r/PoliticalHumor • u/mixedelements • Oct 06 '24
This seems too intense to share. But I'm speechless and can't stop smiling.
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u/Objective_Oven7673 Oct 06 '24
Now wait a minute. The conservative I live with tells me that my liberal beliefs make me juvenile and that I need to become more conservative (because "that's what happens when people mature").
Are you telling me that's nonsense and this person is actually projecting their own insecurities onto me?
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u/Road_Whorrior Oct 06 '24
100%. People only "get more conservative" with age because, historically, progress hasn't stuttered the way it has in recent years and people tended to have a nest egg growing by 30. We lost rights. I have like 2 grand to my name and a bucket of medical debt. At this point, the progress we want isn't even on the table, we have to bring back the status quo from the fucking 70s first.
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u/New-acct-for-2024 Oct 06 '24
Also, people don't really become more conservative with age, exactly.
They become more conservative as they become more invested in the status quo. That does generally correlate with getting older, but it's not because of age and maturity and can sometimes go the other direction.
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u/RedditTechAnon Oct 06 '24
That's an excellent way to put it. So good that whenever I see the argument about people getting older becoming more conservative, I'll remember it.
Reminding me of that scene from SLC Punk. "I didn't sell out son, I bought in."
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u/New-acct-for-2024 Oct 06 '24
I should also add that at least in the modern era, individuals tend to become more liberal as they get older... but the rate of change in individuals who are already adults is often slower than the rate at which society as a whole changes, so they seem more conservative in comparison.
Someone who is 70 today might still be somewhat homophobic but they'll still often use the "I have nothing against gay people..." line but odds are good that 40 years ago they supported the gay panic defense and gay bashing. But open violence against gay people was socially acceptable then while most people today not only reject violence against gay people, but are at least nominally in support of their equal rights so "somewhat homophobic" is a more radical position now than "violence against gays" was then.
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u/Youareobscure Oct 07 '24
Their political beleifs also don't generally change much. The politics of the people around them does, because people die and children grow into adults.
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u/Carl-99999 Greg Abbott is a little piss baby Oct 06 '24
If Trump gets back in, we have to throw everything we WANT out the window, and just hope AOC can filibuster every day for 40 years.
Because the Union matters most, and Trump is the number one danger to it.
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u/TheAskewOne Oct 06 '24
People became more conservative because they became wealthier, often wealthier than their parents as well, and became afraid to lose what they had. These days, becoming wealthier isn't even a dream for many, so there's not much to "conserve", and the reason for that is 4 decades of conservative policies.
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u/TheThoughtmaker Oct 06 '24
If I wanted to live the same life as my dad, supporting a family of five in a townhouse, not even with modern things like the internet, I’d need an entry-level retail position to pay $112/hour and require 1/3 the productivity as it does today. I ran the numbers myself.
Boomers were the richest generation in human history, and they’re damn sure trying to keep it that way.
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u/gramathy Oct 06 '24
...is this why they're so authoritarian? They want a father figure to take on all the complexity for them and tell them what to do?
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u/Dont_Touch_Me_There9 Oct 06 '24
Yep. Decisions are hard. Why not have a strong man handle all that.
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u/elpatio6 Oct 06 '24
Yes that, and make it easy for them because they are white men and deserve to be in charge regardless of their intellect or skills.
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u/cubbyatx Oct 06 '24
I mean, I want that but I don't want to make it everyone else's problem with a fascist leader lol
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u/Shadrack1975 Oct 06 '24
Yes and also they know in another ten years they will be irrelevant and need to hold onto power.
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u/joewo Oct 06 '24
Trump is the manifestation of their father who did not like them either. This is Conservatism later in life define and acted out.
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u/Road_Whorrior Oct 06 '24
Funny, because Mary Trump maintains Trump is Like That tm because his father was incapable of love. It's daddy issues all the way down.
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u/WhiteTrash_WithClass Oct 06 '24
Yep, and the trump they worship is a fictional character that they project their daddy issues on, and that's why it's so hard to get them to see reality.
