I don’t have much of a problem either way as I don’t think I’ll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That’s fine. There’s clearly a more liberal audience here and that’s okay. I just don’t want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.
Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I’m new here.
If your “conservative / right wing opinion” is that austerity measures are a good thing, then the most generous interpretation of that is that you’re just a moron. As it turns out, though, today’s “conservative / right wing opinions” are way worse than that. Things like “trans people aren’t people”. Or “we should do a treason”. Or “bribing supreme court justices is totally fine”. If you hold any of those opinions, the most generous interpretation of that is that you’re evil. And probably also stupid. That is the MOST generous interpretation, mind.
I think we need to have better conservative content. All of what your describing sounds like negative characterizations of conservatives made by far left individuals.
Yes, there are some absolute morons in the world. Probably a lot of them. But not all conservatives are morons, despite what many left leaning people would like to believe due to the polarization brought about by social media echo chambers.
The issue is the party overwealming supports these ideas, we are not debating what color school busses should be or how we should ensure we have clean water into the future, we are instead debating should X group be allowed to live. An option that involves taking rights from others based on misinformation isn’t an opinion.
I have yet to see a modern conservative position that is more backed by real world evidence than whatever more progressive position it opposes.
Climate change? Denying overwhelming scientific consensus. Gun control? “It doesn’t work”, even though it works in every other western country. Healthcare? “But the death panels will decide if you get to live”, they don’t exist, and are used as pretense to ignore all those people who die because they can’t afford treatment. Car infrastructure? It’s literally better for drivers if more people are using transit or cycling. Student loans? I don’t even know what the argument is here except “I had to pay them so everyone else should too”. The money certainly isn’t going towards the teachers.
Some of these are US specific, but the sentiment is the same everywhere. The list goes on and on. If someone refuses to listen to any reason or evidence and instead bases their worldview on only their own, limited lived experience, why shouldn’t they be characterized as a moron? And if they understand that their view isn’t based in reality and they hold it anyways, why not call that actively malicious?
I’ve always loved the irony of the argument that if the government pays for healthcare, there will be “death panels” that decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. Because those already exist under and directly because of a system of private healthcare funding where if you don’t have enough money, you’re refused treatment. Meanwhile under a system of public healthcare funding, people get treatment based on who’s most in need of the resources available, and that’s only if the system is already over capacity.
Lmao fucking seriously.
Routinely my primary fucking care physician will approve a prescription just for my fucking insurance to say you know what, we will BLOCK that medication from being released to you at the pharm cuz we don’t wanna pay for it yet. Try again next week!!
god fucking damnit like let me just pay for it out of pocket!! They won’t let me.
Private insurance death panels are alive and well lol
Due to the actions of recent right wing political parties whe gaining any power.
That’s a bit like saying
"How dare you call us all arsehole. Because we keep voting for arseholes to lead our parties. "
Unless you and others are prepared to form a right wing that opposes these ideas. Then that is the reputation the right deserves.
For the record, I would not consider myself right wing. But I do oppose many leftist ideologies. Grievance studies (Critical race theory, queer theory, and other ideologies based in post modern belief systems), for instance, are eroding many useful and productive enlightenment ideas. Color blindness is a legitimate way to reduce racism. Instead, leftists believe they should elevate group identity at all costs, thereby expanding and heightening racism. Queer theory denies human physiology, elevating the idea that everything is socially constructed. This framework is a grave distortion of the reality.
I agree that conservatives need to do a better job with their policies. Trump was a stain, and the few (okay maybe more than a few) loud idiots in the party make conservatism look bad. But if left wingers only get their information about right wingers from hyper left sources, we are going to have a lot of distorted views.
On social media, people are served more and more radical content. Much of that content includes great distortions of the “other side,” which pushes people further into an untenable and undesirable belief system.
We need more debate and we also need people to stop simply calling the other side morons.
