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The idiocy goes right over their heads
All churches should be required to have minimum 50% of their pastors be atheists by spring 2026. In each church.
I'll go first! Let's open up to Leviticus and talk about logical fallacies everyone...
I'm just upset that God told me that I can't eat owls.
Luckily, beavers are fish, so it's ok for lent.
Yeah, we've given ourselves a pass on a lot of things, but Old Testament God is going to be pissed off when he comes back to find us eating shellfish and wearing linens with wool.
I'm fully convinced that the vast majority of Twitter activity post Musk purchase is just bots talking with each other. I'm confident that we'll look back at the zombie corpse of Twitter as the first real instance of dead internet theory in practice.
The reason why I say this is because there's no way any genuine users are left on that site. Twitter in the 2010s was already notorious for being the most worst cesspit on the internet, so much so that its user base was already on the decline long before Musk bought the platform. After the purchase, Musk went out of his way to make Twitter as unusable as possible, and this was enough to make most people jump ship because not was Twitter just as, if not more toxic, but not the platform is just shit to use.
If you go to Twitter now and see what's going on there, you'll see that it's virtually all just politicians, corporations, orgs, only fans girls, celebrities, and right wing grifters... most of these were already run by bots long ago, but now most of the "normal" users are bot as well. If you go to any twitter thread, you'll see a lot of faceless accounts that all happen to parrot the same talking points that happen to mysteriously align with Musk's personal views on things.
Can we have 50% druidic as well?
Perhaps universities would hire more conservative professors if more conservatives were smart enough to be one.
“You don’t need a university degree to xyz!” Okay but you need one to teach university.
Oh they don't want fifty percent to be conservative. They want 100%.
That's the thing with fascism.
If conservatives were discriminated against, all of this would be true.
But they aren't discriminating against conservatives for intellectual jobs. They're discriminating against idiots.
It just so happens, for whatever reason, that the upper echelon of intellectuals often reject the backwards and counterproductive conservative dogma in favor of rational policies based in reality.
Click to see the usernames who downvoted this comment
BombOmOm@lemmy.world
That's just what a woke gay muslim atheist commie would say!
You forgot TRaNs! Everything we don't like is TRaNS!!
Yep, which this is not DEI, for the reason you describe. DEI just means you need to ensure you aren't discriminating against certain segments of society. It doesn't mean you have to hire or accept equal percentages, only that you aren't dismissing some due to discriminatory factors.
Do these “conservative professors” have masters degrees and teaching credentials? What subjects are they qualified to teach? If so where are they hiding? Do they have a resume? Are they responding to job adds?
They already exist. They're usually found in law, business, or theology departments (though not all professors in those departments are conservatives). They also exist in departments that don't require you to apply your critical thinking skills to social issues, such as maths, IT or engineering. You wouldn't know whether your professors in those subjects are rightists, conservatives, liberals or leftists though, because politics doesn't actually ever come up in classes that aren't related to societal issues. The only way you'd find out is if a professor is obviously biased against women and/or minorities, which does happen sometimes. The people in the original post don't care about any of this though, the outrage is the entire point and the truth doesn't matter.
That's an impossible task. Conservatives are too stupid to be professors.
They're too stupid to be presidents too, yet there's a long line of them.
You historically do not need to be intelligent to be president. Or any kind of leader for that matter. You just need confidence and charisma that can persuade people to listen to you.
There's a reason they want to stop people from being educated
I've spent years trying to imagine how fucking stupid I'd have to be in order to be a conservative and what it would feel like.
I just can't.
Imagine being drunk and hungry all the time. For weeks. Years. Go on. Next time you're drunk (or sleep deprived, if you don't drink), try to read a complicated wikipedia article. Did you understand any of it? Or are the authors assholes who don't understand shit?
It's kind of sad. Like they're trapped in a quagmire of feelings and slop, with no way to sober up. Except they suck, so it's more dangerous than sad.
I remember having been awake for 50-something hours, and getting on a plane. I spent what felt like 3 minutes trying to cram my bag into the overhead compartment, before a flight attendant reached out, rotated it 90 degrees and slid it in no problem.
I often think of that when I see someone being an absolute moron.
I don't need to imagine it. I'm still a liberal, because I have friends and empathy.
That's an incredible description, and I'm feeling a deeper empathy for Conservatives than I had before. It's fucking tragic what they do to themselves; it seems a sad life to lead.
Sometimes when I find myself struggling to grasp something that's beyond me, I recognise an instinct within myself that wants to become hostile and belligerent at the text, as you describe — to do whatever is necessary to reorient myself such that I am smart and capable, instead of being thoroughly humbled by the uncomfortable experience of personal growth. I've become pretty skilled at recognising that instinct, and running in the opposite direction (that is, into the things that challenge me), but I can imagine what kind of person I'd become if I indulged it.
I'm reminded of a post I saw a while ago about how conservatives recognize many of the same problems (low wages, abusive work situations, healthcare hellscape, etc) but then connect the dots all wrong to draw the wrong picture. Most people connect the dots to get "capitalism and rule by an elite few is bad", but somehow they get "queers, jews, and blacks are the problem!"
Their worldview doesn't really allow for systemic analysis. Every bad thing has to have a singular individual cause. Status quo bias personified.
