I agree. It only makes sense. The world has a really good history with, “Work harder or have your food ration decreased.”
These sorts of “I dare you” should only be allowed politically when the declaring also put something on the line. IE, if he thinks schools should “put up or shut up” then he should be willing to, say, donate all of his salary for every year this “scheme” doesn’t work.
Otherwise he’s just an ass wagging a dog’s tail. There’s a lot of “unstated assumptions” in his bill, about demographics or socioeconomics et al, about “shifting the blame”. OTOH if the schools really are graduating ie out of primary school 60% unable to fully read, well, yea, that’s a problem too, and there may not be a way out of that problem without being an asshole to somebody somewhere.
Charter schools may well be an answer here, don’t know. Neerav Kingsland has made a good case for charter schools in New Orleans, for ex. But “taking away your lunch” doesn’t seem particularly … thoughtful, no. That it’s coincident with “spending less money” draws conservatives to such schemes like moths to money-on-fire flames.
I will admit up front that this is just a complete bit of armchair psychoanalysis based on a lot of people I met, things I have read, etc., but a really big chunk of conservatives just seem like angry prison warden types. The answer to everything is, “They’ll do X when they feel pain, by god.”
Perhaps part of it is that I grew up around a lot of these personality types (who were all, coincidentally, conservatives). But I just get tired of the brutality of the conservative movement. There’s nothing joyful or happy. There are no positive reasons for doing anything. Life is about the protestant work ethic, misery, and starving if you don’t work. Teaching others is about putting fear in them. They’ll work, or they won’t eat. That sort of thing.
Getting ahead in life financially means you get to punish other people, to “teach them a lesson.” I literally remember the voices of the personality types who were into this shit growing up in my small, rural town. It’s like they took a sadistic joy in misery.
“Maybe them kids will start learnin’ to read better, once they start missing a few meals heh heh heh.” I to this day want to fucking punch people who think like that.
A lot of conservatives I’ve met are… from a completely different psychological stock. It’s lke their underlying features is a desire for intemperance that is only mitigated by harsh restrictions.
What I mean is many (look, super generalizing here) seem to be the kind that if they won a lottery the first thing they would do is run to Las Vegas and spend their millions on hookers and blow literally until they were bankrupt, because really, deep down, that’s what they want to do. That they do not is only because, as they attribute, to harsh upbringings (“my pa whooped me good whenever I acted up, thank god for that, because I was a little shit!”) or a turn to religion or a turn to family responsibilities.
When they think this is how the world really is, just reflecting their own preconceptions, they think the way you “fix” problems is with the stick and not the carrot, because that’s how their own psychology works. If they’re kept in line it’s because someone somewhere hovers over them with a large object, ready to smack them down for acting up again (parent, wife/spouse, coworker or boss, religious figure, government authority, ect).
This seems to be why so many Conservatives religious figures and politicians keep getting caught out doing immoral or unethical things, and why their constituents seem to forgive them over and over. All that said I think this is a cultural phenomenon, not some kind of “inborn” genetic feature or whatever.
This appears to be the same sting that nailed Bob Kraft
Have you read much on the “5 moral foundations” ideas that are gaining currency now? I feel those ideas shed a great deal of light on our politics.
To me the throughline of all of it, Limbaugh, Coulter, Trump, build-the-wall, lock-her-up, etc., is a license to behave like jerks. There’s that twinkle-in-the-eye joy you sense, when a person is allowed to be straight-up mean in a judgment-free environment. And of course, when some liberal gets offended by said behavior, the joy compounds. This is why I find it so confounding that self-professed Christians make common cause with this movement.
Maybe they make 'em different where you grew up but SlyFrog’s post is more or less the overarching descriptor of self-professed Christians back home for me.
Right wing Christians lost their moral authority a long time ago. Their own leaders are hypocrites to Christ’s teachings. I’m not sure where in the Bible it says, “Nail porn stars and pay them off, divorce multiple wives for younger women.”
