this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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Every word uttered by a conservative is either a lie or profoundly incorrect. Every communication is an attempt to manipulate. This is who conservatives are.
Never trust the word of a conservative. Never.
I was about to advise you to chill a bit, then saw your username and now am sort of impressed by such staunch commitment to being pissed off.
I've been putting off seeing family for so long, but I've been begged to come to the reunion this year as my Grandma is not doing so great. Every single one of them were once proud Trump supporters who grew silent after j6. Now all they do is scream about Phil Murphy and...bears? Windmills causing whales to beach? This weekend is going to be dreadful.
Why do they all hate windmills so much?
I had an old family friend meltdown, unfriend me from facebook, and avoid me like the plague ever since I told him he was wrong when he claimed it takes more electricity to make a single windmill than a windmill can ever produce in it's usuable lifetime...
Pure culture wars. Renewable energy is an amazing boon for decentralization, which means rural communities and those who want to go off-grid. It's a no brainer. But because they've tied themselves to social conservatism and their thought leaders in that sphere have major financial ties to gas & oil, they have to morally oppose windmills.
Actually that is really really interesting what you said, "morally opposed to windmills." They obviously are against them from a "moral" perspective, but I've never seen even an attempt at a moral argument against windmills, its all crazy conspiracy theory stuff. I would almost respect it more if one of them just said something like "I don't like windmills because I think it is morally wrong to harvest wind".
Meanwhile, drive through Kansas sometime....thousands of windmills along I-70, sometimes stretching as far as the eye can see. Maybe 10s of thousands. The discrepancy between that fact and the opposition is astounding. Look what states have the most power generation by windmills.
Or projection, so much projection.
I used to read ToiletPaperUSA on reedit and yeah, fuckin Charlie Kirk. EVERYTHING he posts online contains fallacies and conflations attempting to manipulate people, like he knows his ideas can't stand on their own without dishonesty.
You forgot my favorite: every accusation is a confession.
Hey now, I know the average Bush voter in the late 90s wasn’t like this. Blind hate for half the country just destroys the country. This is a new problem.
Whatever this new thing is, the small group doing this - not the ever growing group being exposed and converted by it - deserves everything you’re saying. But don’t give up on your conservative family members. We’ll figure out how to stop the flow of hateful brain junk food eventually. We can go back to just politically disagreeing with them, instead of being irrationally hated by them. And vice versa.
They weren't quite like this but there was still shitty conservatives in much the same way... The extremists weren't the core yet though. They were absolutely still there and voting for Bush, they just weren't allowed to be the face of the party... Yet.
Respectfully disagree. Since Reagan the right has been completely fine with utter hypocrisy in the service of - well, ultimately nothing though for awhile they would say it was in the service of national security, or Christianity or something like that. Reagan republicans actively worked to fool the working class into giving them more and more power by lying, using "morning in America" commercials, and otherwise laying the groundwork for what became the fox news nation we now know and love so well.
The fact that otherwise good people who would help others and meant for everyone to get a fair chance etc. would steadfastly give their votes to them every election became more of a house of mirrors and lots of analysis as to how that could possibly be when their policies are so obviously cruel / stupid / nonexistent.
TL;DR - Propaganda works. "The average person" is criminally under-informed in many ways.
I hope this is ok to say, but I don’t think there was any part of what I said that you disagreed with.
I completely agree on all points. Those people have a dishonest agenda and they’ve figured out how to manipulate human nature to get what they need from part of an otherwise-good populace.
^ how you radicalize yourself
That's not correct; you're taking a black and white, absolutist view to the question, and that just doesn't work.
For instance, take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices. Social conservatism also has a place, given the tension that exists between concepts of community and society. I do not agree with many conservative interpretations, but it's not accurate to say that all conservatives are intellectually dishonest.
OTOH, modern "conservatives" aren't conservatives in any meaningful way. It's now more like regressive populism.
Like trickle down theory, corporate personhood, that tax breaks will result in tax revenue, and that government austerity is preferable to stimulus to move an economy from recession to expansion? They're zero for four in the most popular 20th century conservative economic theories. I'm not sure that economics is the best lens to view conservative theory in a positive light.
Dude. What you consider "the left" IS CONSERVATIVISM. The USA is soooooo far afield, people are sooooo brainwashed, they can't hold a liberal thought in their heads if they fucking tried.
US liberals are more centrists in a European sense, no argument there. I'm just pointing out that offering up US conservative economic theory as a shining star of success is not the boast they think it is.
neoliberalism is conservative ideology and it has been doing very well the last 40 years, to our vast detriment
No, Reaganomics was a bad-faith move by social regressives. Corporate personhood has been a reality since Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. in 1886, so I guess that's conservative, but also not exactly. The idea of laissez-faire economics--that the market will mostly sort itself out with minimal gov't intervention--is generally upheld by prevailing economic theories, and is a fundamentally conservative view. I happen to disagree with the economists though, because they're only looking at it as an economic issue, rather than economics being a manifestation of the social realities.
"conservative" is starting to feel like a meaningless label that assholes throughout history have tried to use to describe themselves because they didn't like the other words people were using to describe them.
And don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are "real" conservatives out there and in history, but it sure feels like they are outnumbered by the people that use the word as a mask, and that is weird.
Conservatism took a weird turn with Reagan. Reagan was socially regressive, and not an orthodox fiscal conservative. George HW Bush (Dubya's dad) was in many ways more of a traditional conservative. Eisenhower was a particularly notable conservative, and is generally regarded as a successful president. Nixon was likewise extremely successful, and managed to significantly dampen inflation, despite being generally bad on racial issues (although he did enforce desegregation orders, but he was also working to pull the teeth of the civil rights act to appease white southerners), and generally being a thief and liar. His re-election was a complete blow-out, winning every single state except Delaware.
We've also got this weird idea that being 'liberal' is some kind of magic, that libs are going to do wonderful, magical things as soon as they have majorities in the house and senate, and have the presidency. We've seen that NYS, CA, and IL can't address shit in their own borders--e.g., housing/homelessness, and Obama did very, very little to advance a significant progressive agenda aside from the very weak and watered down ACA. Biden is just going to policies that existed prior to the Trump toxic clownshow.
That is kinda my point, the meaning of "conservative" changes a lot through the centuries it has been used, and the only consistent part seems to be the assholes using it as a "friendly" sounding mask.
And your perspective of the public opinion of liberals is entirely too informed by mainstream media. Many leftists dislike liberals for not being leftist enough, and moderates seem to only expect maintenance of the status quo, not magic
That would be me, right there. The older I get, the farther left I go, and the more disillusioned I get with what I thought Dems had been promising for the 45+ years of my life. Not that Republicans have made my life better in any meaningful way; NAFTA might have improved the bottom line of businesses, but it killed my career in it's infancy when GM/Ford/Chrysler all moved manufacturing south of the border to take advantage of cheap labor. Meanwhile Biden doesn't seem to be doing a lot to help labor either, esp. since he killed the railroad strike before it happened.
I don't want a status quo.
I don't want a status quo either, I'm also a leftist.
I'm just trying to describe things as I see them.
No true Scotsman much?
So Manchin and Sinema are libs, right? Because they claim to be.
Nobody on planet earth thinks they are liberals. No one.
When two random assholes claim a label and all the other pressure who claim it disagree, they're just two random assholes.
When 99% of the people claiming a label are a certain kind of asshole, that label describes what kind of asshole they are.