"Everybody I disagree with is a dumbass." Thankfully, the world is more complex than that.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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A lot of you people haven't read this, and it shows.
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html
Ps. You can literally just ask yourself what it is conservatives want to conserve...
Paragraph after paragraph of head canon without any sources. Lovely. And conservatives are delusional.
One thing to understand is that our ability to reason comes down to how we weigh our knowledge of the material in question. Someone can be extremely knowledgeable (and through that knowledge, intellectual) about one topic; and dumb as rocks in another. One of the culture shocks for me when I started working in the medical field was not just the existence, but the prevalence of stupid doctors. You'd think that someone who could become a doctor would be an all around curious and open-minded person... and when they're talking about their area of expertise, it 100% seems that way; but once they deviate into other areas, it starts to show that they're just as much a joe-dipshit as the rest of us.
So, you could have someone who's intellectual as fuck in the context of like orthopedic surgery; but even in other parts of the field of medicine, their brain hits a brick wall and suddenly your ortho doc drinking the covid conspiracy theory koolaid; or conned by some talkshow host into paying money for NFTs; or swallowing the lies about dragshows somehow being about grooming children.
There is absolutely such a thing as a conservative intellectual: just means they're really smart in some unrelated area; and really stupid with politics. There are also plenty of folks who buy into the hatred spewed by the political rightwing. Tricking rednecks into voting against their own interests is one thing - a bigger problem is that for a lot of voters, the cruelty is the point. They don't give a fuck about children: they just want to hurt trans people. They don't give a fuck about fetuses: they just want to hurt women. Assuming that conservatives are just politically stupid is actually giving them the benefit of the doubt - cuz the alternative is that they're just evil.... and evil paired with intellect is both real and incredibly dangerous.
I’m a leftie, but I’ve found my beliefs challenged, altered and enriched by debating right wing intellectuals.
It’s possible for two ideas to be equally right and incompatible
hopefully lemmy will not become gab for the left...but it's a free world!
There absolutely are conservative intellectuals, they just don't tend to endorse MAGA.
Here's a great example: https://scholars-stage.org/ Knocks it out of the park all the time. Then again, he rarely spends his time talking directly about culture war topics.
It regretfully doesn't matter how intellectual they are if the two-party system forces them to let their anti-intellectual minorities run the party. Once a governing body decides that keeping power away from "the other team" is more important than their principles, they cease to have the merit of those principles. Middle of the road negotiation simply ceases to exist. Either you have an overwhelming majority and don't need the other party's consent, or you have a narrow majority and policy making gets held hostage by the most belligerent minority faction within the party. When that belligerent faction is anti-intellectual, the result is the current shitshow.
Since American politics are right-leaning on the Overton window, that makes both parties more susceptible to getting kneecapped by their most right-leaning belligerents when they hold a narrow majority. A narrow Republican majority gets kneecapped by the Freedom Caucus, and a narrow Democrat majority gets kneecapped by the likes of Sinema and Manchin.
You… know it's possible to be a conservative without being a Republican, right?
If you want to say there are no politically relevant conservative intellectuals, that I would agree with. the Republican party is currently dominated by grifters, so anyone involved is going to be doing a lot of shoddy post-hoc justifications. But to say that being conservative of any stripe bars one from actually thinking deeply and critically is narrow minded.
What a horrendous take
Reality is definitely something the conserved brain cannot handle. Cracking open that tin can is sure to relieve some of that debilitating pressure bearing down on the logic of basically any situation. In my exerience not one conservative has a good argument about their viewpoints, as their viewpoints are grandfathered in and pasted over their ability for compassion, logic and critical thinking. If the world weren't in the hands of people using dumb conservatives to rob and maintain wealth, it would be classified as a mental illness akin to schizophrenia.
Well not every intellectual was born in the past century. Virtually all of these would be conservative based on our modern values. Virtually no one 100 or 200 years ago would have been in favor of gay marriage. There were plenty intellectuals 100 and 200years ago.
So, no.
I wondering if Correct The Record/Share Blue made the jump, or if the actual r/politics users actually think like this.
So what's one good conservative position?
I agree with some conservative positions like Americans have an individual right of freedom. I can and should be able to live my life in manner that I want to without the government forcing me to live it another way. I view things like LGBTQ rights fall under this surprising core conservative belief. Now most conservatives would view it as individual freedom mean they can be a racist bigot and discriminate, but that isn't individual freedom.
