rolling explaining conservatism

taxes are theft; therefore, democrats are criminals

selfishness is too a virtue

Making people's lives better is not a function of the state. The state's job is to get out of the way so the market can make people's lives better*.

*or not

wasn't it Jeremy Clarkson that said something once like "governments should build park benches and leave us alone"

if your parents don't have enough money, nothing you do matters

job security is a necessary evil to coerce the talented

if you weren't forced to pay taxes, you could just afford things on your own like insurance and private police protection

in my very amateurish opinion modern conservativism has two major planks:

1) denial of any link between capitalism and the undermining of traditional values.
2) strict and explicit separation of society into categories of, let's say, "elect" and "damned" (those deserving of privilege, security, etc. and those undeserving...white supremacy is obviously a huge part of this)

All conservatism is the rationalization and preservation of privilege. The hatefulness and nastiness that seems to travel with it has always been there, but obviously people have had different expectations throughout history about what's uncouth and which are the parts you aren't supposed to say out loud.

Scalzi's essay is a tad goofy but I liked his nerdy explanation of privilege: "In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is."

Any policies that increase egalitarianism in Western societies, by necessity, can be seen as mildly increasing the difficulty setting for Straight White Male. If you're not doing so great at The Real World, and you were already on the lowest difficulty setting, then something's clearly very wrong.

life is a golf course. climate change is a chinese hoax

life is a golf ball, I wanna drive it all night long

russian=socialists are the worst ever evil in the world, except when republican president donald trump houses and praises them. government is the problem, as well

states' rights except when not

I'd love to see Scalzi recite his essay to the corpse of a drug overdosed white person whose lost all realistic hope for his/her life. Americans don't know each other anymore.

that is not in his individual self-interest. individual self-interest is all that matters

regulation gets in the way of businesses succeeding and makes capitalism not work. we shouldn't regulate wrongdoing out of existence - the market will react and put evildoing companies out of business. it's ok if 371 people die due to eating salmonella infected peanuts because AFTER those people die, people will boycott the brand!

We could have stopped those people from dying but that would have hurt Planters' sales and really when it boils down to it, aren't 371 lives worth it?

also the Holocaust never happened.

People want the government to be run like a business, so that after a few years they can be surprised by a FOR LEASE sign on City Hall, and no idea what it might turn into next.

Maybe it will be a new coffee place, or a hair salon!

All white grievance is legitimate, especially hopelessness in the face of poverty

except for the four gospels, the judeo-christian bible is the literal word of god, bro

All white grievance is legitimate, especially hopelessness in the face of poverty

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, March 7, 2017 4:20 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ignoring suffering because of classism and identity politics is part of why we're here. People like you have blood on your hands... POC die because of attitudes like yours, which, on the surface, tries to celebrate them. But it's not out of concern for the lives of POC, but for your own narcissism and privilege, which you then flip on others less fortunate than yourself.

Liberalism and conservatism is the same side of the same coin at this point. Is it any wonder why we are where we are?

what would we do without you, larry

have you heard of this guy, jim goad? I think his books would grab you

Well, there was a reason I worked with an Obama appointee, you low-level bureaucratic waste. My ideas make sense and work, they're just not in vogue right now, because of snot wipes like you who want to sip glasses of wine while people suffer and die.

The funniest part of your schtick is that everything I've posted to this thread is either me actually linking to and quoting John Scalzi and the rest is ripped off from Ta-Nehisi Coates - I haven't expressed a single original opinion worth lashing out at. But you man, you got the solutions that make sense, and work!

beef is when I see you
guaranteed to be in ICU

but you won't have healthcare

All conservatism is the rationalization and preservation of privilege.

fucking otm. all hoarding and no empathy. fuck you, got mine. what's that, an oppressed category of people wants equal treatment? get the fuck off my lawn. if you need quotas, that just means you females/non-whites/whatever are simply terrible at what you do. let the free market do its job because the free market is faultless*.

* at preserving old-timey privilege

this is the angriest i've ever been this early in a thread

anger is an energy. it's cool to frack oklahoma into earthquake hell, because profit

the united states is a republic, not a democracy

That one I've honestly never been able to figure out. It's a non sequitur beyond the rest

Democrats fancy themselves civil rights pioneers but it was REPUBLICANS who freed the slaves we are just like that 19th century party

as Martin Luther King famously said, people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character

and MLK was a Republican after all!

