Oh, and yes, guns are under attack everywhere but the left has been losing that fight since about 1987. They are not winning it now, either.

You seem to be stuck on a sort of lefty approach, where only perfection and the end of history are worthy goals. No, history doesn't end, the fight goes on. Moreover, when Generation Zyklon comes of age, quite possibly the most conservative generation in history, you will see how things that seem lost are regained.

No, I'm not lawyering around anything. I am holding you to account for a uncategorical statement that is categorically false. You can legitimately say that conservatives have conserved little, have conserved not enough, could have conserved more (although that is, in the circumstances, arguable). What you cannot say is that they conserved nothing.

Yeah sorry, Didact. Sometimes the Internet is poor at communicating basic facts like "hello I did the research" Mea Culpa .

You are of course spot on. Its kind of understandable, even as failure prone as US "Conservatives" are the core idea of not wanting to upset at the apple cart is always part of the makeup ..

Its made worse by the Libertarian streak that so many have and that streak is basically a gateway drug to the Left since Libertarianism is the worst of all worlds save communism , economic liberalism + social liberalism is a recipe for a third world country

Real Conservatives IMO anyway are far closer to Paleoconservatives, Socially Conservative (authoritarian as needed) and Economically Conservative, aka Economically Nationalist

The easy way I'd put is is the Pure Food and Drug act and the EPA despite some failures are at their core true right wing endeavors in that the conserve clean air and water and are based on the notion that the profit incentive can lead to amoral or even immoral behavior. Greed is not good

Long term thinking is Conservative .

This creates huge level of cognitive dissonance with Republicans who are often corporate stooges, money cucks or so stuck on a stupid frontier muh rugged individualism that makes no sense in 2019 whatsoever

The US is 80% urban , very high tech and awash in deadly tech and chemicals that did not exist in 1780 or 1880 or maybe 1980.

You can't run away from responsibility for your society and hope to lead it

As a personal aside, Tom is justly famous in our circles for his fascination with crucifixion .

Morally IMO again he doesn't come close to the proper targets. Thieves and robbers are scum and murders sometimes deserve a noose. if anyone though deserves that excruciating a death its polluters who ruin the land and water for future generations . I'm not all in on it mind you

Everyone dies and stuff is replaceable but ruined land can be forever

Long term thinking for good ends, is Conservative. Terror to maintain order is a thing of the Left

And Didact, its natural for Tom to lawyer around . he started in that profession back in 1995.

I know ))

The reason why I take issue with the approach of lawyering around things is because my original statement was, and is, a rhetorical device couched in hard dialectical fact. That is why it is so effective at pissing off conservatives – because, at its core, it is true.

Tom, the 2nd amendment is conserved except where it isn't , NFA, 1968 GCA , Brady Act , California , New York, New Jersey , Maryland, Illinois D.C etc

In some states we've begun to restore our rights but its far from most and the majority of Americans live under Constitutionally dubious regimes

And as for more important things, culture, history. common values Christianity, I could go on They've encouraged the founding peoples to be replaced nearly as much as the Democrats

The Conservatives are utter failures save a little on guns

And Didact, its natural for Tom to lawyer around . he started in that profession back in 1995.

Sir, yours is very much an attempt to "lawyer around" the statement. The fact is that conservatives haven't really managed to "conserve" the 2nd Amendment either. Gun rights are under attack all over the country, and have already been pushed back considerably in the big cities. Hell, it was one Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan who signed into law the Mulford Act, prohibiting personal carrying of firearms and imposing a 15-day waiting period on gun purchases, and it was a certain President Reagan who supported the passage of the Brady Act.

How, exactly, does this fit into the lawyerly view of "conserving" anything, especially when it is conservatives themselves who like to say (as I do): "What part of 'shall not be infringed' do you not understand"?

Americans for the most part are hyper individualistic other than when organized by the state, a few militias aside. If you can't get half a dozen friends to gun up with you without Daddy Gov you'll lose to anyone else who can.

