This is why conservativism is just not compatible with democracy. You can’t have a society that adapts to a changing world and growing understanding of reality if people’s political ideology boils down to “We need to ignore new information and instead keep trying the failed ideas of the past.”
This is why when the Democratic party talk about the need for “balance” between the two parties it’s so toxic.
I don’t know if this is conservatism anymore. My Grandfather was conservative, and he was an engineer. He would have loathed the amount of misinformation and straight up lies being flung around these days. As much as his views were disagreeable, he never tried to manipulate or lie to anybody and always wanted to get to the truth of things. This is something else.
It’s still the end result, and while your grandfather might’ve been an engineer and accepted some science as an individual, his political ideology is what has contributed to the slow creep of increasing ignorance because his conservative views are what prompt him to vote for conservative politicians who obstruct attempts to improve society for all of us. Conservativism degrades a society’s ability to access the truth.
There actually is no reasonable form of conservativism. You’re either looking for ways to improve and integrate new understanding about the world based on the best information available to you at the time, or you’re trying to preserve ideas simply because they existed beforehand.
It would be like if someone brought a newer, safer design to your grandfather and he rejected it simply in the interest of preserving the old design because its old. He couldn’t function as an engineer if he applied his conservative thinking to his work, so I don’t see how people expect that philosophy to work in politics either. There is no effective scientist who, upon recieving new information, rejects it because it doesn’t fit with what they already believe, they try to adapt their model to fit the new facts.
We accept conservativism as some kind of immutable facet of politics, but we don’t actually need to. Making itself seem intrinsic is how the ideology survives, but really all it is is the remnant ideology leftover ftom the death of monarchy, it was injected into our politics early on in order to protect an aristocratic class, allowing it to continue on in a new form (corporate oligarchy).
Very well said.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that conservatism is an inherently reactionary and counter-revolutionary ideology: it is primarily concerned with protecting the powerful by entrenching privilege and maintaining the structural oppression of the underclasses.
Well said!
Yea basically you don’t accept “states rights” blindly unless you’re willing to overlook “other things” and accept them in the back of your mind.
What you look past is more telling than what you say.
It’s regressivism now
Capitalism was always destined to progress to an advanced terminal stage.
Sounds like your grandpa might have been conservative as in slow to change.
Nowadays, conservative in politics means deepthroating fascism.
Conservatism has always been authoritarian. The notion of “slow to change” has only ever been a fig leaf to obfuscate that fact.
I don’t know if this is conservatism anymore.
It’s a return to what conservatism always was.
I don’t believe actual conservatism exists anymore.
That’s why I call those clowns “servatives.” Take the “con” out of “conservative” and you get “servative.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a conservative.
Conservatism isn’t compatible with a lot of things in the modern age: social programs, military industrial complex during arms races spanning decades, late-stage capitalism in a social Republic…etc. I wouldn’t say Democracy in general though.
Also, these whack jobs are not Conservatives with a capital ‘C’, they are Radicalized Religious Zealots at a minimum. They think their way is the “right way”, and are on some mission to ensure everyone else gets on board, or else. It’s how they approach everything.
The nutty thing about Candace Owens is that as much as she is a liar and scammer, she’s just jumping into the deep end with all these people who are working against her own best interests. She’s not completely stupid, so she must realize this, but refuses to be deterred because she thinks she will somehow benefit in the end. To what end that is for her, who knows. She’s working hard to enable a bunch of racist, misogynistic, assholes though, but she’s also profiting from it and couldn’t care less about who she’s impacting elsewhere with her vitriolic bullshit.
Also, these whack jobs are not Conservatives with a capital ‘C’, they are Radicalized Religious Zealots at a minimum
Yes, there are degrees of commitment, but the normie conservatives are still enabling the extremists and play a key part in the progression from democracy to fascism, you can’t just flip from democracy to a fascist state, you need “respectable” conservatives to start to ease people towards the notion. There’s still no value in their conservative leanings, even if it’s watered down.
I don’t want any lead in my water ideally, even if slight amounts aren’t immediately harmful, the lead traces in the water has no benefit regardless of the degree.
Radicalized Religious Zealots
Run of the mill, average religious people. Religion is one of the many reasons the working class must never disarm. The cult followers literally cannot help themselves. At some point, they all will work to make their delusions your reality.
