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#conservatism

3 posts3 participants0 posts today
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@dangillmor ”There must be in-groups who the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups who the law binds but does not not protect.”
-Frank Wilhoit

This is the only true rule of conservatism.

And it was made in the context of pointing out that we have no other politics than #conservatism left.

All parties today protect the wealthy at the price of hurting the non-wealthy. Only different flavours of implementing #wilhoitslaw remain in power.

This needs to change.

Historical Linguistics: Evil.

The noun “evil” is defined by Oxford Languages as “profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.” The religious connotation of the word troubles me by contributing to a dumbing down of how we look at societal problems. It is a word overused by politicians to dismiss mass shootings and other antisocial behaviors in a way that immediately shuts down further discussion that could lead to better public policy. Some Christians believe their faith compels them to seek thoughtful, understanding, and forgiving explanations for human shortcomings rather than simply condemning them as evil. The USA has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and is one of the few democracies that still uses capital punishment (i.e., the death penalty). Perhaps those solutions are partly related to how we view antisocial behaviors.

I notice that usage of the word “evil” began to rise around the year 2000, after having been low and flat from about 1940 until the start of the new millennium. It is now being used at about the same level as it was used in the early 1900s. Might this correlate with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the USA?

Freedom

I am meeting my former employees for lunch next week, at a restaurant in a small Texas city where the public university that employed me for 32 years is based. It will be great to see them again, five years after we last worked together, all of them longterm and dedicated colleagues. I will listen carefully for hints of how they are doing without suggesting that anything might be amiss in public higher education. I will keep my opinions to myself. (1/5)

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@TicklishHoneyBee Indeed. Watching women’s skateboarding progress into what it is today has been phenomenal.

But there’s a nagging feeling in the back of my head, that there might not be a new generation of women skaters to push to the next level if #conservatism in the USA manages to subjugate women again.

Will there be any girls who want to skate? If their everyday worlds are full of Andrew Tate -watching boys telling it will make them ”undesirable as mates”? 🤔

A survey of over 9,000 U.S. residents who completed a survey on political attitudes and personality traits found that political conservatives generally scored higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and Dark Triad (i.e., malevolent) personality traits.

Summary: psypost.org/trump-supporters-r

Original paper (not open access): sciencedirect.com/science/arti

PsyPost Psychology News · Trump supporters report higher levels of psychopathy, manipulativeness, callousness, and narcissismBy Eric W. Dolan

"If you reject the very idea that problems are systemic, then you have no use for institutions, and institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems. That primes you to reject the unsatisfying answers of science ("If you don't want to get cancer, regulate corporations and cars that dump carcinogens into the environment") in favor of individual solutions, which are, inevitably, products that someone can sell you, from alkaline water to electrosmog-shielding hats.

Rejecting systemic explanations also primes you to believe in conspiracy theories. This is why antisemitism is called "the socialism of fools": rather than fighting against the system of primacy of extractive finance capital over the productive economy, you spend all your time locked in a one-sided battle with an imaginary cabal of evil Jewish bankers.

Conspiratorial beliefs make you especially vulnerable to a grifter's sales pitch that goes like this: "Of course they don't want you to drink raw milk, otherwise you'd be as powerful as they are." Variations on this theme include "buy the miracle anti-aging cure that only billionaires are privy to" and "buy a bump stock before the conspiracy to take away your right to self-defense makes them illegal."
(...)
Many people have observed that one of the reasons conservatives govern so badly is that they campaign on the idea that "governments are wasteful and inefficient," which means that if they run the government in a wasteful and inefficient fashion, they only prove their point. In the same fashion: right-wing grifters who pitch you on the idea an evil cabal has rigged the game, and then take your money and rip you off, are demonstrating the correctness of their pitch."

pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all

pluralistic.netPluralistic: Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (22 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

alojapan.com/1325027/japans-pm Japan’s PM Ishiba faces uphill battle in upper house election with US tariffs and prices rising #123881327 #article #conservatism #elections #gender #GeneralNews #GovernmentPolicy #GovernmentPrograms #InternationalTrade #Japan #JapanNews #Japanese #JapaneseNews #news #politics #scandals #WorldNews TOKYO — Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba faces an increasingly uphill battle in Sunday’s upper house election, and a loss could worsen p

Saying that “everyone is welcome” has become a political statement in the way that “science is real” has become one. Not because these statement themselves are political or even particularly controversial. No, they are now tainted with politics because they reject the right’s rejections of both objectivity and pluralism.
#liberalism #democracy #fascism #authoritarianism #conservatism #USpolitics #collapse #education
washingtonpost.com/opinions/20

The Washington Post · The Republican shift against American pluralismBy Philip Bump