Author Topic: Am I becoming conservative?  (Read 1407 times)

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Offline Id82

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Am I becoming conservative?
« on: January 31, 2018, 11:16:17 pm »
I feel like I'm becoming some weird kind of conservative. I was born in 1982. I feel it was too late to be a gen Xer and too soon to be considered a millennial. What they would consider the star wars generation, oregon trail generation. I feel I grew up feeling cynical and optimistic about the future. But not being able to identify as either group.
New new technology and social media stuff scares me and honestly it changes so fast I can't keep up with it all. People talk through tweets with eachother when I would rather talk on the phone with someone. But nobody wants to talk on the phone. They want to text. But I hate texting. People just put their business out there which is weird to me.
I feel like I idealize a period of time for me when things felt more simple. That golden age was the 90s for me. Like other people idealize the fifties. Things felt much more simple. No major wars, strong economy, music was good, kids played outside, I was into video games before it was cool to be a geek like it is now. Early internet was full of wonder and file sharing. I feel like I kind of long for that simplicity and wish we could return to it.
Everything in the government feels so doom and gloom now. Huge wealth inequality, automation taking jobs away possibly eighty percent of jobs away in the coming decades. I see young people embracing automation, which scares me. The economy has gone global and no politicians or economists seem to know what to do with it. Republicans: tax cuts! Democrats: Social safety nets!
But at the same time I consider myself a progressive. I want socialized health care, affordable education. I want everyone to be more equal and like MLK said treated by their character and not the skin, sex or orientation they were born with. But I hate sjws. I feel they want a world that's so fair that life becomes an unbearable string of apologies.
I feel like my longing for more simpler times imho is making me some weird kind of conservative. But my want for social and fiscal progress is making me excited for some change but I'm not getting my hopes up. Which is why I feel my fusion generation is playing into who I am.
If you managed to read through this, would you say I'm becoming more conservative as I get older? Just what the hell am I?
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Art Vandelay

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #1 on: January 31, 2018, 11:46:12 pm »
Look at it this way. As long as your views on specific issues can be justified based on actual merit, there's nothing wrong with being conservative overall (not saying you actually are or not, just that it's not an inherently bad thing if that is the case). I say fuck trying to be loyal to a specific label and just try to be as informed as possible in your views.

Offline Dappler

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #2 on: February 01, 2018, 03:41:27 am »
Everything in the government feels so doom and gloom now. Huge wealth inequality, automation taking jobs away possibly eighty percent of jobs away in the coming decades. I see young people embracing automation, which scares me. The economy has gone global and no politicians or economists seem to know what to do with it.
If it helps, this is the bit (ninetiestalgia aside), where you think you might be a bit conservative. The conservatives love the inequality and what the economy is doing right now. Deregulation (fuck the future), short term tax cuts (fuck the poor and the future), regressive policies (fuck science and humanity), denial of facts (fuck reality). If you think those things are bad, you suck at being a conservative. They think those things rock! You're possibly thinking back to the whitewashed halcyon days lost in history, where the toxic shit like McCarthyism doesn't have the same evil sanctimonious ring to it - due to the fog of time, not because it was OK, and the science denial wasn't as insane, because the evidence wasn't as robust and self evident.

It's that thing about good men questioning if they have a bad side, and bad men being utterly convinced that they're right...

A tiny bit of it comes down to that meme with the picture of the dogs being shipped out of New Orleans after Katrina on a bus: "Liberals treat dogs like people. Republicans treat people like dogs."

The minute you start victim blaming, you can call yourself a conservative. Pretty sure even communists get nostalgic.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

And please can your vision of the future not come true. Trump destroys the Republican party. The new battleground in a dystopian future is between the conservative democrats who want a progressive state and the anarchist libertarians who want everyone to fend for themselves and only the strong should survive. (And much like the world being divided into the righteous and unrighteous --- with the righteous doing the dividing, of course they are the strong in their eyes - mainly because they've survived through luck and support to date, but want to pretend it was their own genius.) You can be a conservative in that world.

