I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Yeah, it hasn’t been overrun by Russian troll farms and AI yet like reddit and facebook
Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it’s going to, but… Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It’s a different group here.
Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others’ needs.
Reality is left leaning…
It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.
Reality is left leaning
I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It’s truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.
To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.
I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They’re going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can’t claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.
What’s a tankie? I keep seeing it.
I had to look it up too. Apparently it’s an authoritarian leftist. Thinks state-socialism was a good thing. As while most leftists are more of the democratic, market, and anarchist varieties.
State socialism is a good thing, what tankies promote is something else, they’re fascist that can’t accept that fact because it would mean having something in common with the fascists in the USA, a country that they hate so much that they’re ready to deny reality to have an anti USA opinion.
They’re authoritarian. Not fascist. There is a difference. Even if both groups are more dedicated to authoritarianism than anything else. I would not be caught dead voluntarily anywhere with a fascist. While I disagree heavily with ML communist I might associate with them a little bit. But just never give them power.
I’m confused, and you seem to be a lot more familiar with the term. I read the wiki link that explains tankies. I don’t personally know any left leaning people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes. Maybe because of my America-centric viewpoint and where things are today, but typically people who are economically left are also socially and politically left (equal opportunity is more important than individual freedoms), which is very anti-fascist. I’ve heard people say how great a true communism could be if it were possible, but no one’s ever made it past a dictatorship to get there.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right, and think someone has achieved a communist utopia without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it. Tankies promote authoritarian views similar to fascists but with a different economics view (not even that different some times), hence they prefer the dictatorships like USSR (in these days even Putin, which is idiotic), North Korea, China; over what they perceive as imperialist, the USA (I agree on calling it imperialistic and disliking it, but not on considering it worse than dictatorships).
I’m a communist which likes state socialism, but what is and was present in those dictatorship (ignoring the authoritarian side which I despise) is state capitalism.
Thank you for taking the time to explain! I appreciate you!
Thanks for explaining for me, that’s exactly what I meant, I just didn’t have the time to reply!
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it
The communist utopia needs authoritarianism to work
The confusion comes from so much mass media that equates socialism with communism. They’re orthogonal concepts! Saying socialism is the same as communism is like saying beer-making is exactly the same as cheese-making. Anyone who understands what beer and cheese are would be like, “I’m sorry, what‽”
The best way to think of socialism is that’s it’s a governance strategy that can be used wherever you want. Want everyone to pay taxes in order to fund and deliver government-run firefighting services? That’s socialism. Want to do the same with the military? Socialism. Whenever the government is delivering some good or service by way of taxpayer dollars that’s socialism.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems. You can have socialist government constructs under either capitalism or communism. It’s just that communism doesn’t really have the flexibility to provide goods or services in any other way than via the government.
Then there’s countries like China that claim to be communist (and the Right loves to call them that) but really, they’re more capitalist than communist. What they do have that most communists and fascist governments have is authoritarianism.
That authoritarianism is what fascists and “tankies” have in common: Fascists support an authoritarian, pseudo-capitalist government while “tankies” support an authoritarian, pseudo-communist government.
I appreciate your break down on this, I feel like I get so confused with auth/fasc terms
people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes.
Congratulations: That, and only that, is a tankie. It is a good practical defintion for the term.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right
As I see it, tankies are just the same as the Trumpers. You can’t really say where they stand socially and politically, because they do not have a coherent opinion or ideology. Everyone who opposes their favorite regime is WRONG, and everything their favorite regime does is RIGHT. Bonus points for every action and opinion that hurts “woke lefties”, because the favorite regimes of tankies are all inevitably incompatible with progressive ideas and ideologies.
without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
Imagine the answer a Trumper would give when you ask them if they don’t know about Trump’s corruption and character. The tankies answer just the same in response to allegations in regard to corruption and character of their favorite regimes:
First of all, none of that is true, because the woke lefties, the media, and everyone are all corrupt, and lying. And what is true, is all a well played move of brilliant 5D chess which will save us all, because the supposed “corruption” is actually all part of a very smart and deliberate system of ploys and strategems which the woke lefties just don’t understand.
