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On June 14 2020 10:59 Sent. wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2020 09:59 farvacola wrote:
We're not talking about 2016 though, now is not then in a way that now rarely is. The election this year is fairly unique, in other words. This year's Trump is the same as 2016 Trump. If he loses, it will be because the voters will finally realize he's a shitty person, not because they'll somehow decide holding conservative opinions is morally wrong. Show nested quote +On June 14 2020 10:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 14 2020 09:57 Sent. wrote:
You would need to seriously disregard a lot of what the majoirty of 46,1% of American voters thought in 2016 to come to this conclusion. Doesn't the fact that Trump has split apart Republicans - to say nothing of the country as a whole - invalidate the idea that he's somehow unifying everyone? We see Republican leaders, Cabinet members, and even Fox News hosts calling out Trump as being a divisive moron. The only thing he seems to be able to unify are a string of 3 K's. First things first, I said that I'd rather vote for the left's candidate than Trump. What I meant is that I find the reasoning of Trump supporters understandable despite disagreeing with it. I do think he's more divisive. The idea is that you have two camps and people in between: leftists think right-wingers are evil and right-wingers think leftists are evil. The "third camp" is people in between, who (I assume) are mostly people who are at least moderately socially conservative and (somehow) didn't make their minds up yet. From their perspective, it's a choice between Trump, who's being a dick mainly to his personal enemies, and a candidate presented by a camp that considers them bad people (or at least stupid, uneducated people). With this assumption in mind, you can claim that Trump is more unifying because his rhetoric tries to appeal to both his camp and people in between, while the other camp is less unifying because it's relying on the binary rhetoric of "you're with us or against us". Yes, Republican leaders consider Trump divisive, but they consider pretty much everyone but themselves to be divisive, so it doesn't really mean anything. Both the right and the left consider full unity to be impossible, so in this context being "unifying" should be interpreted as something as close to full unity as it's possible, that is being able to convince the undecideds to support you instead of your opponents.
I agree with most of what you're saying, although I do think it's important to note that some conservative leaders have recently said that they'll be voting for Biden over Trump, and I don't really think that's Biden's fault. I think Trump is successfully pushing away enough people that they're uniting *against* him.
I'm pretty sure he'll lose the popular vote again, so it's just a matter of whether or not he wins in the few states that decide the general election.
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Northern Ireland27351 Posts
On June 14 2020 10:59 Sent. wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2020 09:59 farvacola wrote:
We're not talking about 2016 though, now is not then in a way that now rarely is. The election this year is fairly unique, in other words. This year's Trump is the same as 2016 Trump. If he loses, it will be because the voters will finally realize he's a shitty person, not because they'll somehow decide holding conservative opinions is morally wrong. Show nested quote +On June 14 2020 10:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 14 2020 09:57 Sent. wrote:
You would need to seriously disregard a lot of what the majoirty of 46,1% of American voters thought in 2016 to come to this conclusion. Doesn't the fact that Trump has split apart Republicans - to say nothing of the country as a whole - invalidate the idea that he's somehow unifying everyone? We see Republican leaders, Cabinet members, and even Fox News hosts calling out Trump as being a divisive moron. The only thing he seems to be able to unify are a string of 3 K's. First things first, I said that I'd rather vote for the left's candidate than Trump. What I meant is that I find the reasoning of Trump supporters understandable despite disagreeing with it. I do think he's more divisive. The idea is that you have two camps and people in between: leftists think right-wingers are evil and right-wingers think leftists are evil. The "third camp" is people in between, who (I assume) are mostly people who are at least moderately socially conservative and (somehow) didn't make their minds up yet. From their perspective, it's a choice between Trump, who's being a dick mainly to his personal enemies, and a candidate presented by a camp that considers them bad people (or at least stupid, uneducated people). With this assumption in mind, you can claim that Trump is more unifying because his rhetoric tries to appeal to both his camp and people in between, while the other camp is less unifying because it's relying on the binary rhetoric of "you're with us or against us". Yes, Republican leaders consider Trump divisive, but they consider pretty much everyone but themselves to be divisive, so it doesn't really mean anything. Both the right and the left consider full unity to be impossible, so in this context being "unifying" should be interpreted as something as close to full unity as it's possible, that is being able to convince the undecideds to support you instead of your opponents.
Which is a regrettable state of affairs in many ways, and I have been consistently critical of the left for their part in fostering this mentality. While parts of your political opponents are racist or stupid or otherwise morally flawed, calling everyone who opposes you those things just elicits a backlash or puts up walls that are extremely tough to break down. See it in the States or saw it around Brexit over here.
