- cross-posted to:
- aljazeera@rss.ponder.cat
- cross-posted to:
- aljazeera@rss.ponder.cat
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This is an example of one of the things that most baffles me about the right in the US today.
They have this whole narrative about government overreach, but the reality is that while, for example, government agencies did have DEI policies, they were internal. There was no interference in businesses - the businesses that had or have DEI policies chose to on their own.
Then the Republicans come in and what do they do? They ban DEI, not just in their own agencies, but in private businesses. So in reality, we’ve gone from a situation in which the government did not interfere and businesses freely chose their own policies, which the right characterizes as government overreach, to a situation in which the government attempts to directly intervene and control which policies companies may or may not put in place, which the right characterizes as freedom.
How does that even work in their own brains? I understand the human capacity for self-delusion and confirmation bias but surely there’s some sort of upper limit, which the MAGA right should’ve already passed.
???
They’re not operating on logic. They listen to media which is shouting all this stuff at them, in a carefully engineered format which plays on their emotions and is carefully packaged to make it sound like the most logical thing in the world.
DEI is ruining America. They’re hiring air traffic controllers who can’t do the job, they’re killing people crashing planes just because they got hired because they’re black, same with the LA fires, something must be done, oh thank God Trump is going to finally fix it. That’s about as far as it goes. Any kind of factual analysis about whether those things are actually happening or not, or even about is it internally consistent, gets aggressively thrown out the window.
“Like sure, small government, it’s great and all, but you can’t possibly be telling me the government can’t mandate that the ATC controllers need to be qualified. Right? Is that what you’re telling me? That’s insane. You’re killing people. Can’t you see that’s insane?” And then some kind of a rant that simply will not stop. You can either interrupt with enough force to match the emotional level, at which point it’s a yelling match or you’re being super unreasonable about it and nothing gets accomplished anyway, or you can let it continue. Forever.
The number of times I’ve seen someone successfully have this type of conversation is very limited. All I can really say is, it takes a bunch of times talking about it, not just once, and you have to be very strategic about both your overall emotional tone and empathy involved, and also the factual backing of what you’re saying and when to knock down particular arguments (and stick to it, because they will instantly deflect to something else, before you’re even done with half the first sentence) with something that will resonate with them factually.
You’re going up against a professionally-produced machine which has produced a system in their brain that’s self-sustaining with particular features that make it very hard to talk them out of, once they’re in it. It’s tough.
But I was told that I need to engage with those people and seek to understand them, and ask them questions, because they feel ignored or something, and I should be more empathetic.
(Not pointed at you, Phil.)
I don’t think that approach should be discarded, but one needs to see the signs of when it’s not getting through. Don’t waste time on people who are fully in the cult and are lost, but still try to get to the ones who are listening to the Sirens but haven’t jumped overboard yet. And yes, it’s often not easy to see the difference. If they can’t dig themselves out (with questions meant to make them think past the soundbites), you aren’t going to pull them out.
And I’m as pessimistic as they come, but I’ll still throw a nugget of facts into the mix of a conversation if I feel it could make a person stop and think even for a second. I take a bit of pleasure seeing the cogs jam up when it works.
Before the election, I would have agreed with you. Now, not so much. If they can’t just see it now with their own eyes, my discussion efforts are going to accomplish nilch.
No, my own efforts are now better spent paying closer attention to the world right in front of me, and watching for opportunities to make fascists experience regret and fear.
You may be right, honestly. But I do think that there is a type of echo chamber (that we’re in) that assumes people are informed or aware of things that should be obvious perhaps, but they don’t see it for whatever reason. It’s probably futile as you say, but I do like to at least leave the door cracked for the few that maybe just haven’t gotten the right information yet. And you may ask, rightly so…how the hell can anyone be that ignorant in the 21st century? I submit that it’s still very possible to have blinders on and make bad choices if your life has other priorities than what is deemed common knowledge.
It’s frustrating, regardless of which viewpoint you take. We (society as a whole) could be so much better.
It’s almost like it was never about “small government”, it was about control.
Well, yeah.
You’d think though that the politicians would be a bit less overt about violating their stated principles, and/or that their supporters would be a bit less tolerant of it when they do.
I mean… it’s not like a used car salesman primising to sell you a fine car then selling you a lemon. It’s like a used car salesman promising to sell you a fine car then breaking your legs.
And the rank and file keep coming back for more.