I also agree with the concept of limited government, but from the view that government even in its best state is a necessary evil. It should not govern our everyday lives but it must serve the people. Government isn't a power, it is a service that ultimately serves the people.
some conservative positions like Americans have an individual right of freedom.
That's not a conservative position. Proof: Conservatives don't want women to have the freedom to end their pregnancies (or just get basic prenatal care in general apparently). They also don't want universities to have the freedom to choose who they admit based on race (trying to undo historical racism or to prevent a single race from taking over).
In Florida the conservative government removed the freedom of local government to decide how they handle a great many things from elections (can't have them using ranked choice voting) to what they teach in schools (e.g. teaching about historical racism).
In other states with conservative governments they are banning books, limiting citizens right to sue for damages, making it harder for minorities to vote, and generally reducing the people's power to change how their government is run. They're very anti-democracy lately (it was talked about in the article).
What individual freedoms are liberals trying to take away? The historical record here is vastly in liberals favor.
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Bro, that's exactly what liberals want.
The government is a tool to ensure the good will, safety, and prosperity of the people. What we can't achieve on our own gets done through the collective power of the government.
Liberals aren't trying to force government on people, they're trying to ensure that the rights of everyone take precedent over someone's perceived "right" to discriminate.
Do you consider a business employing people to mutually ageed standards moral?
Business aren't moral entities and it should never be assumed that they will act as such. In fact, the basis by which one should assume a business will operate is on profits and profits alone.
Therefore, if you want to make business behave in any sort of moral fashion their behavior must be regulated and businesses with a history of societal harm must be highly regulated.
Based on these truths one must view with a highly skeptical eye anyone who wishes to broadly remove regulations without specificities as to which ones they want to remove and why the regulation is unnecessary. The belief that regulations are bad--generally speaking--is an inherently unethical and immoral position.
Yeah. So literally using police to force shit is just bros being bros. Hiring someone to paint your fence, oppression. Got it.
What a completely dishonest and bad faith response.
Just being reductionist doesn't make it bad faith. I do appreciate your response and I'm sorry I just wasn't into digging into weeds of justification.
It doesn't really do any good to go back and forth and call our views when we have wild deviations at a very basic level.
What makes it bad faith is that you made no attempt to respond to what Riskable said, and instead said something silly to try and steal a win in the convo.
If you agree police should exist, then you also agree that the government sets the rules about what they enforce. If someone paints my fence with some hyper toxic paint, then it should be illegal. Riskable was implying that businesses will reliably degrade quality and safety until the legal minimums and sometimes we need to put effort into regulating some basic standards.
Now, on the other hand, conservatives are usually INCREASING regulations that the police follow, doing the closest things to genital checks and hauling people away to prison for having a now illegal abortion as bad examples.
Conservatives say they want less regulation, when you guys are the ones in power maxing out regulations against existing in harmless ways.. we just want toxic paint banned, or the real example.. we don't want a climate apocalypse, we want PFOA style chemicals banned and forced incineration of all odd chemicals, we want basic human and animal rights, we want the last ecosystems for natural non human life preserved... and conservatives just want the last checks and balances that protect us removed while adding ten times more regulation against people you hate and yourselves in the process.
I was trying to get an idea of their ideas. I asked a simple question and got a huge response that just veered wild. I apologized for them putting in that effort.
I'm not a conservative I just believe in individual rights. I mentioned it elsewhere, but there's no coherent definition of conservative to be found. If you want to call a dude with pro-choice and trans stickers on his wallet conservative, you do you.
I'm going to let you in on a secret mr ancap. Ancaps, conservatives, fascists, libertarians and nazis are all the same group. None of those types have looked into their own views. They all have contradictory silly rhetoric which boils down to "I say whatever i think wins me the conversation, because my view is correct because it's my view"
I'm an anarchist and am tired of ancaps pretending to be related to me by ideology. Oxymoronic
That's too bad. I tend to get on well with syndicalists and mutualists.
Sorry for the late and lackluster reply. My wrists feel like they have axes wedged through them. Hooray for RA.
No syndicalist or mutualist would agree with the pro-capitalist groups views about capitalism, only destruction of hierarchies such as capitalism and the state. What you said is the bog standard "i have black friends, i cant be racist". This is what i mean by pro-capitalist group people being the same and using language just to score points. You've still not refuted anything in any meaningful way.
