Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

british imperialism was better than most of the alternatives

individualism is in many respects v good

i've got nothing else i can think of, you people are monsters tbh

'cept unregistered maybe, can get behind the secret atheism bit

brown sugar runs rings around superfoods as a topping for oatmeal.

i have brooks brothers glasses

Compulsory parade attendance.

yoga is bullshit

military technology is pretty cool

I am this guy IRL

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Gb%2B7TzrEL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

it is obnoxious for boys under the age of 13 to have long hair, and an indication that their parents are overindulgent.

today, while at the supermarket, I saw a boy of no more than 10 with a mohawk and felt genuinely incensed.

i like to open a door for a lady

lol, there is definitely this thing that happens in Brooklyn where I see certain longhaired pre-teens and I can just *tell* that they have skateboard dads who encourage them to have it, like it's not even rebellious but actually DL striving by the parents.

I like women.

I don't append "cis" to the male box that I check off on every form.

Cannot abide visible bra straps, even when fashionable

Dogs are outside pets.

Tattoos.

an individual's actions does have something to do w/ their success

not all cultures are equally wonderful and some are bad enough that they should be discouraged

life could be hellish and for many ppl it is so if yours isn't some gratitude is probably in order

nb 1 + 3 might not be internally consistent

Femmephobia is way less useful as a critical concept than misogyny

Self-care is necessary but not thereby radically oppositional

Couching leftist projects in terms of resistance to neoliberalism rather than to capitalism risks a lot of reformist implications

(Not that femmephobia can't be useful in order to talk about, say, biases in specific queer spaces, but it can mystify the conditions that butch and gnc women actually face if applied too generally.)

watching grown adults discussing rae sremmurd like it was literature is to behold the end of art

that's not a "reveal" per se

I forgot imago had some sort of Sremm beef. Why so much hate?

Marxism is dumb and bad.

Capitalist liberal democracy is the end point of Western civilization, it will never be superseded by a higher/better form of social organization, will only end through collapse.

Men should not have facial hair and people in general should not have messy hair.

xps i don't recall saying that you can hear a soulja boy's influence on chaucer

lol "a soulja boy." the soulja boy's tale

currently at peak hair and beard, this will probably only end by collapse too tbh

sremm beef = just watch their latest video, 'set the roof' and listen to the lyrics, they're just the worst people in earth, i fucking despise literally everything they're doing, it isn't even abrasive in an interesting way

lol crut, one for old-skool ilx that

hir wese y manne ful cranke, tellynge

Femmephobia is way less useful as a critical concept than misogyny

Self-care is necessary but not thereby radically oppositional

Couching leftist projects in terms of resistance to neoliberalism rather than to capitalism risks a lot of reformist implications

― one way street, Thursday, August 4, 2016 10:52 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink]

looooool

women's sports are, in general, less exciting versions of men's sports

http://allproudamericans.com/paimages/does-duck-and-cover-really-work.jpg

I'll watch women's tennis from time to time but yeah

There are too many things that I massively disagree with posted here for it to be worth a fight on any one of them. I'm just wondering why the 'loool' at ows? Because those aren't really conservative standpoints? They kind of are in comparison to a lot of current radical discourse (I agree with all of them, though not entirely with the latter, but again, I kind of feel this thread is meant to be a dumping ground not a discussion ground).

women's sports are, in general, less exciting versions of men's sports

― have you ever even read The Drudge Report? Have you gone on Stormfron (k3vin k.), Wednesday, August 17, 2016 10:52 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sexual dimorphism of humans def means that a lot of sports are more exciting to watch when men are playing them but otoh a lot of women's sports are less commercialized and therefore less likely to suffer from rampant PED use endemic to men's sports and therefore likely to be more of a clean competition

also crowds at woman's sports tend to be less shitty

(emil.y i was laughing at the extreme relativity necessary to consider those "conservative opinions." i assumed they were posted tongue in cheek so thought i was laughing along with one way street, not at them, and wasn't critiquing the positions themselves)

