Some friends I just can’t shake
hard enough
around the neck
with a firm grip
Somebody that’s actively trying to end my existence isn’t a friend.
I love that they excuse their vote as anything else.
I just want a tax cut. (and don’t care about the republic or my friends’ lives)
And said tax cut will work like this:
Step 1: Before it happens, you’re asked to publicly dream about what an extra $4000 will do for you on social media. Step 2: Once it passes, you get a 0.1% tax cut. Enough for one extra pizza. Per year. The bill will also includes 3 tax raises only for the poor, one every 4 years that follow. Step 3: The corporation you work for, meanwhile, gets a 16% tax cut. With it, they’ll announce a $2000 one-time payment to all workers. Which will be rescinded as soon as it’s been reported about on local news. The bill also includes 3 further, even bigger tax cuts for the rich, one every 4 years.
End result: taxes raised on the poor, taxes lowered for the rich, but lots of social media euphoria from the working class, lots of newspaper clippings of bosses giving their workers generous one-time payments (that never materialized). And next election cycle, Fox News can dig up all the happy reports and the truth of the matter has never even entered the attention span of the royally-effed-over working class voters.
Aw come on… they’re not trying to end your existence. They just don’t want to be alive or exist.
Okay wait actually some DO want to end your existence directly. But most wished if you just died.
Most of them would be fine if you just denied everything about yourself that didn’t conform and pretended to be just like them.
Editors note: This only applies if you’re a white man. Other demographics are not allowed to conform.
No, you forget about, “the good ones.”
Just don’t ever expect your existence to change their beliefs. Hell you could climb the ranks in the party even make it to the Supreme Court. As long as you have no problem shutting the door on people who look just like you because of the way they look.
If you were to try to argue their view, I think they would say that their only problem is when you exhibit immortal behavior. Their definition of immoral behavior isn’t the only historic definition but is certainly a prominent one.
I exhibit immortal behavior every day by not dying.
Sure, but the Christian/MAGA view of morality is a shit one that I don’t subscribe to. They can fuck off with their moralizing of my decisions.
It’s ok not tolerating intolerant people.
You’ve become the intolerant. I can’t tolerate that. Repeat.
You’ve become the intolerant. You can’t tolerate that.
error: success
Fuck building bridges. Everybody start digging a graveyard for the things that need to die.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’d be fine with them if they weren’t constantly shoving it in our faces. Think about the children!
And then they put that stuff in classrooms! How disgusting
I have [a] conservative family.
To be conservative in 2024, you have to dismiss that some people in our community are miserable and every day we leave them to their fate is heinous.
In the US, a failure to vote [against] any given Republican (by voting [for] an opposing democrat) is another step towards autocracy and genocide. Every Republican in office is a force towards the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 project, by which they will unmake the meager democratic features and civil rights that remain in the US.
Conservatives believe, by the natural extrapolation of their positions and behavior, I have no right to exist. (Curiously, this includes my own father, who simultaneously facilitates political efforts seeking out my extinction while expressing a dissonant interest in my well-being. He doesn’t dare connect the two in his mind.)
I’m so terribly sorry.
You both deserve to exist and most likely rock out loud :)
A conservative you are guilted into seeing occasionally? We call that family
If anyone knows about toxic family dynamics it’s Neptune.
Honestly Neptune could be pretty toxic himself sometimes
To be clear: I’m not going to bat for any gods over here, but a lot of his bad pr was from the Greek franchise.
The paradox of tolerance says if we tolerate intolerance, then intolerance will dominate. Or something.
The social contract solution is pretty solid. If you are intolerant of other people first, you lose protection of the contract and others will be intolerant of you without penalty.
The problem on Lemmy is that this gets combined with overgeneralized binary thinking, and all loosely “conservative” people get strawmanned as the intolerant outgroup, which, when this happens, actually does make you the guilty party.
Then maybe it’s time to start considering if conservative values have a place in our world? What does being conservative entail other than limiting the freedoms of other humans and refusing to spend money on anything but the military? Please give me a legitimate reason why we need to resist progress?
