Now we need solutions for something a bit more difficult: how to curb all the non-stop complaining. Fed-bashing, complaining about everything, and offering no solutions is at best lazy thinking and more precisely a toxic mentality. Morons writing op-eds and morons on these threads do worse than waste our time, they're a pain in the ghescheusteh.
So the question is how do we put a lid on it, do we make fun of them? Do we inform them politely of their errors?
Introduction of facts and education is all you can do, the rest is up to the individuals who happen to be exposed (and might help influence others) to it.
My concern is that conservatives and/or Republicans are at risk of getting stuck in certain factually wrong positions for no other reasons than it’s the opposite opinion from “the other side” or because of the general negativism of their “leaders” and they don’t know enough about certain subjects to discriminate between facts, fiction or uninformed opinions.
That’s what helped Clinton win again in 1996 when, if he said “the sky is blue,” the immediate visceral reaction became “no, it’s more like dark gray”. Credibility is difficult to earn and easy to lose, and Republicans were “losing it” then. Same can be said about the liberals with BDS who are stuck on stupid about “Iraq” being a “unnecessary, wrong war at the wrong time” and therefore are still and forever will stubbornly cling to the “Iraq war was lost” narrative because they can’t “justify” winning the “wrong war”.
In the same category is the notion of “Roosevelt’s New Deal got us out of the Great Depression” when all the evidence shows that Keynesian theory failed every time it’s been tried. Or how many people are led to believe the “global warming” and that man-made CO2 is the main cause of the [phantom] phenomenon of “climate change” and that the solutions are the more expensive “renewable” energy and the “green investment” financed through higher taxes and new mandates.
All these are on the strength of the lies being repeated often and long enough, supported by fake but impressive sounding theories and backed by false “facts” and “science”.
If people have the wrong ideas about what the problems are, there is little chance of them to provide or support the right solutions. I would be disappointed to see conservatives fall into the same trap again and then be backed into a corner in the same manner, especially on the subjects that are mostly economically uncontroversial - if taken outside of ideological realm - and only distract from the winning formula of explaining the simple facts about who was responsible for mortgage crisis / financial meltdown and unsustainable deficits of the welfare state. There are great examples of it on all levels of government - federal, state, municipal - that have gone or are going bankrupt. Since the responsibility lies with generations of politicians (corrupt or well-meaning) and their policies, it’s only natural that they will try to find scapegoats and scarecrows everywhere else and will try to convince people that they are going to “fix it” with yet another piece of legislation or draconian regulations that will finally “punish the guilty,” “protect the innocent” and stop the “abuse”... all the while making matters actually worse by increasing the scope and expense of the government.
Don’t see the point in helping politicians to pull the wool over people’s eyes, just because it’s the “populist” thing to do at the moment and might help getting political power, if all it’s going to do is make it more difficult to solve the actual problems once the power is gained.
One more consideration. There are thousands of Freepers and tens of thousands of lurkers (and I could be off by a significant factor) who are not whining, complaining, bashing etc. for no reason, but are “passing through” and might come across the information you provide, either serendipitously or by looking specifically for this kind of information or arguments pro/con on the subject (FR tags are very useful).
So, “if you build it, they might come” and be affected by your info or arguments but because of the nature of Internet, you might never know if or when it happened. So don’t get too frustrated, you may be a lot more successful than you might think... or ever know.