Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

Multiculturalism gone mad... in the 17th century.

thrilling point lads

No point at all, just thinking how terrible it would be

I mean i know we've got colonialism sorted, thx

The history of colonialism offers a rich vein of things to talk & think about. It's a perennial cartoon: Native Americans stand on the shore seeing ships fulla pilgrims or whatever and saying "if we refuse to educate their children, maybe they'll leave" etc.

But overstressing the precedent has rhetorical risks. Some right-wing choad who thinks he's clever is eventually going to say "yeah and look how that turned out - genocide and displacement, just what we want to avoid."

It remains (perhaps depressingly) the case that many/most current immigrants are arriving not to conquer and enslave but to clean toilets, pick crops, mow lawns....

Darragh, point taken. That said, if one holds my point #2 (vastly more permissive asylum policy) together with #6 (speedier adjudication) I would hope you get the same thing: speedier approval, right?

the tension man alive points out is prob a real thing, even our boy denmark is super creepy about migrants. i favour open borders idealistically on both utilitarian and ethical grounds but in practice the real constraint on immigration is the political backlash it creates in the host country

When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”

Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immigrant-ghettos.html

wild

you need spaces for people in housing, transit, schools, you need social services, you need businesses to serve them, there actually are logical reasons for controlling at a minimum the pace of immigration

wouldn't it be more humane to provide transportation for everyone to whatever country they want to go to, instead of treating as exception those who suffer through horrifying trips to get to the places they want to go to? that would entail giving everyone all over the world the choice of where to live, paid for by the countries they want to go to.

yes but y'know I worry we're making this the cool fully automated luxury gay space communism thread and not the uncool conservative opinions thread now

meant my post as more a rabbit–duck illusion kinda thing tbh

Okay so where is the cool fully automated gay space communism thread? Is it a 77 thing?

you need spaces for people in housing, transit, schools, you need social services, you need businesses to serve them

these are arguments for controlling the birth rate

population is growing much slower in say the UK now than it was in the C19th

You're right about there needing to be infrastructure etc., but it's worth noting that there's plenty of room.

http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/geography/maps/US%20Population%20density,%202010%20570x361.png

I think an advocate of dramatically increased legal immigration could say that the housing, transit, schools, social services are a little bit of a "if you build it, they will come" situation, as well as chicken/egg. I mean, in 1887 none of those things existed in Oklahoma. Didn't take long.

Also: Making housing, transit, schools, and social services happen? Sounds like, um, I dunno, JOBS. Which I thought conservatives liked.

The following facts remain stubbornly adjacent:

- The places with the most room are the most conservative and least receptive to immigrants.
- New arrivals are much more comfortable going to the most populous places (with good reason!).
- That said, having new immigrants transform (dare I say, settle?) a rural region - making it more populous, dynamic, and diverse - would be great for them both if it were welcomed bilaterally.

I don't have good answers for those questions - or, at least, not suited to this thread.

Popular methods at modernizing gender in language are an inconsistent mess aiming in all directions at once and only monolinguals think that there are no reasons to criticize those methods except deliberately wanting to exclude people.

a lot of what's framed as the "refugee problem" or the "immigrant problem" is actually a xenophobia problem - this is most apparent in america but it's true everywhere and i'm amused at people who think countries should "moderate" their immigration policies to placate xenophobes, as if such a thing were possible. that's not to say there aren't serious legitimate problems that come with mass numbers of displaced persons, but those numbers, particularly as the effects of climate change take hold, are going to increase rather than decrease. people need to make their peace with mass societal disruption, with mass death, or, more likely, with both.

Is that really a conservative belief?

i thought we decided this was the luxury gay space communism thread

conservatives don't have "beliefs", only prejudices

"conservatives don't have "beliefs", only prejudices"

I think this is a fascist belief, but I don't know if it's conservative or liberal

It's a fact

of all the reductive dichotomies we can sort the world into, "people who worry for the souls of their enemies" and "people who don't" is one of them

Never wear a belt with a waistcoat, ffs

I think this is a fascist belief, but I don't know if it's conservative or liberal

― droit au butt (Euler)

yeah i know i'm ignoring all of the Principled Conservatives who have columns in the New York Times

no I mean it's fascist to think that people (conservative or whoever) only have prejudices, not beliefs, because that means you think they act without beliefs, without reason, and that's how fascists think about people: action before belief

i don't know what conservatives (or anyone else) "have". i just know what they do.

I don’t think people’s beliefs, as they would articulate them, usually enter in to the causal history of the actions they take. Dunno how that is fascist.