This is an example of one of the things that most baffles me about the right in the US today.They have this whole narrative about government overreach, but the reality is that while, for example, government agencies did have DEI policies, they were internal. There was no interference in businesses - the businesses that had or have DEI policies chose to on their own.
When you stop thinking of conservatives as acting in good faith and realize that they have always been bad faith actors, it makes a whole lot more sense and life gets a little easier because you no longer waste time and energy trying to bring just the right but of information or perspective to show them the errors in their logic.
I’m not trying to show them anything, and I’m not talking about good or bad faith.
I’m talking about the rank and file conservatives who believe the self-serving lies of the bad faith actors in office, and specifically who believe the astonishingly obvious lies that a private company choosing entirely on its own to implement some policy (like requiring masks or following DEI hiring practices) somehow represents government overreach, and that the government then interfering to dictate what the private companies can and cannot do somehow represents the elimination of government overreach.
That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.
And again, I’m not talking about the people who spin that insanity - I’m talking about the people who believe it - who seemingly unquestioningly believe, literally, that freedom is oppression and oppression is freedom. I have no idea how they manage to do that, and it baffles and fascinates me.
My parents are both conservative - white Protestant evangelical Christian conservatives. In my 20s, I first became liberal, then atheist, then leftist. I’ve given up talking to my dad because he won’t discuss in good faith, but my mom still… tries.
I genuinely think the problem with conservatives is that they pay attention to and trust the wrong sources. We all have to trust people at some point, we can’t experience or verify literally everything ourselves. And the people we listen to have to trust who they listen to, forming large and complicated trust networks.
Most people don’t spend any significant time or effort vetting their sources. And if you don’t weed out bad sources, or learn to be skeptical of people you might already trust, then your trust networks become corrupted. By that point, questioning someone you trust could be a slippery slope - if they were wrong (or worse, lying) then that means soooop much of the trust network might fall, too. And that is legitimately terrifying for folks. It certainly was for me. It was honestly hellish, realizing that I had to rebuild from the ground up my entire trust network, and now I have anxiety about needing to keep my mental guard up at all times lest I be fooled again.
No wonder people get invested in politics and culture wars as team sports, with clearly defined good guys and bad guys. It’s painful to stop.
I could go on and on about this, but I don’t have these thoughts formalized very well, so it’d just be rambling at this point.
Stay safe out there, gang.
I’ll say it again, louder for the ppl in the back.
YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME
THEYRE CALLED CONSERVATIVES
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I am also referring to rank-and-file conservatives. The ideology itself is one of bad faith, from the perspective of anyone who does not believe in rigid societal hierarchies, Just World fallacy, power over orders, or DOES believe in rule of law.
The ideology is not honest about the goals that it communicates (ex. slowing societal progress to keep things “safe” and protecting the status quo). The actions of practitioners of the ideology, throughout history, including its modern origin of protecting monarchy, show that it is simply about establishment and enforcement of hierarchies of power, where everything from morality to facts are based upon the individual’s position in the hierarchy, and those lower or outside of the hierarchy are open targets for abuse and exploitation.
The ideology is so fundamentally opposed to democracy and universal self-rule that it is not possible for good faith engagement on any level.
That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.
For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity. My point is that any overlap between objective reality and “beliefs” spouted by conservatives is purely coincidental. Conservatism is not a reality-based ideology but rather one that seeks to force reality into whatever its practitioners’ preconceived ideas are, or what they are told by authority. Willful, voluntary delusion and denial of observed reality are features, not bugs.
Ah… yes. I see something I’d been missing.
For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity.
Broadly, though more in the context of Nietzscheanism vs. stoicism, I’d noted the distinction between those who believe that reality can be forced into alignment with preconceptions and those who believe that conceptions must follow reality.
Sort of like the linguistic distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism, but on a much greater scale.
(And as far as that goes, I think that prescriptivism is obvious bollocks).
I’d never really considered that same distinction in a broad political context though.
I suspect part of the problem is that I’ve never been even the slightest bit authoritarian. I used to be further to the right (never really past barely right-of-center, but still much further than my current hard left), but since I never had any use for authoritarians, my experience with the right was mostly old-school right libertarians - people who advocated for some government interference in private lives because they believed it to be necessary to mitigate harm.
I don’t think I’d ever really considered the idea of people believing, if not stated quite this way, that authority can literally change reality - can force reality to take forms other than whatever it is by which they’ve chosen to be offended.
