To my knowledge, the concept of “conservatism” is the will to conserve, preserve past values that are seen as superior. While I don’t agree with this either, this community has almost exclusively posts about fearing new things and trying to show them as evil. Evil migrants, evil new generations, evil new sexualities, whatever.
I do not see any “values” in it, only fear. Rejecting migrants is not based on morals or values that are rational, but on fear. Same for the rest. Which leads to the question, what is the point of this community? It does not lead to debate, people calling it out as fascism on one side (which is quite justified as the root ideas are seemingly identical) and the other side just saying that it’s wrong and that’s it. There’s no debate of values, as there are no values to debate about.
I do not agree with the concept of conservatism, and I couldn’t care less if this place is forever doomed to be downvoted in oblivion. But if you actually want to do something else than fear-mongering, even if you insist on talking about conservatism, then maybe it would be a good idea to refocus the community on actual ideas, and not the typical far-right speeches of hatred and fear that already flood a lot of media.
Of course I believe that it would be better to reconsider opinions that basically encourage the worst of humanity; but even aside from that, there is more to do than to replace every possibility of a conversation with the (stereo)typical “immigrants bad, jesus good, gays evil” speech.
Note: I’m the main poster, and head mod. I’m trying my best, but I’m kind of a fuck up, and have a hard time explaining myself well.
When you’re posting news articles, it’s usually about the stuff that happened recently. Combined with “Not all progress is good progress”, it’s basically indistinguishable from “fearing new things”. But fair point, and I’ve been trying to find good stuff happening, like the rates of gun ownership going up, and high school skeet shooting clubs. I’ll give it more thought on what quality content actually looks like. In the meantime, I’ll keep going.
with the (stereo)typical “immigrants bad, jesus good, gays evil” speech.
That middle part has all but vanished here. We can’t have compassion for migrants because we have “limited resources” and clearly they’re all just bad people (totally unrelated to their skin color they’ll tell you). They gladly elect politicians that destroy the social safety net for the poor.
The only thing even remotely related to Jesus being here is supply side Jesus.
You have a weird view if you still think all conservatives are christians. Hell, have I posted a single christian thing here?
I think your problem is you have this inaccurate preconceived notion, and its just not jiving with what you see.
Just declaring that everyone you disagree with has no values doesn’t make it so.
Our side may support Nazis but at least we keep the wrong people from being happy…
What’s weird is I thought I left a comment giving you an official warning.
Well, here it is.
Rule 3, bad faith. Official warning.
It always cracks me up how wrong liberals are about everything.
I support a single payer system.
Even Trump praised it.
https://pnhp.org/news/trumps-forbidden-love-single-payer-health-care/
Maybe you’re a closet conservative and you didn’t even know it.
The major debate is how to fund it, how to change the system and not end your like Canada or Europe where it’s in name only. I don’t want Medicare for all. I want something more akin to the Australian system.
If we don’t fix our shit now, we are going to sail past the 2.5° mark. That is going to risk a food chain collapse, which would be a mass extinction level event. And that’s only one of many of the >disastrous effects.
You realize the Earth has done that in the past as well? We survived. We will adapt.
It isn’t. There are few sciences as close in agreement as climate science. The overwhelming consensus (97%) within the scientific community is that it is happening, and that it is man made.
You just ignored everything I said because you were excited to repeat that trope. Follow the money.
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/follow-the-climate-change-money
That point being that there is mountains of evidence showing that climate change is happening, and it is human caused.
Do you even read what anyone says? Or is this an attempt at a straw man. I clearly pointed out the climate it changing as it has since the inception of time.
That’s not how science or the peer review process works. The scientific method takes money to be able to experiment. Do you think climate monitoring satellites are just free?
Are you a doctor? I am, so don’t tell me how the process works. I am published, you are not. Money taints the process. It’s a well known fact that money taints the results.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-money-is-a-problem-for-science-2016-7
Not sure what you think satellites have to do with what I said.
I would describe conservatism as the belief that changing things can make them worse, which can manifest (or appear to manifest) as a fear of change.
Im a libertarian-leaning socially-liberal economically-conservative person rather than a standard Republican so I don’t know how representative I am, but here are my conservative values: the people of the USA are amazingly free, wealthy, and safe. I am an immigrant; my family got enough government support to survive when we came here with almost nothing, I attended excellent public schools and went to college with a generous scholarship, and now I live a secure upper-middle-class lifestyle. For me, the American Dream is very much real.
I worry when I hear people (most of whom had great opportunities like I did) claim that America is exceptionally bad and demand drastic change. I would say that they want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but many of them are worse than that because they apparently don’t recognize that the eggs that the goose is laying are even golden. I’m not claiming that there’s no room for improvement, but improvements must be made slowly and carefully in order to avoid breaking what we do have already, which is both precious and fragile.
my family got enough government support to survive when we came here with almost nothing, I attended excellent public schools and went to college with a generous scholarship
And most of those things have gotten significantly worse because of “conservatives”. And the people who want “drastic change” are the progressives who want to restore the old values. What you already have is getting worse all the time.
Because the problem in the US is that political left is seen as the same as progressive and political right is conservative. And the right opposes government interventions in the form of social safety nets, free education, etc. Those are not conservative values, but since the US only has 2 parties, they’ve become conservative value because the conservatives are also right-wing.
If you’re a libertarian, I don’t see how you even support tax-funded programs like these.
I don’t think these things have gotten worse, but my perception is based on looking at immigrants in NYC, which isn’t a Republican area. With that said, I don’t disagree with you. A lot of current Republicans are willing and even eager to break things - the distinction between them and the most extreme Democrats seems to be which “utopian” vision they want to reach by burning down the current system, and IMO that willingness to destroy what we already have should be unacceptable to reasonable conservatives.
As an aside: I’m not captial-L Libertarian. I lean towards libertarianism because I really don’t like being told what to do and therefore I oppose both Democratic “nanny state” policies and Republican moral busybodies. However, I think that government is the best tool for providing a level of social services that almost everyone is willing to support out of basic human decency, and I also think that these social services make good economic sense from a purely selfish perspective too - I pay a lot more in taxes than I ever received in social services so the USA got a good deal on me.
and IMO that willingness to destroy what we already have should be unacceptable to reasonable conservatives.
Why? A huge amount of what we already have fucking sucks. Why should it be unacceptable to get rid of it?