rolling explaining conservatism

Angry at plenty of things, but I don't understand trying to write an essay as a series of tweets.

― DJI, Friday, July 7, 2017 11:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

twitter only lets u write 140 characters per tweets (1/)

sometimes you have more than that to say, but want people to be able to read(2/)

it inside twitter rather than click out to something else.(3/)

if ppl have to click another link, they will probably skip it.(4/)

if u dont want to read tweet threads, skip them. (5/5)

guys, conservatives just love to poop their pants. that's it. psychoanalyse them all you want, that's all there is to it.

Lol @m bison, esp the part where even one goddamn sentence doesn't fit into a tweet and has to be split into two tweets.

I think I found the image that sums it up:

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/simgad/16612822897549419215

All I see here is a bunch of know-it-all's giving their opinion without having read a lick of Republican literature.

Go on and smash with your baseball bats the lowest hanging fruit of the conservative tree while the rest of us try to live our lives the best we can.

know-it-alls doesn't need an apostrophe

yo snipes i question your assumptions

Possibly not the best username to have whilst complaining about conservative stereotyping

just glad to see Wesley out of prison tbh

Republican literature lmao

Aka the back of a dollar bill

Banana Man, let me give you some homework and then we can talk. How about you read Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver.

Believe it or not, I was once young and went to college just like the rest of you.

But then you were done mowing the lawn and went home

In its pages, Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights.

so Weaver's being prophetic about modern conservatism?

not to nitpick but weaver isn't really "republican literature" right? it's more like conservative literature. there's lots of great conservative literature.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/LincolnNovel.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b6/Sister-cover.jpg

^ Republican literature

I read Ideas Have Consequences in college too! It's pretty dull iirc

Well, here's a more exciting read

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ihld5IeIL._AC_US218_.jpg

if your parent(s) have (has) enough money, you can get away with treason, and why not?

"He has created more jobs, real estate -- the hotel, the casino industry -- he has created more wealth than anybody in this entire country."

"Where was the media ten years ago when Kenyan Islams placed one of theirs in the White House?"

(1) Stigginit
(2) Hillary had illegal emails. Lock her up.
(3) Obama conspired with the Ukraine vs our Russian friends
(4) Seth Rich, NVR 4GT (his grieving parents are in on it)
(5) Kept us Safe from illegal refugee terrorists
(6) Mexico will pay
(7) Hillary had illegal debate answers. Lock her up.
(8) Bill Ayers
(8) Th3ey're protecting that scumbag pedo Weiner and his pizza sex slave operation.
(9) SOROS!11!

Nugget from our national poll coming out tomorrow- only 45% of Trump voters believe Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with Russians...

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) July 17, 2017

It's not treason, because this was a Republican.

Republicans working with the Russians to destroy the United States isn't treason because the Republicans are the New American Confederacy, and their goal is to destroy the United States and replace it with a series of fiefdoms in which they are once again allowed to own people.

When a Republican works with the Russian government against the United States, it's merely working with an ally against a common enemy.

a series of fiefdoms in which they are once again allowed to own people.

actually these will be voluntary contracts. constitution!

"At some point, you've got to ask yourself, has the day of the CBO come and gone?"

Have ye explained conservatism yet

Asking for a friend

He is a conservative btw

is he you

Sir he is not

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/20/most-republicans-still-say-they-support-trump-whos-most-likely-to-break-ranks-and-speak-out-against-him/

To answer this question, it helps to look into the social psychology of group loyalty. Consider politics today as populated by two tribes: Democrats and Republicans. A growing literature suggests that partisanship has become a social identity akin to tribal affiliations, inspiring strong loyalty.

...

This might sound counterintuitive, since the people with the strongest partisan loyalties are also most likely to adopt party leaders’ positions on issues. But here’s what makes the difference: People who felt connected to the party were willing to express opposition only if they felt that their party’s position threatened the future of the Republican Party and its ability to win elections.

In other words, strongly connected Republicans were willing to speak out when they worried that their tribe’s future was in jeopardy.

This was refreshingly blunt, I thought

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/07/revolt-of-the-masses

Especially over the past decade or so, these people have increasingly been told that their deeply-held views are not only wrong, but make them bad people. And, being humans, their reaction isn’t to rethink their lifelong worldview and change their attitude, but rather to dig in and say “fuck you.” They know they are “supposed to say” that they are ok with gay marriage, and black lives matter, and all that, because if they don’t they are going to be called stupid, redneck racists by people on TV and in print media. So they have changed what they’ll say out loud, or at least to whom they will say it, but haven’t changed their beliefs. And Hillary and the democrats are exactly the kind of people that would judge them harshly for their views, and Donald Trump and the republicans are the kind of people who don’t. So they are voting republican, no matter how big of a clown Trump is, because at least those people don’t piss all over my fundamental sense of self.

or you know perhaps they actually are bad people

(is that "refreshingly blunt" enough?)

yeah if your "deeply-held view" is that black lives don't matter, I think "bad person" is a pretty apt descriptor

all lives matter

especially fetuses

I don't think they'd describe their disagreements with the movement Black Lives Matter in those terms but sure. Being against gay marriage and wilfully blind to all sorts of systematic injustice is morally wrong. There are fundamental moral disagreements between liberals and conservatives.