didn’t see/say anything about causal histories

but if you think action comes before thought... you might be a fascist

i think it's important to check yrself, esp in times (and threads) like these, so let's see. do i think democracy is a wicked and perverse institution? i do not. am i convinced that the problems in my life and my peers' lives have been inflicted upon me by an elite conspiracy designed to invert the rightful hierarchy i am also convinced my peers and i ought to be on permanent top of? nope. is my response to the notion of serious downward redistribution of wealth and power to use any means necessary to prevent it, including violence, including if some of that wealth and power is likely to be redistributed to me, because it would also be distributed to people i hate and fear? not rly. have i plotted, or had plotted for me, an elaborate story that explains the stresses and democratic instability that come from inequality as instead coming from a racialized moral impurity that infects huge swathes of the lower classes, is cooked up by treasonous snakes in the upper classes, and can only be purged by mass violence? nah. do i think history is nothing but zero-sum struggle between implacably opposed nations and tribes and that anyone who tells you any different should be killed? can't say that i do. is my idea of a beautiful public event one that is full of spectacular and intimidating demonstrations of mass solidarity, rage, and violent potency, but also tightly scripted down to the second by unquestioned authorities? def not. do i look good in black? no better than the next husky guy. do i suspect that much of what people think of as their moral principles are actually post-facto rationalizations for actions they take instinctively, explaining why so many people's principles are so conspicuously incoherent? yeah i kinda do-- ah fuck! just when i was doing so well.

lol

it's true that fascism is hard to define, and so we tend to identify it with the way things went in Italy and Germany. but I'll be that guy who says you can't define communism by what happened in the USSR and China too. & as I understand fascism (from Gentile and Mussolini for instance), it's a doctrine of action & feeling over thought, a romanticism. this kind of doctrine is appealing to brutes and so the "action" realized is violence against "others", but that doesn't mean it's "what's most key" about what fascism is. as in: any state that values action & feeling over thought is going to end up doing the kinds of things you listed...because those feelings are powerful (and states that want to avoid those things should work against putting action and feeling over thought). (that is my conservative thought)

ha, see, relevantly, i would probably say the generic philosophical principles of fascism postdate and metaphysically justify the actions of a state or party or person that is responding to the pressures i describe in the manner i describe.

will grant that like, if you've personally become rly disillusioned w the concept of rationality, or if you're rly tired of feeling obligated to critically evaluate any of your feelings, you may respond to the blind and muscular righteousness of an existing fascist appeal even if you weren't previously too worried about jews replacing you. but it's worth asking at whose hands exactly it seems to you that you are inflicted with these obligations-- who it is exactly you feel expects you to care about what, and why exactly you'd prefer not to. imo there are likely to be clear material answers to these questions.

dlh doing good work here

good talk imo

no I mean it's fascist to think that people (conservative or whoever) only have prejudices, not beliefs, because that means you think they act without beliefs, without reason, and that's how fascists think about people: action before belief

― droit au butt (Euler)

so you're interpreting my statement as implying something like that we humans are mindless beasts driven by animal unreason? that does sound fairly fascist - and like most fascist beliefs it's completely false. Prejudice and hatred aren't something we're born with, they're something we learn. thinking in a strictly logical sense is something difficult and taxing for all humans. in that conservative mind attachment to one's paralogical thought processes becomes pathological and one becomes incapable of logically evaluating certain things, most notably the value and efficacy of those paralogical processes themselves. so it's utterly useless to try and reason with them, because they outright reject reason in certain specific domains.

think it's important to check yrself, esp in times (and threads) like these, so let's see. do i think democracy is a wicked and perverse institution? i do not. am i convinced that the problems in my life and my peers' lives have been inflicted upon me by an elite conspiracy designed to invert the rightful hierarchy i am also convinced my peers and i ought to be on permanent top of? nope. is my response to the notion of serious downward redistribution of wealth and power to use any means necessary to prevent it, including violence, including if some of that wealth and power is likely to be redistributed to me, because it would also be distributed to people i hate and fear? not rly. have i plotted, or had plotted for me, an elaborate story that explains the stresses and democratic instability that come from inequality as instead coming from a racialized moral impurity that infects huge swathes of the lower classes, is cooked up by treasonous snakes in the upper classes, and can only be purged by mass violence? nah. do i think history is nothing but zero-sum struggle between implacably opposed nations and tribes and that anyone who tells you any different should be killed? can't say that i do. is my idea of a beautiful public event one that is full of spectacular and intimidating demonstrations of mass solidarity, rage, and violent potency, but also tightly scripted down to the second by unquestioned authorities? def not. do i look good in black? no better than the next husky guy. do i suspect that much of what people think of as their moral principles are actually post-facto rationalizations for actions they take instinctively, explaining why so many people's principles are so conspicuously incoherent? yeah i kinda do-- ah fuck! just when i was doing so well.

― difficult listening hour

but do you like the PSB's "Do I Have To"?

and what to do about october?

it's so bemusing

but it's worth asking at whose hands exactly it seems to you that you are inflicted with these obligations-- who it is exactly you feel expects you to care about what, and why exactly you'd prefer not to. imo there are likely to be clear material answers to these questions.

this is a v bertrand russell line yr taking here

I think free will as most conceive it today is bullshit nonsense but I also think being not-a-fascist is pretty easy living and you only need a mild helping of information to pull it off.

Sorry wrong thread

Wall to wall carpet is kind of a nice change sometimes.

euler on-topic, framing every argument in terms of the philosophical debates of 200 years ago is v. uncool conservative belief

yeah respect

ha ha well that is what I get paid to do so

I generally consider myself one of the most conservative people here for that reason

Standing athwart etc

yelling cessāte

kids today listen to bad music

Well, haven’t they always?

kids today listen to bad music

― adam the (abanana)

if you're talking about greta van fleet i agree