Now, do the tankies and Trumpers truly believe that? Who knows. Doesn’t really matter anyway. What is clear is that both of those “ideologies” are dumb idiots.
Thinks Stalin was cool and Lenin was correct to break the short lived democracy of the USSR. The rest is details.
Basically authoritarian leftists that are caricaturized as worshipping the Soviet Union
People who cheer when others point out flaws in USA but start screaming when flaws in Russia or China are pointed out.
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Thanks! I thought it was Lemmy specific slang.
Makes sense. I may have heard the term once or twice before, but here, I come across it almost daily.
Nah it’s been going on for probably more than a decade
I gotcha
The super rich are usually highly educated but they live in such a homogenous bubble that they’re opinions on the majority of society should be entirely discounted. They usually have a total lack of empathy for people and vote for politicians with the same attitude. I have met some super rich people who try very hard to go against the grain and not fall into that mindset, but something about the need for protecting your money and lifestyle usually promotes an untrustworthy and skeptical view of everyone in their lives including their own family.
The political vibe on Lemmy isn’t really a new thing. Reddit had it 15 years ago. Good forums and IRC channels had it before that. It’s been part of the “golden age” of every online social medium
Eventually, teenage edgelords find start taking up too much space. Shortly after that, the far-right turn up to prey on them.
The people who made the platform good in the first place leave and the cycle begins anew.
Just cause I’m a nerd dusnt mean I can spell correctly
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Theres a difference. While nerds are often book smart, we often have social difficulties.
“tens”
“You can tell by the grammar, the spelling”
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Lol! I am totally a nerd
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lol when was it apolitical? As far back as 2010 it was getting mentioned on TV by liberal media for starting the Restoring Truthiness movement.
Your memory is awful, or you haven’t been on it that long and are just making up its history to suit yourself. The earlier days of reddit’s politics were mostly liberal. Although liberals were significantly more awful on social issues back then than they are today.
Do you realise how dehumanising and ignorant you’re being? You’re just using stereotypes of your specific country to generalise everyone you disagree with.
Underestimating your “rivals” never goes well, as reality is often more complex than “we empathetic genuises they dumb psychos”
If anyone is basing their morals specifically just to go against their “rivals”, I would seriously question that person’s ethics, empathy, and reasoning skills. I’m absolutely serious about that. I would not trust that person in real life.
I would also have little sympathy for anyone who makes their own life worse just to get one in on their “rivals”. You should always think how a new law might expand in 5-10 years, and not just focus on the current emotions.
If someone who you considered to be a truly terrible person got into power next, would you feel comfortable with those groundwork protections being seen as changeable? Would you be ok with that terrible person having that level of say over your life, knowing that they would get away with it?
If you hypothetically start messing with things like your country’s ground-level human rights, it’s likely to only be a matter of time until everyone is effected by it in unpleasant ways. Everyone thinks these changes will magically stop before it hits them, but I would strongly recommend for these people to brush up on history again. How has that gone in the past?
Politics shouldn’t be some lame “gotcha” game because politics effect the real lives of many people. If anyone wants to do “gotcha” games, there are many places for those that won’t possibly end with someone dead. That “someone” may be a stranger today, but it could be your child, spouse, or best friend next time.
Ah, I forgot you’re probably American.
Then forget about what I said, you’re ruled by a party with two colors, two letters and stupid followers
Not even close. Do you project this anger on complete strangers all the time?
I was referring to things like labor law changes. It’s fine when it’s someone else to a lot of people, but those people are silly to think that their jobs would be the one exclusion.
Not even close? Bro Biden is at most a little more center-leaning than Trump
I’m not in the US haha.
I don’t vote based on parties or teams. I vote for the changes that I want to see.
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…I am not funding the right wing. I am building a better world one line of code and one circuit at a time.
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Well first off software isn’t just flowing rectangles connected to internet tubes. Many of us work in Industrial/Chemical/Civil control systems. Like me. There is a lot of thought that goes into making sure what you flush doesn’t just pour on the ground. I made a decision early in my career that it was more important to me that we don’t drown in our own waste vs making sure slack integrated well with outlook.
