Are you trying to make asahi’s point for him?
There is no shortage of religious fundamentalist that hate absolutely everything about you. You just don’t troll ISIS forums.
Because you probably didn’t say vile, hateful shit right in front of their faces, the way you do here.
Our experience varies.
Mine, however, does not cause me to conclude that such behavior by one Christian, or even a number of them, means I get to write off Christianity in general.
And I was not the one who called you vile; so it’s not clear to me why you’re calling me out on it.
Yep, that was me. Inexecrable would have worked as well. Once Trump appeared on the political stage, loathsome pustule of humanity just doesn’t really have the same zing to it that once did, so I’m having to find other terms for the vile dregs of society.
This is all either in the past or else future speculation. All very clean as a whistle, like you bathed in holy water and came out pristine.
It’s not about that. It’s about now and what your positions are on conservatism under trump, insurrection, the ties of your issues with current irrationalism on the right. You have to weigh in on vaccines. You have to explain why fellow righties think vaccines have invasive technology in them, why they are disrupting public meetings to advance irrational anti science political trolls against your democracy. Yours. Your democracy. Give it a thought.
On the internet no one can tell if you’re a dog right? But it’s very easy to tell if someone is being a real advocate of something or a just dragging oppositional troll. Most of the right wing stuff here is the latter. You have to address it to have intellectual cred.
Now we can say “intellectualism is elitist!” and end the thing. But I don’t think you feel that way, and I would like to be more circumspect and intelligent about it.
I’m for investigating and arresting all of the insurrectionists. I’m not aware of any ties between my issues and current irrationalism.
I’m vaccinated and encourage everyone I know to get vaccinated. There are a lot of anti vax people most of them have been ultra crunchy lefties now it seems that trump morons are making it their issue too. I don’t see why I have to make excuses for people who are anti vax. What does that have to do with being a conservative any more that liberals have to answer for every chick who put an emerald egg in their vaginas.
I’m sure we hang out in different threads. I don’t spend much time in the biden threads or many of the stupid shit a politician did threads. On the other hand I don’t see much trolling in the union threads, various employment and gun threads, or the annual federal budget threads.
As someone with a master’s degree married to someone with a PhD you may be looking in the wrong place for anti-intellectualism.
How far up the chain? To the potus? To R congress persons? If so you are not with the R party, even as a conservative. It needs explanation as to how this happens to conservatives in society even if you think you are “remote” from such matters. You are still a conservative.
Conservatives are pushing this shit like its the end of the world. You can’t just close your eyes and whistle. You acknowledge no connection between your conism and their conism?
All the cons here take advantage of the ad hominem shit posting of the shitty righties. Then you claim it’s not your business. Cute. It’s obfuscation towards an end.
Many famous liberal dragging maga personalities went to ivy league schools. Hypocrisy is on the menu at all times.
And oh those maga peeps are way into anti intellectualism. To the small intestine.
Now? Now? It’s been more like, at least, 15~20 years that it’s been bi-partisan nutbaggery.
You’re right about Charlemagne, but @eschereal is correct about the rest of it. The Roman emperors did become Christian at a certain point and much later the Western part of the Empire collapsed.
And DemonTree is right about this. It’s one of my favorite history facts. The Roman Empire split and the Eastern part survived for centuries longer.
This is an encapsulation of what I interpret @asahi to mean about conservatives. A slavish belief that “leftists” are intolerant while refusing to do anything other than support the rights of WASP men. Leftists is a bullshit term by the way. Throw in bolshevik while you’re at it.
People calling themselves conservatives are doing so. I don’t think they’ve got much in common with what were considered conservative positions until fairly recently.
What is the fucking point of this ridiculous harangue? @Oredigger77 has given no reason for your continuing to lecture him about how terrible Trumpists are. Yet you persist on this tedious finger wagging. It would be Kafka-esque if it wasn’t so pointless and impotent.
And you leftist clowns are still more scared of a Thomas Jefferson statue and actual free speech than you are of the genocidal CCP. Probably because you folks are ideologically aligned with struggle sessions and re-education camps.
The projection is strong in this one.
Ah, nice deflection. You seem to suggest that the USofA is/was historically less brutally genocidal than the PRC, or that our ethnocentrical viewpoint has genuinely become tempered over time (“ethnocentric”, by the way, is generally not a social net positive).
