I don’t have much of a problem either way as I don’t think I’ll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That’s fine. There’s clearly a more liberal audience here and that’s okay. I just don’t want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.
Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I’m new here.
Edit: Thanks for the rational replies. I was expecting to get lit up for even mentioning this topic lol.
Gentle reminder to try to assume best intention of others and provide nuance where appropriate. If by ‘conservative/right wing’ this person means they’re all about what these things have morphed into lately in the US (transphobia, homophobia, and otherwise thinly-veiled hateful notions), then I completely agree. Fascists aren’t welcome here. Nazis aren’t welcome here. Beehaw is explicitly intolerant of the intolerant. But there can be honest perspectives that fall ‘to the right’ of the liberal perspective that can and should deserve consideration (they just seem to be rare these days, as political discourse has become so polarized).
Dumb answer. I don’t care. We shouldn’t tolerate oppression, and we shouldn’t burden ourselves with the need to support them or equivocate. If they want their own communities, they can support that completely on their own (including research on whether they can run their own shit and how) without our help. It’s really fucking easy to just say “nah” and let them figure out whether to trust that answer or not. You’re choosing to shoot yourself (and me, and everyone else) in the foot. How about just don’t.
I think what Dankenstein meant was that there are already today servers dedicated to right wingers (we block them but they exist), not that we should help them or something like that.
Or at least - I think that’s a good faith interpretation.
That’s okay. We don’t have to help them set them up, or find them, or even know they exist. Why is everyone so obsessed with giving reactionaries the IT help they need to setup and grow communities of hate? Doesn’t make any sense at all, TBH.
Again, why would we help reactionaries discover communities they can become a part of where they are welcomed? Why would we tolerate their existence and their growth? That’s absolutely silly. I don’t “agree with you”, but here’s how you can find communities which do, so you can organize with them to crush me and the people I love. Dumb shit.
@straycatfrump - you are arguing against a point that Lionir is not making. Please assume good faith when engaging with users on Beehaw. Our one rule is: Be(e) Nice.
I don’t personally align with either political party but the fact that you didn’t see the irony in this before posting it is really something spectacular.
No, One side is fucking evil, and would happily exterminate the amorphous “other” if they could get away with it. How does if feel to know that you and the KKK vote for the same things and people btw?
We don’t tolerate intolerance. If that sounds ludicrous to you, you should search for “the paradox of tolerance”.
Coming from a former hardcore conservative who listened to that snake Rush Limbaugh and his ilk every single day for hours for the better part of a decade, then moved to Los Angeles and learned quickly that everything he had been told was a fucking lie… Put away the dog whistles. You aren’t fooling anyone.
Hi there. I’m trans. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t choose to be. Life would be way easier if I wasn’t. I’m dealing with it as best I can so I can live my life. An entire political party is currently putting money and energy behind denying me healthcare. I’m an adult. I’m at a point where I can’t make hormones on my own but that doesn’t matter to them. The dysphoria I was experiencing prior to transitioning was straight up not compatible with continuing to live. You don’t even have to take my word for it - several doctors at different agencies agreed enough to write letters for me to start care. It is disingenuous to look at how conservatives are trying to, at best, make me very sick on a daily basis, or are, at worst, trying to put me in the ground and say “yeah, this is just as bad as the left’s typical talking points.”
If I were a cis person who couldn’t synthesize my own hormones for whatever reason, there would be nothing stopping me from getting this exact. Same. Treatment. These things don’t happen by accident. They happen because the hate is there to open the door and a lot of self-proclaimed “good” folks are real happy to watch it go down.
How do you reconcile with such an insanely disjointed false equivalency? Honest question.
As long as it’s not hate speech, doxing, etc, it’s probably not off limits. But it’s popularity will decide on the user base. I think it’s sort of a techie crowd here and that sort of crowd tends liberal. But I’d say you can try and see what happens.
What opinions do you mean specifically? The question you asked is too vague to help us sort out the welcome from the unwelcome.
Remember: “lower taxes for businesses” is a mainstream conservative opinion, but so are “children should not be allowed to know of the existence of gay people” and also “Breonna Taylor probably deserved to die” and also “Dr. Fauci is a mass murderer” and also “Trump won in 2020” and also “more brown children should be put in those cages”, etc., etc., etc.