Can't speak for sciatica but I lol'ed at ows' post bc it requires some, like, wicked fractal definition of conservatism within the queer anticapotalist left. but I get how all those opinions could be uncool rn

liberalism as many of my friends practice it is like a shitty religion that i want no part of.

they think of other people as needing to be saved, by them.
they make penance with speech acts, not real action.
they live their lives in constant guilt.
they live in cities that are only differentiated from other cities by being huge destinations for wealth, then they disavow that wealth while continuing to partake in the lifestyle it provides.
they blame rich people for all the evils of the world while ignoring that they are the 1%.
they prescribe how other people should be living their own lives.
they say things that have no meaning other than to reveal to others that they are members in this very sensitive club of good people.
it's nothing but performative.

Lol got xp'd

I must admit I like Republican President Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower. But chances are, you also like Ike. Maybe everybody likes Ike.

xps to sciatica and flopson - yeah, both of those reasons are basically fair enough. I think I inhabit so many circles where these are topics for fierce debate that I took it w/ a completely straight face!

watching grown adults discussing rae sremmurd like it was literature is to behold the end of art

― imago,

links?

I must admit I like Republican President Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower. But chances are, you also like Ike. Maybe everybody likes Ike.

― Philip Nunez,

best Cold War president if you look past his championing of covert ops

just watch their latest video, 'set the roof' and listen to the lyrics, they're just the worst people in earth, i fucking despise literally everything they're doing

Lj on rap always sounds like thinly veiled racist uncle 'i like blk ppl...who pull up their pants' lol

There was some self-directed irony in my post (like, as a queer trans woman and a marxist, I realize I occupy a different milieu than some of you), but I do actually hold the positions in it, and they're generally unpopular in radical circles; but as e.mily said, this thread seems "like a dumping ground not a discussion ground," so I'll stay out of the rae sremmurd discourse.

*emil.y, I mean

if hating on vicious misogyny, shit beats and two little soi-disant alpha male fuckers is racist then

never listened to rae sremmurd but i see his/her/their name everywhere

just read the lyrics to set the off and stopped here:

Now let's fill up her head and let's see if she chokes

it's fashionable to call anything (thinly veiled) racism these days (oh my conservative opinion i guess)

Bill O'Reilly also quotes lyrics as if they made sense removed from arrangements.

if hating on vicious misogyny, shit beats and two little soi-disant alpha male fuckers is racist then

― imago,

you just wrote hating "on."

if you are comparing me to bill o reilly you should say so instead of hinting at it

….up with mdma

Handwringing vs Pearlclutching vs Bobohonking

"most countries are rich as well as poor."

This is not really true. Like, at all.

Yeah, I am confused by that.

The population in richer countries have far, far more to fall so they even begin to see what people in the global south have to deal with.

I want to burn down every smoke shop in my neighborhood

Xp - I get what map is saying. Poor countries tend to have wealthy elites that reap the rewards of the exploitation. There is some complicity involved.

But it seems like there may be folx on this thread who hold the uncool conservative belief in “the noble savage”

Though maybe that belief is cool again idk

I've met several noble savages on ILX tbh

There are far bigger numbers of middle class/well off people in richer countries that spend and consume and are complicit in their voting/policy preferences that map and you ought to be aware of xps

That is not something I am disputing at all.

And circumstances where environmental degradation and pollution is done by poor people is often a matter of survival vs convenience

I don't think a country having a wealthy elite makes it "a rich country" or even both a rich and poor country.

When I've seen discourse around rich poor countries it's been more to do with countries rich in national resources but that have not managed to benefit from those due to a) imperialism and b) aforementioned elites. Diamond mines in Angola and such.

well, i think seeing things in the context of global imperialism is certainly important, but so is challenging racist assumptions or media representations about how brown people do economics. India, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia are all in the top 20 global GDPs, well ahead of Denmark and Norway for instance. but we are accustomed to seeing the poverty from the former and highlighting the successes of the latter. also class warfare cuts across national and racial divides and i think sarahell is correct to point out that there is some complicity!