As for how I would go about changing stuff the answer is I do it everyday. Can do it a lot faster if the rest of you people stayed the hell out of my way.
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Praise after attacking me means nothing.
Get off the wrong internet spaces and you’ll start meeting the right kinds of nerds.
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If it smells like shit everywhere you go, change your shoes.
Are those groups right wing, or just centrists that don’t react well to people trying to push far left ideals in their spaces?
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Just very, very rightist.
progression tends not to be conservative
I’m afraid future will be conservative nevertheless due to the simple fact that they’re the only ones making kids. I’m liberal myself but I don’t have kids and will never have so my traits don’t pass to the next generations. The conservative neighbours with 7 kids on the other hand…
Politics being genetic, of course.
What?
Politics aren’t genetic.
But they ARE communal. Where you grow decides 90% of what you believe in.
It’s actually why I disagree with the top comment chain that smarter means more left leaning. I think it’s more that left leaning communities have better education standards and lead to smarter generations. Cause and effect reversed.
The ability to propagate the politics depends mightily on the success of the community though. It’s sort of the other side of the ‘brain drain’ principle-- if people have to leave the community for educational or economic opportunity, they’re probably not going to be able to reconstruct the same echo chambers.
Even when you see a preserved group within a larger population (think of Chinatowns and Little Italies), they’re inherently getting a lot more cultural exchange than back in the home country.
A lot of the most self-destructive policies (neglecting education, running the environment into the ground, skate-where-the-puck-was-in-1972 economic policy) are just begging for decades of brain drain. The kids are going to leave because there’s simply nothing there but the Gizzard Extraction Plant, and that got automated in 2032.
In some ways yes but it can have the opposite effect too. I know lots of left leaning people who grew up in super religious/conservative families and hate everything about their beliefs.
What top comment chain? They’re all talking about Reddit censoring leftists, not talking about the intelligence of any faction. The most I’ve seen are people making fun of the right, but that’s to be expected.
This is the thread’s first reply chain if you sort by top:
https://lemmy.world/comment/1614009
Federation may make things wonky I guess.
Okay. I read that post, nowhere did it come off as patronizing at all, and it holds people accountable foe having basic knowledge which is an expectation of most adults in society, so I don’t see how the anti-intellectualist garbage is in any wa valid here.
If you take in account that they’re raised in their parents’ household it’s not ridiculous
Is that controversial? Look around…
I don’t know. I think it depends more on where they grow up and who/what they’re exposed to (in person and online). At the high school I work at, we have a bunch of lgbtq+ teens whose conservative parents have no idea they’re queer or go by a different name. But I also don’t live somewhere like Wyoming with a much higher conservative population. I live in a college town in a (barely) blue county surrounded by red counties in an ultimately very blue state.
I hope we find a way to kill the online radical right pipeline and continue to expose more teens to other ideas, other cultures, and other ways of life, and maybe it won’t matter so much who their parents are.
A blue county surrounded by red counties in an ultimately very blue state
Tell me you live in California without telling me you live in California
;)
Speaking of Reddit, here’s an overused response that needs to be left behind with all the other unoriginal crap responses.
Only if we can kill the online radical left pipeline too. Too many tankies
The thing about that is, if they’re ignorant, their kids will be ignorant too. And what that adds up to is just the same thing we’ve got: a large group of people who are subject to whatever momentary persuasion happens to reach them on any given day, and a political/ruling class that can work with that just fine, so they are taking steps to hamper education sufficiently that this can endure for an indeterminate amount of time before we all burn.
What those large populations do react to, is missing a meal or three. And so far, these aristocrats seem to understand that whatever else they try to pull, they must always service the fundamentals: bread and circuses.
See you at the coliseum.
But if that logic held wouldn’t religion tend to increase instead of decrease?
Yeah it probably will. We’ll see in the next few decades. Aging population and low birthrates are much bigger problems that most people realize. Increasingly small amount of workers has to cover the living costs of the increasing numbers of retirees.
Well by definition right?