If the conservative mainstream is so hateful and bigoted that most of their opinions would not be allowed on a well-regulated platform, that is not the fault of the platform and it does not suggest that the platform has to change just to accommodate conservatives.
One issue is that it sometimes gets hard to discuss something like “lower taxes for businesses” because some people will assume you want to murder all gay people and others come along who actually do want to do that and think they are on you’re side…
When positions are too simplifed into left vs right and all your other positions are assumed to be in line with the left vs. right debate there will never be any real discussion.
Sure. The people who make that assumption are being rational in doing so, IMO.
Part of the reason for this is that people use the “lower taxes” thing as an excuse for, for example, having voted for Trump. “Oh no I’m not into all the cruel shit, I’m just a Fiscal Conservative™️” won’t convince anyone because nowadays you can’t vote for “lower taxes for businesses” without also voting for “trans people are all pedophiles”. Check your nearest Republican state legislature for verification of that fact.
Of course, the other important caveat is that “lower taxes for businesses” is usually packaged with “more deregulation”, which is in itself cruel, always implemented haphazardly, and never promotes the safe and sustainable economic growth that is promised.
This reply is accurate and probably one of the reasons why you see entirely different platforms for people from different political positions. This isn’t the platforms fault, the fault lies with a lot of factors.
-The people who have accepted intolerance as a feature instead of a bug in their political party.
-The politicians who continue to rile up audiences using dog whistles.
-The media who allow dog whistles on the air un-critically as though it’s legitimate political discourse. Family Guy example
-Money in politics, specifically Rich people and corporations being allowed to use their pile of money to get whatever they want at everyone’s expense.
Conservatives I can deal with, but modern right wingers have lost their goddamn minds.
And the entire issue is that a lot of people who view themselves as moderate conservatives are enabling this ideological brain rot by not vocally disassociating it with more reasonable conservative positions. Because of that, I am way more comfortable saying that conservative voices should be viewed with suspicion than I used to be.
My brother is conservative. Small C. He recognises that the Tories are a shower of pricks and wants them to actually do conservative things, rather than focus on race baiting and hatred. I can talk politics with him, and enjoy doing so even though I’m getting more and more commie as every year passes.
I guess it depends on which conservative or right wing opinions you’re talking about.
The traditional conservative opinion of smaller government hasn’t existed now for 50 years. Reagan, Bush, and Trump all grew the size of government.
The conservative talking point of “states rights!” flies in the face of states who want safe and legal abortions, or equal access to marriage rights, or the ability to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ kids actually exist.
Similarly if you’re talking about the conservative push to make it harder for black and brown people to vote, and make no mistake about it, they are specifically targeting black and brown people.
Let’s not even open the door to the fringe anti-vax or “election was stolen” movements.
So with all that conservative messaging off the table, what are you left with, honestly?
Conversation with right, left, middle, whatever are only productive if based on a principalled ideology. I disagree with the NeoCons of Bush and Cheney, but at least there is an ideology to work with. MAGA, on the other hand is defined by no principals other than authoritarian aims of “winning” where “winning” is making the other side mad.
The post truth world we live in makes this hard, though. Right now there is no shared truth, and with varied truthinesses out there, it makes the conversation hard. Using flat earthers as an example, the sheer rejection of math and science is astounding; having a principalled conversation is hard when the foundations are different.
And with 24hr news, breaking news, and global news, and only so much news worthy content, there is an incentive to come with with differentiation and that creates eco chambers. News Max isn’t going to bring on a CNN contributor (and vice versa) to challenge their views.
This is a good point. There are conservative viewpoints I find compelling, but they have basically nothing in common with MAGA, de santis, or any other popular conservative these days.
I find I can talk with individuals, when we both view the other as individuals, instead of a representative of republicans or whatever other moniker you give them. I mean, not everyone, but at least most people.
I keep asking, and have probably asked more than fifty times over the last 4 years, what right-wing Americans stand for other than the “culture war”. Why would someone call themselves a conservative/Republican if they are opposed to the Republicans’ stances on minorities, stances on LGBT+, stances on gestures broadly at Florida, etc. What’s left of the ideology when you take those things out, especially considering that the right has pretty demonstrably dropped their support for “fiscal responsibility”, “small government”, “anti-judicial activism”, and “opposing the influence of Russia”.