I think it helps to understand conservatism as a bias in the way people solve problems. In a vacuum where tribalism is absent, conservatism comes from being more risk averse and preferring older societal systems, real or perceived.
Capitalism was successful for the visible society until inequality grew so bad that economic development started going backwards. This perceived golden age also disenfranchised queers, jews, and blacks. So the appealing solution to many problems is to go back to the culture of the 50s where these things happened.
This risk aversion also presents itself in the rural/urban divide. People living in the suburbs who are risk adverse prefer the sheltered, familiar environment of rural areas/suburbs, instead of moving to cities, where they have to face the possibility of strangers, or foreign cultures/ideas. So the appealing solution is to stay in rural areas.
Conservatism also has a preference for stratified social structures. There is a core tenet that is very common among American conservatives that says "some people are more important than others". This also causes conservatives to lean towards economic stratification, bigotry, and authoritarism.
Of course these are just their biases, i.e. the preferences that conservatives are likely to lean on when first presented with a decision. Similarly, progressives have different biases stemming from underestimating risk. Other factors can also have a lot of impact in political decisions such as context, tribalism, personal experience, etc.
I think the big issue corrupting American conservatism and preventing it from being a healthy stabilizing debate partner, like you see with European conservatives, is that the entrenched ideas and tribalism have gotten so extreme and detached from reality that American conservatives are just openly fascist. American Republicans hate European conservatives like Macron, Merz, and Rutte. The cause of that goes far beyond just personal biases and into serious structural problems in the US, and powerful corrupting interests.
Even then, why an educated person like JD Vance thinks he needs to end Liberalism worldwide and attack European culture is beyond me. My best explanation is either selfish opportunism or corruption.
But yeah, if you talk to the average Trump voter and get to know them, there is a lot you can probably agree on, and there are a lot of bubbles, tribalism, and misinformation you can debunk and come to reasonable conclusions on. We're all logical humans somewhere.
I don't know if conservatism is really about preferring older solutions. I think that's the marketing. It's pithy but I think the "conservatism means there must be in-groups the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups the law binds but not protect" is very explanatory. That might not be what they tell you, but humans generally feel a thing and then reach for a socially acceptable explanation afterwards. But it's really just "I want my group to thrive, and the other groups to go away". That was probably a survival trait in pre-history. Now it's just being an asshole.
One of the problems is that the way these people are dividing people into groups is kind of stupid and self destructive. Instead of seeing "all of us who trade labor for money have common cause", they think they're in the same tribe as the ultra wealthy. Instead of recognizing that that queer couple is struggling to pay bills and raise their kids, they mentally put themselves in the same group as some rich assholes who (under)pay a nanny to raise their kids and never spend time with them. They vote to cut social programs because they think it'll hurt their out-group, but it's hurting them. They have the groups wrong.
I think there's also more fragility among conservatives. They hear something like "white people perpetuated the horrors of slavery" and their ego freaks out. That's an attack on the in-group! Can't have that! And so they reject it, because the in-group is the most important thing.
To be conservative is to be a failure. To be less decent. It's not hopeless. People can change. But I don't think "Oh, they just prefer older institutions" is apt. It's about dividing people into us-and-them, and really putting the hurt on "them".
It's both. They share both the bias towards avoiding risk and the bias towards stratified social structures.
Tribalism is common to all political leanings though unless consciously suppressed.
But yes, American conservativatism is really broken and unwell.
years of discrimination
Can't say the n word no more :(
balanced out the years of blatant discrimination
That is not the purpose of DEI initiatives, it frames DEI as an advantage which it is not. It is about recognizing our inherent bias, understanding the strength of diversity, and empowering teams to benefit from diversity by fostering environments where all team members feel respected and empowered to contribute.
Everyone in this image has allowed the fascist demonization of DEI to define their own understanding of it, even if subconsciously. That should cause concern, not applause.
I'm sure conservatives could get involved in some subjects... I have yet to meet a conservative with a rudimentary understanding of statistics. Shit, I think that's a requirement for being conservative.
I have yet to meet a conservative with a half-basic understanding of reality
Which is a requirement for being conservative, but in a civilized society, you need at least a FULL basic understanding of reality
There is so much wrong with this whole notion. But the two that are most painful is the false assertion that there even could or should be "balance" based on the idea that there are only two ways to think... at all. Absurd. And the other is folks consinuously misuing DEI as a stand-in for whenever conservatives whine about not being at the table. I see what they are attempting to say, but it gives weight that there is merit in the argument that they should be given this seat, ans it misuses the actual place for DEI initiatives to help actual people in need of them.
If it wasn't for hypocrisy, the GOP would not exist.
The people you vote for are not a job qualification.
But this is exactly what the GOP has been pushing for anyhow, for years now. It's all written out in Project 2025, amongst other documents.
It's always been about rules for thee but not for me.
Sure, this needs to be pointed out again and again, but new it is not.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition... There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect".
…do they seriously think that they have a large group of very highly educated fans? Really?
No. This is part of there war against hight education. And that goes down more easily by othering.
Or, bear with me, a conservative at this point in history should never be allowed to teach others. Because conservatism has led to a deeply evil place for a society to be in, and they have no qualms about it. They do not give two shits about logical arguments or facts and thus should be banned from academia for life.