To be absolutely clear to anyone who runs across this, this person has been banned from our instance, you don’t need to report it again. The only reason this reply is still up, is for others to see all the ways in which this person is wrong and the whole they dug themselves when they did reply to someone and were rightfully reported and ejected from our instance.
Have you studied any of these yourself? Or are you relying on characterizations of them you heard in media?
In theory, sure. But in practice it often gets used as a rug to sweep racism under.
Keep on mind this is a society where certain groups have been marginalized and terrorized for decades or even centuries. “Elevating” them is only a reaction to that long-entrenched bigotry. But (what’s that quote?..) when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Attempting to bring historically marginalized groups into equal footing with mainstream groups probably will look like they’re being “elevated” to the people who enjoy the privilege of being accepted broadly by default.
Yes, I have a Ph.D., you will encounter grievance studies and post modern ideologies when you pursue this path. I have indeed studied the philosophical foundations of these ideologies. I don’t agree with post modern ideologies, nor do I agree that you can state that something is purely constructed by a culture. An individual is defined both by their physiology and their societal structure. It’s physiology and culture. Post modernism denies objective truth. I believe in objective truth. I also believe in intentionality, which post modernism denies. We could go on. Stop using the “have you actually studied this” argument and actually engage in productive debate. An appeal to academic authority is really not useful here.
It seems some forget, for instance, that the native population of America benefitted greatly from their encounters with colonial people from France and Britain. They sold and traded items. They learned knew technologies. Hell, many native tribes fought alongside the Americans during the American revolution. They also fought alongside France. The whole situation of the American colonies is really messy. Anyway, colonialism is not a black and white issue.
ah, yes, the minimum of 30 million people killed just in the Americas really benefited. get out of here with this settler colonialist apologia, my dude. you are a textbook case of why nobody is interested in hearing out conservative “thought”, which appears to be impossibly tied to being pro-genocide.
Either you’re the stupidest person who has ever received a PhD in the world, or you’re a fucking liar. There’s absolutely no god damned way that you can hold this many imbecilic, counter-to-reality views while having had to engage with primary sources for the multiple years it took to achieve a PhD. Stop lying, seriously. Nobody buys your bullshit anyway.
You’re already getting pushback on your other points, so I thought I would weigh in here. Biologically speaking, sex is multifaceted, variable, and somewhat malleable. Even anatomically or physiologically scientists say that gender and sex are not as simple or clean cut as you are making it out to be. Additionally, gender diverse people can be found across all cultures and throughout history - transgender people are not an invention of the post-modern era.
I don’t think that acknowledging the reality that human experience is complex and multi-faceted is a left wing value. It is evident to anyone who honestly engages with scientific consensus and with the lived experiences of LGBTQ folks that those people exist. They’re not going anywhere, and I don’t think it’s especially “left wing” to say we ought to make space for them in society to just live their lives as they are.
Colour blindness is not a way of combatting racism.
If you have a real world system, and you bias it heavily to be unequal, then you try and correct it by biasing it to be equal, the average output is still vastly unequal, and the absolute best case scenario you can hope for is that it will trend towards equality over time without ever reaching it.
There’s a reason that people who actually study and think about the topic come out as antiracist and people who don’t think it about it except when it inconveniences them just wish everyone would stop talking about it and we could pretend like it didn’t exist.
Yes, it is. There are a lot of academics that have fallen prey to post modern ideologies like anti racism. But there are also academics that haven’t, like myself and John McWhorter.
‘nuh uh I don’t believe that’ isn’t an argument.
I’ve explained how balanced system + inequality + balanced system = inequality, and you’ve just said “nuh uh that’s not convenient for me”.
Wow, what a shocking comment. Explains your original I suppose.
You can’t just lay judgement on something because you don’t like it. You need to actually understand it, hopefully your read the other responses you got with an open mind, lest ye drift deeper into bigotry via ignorance (chosen ignorance, at that)
I would agree with you, but at least in the US majority of conservatives fully embraced those moronic ideas.