Most of the time, that question just gets ghosted. Like, over 90% of the times I’ve asked it, it’s just been a conversation-ender. The rest of the time, the answers boil down to “my bigotry is more fine-grained than that”. They’re good friends with Mexicans and Asians and African-Americans, but hate Muslims. Or they’re fine with gay people, but feel transgender people shouldn’t exist. Or they love gay people and minorities, as long as they’re all Christian whether they want to be or not. These folks call themselves Republicans not because they hate everyone the Republican party hates, but because they hate one (or a few) groups that the Republicans hate.
Your comment is a pretty good attack on what the GOP has become. My criticism is that the GOP doesn’t represent all of right-wing political ideology. I think most people, or at least people like me, aren’t dogmatically locked into any party or ideological label. I have some views which conservatives would agree with and plenty that they wouldn’t. Overall, I think that most conservative-oriented communities are narrow-minded at best, and openly racist and authoritarian at worst. But the left-leaning communities aren’t great either. They (justifiably) want to insulate themselves from the hateful parts of the right. Unfortunately, this often devolves into an echo-chamber without real discussion. I’m hoping Lemmy as a whole doesn’t devolve down either path.
Unfortunately, this often devolves into an echo-chamber without real discussion.
I haven’t seen a discussion about the merits of different tax policies (and no, “cut all the taxes!” isn’t a policy), or the role of local/state/federal government, or social service policy (and no, “stop all poor people spending!” is not a policy), or the appropriate division of power between executive/legislative/judicial, or anything like that, in decades. W was president the last time I saw any form of media having a real discussion about those things.
Before 2015 or so, there were a handful of people in my circle who identified as conservative that could have a real, nuanced, complex conversation about public policy with; people who I thought were incorrect, but who could articulate their points well enough that I could kind of see where they were coming from, and we could come out of a discussion with a better understanding of each other, and maybe one or the other of us might even have softened on a given position in the process. It was possible to find basic, fundamental points on which we agreed, and use those as a foundation for a broader discussion.
Since 2016, all of those people, to a man, have become Q-anon deep-state groomers-coming-for-our-kids frazzledrip climate-hoax hunter’s-laptop gays-have-it-too-good morons. Not a single one of them still believes in any of the fundamental points of agreement we used to have, from which a productive discussion could be based. They have entirely left reality behind in favor of Jewish space lasers and (the latest talking point) “every father thinks about his daughter that way!”.
I have not met someone who identifies as a conservative or a Republican who isn’t on that same train for a very long time.
This has been exactly my experience as well, and why I am increasingly comfortable with skepticism of unqualified conservative voices as a default.
I have been having good faith debates over real policy with conservatives for three decades. Since Carter more or less. I know what that debate looks like. But since 2016, I know two types of former conservative - the reformed, who were awakened to the monstrosity that Trump created. And those who openly embraced fascism like a parasite embraces dog shit.
Every person. Every single one so far, who has been equivocal on this topic has turned out to be quietly the latter. The ones belonging to the former group are very open about feeling dumb and misled, even victimized. They express loudly and often the nature of their reform to anyone who will listen.
That’s fine, but then there is a burden to both understand why your adjacency to this evil force makes people uncomfortable, and to rhetorically separate yourself from it as needed. This is just the unfortunate reality of how deranged mainstream conservatism has become.
I consider myself pretty libertarian in the grand scheme of things, but I am fine with an echo chamber where basic human rights are respected. I believe that my vision of society has no place for bigots or theocrats and that such people should be treated legally the same as fraudsters or thieves. And I think it’s absolutely insane that this would be considered controversial in a good faith conservative circle. The real conservatives I know would understand that an inclusive, well represented society is a productive and ideologically secure society.
I think a lot of the other posts covered my thoughts on the issue but I wanted to add something less about politics and more about lemmy itself:
unwelcome on Lemmy
There is no one Lemmy, it’s a bunch of federated instances. You made this post on the beehaw instance. Some instances will have their own personality and rules, but if you don’t like them, the beauty of the lemmy and the fediverse is that you can just create another instance. I haven’t done a ton of searching yet, but I imagine that conservatives and right-wing personalities will carve out their own corner eventually.
I imagine that conservatives and right-wing personalities will carve out their own corner eventually.
They have, and most of those instances have been defederated from the rest of the fediverse because they breed a bunch of toxicity and hatred that spills into other instances if you don’t defederate from them. I don’t know of any conservative spaces that haven’t been defederated from most others tbh. I think sh.itjust.works still federates with a lot of them though, at least last I heard.