My ideas make sense and work, they're just not in vogue right now, because of snot wipes like you who want to sip glasses of wine while people suffer and die.

― larry appleton, Tuesday, 7 March 2017 04:39 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Moonlight swine leap whiff off this one

which ideology is against water fluoridation now?

fluoridation is how the govmint gives you gay mind control cancer, keep up

My ideas make sense and work, they're just not in vogue right now, because of snot wipes like you who want to sip glasses of wine while people suffer and die.

posts that effortlessly etc

maybe start a thread for recommending a good wine to accompany people suffering and dying

Egoism is real, altruism is not. Hence, running a state by egoists’ rules - “like a business,” if you will - is the only sensible option. If the state then falls apart, it’s not because a democracy is inherently altruistic, but because the state is broken and needs to be abolished.

Right, the only motivating factor you can count on is that everyone wants to get rich. EVERYONE. We all like money right guys? Also, everyone cheats, come on.

who among us would not rather have the opportunity, however small, to live beyond the dreams of Croesus rather than to bumble along with our needs generally satisfied but no prospect of rubbing anybody else's nose in it?

tucking your shirt into your jeans is a timeless look

brb I'm off to find a conservative board with a thread explaining liberals and the staggering insights therein

Bow-ties are a legitimate fashion choice

MANY YEARS AGO PRINCE DARKNESS "GANNON" STOLE ONE OF THE TRIFORCE WITH POWER.

That does explain a lot. And the triforce of wisdom being in eight pieces is why the left is so hopeless.

lol @ larry appleton / Tombot guvmint dill-weed beef

have you guys ever considered that conservatism has ideological appeal to its adherents, rather than something dismissive like "the rationalization and preservation of privilege" (what about the millions of non-privileged people who are conservatives? don't say false consciousness!) or "individual self-interest is all that matters"?

I considered, then dismissed it.

Most problems can be pretty easily explained through racism and false consciousness.

is everybody's brain broken?

if it goes bad you cant just put it in the snow after and make it go "unbad." they would have had to have unloaded the whole fridge and dumped it outside as soon as the power went out.

— sli me :o) (@ssslimeslime) February 17, 2021

I refuse to delve into it with these people but I will note that for produce and things that don't freeze well, putting them outside may not be an option but if your house is 40 degrees you could just...leave the fridge door open?

It does get weird when your fridge is WARMER than the air outside and things in the fridge start to freeze.

I think some fridges that aren't well insulated heated up before indoor temps dropped enough.

If you are a so-called survivalist and don't carry a P38 or know where yours are located at any given time, then you are not a survivalist, but a conservative suburban asshole with too much money and too many guns.

Like, I keep one in the car, one in the bear box, and one in my hiking pack. It's truly an indispensable tool.

A pity twasnt the likes of them found pandoras box all the same

🧐 pic.twitter.com/Ey2oghZ1Fv

— Alisha 💜🤘🧀🌊 (@cptnwtrpnts) February 20, 2021

why are all these homos lubricating my rifle?

wait what does that mean

surely that is "tears" 'shopped, right?

because

You help a guy out one time and he has to go and advertise it on a t-shirt, sheesh

Ass Rim 15

lower-case “l” i’m assuming. like he just uses a LOT of cum.

Jonny Edgelord rides pic.twitter.com/tLCS6hheEX

— J.A.K. (@JasonAdamK) March 15, 2021

Sums it up, really.

wokemon be warned, lol

even more succinctly:

oh so i can't be racist but the tv can play wet ass pussy

— mark (@kept_simple) March 16, 2021

If 4o years from now, Cardi decides the song was a bit too much and stops selling it....will these same people bitch?!

A+

lol at ppl who think there'll be a planet 40 years from now

Planet yes.

People, though...

is Adam Tooze conservative?

― flopson, Sunday, 25 June 2017 bookmarkflaglink

Tooze in China is creating entirely novel forms of aesthetic sensibility (contemplating the post-Enlightenment in a storm-hit Chinese metropolis while reading Sloterdijk and posting feet-pics).https://t.co/vE8SHAVdBO pic.twitter.com/RCM74XF8zc

— Alan Smithee (@AlanSmithee1987) July 23, 2025

https://bsky.app/profile/internethippo.bsky.social/post/3m4t5zj5hkk2v

‪Conservatism used to be about media and political elites who were in on the joke riling up the rubes for profit but they got displaced by people who really believe the propaganda so the entire right wing now is a human centipede of guys producing and consuming the same dreck

this is a solid take

Julian Sanchez‬
✧@normat✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 1h
I’ve been saying this for ages: These folks are doomed to be permanently angry because they’re angry about aspects of the culture that policy ultimately can’t change. They’re seeking political power as a consolation prize for lack of cultural power, and will always be dissatisfied.

