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We don't actually like freedom here. It's really just a dog-whistle for conservative values.

• giraffe_lady 4y ago
  And even "conservative values" is a dogwhistle for a certain shard of radicalism. Conservatism in the sense of just generally being resistant to change is a valuable social function. It slows down change, lessening the social shock and upheavals, and allows for the consequences of changes to be better predicted and understood as they happen. If you oppose everything you'll be right some of the time, and catch things others miss when making case-by-case decisions. And this is in tension with and balanced by others who try to make changes before they're fully understood, because if we wait until we know everything we'll never do anything. The american conservative movement is mostly not conservative in that sense, and in some ways is one of the most radical ideologies extant right now. They are fine with and support swift, sweeping changes across large parts of american life: socially, politically, legally, towards certain ends. To the extent they are motivated by the state of change it is to undo change we have already gone through, and already experienced the unknowns and social consequences of. Trying to walk back large-scale social change has other names: reactionary, revanchism.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  The signalling and actual actions is always so weird for me. Like the stimulus checks. To me those sound exactly like socialism. Such that would not have really flown in one of these socialist European hellholes.