There’s a general difference between conservative and regressive, or reactionary. Being conservative in the true meaning of the word can simply mean that you have a preference to wait and see, to, if in doubt, stick with the old and trusted. And there’s nothing wrong with that: It’s a good idea to have new ideas, but following every new idea blindly? Not so much. Society needs inertia, and that means both moving forward and not moving faster than we can actually adapt to ourselves changing. And we all have that in us. To different degrees, but it doesn’t get more than 70% progressive or 70% conservative, in my observation.
That’s because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with lentil stew. It is, like so many things, tradition, “tradition” in the sense of a sum of successful innovations. Does anyone here have any problems with traditional woodwork? No? Thought so. Even the woodworking innovators respect it.
How to distinguish reactionaries from such true conservatives? Easy, actually: Reactionaries will invoke a past that never was, trying to move there, betraying that they’re actually terminally misguided progressives. They do that in defence of failed innovations – such as the nuclear family, or capitalism, or whatever.
I appreciate your honest response but, I haven’t heard those intentions from anyone claiming to be conservative until just now.
I think it’s fine to celebrate traditions, even fine to share them when asked, or offer to share them with people you know. My family makes these really specific pancakes for holidays, I love making those, great tradition. Some families deny their children basic healthcare because, traditionally their faith tells them to and that’s child abuse, awful tradition. I get what you mean but it’s a pretty shaky argument. As for waiting and reacting, how much longer do we need to wait to react to things like climate change, the homelessness epidemic, the opioid crisis, childhood cancer? If any of your traditions are against solving those problems, I’m sorry but I’m against those traditions and they aren’t compatible with modern society.
I’m curious, why not find a new title for your political beliefs, and shame modern conservatives who line their pockets with money from big corporations? Sounds like the conservative badge isn’t quite reflecting what you’d like it to anymore.
I’m curious, why not find a new title for your political beliefs, and shame modern conservatives who line their pockets with money from big corporations? Sounds like the conservative badge isn’t quite reflecting what you’d like it to anymore.
I’m an Anarchist, a widely misunderstood term. I thus emphasise with actual conservatives who are similarly misunderstood, is all.
how much longer do we need to wait to react to things like climate change, the homelessness epidemic, the opioid crisis, childhood cancer?
We don’t. Oh wait opioid crisis you mean the US, and your use of epidemic isn’t hyperbole.
E.g. farmers over here don’t mind environmentalism, they mind being told what to do by Greens who fail to care about farmers still being able to earn a living – they’re getting squeezed by supermarkets and agricultural subsidies, for decades, were designed to kill off family-sized farms. People don’t mind electric cars they mind having to pay for a new one, doubly so while absolutely nothing got invested into rail over the decades and the FDP penny-pinched the 49 Euro ticket. People don’t mind new building developments they mind that what gets built (by private developers) is way too expensive. People, and this is very telling, don’t mind wind mills as such they mind not owning them: In SH, on the countryside, where mills are largely owned by municipal cooperatives, everyone is in favour, in MV, where they don’t have much money at all to invest, they do mind as it’s big corporations from the city who put the mills there. And this goes deep, studies show how subsonic noise emissions from those mills are calming to one group and a stressor for the other.
Things like cars and intensive, import-dependent agriculture aren’t actually successful innovations, but mobility of people and everyone being fed are successful innovations. It’s especially in these areas where trouble arises when so-called progressives declare the unsuccessful part evil but don’t bother to protect the successful parts, thinking their part is done by fighting something, instead of building something new to replace it.
So, how long do we need to take until the US gets its act together? Exactly as long as it takes for progressives to realise that everything is going to change much faster if they care about being popular with the conservative crowd. Not the MAGAs and crazy evangelicals, forget about them, they’re a symptom, not a cause.