They’re having a vote on it right now. It’s been a month since the community at large asked for defederation, and will be friday at the earliest before they defederate. In that timeframe, users of sh.itjust.works have skewed farther and farther right and gotten more and more toxic (@natori@beehaw.org can help discuss this as they originated from sh.itjust.works before moving here), and whereas sh.itjust.works started as the instance I felt more confident about refederating with someday, lemmy.world has done more to crack down on the kinds of behavior that got their instance defederated in the first place. It seems that @ruud@lemmy.world has a similar philosophy to what we do over here, but wants more permissive signups under the belief that streamlined community joins will grow the community more organically than checking beforehand that users will follow the rules of the road.
Can confirm. Sh.itjust.works has gone to shit and several of the responses I’ve received - and the areas where they (the admins and moderators that is) have remained conspicuously unresponsive - indicate to me that they are, by and large, quite sympathetic to alt-right views, hence their very slow delay. I get the impression that they come at this from an Enlightened Centrist angle, so I don’t think they consider themselves sympathetic. it’s that kind of sympathy where they think it’s fair to equally tolerate group A that just wants to exist and group B that openly calls for violence against group A. Both sides amirite?
I don’t really want to get down to it too much more than that.
If by “conservative/right wing opinions” you mean the current extremist fascist opinionated MAGA-‘my way or the highway’ brand of Republicanism, then I sure as hell hope it’s unwelcome on Lemmy instances.
If you wish to bring back reason and logic into conservative/right-wing opinions (such as limited government, which means NOT legislating their brand of morality), then I’m all for those viewpoints (not that I would agree with them wholesale, but it’s a discussion I’d be willing to take part in).
The real problem with this discourse is that current climate of conservatism is completely closed to reason and logic, completely embraces lies and conspiracy theories as factual, and basically wishes to see all liberals either dead or suffering in some way.
I think you’re seeing backlash against being involuntarily exposed to (and often pushed to see) unbridled and deranged hatred and fear on traditional socmedia.
A conservative opinion like “I’m not sure communism is practical” is something that can be engaged with pretty cordially, “I think that education should focus on marketable skills” is an opinion I think is pretty misinformed but it’s not something that exhausts me.
Unfortunately a lot of online conservatism is stuff like “I think there’s a conspiracy by $minority to mind control us with vaccines” or “Should we be trying to make queer people afraid?” which aren’t positions you can engage with.
The waters have been muddied. I have huge disagreements with conservatives… But it has never amounted to much. However, the past decade has seen a switch from “conservatism” to “alt-right maga scum”. My friends who were not swept up in the Trump cult of personality and far right tribalism are fucked.
I’ve been a fence sitter and contrarian for most of my life. As a person that hates how both parties operate and I firmly believe that structural and systematic changes need to happen to the US system of governance. For that to happen we need those that have conservative viewpoints in order to create a balanced system in which we all can live in. It’s disconcerting to see the vitriol espoused from both sides of the (US) political spectrum. It’s feels like a pendulum swinging wider and wider threatening to throw itself off.
I’m a firm believer to the Forward Party’s thesis that a minority of voters is now dictating policy being done to the detriment of the majority. I believe that the system allows for bomb throwers like Lauren Boebert to exist because she only has to represent a vocal minority. I believe that dark money from superPACs is manipulating public discourse to the point that rational discourse is almost impossible.
I guess what I’m getting at is that there are those that believe in the old guard republicanism and conservatism, the small government and fiscally conservative ideals/planks. We should allow those voices to speak up if only for forming ideas and policy that the majority of us can accept. I don’t know, it just feels that as we grow more divided in our politics the harder it will be to create new polices and visions for a better Country. The adage from Clausewitz always comes to mind, “war is a continuation of policy by other means.”
There are greens, yellow, and reds. Greens agree with you, yellow may not agree but you can have a constructive conversation, and red are people who never will and will only double down and care little for evidence or logic. Angloworld conservatives are reds. They are fascist.
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Yes.
Gentle reminder to try to assume best intention of others and provide nuance where appropriate. If by ‘conservative/right wing’ this person means they’re all about what these things have morphed into lately in the US (transphobia, homophobia, and otherwise thinly-veiled hateful notions), then I completely agree. Fascists aren’t welcome here. Nazis aren’t welcome here. Beehaw is explicitly intolerant of the intolerant. But there can be honest perspectives that fall ‘to the right’ of the liberal perspective that can and should deserve consideration (they just seem to be rare these days, as political discourse has become so polarized).