I actually think there’s something to this.
However, first I’ll need to cover the problem I have with this claim. I do not know of many monocultural institutions, especially not in the higher tiered universities. They all tend to value diversity, explicitly basing their acceptance policies on valuing it. They try to get people from diverse backgrounds, diverse subcultures, diverse ethnicities, and so on. And I’ve seen no indication that this strategy excludes conservatives.
However, I can agree that it does seem that conservatism and further right ideas do not seem to be represented well in these institutions. So, then, the question becomes why. Based on what you’ve said before, you seem to think universities are doing something wrong, that they are actively stifling conservative thought in some way. But I don’t accept that this must be the case.
Before I go into what I think is going on, let me quickly address some things I don’t think are the problem. I do not think there is any move to discourage conservatives from going to college. I do think there is some self-selection of conservatives choosing to go to conservative institutions, but I don’t think the number has risen proportionally. I also have not seen any sort of violence or threats of violence to force conservatives not to speak out.
So what I think is happening is that conservatism as it exists now isn’t holding its own in these settings, for some reason. It’s not successfully standing up and making its voice heard over the others.
And I think that is not because of any sort of censorship. Hence mentioning the lack of violence. The only thing being used against it is speech.
No, it’s because conservatism largely doesn’t seem to have answers to modern issues. Instead of doing what it has done in the past, and evolve, it instead has decided to remain stagnant, resulting in people instead pulling in other right wing ideologies to keep it afloat.
You may say “What about those special guests who get shouted down by protestors?” Well, look at who gets shouted down. Is it the full conservatives like, say, Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney? No, it’s the Trumpists. It’s those pulling in from the alt-right. It’s not conservatism that gets shouted down.
And that’s because what is now “mainstream conservatism” largely isn’t conservatism anymore. It’s reactionaryism. It’s anti-liberalism. It just says that the other guys are wrong. It doesn’t have answers, either.
I keep thinking back to a speech I when Reagan was running for office. He talked about how the problem with immigration was that people didn’t have money and would come over here, and then suggested allowing migrant workers. No, it’s not my preferred policy on immigration, but it’s a far cry from the idea that these people are some thread. In fact, Reagan and Bush directly argued against that.
And I don’t agree with Reagan at all. I think he did a lot of bad things. So it’s not disagreement that is the issue.
You say that people are only given the more radical, less sane right wing ideas in college. But that’s not entirely on them. That is what “mainstream conservatism” is selling. You say that they’re only seeing these ideas that they have debunked, but that’s all I see conservatives selling. They don’t have counterarguments, which is what you need to survive. They just have rhetoric.
And it is what we mostly see on this board. We see the radical stuff, the hateful stuff, the talking points, and so on. If we are seeing how conservatives think, it seems that what colleges teach are exactly right. Only a few people seem to have resisted that. You were one of them, before Trump. But, since Trump, you’ve jumped on the bandwagon at times, too. Not all the time, but you do it.
I think the problem is that conservatism as it exists doesn’t have real answers to current problems. It mostly seems to want to say to ignore the problems. And then wage a war with the left about everything, even thinks that conservatives used to think was normal.
I point back to the whole “African American” naming in the 90s. I’m referring to the whole trend to stop saying Black and instead say “African-American.” That wasn’t just the “SJWs” who used that term. No, everyone wanted to avoid offending. It wasn’t considered wrong to do that. Sure, it turns out that black people actually were fine with being called black, but people were trying. And no one was attacked for being “PC” for doing so.
I grew up in a Republican household. But what I remember has nothing in common with what is mainstream today. There’s a reason why the people who hardline “conservative news” seem like different people.
This is not to deny the history from the perspective of, say, black people. Sure, racism has been a problem for a long time, on both sides, actually. I’m not saying none of the stuff I described was there. But it wasn’t what conservatism was about, like it seems to be today.
Conservatism the way we remember it seems to be dying. It’s not evolving while staying consistent, but instead just pulling in people further right. It’s not seemingly trying to reach the middle anymore. Its answer to bigotry is to say it’s not actually bigotry. Its answer to economic hardship is for rich people to pay less taxes—something that tried and failed.
Ultimately, conservatism has always been the way just a certain culture group thinks about the world. And they are having trouble holding their own when more cultural groups are given a voice. It’s devolving into what conservatives call “identity politics”—being more about what group you belong to than the ideology.
