Sorry for this culture war post, but why am I the only person seeing this?

How to be a conservative leftist

If you’re left, and you want to homeschool, you say it’s because of gun violence. If you’re conservative, it’s because the left will make your kids gay.

A lot of “reasons” deployed in an argument, are more like plausible reasons rather than actual reasons. If you’re on the left, and you want to homeschool, you better have a damned good reason, and school shootings are about as good as it gets.

Neither will say it, but each benefits from the excesses of the other.

If you’re right wing, you advocate for traditional values. You want women staying at home to raise their kids. If you’re left leaning, you get to the same place, but by a circuitous route.

So a leftie stays home because going outside is dangerous because of crime. Trans people in bathrooms is fine because it makes it that much harder for women to justify going outside. When you’re on the left, you have to endlessly apologize for all the values the right believes to be normal. It would seem bizarre. Why not just say what you mean?

One big reason for the indirection is that the left feeds off the very groups they appear to celebrate.

What about trans women in sports? Again, it’s conservatism dressed up as leftist progressivism. Why would a conservative male chauvinist want women playing sports? He wouldn’t. He’d want them staying home. And trans women are the best thing that’s ever happened in this regard.

But it’s actually more complicated than that. For some people, you stand a better chance convincing them if you’re the opposite of pushy. If you say “fine, you can leave”, then at this very moment they’re going to want to stay.

The left controls women by instilling an atmosphere of fear of the outside world and then gaslighting them about it, which only makes them fear more.

They say, “no, that man isn’t dangerous, he’s just down on his luck”—which may actually be true. It’s all very complicated.

In order to understand the left, you have understand the logic by which it persists. The left doesn’t differentiate itself from the right on random dimensions.

The right is in some sense autistically blunt. And the left is schizophrenically paranoid. But the left as a political dimension eats and consumes the hapless autists they find in their midst. It does so by encouraging people to be open and vulnerable, and the autists gleefully comply.

Those on the left fear many of the same things conservatives fear, but their strategy is more sophisticated.

If gay, trans, and pedophiles are born that way, then the way you find out is by laying traps of honey, rather than stomping around and loudly yelling “I KNOW YOU FREAKS ARE OUT HERE SOMEWHERE!” If you’re on the left, you want people to feel they can confide in you. You want to be accepting of everyone in order to find the truth and to avoid the bad people using your goddamn common sense, and eschewing the official ideology’s demands on your personal decisions. If anything, your primary goal is to apologize endlessly for being “normal” and if you have to make contact with the ideology, then you want to make it as public as possible to reap the social brownie points.

if you’re a conservative, you might now feel relieved that you don’t have to jump through all these hoops in order to be “normal.”

What those on the right forget, is that Christianity is itself a religion that operates by an indirect logic. At one point, Christianity was new, radical, and maybe even liberal.

Christianity preached a message of non-violence while indirectly aligning itself with power.

To call wokeness a religion is a bit too kind for the movement at this point, but it’s definitely heading in that direction.

For example, if people are born trans and trans means a female brain in a male body or vice versa, then we’re positing an internal reality that is more real than the observed one. This is not so different than a religious belief in the numinous.

So the left hold the invisible internal identity holy and sacred, while the right believes in an external invisible entity and holds that sacred and holy.

But ultimately, nobody can prove that God exists any more than they can prove that some people really are women in male bodies.

The right clings to the traditional values the endure, while the left insists on ensuring that if gay genes really do exist, then God forbid we tell these people to pretend to be cis for their own good. Why would you do that?

I’m not saying that if we just learned to understand each other, we’d all be better off. A lot of the reason why this divide exists in the first place is that the US is a two party state. And we’re not gonna solve this by adding more parties or changing how we tally votes. AFAICT, the divide exists because the US is a democracy. What if the US, or any democracy, is a scissor statement machine?