The only thing I would change, and to bring it back 'round to misogyny, is that “Women have sex without consequence” is the worst outcome. Men can have all the sex (with women) that they want. Oddly, women are not afforded the same opportunity. I’ve never understood how that is supposed to work.
Men are still sinning when they have sex, they’re just sinning in an awesome way. It’s likely a reflection of the fact that the people deciding what’s “bad” have a hard time being truly critical of things they want to do themselves.
There are plenty of people, even men, who consider male sex just as bad as female sex. They haven’t controlled societal perception, though.
Among other things this is one of the great mysteries of conservatives that I don’t get. They will go on about how liberals want to help Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, LGBT people, and minorities in general, about how liberals want to help all those other people but not them. Then we can point out that liberals do in fact support many things that will help working class white people, whether it’s expanding access to medical care, raising the minimum wage, making college more affordable, and so on. The response to that is usually something to the effect of no, we shouldn’t do those things because it’ll piss off the wealthy people and we can’t have that.
ETA. I realize I just restated your point. I just don’t get how conservatives justify it.
Come now, we know that’s not right. The usual response is that they’re going to have to pay for it all (via the socialist taxes), and it won’t work anyway, and it’ll be worse than what they already have (no matter how little that actually is).
The liars selling them the propaganda don’t lead with “this is all actually to help us rich people and you poor losers are just grist for our mill”. That’s the unsaid part that they really don’t say, even now.
I’m sure it’s what they believe. It just doesn’t make any sense to me why they believe that.
They believe it because they were told to believe it, and they encountered enough communal support while learning it that they uncritically internalized it as a true fact. At this point challenging the fact would be challenging their identity, so when faced with counterarguments and disproofs, they start with the premise that they’re right, and based on that premise conclude that the counterarguments and disproofs are wrong. Any justifications they feet to you to support those claims are just that - post-facto justifications, since you don’t seem inclined to accept their obviously-true premises, you wrong person you.
No, I think the only true priority is “make it known to the rest of your tribe that you act like you care about this shit as much as they all claim to.” I honestly, truly believe that they DON’T CARE ABOUT THE UNDERLYING ISSUES at ALL. It’s just become a signifier, like when I was in junior high school in 1998, you wore Tommy Hilfiger shirts because they were cool, nobody understood WHY they were cool, they just were, so you wore them. None of these people genuinely give a flying fuck about any of these underlying issues.
Lots of them definitely care. Probably not the leaders, but at least some of the guests at a party are going to drink the kool-aid.
Have to disagree with most of this. You’ll find very few conservatives objecting to reproductive healthcare in the form of birth control.
You’re probably correct about how conservatives view what the left calls ‘reproductive education.’ My state just passed a K-12 gender and sexual education bill and I was horrified by it. I anticipate there will be some harm and confusion inflicted on children as they are told they may actually be the opposite gender and just not know it yet. As if figuring out your own sexuality isn’t difficult enough.
Yes, their agenda is actually eliminating abortions. They see promoting birth control and making abortions illegal as the fastest path forward.
My observation is that it is a majority opinion here that there’s no reason to make a distinction between the first and second groups. If you’re in the first, you are complicit in the actions of the second, and so therefore you might as well be the second.
So I think it’s a long topic of discussion either way.
I would argue this is only true if you’re looking to assign blame, which is probably a fruitless activity for ordinary citizens. If you want to understand them it’s probably important to distinguish them, because the Trump cultists are an implacable part of the electorate that will never improve. Some of the other people who voted for Trump likely can either be messaged to and brought to vote for Democrats in some situations, or can be countermessaged into not voting–which may often be just as important. There’s some important stuff that happened in 2020 that hasn’t happened really in ages, and that’s that in a huge turnout election the GOP actually had really high turnout of low propensity voters in lots of places. Usually the GOP has relied on more “stable” voters that we know quite a bit about. But Trump actually brought significant numbers of low propensity voters out this year and that’s probably worth greater study because we know far less about these voters.
Let’s see the text?
I don’t understand how laws in general that prohibit certain activity are not the majority imposing their views on a minority that might not agree with them. Whether a law is good or bad has nothing to do with it being ‘imposed’ since by definition, that is what laws that regulate or limit certain practices are.
Some of those may include animal welfare laws, euthanasia/assisted suicide laws, laws against providing horse or dog meat for consumption, anti-prostitution laws, laws limiting the access of gambling/alcohol/tabacco/etc to minors, age of consent laws, or laws that make pornographic cartoon/comic book depictions of children illegal. Each of these laws exist in some to all US jurisdictions. If imposing your will is the aspect to these laws that make them bad, they should pretty much all be overturned.
I feel like you are correct and the Nietzsche theory fits into what I call the “John Hughes High School Theory of American Politics”.
Basically the idea is based on the concept of the social structure of the American high school as portrayed in the films of John Hughes in the 80s (and pretty much every film since). Republicans represent the “popular jocks and cheerleaders”. They dictate what is “cool” in these sense of what it means to be a “True American”. Of course, it is a relatively small percentage of the population that can actually enjoy the affluent lifestyle of a “True American” just as only a small percentage of high school students can be the good looking popular jocks who bang all the hot cheerleaders. But they dictate what’s “cool” and can use their power to bully anyone who isn’t.
