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Notes -
Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"
It really is Poetry.
Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.
I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.
It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).
Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.
I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.
All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.
The guy who chanted "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"?
And allegedly purchased a child via surrogacy. Probably not the kind of aesthetics I'd support, but I suppose that's the problem with trying to judge someone by aesthetics. I don't care for Trump's, but I'd be hard pressed to name a politician from either party who has aesthetics that make me think I should support them.
In the absence of artificial uteruses, how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy? I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.
Surely it hasn't been that long since "kids need a mother and a father" was a mainstream, common-sense point of view on the right?
Obviously the conservative position is that gay couples, whether male or female, cannot have children. It is physically impossible for such a couple to have biological children, obviously. One partner might be the biological parent, but there must necessarily be a mother or father who is being excluded somewhere, and this exclusion is firstly an injustice, and secondly itself a mere pretense, an attempt to ignore the biological fact of parentage while fantasising a similar role for the same-sex partner. And sociologically, sure, the same-sex couple can adopt a child, but it is normatively bad for a child to be raised by a same-sex couple. Children need both their parents, and if for some reason that is not possible (there are divorces, separations, maybe a biological parent dies, etc.), they still need parental figures of both sexes.
It's barely been a decade since Obergefell. Has everyone forgotten the gay marriage debate so quickly? Gay adoption? It is very common for conservatives to just bite the bullet here and say, "Gay couples can't have a biological child, and shouldn't parent children at all. That's the whole point."
I mean, you'll find people forgetting that Western society literally went full Nazi 6 years ago and destroyed ~20% of planetary wealth (mostly through inflation) in an ill-fated attempt to cure a particularly nasty variant of the common cold.
So not only is 20 years ago ancient history, but the loudest contingent opposing it has shrunk by half due to a dynamic best described by actuarial tables. People who were 60 and driving the opposition to gayness in 2008 are 78 now, so half of them are dead and the other half have been brainrotted by social media, usually into TDS (these are the kinds of people you see at No Kings protests).
Yeah, that's not what the people who came of age during the '70s (and so are 65-70 right now) think (remember, divorce was [simplification] legalized at that time), which is why it's not a big deal for them to have family units with 2 'parents' of the same sex. Which is why once the last generation grew too old to combat it, that "need" was done away with.
Conservatives have conserved nothing.
And progressives haven't progressed anything, what's your point? :P
More seriously, I think it depends on the time-scale you look at and who you think counts as a 'conservative', and I'm also inclined to think that it's unfair to judge a movement for not necessarily succeeding overall. Movements tend to name themselves for their goals - we understand that it's not really that fair to criticise American libertarians or communists for not having restored liberty or brought communism, because those are small parties. How small is 'conservatism' as a movement? Over the last decade or so there's been plenty of writing trying to distinguish 'conservatives' from 'the right', with the understanding that actual conservatives might be a significantly smaller tribe than was realised.
Anyway, if I look at the last two hundred years so, I think that conservatives, in a broad sense, have achieved plenty of things. Not everything they wanted, certainly, but I wouldn't say their efforts were wasted. Eugenics and communism stand out as probably the two biggest issues that conservatives were on the winning side of.
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