Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

It's the sweet chestnut that smells of semen. Around June/July, when they're flowering, the woods fair reek of jizz.

there are too many people on the planet.

this one really seems to rile up left-leaning people but i just don't see how it's not true. yes, we have immense capacity for reducing our footprints. yes, often the next step taken from this baseline statement is to start talking about how to reduce that population, which is An Unspeakable Sin, Apparently. but i just think it's so hubristic to deny it. we are animals. the same rules apply to us as other animal populations, broadly speaking.

the most egalitarian way to address this would be to start pushing male birth control hard, but since most of the world seems to be driven by men having unbridled access to women's bodies as property, it seems a change of heart there is unlikely. so capitalism interlocking with colonialism and racism is going to do the "thinnning out" in a very not-egalitarian fashion for us.

Population decline tends to take care of itself.

The reason people yell at you is that any policy measures aimed at population control have a pretty eugenicist stink on them. It's not like it'd be less racist.

It is very funny and strange to me that declining birth rates make economists upset

But yeah when the earth's carrying capacity for humans declines you will have fewer humans, also fertility has been declining globally for decades already https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/

the malthusian issue will only come into play if we actually make the radical changes to our way of life that are required by climate change and then that's the issue that is left over. as that is not going to happen people should have all the kids they want.

just be aware that they live til they're old things will probably suck ass (i kind of want to have a kid despite this)

lol map I appreciate you not beefing with me on FB regarding this, I hear what u are saying but yeah fertility just keeps going down, nature bats last, etc.

Adults shouldn’t use slang.

that sentence slaps

calm

I can't enjoy the deaths of even the very worst murderers and the celebrations online make me feel really queasy.

If they are evil politicians, otoh, I can wholeheartedly join in with the fun.

tbf the worst murderers fail to kill anyone. evil politicians succeed.

if you want to listen to or watch something on public transport you should wear headphones

ppl blasting stuff out of their cars I'm ok with tho

I don't think it's particularly conservative to want people to be baseline courteous when everyone around them is trapped in a tiny box. We even have explicit rules against that behavior on our public transport.

Does it make me conservative to say 95% of the time I hate the music blasting out of cars though? I live in a neighborhood where just the worst garbage driveltunes are blasted to the max with an inverse relationship between taste and volume. Coupled with all those modifications to also make the car itself (engine) as loud as possible as well.

Yeah this no headphones in public thing is getting horrible

The Guardian sends two people on a blind date to a restaurant every week and then asks them about it, this was this week's

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/16/blind-date-andrew-marta

Any awkward moments?
A man on the next table was watching a horror film loudly on his laptop. The constant screams were a tad awkward.

was sat at a restaurant once with a guy watching porn videos on his phone at the next table, that was in guangzhou though so doesn't really count

We even have explicit rules against that behavior on our public transport.

I wish we had. It used to be kids who did this but, where I am anyway, it's now almost overwhelmingly adults - and I mean people in their 30s/40s/50s.

I don't like people driving around playing loud music driving through neighborhoods at night (like my son's friends who roll up to the house at 10:30 pm to hang out) but I enjoy pulling up to someone in traffic who has something loud on. It doesn't even have to be (and usually isn't) music I like, but it's good atmosphere for me.

Also wanted to mention that I think people blast music in cars way less than they used to, but it may just be my own experience. Can anyone confirm?

When terrestrial radio was still a thing, I used it as a gauge. The last time I got a thrill was early April 2020 at the peak of lockdown when the car beside me at the stoplight blasted Dua Lipa's "Levitating" and I thought, yeah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvDazrJuSdA

Yeah this no headphones in public thing is getting horrible

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

Yeah I'm not into that

Also not into those portable blutooth speakers especially in the park, at the beach

Don't really mind music blasting from cars as long as they're moving and not standing or idling l

Yeah this no headphones in public thing is getting horrible

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, October 21, 2021 12:26 PM bookmarkflaglink

I used to hate Sia's "Chandelier" because before boarding a Megabus, this kid in the seat across from me kept playing the chorus and only the chorus on her handheld device. Loudly. At 6 in the morning.

BLOT: if u don't wear headphones I'll meet you off the bus

actively pro bluetooth speakers at the park, beach, etc, that's literally what they're for, just keep the volume courteous imo

having a conversation over speaker phone in public is absolutely depraved, however

park/beach definitely. I have a tiny little bluetooth speaker for that type of thing, was really affordable from Oontz

speakerphone in public i'm tempted to join in the convo but I don't because the person on speaker didn't choose to be on speaker but part of me wants to alert them to the fact that they're on it and their convo isn't private

i probably posted upthread about this but someone at the airport once had a speakerphone convo about their debauched hen party weekend with someone, very loudly, and it seemed pretty apparent that a) the person on the other end probably would not have said what they were saying if they knew it was v much in public and b) the person on my end (in the airport terminal) was enjoying the exhibitionism, she kept looking around to see if anyone was listening

