Having sort of gone through this recently - the lunatic group is small but extremely loud and vocal, so it seems like there’s a lot more of them than there really is. I thought this last school board election was going to be pretty close, but the lunatic group lost pretty handily.
We have a school levy replacement vote on Feb 13th. If you look at social media it looks like it’s not going to pass, but I’ll be very surprised if it passes with less than 65%-70% of the vote.
ETA: I also notice on the last school board election that the lunatic fringe had A LOT of signs, but they were all on public right of ways. The sign count in front of actual homes was skewed much more to the sane side.
Our school board elections are done by area, but people in my neighborhood are putting up signs anyway. It’s like putting a sign on your lawn that says “I’M A BIGOT”.
Now in fairness I have a sign up for the good guy and can’t vote for him, but at least I’m right.
This is the whole appeal of Trump, of course. A whole lot of people like being bigots. People have liked being so since, like, the dawn of humanity. For a massive portion of that time, it was socially acceptable to be openly bigoted. There was that brief period of time in America from the late 90s through the early 2000s where there was social push back on being bigoted, and, naturally, the bigoted assholes hated that shit. Now Trump is making being a bigoted asshole great again. Put up the sign. Fly the flag. The more bigoted the better. That’s how you show allegiance. Isn’t that the core issue in American politics right now? It’s, Do you think white Christian men deserve the place at the top of society while all others should fuck the hell off, or do you believe in some sort of equality bullshit?
Basically, conservatives value tradition and continuity with some point in the past that they view as ideal. They differ on what point on the past, what aspects of that point, and how much evidence they need to update their priors and break with tradition.
They start with a null hypothesis that the way things have been is the way things ought to be until proven clearly wrong. Generally, they value order and predictability, which is why facets of the postmodern condition can cause moderates to abandon the center-left coalition.
This is what they claim, but I think conservatives think more along the lines of change is bad by default. So you’ll now get “hands off my medicare” conservatives. We like MLK conservatives, etc. Really it’s kind of a shell game and what conservatives want is personal power not too closely linked to any particular policy agenda. Like abortion wasn’t a real issue until they saw they could ride it to some power in a way that worked better than “segregation forever.”
For fox news type conservatives I think you just need to tell them that they are constantly threatened by shadowy forces and they need to vote for X to fight back.
I find the most common thread among bigots and racists is fear. They are frightened by that which they are unfamiliar with, be it culture, religion, or sexual orientation. A male who doesn’t understand an attraction to another man becomes intolerant of such behavior (I guarantee they are more tolerant about two attractive women engaging sexually)
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit my own uneasiness upon first spotting two men kissing. It’s something I don’t get and appears unnatural to me. But I also realize that’s my problem, not theirs. The more tolerant and accepting we are as a society, the more open they can be to their true selves, and the more used to it people like me will get
This is long but I think I have a point somewhere in here:
Over the years I’ve done a ton of online surveys as kind of a side hustle. There’s this boilerplate set of questions that pops up from time to time that apparently measures one’s idea of morality, asking you whether item X is relevant to your idea of right or wrong, with a 7-point scale of agreement. I found a summary of the terms they ask about, which is quoted below (The headings and the categories in caps don’t show up on an actual survey, just the phrases themselves in random order):
So I’ve filled out this set of questions about a hundred times over the years so I rarely give much thought to it, but it’s always the same for me: The “Fairness” stuff is always “extremely relevant”, the “Harm” is a notch or two down, and almost everything else is toward the bottom of the scale, some mix of “not at all” or “not very” relevant.
These always felt like very “standard” answers to me, and I never gave a ton of thought to how a more conservative person would answer them–like sure, maybe the Authority and Ingroup stuff would be a bit higher, maybe the God answer would take on much more importance for religious folks (although that doesn’t bother me, because any god I might happen to believe in would sure as hell be big on the Fairness and Harm stuff anyway).
But reading lagtight on here talking about fucking “wickedness” and “perversion” makes me realize that I’m probably just way off, and makes me feel hopeless trying to find any kind of common ground with a person like that. The more I think about it, the more I feel like the average Trump voter probably gives top ranks to the Respect and Traditions questions, all the Purity ones, and something close to the top for Ingroup.
Even the one thing that I would think is a given to sit at the top, the Fairness stuff, I could see easily floating down to the middle for these people, because, well, people being treated differently than others is probably considered a good thing as long as you come out on top, and being denied one’s rights is seen as something some people deserve.
It really makes me feel even more hopeless when it comes to talking about political shit with lagtight types because it’s like we’re speaking two different languages. The stuff we think about when determining good or bad isn’t even on some people’s radar, and vice versa.
No. The most common thread is stupidity an/or ignorance. Most of the fears they have can be allayed by thinking about things critically for a few minutes. Or by learning some easy to discover facts. Fear is quite common also, but I’m putting general idiocy at the top of the “most common” list.
It has become really apparent to me that I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in other peoples’ heads, and there is really no relationship between that and what’s going on in my own head. Sure, there are occasional points of intersection, but my experience is only my own. And if I don’t want to be judged for me having my own experience, I had better not judge other people for theirs. It is a work in progress and I fail literally every day, but that’s where I want to be.
While there is certainly something to the idea that conservatives and liberals have different moralities, I think framing accounts for a lot of it as well. For example, when I look at the pictures of the Trump boys going hunting in Africa and holding up bits of an elephant for the camera, disgust is the word. It’s not really that they’re hurting the elephant, I handwave away mistreatment of animals on farms on a daily basis. The problem is that these guys are fucking perverts, going down there and slaughtering majestic animals for their own gratification. But if I tried to show photos of the Alaskan wilderness to the “drill baby drill” crowd and explain that this is something sacred, they would be like “no no, see sacredness actually has to do with where you are allowed to stick your weewee”. And then I’d be like “you guys are fucking toddlers”. So it’s not that I don’t understand the emotions of sacredness and the violation of same, it’s that I have very different ideas from conservatives about what ought to inspire these emotions.
And again, while there is something to the idea that leftists struggle with establishing effective authority (as anyone who has witnessed collective governance attempts and internecine squabbling in leftist organizations will know) it also has to do with ideas of what authority ought to look like. The COVID pandemic has been an ongoing attempt by left-liberals to insist that scientists and governments ought to have the authority to tell us what to do and passionate resistance to this idea from conservatives. Conservatives simply have a very limited idea of what authority ought to look like, namely that it ought to be masculine and underpinned ultimately by violence, “the supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived” as Starship Troopers put it.
I like how bible believers point to 2 or 3 verses in a book of 20,000+ to justify their hate/discrimination. Yet they conveniently ignore others that they deem to be outdated or opposes their worldview.
23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Haha I mentioned this passage to heritage not hate during a discussion months ago and he said Jesus didn’t say that