So… yeah. It’s likely not that they so grossly misperceive reality but that the whole idea of trying to accurately perceive it in the first place is foreign to them, since they believe that it - whatever it might be - really is subject to the dictates of puffed-up egomaniacs in suits. So all they need to do is get the “right” puffed-up egomaniacs in charge, and it’ll just magically change to whatever they prefer.
Oh… and…
Yeah - they stay trapped in that delusion because they never see their preferred puffed-up egomaniacs’ failures to alter reality as a counter to their delusion. Instead, to them, it must be that the puffed-up egomaniacs with [D]s after their names have altered reality in the “wrong” direction. So the solution is to try even harder to get the puffed-up egomaniacs with [R]s after their names in office, so they can wave their magic wands and reshape reality into the form they prefer.
And that’s another benefit to binarism too. I’ve been mostly ascribing the tendency to binarism to the need for self-affirmation and the benefits of backhandedly convincing oneself that one is a good person simply by dint of the fact that one is not part of the (falsely) dichotomous “bad” opposition.
But yes - it also undoubtedly spins off, to some degree, from the misconception that the only reason the world has problems is that the “wrong” puffed-up egomaniacs with magic wands are in power.
Mm… yeah. Things are falling into place. Thanks.
Indeed. It’s also not that everyone who embraces the ideology understands that it relies upon “magic” or what they even believe in (dispassionate self-reflection is antithetical).
And definition of the preferred reality is also relevant in understanding why people embrace the ideology and why it should not, in my opinion, be given legitimacy for the real and unnecessary harms that it brings. Nearly all of its characteristics revolve around exerting power and control over others and leveraging the Just World fallacy to justify it.
The ideology is strongly associated with fear and rage responses for a reason; it allows significant cognitive load related to coping with a chaotic reality that one doesn’t have control over to be completely avoided. It’s like having a heroin auto-injector that prevents one not at the top from feeling bad while those at the top can leverage it to reduce cognitive load necessary to justify megalomaniacal behavior to themselves and others.
It’s a strategy to allow discrimination by other companies. They plan on losing in court.
Mm?
I hadn’t really wondered about the Republican government’s strategy and goals - they’re safely presumed to be broadly racially divisive, both for the immediate benefit of satisfying the racist inclinations of the politicians and much of their voter base and the longervterm benefitvof dividing the people against themselves - but that’s an intriguing idea.
Yes - just by filing the suit, they’ve already signaled to other businesses that discrimination is not only okay, but expected.
…
They went from abortion nationally legalized to “states rights” as justification for states to choose abortion law… And are now pushing for nationalized abortion bans.
It was never about states rights and never about overreach. It’s about enforcing all of their policies as widely as possible using whatever means possible.
If you can’t see that by now you can’t be helped.
What you’re talking about is perfectly in keeping with the expected actions of power-hungry jackasses, and likely isn’t news to much of anyone, and certainly not to me.
And it’s not what I’m talking about. The “they” you’re talking about here are the policy-makers and officials and their spokespeople. That’s not who I’m talking about. And the set of lies you’re talking about - advocating some set of legal restrictions, then changing the promised reach of those restrictions - is not the dynamic I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about are the rank and file supporters who think of themselves as pro-freedom, and who apparently sincerely believe that they’re being oppressed by the government when the government is not actually involved (such as Walmart requiring masks during Covid or Starbucks implementing DEI policies), then apparently sincerely believe that they’ve been freed from government overreach when the government steps in and interferes (such as banning masks or banning DEI).
I don’t understand what’s going through their heads. Obviously they’re some combination of stupid, ignorant and partisanly blinded, but even that doesn’t seem sufficient to explain away such a glaring set of misconceptions. They quite seriously and apparently sincerely claim they’re being oppressed by the government when the government isn’t even involved, then that they’ve been freed from government oppression when the government steps in and interferes.
It’s seriously as if they live in a fantasy world in which up is down, not just figuratively but literally. This isn’t just self-serving lies and manipulation - it’s more like mass schizophrenia.
And it baffles me.
Racial discrimination in hiding has been illegal for decades. This isn’t new. Just that things are becoming impossible to ignore in new political climates.
I hope this drags on in court for years.
Could somebody explain to these dumbasses what DEI actually is? Nobody is hiring terrible candidates on purpose, based only on their race or whatever, just to make their own jobs more difficult lol.