As for conservatives, to appropriate some Donald rhetoric, ‘some, I assume are good people’. But no, facetiousness aside being conservative does absolutely not preclude folks being decent, least to me. Some of my best friends are conservative.
Aside from diametrically opposed positions, if the country was divided into two vaguely equivalently sized blocs, which had differing and consistent sets of beliefs then some degree of accommodation and compromise could be obtained if people dropped hostilities so to speak.
To crudely generalise that approach is much simpler to pursue if the opposite bloc is indeed consistent. Trump being injected into the equation has thrown consistency out the window, so in that sense he does have some unifying characteristics and has polarised the country yet further.
In crude terms, one can work around a position of say, states rights. It becomes increasingly difficult if it’s ‘states rights for this specific position I hold’ or ‘states rights except when Donald does it’.
Once that perception takes hold adopting a with us or against us mentality is almost the inevitable consequence.
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A lot of very smart people are conservative. It's always interesting to talk to the very smart people about why they have these ideologies, instead of getting stuck in the tyical shouting matches. This way we'll learn way more about the why and the how and we can actually be constructive. We'll never gain a single foot of progression or change if we can't form a synthesis with the other 50% of people.
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Interestingly in the UK yesterday there were some right wing 'protect our statues' protests where they chanted 'we're racist and we like it'.
I wonder how universal that set of values is.
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On June 14 2020 20:43 Jockmcplop wrote:
Interestingly in the UK yesterday there were some right wing 'protect our statues' protests where they chanted 'we're racist and we like it'.
I wonder how universal that set of values is.
There are definitely compelling questions regarding associational culpability on that front, universality of racist belief aside. Folks like to delude themselves into thinking they can say words and think thoughts that are somehow rooted in a vacuum of their own mental creation, when in reality, we are all actors that say and do things that necessarily implicate things outside of ourselves. That is not to say its as easy as "person A says X, person B says X, therefore person A and person B should be regarded as connected for purposes of culpability," but it seems clear that we need to revisit just how interconnected all forms of expressive conduct truly are. Only then can we appropriately show why a notion like "All Lives Matter" turned expressive act is, at least temporally and circumstantially, a reactionary retort that attempts to stand on "Black Lives Matter" rather than on its own.
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On June 14 2020 20:20 Wombat_NI wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2020 10:59 Sent. wrote:On June 14 2020 09:59 farvacola wrote:
We're not talking about 2016 though, now is not then in a way that now rarely is. The election this year is fairly unique, in other words. This year's Trump is the same as 2016 Trump. If he loses, it will be because the voters will finally realize he's a shitty person, not because they'll somehow decide holding conservative opinions is morally wrong. On June 14 2020 10:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On June 14 2020 09:57 Sent. wrote:
You would need to seriously disregard a lot of what the majoirty of 46,1% of American voters thought in 2016 to come to this conclusion. Doesn't the fact that Trump has split apart Republicans - to say nothing of the country as a whole - invalidate the idea that he's somehow unifying everyone? We see Republican leaders, Cabinet members, and even Fox News hosts calling out Trump as being a divisive moron. The only thing he seems to be able to unify are a string of 3 K's. First things first, I said that I'd rather vote for the left's candidate than Trump. What I meant is that I find the reasoning of Trump supporters understandable despite disagreeing with it. I do think he's more divisive. The idea is that you have two camps and people in between: leftists think right-wingers are evil and right-wingers think leftists are evil. The "third camp" is people in between, who (I assume) are mostly people who are at least moderately socially conservative and (somehow) didn't make their minds up yet. From their perspective, it's a choice between Trump, who's being a dick mainly to his personal enemies, and a candidate presented by a camp that considers them bad people (or at least stupid, uneducated people). With this assumption in mind, you can claim that Trump is more unifying because his rhetoric tries to appeal to both his camp and people in between, while the other camp is less unifying because it's relying on the binary rhetoric of "you're with us or against us". Yes, Republican leaders consider Trump divisive, but they consider pretty much everyone but themselves to be divisive, so it doesn't really mean anything. Both the right and the left consider full unity to be impossible, so in this context being "unifying" should be interpreted as something as close to full unity as it's possible, that is being able to convince the undecideds to support you instead of your opponents. Which is a regrettable state of affairs in many ways, and I have been consistently critical of the left for their part in fostering this mentality. While parts of your political opponents are racist or stupid or otherwise morally flawed, calling everyone who opposes you those things just elicits a backlash or puts up walls that are extremely tough to break down. See it in the States or saw it around Brexit over here. As for conservatives, to appropriate some Donald rhetoric, ‘some, I assume are good people’. But no, facetiousness aside being conservative does absolutely not preclude folks being decent, least to me. Some of my best friends are conservative. Aside from diametrically opposed positions, if the country was divided into two vaguely equivalently sized blocs, which had differing and consistent sets of beliefs then some degree of accommodation and compromise could be obtained if people dropped hostilities so to speak. To crudely generalise that approach is much simpler to pursue if the opposite bloc is indeed consistent. Trump being injected into the equation has thrown consistency out the window, so in that sense he does have some unifying characteristics and has polarised the country yet further. In crude terms, one can work around a position of say, states rights. It becomes increasingly difficult if it’s ‘states rights for this specific position I hold’ or ‘states rights except when Donald does it’. Once that perception takes hold adopting a with us or against us mentality is almost the inevitable consequence. The problem is, where were those "good decent people" during the primary? Trump won on a pretty racist campaign.
