Ugh, what will it take to put this to rest? Yes, global cooling was taken seriously by a handful of scientists for a brief period in the 1970s, but it was never a dominant scientific consensus like global warming is today.

During the 1960s and 1970s, some scientists observed a cooling trend in global temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. This was partly due to an increase in aerosol pollution, which can reflect sunlight and cause temporary cooling. As a result, a few scientific papers and popular media articles speculated about the possibility of a coming ice age.

However, even at the time, the majority of climate scientists were more concerned about the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions, and by the late 1970s, research overwhelmingly supported the idea that global warming due to CO2 and other greenhouse gases was the more significant and lasting trend.

A 2008 review of climate literature from 1965-1979 found that about 10% of studies suggested cooling, while about 62% predicted warming.

Thus, the concern over global cooling was largely a product of media exaggeration rather than a strong scientific consensus.

The most clever "your mom" joke I've seen in a while.

I like my women like I like my voffee: just wrong enough to be interesting.

You're conflating political ideology with party labels. Conservatism and liberalism are philosophical traditions that predate and transcend the Republican and Democratic parties. The parties themselves have shifted coalitions and priorities over time, but the underlying ideologies have shown remarkable continuity. Trying to turn a complex social and political realignment into a cartoonish morality play where Democrats are eternally racist and Republicans are eternally virtuous is not how society works, and it's a textbook strawman.

Throughout history, conservatism, regardless of label, has prioritized preserving existing hierarchies over expanding equality. From defending monarchy in Europe to upholding slavery and segregation in America to fighting against diversity policies today, conservatives have consistently sought to protect systems that keep power concentrated in the hands of a dominant group. While the language and tactics have evolved, the pattern of resisting social progress has remained remarkably consistent.

1. "The South didn't stay racist, Republicans just won on merit"

It's great that Georgia isn't the same place it was in 1960. But to suggest racism magically vanished as soon as the South flipped parties, while a nice story, is demonstrably false. That claim leans on a false dichotomy, either the South stayed exactly the same, or racism completely disappeared. The reality is far more complicated.

Southern conservative voters began moving Republican in the 1960s–70s, right after the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. That's not a coincidence. Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and swept the Deep South in 1964. Richard Nixon's aides openly described the Southern Strategy as appealing to white voters alienated by integration. Reagan launched his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi talking about "states' rights" while just a few miles from where civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964.

2. "Republicans were the party of civil rights"

Yes, historically, the Republican Party was the party of abolition and Lincoln. Yes, Eisenhower sent troops to enforce integration in Little Rock. But these talking points become a false equivalence when applied to today's politics, as if party coalitions haven't shifted since the mid-20th century.

- The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 were signed by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson over fierce opposition from Southern Democrats but with critical support from Northern Republicans.
- Afterward, the Southern segregationist bloc began voting Republican at the presidential level.
- This shift took decades to solidify, but by the 1980s the South was a GOP stronghold.

This isn't about one party being "racist forever." It's about a realignment that moved conservatives into the GOP.

3. "FDR and Truman were racists, Republicans aren't"

FDR cut deals with segregationist Southern Democrats to pass the New Deal. That's true, and it's a stain on his legacy. But the New Deal also began the process of bringing Black voters into the Democratic coalition. By 1948, Truman desegregated the armed forces, and Southern Democrats bolted in protest to form the Dixiecrat Party. That tells you where the racists went.

The claim that "FDR bragged about having tons of friends in the KKK" doesn't hold up. There's no evidence he ever said such a thing. It's true that FDR sometimes compromised with segregationist Democrats to advance his agenda, and one of his Supreme Court appointees, Hugo Black, had been a Klan member in the 1920s. But FDR was reportedly unaware of Black's ties at the time, and Black himself later repudiated the Klan. None of this excuses FDR's compromises, but it does put them in context, that political coalitions were shifting, and cracks were beginning to form in the Democratic Party's old segregationist base.

Dwight Eisenhower was indeed admirable for enforcing Brown v. Board, but in the decades that followed, his party stopped being the home for Black voters. They didn't abandon Republicans because of "free stuff." They switched as the GOP's Southern Strategy took shape and Democrats embraced civil rights. Bringing up FDR and Truman here is a typical whataboutism, it doesn't engage with the argument about how party coalitions evolved since the 1960s.

4. "Democrats use racism as a wedge issue, Republicans don't"

Republicans most certainly do use race as a wedge issue, though often in different terms. "States' rights," "law and order," "welfare queens," "inner city crime," and "voter fraud." These are racialized tropes. Pretending that only Democrats recognize race in political messaging is disingenuous.