The subject of this pitting is no longer atypical. And I don’t just mean among conservatives on this board. I mean those who identify as such in real life.
In real life, ideas can wind up not holding up. There’s no truism that there will always be a conservative group fighting. Lately, liberals have been filling in that gap, while progressives are the ones pulling leftward. Liberals put on the breaks, which is the main value in conservatism—to tell us to wait and not just run ahead, and to not discount the status quo simply because it is the status quo.
Some parts I couldn’t fit in:
I know I haven’t covered every single talking point. I didn’t get into cancel culture because, if you remove violence and threats of such, then it is just freedom of speech, and is something that conservatives never had any problem before when people were listening to them. That’s a symptom, not a cause. For cancel culture to work, the majority have to already agree that the person deserves to be cancelled. (Otherwise you’d make more money ignoring the people calling for cancelling.) So it can’t be the reason the majority doesn’t agree with conservatism anymore.
Cancel culture is part of the new right wing concept—the one where it’s all about being against anything the liberals or progressives support.
Oh, and conservatism is not bigotry. That’s not the same thing as saying there is not bigotry in conservative thought. But it’s not inherent in the ideology, and is something that was improving over time. The good conservatism I want to see rejects bigotry.
Unfortunately, that’s seeming to be more what moderatism is.
I also note that you (Sam) are Canadian. I do wonder if it’s not quite as bad up there. I do know that a huge part of Canadian national identity is being “not America.” And I know other countries do things differently: I’ve been told that, in the UK, UKIP is closer to our Republicans, and the Conservatives are closer to our liberals. I don’t think the difference is that stark in Canada, but I do think it’s not the same. I could see your conservatism being more reasonable.
Oh, and one other example of the craziness of US conservatives is, of course, the anti-vax, anti-mask stuff. There’s nothing actually conservative about that. Sure, maybe there’s something conservative about not wanting mandates. But there’s nothing conservative about believing in conspiracy theories. That’s just the reactionaryism, the anti-liberalism. Or, worse, it’s part of the authoritarianism, because dear leader said it.
And I am leaving out a lot of newer ideas about how to look through history. There are ideas I’ve never encountered from a more black perspective, for instance. And I think they have merit. But I’m doing my best to separate out conservatism and racism. I do not think any form of bigotry has a place here, but I do think conservatism does.
I hope all this makes sense. I tried to plan this out, but I realized that I’d never complete it if I did that. I already delayed a day, and that’s enough.
Exactly my point. Most of what Trump did was the antithesis of what I believe in. I’m all for sending every president, congressmen or looter who was involved with the 1/6 insurrection to prison. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop being for free trade, private ownership of guns or minimalist government intervention.
I also believe in global warming, COVID, and that its her body so its her choice. I feel no need to defend these positions except for threads that ask why someone might hold such beliefs like the recent non-bigoted reason to be against same sex marriage which isn’t so much a defence but trying to explain people I know.
Right so you bathe in holy water.
It is impossible for this to be true.
The problem is that there is a con going on with the facists and the “reasonable right wing” like a tag team where you always deny each other but the vicious unreality of the fascists is never addressed as being right wing. But it most certainly is. And you are too by your self definition. So you have to pretend there is no connection for rhetorical purposes here.
There is s connection between all right wing positions. They evolved out of each other and went out into the world to seek compatriots. Like you sometimes.
If you are of the right you need to address the rise of right wing autocracy, unreality and fantasy and the connection with the right wing project in the world to have intellectual cred as “fighting ignorance”. You need to address why you can’t vote R with more reality than to just say you are the opposite of trump. That is a meaningless obfuscation. What happened to the right that they are unreal now. It’s a big issue and it won’t go away until we either save or lose democracy. Not worth addressing because you and other reasonable republicans are so pure of heart?
I’ve read this like three times and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you saying that I am somehow morally required to do more than vote against trump and his followers because I claim to be a conservative?
He’s playing the usual SDMB clique shell game:
Board insider: “You support Trump.”
Board outsider: “This is factually incorrect. I do not support Trump.”
Board insider: “Wow, a Trump supporter AND a liar! Even worse.”
This from the people who claim to love “facts” and “good faith.” And now the fact that you’re doubly in the hole gets used to justify the shifting standards of rule enforcement, “politeness,” etc,