1y ago

Like surely you must have acquired a clue by now.

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I can remember when being conservative meant you believed we had a calling to be stewards of creation
LOL good times
- Honestly, I can't keep track of the constantly changing definition for what a conservative represents.
  Right now, I just equate conservative with capitalist and move on.
  
  It always makes me laugh how conservatism - the idea that we need to conserve and not change, radically changes more than other ideologies.
  
  It really didn't start changing until the 2010s when it was hijacked by extremists. Before that, conservativism was a pretty consistent ideology.
  
  The hijacking of the Tea Party movement and what happened afterwards was a watershed moment for us in the USA. And we failed miserably.
  
  Add nationalism and that sums it up well enough
  
  Just don't forget that neoliberal is also capitalist.
  
  I'm not even going to start with that group.
  
  Everyone in the civilized nations of the global West is basically a capitalist in effect. If you participate in the economy at all, you have engaged in the basic functions of capitalism.
  IMO you are only not a capitalist if you lead an alternative lifestyle, like commune hippies or other groups of non-property-owning collectives. Or maybe you could perform a chant of "My personhood disavows the morality and validity of this structure requiring this transaction" whenever life needs you to buy something.
  
  I may be participating in capitalism, that shouldn't imply I believe in capitalist ideals; the same way that someone can disagree with communism living in China. They're a part of the system, but they don't necessarily believe in it.
  To me a capitalist is a philosophy of profit over everything. That everything and everyone only has value based on what profit they can generate. That the more wealth you obtain the more successful of a person you must be.
  Being a successful human has a lot more to it than accumulating wealth. My value as a person should not lie solely in my ability to generate revenue/earnings/profit.
  I live in a capitalist society. I am not a capitalist.
  
  You're not really a capitalist unless you own something that makes you money without you being there
  
  I don't agree with that opinion, but if that were true, then everyone with a savings account or retirement account would be in that category.
  I'm in the capitalist category either way and I celebrate the benefits it has brought me and the society we all live and prosper in. Life is good in America and I wouldn't trade it to live anywhere else at this point.
- The number of people I knew in my church whose reason for denying climate change boiled down to "Humans don't have the power to change God's creation like that, anyway even if we did God's gonna call us up to heaven before anything really bad can happen" was not small, and I can't imagine it getting smaller in the intervening decades. If anything I expect there's a vocal "gotta use up all that oil before the Rapture!" contingent these days.
  
  I heard similar notions, with an added “and if it get too bad god will fix it for us”.
  Oh, yeah. You are terrifying.
  
  Had a friend pose the argument that using oil for energy does lend rapid advancement to society at the cost of climate impact. He seemed to downplay the degree of climate impact, postulating that would be resolved faster by finding very effective solutions beyond the incremental green energy we have today. Not that we shouldn't invest in green energy, but rather utilizing abundant available fossil fuels where advantageous to get things going. I.e., modernize African nations rapidly to bring a wider society to contribute towards greater real solutions sooner rather than later.
  Definitely left a bunch of the risk of such a gamble not paying off out of his consideration.

376 comments