Offline Lana Reverse

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2018, 02:24:59 pm »
I feel like I'm becoming some weird kind of conservative. I was born in 1982. I feel it was too late to be a gen Xer and too soon to be considered a millennial. What they would consider the star wars generation, oregon trail generation. I feel I grew up feeling cynical and optimistic about the future. But not being able to identify as either group.
New new technology and social media stuff scares me and honestly it changes so fast I can't keep up with it all. People talk through tweets with eachother when I would rather talk on the phone with someone. But nobody wants to talk on the phone. They want to text. But I hate texting. People just put their business out there which is weird to me.
I feel like I idealize a period of time for me when things felt more simple. That golden age was the 90s for me. Like other people idealize the fifties. Things felt much more simple. No major wars, strong economy, music was good, kids played outside, I was into video games before it was cool to be a geek like it is now. Early internet was full of wonder and file sharing. I feel like I kind of long for that simplicity and wish we could return to it.
Everything in the government feels so doom and gloom now. Huge wealth inequality, automation taking jobs away possibly eighty percent of jobs away in the coming decades. I see young people embracing automation, which scares me. The economy has gone global and no politicians or economists seem to know what to do with it. Republicans: tax cuts! Democrats: Social safety nets!
But at the same time I consider myself a progressive. I want socialized health care, affordable education. I want everyone to be more equal and like MLK said treated by their character and not the skin, sex or orientation they were born with. But I hate sjws. I feel they want a world that's so fair that life becomes an unbearable string of apologies.
I feel like my longing for more simpler times imho is making me some weird kind of conservative. But my want for social and fiscal progress is making me excited for some change but I'm not getting my hopes up. Which is why I feel my fusion generation is playing into who I am.
If you managed to read through this, would you say I'm becoming more conservative as I get older? Just what the hell am I?

I don't know. To me, it sounds less like you're becoming conservative, and more like you're nostalgic for a different time. I don't think that's inherently conservative.
Beware those who hate the rich more than they love the poor.

Offline Tolpuddle Martyr

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2018, 03:28:58 pm »
Nahhh, it's called getting old. Don't sweat it, aside from short-term-what's-that-thing and using expressions that cause young un's to go all googly eyed and WTF, she'll be apples mate!

Offline Id82

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #5 on: February 01, 2018, 06:32:10 pm »
So my resistance to the changes that are happening in Washington, and my desire for a more simpler time (even though that time wasn't simpler it was only because I was a kid ignorant about the world and looking through rose tinted glasses) is more nostalgia?
Wouldn't that be weird to be considered a conservative progressive, where you wish to go back to a time before things became so conservative?
G.O.P
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s  s o
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i   r  e
g  u c
h  c  t
t   t

Offline Skybison

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #6 on: February 01, 2018, 11:01:24 pm »
What Art said.

Being somewhat conservative (whether you count or not) isn't automatically a bad thing.  There's nothing wrong with "be careful and don't fix what ain't broken" is perfectly reasonable in principle and there are a lot of situations where that's the right idea.

whether your opinions are based of facts and compassion is far more important then where they fall on the oversimplified one dimensional left-right divide.

Offline Dappler

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Re: Am I becoming conservative?
« Reply #7 on: February 02, 2018, 04:19:52 am »
Wouldn't that be weird to be considered a conservative progressive, where you wish to go back to a time before things became so conservative?
Welcome to intergenerational change (the neck of the woods I came from, I knew grandparents your age). 'Conservative' is not a useful descriptor, it's a euphemism (albeit one that a certain bunch of assholes have hijacked to make themselves feel better and to more easily indoctrinate and induct others). The opposite of progressive isn't conservative, it's regressive, so in an openly regressive society, a genuine conservative viewpoint may well be progressive. The fact that 'conservatives' have been on the wrong side of history pretty much since history began is an indicator that society has been largely progressive over that time, not that genuine conservatism must equal regression. You're kind of gaslighting yourself.