Where are they now? Looks a lot like every person that speaks up against Trump gets ostracised in short order.
Its hard to look at Trumps approval among Republicans on gallop as consistently being in the high 80's to low 90's and not conclude that Trump represents Republican voters.
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On June 14 2020 20:41 Uldridge wrote:
A lot of very smart people are conservative. It's always interesting to talk to the very smart people about why they have these ideologies, instead of getting stuck in the tyical shouting matches. This way we'll learn way more about the why and the how and we can actually be constructive. We'll never gain a single foot of progression or change if we can't form a synthesis with the other 50% of people.
This is a common misconception. We're talking about ~25% of the voting age population when referencing Trump voters. Less when talking about house representatives. Lots of worldviews have died out over time and the one represented by social conservatives is long past due to be tossed imo.
That's not to say they have no views of value, Gall and phrenology comes to mind (as an example of a trash view held by smart people with bits that are valuable).
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I'm talking about general conservative values.
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On June 14 2020 20:43 Jockmcplop wrote:
Interestingly in the UK yesterday there were some right wing 'protect our statues' protests where they chanted 'we're racist and we like it'.
I wonder how universal that set of values is.
And in France, the anti racist protesters started chanting (translated) “Dirty Jews.” I know that there’s some crossover in lefty circles regarding embrace of Palestine, and hatred of Israel, but that was quite the wtf moment in international news.
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On June 14 2020 20:43 Jockmcplop wrote:
Interestingly in the UK yesterday there were some right wing 'protect our statues' protests where they chanted 'we're racist and we like it'.
I wonder how universal that set of values is.
Apparently this story was never true in the first place which is weird because i saw it reported all over the place yesterday (the Guardian etc.) but I can't find it now. There was some video circulating that was fake.
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On June 14 2020 21:15 Uldridge wrote:
I'm talking about general conservative values.
What are those?
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On June 14 2020 20:41 Uldridge wrote:
A lot of very smart people are conservative. It's always interesting to talk to the very smart people about why they have these ideologies, instead of getting stuck in the tyical shouting matches. This way we'll learn way more about the why and the how and we can actually be constructive. We'll never gain a single foot of progression or change if we can't form a synthesis with the other 50% of people.
I've encountered much more sophisticated fiscal conservative ideas than social conservative ones, despite the vast majority of vocal conservative talking points being about social conservatism. For that reason, when trying to build common ground between myself and conservatives, I try to listen to and learn about their economic positions first, before taking the plunge into more heated topics like abortion and prejudice.
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Trying to hold on to the current culture.
Keep legislation the way it is, don't change marital rights, keeping hierarchical structures, keeping current infrastructures.
It's basically in the name, no? Am I naive/ignorant for looking at it like this?
I think conservative ideology stems from a fear of the unknown consequences of change and that they feel that things are good, so why change them?
Of course they can go so far that they regress to long overhauled tendencies, but sometimes I feel this is more reactionary than anything.
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On June 14 2020 21:38 Uldridge wrote:
Trying to hold on to the current culture.
Keep legislation the way it is, don't change marital rights, keeping hierarchical structures, keeping current infrastructures.
It's basically in the name, no? Am I naive/ignorant for looking at it like this?
I think conservative ideology stems from a fear of the unknown consequences of change and that they feel that things are good, so why change them?
Of course they can go so far that they regress to long overhauled tendencies, but sometimes I feel this is more reactionary than anything.
Those aren't values, that's just various degrees of nostalgia and metathesiophobia
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Okay. Why are conservative people the way they are? Obviously this is an umbrella term, but there should be some unifying principals on what can be viewed as 'conservatism'.
