Drinking lead can damage people’s brains, but Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach opposes a plan to remove lead water pipes.
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In their letter, the attorneys general wrote, “[The plan] sets an almost impossible timeline, will cost billions and will infringe on the rights of the States and their residents – all for benefits that may be entirely speculative.”
Kobach repeated this nearly verbatim in a March 7 post on X (formerly Twitter).
Buttigieg responded by writing, “The benefit of not being lead poisoned is not speculative. It is enormous. And because lead poisoning leads to irreversible cognitive harm, massive economic loss, and even higher crime rates, this work represents one of the best returns on public investment ever observed.”
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You lost me here. Could you explain?
I’m guessing they meant to say supporting
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Motives is a better word than beliefs. Other than that I’ve come to the same conclusion.
Conservatives deeply depend on ideology. This is why they say everything is a slippery slope, because their own plan is to keep going with their ideology. They can’t understand that others want to do one action, without some secret grand plan to ____.
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Why do you help moderate the largest conservative Lemmy community then?
It seems you’re just helping legitimize their beliefs.
I came oh-so-close to moderating a conservative community and I am quite vocally opposed to conservatism.
I’m hoping that maybe some conservative communities on Lemmy are moderated by normal (non-conservative) people who can keep the conservatives within the bounds of their instance’s guidelines. Perhaps this is one such moderator. That would certainly be better than letting conservatives moderate a community. We’ve seen how that turns out.
I hear what you’re saying but I disagree.
I think that is the instance’s admins responsibility to deal with a community’s moderators.
I believe that moderating an extreme community’s view to make it more broadly accessible is not helping anything.
Moderating herein means kicking and banning people whose behavior is unacceptable or locking and removing individual posts and comments that are unacceptable. For instance a conservative sub may have threads on the virtues of tax cuts for the rich by relatively normal folks and threads calling for lynching black folks for imaginary crimes.
I believe the rich should pay their fair share but I sure hope someone normal is willing to allow the former and ban the latter even if the would be lynch mobs threads are couched in polite and indefinite language while they spread their lies and hate. I feel like a normal fellow might be better situated to make such a distinction than someone of a conservative bent who is looking to follow the bare letter of the law so to speak.
In theory that sounds great but if you visit the community they moderate you’ll see that they are the token leftist to legitimize them.
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In other words, for those that tldr: Conservatives could be incredibly kind and might often actually do the right thing, if they weren’t total idiots. Problem is: They believe too hard literally all the time and base their self off an ideology built on narratives, true or false.
They could be decent people, but aren’t.
Got it.
Actions speak louder than words. If you say you love and support children, but vote to take away their rights to be who they are and read what they want, you’re a bad person. If you say you support women, but vote to take away their bodily autonomy and voice, you’re a bad person. If you say you support helping the poor, but vote to decrease or eliminate social programs meant to help the poor, you’re a bad person.
But they’ll never realize that.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. -Maya Angelou
I don’t think that’s a conservative specific thing there, and if you do odds are you’re doing the same thing but privileging the ideologies and narratives you are using in a way that you don’t think they count as narratives or ideologies but as either facts, justice or something along those lines.
To put it another way, I suspect if I asked for a list of your ten mostly firmly held and allegedly defensible political beliefs and we really drilled down to the bedrock on them we’d hit some bits that are more ideology or narrative than you’d be readily comfortable to admit. Or cases where you built the position around a principle that only applies when it otherwise neatly aligns with your preferred ideologies and narratives.
For example, pro-choice people tend to be able to invoke one or more general principles that they often claim being pro-choice is an example or expression of (bodily autonomy is a popular one), but it’s shockingly common for nearly the only controversial case where they’ll apply those principles to be abortion (and I say this as someone who is pro-choice).
Kelly Oliver (philosophy professor at Vanderbilt specializing in feminism among a few other topics, ironically including ethics) once argued that feminist theory isn’t about producing true theories or false theories but rather strategic theories - in other words it’s not about whether or not it’s true but whether or not it is useful for activism. This sounds shockingly like something conservatives might say about some of their hot button claims of the moment if they were being unusually honest.