This kind of language works because it speaks to two audiences at once. To some, it sounds like neutral policy, to others, it signals resistance to the social and demographic changes brought by the civil rights movement. That ability to deliver distinct messages without saying anything outright is precisely why coded language has long been a powerful political tool. It allows a message to resonate with those attuned to its subtext while appearing innocuous or neutral to others. That duality is what gives such strategies their enduring appeal.

5. "Democrats run almost every major city, therefore, racism"

Yes, Democrats run many big cities, and yes, those cities face serious challenges. But pointing to urban problems as proof of Democratic racism is a classic false cause fallacy. It assumes that party control alone determines complex social outcomes while ignoring factors like decades of disinvestment, structural inequality, and state-level policies that often undermine urban governance. It also veers into a non sequitur, deflecting from the original argument about partisan realignment. Plenty of Republican-run cities and states face similar issues, which undermines the claim entirely. More importantly, this argument does nothing to explain why Republicans have not won a majority of Black votes in generations. To suggest that 80+% of Black voters lack the ability to think for themselves isn't just wrong, as you yourself said, it's racist.

The fact is that the parties evolved. The Democrats of 1860 are not the Democrats of 2025, and the Republicans of Lincoln’s day are not the Republicans of Trump’s day. Trying to freeze history and pretend nothing has changed is willful ignorance. Attempting to pivot to education, policing, or urban poverty is a red herring. It does nothing to change the well-documented reality that since the 1960s, conservatives have moved overwhelmingly into the Republican Party. Reducing this complex historical realignment to static party labels glosses over the ideological and regional transformations that actually occurred. The shift in parties was deliberate and substantial; denying it is not a defensible position.

We're 17 hours in and nobody has brought up a beowulf cluster? Truly a sad day.

This is a classic revisionist argument that mixes half-truths, omissions, and partisan framing. Let’s break it down point by point and show why it’s historically inaccurate:

1. “Only 2 national Democrats switched parties in the 1960s”

True in a literal sense: very few sitting Democratic politicians (like Strom Thurmond) immediately switched to the GOP.
But that misses the real shift. This wasn’t about politicians flipping en masse; it was about voters and regional partisan alignment shifting over decades.

- Before the 1960s, the “Solid South” was overwhelmingly Democratic because of Civil War-era loyalties and the party’s support for segregation (Solid South).
- After the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965), white Southern voters migrated into the Republican Party over time because they were alienated by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights and federal intervention (Southern Strategy).
- In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater carried five Deep South states (despite losing in a national landslide) because he opposed the Civil Rights Act (1964 Election Map).

Before the 1960s, the South was reliably Democratic. After the 1960s and 70s, voter behavior shifted dramatically. By the 1980s and 90s, the South became a Republican stronghold in presidential and congressional races.

2. “Southern Strategy wasn’t about race; it was about economics”

Economic messaging was part of GOP outreach, but race was central to the Southern Strategy.

Nixon’s advisor Kevin Phillips famously said in 1970:
“The more Negroes who register as Democrats the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.” (NYT: Nixon's Southern Strategy)

The GOP used coded language (“law and order,” “states’ rights”) to appeal to white Southerners upset about desegregation, without explicitly using racist rhetoric.
This wasn’t about “convincing Southern Democrats that their problems weren’t about race.” It was about reassuring white voters who opposed civil rights legislation that the GOP would protect their interests (Britannica: Southern Strategy).

3. “Republicans passed Civil Rights bills because they were horrified by Democrats”

Yes, a majority of Republicans in Congress supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Civil Rights Act Voting Record).
But context matters:

- In the 1960s, the Democratic Party was split: Northern Democrats were pro-civil rights; Southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) were staunchly anti-civil rights.
- The Acts passed because of a coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans, over the opposition of Southern Democrats.
- After these bills, the Dixiecrats’ base shifted toward the GOP, which began absorbing the South (Dixiecrat history).

The Republican Party of Lincoln (1860s) and Eisenhower (1950s) was very different from the GOP of Nixon and Reagan, which leaned into appealing to white conservative Southerners.

4. “Democrats have always been the party of racism”

Historically, the Democratic Party was the home of pro-slavery Southerners in the 19th century and later the party of Jim Crow segregation (Jim Crow laws).
But this flips in the mid-20th century:

- FDR and Truman began bringing minority voters into the Democratic coalition in the 1930s-40s (New Deal Coalition).
- By the 1960s, the Northern Democrats embraced civil rights, alienating their Southern segregationist wing.
- The Republican Party, through the Southern Strategy, took up the mantle of “states’ rights” and began attracting the white voters who opposed desegregation.