Think about how they’re not blasting their ears using headphones & feel good for them

having a conversation over speaker phone in public is absolutely depraved, however

― gbx, Thursday, October 21, 2021 2:53 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm pretty sure that this "pizza talking" speakerphone thing is 100% the result of people emulating reality tv shows where everything had to be on speakerphone for the cameras

C/D: holding a phone in front of your face as if it were a slice of pizza

i was thinking a bit today about the fentanyl flood, mostly because i saw a dude just cold zonk out standing up at the sandwich place and smack his head on the corner of a table.

anyway, one of the fever swamp theories is that the chinese govt is pumping the US full of cheap fentanyl just to nakedly weaken and kill americans, and/or for the money. there's no good reason at all to believe this, but if somehow it turned out to be true i wouldn't be at all surprised. why not? it is exactly what the british empire did to china, and what US intelligence did to americans more than once

the recent nyt story about this (relying on a book by Ben Westhoff i haven't read) only identifies china as the source, or source of the raw materials that go into it. trump pressured china to ban all varieties of fentanyl, which apparently they did, but china is still named as the ultimate source of the ingredients. the nyt story says nothing on this point, but the invitation is there to suppose that if the precursors were still being exported to the same suppliers with a wink, the chinese state would have to know about it

i'm extremely skeptical of major US journalism about china these days. just something that came to mind.

Probably my most hardcore, far-right opinion:

https://www.methodsman.com/blog/gas-stove-statistics?fbclid=IwAR1ZH3rDX3-f9XFl3CHBcC7jLKNFwsAiGNgkR2TLyFhKgRHSuf19igCEKdA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1LjDgzntvI

idk you also were toying with the notion of buying guns to defend your suburban homestead from imagined home invaders

pretty sure you're talking about the thread where I was talking about buying a gun because of fear of fascists, but ok

But here, you can read all of my posts about it in this thread, or, if you prefer, just make some up to support your strawman of me

Are you considering purchasing a gun?

the gas stove post is completely idiotic

Is this another American thing where gas means petrol

it means farts

no "natural gas" -- America had a brief post trump stress disorder flashback seizure where some govt agency made a probably misguided suggestion to ban gas stoves, conservatives seized on it as they're coming for arr freedom, and then liberals had to reflexively take the polar opposite position and started throwing their stoves out the window. In reality, there are probably some decent environmental arguments for phasing out gas stoves (assuming we can actually make our electric grid cleaner, which it isn't yet), and induction stoves are very energy efficient and, though expensive, starting to come down in price. However, one of the main "facts" that has been cited against gas stoves is that they are "responsible for" some large % of child asthma cases, and that is just not true, it's based entirely on bad use of statistics.

America had a brief post trump stress disorder flashback seizure where some govt agency made a probably misguided suggestion to ban gas stoves

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-09/us-safety-agency-to-consider-ban-on-gas-stoves-amid-health-fears

in reality, one official (trumka jr) raised banning it in an interview, and in the same interview also suggested that other options, including setting standards on emissions from the appliances.

(assuming we can actually make our electric grid cleaner, which it isn't yet)

by the wording of this, i assume you mean "clean", and it'll never be 100% clean, so that's not a very good goal. if you mean "cleaner", as in, "improving",

https://i.imgur.com/AlfxKTK.png
https://electrifynow.net/fact-the-electric-grid-is-getting-cleaner-every-day

that was before the pandemic. but clean energy is now much, much cheaper per MWh than coal, and recently the costs have even dipped below natural gas. and many states have passed laws mandating 100% clean energy by 2035, 2040, 2050, etc. the winning argument, as always, is to be very cynical and say that those states will never get there. but they are doing better and making progress toward it, especially the states that aren't run by conservatives.

Claims about 'capitalism' producing a bad life condition (like, say, 'being a slave to the clock of the working day') are often implicitly predicated on a better alternative which once existed, whereas, unfortunately, in actual history (eg absolutism, feudalism, and arguably Stalinism also), it didn't.

This isn't truly a 'conservative' argument because it is, I hope, consonant with the Marxian view that capitalism represented progress and needs to be developed further / built on for something better, not reversed.

Pre-covid I remember having an argument with a fellow anarchist friend about this ... and he was kinda in denial about feudalism, and kept referring to some version of land stewardship by peasants minus kings/lords that seemed to be the exception to the rule

ecologically, tho, capitalism could well yet prove fatal to humanity

Like we agreed on the goals for the future, but were arguing about his premise that Capitalism was some "exile from Eden" thing whereas I was saying, "life was shit prior to Capitalism, there was no pre-Capitalist Eden"

xp - I'd argue that humanity could well prove fatal to humanity

it's the Lou Reed fallacy ... romanticizing being born 1000 years ago and sailing on a great big clipper ship ... dude would have gotten scurvy and been miserable tbrrwu