Well that’s not true. I know plenty of religious people who don’t give a shit about what other people do or believe, and that’s the standard. Anyone who is out trying to recruit, guilt, or force fear onto others in the name of religion is absolutely just a Zealot (capital “Z”), and that is not the standardnof behavior for what I would say is most people.
There’s certainly something about the Southern US that really churns these pieces of shit out like a factory though.
It worked out for Dave rubin. Wait, no it didn’t. And then he doubled down on hate speech so people would forget he was gay and having surrogate kids.
I’ve not heard the Democratic Party demand a balance between themselves and Republicans as a policy plank. Even if an individual had done so, It seems foolhardy to blame a large tent of fairly reasonable people for the incestuousness that has become conservatism.
You are in a abusive relationship with the democratic party. You are a domestic abuse victim.
And the Republicans burnt your house down every once in a while.
Smile, for you are fully represented by the greatest democracy on planet earth! Feeling free yet?
It’s less than ideal, but is still preferable to many places, if for no other reason than its potential for reform. We still have some insight into things like campaign finance for now, which makes it possible to fight from an informed position.
I’m actually not that committed to the Democratic party itself, but you’re right that they’re abusive. Acting politically based on the division between conservative and progressive, regardless of any label a politician might self-apply, helps clarify the way forward for me. As far as my mental model of the political landscape goes, conservative/neoliberal democrats are quarantined off with the GOP, they’re the same in terms of their potential to produce lasting change. I’m not going to support an AIPAC democrat the same way I’m not going to ever support a MAGA conservative.
But yeah, our democracy is functioning incredibly poorly at the moment.
The abuse comes from this comment.
You don’t recognize democracy and like to abuse people as a result.
We are all in an abusive relationship with our government here in the US. For some reason we are accepting being lied to, gaslight, and manipulated by our ruling class.
For all their faults the Democratic party is the only one doing something about it. From trying to hold police responsible to protecting our most vulnerable people.
Meanwhile Maga is repealing transparency laws, taking away women’s rights, and othering people at an alarming pace.
The two side of the same coin rhetoric grows old and at this point is only here to blur the lines and continue to give conservatives control due to apathy.
For some reason we are accepting being lied to, gaslight, and manipulated by our ruling class.
We have been bred to be moral. To NOT accept abuse and lies implies to fight. And fighting is never considered moral. To fight you have to admit there is a conflict (your interests vs the billionaires aka “the owner class”), then escalate the already existing conflict, do lots of deeds considered atrocious by society, etc.
Morality, like religion, is a conservative policy meant to protect the status quo at all costs. That’s why no one ever went to jail for preaching or exercising morality. If morality could change the status quo, it would be prohibited and punished.
This is why conservativism is just not compatible with democracy.
You can’t have a society that adapts to a changing world and growing understanding of reality if people’s political ideology boils down to “We need to ignore new information and instead keep trying the failed ideas of the past.”
These two statements do not logically follow each other. There’s nothing inherent to democracy that makes Progressivism necessary
Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There’s no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it’s a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they’re not. They’re either able to admit when something doesn’t work or they’re not.
Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they’ll work. It’s an ideology that’s constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would’ve never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking “We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing.”
Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it’s not a counter balance.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same.
Literally untrue. You seem to have a very idealistic definition of what a democracy is. Democracies can follow any policies they want, as long as they’re based on the popular vote of the people.
Inherent to democracy, no. Inherent to a well-functioning society in a world where changing circumstances are inevitable, yes.
Yes? That’s a completely different statement though.
I think it’s safe to assume that a person wants their society to function smoothly. But yes, I suppose it is technically different.
Science is a religion in the same sense as not playing golf is a hobby.
Science is a religion in the same way that golf is a religion. It’s not, but it’s easy to see how one might get the wrong idea by listening to the rhetoric of its most enthusiastic admirers and not looking too closely at the actual thing they’re talking about.
An oxymoron. The principals of science are provable through repetition. Faith implies lack of proof. An oxymoron.
Where I think she has a point (whoever she is) is that most people don’t repetitively prove science’s principles themselves. So for the vast majority of people that believe in science, they take their world view on faith from a book written by someone they don’t know.
They grow up with the understanding that it’s the truth, so they accept it. They have no idea how to actually follow the scientific process and test the theories themselves, they just trust the authority of the institution distributing the knowledge.