And circumstances where environmental degradation and pollution is done by poor people is often a matter of survival vs convenience

― sarahell, Thursday, 27 November 2025 bookmarkflaglink

They have to survive in a way that most ppl in the north will never have to.
--

GDP is not a measure of success for any countries, never mind India or Mexico. It doesn't take into account the poorest millions in both of these countries are not responsible for the destruction of the ecology, but they will bear the brunt of climate change.

fwiw I don't think anyone at all itt is unaware that wealthy elites everywhere side with other wealthy elites, it's kinda post colonialism 101. The context in which "poor countries" were brought up was concerns about overpopulation, it ain't the wealthy elites contributing to that (it is also not the problem it is painted as, but that's been hashed out here already).

They have to survive in a way that most ppl in the north will never have to.

Otm

But it seems like there may be folx on this thread who hold the uncool conservative belief in “the noble savage”

Fwiw that David Graeber book has an interesting digression into how quickly "noble savage" was weaponised by imperialists as a "loony left" type way of dismissing anyone advocating for the humanity of indigenous cultures and how much material was erased or dismissed based on these faulty premises. Which obv doesn't mean fetishization of other cultures doesn't happen, but it was an interesting history lesson.

Which Graeber book? I have read several and don’t remember that.

it's kinda post colonialism 101

correct but you'd be surprised by how many people i encounter who seem never to have been exposed to these kinds of ideas. given the state of the world and the predominant narratives being used to explain it, it doesn't strike me as bad to keep returning to basics

You're right lol I should have specified: The Dawn Of Everything.

I haven’t read that one.

But it seems like there may be folx on this thread who hold the uncool conservative belief in “the noble savage”

― sarahell, Thursday, November 27, 2025 7:13 AM (two hours ago)

woke up, had coffee, thinking

what i'm saying is going to be orthogonal to what people are saying in the thread rn but not irrelevant

in some ways conservatism is about "tradition", and i do think there is value in tradition. i'm older and a lot of the stuff i know is old and that doesn't mean it's necessarily outdated, even though i haven't read marx or graeber or really a lot of stuff. i tried to read mbembe, and from what i can tell i agree with him, but not only is he really smart he's experienced a lot of stuff i haven't, so i'm not sure i really fully understand him. i start a lot of books i don't finish. i do sometimes talk about stuff i don't really understand, which i think is an uncool conservative thing to do, but i also admit that there's a lot of stuff i don't know and that i'm not as informed on stuff as i'd like to be, which is like, very not conservative.

what i have read is erich fromm's "escape from freedom" and richard hofstadter's "the paranoid style in american politics", which was i guess originally published in harper's. i wonder what richard hofstadter would have to say about gooning. of course neither fromm or hofstadter were conservatives, but they're both dead white men who taught me my childhood beliefs, and i'm strongly influenced by what i was taught as a child, and i think that's conservative.

i'd say it's less that i believe in the "noble savage" and more that i happen to belong to one of the many classes of people who are considered, in practical term, subhuman by people in power. to me, the "noble savage" is a liberal idea more than a conservative one. the point of the "noble savage" is that these are people who should be exempt from extermination. it's the idea of there being "good ones". this was the same philosophy that led hans asperger to come up with the diagnosis he did. he supported his government's eugenic murder program, aktion t4, but he also wanted to exempt certain people who would otherwise qualify. that's not a great example of "noble savage" being a liberal idea. i bring it up only because i happen to be autistic, and because i happen to live in an age where the american government is actively promoting pseudoscientific policies directed against autistic people.

