do the right wing guys think it’s like a draco malfoy thing where they’re a good guy underneath?
like when it’s like a lady and a cop and the lady seems like a normal sorta boring suburban lady
do you know what i mean. this is one of the things where if you try to ask an AI bot it yells at you
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It’s not the knitting projects at home or shooting cans in the woods people have an issue with, it’s the legislature you vote for, the way you treat people when you’re not at home, and the kinds of people you support (people in aggressive positions of authority)
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As a queer person, I don’t. You supporting a party that opposes my rights and is actively demonizing my existence. From grooming rhetoric to outright calls for the abolition for my way of life Listening to conservative politicians is frightening, scary and isolating. I’m sure you don’t think of yourself as a bigot, but every donation, vote or right wing politician you promote, you embolden those who ask seek to block my basic rights. And very often, those people succeed. Your priority for “your own self interest” at the expense of my existence does not make you a nice person.
Kind people aren’t selfish. Your actions harm me and many others like me, but you only think of yourself.
I think the point is moreso that the party you support typically is indifferent about minorities/LGBT/immigrants/poor people, etc.
This seems antithetical to the morality we are taught as children (ie: the Golden Rule) which is why people question how you generally survive in that type of relationship when both people seem to have blinders on regarding empathy for others.
Republicans are not “indifferent” about those things.
Yeah, actively trying to eradicate is not what I’d call “indifferent.”
If you vote for people who want gays to have less rights than other people, you’re not a generally kind person.
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You know for someone who acts like they care about “civil debate”, you certainly don’t engage in good-faith.
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You literally started this thread by telling us who you vote for lmao
I didn’t comment about who you voted for.
I commented on the deflection.
It’s not a deflection it’s a reflection. A purposefully and deliberately mis characterizes B’s position, so B does it back to A.
There ya go, another ad hominem attack. Can’t actually debate, just engaging in rhetoric. Now we see your true colors. You really seem generally nice from this comment /s
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Lol what a lazy response. Just straight to trolling and whataboutism, no nuance in your thought.
You might want to reevaluate how you think about yourself as a “generally nice” person. This isn’t how nice people talk to others.
You said above:
Now you’re calling someone a bigot when they said nothing bigoted. I guess when you said you were kind, it was a lie.
I am the person who made the villain comment. No, we don’t think you actively go around acting like villains from cartoons lol. But while you quietly enjoy your life, you vote for and support policies that cause direct harm to tens of millions of people. You care about the things that impact you, but not about people you don’t relate to. The people you vote for spread hateful ideas that lead supposedly good, Christian conservatives to commit violent crimes because they think the trans person they meet is automatically a pedophile.
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I vote to increase taxes every time, so very recently. Sure it would be in my best interest to hoard my money, but I care more about everyone having access to healthcare and social services, because I’m not a selfish person. Conservative policies are inherently selfish.
You cite gun violence, but right-wing politicians have absolutely no policies that aim to reduce gun violence. They oppose all forms of government social services and any gun control. When comparing violence between red and blue states/cities, per capita, red areas commit more violent crimes.
I think this is honestly a conservative misconception. i very recently considered voting for our Maori party here in the latest elections, all that stopped me was some recent controversy that called the party leader’s integrity into question. but still, I would relish the country’s minorities receiving greater representation and privilege. as a straight white cis male, I have plenty enough privilege already, even if I don’t consider my own life especially easy.
I think you replied to the wrong comment :)
no, I intended to reply to you, but perhaps I should have quoted vector in my response. i was wanting to expand on your answer, to add that it’s a misconception of conservatives that people vote for their own interests.
I guess perhaps it could have worked better as a direct reply to vector.
Please tell me that’s a typo lol
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The only way I can see to fix the healthcare costs is regulation, which conservatives vote against every time.
Enforcement of current laws is definitely an issue. Cops refuse to enforce policies they don’t like, and they send domestic abusers right back to their families to continue abusing. I am having a hard time finding statistics for the catch and release of violent criminals, do you have one that shows they comprise a significant or majority portion of violent crime? I see a lot of assumptions from conservatives that illegal immigrants cause the majority of the violent crime in the US, but I never see the data to back it up, so it just comes across as racist.
First of all, what is our current healthcare system doing if not lining the pockets of big pharma? They get to charge whatever they want for lifesaving treatments because there’s no regulations on it, and everyone is expected to just pay out the ass for insurance to maybe have it cover a portion of the bill.