Progressive outlook means your open to new ideas, exploring new territory, open to concept that challenge what you think and know, and gives you the ability to push boundaries, make new discoveries and try new things.Conservative outlook on the other hand means you are content and safe with the familiar, doing things the way they have always been done because its tried and true, however this means if they feel unconfortable or threatened by ideas which are going to change the way the live and how things work which makes them dig their heels in and get defensive.
The progressive/conservative axis has nothing to do with the economical left/right, it was only forcefully merged in the USA because they have only two parties.
I find it so ironic that the comment above you is literally saying that being progressive means challenging what you [think you] know, but you are being downvoted by (I assume) people who call themselves progressive, without any discussion.
Reality has a well known left leaning bias.
Conservatives and their politics do not have equal status. In this climate, “both sides” is toxic and suggest each is equally supported and viable. They are not. The right is an incredibly hateful minority end should be treated as such.
This actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people are using Lemmy either because they prefer federated web platforms to centralized, which makes it antithetical to corporate interests, or because they’re opposed to Reddit’s API policy, which was a blatant move to squeeze more money out of their users. Either way, Lemmy’s appeal is very anti-capitalist, and since opposition to capitalism is a generally left-wing philosophy, I can totally see why most Lemmy users would be left-wing.
This is my thought as well. Lemmy isn’t what everyone is looking for. It’s a free open source software project for creating a decentralized federated network of content aggregators. For most people that sentence doesn’t make any sense nor do they really care. They just want a site they can doom scroll for hours.
The people who choose to use Lemmy are people who care about open source projects, care about decentralization of online platforms, or both. These types of people by their very nature support groups of people coming together collectively to do something big.
A collection of people working together towards a common goal without a strict hierarchy. You could say these people are community focused. Maybe we could call that communityism or something. Where people make rules as a group, or a union you could say. So yeah, no idea where the left lean is coming from.
“communityism” was somewhat the goal of reddit by having subreddits but still site owners has all the control over you. Lemmy is a free software and many free software projects interact with the userbase with such a community. Before this reddit thing, Free software enthusiasts used lemmy. Same goes with mastodon users before twitter was bought by elon. Now i can see when whatsapp does something shit(maybe) and people porting over to federated and decentralised E2EE matrix for instant messaging.(or maybe they just switch to telegram)
Honestly I came here just a few days ago, right after Reddit admins removed that r/place guillotine. I wouldn’t say that I am very far to the left, but I do enjoy living in something close to a social democracy. I wouldn’t be happy in a place like the United States for example.
Perfectly understandable
Maybe Lemmy was like this at the very start and is what helped Lemmy kick off, but I think a lot of people are looking for an alternative to Reddit. I think you’re going to see a lot more people coming here for the content, not the politics of it all.
Hey, I’m on TV!
This has been my running theory as well. Wonderful to read all of the input on this thread.
Well, I don’t oppose capitalism and here I am, trying to evade echo chambers and reading everyone’s points
To be sure, you don’t have to be anti-capitalist to want to use Lemmy. I’m just saying that it’s very appealing to anti-capitalists.
"I’ve noticed that lemmy as a whole has much more moral, empathetic individuals than reddit (outside of political servers of course)
I think you’ll find a lot more leftists interested in platforms that are not powered solely by money and profit. Lemmy, much like Mastodon and other federated platforms, only need instances to run to be usable. It doesn’t require millions of dollars to keep it afloat.
Generally speaking centrist and right wingers, especially in Western countries, tend to be very capitalist. They only understand the value in terms of money.
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It’s in the name really.
And no, I witnessed this with the internet itself post 2000. Get off my lawn 😜
That’s not really true. The right created Gab, and Ruqqus, and Voat. And they managed to hijack the U.S. legal system which the left can barely understand, let alone influence in any appreciable way.
A good chunk of the left (not the Dems, the actual left) understands the US legal system. It’s just that it’s hard to win in a pay-to-play system when everyone who can pay is against you.
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Maybe because on reddit you have an absolute fuck ton of right wing propaganda bots.
Thankk you. The Overton window has been forcibly molded to what would’ve been the mid- Right when I was a kid growing up (90s-00s). This is because of Fox News. And then social media propagandists have tried ripping it to the extreme right, aka alt-right.
I imagine a lot of what younger people think of as left/liberal was very much a moderate view point just a generation ago.
