even stupider than that.' That said, on one hand it's kind of hard to disparage stupid people for being stupid. In fact, if one happens to find oneself on the stupid end of the spectrum, then suddenly the act of railing against the 'elites' and eschewing education and the opinions of experts until there is no practical difference between proven facts and uninformed opinions in the public forum is actually...kind of a smart strategy - especially if you're too dumb to realize the long-term consequences that accompany such a strategy on a national/global scale.

You raise a great point about how we're incentivizing these kinds of projects with below-cost transportation, infrastructure, and utilities support that play a big part in making this kind of project viable. We're in complete agreement about that, and that's something we as a society should definitely address, which in turn would drastically change the economic models that currently make these kinds of developments possible.

I think I disagree with you on this one, BNA. I assume that the two hypothetical parking garages you mention would not in fact be cheaper than the additional land required to create these oceanic parking lots - otherwise the developers probably would've gone with the garages in the first place. That is, unless the previous landowner was only willing to sell the plot as one giant parcel, in which case the economics would once again point to sprawling parking instead of garages. You're right that land isn't infinite, but parking lots aren't permanent, and the developers retain the option to convert some of that land to parking garages (or more retail/hotel/office/residential with incorporated parking garages) at any point in the future. And what was there under these parking lots before they were leveled and paved over? I'm not sure that an island in a sea of crop fields or whatever is all that preferable to an island in a sea of asphalt, from a practicality standpoint anyway. Bottom line, something like this would be way out of place in Nashville of course, but I don't fault the developers for choosing this model for this location if that's what they determined their present economic conditions could support.

I think it's Buckingham in Gold - with 19th and Broad to it's left, and Gulch Endeavor, Broadwest, One22One to its right?

It seems like you're getting caught up in the labels, Titanhog - but ideas and policies are either good, bad, or neutral regardless of their source. Any given person's perspective will influence which policies they believe are good and bad at any given moment of course, but I think we can all agree that plenty of good and bad ideas have come from both liberals and conservatives, as well as from both Republicans and Democrats. Nixon created the EPA (good in my opinion) and Bill Clinton removed restrictions that separated retail from commercial banking (bad in my opinion). It doesn't have to be all tribalism and team sports here. I haven't seen a whole lot of the "liberal mob" as you called it taking shots at conservatives on this site BECAUSE they're conservative. What I have seen a fair amount of is people on this site taking shots at ideas that they believe to be wrong, hypocritical, ill-advised, or otherwise "bad" for whatever reason. Even though some of the people who are promoting those "bad" ideas happen to be conservative and/or Republicans doesn't mean that you need to take it personally just because you identify with those labels. If those ideas are "good" in your opinion, then defend the ideas themselves (you might even make a solid case and win some converts), and if those ideas are "bad" in your opinion, then you certainly shouldn't feel the need to defend them just because they come from a Republican/conservative. We would all be a lot better off if we were more willing to hold our own parties and political philosophies to the same standard of scrutiny that we apply to the opposing party. Further, I can't think of one single occasion when the mods have "run off" a conservative for being a conservative, though I could be mistaken of course. The only conservatives we're missing around here that I recall are Nashville Bound (who I have no recollection of the mods reprimanding) and FMDJ and Ingram (who the mods were endlessly patient with until they continuously violated the sites rules...in addition to basic human decency). I for one very much enjoy the contributions made by several of the conservatives that frequent this board without whom our little UP community would certainly be worse off. All that to say, you're right that Cooper is a Democrat. Briley is a Democrat too, and I didn't like or particularly agree with the vision that either one presented for our city. When given the choice between the two, however, Cooper clearly ran to the right of Briley and picked up the vast majority of both the conservative and the independent vote, which is the point that others are making I think. More importantly, despite that Cooper is a Democrat, I have no problem criticizing his policies when I think they're "bad." And despite not having voted for him, I will have no problem praising his policies when I think they're "good". In either case, I'm not going to take it personally, and as always I reserve the right to change my mind when someone makes a compelling argument that I'm wrong about which policies are "good" and/or "bad" - conservative/liberal/Republican/Democrat labelling be damned.

Ha. Well that escalated quickly! I for one would prefer that you don't "blow up this whole site with Facebook type crap." But if you have any relevant info to share in a calm, well-reasoned, and objectively truthful way just as BNA did in the post you quoted, then sure, please proceed.

If you'd wanted to stick to the topic at hand, you could have just...you know...stuck to the topic at hand instead of taking a shot at"liberals on UP" in the first place. But if you want to start a coffee house thread where we exclusively discuss objective facts about Trump, I'd be happy to join you there. I don't consider myself a liberal, but I've got more than a few objective facts about Trump that I like illuminate whenever possible. Let me know and I'll see you there!! Now back to the topic at hand. LOL

Trump is a muslim born in Kenya, how about those facts? lol

It's not about 'honor' it's about continuity and consistency and proving ourselves to be reliable negotiating partners. As to the rest of your post...I'm not really sure what to tell you, man. I happen to think the city officials did in fact do what was in the best interests of the tax-paying citizens of Nashville, which is why these differences of opinion/philosophy are best handled at the ballot box with the understanding that new elected officials don't renege on the deals made by previous administrations - otherwise our deals are meaningless and we won't find ourselves being offered many good ones going forward.