More importantly though, universal healthcare is CHEAPER than our current healthcare system, so that covers getting it “under control”*. There have been countless studies showing how switching to a single-payer system would reduce costs, while still guaranteeing every citizen healthcare.
* - (Why do we need to get it under control, though? Slash a $100B off the egregiously bloated as fuck military budget and healthcare has all the funding it needs)
“Slash a 100$ billion off … military budget and healthcare has all the funding it needs.”
Pretty misleading. That 100 billion isn’t enough, you’d have to raise taxes as well.
The actual cost is on the order of 3 trillion or higher per year. Larger than the entire US federal budget.
If you simply had looked at the cost of Medicare you would have seen how preposterous the 100 billion dollar estimate is. Medicare is not completely free for users and only covers around 18 percent of the population, has expenditures in excess of 700 billion.
If what you were saying is true, how does every developed nation on Earth, except for the US, afford it?
Not to mention that universal healthcare is cheaper than the US model.
Because they have higher tax rates. Some people argue that the tax rates are actually equivalent to the US, but that only factors in income tax and ignores VAT (which the US doesn’t have at a federal level).
The claim was that a mere 100 billion would pay for it, proving that claim false does not affect the fact that other countries have it.
“The universal healthcare model is cheaper than the US model”
By about 10 percent. The problem with a lot of analysis of Medicare for all plans is that they assume that it would be able to run at the same cost ratio as it does now. But Medicare currently does not pay for the full cost of services, it’s essentially subsidised by the private insurers. Replacing private insurance would require increasing the Medicare payout percentage or else hospitals would lose money, and have to cut services.
Additionally if you actually poll the public, they do not want to pay the additional taxes to fund this universal healthcare. The US is in a weird position were a chunk of the population has government insurance, but the bulk is pushed onto employers and that’s basically the best place to put it if you want to minimise the burden on the public.
https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/gun-violence-by-state/#states-with-highest-gun-violence
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm
Illinois doesn’t even rate in the top half of states.
Between 2008 and 2016 115 domestic terror incidents were far-right inspired, 19 were far-left.
Since 9/11 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths were caused by right wing radicalism.
From the KKK, to Oklahoma City, to Jacksonville and El Paso, the vast majority of politically/religious motivated gun violence were far-right inspired.
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If your talking about the firearm mortality rate, the top 4 states for firearm mortality are also the top 4 for homicide rate… there are a lot of similarities between the two and a strong correlation.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm
Progressives routinely vote in ways that conservatives would consider against our interests. Fot example, I don’t have kids and never will, but I always vote for policies that will improve schools, pay teachers more, etc, even though technically I’m spending money on something that doesn’t benefit me directly. It’s just that progressives see that we all benefit from having a healthy, happy, well-educated population, while conservatives only care if they (or maybe a handful of family/friends) benefit and don’t care about anyone outside of that circle, particularly.
I vote against my own interests nearly every election. I try to vote for what I think is best for the country as a whole, and if that is unclear, I try to think “What decision will my kid want me to have made looking back in 30 years?”
Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it’s all good?
Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like “yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don’t think any of the solutions I’ve heard will work.” Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.
This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as “right wing” earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as “convenient dismissal of the real issues.” No, it’s not convenient dismissal, it’s literally a disability: Our supposed “right wing” friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are “powerless”) without any understanding of what the consequences may be.
Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same “convenient dismissal” of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That’s harder to say, but it’s an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we’re doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.
It’s painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there’s a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn’t actually understand or care about those, there isn’t really any reason for them to hold up the label of “right wing.”
You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.
Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don’t want anybody else to get hurt along the way.
I would say one word covers a great deal of this (but certainly not all of it) - Tribalism.
People engaging politics in the same way as they engage sports, taking sides, living it almost entirelly at an emotional level, unquestioning of the superficial ideas (at times no more than slogans) they parrot and with thinking at best relegated to a supporting role as a “solver of puzzles” to come up with counter-“arguments” to those of the “other” side.
Whether one thinks oneself Left or Right (and, frankly, if you haven’t tought through your politics in my opinion you’re not really politically aware enough to be either), really analysing the pap one is fed by politicians in light of one’s personal principles and of “how will this lead to the World I would like to live in” is usually quite the eye openner.
I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one’s own eyes.
Tribalism is part of our nature. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It’s a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.
Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who “aren’t into politics” but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There’s nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that’s the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it’s terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.
How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?
I wouldn’t be so sure that Sports tribalism is healthy.