Oh, last thing: Jehovah’s Witnesses over here accept blood donations etc. for their kids. They had to change doctrine to get the status of a public-law church. I think they used an anabaptist-like “religious duty only starts when you’re old enough to practice it” kind of reasoning – that’s a good innovation, isn’t it?
I think you fail to account for the people that just don’t care or are too (morally or otherwise) corrupt to care. You will not get a CxU voter to vote for anything else than their christian conservative values where anything against the status quo is bad.
A simple fact is that actions to minimize climate change will never be popular because it will affect most people in significant ways and it will hurt. We still need to do this, though. Conservatives are so hyperfocused on not changing anything and making other people’s lives miserable that they cannot see what is coming to all of us not in the far future but potentially really soon.
There is no time to appease the conservatives and do things more their way to be more popular, because as the Americans say “if you give an inch they take a mile”. Nothing will happen and that is something we all can’t afford.
What it ultimately comes down to is corporate interest. Conservative parties will do nothing until it is in the interest of the corporations that fund them and their corrupt politicians. As you can see with the 49€ ticket, the railway maintenance or basically anything in control of FDP, CxU or SPD
Well, there is a value in conserving nature and the environment. It’s just that somehow conservative values generally contradict conserving things that are in danger, really.
Yeah, my mind has completely separated conservation with conservative. Most folks I know concerned with conservation efforts, are progressive. Most conservatives I know, want to watch the world burn to turn a profit.
Because the feelings of the people who would be affected negatively by progress are as valid as yours.
Okay but if progress means validating people who are made to feel invalid by a lack of progress, we’re just in the tolerance paradox with different words.
Yeah, notice how you are now talking like “them”.
Like who?
Who would be affected negatively by progress but the extremely wealthy?
I’ve heard tolerance is more of a social contract
If I go hey black guy I’ll tolerate you if you tolerate me We agree Hey gay person I’ll tolerate your differences if you tolerate my differences Hey nazi-
He doesn’t tolerate us so he is not protected by the social contract and then we don’t have to tolerate Mr Nazi
I have friends
OK you don’t have to brag.
I don’t have Muslim friends who preach for all out jihad and the destruction of American democracy.
I don’t have conservative friends who preach for all out insurrection and the destruction of American democracy.
Some choices aren’t difficult.
I wouldn’t say “preach” but I do have conservative friends that openly tell me that being gay or trans is wrong. (I’m trans, and they know this). I’d love it if they kept that shit in the privacy of their own homes
These people aren’t actually your friends
To be fair it rarely comes up, and they’re not really judging me over it. It’s just shit like complaining about pronouns. Or if we’re talking about religion they’re usually pretty clear that they don’t think I’m disgusting or anything, they’re just holding to what they think is biblical.
But it does kinda feel bad knowing that they’d vote away my right to HRT in a heartbeat
(@[email protected] also)
Or maybe realize that the human race is on a collision course with a hot, chaotic destiny in the form of climate change coupled with economic collapse. Maybe it’s time to solidify our networks instead of silently praying the ‘other’ changes or dies?
Some kind of friend, huh
America has democracy??
Officially.
Allegedly
It’s a Republic because the wealthy knew the people would get it wrong and they needed representative government rather than democracy
Ostensibly. On paper.
Not only does it have democracy, it also has socialism! You just have to be ultra rich or a mega corporation.
To be fair, subsidies aren’t really Socialism. Socialism is more about who owns the Means of Production than it is who gets the benefits from the state.
The point is to not be tolerant of intolerance…
I have a couple of conservative friends. We just don’t talk about politics or the issues of the day. Surprisingly it’s not that hard.
You know, there’s so many people I have tried this with. They just won’t stop bringing it up even when it is completely unrelated to what we’re doing. One of them told me he feels smart because when that comes up I usually walk away to avoid the endless drama and he took that to mean that his position and opinions had so confounded me that leaving was my only way to respond.
Stuff like “yeah I think religion should be enshrined in the Constitution and everyone should have to live by our rules” and “if women don’t want to have kids they should keep their legs closed”.