the "noble savage", i'd put that in the same class as "the white man's burden" of kipling. again, i think of kipling as a liberal, i think of "the white man's burden" as a liberal idea. it was one of the liberal ideas i was taught, one of the liberal ideas i deeply internalized. to me it's the same idea as the lee/ditko formulation "with great power comes great responsibility". this is _largely_ a white idea, but there are echoes of it in, say, W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of the Talented Tenth. elitism, exceptionalism, the notion of the "model minority", the idea that those of us who are _better_ have a responsibility to _uplift_ the rest of humanity to _our level_.

the thing about conservatism, in my experience, is that it takes real data and perverts and twists the meaning. the classic example of this, to me, is hernstein and murray's 1994 noxious piece of trash _The Bell Curve_. another piece of very dismal "science", which is to say, racist pseudoscience. very much in the tradition, i think, of carlyle. hell, for all i know the authors might actually be _proud_ to be compared to carlyle, haha. the reason i find conservatism so fascinating and compelling is that in a lot of ways it's half-right. conservative writers will talk about things in a critical way that liberals tend to ignore or gloss over. so the bell curve comes out and they have data showing racial achievement disparities, which is compelling to _me_ because the liberal tradition i grew up in was that of, oh, hey, let's "uplift" minorities so they can be exactly like us, "us" being white heterosexual cisgender men. conservatives can post data showing that it's not working and make a compelling argument that it _isn't_ going to work. the difference being that conservatives then come up with the idiotic, false, and bigoted argument that somehow marginalized groups aren't achieving the things privileged groups are because they're _genetically inferior_.

well, i'm white, and for most of my life i thought of myself as a heterosexual man. i didn't agree with the bell curve, but it was something i _intellectually grappled with_. it was something i _took seriously_. now i look back at that and i'm kind of horrified. to me, it's like taking something like _the turner diaries_ seriously. their argument is not and never was worthy of serious intellectual consideration. my uncool leftist belief is that if your "science" leads you to a conclusion that some groups of humans are categorically inferior to others, you're doing something wrong, and rather than publishing your work you should figure out what's leading you to such an obviously false conclusion. i'm not great at math, but if you're doing an equation and it reduces to 1 = 0, i mean, why would someone look at that and claim they've found a groundbreaking new mathematical proof? that's stupid. that's fucking stupid.

-

i'd say my current belief that comes closest to being an "uncool conservative" belief is the idea that when the chips are down, the only person i can truly rely on is me. just like with any conservative belief, though, i don't believe it the way conservatives believe it. i'm not into, like, the whole juche thing. because i have this core belief that's very anti-conservative, which that while emotions aren't facts, they're _important_. they _matter_. the absolutely most fucked up belief conservatives have is... it's the whole "facts don't care about your feelings", and then they substitute themselves for "facts" and me for "feelings". it's a disingenuous, prejudiced framing. arguing against the statement "facts don't care about your feelings" would be stupid, because it's self-evidently true that facts do not, in fact, care about my feelings. this is why i don't argue, people are out there saying "fight me" and ultimately some idiot gets fed up and decides to make their argument with a bullet, and the problem, to me, isn't _just_ the bullet, it's the fact that they were having that _kind_ of argument, the kind of argument that was only going to ever end in a fight. charlie kirk, as an individual, i guess lost that fight, but in the larger scheme of things, the charlie kirks of the world are at a distinct advantage in that sort of fight. it's like getting into a boxing match with uwe boll. why the fuck would i get in the ring with that man?

i don't know if it's a liberal or conservative or whatever kind of belief, but there's this belief that _we_ have to beat _them_ on THEIR TERMS. i mean you know what's an uncool conservative belief? the idea of the clash of civilizations. i guess in some sense that is true. when i was a kid they used to tell me that it takes two people to make a fight, and i never quite believed that. sometimes one person decides to beat the shit out of another person and whether or not the other person fights back, that gets called a "fight", the other person gets accused of having "provoked" the first person or something. it's very, very easy to manufacture a casus belli out of thin air. that's what i believe.