So when you move to a new medium not propagandized yet (or at least a new venue like Lemmy) you might find that organic discourse is a lot more sane, tempered, and moderate.
Remember during COVID, some people thought washing your hands is being left.
Remember when people thought that a virus sweeping through the human race was politically affiliated?
While this is hilarious and I want it to be true, can you pass any source on it?
Uhh, I don’t have a direct source , I think it was a German from the afd on twitter or a festival(Corona Demo), I don’t have an X account anymore and don’t want to create a new one to search it.
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This is the actual Republican platform. They don’t care a whit about what we consider to be ‘problems’. The only thing they think is problematic is that they might not have power, and that we might have power. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
It seems as though the only “problem” that the modern American right are concerned about is how to ensure they have unquestioned power and authority and that noone ever oppose them.
You are absolutely correct. For Republicans, in the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
That is quite true as well. Lemmy gets Russian shills on Ukraine coverage worse than Reddit though. I don’t know if that would be tankies or Russian trolls.
I’ve noticed several pro-china shill accounts as well. Fortunately their attempts at astroturfing are made in China, very obvious and poorly done.
You have to appreciate their stupid confidence though. It’s entertaining.
Yeah, but I have to block it just to save my sanity. Saw one of them denying genocide and when called out I got a pretty collage of economic statistics about why the US sucks balls and China rules…I’m not even American.
I’ve blocked a few as well. No sense wasting your time with fantasy posters who conveniently ignore the issues of their own country. As if we don’t get videos of people being sealed inside apartment buildings, live meat markets, and other insanities. I’m American and, while some states want to erode history because they’re just as thin skinned as these Chinese propagandists, at least we can talk about slavery, trail of tears, Tulsa riot, and other negatives without threat of prison and hopes of social progress. Tiananmen Square though? Ha.
I didn’t see any specific “propaganda bots”, just bots regurgitating anything that was posted
Because they are meant to seem like you’re talking to a human. Bot/troll farms are a thing.
Anti-corporate platforms don’t generally appeal to people that built and uphold the existing corporate status quo.
The first wave here were anticapitalists, anarchists or communists. The second wave are the most anti-corporate “liberals”.
Probably because this migration may be related to the anti-corpo sentiment, which is more common in leftist circles
Left and right are two stupid categories built up by propaganda, get them out of your head and start to think on your own terms
Lemmy is exactly as left leaning as Reddit was before the wave of propaganda and bots emboldened the right wing crazies to think they were the majority or welcome. I remember the falsely inflated upvotes that made those morons think they were the “silent majority”.
reddit had given into the “work the refs” strategy of the American right wing. That artificially elevated the voices of the right and suppressed the voices of the left. It’s actually the case when you look at surveys and voting behaviors that right wing ideas are abysmally unpopular.
So when we’re on an actually free platform that doesn’t have an “engagement” based algorithm driving anger and division, with no one putting their thumb on the scale (or people who try getting defederated), “leftist” ideas come up.
The confusion reflected in the OP is the obvious outcome of the post Fairness Doctrine “both sides” media landscape. There really aren’t as many right wing people as left wing. We are legion.
Federated sites overlap with leftist-adjacent interests. Software freedom, opposition to Facebook, weird illustrated porn, that sort of thing. Even if we’re not leftists - we’re the people who heard about Lemmy and went “oh, like Mastodon.”
Many leftists were also familiar with Mastodon, because they saw Twitter as a harassment engine. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results. Even before Elmo took over, Twitter was a continuous source of misery by design, if not on purpose. Now it’s definitely on purpose. And it’s been tilted against leftists, specifically, for a long damn while.
Some people are here because the mainstream options were a threat to their physical safety.
Meanwhile, right-wing assholes aren’t leaving Twitter until they run out of victims. They just want an outgroup to yell at. They don’t even like alternatives made for them specifically, because they can’t stand each other, either. When they get tired of suffering their own company they’ll migrate over to Threads. And then endlessly whine that Threads is “bias” against them, no matter how blatantly Zuck ignores their abuse and silences their victims.