No, there are communities and instances dedicated for them.
Edit: speaking in a general sense, “conservative” is a broad term.
Dumb answer. I don’t care. We shouldn’t tolerate oppression, and we shouldn’t burden ourselves with the need to support them or equivocate. If they want their own communities, they can support that completely on their own (including research on whether they can run their own shit and how) without our help. It’s really fucking easy to just say “nah” and let them figure out whether to trust that answer or not. You’re choosing to shoot yourself (and me, and everyone else) in the foot. How about just don’t.
I think what Dankenstein meant was that there are already today servers dedicated to right wingers (we block them but they exist), not that we should help them or something like that.
Or at least - I think that’s a good faith interpretation.
That’s okay. We don’t have to help them set them up, or find them, or even know they exist. Why is everyone so obsessed with giving reactionaries the IT help they need to setup and grow communities of hate? Doesn’t make any sense at all, TBH.
You go low, we…help you go low.
Again - we’re not helping them. Why do you think we’re helping them? I don’t understand where you got that from - genuinely trying to understand…
Again, why would we help reactionaries discover communities they can become a part of where they are welcomed? Why would we tolerate their existence and their growth? That’s absolutely silly. I don’t “agree with you”, but here’s how you can find communities which do, so you can organize with them to crush me and the people I love. Dumb shit.
@straycatfrump - you are arguing against a point that Lionir is not making. Please assume good faith when engaging with users on Beehaw. Our one rule is: Be(e) Nice.
We all need less stupid, bigoted, selfish, aggressive, and violence-supporting people in our lives.
I don’t personally align with either political party but the fact that you didn’t see the irony in this before posting it is really something spectacular.
Please. Spare us. “I don’t support either political party but liberals are just as bad” is a very roundabout way of saying that you’re a Republican.
No, One side is fucking evil, and would happily exterminate the amorphous “other” if they could get away with it. How does if feel to know that you and the KKK vote for the same things and people btw?
We don’t tolerate intolerance. If that sounds ludicrous to you, you should search for “the paradox of tolerance”.
Coming from a former hardcore conservative who listened to that snake Rush Limbaugh and his ilk every single day for hours for the better part of a decade, then moved to Los Angeles and learned quickly that everything he had been told was a fucking lie… Put away the dog whistles. You aren’t fooling anyone.
Genocide is evil? Next you’ll tell me the nazis were the baddies!
Is there a term for this 'both sides’ing? Politely declaring “both sides are equally bad” despite the glaring disparity?
False equivalency is the term I’d use to describe it.
Hi there. I’m trans. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t choose to be. Life would be way easier if I wasn’t. I’m dealing with it as best I can so I can live my life. An entire political party is currently putting money and energy behind denying me healthcare. I’m an adult. I’m at a point where I can’t make hormones on my own but that doesn’t matter to them. The dysphoria I was experiencing prior to transitioning was straight up not compatible with continuing to live. You don’t even have to take my word for it - several doctors at different agencies agreed enough to write letters for me to start care. It is disingenuous to look at how conservatives are trying to, at best, make me very sick on a daily basis, or are, at worst, trying to put me in the ground and say “yeah, this is just as bad as the left’s typical talking points.”
If I were a cis person who couldn’t synthesize my own hormones for whatever reason, there would be nothing stopping me from getting this exact. Same. Treatment. These things don’t happen by accident. They happen because the hate is there to open the door and a lot of self-proclaimed “good” folks are real happy to watch it go down.
How do you reconcile with such an insanely disjointed false equivalency? Honest question.
I don’t care if you like either political party. Buy if you’re indifferent to fascists, then opposing fascists could look fascistic.
As long as it’s not hate speech, doxing, etc, it’s probably not off limits. But it’s popularity will decide on the user base. I think it’s sort of a techie crowd here and that sort of crowd tends liberal. But I’d say you can try and see what happens.
What opinions do you mean specifically? The question you asked is too vague to help us sort out the welcome from the unwelcome.
Remember: “lower taxes for businesses” is a mainstream conservative opinion, but so are “children should not be allowed to know of the existence of gay people” and also “Breonna Taylor probably deserved to die” and also “Dr. Fauci is a mass murderer” and also “Trump won in 2020” and also “more brown children should be put in those cages”, etc., etc., etc.