so when i believe that the only person i can rely on is me, what that means is that often, the most important thing i can do is find friends. because i don't dig my own coal. i can complain about how shitty things are, and the response could be "life isn't fair", which is true, or "there are children starving in Africa", which is also true. i think there's a time and a place for complaining about how shitty my life is, not because the fact bears restating but because it does take an _emotional_ toll on me. saying that to people who will listen and empathize, that's necessary, i think, that's important. "relying on me" doesn't mean not ever telling anybody else about my problems, it means trusting myself to find people i can express my feelings to, the fear, the grief, the anger, not because i want them to _fix_ it or to _change_ anything, but because one of the things i need is to be listened to and heard by people i trust and care about. again, very not conservative.

i'm not dismissing the importance of "children starving in Africa". i do think that's a problem, that's unjust. it's also not a problem that i _personally_ can fix. if i'm building friends, that to me needs to be built around shared values. if someone points out, say, the inequities between the global north and the global south, the way the cost of the hegemonic actions of the global north disproportionately affect people in the global south, i'm not gonna say "oh yeah, well, i'm a trans person in america, i have it bad too". because, like, it's not fucking about _me_? not everything everyone says is about _me_ and _my_ problems? again very much _not_ a conservative belief. that's something else i mean when i say that the only person i can rely on is me. i can ask for help and maybe someone is prioritizing other people's problems, or even their own problems. that's totally fair! blaming them or being resentful of them for not helping me isn't going to get me anywhere. since resentment is a feeling, i mean, i might feel that, since feelings aren't right or wrong, but it's just not going to do me any good to _act_ out of resentment.

but i had to learn that, because the truth is that white people - and i'm very much a white person - act out of resentment a lot of the time, and because we're privileged, a lot of times that's effective in an immediate sense. it's taken me a long time to learn that acting out of resentment _doesn't_ benefit me in the long term. there's this particular fucked up idea that a lot of white people seem to have, an idea that i used to have, that, like, as long as other people are suffering _more_, we're doing ok. that's bad enough, and then there's this dumb corrollary that's, like, if we're not doing ok, we must be suffering more than anyone else. both of those ideas are, imo, fucking stupid, and so it makes sense that people aren't gonna say that outright. if i dig down personally, though, to why i believe certain things, what i find is some internalized value, some internalized belief, that's just dumb. and then i have to kind of figure out how to change how i live my life so that it doesn't rely on this belief that i rationally know is just plain wrong.

that's _why_ tradition is so important to me. because doing new things, there's not really a lot of data on whether they work or not, if it hasn't been tried before. communists used to say "oh well we don't know communism doesn't work because we've _never really tried it_." ok, sure, i'm not a true scotsman either. my uncool conservative belief is that if i'm gonna live my life based on something, i'd rather it be something that i _know_ works. my non-conservative belief is that just because i was taught something when i was young doesn't mean i know it works. just because something worked when i was young doesn't mean it still works!

anyway ramble. it's thanksgiving here in america. i'm gonna call my family.

to me, the "noble savage" is a liberal idea more than a conservative one. the point of the "noble savage" is that these are people who should be exempt from extermination. it's the idea of there being "good ones".

This isn't correct fwiw. aiui, the original idea, primarily from Rousseau and other Romantics, was that humans are inherently good but become evil through the corrupting influence of "civilization." This was then applied to non-Western, often Indigenous, societies, romanticizing them by assuming them to be less violent or less corrupted, more pure and innocent etc. than "rational" European societies that were purportedly the culmination of centuries of intellectual and cultural progress.

it goes back a bit further than that, and although i do think that's the gist of it, it's worth noting that in e.g. Las Casas's account, there was a real imperative to humanize indigenous people in the Americas in an attempt to critique and ideally influence Spanish colonial policy in the Americas. whereas with Montaigne and yeah Rousseau later it feels much more in the realm of a "thought experiment" that had much more bearing on Enlightenment ideas about liberal governance than it did on any actual foreign policy (but in that sense i do think it's a "liberal idea")

for sure (and the core argument about inherent goodness & corruption could be traced back way before European colonialism), and I don't mean to elide Daniel's post which alluded to things like that:

Fwiw that David Graeber book has an interesting digression into how quickly "noble savage" was weaponised by imperialists as a "loony left" type way of dismissing anyone advocating for the humanity of indigenous cultures and how much material was erased or dismissed based on these faulty premises. Which obv doesn't mean fetishization of other cultures doesn't happen, but it was an interesting history lesson.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Thursday, November 27, 2025 11:20 AM (three hours ago)

I just thought the claim that the concept of the "noble savage" was about elevating individuals or an elite sub-class within a group was off-base. Obviously that phenomenon does exist, but I've personally never seen the NS term used that way. A little pedantic, but reading it Kate's way would put the preceding posts in a weird light imo.

ps. thanks for mentioning Las Casas, really interesting figure

I just thought the claim that the concept of the "noble savage" was about elevating individuals or an elite sub-class within a group was off-base. Obviously that phenomenon does exist, but I've personally never seen the NS term used that way. A little pedantic, but reading it Kate's way would put the preceding posts in a weird light imo.

― rob

yeah actually you're right and the correction is appreciated!

idk, 18th century french philosophy is tough for me to get a handle on. voltaire predated rousseau, right? is rousseau's concept of the "noble savage" distinct from the leibnizian optimism parodied by voltaire in _candide_?

they were pretty much contemporaries. voltaire was kind of a shit poster whereas rousseau was much more of a treeship. voltaire was a deeply cynical person and he dismissed rousseau's ideas about human nature with as much acerbity as anything pilloried in "candide." i don't know too much about leibniz but my understanding of his "best of all possible worlds" was that it was more of a goofy theological deal than anything else. whereas for rousseau at least the "noble savage" was a kind of stand-in or intellectual exercise to theorize the human being before the institutions of culture and politics begin its work on him, the idea being that if there's an inherent goodness/empathy at man's core than it stands to reason that corruption and vice are social ills that can be overcome in the sphere of politics as opposed to being evidence of an inherent evil, in the theological sense, within the human condition. i think

having said that, Rousseau would be a great person to post on the "Uncool Conservative Beliefs" thread because he sure as hell had them in spades

ok here is an uncool conservative belief.

there are probably too many people on the planet.

i always see this countered with "but nazis". it's .. still true. the earth has limits for any population. whether or not we've reached that limit is arguable, but i don't think it's arguable that our population going down would be bad, for our own future or for the planet's.

is it conservative to believe that the earth is going to deal with "our" climate change in ways we can't envision? it isn't some fragile thing. it is in fact very resilient. we're fooling ourselves if we think the earth isn't going to roll with it, respond, and endure. part of its response will be to lower the population. we are subject to it, not the other way around.

― map, Wednesday, November 26, 2025 1:49 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

n.b. i think by far the best way to address the population issue would be widely available and valued birth control / vasectomies. and maybe starting a mandatory earth cult to go with it all. j/k about that one.

― map, Wednesday, November 26, 2025 1:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the global population is already set to peak in 60 years and then decline, with many countries birthrates already below replacement level, and the forecasted date of the peak keeps getting closer and closer. china's population has already plateaued, japan's is decreasing and 30% of people are over 65. the population minimizers don't really need to do anything to address the issue, ya'll are already winning

great news!

I'm contributing to the falling birth rates.

So all these good posts here had me going back to the Graeber/Wengrow book I mehtioned. Quick tl, dr of what the chapter on Rousseau says:

Basically the initial assertion is that even in Rousseau's times Europe was not isolated from other cultures, though its historians were very eager to downplay any foreign influence - they actually cite Leibniz as an example, saying his interest in Chinese govt structures lead to some of these being adopted in different countries, but that's a tangent.