Today, African Americans vote about 80% Democratic (Pew Research), and the GOP dominates the South. That didn’t happen by accident.

5. “Voter ID laws don’t suppress votes”

This is a different issue entirely, but:

- Multiple studies show voter fraud is vanishingly rare (Brennan Center: Voter Fraud Myth).
- Voter ID laws disproportionately affect groups less likely to have IDs: the poor, minorities, students, and people with disabilities, groups that lean more Democratic overall.
- That’s why critics say these laws have discriminatory effects, whether intentional or not (ACLU on Voter ID).

Your comments try to erase the well-documented partisan realignment of the 1960s-1980s:

- Yes: Democrats were the party of Southern racists in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Yes: Republicans supported civil rights more consistently in Congress before the 1960s.
- But: After Democrats embraced civil rights in the 1960s, Southern conservatives shifted to the GOP over several decades.

When you say Democrats, of course you actually mean conservatives.

Conservatism has always been about preserving hierarchy. Not just in a vague social sense, but in a very real, very deliberate way, making sure a certain group stays on top and others stay down. Before the Civil War, that meant slavery. White plantation owners built their entire world on the idea that Black people were inferior, and the system was set up to keep it that way.

When slavery ended, the goal didn’t change. Conservatives just switched tactics. Instead of owning people outright, they used laws, terror, and institutions to keep control. Jim Crow, voter suppression, segregation, all of it was about holding onto a racial and social order where white people, especially wealthy landowners and elites, kept power, and Black people were pushed to the margins.

For a long time, this version of conservatism was housed in the Democratic Party. Democrats were the backbone of white supremacy in the U.S. for nearly a century after the Civil War. They blocked civil rights legislation, upheld segregation, and used every tool they had to stop any kind of racial equality.

But when the national Democratic Party started shifting during the civil rights era, especially in the 1960s, that conservative base began to move. They didn’t suddenly stop being conservative, they just switched parties. Nixon’s "Southern Strategy" openly appealed to white voters upset about integration and civil rights, and over the next couple decades, those same old conservatives became the heart of the Republican Party.

So when people act like the Republican Party used to be the party of Lincoln and abolition, they’re not wrong historically, but it misses the point. The parties flipped. Same ideology, same obsession with control and hierarchy, just under a new banner.

Modern conservatism still carries all the same themes: fear of social change, pushback against civil rights, "states' rights" rhetoric used to block equality, and a deep discomfort with anything that challenges traditional power structures. It’s not about small government or freedom in any consistent way. It’s about making sure the people who’ve always had power don’t have to share it.

That’s the through-line. From slavery, to segregation, to mass incarceration and voter ID laws, the tactics change, but the goal doesn’t. Keep the hierarchy. Keep control. Everything else, party labels, slogans, talking points, is just packaging.

The fact that you went to the portal and tried to use it by yourself puts you head and shoulders above most of the people I dealt with who needed instructions on how to open the web browser and enter a url. On the rare occasions that I actually got someone who had a clue about what they were doing I would just give them a temporary password, set it to have them reset it on first long, and send them on their way. No time to preach, I just wanted to get through the calls in my queue and get back to my book.

A couple decades ago I worked in a call center for one of the biggest national banks in the US. I worked on the password reset queue with about a dozen other people. All we did all day was reset passwords for bank employees, not customers, employees. 99% of it was talking them through the 4 steps on the self-serve portal to reset the password to almost every system they used. There were only a few edge cases with certain mainframe systems that we actually had to go in and do something, but those were few and far between, for the majority of calls it was stuff they could have done all by themselves. It was mind-numbingly repetitive and boring, thankfully I only worked there for 6 months.

If I had to choose between the two I would pick low attention span every time. Dementia is no joke. It's not "I don't remember where I put my keys" it's "I shit my pants because I can't find the bathroom in my own house."

Correction: CO2

During the 1960s and 1970s, some scientists observed a cooling trend in global temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s. This was partly due to an increase in aerosol pollution, which can reflect sunlight and cause temporary cooling. A few scientific papers and popular media articles speculated about the possibility of a coming ice age.

However, even at the time, the majority of climate scientists were more concerned about the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions, and by the late 1970s, research overwhelmingly supported the idea that global warming due to CO and other greenhouse gases was the more significant and lasting trend.

A 2008 review of climate literature from that time found the concern over global cooling was largely a product of media exaggeration rather than a strong scientific consensus.

This*

Thos is what happens when the queens start letting in all those migrant worker bees into the hive instead of red blooded American WASPS.

OMG that's so insightful and true!