If the conservative mainstream is so hateful and bigoted that most of their opinions would not be allowed on a well-regulated platform, that is not the fault of the platform and it does not suggest that the platform has to change just to accommodate conservatives.
One issue is that it sometimes gets hard to discuss something like “lower taxes for businesses” because some people will assume you want to murder all gay people and others come along who actually do want to do that and think they are on you’re side…
When positions are too simplifed into left vs right and all your other positions are assumed to be in line with the left vs. right debate there will never be any real discussion.
Sure. The people who make that assumption are being rational in doing so, IMO.
Part of the reason for this is that people use the “lower taxes” thing as an excuse for, for example, having voted for Trump. “Oh no I’m not into all the cruel shit, I’m just a Fiscal Conservative™️” won’t convince anyone because nowadays you can’t vote for “lower taxes for businesses” without also voting for “trans people are all pedophiles”. Check your nearest Republican state legislature for verification of that fact.
Of course, the other important caveat is that “lower taxes for businesses” is usually packaged with “more deregulation”, which is in itself cruel, always implemented haphazardly, and never promotes the safe and sustainable economic growth that is promised.
This reply is accurate and probably one of the reasons why you see entirely different platforms for people from different political positions. This isn’t the platforms fault, the fault lies with a lot of factors.
-The people who have accepted intolerance as a feature instead of a bug in their political party. -The politicians who continue to rile up audiences using dog whistles.
-The media who allow dog whistles on the air un-critically as though it’s legitimate political discourse. Family Guy example
-Money in politics, specifically Rich people and corporations being allowed to use their pile of money to get whatever they want at everyone’s expense.
Are* and god I hope so. Protections from nazis are precisely why I came to beehaw.
Conservatives I can deal with, but modern right wingers have lost their goddamn minds.
And the entire issue is that a lot of people who view themselves as moderate conservatives are enabling this ideological brain rot by not vocally disassociating it with more reasonable conservative positions. Because of that, I am way more comfortable saying that conservative voices should be viewed with suspicion than I used to be.
My brother is conservative. Small C. He recognises that the Tories are a shower of pricks and wants them to actually do conservative things, rather than focus on race baiting and hatred. I can talk politics with him, and enjoy doing so even though I’m getting more and more commie as every year passes.
He’s not a right wing shithead.
I guess it depends on which conservative or right wing opinions you’re talking about.
The traditional conservative opinion of smaller government hasn’t existed now for 50 years. Reagan, Bush, and Trump all grew the size of government.
The conservative talking point of “states rights!” flies in the face of states who want safe and legal abortions, or equal access to marriage rights, or the ability to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ kids actually exist.
Similarly if you’re talking about the conservative push to make it harder for black and brown people to vote, and make no mistake about it, they are specifically targeting black and brown people.
Let’s not even open the door to the fringe anti-vax or “election was stolen” movements.
So with all that conservative messaging off the table, what are you left with, honestly?
Conversation with right, left, middle, whatever are only productive if based on a principalled ideology. I disagree with the NeoCons of Bush and Cheney, but at least there is an ideology to work with. MAGA, on the other hand is defined by no principals other than authoritarian aims of “winning” where “winning” is making the other side mad.
The post truth world we live in makes this hard, though. Right now there is no shared truth, and with varied truthinesses out there, it makes the conversation hard. Using flat earthers as an example, the sheer rejection of math and science is astounding; having a principalled conversation is hard when the foundations are different.
And with 24hr news, breaking news, and global news, and only so much news worthy content, there is an incentive to come with with differentiation and that creates eco chambers. News Max isn’t going to bring on a CNN contributor (and vice versa) to challenge their views.
This is a good point. There are conservative viewpoints I find compelling, but they have basically nothing in common with MAGA, de santis, or any other popular conservative these days.
I find I can talk with individuals, when we both view the other as individuals, instead of a representative of republicans or whatever other moniker you give them. I mean, not everyone, but at least most people.
Depends on what we call “right wing”.
I keep asking, and have probably asked more than fifty times over the last 4 years, what right-wing Americans stand for other than the “culture war”. Why would someone call themselves a conservative/Republican if they are opposed to the Republicans’ stances on minorities, stances on LGBT+, stances on gestures broadly at Florida, etc. What’s left of the ideology when you take those things out, especially considering that the right has pretty demonstrably dropped their support for “fiscal responsibility”, “small government”, “anti-judicial activism”, and “opposing the influence of Russia”.