Reddit was in a damningly similar situation, long before Spez decided to burn down every scrap of trust and goodwill. Some of us have been waiting on a better alternative for ten fucking years. There wasn’t one. There still isn’t. The bastards in control just made reddit itself worse, in ways that make even passive use feel like a failure and a betrayal. Spez could personally hunt me down and kick me in the groin, and it wouldn’t leave me any less likely to waltz back in with a smile on my face. Dumb bastard made insane demands, killed the best interfaces, told us stupid lies, threw away our money, declared protest powerless, and threatened the people who do all of the fucking work on his empty box of a website… then says ‘they’ll come crawling back.’ Nooo shit the first people out were principled self-organizing curmudgeons.
That aside:
People here reasoning from what they pretend “conservative” must mean are actively doing harm. Political conservatism obeys none of the other dictionary definitions. It’s just a label. It’s the label chosen by generations of influential public figures whose general philosophy is “Well someone has to be the king.” That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default. That’s why dealing with it is such frustrating bullshit.
“Well someone has to be the king.” That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default.
Fun fact: if you’re raised in a chaotic environment of abuse, distrust, and neglect, you can go blissfully free of the need for leadership for the low, low price of CPTSD! I assume that this leaderless way of thinking can be imparted to children without truama, but I only know how I got there. For better or worse, I’ve never trusted or craved authority because my formative authorities were infinitely untrustworthy and unsafe.
It is possible. My childhood wasn’t without trauma, but I’ve never had PTSD. My parents taught me to question rules and edicts from on-high. When I would do so with my parents, they were almost always able to articulate reasons why we did things one way and not another. When I did so with friends’ parents, some teachers, and most other adults, I got abusive bullshit spewed at me till I submitted to their defacto authority.
My parents were safe, but authority figures in general could not and should not be trusted.
principled self-organizing curmudgeons
I’ve never been more proud to be categorized!
Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results.
I don’t know if you strung that set of words together yourself or read it somewhere, but I had never quite heard it put that way before. Very succinct. Sorry, I’m very into language, sentences are like flowers to me and that’s a particularly nice blossom.
Re “conservatives,” it’s an extremely frustrating word because of how it’s been misused. I took Intro PoliSci once, my teacher was an open Marxist like me, and he taught us a non-loaded, non-controversial, non-toxic definition of political Conservatism - it was along the lines of, “Conservatives believe that societal change should be done slowly, with careful consideration, with as little disruption to the existing society as possible.” - and in all honesty, I once knew a few people who fit that description pretty good. They are long dead now, and I considered them devils at the time we knew each other, but I wish they were around right now, because I know we would all pretty much agree about all this bullshit - we spent a lot of time debating in places like this, and we got into a lot of what ifs. I don’t believe any of them would pinch their nose for the current leader of our (Canadian) Tories.
I’m not saying, if we were to apply your maxim about “observed results” to the matter, that that is what Conservatism is “perfectly designed” to do, but that’s more or less what the word actually means, and what the traditional branding of Conservatism has been; neither a desire to anachronistically cosplay the worst parts of the past, nor a desire to pointlessly harm life (another word they have barbarized to the point of uselessness), is actually an ideological feature of the traditional Conservative political body. In the 1950s the SBC approved of abortion. Look it up if you don’t believe me - there was once a time when they really did believe that life was precious. Jimmy Carter was one of em.
It’s the most fundamental aspect of how the modern Right uses routine gaslighting to sell their baldfaced neo-aristrocrat sceheme, because whatever individual opinions modern Conservatism might share with the GOP Nixon admin that started the EPA - an institution with a foundational intent so thoroughly conservative that they should be running CPAC - they are the ones attempting to radically change society in as short a time as possible.
If we go back to my Marxist professor’s definition, my Marxist ass is generally the most conservative one in most of the rooms I occupy.
I absolutely stole that from somewhere else. It had a similarly revelatory effect and has been wedged in my brain ever since. (Oh hey, I made a note of who to blame: r4b1d0tt3r, MD.)