Tribalism in Sports repeatedly leads people down certain mental pathways in contexts involving many people divided in groups and were one has chosen a groups, as well as personal identification with a group based on things with would otherwise be irrelevant, which familiarizes people with such ways of thinking about oneself and others.
Because the choice of the mental pathways we use when confronted with a situation is not conscious, it leads itself to us favouring what’s familiar from similar contexts, so repeatedly leading people down the tribalist route in Sports can be an insidious way to predispose them to go down the exact same route in contexts were the same kind of pattern exists, such as nationalism, politics, race and so on.
All this, by the way, is not too dissimilar to some of the psychological levers used by Modern Marketing.
Consider the possibility that the culture created around the circus both feeds from and feeds in the equally mindless cultures that have been created in things like politics and nationalism.
The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don’t think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.
Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne’er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don’t even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.
Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.
I mainly agree with you on that.
I expect people might learn to “decorate” those things differently (i.e. cheerful well humoured competitiveness rather than the kind were the fans of the opposing team are almost treated as “badies”) but I doubt most people will ever loose or overcome what are probably well rooted instincts.
I love your comment. As someone who’s perpetually hung up on others’ misaligned discourse on major issues, it feels so refreshing to see it pointed out and articulated better than I could’ve done.
out of curiosity, did you use a bot to write this? something about the frequency with which you use their username to refer to them stood out to me.
if that’s not the case, I wonder why it is that using a proper name instead of a pronoun or stand-in reference jumps out to me as unnatural…
I’ve just been on the internet a long time and pride myself on writing with precision. I am a rather bot-like writer, Narrrz.
I’ve noticed a tendency of late by some in confusing step-by-step building of arguments in written form with the product of Chat AIs.
Don’t know if it’s meant as an insult, is a way to try and plant doubt in the minds of the audience without actually addressing the argument being made, or if it’s people genuinelly not being familiar with structured thinking (which, for example, tends to be common amongst scientists and engineers because of their work) hence feeling it’s machine-like.
This really is how people trained in analytical thinking will figure things out, build theories and put together solutions and if you’re any good at it will most definitelly not include “decorations” such emotionally charged language.
(The funny bit is that Chat GPT and the like would be less unemotional, as those things are text-assemblers incapable or rationalization and trained in general language samples, so they actually fluff-up text like most people).
Are you possibly reading far too much into someone who simply doesn’t want to debate politics at the moment?
“Left-wing identity and culture is almost the same as right-wing culture”
I fully agree, both embrace vacuous and contradictory ideals, care little for facts, and have a streak of individuals that really really want to kill.
Posted 22 minutes ago… and already playing the victim. Big surprise. Must be so traumatic being you.
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At least they aren’t suggesting people are bigots to insult them when they said nothing bigoted.
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Clever? No. Factual? Yes. Keep proving what a nice guy you are though.
The problem is that they fall in a false dilemma.
Evaluating the world and the people around you with labels so generic as “left wing” or “right wing” is not useful at all. Another problem is being too politicized, as I think it can damage your relationships with others.
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That’s not a fair representation of the people you are talking about. We can agree to disagree about a lot of things. But not about the humanity, dignity, and freedom of people.
We will never agree to disagree about other people’s humanity. Being willing to do so would make us monsters.
Are you referring to the recognition of the problems involving those concepts or the solutions proposed to fix them?
We can have different approaches and views about a variety of problems, but the concepts would be the same.
It doesn’t mean we should always make an agreement about how to solve them, but the idea of treating others who don’t think like me as “monsters” just because they are different is populist and dishonest.
Hating ideas is not the same as hating people.
My entire life, for pretty much every progressive issue, has been filled with people saying “We agree with your cause but not the way you are going about it.” literally no matter what “going about it” looks like.
Every effective proposition is shot down. There is no “solution” that is ever acceptable. Because changing the status quo is always interpreted as too radical.
So… I’m not keen on playing these kinds of stupid games?
What’s one example? Maybe we can analyze what went wrong.
Police violence, particularly against people of colour. Protests? Too disruptive! Literally just kneeling? Too disrespectful!
Even MLK Jr. mentioned this in his letter from a Birmingham jail:
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Ironic. By representing a differing view as “manipulating definitions” like this, you pretend I’m engaging in the conversation maliciously, and completely ignore what I’m saying. You aren’t going to get closer to understanding other people unless you engage in good faith.
In the eyes of progressives, conservative politicians undermine the dignity of minorities. You might not agree with that, you might not care about that, you might simply value other things more.
And cut the hyperbole. I haven’t tried to remove your humanity. Do you really not know what that is like?