There's another piece to this, though, which is that the blue states have seen more economic growth in the past few decades and blue state culture is largely equivalent with mainstream media culture. When the most visible advocates of liberal ideas seem like cultural elites, the hoi polloi are going to instinctively rebel, a dynamic that Fox Newd and similar outlets have played into. Trump's rise was basically a tantrum thrown by people who felt culturally marginalized, even if in all kinds of ways -- like race and income -- they were actually coming from a position of privileged.

A more economically just society where people didn't feel like they had to be at each other's throats all the time wouldn't have this kind of toxic bullshit. Trump voters may be bad people but they got that way due to larger social and economic forces. They are culpable -- don't get me wrong -- but still, we don't just have 80 million bad people in this country for no reason.

Like Republicans in 2017 are grotesque and idiotic but we still need to be able to give a coherent account of why they're like that.

sorry, that was a bit tetchy of me. full disclosure: i didn't read the article. i was put off by your pull quote, which looked to me like more of that "y r libruls so MEEN?" liberal breast-beating i've seen everywhere (particularly) since november.

from everything i've seen, it sure looks like we're past the event horizon here. this "can't we all just get along" shit isn't going to play. neither will any "solution" predicated on salvation via the stringent application of liberal principle. the high road has collapsed due to lack of maintenance. fortunately nobody was on it at the time.

because the blind tribalism we see in trump supporters is not a unique feature of the right. i see no evidence that democrats wouldn't, to nearly the same extent, support someone just as awful with a (d) next to his name. this is the way it's been probably my entire life, and we may be surprised at the extent and depth of this blind loyalty, but it's difficult for me to be surprised at its _existence_.

six months in i'm of the opinion that the great threat posed by the trump administration is not its malevolence. i am, again, unconvinced at the notion that trump is any more evil than republicans have been through my entire life. over time this certainly takes its tolls, but evil, i continue to believe, can be overcome.

the looming and inevitable disaster will not be the death camps that haunt people's nightmares. it is the spectre of chaos, brought about by the trump administration and republican congress's fundamental inability to perform the necessary duties of government. the people in charge right now (along with, certainly, the entirety of their partisans) don't even understand there _are_ necessary duties of government, and will be blindsided when their failure to sign some essential piece of paperwork leads to america's ruin.

I can't do better than Corey Robin's description a few years ago. Positing Richard Nixon as the architect of this resentment, he noted the president's talent for making whites "into white ethnics burdened with their own history son oppression an requiring their own liberation movements."

treesh, i don't think we need to give a coherent account of republicans because they can't give a coherent account of themselves! i was reading some petition against the female doctor who, which was not explicitly trumpist but evinced all the hallmarks of trumpist thought - non sequitur republicanism. "whataboutism" is not arguing in bad faith so much as the only argument they are able to present. every statement they offer is an axiom, every movement a knee-jerk. to try and ascribe some master plan or grand ideology to such people is overshooting the mark by quite a bit.

democrats wouldn't, to nearly the same extent, support someone just as awful with a (d) next to his name

for real. all those clinton/kaine supporters with "fuck your feelings" t-shirts on i saw on fox

I like the mention in that post of 'unmarked category', the idea that white and Christian are seen as default, and everything else is defined by it's marked difference from that. But it could go a bit further. A lot of people seem to continue that exact mistake when they discuss this. White Christians are sometimes given a pass voting for Trump because, as the quote says "at least those people don’t piss all over my fundamental sense of self." But they themselves of course piss all over other people's sense of self. And this not to point out cheap hypocrisy, but to say, that of course lgbt, women, and minorities then piss right back at these asshole bigots, it's what people do. But because one category is marked, and one unmarked, only the white christians are immediately looked at in ways that says: 'being humans, their reaction is...'

In the end both sides are humans, and both sides have dark feelings, and it's really just a question of power. If you want blunt, I'm not sure there's anything else to do but say what Gordon Cole said: 'They need to fix their hearts or die.' Nobody can understand everybody, and I'd wager all the effort into understanding these people would be much better used trying to understand ones own allies who differ from one self, since they are the ones who's support is needed. So lay down fucking Hillbilly Elegy and pick up Between the World and Me, if you haven't already.

Tribalism is much worse on the right at this point, though, because the right is one big tribe (white people, mostly) while the left is a coalition of smaller tribes. It's not a moral highground, it's a practical.

"the right" never matured past junior high or high school (private or public) and "the left" is everyone else

From Tombot's LGM link:

It draws a picture of Trump’s base as made up in large part of people who harbor a deep sense of alienation and marginalization, and who see themselves as revolting against The Establishment, especially the media establishment

You had me at "revolting."