Most of the time, that question just gets ghosted. Like, over 90% of the times I’ve asked it, it’s just been a conversation-ender. The rest of the time, the answers boil down to “my bigotry is more fine-grained than that”. They’re good friends with Mexicans and Asians and African-Americans, but hate Muslims. Or they’re fine with gay people, but feel transgender people shouldn’t exist. Or they love gay people and minorities, as long as they’re all Christian whether they want to be or not. These folks call themselves Republicans not because they hate everyone the Republican party hates, but because they hate one (or a few) groups that the Republicans hate.
Your comment is a pretty good attack on what the GOP has become. My criticism is that the GOP doesn’t represent all of right-wing political ideology. I think most people, or at least people like me, aren’t dogmatically locked into any party or ideological label. I have some views which conservatives would agree with and plenty that they wouldn’t. Overall, I think that most conservative-oriented communities are narrow-minded at best, and openly racist and authoritarian at worst. But the left-leaning communities aren’t great either. They (justifiably) want to insulate themselves from the hateful parts of the right. Unfortunately, this often devolves into an echo-chamber without real discussion. I’m hoping Lemmy as a whole doesn’t devolve down either path.
I haven’t seen a discussion about the merits of different tax policies (and no, “cut all the taxes!” isn’t a policy), or the role of local/state/federal government, or social service policy (and no, “stop all poor people spending!” is not a policy), or the appropriate division of power between executive/legislative/judicial, or anything like that, in decades. W was president the last time I saw any form of media having a real discussion about those things.
Before 2015 or so, there were a handful of people in my circle who identified as conservative that could have a real, nuanced, complex conversation about public policy with; people who I thought were incorrect, but who could articulate their points well enough that I could kind of see where they were coming from, and we could come out of a discussion with a better understanding of each other, and maybe one or the other of us might even have softened on a given position in the process. It was possible to find basic, fundamental points on which we agreed, and use those as a foundation for a broader discussion.
Since 2016, all of those people, to a man, have become Q-anon deep-state groomers-coming-for-our-kids frazzledrip climate-hoax hunter’s-laptop gays-have-it-too-good morons. Not a single one of them still believes in any of the fundamental points of agreement we used to have, from which a productive discussion could be based. They have entirely left reality behind in favor of Jewish space lasers and (the latest talking point) “every father thinks about his daughter that way!”.
I have not met someone who identifies as a conservative or a Republican who isn’t on that same train for a very long time.
This has been exactly my experience as well, and why I am increasingly comfortable with skepticism of unqualified conservative voices as a default.
I have been having good faith debates over real policy with conservatives for three decades. Since Carter more or less. I know what that debate looks like. But since 2016, I know two types of former conservative - the reformed, who were awakened to the monstrosity that Trump created. And those who openly embraced fascism like a parasite embraces dog shit.
Every person. Every single one so far, who has been equivocal on this topic has turned out to be quietly the latter. The ones belonging to the former group are very open about feeling dumb and misled, even victimized. They express loudly and often the nature of their reform to anyone who will listen.
That’s fine, but then there is a burden to both understand why your adjacency to this evil force makes people uncomfortable, and to rhetorically separate yourself from it as needed. This is just the unfortunate reality of how deranged mainstream conservatism has become.
I consider myself pretty libertarian in the grand scheme of things, but I am fine with an echo chamber where basic human rights are respected. I believe that my vision of society has no place for bigots or theocrats and that such people should be treated legally the same as fraudsters or thieves. And I think it’s absolutely insane that this would be considered controversial in a good faith conservative circle. The real conservatives I know would understand that an inclusive, well represented society is a productive and ideologically secure society.
I think a lot of the other posts covered my thoughts on the issue but I wanted to add something less about politics and more about lemmy itself:
There is no one Lemmy, it’s a bunch of federated instances. You made this post on the beehaw instance. Some instances will have their own personality and rules, but if you don’t like them, the beauty of the lemmy and the fediverse is that you can just create another instance. I haven’t done a ton of searching yet, but I imagine that conservatives and right-wing personalities will carve out their own corner eventually.