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Norway28892 Posts
I mean the main underlying principle of conservatism is to 'conserve'. In this case, society, rules and values that have been predominant. I think that in terms of ecology, I'm technically a conservative. Of course, this happens to be one area where many conservatives are not.
Then there's a separate issue on whether the preservation of old hierarchical structures that happens in conservatism is a bug or a feature of the system (not wanting to upend principles that have from a conservative perspective functionally governed society for more equality of outcome vs not wanting more equitable outcome)
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On June 14 2020 21:50 Uldridge wrote:
Okay. Why are conservative people the way they are? Obviously this is an umbrella term, but there should be some unifying principals on what can be viewed as 'conservatism'.
Plenty to unpack there but I identify it as white supremacy in the US. Globally it's more about maintaining a rigged system they see themselves as doing better under than a more equitable and just alternative. The nature of the existing systems, and "conserve" in the literal sense, makes this abundantly clear on its face imo.
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On June 14 2020 21:50 Uldridge wrote:
Okay. Why are conservative people the way they are? Obviously this is an umbrella term, but there should be some unifying principals on what can be viewed as 'conservatism'.
Not necessarily, in natural languages (such as English) there are some words which are used in such a way that they cannot be defined useing standard definitions. The situations in which those words are used vary so much that there is not a "core meaning" attached to such words that can properly explain all those usages. As such those words cannot be desribed usuing simple definitions and rather can only be defined by listing their "qualities" or "contexts" in which they are used and none of those "qualities" is essential. Conservatism in such word and so is liberalism and so on. Word 'Game' is another example.
In essence that means that there is not such thing as essence of conservatism but rather there are some qualities commonly associted with convservatism and if an outlook contains enough of those qualities it can be described as conservatism.
I know this isnt pretty but sadly thats how natural langueges works. You can read more on that in works of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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I guess I can agree with this, but perhaps this they see themselves as doing better under than a more equitable and just alternative. is simply a byproduct of being risk-averse. I'm not saying this to excuse the behavior by the way. I'm saying this because I know people are prone to take the safe road because this is the road they know, which is a recipe for complacency and overfitting, making things worse in the long run. I can understand people not seeing the unequality the current social conservative climate has caused in the US.
If every conservative politician or person who upholds a general right wing ideology thinks he's a white supremacist and literally believes they have a better life than the minority I'd be completely on board. I just think they haven't thought or felt it because of confirmation bias (people living in neighborhoods without many issues, rich politicians being so removed from every day life it's actually insane that they can make policies about the people that do live the every day life).
Again, not excusing it here. It's definitely a thing which needs to change, but I think the actual change will happen when younger people will get more prominent political positions, they aren't yet rusted into their tunnelvisioned world-view. There's too many older people in power making the system impenetrable.
Also, like DPB and Drone have mentioned, there are definitely more areas than the social ones to consider. Ecological conservation is a weird one, since it seems to be in dissonance with other facets. The question then is why. Is ecological conservation antithetical to social conervation, i.e. do we need more destruction of nature to maintain our current way of living? The answer then seems to be a clear yes. But, just like many big companies, change is slow and risky and risk is also bad. It's the same with meat eating essentially. It's such a difficult thing to let seep into main culture, even when all the upsides to a mostly vegetarian diet are known, each inch needs to be fought with tooth and nail because people are so resilient to change their habits.
I don't even know enough about financial stuff to start talking about the subject, so I don't know where I'd land there lol.
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On June 14 2020 22:39 Uldridge wrote:I guess I can agree with this, but perhaps this Show nested quote +they see themselves as doing better under than a more equitable and just alternative. is simply a byproduct of being risk-averse. I'm not saying this to excuse the behavior by the way. I'm saying this because I know people are prone to take the safe road because this is the road they know, which is a recipe for complacency and overfitting, making things worse in the long run.
Likewise, the liberal/progressive impulse can be a byproduct of reckless behavior. Revolution now, but very poor follow up to what happens next. Maybe, more amicably, the liberal impulse is to identify injustice rapidly, and be a little less circumspect if more arise in the path of correcting the first. The tzars are evil tyrants, so of course empowering revolutionary forces will necessarily correct this injustice.
The more biting flavor of criticism on the liberal impulse is that they’re much better at destroying things than creating things, and more adept at creating instability (which is necessary for change) than creating the stability for growth.
Moving from biting criticism to universal criticism, progressives are good at continuing to make mistakes, and conservatives are good at preventing them from being corrected.
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