rolling explaining conservatism

as Martin Luther King famously said, people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character

and MLK was a Republican after all!

My ideas make sense and work, they're just not in vogue right now, because of snot wipes like you who want to sip glasses of wine while people suffer and die.

― larry appleton, Tuesday, 7 March 2017 04:39 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Moonlight swine leap whiff off this one

which ideology is against water fluoridation now?

fluoridation is how the govmint gives you gay mind control cancer, keep up

My ideas make sense and work, they're just not in vogue right now, because of snot wipes like you who want to sip glasses of wine while people suffer and die.

posts that effortlessly etc

maybe start a thread for recommending a good wine to accompany people suffering and dying

Egoism is real, altruism is not. Hence, running a state by egoists’ rules - “like a business,” if you will - is the only sensible option. If the state then falls apart, it’s not because a democracy is inherently altruistic, but because the state is broken and needs to be abolished.

Right, the only motivating factor you can count on is that everyone wants to get rich. EVERYONE. We all like money right guys? Also, everyone cheats, come on.

who among us would not rather have the opportunity, however small, to live beyond the dreams of Croesus rather than to bumble along with our needs generally satisfied but no prospect of rubbing anybody else's nose in it?

tucking your shirt into your jeans is a timeless look

brb I'm off to find a conservative board with a thread explaining liberals and the staggering insights therein

Bow-ties are a legitimate fashion choice

MANY YEARS AGO PRINCE DARKNESS "GANNON" STOLE ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH POWER.

That does explain a lot. And the triforce of wisdom being in eight pieces is why the left is so hopeless.

lol @ larry appleton / Tombot guvmint dill-weed beef

have you guys ever considered that conservatism has ideological appeal to its adherents, rather than something dismissive like "the rationalization and preservation of privilege" (what about the millions of non-privileged people who are conservatives? don't say false consciousness!) or "individual self-interest is all that matters"?

I considered, then dismissed it.

Most problems can be pretty easily explained through racism and false consciousness.

Go for it flopson I'm all ears

it seems to me that the US left should maybe have more humility than this CONSERVATARDS WANT THEIR KID TO DRINK POISON WATER LOL attitude that has dominated the discourse since at least gwb... like, we went from being just shy of permanent consensus social democracy in the early sixties, then fucked it up and have sucked for 4 decades, and now say things like 'demographics will save us' or 'we just needed a better candidate'. maybe there is something about conservative ideology that motivates people that the left lacks and we could be more modest? idk

What about Nobel Prize-winning intellectuals like Friedman or Hayek? xp to Frederik

nothing can be explained by false consciousness because it's a tautology and not an explanation: 'you're wrong because your consciousness is wrong'

consider religious tribalism as something other than privilege that motivates conservatives to vote consistently for candidates that promise to restrict access to abortion limit rights for lgbtq people

The existence of non-white conservatives isn't really an argument against conservativism as, at its core, a preservation of (mostly male & mostly wealthy) white privilege. Even those who aren't among the largest beneficiaries of privilege may have a vested interest in keeping the boat from rocking. Consider the relatively well-off African American conservatives in the post-Reconstruction south who resisted integration. They were still basically second class citizens but they were secure enough within a relatively privileged bubble that they had reason to help maintain white hegemony.

i just don't think you would be able to find a conservative who says "i want to rationalize and perserve privilge" so despite our amazing collective abilities as psychoanalysts maybe that's not a good ways to understand its appeal

I think most conservatives would say, if questioned, that inequality was natural and probably necessary

right. and that "liberty" (as they understand it) is a higher value than "equality" (as they think liberals understand it).

xp - it kinda is though, just look at ilx

http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf

a lot of people just think the government is extremely wasteful and inefficient (which isn't wrong!) and get pissed off at seeing a substantial portion of their hard-earned dollars withheld/taxed.

also, some people think abortion is murder. i think it gets overlooked what a huge issue that still is for a lot of people.

Flopson otm obv

I think most conservatives would say, if questioned, that inequality was natural and probably necessary

― barry snappleton (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, March 7, 2017 8:14 AM (twelve minutes ago)

Yes. When my brother-in-law was still speaking to me, "There have to be winners and losers in life" was one of his mantras.

http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf

― reggie (qualmsley), Tuesday, March 7, 2017 9:20 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh come on. can't think of a more perfect abdication of politics to say, 'it's not our fault the other side is just too stupid!' there's no value in being right and losing in politics

I think most conservatives would say, if questioned, that inequality was natural and probably necessary

― barry snappleton (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, March 7, 2017 9:14 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

privilege is not the same thing as inequality though; not every inequality is a result of a privilege, and not every privilege produces a tangible (or material, at least) inequality. conservative and liberal opinions on liberty/inequality differ in degree and not kind, anyway

I think conservativism requires a narrow focus for it to hold up at all. Abortion is a perfect example. Abortion is killing babies and it's horrible! But there's no deeper long-term ideology underlying that. Because if you've successfully railed against an unwanted baby being born, you now have to deal with that unwanted baby and the parent(s) who may not be able to care for that baby. When the next step after the successful reification of your platform is 'welp, sucks to be you', I'd argue that your ideology isn't exactly watertight.

flopson, it's not hard to find conservatives explaining why they are conservative from their own perspective. Obvs lefties are gonna be less sympathetic and explain it either in terms of what conservatism actually does, or in terms of what we believe truly motivates it. As opposed to what its adherents think they think.