Like, even if I thought engaging had any chance of working it’s just such braindead regurgitated Fox talking points that I wouldn’t engage anyway. Just waiting for these people to get everything they want and suffer for it.
A distressing number of people seem to have inhibition problems.
A further distressing number are narcissists.
We shouldn’t be surprised though, that’s exactly how they were programmed. The more it became acceptable to pander to our baser instincts, the more profitable it became and the more profit driven concerns did it. The more screen time we had in our upbringing (back when we called it ‘tv’) the more likely we are to have taken on the programming of exceptionalism and decide that what’s good for everyone isn’t what’s good for us.
I don’t necessarily think it was planned that way, but the people who thought that it might be the result were relegated to the fringe.
You must have better friends than I.
Every conservative I know or knew is walking around with pent-up anger, seemingly ready explode over whatever their handlers in the media have railed them up against that day. I guess that is what keeps them active at the ballot box and prevents them from taking a step back, calming down, thinking and questioning the narrative. Either way, it became pretty much impossible to have any kind of outing with these people present.
It’s gotten really tiresome to even look for common ground anymore. Things that were fine just yesterday suddenly make them foam at the mouth. And lately, the persecution complex, too.
Hmm part of it might be that I’m in eastern Canada where there are still ‘progessive conservatives’ and people don’t seem to care so much about politics anyway.
A world away from the USA in terms of media influence.
So, you’re saying you are okay with hanging out with people who are completely okay with the oppression and marginalization of minorities. You choose to keep people around who want other people to loose thier rights. You keep people in your life that support book banning and information suppression.
I would not hang out with you.
Not really. You just know really awful conservatives.
No no no, don’t you see? You need to cutoff all communication with them and get them arrested and ruin their lives bro.
I mean, I’m sorry, but if they believe that abortion is baby murder, black people are predisposed to being criminals, poor people don’t deserve to have healthcare, and trans kids should have to live in a miserable hell that makes them want to commit suicide, I’m not going to just “not talk about it” and stay friends with them. If your morals are that fucked, I can’t in good conscience call you a friend.
Do you think this is what “conservative” means, like completely honestly?
It is when they vote for people who outwardly say that shit. I don’t care what they claim to believe, I only care what their actions say they believe. I don’t know a single “conservative” who wouldn’t vote for a politician aiming to infringe upon minority rights, and if you’re voting for people who want me to be forced to bear a child I don’t want, or who want my trans sibling to be banned from receiving life-saving medical care, or who want to deregulate the medical industry so that insurance companies and profit-hospital CEOs can line their pockets at the expense of the working class, or who want to give more money to racist cops who harass my black friends? Then you can talk about how you don’t hate trans people all you want but the consequences of your actions say otherwise. You can say abortion doesn’t bother you but I don’t believe you. You can say “well, I have a black friend” but you’re still voting for racists. And I’m sorry, but that makes you a bad person and I won’t be friends with a bad person.
Maybe in other countries it’s different. But American conservatives only want to “conserve” the status quo of rich white people doing whatever they want and everyone else getting fucked. They can deny it, but until they stop voting for it there’s zero reason to believe them.
Have you been living under a rock the past ~8 years? Those bullet points are central to the current GOP’s platform. That’s what you’re voting for when you vote republican.
so I guess that means I’m pro bomb since I voted Biden 2020. damn. ill let the kids know
If this is in reference to Israel, every US president has been pro Israel since the creation of Israel. There is no anti-bomb option.
it’s not in reference to a particular policy. that there is no anti-bomb option is my point. just because you vote for a person doesn’t mean their actions become your personal politics
I think that’s what mainstream US conservatism and its adherents think that’s what “conservative” means. And honestly, that’s pretty much been the undercurrent of US conservatism for over 20 years, they’re just now saying the quiet parts out loud.
I think the term’s meaning shifts greatly depending on the country. In Finland, a whole lot of conservative politicians voted in favour of less restrictive abortion laws and their conservative party is in favour of same-sex marriage.
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These people are what you call adults.