None of their professed morals and ethics matter, so long as they can vote someone in who will help with their strange obsession with abortion, gays, foreigners, and tax cuts. I think the modern Christian right would elect Ted Bundy, if he told them he’d cut the corporate tax rate.
But not the descriptor of Christ’s teachings, is what I mean. Well, not all of them, anyway. “I come to bring not peace, but a sword” might be right up the GOP’s alley.
I opted to forgo my usual prejudice and leave “self-professed” in there for a reason, although I suspect I could count the number of people still in my life who even appear to make a modest effort to follow Christ’s teachings and not be an enormous fuckstain he’d be ashamed of on two hands, so I’m not sure if the qualifier is needed, statistically speaking :-/
But it’s like the coal thing. One almost gets the sense that it’s more than some nostalgic yearning for good blue-collar jobs – that some of these people actually rejoice in the idea of destroying the environment. That, global warming aside, if you’re concerned about toxic sludge in your water supply, you’re some kind of pussy. It’s more nihilistic than anything else.
Yeah, I’m frankly amazed at this stuff about billionaires going to massage parlors to pay for sex acts. It’s not as if there aren’t perfectly legal avenues available to billionaires (!) to find sex partners. Adultery stopped being illegal a long time ago, didn’t it? The fact that they’re going this route makes me think there is actually something illegal about what they want. That’s obvious in the Epstein case though not yet obvious here.
I heard one report that “it appears these asian women were not allowed to leave.” So, this may be a trafficking situation. Presumably, that’s a different thrill than high-end escorts.
Part of that is because the politics of media driven outage need to constantly one up themselves, or they’ll become irrelevant. Why tune in again unless it’s for something even more titillating?
That’s great for reality media, but it doesn’t make for good policy.
That’s why i said i don’t think it’s an inborn feature. I disagree with the premise that conservatism is primarily a reflection of some kind of inborn predisposition or reaction to stimuli or avoidance of risk. I think the chicken-egg problem is unbreakable with these sorts of tests; imagine if 50% of the population were raised and lived in monasteries for 30 years before being released “into the wild”, they’d almost certainly have extremely different responses to stimuli and stress. That liberalism and conservatism is regional either says that people in the South are genetically different than people on the West or East Coasts, or that there are some very low bounds as to the fractional influence of genetic predispositions, and the latter seems significantly more plausible unless you can demonstrate through statistical analysis sorting pressures over 150 years on the overall population looking at emigration / immigration statistics.
And i was pretty unfair - for me the line today is less sociological than methodological. I just want debates on facts and figures on both sides of the firing line. I’m indifferent to social composition as long as it’s genuinely consensual (and not “consensual with heavy social pressure”) though that’s a bit of a fairy tale. Most modern older Republicans are genuinely information captured by Fox News which at this point is effectively an arm of the GOP. The cowardice of modern GOP politicians to confront their voters, and their voters willingness to embrace - or lets be honest, probably not even be aware - of pretty grossly hypocritical positions is the “problem” i have with conservatives today.
But this manifests as a kind of lack of self awareness and a bunch of strange cultural baggage in their behaviors and beliefs, much of which is signaling. We live in a greedy consumeristic culture that overwhelms people’s sense of reality with an overwhelming need to consume ever more stuff. I think that for conservatives this often manifests in certain ways after interacting with and being twisted around by those cultural forces influencing them. Many end up showing what seems like natural intemperance privately barely held in check with a public facing austerity.
Not that intemperance isn’t possible for liberal/progressives, it just seems to manifest somewhat differently I think, since the latter don’t have need to perform the internal cultural contortions to justify consumption the way conservatives do, but also because overconsumption for liberals tends to be somewhat different in quality.
I’m not so sure that at this point the GOP isn’t just effectively an arm of Fox News.
Yes. Generally there is much more purchasing of beard oil and Subarus.