The people that call themselves conservatives no longer are conservatives, their only goal is how to hurt “liberals”.
At this point true conservatives that still care about the country started voting for democrats or not vote at all, but they are now labeled as RINOS.
I know it is a loaded term, and many will quickly dismiss it, (but it is correct given the definition), but the party was taken over by fascists and real conservatives aren’t doing anything to take their party back.
Compared to most countries, Democrats are conservatives. And Republicans are extreme right wing.
The US doesn’t have a left wing party. Nor even a truly centrist one.
The conservatives you’re describing are becoming more uncommon by the day. So much of conservative politics now is driven by misinformation and fear, I legitimately can’t remember the last time I had a constructive conversation with a conservative. They live in a different world, which makes constructive discussion almost impossible.
Haven’t seen a lot of examples of that for many decades.
How far have you looked? If you are siloed among left wing ideologies (brought about by social media algorithms), you might grow to think that all conservative thinkers are morons. Needless to say, there is some good content, but you have to look harder and be willing to look into the “other side” in good faith. Most look at the other side with a hyper negative view.
Jonathan Haidt’s book on this topic is a good read. Also check out his “the coddling of the American mind”
I think it’s a matter of perspective. While there are intelligent conservatives, in America they vote Democrat.
What people refer to as Republican conservatism in the US is not actual cohesive conservative economic ideology, but a bunch of irrational bigoted nationalism. In the US they refer to actual conservatism as centrism.
America isn’t the only place were conservatism’s mainstream is lurching towards the extreme, though the Americans do seem to be leading that charge.
In my country, I’m generally considered a centrist (where we do have more a than 2 political parties to choose from), and I certainly don’t live exclusively in a left-wing silo.
I see the right moving further (and faster) from me than the left is, though.
You are essentially using a “no true Scotsman” defense here, which is wild given the public stances of America’s Conservative Party, the GOP.
You act like they are talking about outliers but the whole GOP is in lockstep with those awful stances and decisions. You say we need better conservative content? I say you need better conservative leadership because the majority of conservatives follow what they are fed of fox, oann, and whatever other sources of disinfo
Come back to us when the official party line isn’t supporting the big lie, or attacking climate change or attacking science and vaccines and masking, or that trans people shouldn’t exist, or that students should not be given the forgiveness that those with money get (PPP vs student loan forgiveness), or that Russia and Putin are not our allies nor role models, I could go on and on and on.
You want a better conservative image? You need better conservatives first. Talk about putting the cart before the horse
You say what we mention is mischaracterizations made by the left. Please, point out which are untrue
Yes, this is true, many conservative people are smart - they worked out that in order to get money and power they can exploit conservative talking points easily because they don’t have to be truthful, thoughtful, or in any way care about other people
True. Many of them are just plain evil. But I would argue that the vast majority are some combination of evil and stupid.
Saying that austerity is always bad is pretty dumb too. Economic policy is hard. It’s not a simple as shoving one lever in one direction as far as possible forever.
For example, “austerity” could mean ending corporate subsidies, taxing the wealthy, auditing the wealthy, reducing the military budget, canceling freeway expansions, etc. Too much public debt can absolutely be a bad thing and needs to be controlled.
I concede that you’ve got a point that austerity isn’t an all or nothing proposition. But your examples are laughable. No country that has implemented “austerity measures” has ever interpreted that as “ending corporate subsidies”, or “taxing the wealthy”, or in any way fucking with the wealthy or military’s purse. It just doesn’t happen. I agree, that would be an amazing thing. But it just doesn’t exist in human history. What ends up happening instead is that they cut the educational budget. Or they cut social programs, like housing subsidies or food subsidies. Because governments aren’t run by the lowest common denominator, who actually benefits from those programs. They’re run by the wealthy. So no government is going to fuck over its supporters by cutting their benefits.