Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

i think it's important to check yrself, esp in times (and threads) like these, so let's see. do i think democracy is a wicked and perverse institution? i do not. am i convinced that the problems in my life and my peers' lives have been inflicted upon me by an elite conspiracy designed to invert the rightful hierarchy i am also convinced my peers and i ought to be on permanent top of? nope. is my response to the notion of serious downward redistribution of wealth and power to use any means necessary to prevent it, including violence, including if some of that wealth and power is likely to be redistributed to me, because it would also be distributed to people i hate and fear? not rly. have i plotted, or had plotted for me, an elaborate story that explains the stresses and democratic instability that come from inequality as instead coming from a racialized moral impurity that infects huge swathes of the lower classes, is cooked up by treasonous snakes in the upper classes, and can only be purged by mass violence? nah. do i think history is nothing but zero-sum struggle between implacably opposed nations and tribes and that anyone who tells you any different should be killed? can't say that i do. is my idea of a beautiful public event one that is full of spectacular and intimidating demonstrations of mass solidarity, rage, and violent potency, but also tightly scripted down to the second by unquestioned authorities? def not. do i look good in black? no better than the next husky guy. do i suspect that much of what people think of as their moral principles are actually post-facto rationalizations for actions they take instinctively, explaining why so many people's principles are so conspicuously incoherent? yeah i kinda do-- ah fuck! just when i was doing so well.

lol

it's true that fascism is hard to define, and so we tend to identify it with the way things went in Italy and Germany. but I'll be that guy who says you can't define communism by what happened in the USSR and China too. & as I understand fascism (from Gentile and Mussolini for instance), it's a doctrine of action & feeling over thought, a romanticism. this kind of doctrine is appealing to brutes and so the "action" realized is violence against "others", but that doesn't mean it's "what's most key" about what fascism is. as in: any state that values action & feeling over thought is going to end up doing the kinds of things you listed...because those feelings are powerful (and states that want to avoid those things should work against putting action and feeling over thought). (that is my conservative thought)

ha, see, relevantly, i would probably say the generic philosophical principles of fascism postdate and metaphysically justify the actions of a state or party or person that is responding to the pressures i describe in the manner i describe.

will grant that like, if you've personally become rly disillusioned w the concept of rationality, or if you're rly tired of feeling obligated to critically evaluate any of your feelings, you may respond to the blind and muscular righteousness of an existing fascist appeal even if you weren't previously too worried about jews replacing you. but it's worth asking at whose hands exactly it seems to you that you are inflicted with these obligations-- who it is exactly you feel expects you to care about what, and why exactly you'd prefer not to. imo there are likely to be clear material answers to these questions.

dlh doing good work here

good talk imo

no I mean it's fascist to think that people (conservative or whoever) only have prejudices, not beliefs, because that means you think they act without beliefs, without reason, and that's how fascists think about people: action before belief

― droit au butt (Euler)

so you're interpreting my statement as implying something like that we humans are mindless beasts driven by animal unreason? that does sound fairly fascist - and like most fascist beliefs it's completely false. Prejudice and hatred aren't something we're born with, they're something we learn. thinking in a strictly logical sense is something difficult and taxing for all humans. in that conservative mind attachment to one's paralogical thought processes becomes pathological and one becomes incapable of logically evaluating certain things, most notably the value and efficacy of those paralogical processes themselves. so it's utterly useless to try and reason with them, because they outright reject reason in certain specific domains.

think it's important to check yrself, esp in times (and threads) like these, so let's see. do i think democracy is a wicked and perverse institution? i do not. am i convinced that the problems in my life and my peers' lives have been inflicted upon me by an elite conspiracy designed to invert the rightful hierarchy i am also convinced my peers and i ought to be on permanent top of? nope. is my response to the notion of serious downward redistribution of wealth and power to use any means necessary to prevent it, including violence, including if some of that wealth and power is likely to be redistributed to me, because it would also be distributed to people i hate and fear? not rly. have i plotted, or had plotted for me, an elaborate story that explains the stresses and democratic instability that come from inequality as instead coming from a racialized moral impurity that infects huge swathes of the lower classes, is cooked up by treasonous snakes in the upper classes, and can only be purged by mass violence? nah. do i think history is nothing but zero-sum struggle between implacably opposed nations and tribes and that anyone who tells you any different should be killed? can't say that i do. is my idea of a beautiful public event one that is full of spectacular and intimidating demonstrations of mass solidarity, rage, and violent potency, but also tightly scripted down to the second by unquestioned authorities? def not. do i look good in black? no better than the next husky guy. do i suspect that much of what people think of as their moral principles are actually post-facto rationalizations for actions they take instinctively, explaining why so many people's principles are so conspicuously incoherent? yeah i kinda do-- ah fuck! just when i was doing so well.