The American conservative also has no ideology to speak of and note "leave me alone" is not an ideology. Its closer to the anarchist bull that some factions of AntiFa spew . You have to accept power and have to actually govern and regulate in order for this complex society to function

I know that many on the Right long for simpler times but that simply won't happen without mass death and collapse if that ever happens. You break it, you buy it. You get to run the EPA now.

Last. I'm not sanguine since they lack the above the Right has much will to fight. And note non compliance is not "will to fight" . Oh well. not in my backyard is not will to fight either.

Huge chunks of the US are under Socialist control, the country is flooded with illegal aliens and our culture is pushing Bacha Bazi so anything short of overt gun confiscation , box cars or a mandatory chip under the skin is fine?

Now I won't hold inaction against anyone., I don't think its time to fight anyway and am outright telling people not to do stupid things especially while its moving a bit our way but eventually its going to be "crap or get off the pot" and given the circumstances out there and how degraded the US is I'm not sure there is enough will to make anything happen.

As such I don't blame the Left for being bold, it would seem to them the enemy is as always bluffing.

The best thing anyone can do is to get organized and have an idea to fight with your friends for. Guns we got, ammo we got , ideas we don't

Do that and we might even win without a war.

Sir, I'll readily concede that the 2nd Amendment has been preserved, in many of the states – except where it hasn't. And those places really matter, because the states with the worst gun control laws just so happen to be the centres of cultural, financial, media, and political power in the country. Commiefornia, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, etc. – all of which have significant, armed, conservative, rural populations. And that has not made one damned bit of difference. The Left has happily continued its Long March through the institutions, unchecked and unopposed.

Conservatives have spent forty years losing the war for the culture – in large part because they do not have an actual ideology or doctrine to defend. Russell Kirk made this quite clear in The Conservative Mind. Conservatism is not based on tangible doctrines, but on "principles", which conservatives have routinely given up in order to go down to "Noble Defeat".

Furthermore – Texas, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia all have large populations of rednecks (God love 'em) armed to the back teeth. That does not appear to have deterred hundreds of thousands of illegal invaders from coming in to those states, often with the implicit or explicit permission of the Federal government and the city-bound elites. Nor does it appear to have pegged back the large waves of liberal numbnut carpetbaggers who come South fleeing from the stupidity of their native lands, only to inflict the very same stupidity in their new ones.

We now see the results of these losses in the culture, and the demographics, in the politics of the land. Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly won a race against Vanilla Obama that he should have run away with. The People's Republic of Austin calls itself a "sanctuary city" for invaders – in the very same place where the state Capitol building sits. Gov. Ron DeSantis barely won a race against a corrupt mayor of a failing and dangerous heavily black city – one of the worst cities in the country, actually.

And that's before we get started on some of the more egregious "slippery slope" decisions by the SCOTUS, where even having a (barely) conservative majority still hasn't stopped flagrant abuses of power by the Left.

I greatly admire and respect the conservatives who gun up. I wish I could do the same right now. But the lessons of history are absolutely clear: an armed population is vitally necessary to keep government power and cultural Marxism in check, yet it is certainly not sufficient.

What happens when – not if – Texas turns blue? At that point, America is basically done. There will never be another Republican President. There will be no point in hanging on to the Constitution. All that we can do is hope and pray that the resulting civil war will not be as bloody and horrifying as many of us suspect that it will be.

With greatest respect, sir – is that what conservatives aimed for? The sundering of the country that they loved, and the deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands, even millions, in the resulting fracturing? You once tore Rosie the Whale a new one for being stupid enough to suggest that the Left could win an actual shooting war against the rest of the country, and rightly so. But why was it necessary for conservatives to simply keep retreating until the point that war was inevitable?

You're brighter than this. You said "singularly failed to conserve one damned thing." I've just shown you the one thing. Virginia falling to the government drones in Fairfax country still doesn't refute the one thing. New York becoming Auschwitz for the unborn still doesn't refute that one thing.

Moreover, it's an important, nay, THE important one thing. As long as we're armed, we can undo the damage. Now who do you suppose preserved that one key thing? Libertarians? it is to laugh. The Alt right? They were still wetting their diapers. (Many of them are _still_ wetting their diapers.) No, conservatives conserved that one key thing.