They have, and most of those instances have been defederated from the rest of the fediverse because they breed a bunch of toxicity and hatred that spills into other instances if you don’t defederate from them. I don’t know of any conservative spaces that haven’t been defederated from most others tbh. I think sh.itjust.works still federates with a lot of them though, at least last I heard.
They’re having a vote on it right now. It’s been a month since the community at large asked for defederation, and will be friday at the earliest before they defederate. In that timeframe, users of sh.itjust.works have skewed farther and farther right and gotten more and more toxic (@natori@beehaw.org can help discuss this as they originated from sh.itjust.works before moving here), and whereas sh.itjust.works started as the instance I felt more confident about refederating with someday, lemmy.world has done more to crack down on the kinds of behavior that got their instance defederated in the first place. It seems that @ruud@lemmy.world has a similar philosophy to what we do over here, but wants more permissive signups under the belief that streamlined community joins will grow the community more organically than checking beforehand that users will follow the rules of the road.
Can confirm. Sh.itjust.works has gone to shit and several of the responses I’ve received - and the areas where they (the admins and moderators that is) have remained conspicuously unresponsive - indicate to me that they are, by and large, quite sympathetic to alt-right views, hence their very slow delay. I get the impression that they come at this from an Enlightened Centrist angle, so I don’t think they consider themselves sympathetic. it’s that kind of sympathy where they think it’s fair to equally tolerate group A that just wants to exist and group B that openly calls for violence against group A. Both sides amirite?
I don’t really want to get down to it too much more than that.
If by “conservative/right wing opinions” you mean the current extremist fascist opinionated MAGA-‘my way or the highway’ brand of Republicanism, then I sure as hell hope it’s unwelcome on Lemmy instances.
If you wish to bring back reason and logic into conservative/right-wing opinions (such as limited government, which means NOT legislating their brand of morality), then I’m all for those viewpoints (not that I would agree with them wholesale, but it’s a discussion I’d be willing to take part in).
The real problem with this discourse is that current climate of conservatism is completely closed to reason and logic, completely embraces lies and conspiracy theories as factual, and basically wishes to see all liberals either dead or suffering in some way.
So yeah, keep that shit off Lemmy instances.
I think you’re seeing backlash against being involuntarily exposed to (and often pushed to see) unbridled and deranged hatred and fear on traditional socmedia.
A conservative opinion like “I’m not sure communism is practical” is something that can be engaged with pretty cordially, “I think that education should focus on marketable skills” is an opinion I think is pretty misinformed but it’s not something that exhausts me.
Unfortunately a lot of online conservatism is stuff like “I think there’s a conspiracy by $minority to mind control us with vaccines” or “Should we be trying to make queer people afraid?” which aren’t positions you can engage with.
The waters have been muddied. I have huge disagreements with conservatives… But it has never amounted to much. However, the past decade has seen a switch from “conservatism” to “alt-right maga scum”. My friends who were not swept up in the Trump cult of personality and far right tribalism are fucked.
I’ve been a fence sitter and contrarian for most of my life. As a person that hates how both parties operate and I firmly believe that structural and systematic changes need to happen to the US system of governance. For that to happen we need those that have conservative viewpoints in order to create a balanced system in which we all can live in. It’s disconcerting to see the vitriol espoused from both sides of the (US) political spectrum. It’s feels like a pendulum swinging wider and wider threatening to throw itself off.
I’m a firm believer to the Forward Party’s thesis that a minority of voters is now dictating policy being done to the detriment of the majority. I believe that the system allows for bomb throwers like Lauren Boebert to exist because she only has to represent a vocal minority. I believe that dark money from superPACs is manipulating public discourse to the point that rational discourse is almost impossible.
I guess what I’m getting at is that there are those that believe in the old guard republicanism and conservatism, the small government and fiscally conservative ideals/planks. We should allow those voices to speak up if only for forming ideas and policy that the majority of us can accept. I don’t know, it just feels that as we grow more divided in our politics the harder it will be to create new polices and visions for a better Country. The adage from Clausewitz always comes to mind, “war is a continuation of policy by other means.”
And there are many more sides than just the two parties you see in the US. Something to keep in mind.
There are greens, yellow, and reds. Greens agree with you, yellow may not agree but you can have a constructive conversation, and red are people who never will and will only double down and care little for evidence or logic. Angloworld conservatives are reds. They are fascist.
If by conservative you mean “you and your friends don’t deserve human rights because I don’t like you” then hopefully you’re not welcome.