Democrats represent the various hodge-podge of “uncool” factions - Goths, theater kids, nerds, geeks, freaks, weirdos, whatever. Collectively, their numbers may be equal to or greater than the “cool kids”. Problem is, no one aspires to be like them. In fact, there is no consistent definition of what they are, as they represent a mishmash of various, often contradictory subcultures.
And both sides are fighting for the vast majority of moderates, independents, undecideds and other “normals”. They mostly want to be like the “cool kids” (parties, bitchin’ car, banging hot cheerleaders/quarterbacks, etc) but more often than not they will be treated like the nerds and freaks.
This thread is a perfect example of how to fail at seeing the other side. It didn’t take us long to call all pro-lifers misogynist.
What kind of immature whiny 3 year old behavior is THAT? They’re like the toddler whose baby brother was born and is now taking all the attention, so they decide to throw tantrums to derail the whole family, and to torture their brother because they can’t handle anyone else getting slightly more attention.
I watched a documentary about Mitt Romney last night, and here’s something that struck me. In one scene, I think right after his first debate with Obama, he’s talking about the path Obama has put the country on, and how he talked to a small business owner who pointed out that between corporate tax, FICA, gas tax, sales tax on purchases, property tax, and a couple more taxes, 65% of what they made went to the government. He breathlessly and excitedly talks about how no one ever calculates taxes this way, and it is impossible to survive this way, blah blah blah. No mention of any benefits the business gets from the gov (in Mitt’s mind I’m sure that’s an oxymoron - how could GOVERNMENT BENEFIT a business? Impossible! Public roads? Never heard of 'em!).
And just a few scenes later there he is on hidden camera talking about how 47% of Americans are entitled and suck on the Government’s tit and will therefore always vote for Obama.
Never mind that anyone who doesn’t pay income tax still pays sales tax and gas tax when they buy things. Never mind that most of these people aren’t paying income tax because they make a laughably low amount of money, or take advantage of programs that aid the elderly or people with children. Never mind that the most of the top tax nonpaying states are Red.
With Trump’s recent shenanigans Romney has often stood out as one of the few voices of integrity on the Right. I do believe that Mitt is a genuine, kind, and caring human being - to those who fit into his ingroup. For people outside his ingroup? These justifications for why their suffering is the correct order of things don’t require reality to function. If you are poor, it is because of your moral failings, your mistakes.
I don’t necessarily want to call it a lack of empathy, because I don’t think these people lack empathy. For people within their ingroup, or for individuals outside that ingroup whose story is presented the right way (see movies like The Blind Side), that empathy kicks in just fine and may even be very strong. But somehow the ability to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone from an entirely different background and to understand that if they come to a different, even suboptimal decision, it is because of a different upbringing, not inherent inferiority, moral weakness, or lack of intelligence.
I think it has to do with what you are exposed to as you grow up. If you aren’t exposed to views that aren’t exactly like your own, you won’t be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes like that.
Based on what?
Different people think differently. Different people care about different stuff. Different people have different opinions about the same stuff. This doesn’t mean that everybody who disagrees with you (and, in this case, with me) is faking it.
There are people claiming that no liberals really give a shit about refugees, it’s just a signifier, we just want to be in with our tribe. They can’t or won’t believe that anyone actually disagrees with them. You’re making the same sort of argument, and that argument is still crap; and in no way ‘an honest attempt to see the other side’.
Are some people cynically using the abortion argument in order to keep voters on their side who in many ways disagree with them? Of course there are people doing that. That doesn’t mean that nobody actually cares about it.
That makes sense for Romney himself, as well as all the other wealthy Republicans. The question I have isn’t about the wealthy Republicans, but about the poor. Why is that so many of the poor seem to believe that about themselves, or at least agree at the ballot box by voting for those who want to steal from the poor to give to the rich?
Who you calling “poor”? 
they prefer the term “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
And that’s basically what it comes down to. That, and people buying the story that Republican policy is better for the economy as a whole.
Like I said, they hear all the equality, equity and fairness rhetoric, realize that it doesn’t apply to themselves, and then hear the stuff about UHC, economic policy, etc… and assume that it’s also aimed primarily at the minorities.
From there, it’s a question of scarcity- most people don’t have a lot of extra cash, so they don’t want to be taxed more, especially on something that they don’t perceive as having a benefit for themselves or people in their group.
It’s all well and good to say "I don’t mind a little higher taxes for ", because that generally implies that you have some cushion there, and that your lifestyle won’t be affected. But if you have been struggling to be successful, and you finally achieve some modicum of that success, and then you perceive that a political party wants to tax away a lot of that for programs that don’t benefit you, it’s likely that you’ll be against it.
There’s also a sort of… sour grapes(?) mentality that we see in things like student loan forgiveness, but extended a lot wider. There are people who are struggling to have enough money to get by- they may have just managed to work up into a job with health insurance, or that affords them some spare cash, etc… and resent it when one side wants to play Santa Claus (as they see it) and rain down these things unearned onto others. It’s only amplified when it’s someone who lives in a geographically distant location, or isn’t in the same ethnic group as they are. They see those things as something they had to bust their asses for, and now the Democratic party wants to give them to people in California, or blacks, or whatever, for free on the public nickel. And of course they assume that it’ll ultimately come out of their own pocket via the mechanism of increased taxes in one way or another.
That’s how they think. I’m not saying I agree, but that’s how I’ve heard it most of my life, and that’s how I still hear it. Basically the concept is that the Democrats want to play Robin Hood for other groups elsewhere with your money, and you won’t see much if any benefit.