As for your RA, if you really have it then i hope it gets better, which is kinda why I'm an anarchist. Clearly capitalism wont allow the state to funnel resources into research in any meaningful scale to actually cure disease and only at best offer temporary relief. I guarantee capitalists know the causes and triggers of disease and if they sell a temporary relief they would also be spending money on increasing sales of the causes of your suffering.
They come to some of the libertarian/ancap subreddits for more than just trolling. I'm not really a propertarian. I don't believe In retributive justice. When it comes down to it, I'd choose to live in a leftist community. I help friends and family and strangers when I can and I believe we have an ethical obligation to do so. We should end corporate liability protections and destroy our corporate structures that make top heavy multinationals a thing, much less a profitable thing. Also, IP is theft.
I'm not willing to force you, or anyone else, to do what I want with violence and that's why I'm an ancap, not a leftist.
It sounds like you really are against capitalism as we know it. Capitalisms main trait is that it'll force any reformed system back into a capitalist ran false-democracy. We already have the libertarian/ancap system but with an illusory democracy and a barely meaningful state. You could say as the system gets worse, we get closer to a true ancap/libertarian system. If you think things are getting worse as capitalists weaken the government, then you disagree with ancap ideology.
Liberal ideology is about reforming capitalist systems so that they don't end up controlling the government and ruining the ecosystems. Socialist ideology is about democracy in the workplace, which i think would correct many problems and reduce dependence on NEEDING govt regulation as the workers would rarely vote to pollute their own community.
I don't really know why you call yourself an ancap. The freedom parts of ancap ideology are stolen by the capitalist part, which is why anarchists like myself reject capitalism as mutually exclusive with any form of freedom at the individual level. Remember that standard capitalism is about totalitarian work structures, literal wage-slavery.
I think your views on this subject are good, but the ideology you call yourself by doesn't match most of your actual views.
And without a doubt, IP law is some of the most fucked up law to exist. ugh
On the surface personal responsibility and free market, howeverz there is no thing really conservative about it it gets twisted into some perverted way to punk minorities and to obtain preferential government treatment.
For example koch brothers and few other select clowns fundd Prager U... To shill these ideas...
Kuck brothers are some of the largest well fare queens in the US...
They don't oay much taxes either due to their lobbying.
So I guess none...
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I know plenty of conservative intellectuals, they are not Republicans though. Look up topics on individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law to find thousands of examples.
Most would call themselves moderates as conservative is a poisoned title, but they exist.
So ask yourself, what perspective have conservatives been groomed view the United States? Roger Kimball describes it as, “A damsel (America) is locked in a dark castle, which was once a glorious palace in years gone by.” But now “liberal elites, the bureaucracy, academia” have sapped “her vitality,” turning her “weak and infirm” due to a dastardly belief system in “left-wing ideology, political correctness, egalitarianism. Using this metaphorical trope, Kimball continued to describe citizens as having turned into weaklings who secretly long for a return to national greatness. This view of decline and decadence, so core to the conservative intellectual tradition, is prone to eventual faith in a strong, authoritarian leader. And thus, Donald Trump becomes, for Kimball, the only one ready to rescue the country from its demise.
Their perspective is so vastly different due to indoctrination from years of talk radio, right wing news, and sites like facebook, reddit and 4chan where echo chambers reinforced the indoctrination.
The aspect free minds are missing us that, to quote Kimball again, "Trumpism represent[s] conservatism at its essential core, a kind of return to its roots in monarchism". This “monarchism” is now being nurtured by a populist faith—a combined belief in the supposed goodness of the masses, led by the sort of paternalistic authoritarian leader that conservative intellectuals can get behind.
A free mind can obviously see through the deception has it is full of holes. If you don't believe Steve Bannon is the next Pluto than you've already come to the conclusion that these buffoons are actually fascists attempting to strip American citizens of their rights and to gain power through the courts, through the power of the mob, and to gain power through forced religion, just as the Nazis did in the 1930s. The difference is they have absolute imbeciles in charge who have mucked up the process and exposed what they are doing. The mirror was broken for the vast majority of the American people to see. Thus this movement stalled, but it isn't dead yet.
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Rabbits
This is the most progressive type article ive read in a while.
right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation
Man this rings true for my experience growing up in a conservative area
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