What the book is more concerned with is the dialogues between Europeans and (native) Americans. They begin by pointing out that, while European accounts of Americans varied greatly, American takes on European civilisation seemed quite consistently to be "you guys are fucked up, props on the tech I guess but you live like shit". There were many such accounts written, and Rousseau would have had access to them, which obv doesn't make him an expert or anything but neither would he be theorising in a vacuum.

What then happened, the book suggests, is that most native narratives were dismissed as forgeries by white men projecting their values onto the natives (I'm guessing the historical example of "barbarian" texts actually written by Romans might have had some influence on this line of thought). This was not at all done via modern journalistic or historian means; often the reasoning was the simple racism of "a native wouldn't have such sophisticated thoughts". Somewhat more credible is the argument that many of these reports portrayed different tribes and cultures as far more utopian than they were - to which the authors respond, do we not believe native american ppl would be capable of self-romanticising their culture?

Anyway not saying I'm sure the book is right or anything but it def made me suspicious of some ideas I had previously taken for granted.

interesting, thanks for sharing that. i'm looking into this and will maybe post a response later! i haven't heard of Lahontan

also, kate, i just wanted to say i enjoyed your post yesterday but haven't been able to formulate a response i'm happy with. except to say that my reaction to realizations along the lines of "humans always do this and will never stop doing this [bad thing]" has sometimes been a kind of (conservative) nihilism but has, at other times, helped me to understand that i am not the first human to feel paralyzed at contemplating the totality of human selfishness and complacency, and i won't be the last, and so perhaps there's a lesson there about humility and about scale, and an opportunity to set parameters for your own life that are realistic about the impact you can actually have, and the happiness you can effect in yourself and in others

i love that graeber book!

the global population is already set to peak in 60 years and then decline, with many countries birthrates already below replacement level, and the forecasted date of the peak keeps getting closer and closer. china's population has already plateaued, japan's is decreasing and 30% of people are over 65. the population minimizers don't really need to do anything to address the issue, ya'll are already winning

― flopson, Thursday, 27 November 2025 bookmarkflaglink

There are places in the global south (thinking of Africa) where the population is increasing and yet those will be some of the most affected by climate change. Some of the population decreases will be 'enforced'.

i feel like there is a perceived disagreement implied by your post but i can't grasp what it is

fwiw, the demographers who forecast population growth include africa in their models, so the decline in global population is inclusive of africa. so even though the population of africa will increase, the population of the world will still decrease (pleasing map)

this isn’t mine in particular, but my spouse has been pushing which hands are the proper ones for eating and it’s something I never would’ve conceived them to care about. Worse yet- I’m left handed and have unintentionally been doing it the “proper” way all my life!

xp: less disagreement than filling out the detail that you did not mention.

also, kate, i just wanted to say i enjoyed your post yesterday but haven't been able to formulate a response i'm happy with. except to say that my reaction to realizations along the lines of "humans always do this and will never stop doing this [bad thing]" has sometimes been a kind of (conservative) nihilism but has, at other times, helped me to understand that i am not the first human to feel paralyzed at contemplating the totality of human selfishness and complacency, and i won't be the last, and so perhaps there's a lesson there about humility and about scale, and an opportunity to set parameters for your own life that are realistic about the impact you can actually have, and the happiness you can effect in yourself and in others

― budo jeru

aww, thanks, i'm hoping so :)

rousseau-as-conservative is interesting because of the way the idea of the "noble savage" exists in tension with the hobbesian view that the state of nature is the "war of all against all". i don't think either is true, honestly.

graeber's stuff is the 21st-century leftism i'm most familiar with. i'm not a big reader so i'm mostly familiar with the ways it's reflected in the world around me. i can't help but note that the causes graeber advocated for in his lifetime were pretty spectacular failures. when it comes to conservatism, i definitely lean towards hobbesian pessimism. is there an argument to be made that graeber's ideas might be put into practice in a way that leads to a better world?