Calling someone a monster definitely dehumanizes them. Calling someone a monster for impersonal reasons simply because of their membership in a particular group, even moreso.
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So you value you personal wealth ad comfort more than the ability of minorities to live their lives free of discrimination.
I don’t get why you get so insulted when people point this out?
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So to clarify, you don’t support policies that help other people achieve those goals for themselves (assuming they’re neutral for you)?
And who wins if we agree to disagree? Is it perhaps you?
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It’s not about “winning” a debate. Like ??? We don’t conceptualise “debate” that way.
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Have you? It has absolutely nothing to do with “winning” anything.
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Being a man and giving the answer for a woman definitely confirms you are conservative.
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Imagine making downvote edits on a barely voted on comment at all. Your insecurity is glaring.
Are you married and do you have any children together? Do you consider her or yourself traditional in relationships (however you define traditional)?
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I asked because I believe marriage and children can add pressures to a relationship, and may test right wing beliefs.
For example: What if your wife changed her mind about being a SAHM and wanted to continue working after having a child? How would you both handle household chores and parenting duties?
More examples: If your wife became pregnant but it was an ectopic pregnancy, would you support her having an abortion? Would you support an abortion if the baby was diagnosed with anencephaly while still in the womb?
Would you use IVF if you had trouble conceiving? Would you use birth control to plan the size of your family?
It’s easy to see eye to eye about hypothetical situations but maybe less easy when it’s real life.
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I gotta be honest dude, what makes you consider yourself right wing?
Your GF is in STEM, you’d support her continuing her career if she wanted, you split chores fairly… none of that is things I would consider “traditional” or “conservative”.
Policy wise, you’re mostly vague. Economically you don’t seem to have any actual opinion beyond “things aren’t working as they are”. You’re pro-choice(Yes, even if you would only choose to abort in a dire situation, that’s still a pro-choice position), which is not a right wing position.
Like, what actually makes you right wing? Based on what you’ve said so far, I don’t get it. Are you secretly racist as fuck or something?
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Would you mind answering his question though? I really would also love to hear your thoughts.
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I’m literally trying to have a productive conversation with you, dude. Nothing you’ve presented so far paints you as a conservative, so I want to know what your actual reasons for being one are. From there we could actually discuss things and maybe we could influence each others perspectives on matters, but we can’t do that if you get defensive the minute you’re asked questions.
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That is absolutely not the Pro-choice position. Pro-choice literally means desire is the only criteria that needs to be met (the pro-life position is that desire is necessary but not sufficient). If it actually was as you described, then no one would have had a problem with any of the post-Dobbs laws.
You seem to have this bizarre interpretation of what a conservative means. It’s not the 1950s anymore, literally nobody lives like that and hasn’t since your grandmother.
An ectopic pregnancy would risk her life and her future fertility. Babies with anencephaly do not survive for long after birth, being stillborn (around 75% of them) or dying within hours or days; this pregnancy wouldn’t risk the mother’s life, though, but would be traumatic.
States with very strict abortion laws or where abortion is illegal would prevent your wife from having an abortion in the your and my scenarios. She might be forced to delay the abortion until she ruptured in the ectopic scenario, or be forced to give birth to a dead baby or.one who died in a few hours. There are other dangerous scenarios when an abortion would be the humane option. This is something to keep in mind when voting or supporting candidates. ETA: I didn’t mean this to sound like a lecture. I was just pointing this all out because you actually don’t sound ring wing based on how you described your beliefs.
This is false, every law has medical exceptions. Journalists wildly reported that doctors would be too hesitant to perform medically indicated abortions, but this is simply malpractice not any requirement by the law.
Has she already agreed to this?
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The cognitive disconnect some in this thread would have to hear that I’m in a gay relationship and I’m somewhat right wing, whereas my boyfriend loves to watch Jimmy Dore and Tucker Carlson. We’re also both immigrants. We disagree on a lot(also agree on some things) but someone reaching different conclusions to me doesn’t make them dumb or a bad person.
It’s not really a cognitive disconnect. Most of us know that some members of a minority group will vote against the interests of their own identity. Perhaps because they have some other trait such as wealth that insulates them from the consequences of their politics, or perhaps because they are ignorant. But Quislings have always existed, we know, it’s not a shock.
My basis for my principles are not my own interest but rather my moral principles. There are plenty of Republicans I oppose, but also some I support, such as Rand Paul
Don’t worry, I’m down voting you, you racist Nazi fuck.
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Bro thought he was actually adding something worthwhile to the conversation smh