Not to speak ill of the dead, but… there’s every chance the reasonable bastards you knew would update their bullshit and be even worse. I think your professor did you a disservice in exactly the way I’m sore about. Fascists are conservative. Fascists are hyper-conservative. That never means they’re extra-vigilant against change. They openly demand transformative destruction of existing society, so they can reinvent something that’s always been around. If that sounds contradictory it’s a side effect of how it’s total fucking nonsense. They’re just saying words. It’s not a rational worldview. It’s the innate tribalism of the human animal, cranked to eleven via modern rhetorical gimmicks.
“Branding” is the only place conservatism makes any goddamn sense, because it’s a story they tell. They’re lying. They’re just saying words. When you were in college their reputation was bullshit they made up about times before you were born, and when you were born their reputation was bullshit they made up about when your parents were young. Right now they’re surely selling bullshit about twenty-odd years ago. I’m sorry to say I haven’t paid much attention on account of US politics being such a dumpster fire that your worst scandals seem quaintly desirable. We’ve got people wistfully apologizing for George W Bush’s rainbow of doom and torture prisons, or the Gingrich-era witch hunts against against homosexuals and liberal activism, or the goddamn AIDS crisis under Reagan. Even here, you’re hand-waving that absolute scumbag Richard Nixon did one good thing under intense duress because he expected it to flounder. This is a con job that has been pulled on you. And us. On the world, really, at scale and continuously, to this day.
The traditional branding of conservatism is “we did everything good, but now we’re angry.”
That myth of eternal innocence as justification for outright violence is the only consistent story of this tribalist mode. It is pure ingroup-versus-outgroup storytelling. Good things in the past? Us us us, fuck them. Bad things now? Well they must have stolen the good things from us. (Nevermind who was in charge!)
When you find yourself saying ‘by this definition of conservative, leftists are conservatives,’ that is a shit definition. My apologies to your professor.
I gleefully ride the wave of your disdain. At the same time, I do think that we need to provide a path for people to come back, even if only a very faint one. :>
People are welcome to stop acting like tribal cultists whenever they want to. Every moment is the right moment.
Political conservatism obeys none of the other dictionary definitions. It’s just a label. It’s the label chosen by generations of influential public figures whose general philosophy is “Well someone has to be the king.”
Isn’t this kinda true of most politically-associated labels? Communism, socialism, capitalism, egalitarianism, progressivism… they can all be thought of as general ideas, but when someone actually uses them, they could be referring to a more specific concept, or twisting the idea a bit, or referring to a specific person’s definition of the idea and its kinda hard to know how to interpret it…
Nobody says shit like “communists want community” or “egalitarians love eagles.” But that’s constantly happening for conservatism. People will bend over backwards making up what reeeeal conservatives must surely want… in complete denial of what the visible super-duper-majority of self-identified conservatives actually say and do.
I’ve heard stuff like “communists want community”, but perhaps we are in different social environments. I will agree though that the manipulation of some terms might be more extreme than others.
My only quibble with your post is your portrayal of Republicans’ general philosophy, in the last paragraph. Political conservatism, in my opinion which has recently been heavily influenced by the above link, is instead ‘conserving political power for yourself’. Because that’s what Republicans are doing. They want the power, and they don’t care what they do to get it. If they make a pandemic worse to get more power? That’s fine. Spur global warming past feedback thresholds in the process of getting more power? Who cares, they got more power. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
You should stop with your holier than thou bs. The left is no better authoritarian than the right
“Both sides,” says one side.
Holier than thou? Hahaha. They’re not actively harming humans, forcing their dipshit religion on anyone. Care about human rights, care about having women decide to have an abortion or not. Unlike your kind.
Just fuck off mate.
Or what? Lol.
Anecdotal, but similar experiences, similar thought processes on this end of the server too. Conservatives don’t conserve anything, but they sure do suck.
They are the product of generations of inbreeding and religious brainwashing.
I still believe in the idea of the open internet helping people connect and understand each other better. “Oh, that white guy also struggles with bills and loving his kids when they get to be too much”, “oh, she’s…”, Etc.
I didn’t expect the pAtRiOt front to find each other and start sucking each other’s anus using the internet.
But, we’ve all been naive at one time or another in our lifetimes. Maybe things between us are getting better regardless of interference by the powers that be. Hey, we’re now in the Fediverse, after all.
