Oh, definitely. Conservatives are all about social hierarchies and how it’s the only ‘natural’ form of society. Anyone trying to ‘rise above their place’ or help someone do so is an enemy to be destroyed, lest they cause the collapse of society as we know it.
I wonder if there’s a bit of not wanting to believe what people can accomplish if a massive number of us all teamed up to do something.
Because then they’d feel guilty for not getting up out of their armchair and going to support whatever cause they claim they’re supporting from the comfort of home.
Did a giraffe stretch its neck longer and longer, and then pass that long-necked gene onto its kids? No.
Can an embryo that gets a random mutation while developing in the egg/womb pass it on to their children? Yes.
This gets a bit more complicated if you really dig into it, though. Environment does change the expression of genes, and that particular sequence of genes that have been activated/shut-off/whatever can be passed on to children too.
Hence why children who were born to two shorter parents will often grow much taller than them if given much better nutrition. Or why obesity often shows up chronically in families that were poor or had limited access to healthier foods in other ways; their bodies had adapted to grab and store every extra calorie they could to guard against starvation, and unfortunately shutting that gene expression off naturally takes multiple generations.
Only because it isn’t forced on them. Push these racist idiots hard enough and they may get the idea for ‘color conversion therapy’. Or more people of color will go for it again to try and avoid racism.
I keep thinking back to the Mark Twain quote, ‘As happy as a black mother whose baby has come out white’, and how incredibly sad of a statement that is. And how little things have changed since Mark Twain’s time.
You’d think by now it wouldn’t matter if a child was born light or dark, but it still does, because of a small group of horrible people, and a wider group who don’t care as long as they get privileges, and so just keep telling everyone ‘not to rock the boat’.
Kindly go put your face on a fire ant nest, and then come back and tell us how the cop shouldn’t have moved her once she yelled about the fire ants.
The nests can sometimes be hard to spot, so I’m not voting one way or another on that. But basic human decency says, if you accidentally put someone on a fire ant nest, you move them asap once you notice.
When you're arguing on an online space large enough for a position that doesn't yet have overwhelming support, you're always going to get some pushback of some kind.
Why wouldn’t the safety of women have overwhelming support? Why are we always on the back foot when it comes to discussions like these? Why is this such a ‘small position’ that women find themselves making ludicrous arguments about bears in the first place?
I would hope that a discussion of safety for any group would have majority support.
And we do know it’s not all men. There are many men who would never do such a thing. Or who have even been abused themselves.
But, according to the CDC, over half of all women have experienced sexual violence, and 1 in 4 women have experienced attempted or completed rape. With those numbers, it’s not all men, but it’s not just a few men either.
With those statistics, we can’t afford to just… trust. And the fun part? Many times, it’s someone the woman knows. So we can’t always believe we’re safe even with friends and family.
And sadly, nature hasn’t supplied us with psychic powers to know when the big burly guy leaning in too close to talk is just socially awkward, or up to something more unpleasant.
So I ask… please be understanding. Men are, on the whole, bigger and stronger than women, so a bad encounter has a much stronger chance to go very, very bad for us.
Okay, but, speaking as a woman, we try to explain these issues nicely, with gentle terminology and a big helping of ‘not all of you, but some of you…’ and we get ignored, dismissed, belittled, or flat-out gaslit.
So, we try going for the shock value to get you to at least pay attention instead of dismissing what we say as background noise or ‘us silly little women worrying our silly little heads over nothing’. And then we get told we can’t talk like that, that it’s insulting, that no man would listen because we’re belittling them, that it ‘doesn’t foster discussion’.
Although at least you heard us say something so many of us take it as a small win…
So, honest question. How do we explain it to you, so we don’t offend you, but you actually hear us? Actually get an idea of what it means to be afraid of footsteps behind us when we go out at night? To get leered at when all we’re trying to do is get a good workout at the gym? To have men just take liberties, like touching us, grabbing us? To not want to mention that we are a woman online, especially in gaming circles, because of the sexist bullshit and dismissive attitudes that will inevitably show up and run us out of a group we just want to be in because we like the game, damnit?
To weigh the decision to even make a post like this, because I know it will be brigaded and will attract sexist jerks who will try to shout me down? Or even attract stalkers who will follow me across instances to harass me?
Please, tell me how. Because we want you to understand. We don’t want to chase people away from discussions. But it’s so hard, and gets so discouraging…
According to the CDC, 1 in 3 women in the US have been victims of sexual harassment or assault. And honestly, given how underreported those sorts of stats are, it’s probably higher.
Another hypothetical question was posed to women a while ago: if all the men on the planet got whisked away (not killed, just sent to an awesome men-only vacation planet or something) for 48 hours, what would you do?
The answers were overwhelmingly things like ‘go for a walk at night’, ‘take a jog with my earbuds in’, ‘go to the gym’…
Bold of you to think a conviction will convince them. More likely is them deciding it’s an attack of the Deep State on their God-Emperor, and they’ll vote even harder for him, or any Republican who promises to free him.
I see it as more a combination of self-delusion, coupled with other people getting hurt more (or them being told other people are being hurt more; it seems they don’t even need proof).
They really don’t want to admit that they are in the out-group, because it would shatter their whole self-image.
Don’t forget how it would mess with medical care, given how much medical equipment, especially things like gloves and masks that keep the doctors safe, are plastic.
They do have ideology and ironclad values. It’s very simple: the law should have a class which it protects but does not bind, and a class which it binds but does not protect. And they are always supposed to be in the first class. Because they are awesome. And they’re awesome, you see, because they’re in the first class.
Anything they do is in service of this belief.
Science says the in-group folks are awesome and perfect? Science is great! Science says in-groups and those out-group guys over there are basically the same? Science is useless and probably evil! That out-group person over there says in-group people are better than them? That person is 100% correct! That person says in-group people aren’t better and the out-group people deserve the same things in-groups have? That person is evil and needs to die!
They didn’t hate COVID and refuse to mask because they were just being obtuse. They hated that they were being lumped in with the (in their minds) ‘out-group’ and having all the same restrictions put on them. In their mind, the out-group is the only one that should be restricted. Ever. For any reason.
This is also why the War on Drugs here in the states got so much support. It created a well-defined in-group (white rich people who could still use drugs with impunity) and an out group (poor and people of color who could be accused of drug use and locked up even if they were innocent).
And this is why they’re banning abortion. You’ll note, if pushed, there’s often the vague statement of ‘oh, they can go out of state if they need to’. What they’re really saying is ‘we of the in-group will still be able to get abortions by going elsewhere/having cops look the other way/etc, but you of the out-group won’t’.
They don’t care what it is, as long as they have an item/privilege that the out-group doesn’t have. (I think this might also be why they idolize the rich; the rich naturally have a setup sort of like this thanks to money letting them have more things, and they want that so bad.)
Oh, definitely. Conservatives are all about social hierarchies and how it’s the only ‘natural’ form of society. Anyone trying to ‘rise above their place’ or help someone do so is an enemy to be destroyed, lest they cause the collapse of society as we know it.