My conservative inlaws and acquaintances have a worldview that feels coherent to them, indeed, to them it feels inevitable. As ryan notes, liberty/freedom is seen as among the highest ideals. To my eyes, this has a large component of Marlboro Man cosplay: "I am a rugged individual, I don't want the government or the nanny state or PC whiners coming onto my property and telling me what to do. I succeed or fail based on my own resourcefulness, and by the sweat of my own brow."

I think art has a good point, but it's not even religious tribalism half the time. The lifelong tribal Republicans I run into are almost all non-churchgoing, "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" country club types, it's very much a secular "my family have always been..." kind of a thing.

We need more people on this thread bitching about how we don't sympathize enough with hateful white folks though

morality is set of rules and sense of propriety and not an open-ended obligation towards other human beings. (this is how the abortion thing makes sense, a fetus not being an actual person makes it the perfect object of morality for them)

conservative and liberal opinions on liberty/inequality differ in degree and not kind, anyway

oh please, please back this one up

conservative and liberal opinions on liberty/inequality differ in degree and not kind, anyway

between the majority of conservatives and libs, sure, but other political beliefs are available

privilege is not the same thing as inequality though

agreed, but the conflating of different kinds of inequality is part of the conservative thought process I think - some animals are bigger or faster or smarter than others, therefore some people will "naturally" have more material resources than others purely by dint of birth. conservatism rarely looks at things like inheritance - we could conceive a conservatism that might assert that everybody should start from birth without the benefit of inherited wealth, I think

deems - I have read right-wing boards a lot and their characterizations of lefties are not for the faint of heart. Libs want to control everything because they hate freedom because freedom means manly men doing manly deeds and liberal pantywaists can't stand that. Statists gonna statist; regarding government as a potential solution ignores that government always fucks up (cf. evol's point).

Except D-Day and the moon landing. Those were examples of good government activity, because they were manly deeds done by manly men. I don't wish to minimize the racism but much of the animus is based around traditional gender roles. Recently seen on Carolinian billboard: "Real men provide; Real women appreciate it."

xps Tombot- most conservatives are not absolutist libertarians, most liberals are not communists

xxp to NV, this looks like Rawlsian small-l liberalism to me, not in itself inherently right- or left-wing in and of itself

some revealing comments from conservatives i know:

complaining about people using EBT cards to buy cigarettes and alcohol
if we enacted socialism then "why bother" working or trying at anything (ties into fear of "leveling" or equality--everybody the same)
"i dont want help"
if people dont believe in god then they'll do whatever they want (ie, bad stuff)

xp or at least so Rawls would have had us believe

Perlstein's book on Barry Goldwater is next on my reading list. I'll come back to this thread with any insights I glean.

complaining about people using EBT cards to buy cigarettes and alcohol

If I ever personally hear someone say this shit, I'll see if I can find someone who's willing to lend out their EBT card so that the claimant can show me how this works.

On inequality, "the cream rises to the crop in any society" (I've heard it said exactly this way). The argument goes: if you redistributed all the wealth in the world equally tomorrow, not only would you have millionaires and billionaires again within a year or so, it would probably be the _same_ millionaires and billionaires.

Also: Traditional cultural values - god, guns, guts, family - have worked fine for centuries; why mess with them by accommodating race agitators and tranny freaks in the name of 'diversity'?"

All this said, stereotypically, from the POV of a white male Christian Republican NRA Life Member. He lives on an acre in an outer burb that is a half-hour's drive from Wal-Mart and an hour's drive from an ethnic restaurant. All of his neighbors are also straight white Christian Republican NRA Life Members.

(And yet he characterizes the life of someone in Manhattan, DC, or Hollywood as "living in a bubble." Grr. But let us set that aside for a moment.)

i just don't think you would be able to find a conservative who says "i want to rationalize and perserve privilge"

Any kind of conservatism is rooted in the idea that traditional hierarchies, structures, and values (what liberals would call "privilege") are worth preserving, surely, though?

And, for that reason, I'm not sure that this could be conceived:

we could conceive a conservatism that might assert that everybody should start from birth without the benefit of inherited wealth, I think

I would probably be on board with that but it is socialism, more or less.

"despise"

protecting the children from Bad Bunny

I wonder if he's one of those bad hombres Trump spoke of, being sent in by (checks notes) Puerto Rico

they don't start trends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face

The Guardian had a whole article about Mar-Lagoo face this week

Boat parades

Truck nuts

Calvin praying decals

Quiverfull influencers

Home schooling

T/S: Puppy Bowl vs. Erika Kirk's Turning Point USA halftime extravaganza featuring Kid Rock and/or Lee Greenwood

xp none of that is what I consider "culture", I both stand by and regret this revive

I mean.. all of that is 'culture' even if it's garbage

but it's not considered "cool" by the majority

hear about Erika even more than we did Charlie

lol who??

https://www.advocate.com/media-library/erika-kirk-during-the-public-memorial-service-for-charlie-kirk.jpg?id=61640869&width=600&height=600&coordinates=272%2C0%2C273%2C0

Yeah, that could be any one of about six dozen current Nazi princesses. They grow them in vats.

the fake tan thing still takes me aback tbqf

it makes me feel like i'm on the edge of a bad trip every time i see it

oh but you are

Clark Hunt

Say that 3 times fast

I think of conservatism as like the show Growing Pains, one kid breaks the house rules and the siblings are salivating, chomping at the bit "ooh what's their punishment gonna be thus time"

insofar as that will be future historians of this era, i can only imagine what they will make of 'the president's political allies found it advantageous to undergo plastic surgery that made them look like inflatable sex dolls'

with an inset about matt gaetz's eyebrows running wild at the 2024 GOP convention