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u/Marinaisgo Oct 06 '24
A lot of conservatives will say they long for a time that is usually set about 5-10 years before they’re born. They don’t just want to go back to childhood, they want to go back to the time their parents told them was better: before they existed. They long to fulfill their unhappy parents dreams of a reality before the burdens of parenthood and responsibilities.
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u/Ahlq802 Oct 06 '24
The golden age conservatives remember was made possible by massive public funding for New Deal programs that almost exclusively benefited white Americans.
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u/Craamron Oct 06 '24
I had a colleague who declared that the 50s and 60s were the best, but he was 10 years old when the Moon landing happened.
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u/medge54 Oct 06 '24
You're not after "The goid old days", you're after "The good old you".
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u/bwwatr Oct 06 '24
Yeah, good old them, good old their family, at most good old white neighborhood through a really narrow lens. There are no good old days. America (nor anywhere else) was never great. The world today is better than it's ever been (by tonnes of objective measures) and it sure as shit isn't because of social conservatives.
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u/sunsetrules Oct 06 '24
Children don't want to control women in a weird religious way.
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u/Road_Whorrior Oct 06 '24
No, they just want mommy to do everything and then comfort them and love them even when they're being horrible and abusive. Modern women don't settle for abuse and it's a huge problem for manbabies.
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u/Opinionsare Oct 06 '24
Conservatism is denial of a simple fact of nature and life.
In a society, complexity increases, if for no reason beyond increasing interactions with a growing population.
Add the human element, where ingenuity creates complex solution to problems and technology complexity increases too.
Conservatism seeks to avoid making the difficult choice: creating balance between simplicity and complexity, where you harness the best of both worlds, by limiting choice to a memory of the good old days, forgetting the problems that have been resolved by the current complexity they want to eliminate.
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u/jspurr01 Oct 09 '24
Increasing complexity: — Industrial Revolution — Electrification — Atomic Age — Space Age — Computer Age — Manufacturing Automation Age — Globalization — Internet Era — iPhone Era — Social Media Era — Autonomous Technologies — Bitcoin/blockchain — AI — what’s next, and how soon?
It seems like unavoidable changes are happening faster and faster. And every change affects jobs/careers, and enables new ways to commit scams/fraud.
Most people don’t understand how most of this even works, and what it means to their future. It scares them. It’s easier to blame immigrants.
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u/Gorstag Oct 06 '24
Honestly, it is pretty spot on. Look at how they handle adversity & being caught doing something wrong as an example. Especially the latter. "Timmy did it too!!!" They act just like what you would expect from children.
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u/PowermanFriendship Oct 06 '24
Has anyone seen this guy after he was washed away by the tsunami of irony?
/not conservative
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u/ApprehensiveLadder53 Oct 06 '24
The Astronomy club on Netflix had a great sketch about this, where it’s slowly revealed all the things they harbor a desire for were just being a baby.
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u/dover_oxide Oct 06 '24
It's also infatuation with nostalgia where everything was better back in the day when in reality it wasn't it was much much worse.
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u/Carl-99999 Greg Abbott is a little piss baby Oct 06 '24
That explains the number of AB/DL fetishists that are Trump supporters.
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u/fremeer Oct 06 '24
In some ways things were more simple.
But that's something that happens as the world gets more complex.
When we were hunter gatherers the choices we made were much easier and the need for complexity was much less. As things get more developed life gets harder.
And technology doesn't reduce it. It increases it. A more efficient computer doesn't subtract energy use for instance it adds more complexity
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u/chuck354 Oct 06 '24
No, the world is getting more complex as technology improves. That makes government intervention even more necessary, because without an institution to either mediate complexity or force corporations to reduce it at the point of customer interaction, we have a system that basically exploits people's gaps in knowledge/resources. That's part of why things have gotten shittier in the US, the conservative movement to hamstring government has resulted in system that doesn't keep up in complexity and let's corporations take advantage.
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u/bellingman Oct 06 '24
The Daily Show did an extended bit on conservative politicians saying "things were better back when I was a kid". The punchline was "Yeah, because you were f***ing FIVE YEARS OLD".
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u/Soloact_ Oct 06 '24
Conservatism: because who wouldn't want to go back to a world where taxes didn’t exist and your lunch was packed for you?