[jstarfish]

Conservatism isn't the point, it's the specific tactics being used that they're highlighting. IIRC the same tactics were recommended in that WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" that still makes the rounds on the internet.

The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.

[oooyay]

I disagree, falsely labeling things conservative is unproductive for the conversation of "what is going right or wrong in Portland, OR, USA". That's to say, context and the goals of discussion are important. We do a lot of committees out here, but most of them are with the aim of including a vast number of viewpoints. If your point is that we fancy ourselves the type of liberals that do everything but nothing well even to a dysfunctional degree then you and I might agree. If your point is to say there's some conservative operator out here speaking to struggles, empowerment, etc then I'd say you're off your rocker.

[jstarfish]

It's not a false label. Conservatives do in fact do this. It's kinda their thing. Look what Obamacare became once they got involved.

Nobody is saying conservatives have infiltrated the Portland political scene, only that we see similar failures in other contexts when initiatives are half-assed (on purpose). Similar circumstances-- not identical.

[oooyay]

It is a false label when there are no conservatives in Portland's government. That yields to two things:

- This is just a common American tactic

- There are other, less nefarious, reasons this happens

Including conservatives in a context where they don't exist and shifting the goal posts outside of American politics on a whim is both entirely inappropriate and distracting if your goal is to discuss how Portland can be better. Nobody in Portland is sabotaging our committees is my point; at the very least they're not doing so intentionally.

What you do get here is what some people call "everything bagel style liberalism" where we do everything, but nothing particularly well, and there is really no North Star when it comes to ethos.

[uoaei]

Small-c conservative is a label that is not necessarily aligned with any political party. If I wanted to say (big-R) Republican I would have. Does that help you understand the argument better?

[oooyay]

No. There are no conservatives in Portland's government. There have not been for a long time. There has been no one right of the Oregon Democratic party and a good chunk, if not most, have been left of that in recent times. It's part of why I moved here. The issue was not my understanding, the issue is people who cannot fathom that there are problems here outside of conservatism.