Yes but what gets me is that they also have loads and loads of cultural power.

Like yeah they complain about woke casting choices in popular media but they still control plenty of stuff.

And they keep injecting new amounts of compensatory crassness in the main culture, ostensibly as backlash against PC, so that now the president calls a woman piggy and it's just like, Donny bein' Donny.

they have power but they're not cool. look at the clothes they wear. they don't start trends

The republican coalition habitually describes itself, its policies and its ideology as conservative, but they are really a hodge-podge of politically expedient positions that rapidly shift around, sometimes from week to week or even day to day. The fact that these expediencies successfully provide them with power is what keeps the coalition together. If you want to explain conservatism as a shared set of personality traits then analyzing the republican party is a distraction. They are far more reactionary than conservative.

i think conservatism is a conscious alignment with any social forces that are "on top" and an agreement with all of the stories those forces tell about themselves in order to maintain their power. conservatism is a complete capitulation to power, a baptisement in it. the sentimentalism of conservatism exists to counterweigh its brutality.

liberals and leftists have different relationships to power. sometimes they pretend to have none at all, which is always a bad sign imho.

like dt switching from democrat to republican though, people who worship power in the upper echelons of our society conduct their lives in a fundamentally conservative manner whether democrat or republican.

Excited about this 'alternate halftime show'

Gracie Hunt, the daughter of Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, is throwing her support behind Turning Point USA’s plan to stage an alternative Super Bowl half-time show, a direct counter to the NFL’s decision to feature Bad Bunny at Super Bowl LX.

Hunt said in an appearance on Fox News Channel’s The Will Cain Show on Tuesday that she “most definitely” backs Turning Point’s counter-programming effort, spearheaded by Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk. The NFL’s choice of Bad Bunny for the half-time show has attracted strong pushback from many on the right, who object to his criticism of Donald Trump and US immigration enforcement.

“I really respect Erika for all that she’s done, especially with creating a half-time show for America,” she said. “You know, children are young, they’re impressionable. Young women, young men and everyone, they just need someone to look up to.”

protecting the children from Bad Bunny should be the #1 priority

that is going to be an epic dud and, relevant to the discussion above, not be cool or trendy like she thinks it will be. If it actually happens.

at least the old Simpsons joke will make sense to young people again

two thoughts:

1. I didn't think I needed a further reason to despite the Chiefs, but here we are.
2. Fuck am I not liking this future where we have to hear about Erika even more than we did Charlie.

"despise"

protecting the children from Bad Bunny

I wonder if he's one of those bad hombres Trump spoke of, being sent in by (checks notes) Puerto Rico

they don't start trends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face

The Guardian had a whole article about Mar-Lagoo face this week

Boat parades

Truck nuts

Calvin praying decals

Quiverfull influencers

Home schooling

T/S: Puppy Bowl vs. Erika Kirk's Turning Point USA halftime extravaganza featuring Kid Rock and/or Lee Greenwood

xp none of that is what I consider "culture", I both stand by and regret this revive

I mean.. all of that is 'culture' even if it's garbage

but it's not considered "cool" by the majority

hear about Erika even more than we did Charlie

lol who??

https://www.advocate.com/media-library/erika-kirk-during-the-public-memorial-service-for-charlie-kirk.jpg?id=61640869&width=600&height=600&coordinates=272%2C0%2C273%2C0

Yeah, that could be any one of about six dozen current Nazi princesses. They grow them in vats.

the fake tan thing still takes me aback tbqf

it makes me feel like i'm on the edge of a bad trip every time i see it

oh but you are

Clark Hunt

Say that 3 times fast

I think of conservatism as like the show Growing Pains, one kid breaks the house rules and the siblings are salivating, chomping at the bit "ooh what's their punishment gonna be thus time"

insofar as that will be future historians of this era, i can only imagine what they will make of 'the president's political allies found it advantageous to undergo plastic surgery that made them look like inflatable sex dolls'

with an inset about matt gaetz's eyebrows running wild at the 2024 GOP convention