My question to that particular adult would be “what about the nature of hierarchies, ruling class dominion, defunding social safety nets including healthcare and education, and cutting corporate taxes do to improve life for you and your family?”
Well adults can still be stupid. But having a civilized debate with others is what should be expected of them. 5 year olds throw tantrums. See: the biggest, orangeist 5 year old of them all.
A lot of people have the survivorship bias: “I could do it on my own, and so should you!” But they are forgetting all the chances and support they got. It is in their interest to make it harder for others coming after them, because that makes their “acomplishments” greater. And since they can inherit their wealth to their children, they can be “benevolent”, because their children might not do it on their own.
“Zero sum” thinking: “If others have it worse, I can have it better.”
“If people make wrong choices, they should be punished for them.”
Thinking like this is leading people to conservative attitudes.
Also lowering the age that children are allowed to start working full time while increasing the retirement age. Cuz this is some bullshit and we should be doing a France about it
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The primary difference is, I can throw a party, I can have my trans friends gay friends Muslim friends black friends, and Latino friends All in the same room. Then I can leave the room to go take care of something and not have to worry that any one person in the room is going to say “you people”.
To be very honest I do have some somewhat conservative friends, They mostly worry that legislation will even the playing field and all their lifelong hard work will be for nothing. Which is still a pretty shitty outlook but I can understand it. They spent 10 years of their life putting our kids through college and all of a sudden colleges free.
“I had to suffer, so everyone else should too.” is NOT a valid reason to push back against progress.
Yep. Falls into the “Fuck you I got mine” category.
Every time I hear that I’m like, “So YOU made your car, home, smart phone, EVERYTHING, yourself? Without the help of any other human being? Congratulations on being so self-sufficient, clearly you don’t need money, or to see a doctor, or to hire a specialist for anything, you can do it all!”
That’s my stance too. If I put a group of people in a room, ideally everyone works together.
Thats not a thing with conservatives. They’ll be starting fights with everyone and then blame that they’re oppressed.
Depends really heavily on how fundamentalist that Muslim friend is, comrade. If they are Muslim in the same way that Joe Biden is a Christian, then yeah. If they are a Wahhabist, then may Allah help the gays, because the Wahhabist sure as hell won’t.
I have 4 Muslim friends, 3 of them would never say a bad word about anyone even in confidence. The forth one would in fact say something about someone, but never to their face. I’m sure there are extremists out there, but by the numbers, 6/10 Christians can’t help but preach to people.
I think that it really depends on how much the religion is screwing the government. Muslims from secular lands (for instance Kazakhstan) are usually chill. Muslims from theocracies (for instance Saudi Arabia) often aren’t. Christians from secular countries (say, Spain) are usually chill. Christians from the land of fundies (Uganda) are not.
The 6/10 is there because a casual believer is indistinguishable from a nonbeliever in most cases. Muslims are noticeably different, and so you notice them easier, thus giving you better statistics.
I should note that my thoughts on the matter are mostly based on anecdotal evidence and that you shouldn’t treat my words as Itmām al-hujjah (heh).
Yeah anecdotal here too. good info though, always good to see different sides of situations from sane people.
Glad I could be useful. Cheers!
You don’t choose sexual orientation, race, nationality, body you’re born into.
Conservatism is a choice! And it’s arguably the wrong one
Ehhh. I understand their logic at this point. It makes sense to them.
That being said, the basis for that logic is rather insane, so take that as you will.
Look, I don’t agree with them either, but if you understand them, then you can pre-empt their arguments. This doesn’t seem to be something that politicians on “the left” can do… So they put forward these very sensible and logical motions, and get torn to shreds by the opposition.
I don’t care what you believe or what direction you lean politically. I won’t be friends with jerkoffs and assholes.
That being said, all my friends are left-leaning. 🤷♂️
Why are they leaving the left? Seems kinda sus
Thanks! Auto-carrot kind of screwed me there. I fixed it.
Have a good day stranger.
Auto-carat*
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