Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
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The average American does not give a single shit about protecting minority or women’s rights, from my lived experience. Not unless it affects them directly.
Both can be true. This probably makes more sense in your head.
Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don’t know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don’t know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.
People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who’s not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn’t convince you if you heard it.
It’s hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.
Maybe in the past, but nowadays there’s no rational discussion to be had with someone who doesn’t think you should legally be allowed to exist…
It is very hard to have rational disccussion when people disagree on the basic observable facts, ignore the “rules” of debate, and are struggling with critical thinking. You can meet difficult people on all the political spectrum, but certain idealogy attract more difficult people, and certain stuff mainstream conservatives believe right now has absolutely no basis in reality.
If it wasn’t for their response to the pandemic, I might be inclined to agree with you.
And their response to LGBT+ issues, and their response to Trump’s crimes, and…
Yeah, no. Republicans have had more than enough opportunities to redeem themselves. There is no remaining doubt to give them the benefit of.
I was going to post my rant about conservatives as a top level comment, but I didn’t think it was unpopular enough.
I agree with your central premise that there is a disconnect of understanding and perception between progressives and conservatives.
However, it’s not that conservatives haven’t heard a convincing argument, or something that accounts for their perspective. This is part of the fundamental disconnect, and you’re an excellent example of why people don’t know how to put things in a way others will understand.
Conservativism is not a principled ideology. It is the political justification of narcissism in every form. Conservatives like being conservative because it gives them a free pass to be selfish and egocentric in their political beliefs. There is no foundational value system or policy that is inherently conservative.
The conservative ideology defines the self and the other. Nothing else is fixed. Whatever is good for the self is good, and whatever is bad for the self is bad.
That’s it, that explains every conservative position ever held by any conservative since the invention of conservativism in the 1800s. From Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wanting to roll back many of the reforms of the French Revolution, to Donald Trump becoming the Messiah, conservatives identify the self, and then do anything to benefit the self. Granted, Francois-Rene was a much better writer, but he was no less inconsistent in his desire to promote ideologies that benefitted himself and his peers.
Conservatives will couch their positions as staunch defense of tradition, and general opposition to change for the sake of change, but that’s window dressing. They don’t believe in stoicism or absolutism or really anything they claim to believe. And that’s why you cannot have a rational debate with a conservative. That’s why you won’t ever convince them to change their minds on a subject simply by pointing out flaws in their logic or perception.
The only method that has ever worked at getting a conservative to shift or compromise is by showing them how it will benefit them. Why is this policy good for the self? What value will they receive in exchange for easing up on their intransigence? If you can convince a conservative to abandon an ideological position, you can be sure it’s because they believe the new position is better for them.
Look at any conservative leader in history, any political pundit, any legislator or writer or conservative iconoclast. Viewed through the lens of narcissism, their intentions, their hypocrisies, their inconsistencies, they are all laid bare. There is no deeper meaning, no mystery to why they have had sudden changes or seemingly flip flopped on an issue. It’s not that complicated.
So no, it’s not that people don’t know how to have rational discussions these days. It’s that conservativism is anathema to rational thought, and it always has been. It’s a license to be as hateful or ignorant or selfish as you want to be, and you needn’t worry about defending your positions from things like facts, or realty, or reason, because those are tools of the other. If the other opposes you, they are evil and their reality, their facts, their reason is equally evil. They don’t need to be refuted, they need to be destroyed by any means necessary. The self is good, therefore anything the self needs to do to win is good. Lies, deception, personal attacks, intimidation, threats, violence, all of them are justified by the belief in the righteous self. There is no bar too low to be stooped under, no treachery too vile to be considered, no accusation too false to be levied. A conservative with scruples is a conservative unchallenged.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Edit: Added metric units
I’ve since dropped this position because the world has changed, and so has my view. Heart Disease kills more people than anything, and now we effectively have a cure for obesity. Obesity should now be seen as smallpox or polio - something to be eradicated. No excuses, and now they’re actively limiting the supply of this - forcing more product out of the hands that need it and into the hands of people like musk
I especially hate when everyone’s conclusion is genetics. That’s such a minuscule percent of obese people that it’s ridiculous.
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
An accurate and informative presentation of a product someone might be interested in could be considered an ad. For example, Coca-Cola written in drones across the sky isn’t an ad. It’s actually a target for a drone jammer.
I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
After an entity reaches an annual cap (say $5m profit), 95c of every dollar should be taxed
We don’t need more pronouns. We need less of them.
In my native language there is no even he/she pronouns. The word is “hän” and it’s gender neutral. You can be male, female, FTM, MTF, non-binary or what ever and you’re still called “hän”. You can identify as anything you like and “hän” already includes you.
Nobody should own dogs. They were bred as slave animals in a time before we understood that they were just as sentient as any other being, with pain receptors and emotions just as real as our own. And we have bred them to be miserable when we are not there giving them attention. Their apparent affection is an illusion, a food-gathering instinct honed by countless generations of selective and cruel in-breeding directed by humans who want to pretend that these animals actually love them, when they’re really just pretending because they are rewarded for it.
Also, if you own a dog and let it bark for any length of time, ever, or let it wander unrestrained where it might bite or harass a stranger, or let it take shits and don’t immediately clean that up, you deserve to be put in a cage.
Most people shouldn’t be parents.
Tax is not theft
Generally, social justice is at best, a distraction from real issues, albeit with very good intentions.
(We talk about human dignity, representation in film etc but not say, the fact most of our stuff is made by children who occasionally burn to death making it. If I were one of the billionaires running things, I would be overjoyed that people were so distracted about what a comedian said versus how our entire economic model is structured.)
I don’t believe in prison for punitive justice. Prions should be used to keep society safe from dangerous people, not punishing them imo.
Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.
Reddit is gonna be just fine and the shade we like to throw around here isn’t even a blip on their radar
People who are strongly against nuclear power are ignorant of the actual safety statistics and are harming our ability to sustainably transition off fossil fuels and into renewables.