― difficult listening hour

but do you like the PSB's "Do I Have To"?

and what to do about october?

it's so bemusing

but it's worth asking at whose hands exactly it seems to you that you are inflicted with these obligations-- who it is exactly you feel expects you to care about what, and why exactly you'd prefer not to. imo there are likely to be clear material answers to these questions.

this is a v bertrand russell line yr taking here

I think free will as most conceive it today is bullshit nonsense but I also think being not-a-fascist is pretty easy living and you only need a mild helping of information to pull it off.

Sorry wrong thread

Wall to wall carpet is kind of a nice change sometimes.

euler on-topic, framing every argument in terms of the philosophical debates of 200 years ago is v. uncool conservative belief

yeah respect

ha ha well that is what I get paid to do so

I generally consider myself one of the most conservative people here for that reason

Standing athwart etc

yelling cessāte

kids today listen to bad music

Well, haven’t they always?

kids today listen to bad music

― adam the (abanana)

if you're talking about greta van fleet i agree

“Enthusiastic consent” is an unworkable and silly framework. I get the purpose, but it lumps in mediocre consensual sex with people who are willfully blind to signs of implied lack of consent.

Like “meh, ok” is not categorically similar to being drunk and scared.

IDK if this is exactly conservative, but sometimes I think American football culture is a good outlet for fascist impulses and we're better off leaving it alone than allowing those impulses to surge elsewhere.

I don’t know if football is an outlet, I think it just is fascist.

anyone who has been to a hs pep rally can immediately spot the action before thought ethos

where are my JUNIORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRSSSSSS AT

*WILD SCREAMING*

Yeah, but it seems like a kind of controlled, fishbowl fascism. I'm on the fence about whether it encourages and grows fascist impulses or contains them I guess. xp

Apart from war, what other forms of popular legalized violence are there? Participating and profiting off of people who beat their bodies into CTE ravage and dementia seems extremely fascist.

Well there’s MMA and boxing of course. But ironically MMA may actually ravage the body much less than NFL.

MMA >>> NFL >> boxing for CTE I'd say

esp since fighters don't generally take big hits to the dome while training, and definitely don't fighting 16 times a year

I'm putting boxing last just cuz the entire point is to win by KO

if you're a good BJJ guy in MMA you might avoid getting tagged hardly ever

fighting = fight 16x a year

I'm not convinced Wilbur Ross's trade policy is bad.

I'm also not convinced it's actually conservative.

by "Ross's trade policy" do you mean tariffs and trade wars, or something different?

i don't really know anything about trade policy, but the consensus seems to be that tariffs as a primary component of trade policy is an idea that was discredited around WWII. then again, those policies were gradually made obsolete by things like WTO and whatever system of international trade that's in place right now, which seems to lead to, among other things, terrible working conditions and environmental degradation in much of the world so that western people can buy cheaper electronic goods. but i'm not sure that means that going back to tariffs and the like is a good idea, either.

i have a better take on "fishbowl fascism"

human sacrifice is an important part of maintaining the social order and we should bring it back

and by "better" i mean of course "more horrifying"

I kinda think assassinating politicians is a bad thing. Apparently that's hopelessly centrist now.

In other words, not conservative.

i roll my eyes a little when people say that twitter should ban a sitting US president from the platform

tbh it would be less of an issue if it weren't because @jack is a literal nazi sympathizer

I find the liberal obsession with precocious child activists to be obnoxious and vain.

how many of them are there?

if you're referring to thunberg - and you surely are - she's not exactly "precocious" so much as righteously furious:
https://ktla.com/2019/09/23/how-dare-you-teen-activist-greta-thunberg-asks-world-leaders-at-un-climate-session/
and vilified:
https://tvline.com/2019/09/24/greta-thunberg-fox-news-apology-autism-comment-video/

tbf the conservative obsession with precocious child activists is much worse.

sure, and the liberal version is harmless by comparison. It just seems to really skirt the edge of naivete and magical thinking.

I kinda get where you are coming from but w/r/t climate change the fact of youth/childhood is the whole point

with school shootings, too, obv it makes sense that kids are among the more vocal/visible voices

Also I hate a world that only adultifies children in order to put them in jail or to rationalize sex with them.

my uncool liberal belief is that using precocious children as the voice of an advertising campaign is deeply fucked up, on the same level as taking them to any church that teaches about eternal damnation for sinners

the second half of that is my cool liberal belief though

Greta Thunberg is 16, she can vote in 2 years