You might think this is a false equivalency. But with religion collapsing more and more each day, they’ve mapped their bullshit quite nicely on to science. Generating plenty of pseudoscience for anyone who believes in science but is made uncomfortable by its findings. Religion lives on in how the masses actually perceive science. Because the mechanism is no different:
I don’t understand the universe, but I have faith that someone does. I’ll put them in charge so they can give me the bullet points of how I should live.
I’m unable to articulate the natural reaction that I have when somebody tries to sell me garbage. I can’t articulate it when somebody explains to me, ‘Well, the moon landings definitely happened.’"
Owens continued: “I’m just like, no, I don’t know. Instinctually, it just doesn’t register to me. Just feels like that is a lie. And I’ve realized that I’ve been thinking deeply about this, this pagan cult that we exist in. It is backed by a false science deity. That is what it is. It is the science. This is the new god.”
So she just “instinctively” doesn’t believe stuff that “feels” like a lie, and this proof that everyone else worships the “science deity.” No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?
This is the fundamental problem with this type of thinking. Sure you have some aspect of faith (I wasn’t there, can’t 100% confirm the authenticity of the footage myself), but it’s clearly based on quite a solid piece of evidence. Dismissing that, on the other hand, is literally based on faith, her faith that this footage is fake based on no evidence whatsoever.
I contribute that, maybe, to coming from the school of hard knocks," she said, adding, “I am grateful for having gone through the school of hard knocks because you are required to have an element of common sense in order to survive.”
The “school of hard knocks” apparently does not have a good science program.
I only read this article to work out why she specified “pagan” and I still have no idea.
I’m unable to articulate the natural reaction that I have when somebody tries to sell me garbage. I can’t articulate it when somebody explains to me, ‘Well, the moon landings definitely happened.’"
Owens continued: “I’m just like, no, I don’t know. Instinctually, it just doesn’t register to me. Just feels like that is a lie. And I’ve realized that I’ve been thinking deeply about this, this pagan cult that we exist in. It is backed by a false science deity. That is what it is. It is the science. This is the new god.”
Oh, so what she’s saying is she’s stupid and is admitting to being stupid.
Sure you have some aspect of faith (I wasn’t there, can’t 100% confirm the authenticity of the footage myself), but it’s clearly based on quite a solid piece of evidence.
Except that you don’t need to have “faith” that this happened, you are able to verify it yourself!! There were reflectors left on the moon that you can shine a significantly strong laser to and have it reflected back if you have a sensor that can pick it back up.
THAT is the point of peer review. To prove that the results in the experiments are reproducible by those using the same equipment, and that faith isn’t a requirement - that anyone can verify it and reproduce it.
How would those man-made reflectors have gotten there if not for man going to the moon and placing them there?
There were reflectors left on the moon that you can shine a significantly strong laser to and have it reflected back if you have a sensor that can pick it back up.
Yeah this is the huge issue for moon landing deniers. Also they have pictures of the landing site from the lunar reconnaissance orbiter, not that “school of hard knocks” alumni would believe that anyway (I tried once, did not convince them).
I was mainly using it as an example of how you could argue there was an element of “faith” at play, being generous. But of course you are right.
The natural reaction actually has a name, it’s called being stupid.
Willful ignorance is even better since she is defensive about her stupidity and refuses to learn or accept new things.
Ya, and maybe only to trick stupid people to like her, buy her stuff or some other marketing shenanigans.
No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?
This is why conservatism and conspiracy go hand-in-hand. You can’t believe the things that “feel” true if the “true” truths keep interfering with this pesky reality.
“The longer people stay in school, it seems the dumber they become,”
What she means is that exposure to new ideas usually makes people change their beliefs, and this is a bad, bad thing because that usually involves ditching their parents failed conservative ideas. Right wingers hate education because it shrinks their base. Science = bad is a scream of frustration.
Christofascists fuck off. Not only is she obviously wrong about science being pagan, most pagans trust and follow the scientific method as the basis of our reality.
The Satanic Temple even has it as one of its tenets (not that they necessarily represent pagans, but it illustrates the idea)
V. Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
Sure okay then show me the proof that your faith has that God exists and then it’ll be comparable to science.
Oh what’s that? You don’t have any fucking proof at all because it’s make believe bullshit made up by ignoramuses from thousands of years ago?
Go fuck yourself Candace you dumb fucking cunt.
Who?
Actually, never mind. I don’t want to know.
