Open discussion on what’s happening in your nation, state, or local community politics.
Help.
I’m starting to actively hate conservatives. Not just disagree with them. Not just believe they’re wrong on tax policy, or on infrastructure, or whatever… But to actively despise them for what they’re trying to do to the world.
Take your pick of topics. The environment? They’re trying to light the planet on fire. LGBTQ+ rights? They’re trying to deny people like my son, who is trans, the right to use the fucking bathroom. Health care? They want women whose pregnancies threaten their lives to literally die. Education? They’re trying to rehabilitate the image of slavery, for fuck’s sake. They are on the wrong side of literally every fucking issue. If they thought wanting people to breathe was a liberal political position, they’d all accidentally commit suicide by holding their breaths to own the libs.
Seriously, what in the actual goddamn fuck is wrong with these people? Sorry for the swearing, but I’m feeling awfully swear-y lately over this filth.
I can’t help it anymore. I think these people are broken inside. Something is legitimately wrong with them.
And I hate feeling like that. I want to be able to see things from multiple angles, but when my son’s health care is threatened, or my daughter’s reproductive rights, or I spend a month sucking in smoke from nearby wildfires because the planet’s a tinderbox… It starts getting really hard to have any sympathy for the political positions of the people who are actively working to make that crap happen.
What do we do? How do we overcome this? And how do I find a way not to absolutely despise these people anymore? I know, intellectually, that they’re victims. Victims of a dedicated and concerted campaign to misinform them to an astonishing degree. I know that. But how do I stop hating them for lapping it up with shit-eating grins on their faces? Fucking how?
Sorry, I know this isn’t a rant thread, but I needed to get that off my chest.
I unfortunately agree with you, I have come to view conservatives as cancer, and I don’t mean it as a pure insult. I mean it a literally as you can apply it to them. Like cancer cells they become selfish and refuse to help the greater oganism among other analogies you could apply
Sadly I can’t shake these thoughts, time and time again they show me I’m right in my thinking, granted this is a generation.
I have even gotten so fed up with my conservative friends that I actively avoid them. Sad I know
I don’t really have conservative friends anymore. And I think, on an intellectual level at least, that that’s a shame, because we really ought to be talking to each other.
But there are non-negotiable issues that preclude the possibility of friendship now. You can’t be my friend if you think my son shouldn’t be allowed to use men’s bathrooms, or my daughter shouldn’t be allowed to marry who she wants to. You can’t be my friend if you think we should talk about the positive side of slavery in school. You can’t be my friend if fundamental scientific facts are matters of opinion to you.
And that’s fucking sad.
I strongly oppose bad things! Down with bad sort of things and all that.
Actually, bad sort of things are GOOD! They prevent Unrelated Talking Point!
Why would you prevent that? Do you not support the troops/children/puppies?
Listen. Bad things deserve the right to happen. I don’t like it either. But we must accept that bad things exists and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Screw you! I heartily support bad things!
Saudi Arabia is the second largest shareholder in Twitter (now known as X) and this week a man was sentenced to death for tweets peacefully criticising the Saudi government. The person was the brother of a known political dissident so its likely they were specifically targeted by the Saudi government. Should be much bigger news and Musk should be investigated on this matter. But we all know no one in power cares if Musk is handing people over to the killed.
Philosophize This had a good episode recently on the tradeoffs between security and freedom, and I think he made some good, relevant points about our decision making during the pandemic, but I really think there is nuance to the freedom vs security discussion that is specific to public health.
Like, crime might multiply in areas where crime is already high (broken windows theory), but it’s not 1:1. With novel infectious disease, the only way it spreads is that more than one person gets infected per person who gets it. That is wildly higher than how “infectious” crime is, and I’m not sure on the stats but it seems like the early-Covid 2% death rate is much higher than the average for all crime, too.
It just seems qualitatively different when the numbers are so high (Napoleon’s “quantity has a quality all its own”), in the same way that we tolerate some amount of random murders but would not tolerate an army invading and murdering people.
So, I think maybe it’s worth thinking about because it’s familiar, but we should think about it in a different way than how we weigh freedom vs security normally, it’s an exception for an emergency the same way that war powers are, not a normal-state calculation like whether we want the government to be able to subpoena Ring cams and Alexa recordings.
