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reminds me of the fact that some studies revealed that the human brain as it ages naturally tends to develop more conservative views (which sort of makes sense from a purely evolutionary standpoint i guess? but we're way past that)

I’m very skeptical of this

Relevant paper: those that _do_ change self-ident(!) tend to go left to right. "If those who are not liberal at 20 have no hearts and those who are not conservative at 30 have no brains, there are many people in this world without either hearts or brains." digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcont...

I've slid left on pretty much everything but went conservative on "actually morality is not relative -- please stop electing sex pests and yes, I think Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern should be impeachable."

The "morality is relative" thing is a complete boondoggle dreamed up by conservative grifter like Roger Scruton in the 80s. To the degree to which any serious philosopher argues that morality is "relative" it's only to the degree that they mean it is that "context matters".

FWIW I don’t think that’s a conservative opinion

The problem I frequently run into is that I'm "conservative" in the sense of the word on quite some issues... say - human rights. But "conservative" in the political sense doesn't represent that.

About 10 years ago my dad went from lifelong conservative to straight blue. This is at 60 yrs old. He said only a few of his positions have changed. Doesn’t recognize the new conservative

Moving to silicon valley has kind of broken my brain, particularly on immigration. I don't really know if that counts as more conservative since nobody is running on a platform of being against highly paid, conservative immigrants and also the problem is then blocking sex ed, diversity programs, etc

the majority of immigrants are poor and impoverished. any platform against immigrants will largely affect poor and helpless people, the rich ones as rich people have always done, will continue to get through. moving to silicon valley and becoming xenophobic is probably not something to admit proudly

Yes, thank you for restating every point I made but condescendingly

Don’t worry, I’m continuing my speed run further left.

The only thing I can’t seem to wrap my head around is full prison abolition.

“Full” anything is silly, but Americans cannot imagine how well rehabilitative justice actually works.

my feeling is that recently, things have gotten drastically worse nearly everywhere in a pretty short amount of time and a lot of people are reacting to that by just wanting to go back to the state the world was in before

Got some artsy friends on the elephant site that went “dark mountaineer” aka climate doomerism/degrowth and that whole world is wildly conservative at its core.

i'd be curious to know if this trend is purely amongst cis-het peers or also in your queer peers. when your existence is inherently radical to whatever the status quo is, it's hard to fall into the lulls of conservatism

it's both, for sure. i both agree with you in general but also, it's not a panacea. tons of outright right wing queers

It's kinda hard for me to imagine how someone ends up in that position

My childhood friends were all "skinhead, do business and underpay everyone" so everything after that feels mild to me😅

Saw this recently and I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I'd lie to you if I said I didn't see some people traversing it as the years pass

We should attach starting values and weights and run it to see if it reaches an equilibrium.

Can you elaborate? The examples that people have cited so far is "we should not elect sex pests" and "schools should teach people to cook"

I didn’t read the second as “people shouldn’t learn to cook” I don’t think “don’t elect sex pests” is a conservative opinion bsky.app/profile/stev...

My school did not segregate those classes by gender (I mean, any more than they segregated the computer class for boys)

is the home economics thing just “why isn’t X taught anymore” as a proxy for nostalgia? everything else mentioned in that thread makes perfect sense to me but making educational opportunities available to people in banal topics seems neutral at worst?

I took it to mean reinforcing gender roles. When I grew up girls took home ec and boys took shop, you couldn’t do the other one

My middle school required everyone to take home ec, and it seemed like a positive thing, in both a 'boys are expected to know how to do these things' sense, and a 'learn to cook for yourself at least a little' sense. Shop definitely still had a weird gender/class thing going on.

many people are just straight up evil deep down. very noticeable if you're queer.

I think that the idea that you grow old and grow conservative is a bit "describe the symptom" approach. I am finding that as i get older, people become less willing to mask their true beliefs - and suddenly I see that my friends were actually grumpy, conservatives as long as I had known them.

The "we must retvrn to public virtue" stuff on here worries me a lot tbh

Would be curious to hear more, fwiw

I just don't think it's possible to create a social environment which aggressively polices people on "personal integrity" or whatever and have it stop there. I think that will always turn into a stiflingly conservative society where nonconformity is punished, because the mechanism's so easy to abuse

Forreal

this is a big part of what ^ is about bsky.app/profile/dame...

I'm noticing more people emphasizing Marx's belief that the people working in factories were the most revolutionary class because they actually have the ability to collectively shutter a system, not merely because they were marginalized. There's a point but it's dissonant w/ expansive solidarity.

The radical right has achieved enough cohesion to achieve some big projects and I think a lot of people across the left (and certainly center left) are internalizing aspects of the right's success as a blueprint for their own projects. Tensions between inclusion vs cohesion are discussed more.

See also “wait a minute maybe your politics were performative and not actually deeply held?!?”