LOL. She converted to Catholicism? Wait until she finds out the originator of the big bang theory was a scientist who was also a Catholic priest. Then again she probably knows more about being Catholic than the Holy See (which she probably thinks is a body of water in Rome)
A broadly educated population is toxic to conservative ideologies.
holy hell she is an insufferable grifter. fits right into that party.
I describe Candace Owens as a “moron.”
That’s being polite
First off, Candeath Omens can go fuck herself.
I do think however that there is a weird technology faith in that people believe technology will fix all issues long term or improve or all aspects of our lives. Like when people say AI will fix global warming / climate change… dude, it can’t even properly take orders at a McDonald’s, which is traditionally one of the least qualified jobs. And if you ask an AI how to stop it, it’ll just tell you what we already know, which people haven’t been doing for years. Because that’s what am AI does.
It’s mostly the people neither actually engineering the technology nor studying the actual issue that believe this. But it’s a huge driver in the discussion.
Technology and science are not the same thing.
Laser is also not describing faith in the proper context.
Believing tech will make your life better and believing in supernatural beings are not even close to the same thing. One is an ethos one is not.
That’s why I wrote about “technology faith”, in contrast to the topic “science faith”, because while I think the dangerous idiot is wrong as always, the related issue (as technology is applied science) exists.
Regardless, her motive is just to discredit proper scientific methods and results she doesn’t like, while my point was about technology and its limitations that people don’t understand yet think will fix everything.
I can’t even get AI to put an email attachment in a folder. It sucks so bad.
We need to figure out a way to actually deplatform idiots like her
I want a script that adds “Crisis Actor” before her name to every article. With a link sharing her Explore Talent profile that was taken down after people caught onto Clandice, Tami, Bobo the clown, and a couple others potentially being hired by the GOP.
I can tell you the plain, clear answer but you’re not gonna like it. Nobody does when I tell them.
Hold some yard sales.
For real. Assuming you live in a neighborhood and there are people around and it’s safe to do so, this is one of the best ways to get to know the people who live around you. People go to yard sales to talk about shit and gossip, so it’s a great way to know who’s doing what, how everyone feels about their current neighborhood policies, who is running the school and who the local police or sheriff are, who is running for what position in local city, county and eventually state seats.
Having a grasp of your local political landscape gives you the power to get involved and educate people and get to know who is representing you, what the values of your area are, and you can influence elections or even challenge incumbents who often run uncontested. Any kind of local community organization and involvement is a pushback against the powers that be.
This is all because a lot of the people we have in seats of power in the USA did not earn their power fairly, they often have run without competition or were placed there by political organizations. These are the people who support the larger governmental powers. These are the people who cut checks, who receive checks, who write the bills that let the companies do the things they want to do to make more money.
Candace Owens is a product of this system that wants you to turn away from science and follow an authoritarian, because this is good for business. If you want maximum profits, get you a population that has no time, education or capital to change anything and get them angry at people who look different than themselves instead of their own government leaders.
If we purge the nobodies and clowns and paper-tigers who uphold this vision of America, we also get rid of their mouthpieces like Owens. She is not some passionate thought-leader, she’s just a spokesperson for a bunch of rich fucks who want to keep squeezing blood from the population.
Edit: they want you to be less social. They want you to retreat to your discord friend-groups and social-media safe-spaces. They want to keep you from organizing, from connecting, from uniting and forming groups with a shared voice. This is how you beat them, with shared voice.
“But I’m not sooooooooooooociaaaaal!” You cry.
I don’t fucking care. Adapt. It won’t be the hardest thing you ever do.
lol, after the first paragraph i was like “oof, they’re gonna suggest lynching” but then i was pleasently surprised 😅
Hm this is a good idea, but I’m living abroad =/
Shame them for using science tools like mobile phones to spout their opinions. They should only shitpost through the power of prayer.
There’s only one rule: say the most flippant thing possible to get platformed. Why are we still platforming this amoeba
De-platforming has proven ineffective. The best thing to happen to Trump was getting kicked off Twitter. Now he gets to spout all his bullshit and radicalize his fanbase with minimal pushback and reduced awareness from the public at large.
If de-platforming genuinely worked, then anti-semitism would have died out by now. But it won’t so long as people can form their own communities and recruit under-the-radar.
This. Her statements about science are completely arbitrary, as long as they gain attention. In the 1600’s, she would have been pushing heliocentrism only because it was controversial at the time.
