I have to admit, I don’t have a lot of patience with conservative opinion sites like townhall.com, but this one is so over the top I had to laugh despite myself.
Why Liberals Are So Obsessed With Racism, Homosexuality and Transsexualism
Conservatives care about logic. Liberals care about emotion.
Yup, exactly. That’s why he, as a conservative, starts by assuming that conservative=logical and liberal=emotional, universally. Because that’s such a logical premise. And he’s just getting warmed up.
Let’s go on and see how this approach leads us to a deeper understanding of liberal attitudes towards racism and other human rights issues.
Conservatives care about whether a program works or not. Liberals care about how supporting a program makes them feel.
Like for example “trickle-down” economics, abstinence-only sex education, and “world peace through bombing foreigners.” Conservatives only care whether a program works or not, liberals only care about feelings.
Conservatives take the positions they do because they believe they’re best for society. Liberals take the positions they do because they make them feel and look compassionate or superior to hold those positions.
So you see, liberals oppose racism because it makes them feel good about themselves. By implication, conservatives take the opposing position in support of racism, even though it makes them feel ashamed of themselves, because they believe racism is what’s best for society. Logic. See?
Once you understand those basics, it’s very easy to see why both sides hold the positions they do on most issues and to comprehend why there’s so little middle ground. Once you get the mentalities, you can predict where each side will come down on issues.
Start from these presuppositions, on the basis of no supporting evidence whatsoever, and it all becomes crystal clear. Logic explains everything!
An extremely expensive program designed to help disadvantaged minority children read better that has been proven not to work? Liberals will support it and conservatives will oppose.
Also, apparently, logic requires a vivid and creative imagination. If you imagine such a program, and then imagine liberals supporting it, then you’ll see, from the evidence, just how conclusive this conclusion really is.
A program that cuts the deficit by cutting people off the welfare and disability rolls who don’t belong there in the first place? Conservatives will support it and liberals will oppose.
And since, by definition, only wealthy white bankers and CEO’s deserve government handouts, you can see what kind of savings that would produce. Hey, if you didn’t want to have to go on food stamps, and then lose your food stamps, you should never have gotten a minimum wage job (or two), you irresponsible moocher.
A program called “Puppies for Orphans” that hands out “therapy dogs” to poor children at $100,000 per year in cost? Liberals will support it and conservatives will oppose.
Not that any such program exists, or costs $100K per puppy, or has any support from liberals. We’re not talking about reality here, folks. We’re using logic.
The problem with all of this is that most of what passes for “compassion” with liberals isn’t real compassion. There’s a cost to real compassion and thus, a limit to it.
And remember, this is helping explain why liberals oppose discrimination against blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and LGBT people. That’s why we’re proving that liberal compassion is “not real compassion” through the use of examples that aren’t real examples.
99 times out of 100, liberals’ “compassion” is nothing more than “virtue signaling.” They’re offering to take your money and give it to someone else. They’re offering to take rights away from other people that they don’t care about. They’re saying people are racist, bigoted, sexist or homophobic for disagreeing with them.
Yes, when liberals try to protect people from being abused and persecuted, it’s because liberals don’t really care. And the reason they don’t care is because they’re emotional, not logical. That’s why they keep appealing to discredited ideas like virtue and compassion and justice. They simply don’t understand that when you prevent conservatives from abusing people who are minding their own business and not doing any harm, that takes away our money and gives it to people who don’t deserve it. I’m not entirely sure how that works exactly, but then I’m one of those emotional liberals too, so I must just not understand logic.
No, for real compassion, you have to look to the conservatives. Conservatives understand that real compassion has limits. For example, you have to limit it to people who look like you and worship the same way you do and for God’s sake fall in love the same way you do. Once you start standing up for people who are obviously different, you’ve left the boundaries of real compassion, and strayed into signaling all that virtue crap. And that’s just not logical. See?
It’s cost-free for someone to talk about how much he hates racism because racism is almost universally despised in America. There is no price to be paid for attacking a zoo that made the difficult decision to shoot a gorilla because a boy had fallen into his pen. If you’re not a Christian and have no moral qualms about gay marriage, it’s easy to call for the law to crack down on bakers or wedding photographers who refuse to participate because they find it morally repulsive.
The problem with all this pointless virtue signaling is that because there is no real cost to it, there are no limits to it. As long as liberals lose nothing by advocating a position, but get credit for being compassionate for taking it, why not go for it?
I know, it’s so unfair, right? Why do liberals keep doing things that people admire them for when they know conservatives can’t compete? Virtue ought to be punished, so that it would cost people to stand up and advocate virtuous behavior. The situation right now, where you can actually be admired for promoting virtues like tolerance and understanding and cooperation—well, I just don’t know if this great nation of ours can survive for long unless we can turn this thing around. Because, you know, a gorilla in the zoo, mumble, mumble, something. You still with me? Logic is hard, I know.
This creates a situation where people have to keep on upping the ante to stand out. If racism is almost universally despised, how do you get credit for being more sensitive about race than other people? You find new things to call racist.
What are those “new things”? We’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. And no fair using the same old things that racism has always been called out for, like being prejudiced against people, and discriminating against them, and trying to refuse to allow them to enter or remain in the country just because of their ethnicity. Or things like trying to sabotage their work, minimize their successes, and exaggerate any real or imagined transgressions, just because of their race. Things like that have always been racist. You have to find new things, that have never been racist before, that liberals are now calling racism. Good luck.
Eventually, when liberals moved beyond parody when it came to race issues, they showed they were compassionate by obsessing over the 3% of the American population that’s gay. Then from there, they became maniacally focused on the .3% of the population (if that) that claims to be transgender.
See, a lot of people don’t realize this, but the magic number is 51. If you’re not part of some group that’s at least 51% of the population, your rights don’t count. Conservatives realize this because they’re logical, and what’s more they can also do math. If your group is a smaller percentage of the population, you get fewer rights. It really is that simple. “Liberty and justice for all” is just a slogan. Only maniacal liberals take that stuff literally. The fact that conservatives reacted to gay rights by specifically targeting transgendered people for abuse is purely coincidental. This is all just liberals looking for something to maniacally obsess over.
If every single thing on the liberal wish list for minorities, gays and transgenders were to happen tomorrow, a new list of demands or some new series of pet groups that need to be protected would spring up almost instantaneously. That’s because it’s not about the specifics; it’s about an arms race between liberals trying to signal their virtue by being willing to go further than other people in being conspicuously compassionate while getting in some cheap shots on their political opponents at the same time.
It’s like conservatives warned us back in the day when those darn liberals started talking about giving equal rights to women and blacks. Start giving them equal rights, and the next thing you know you’ll be giving equal rights to Jews and Irish immigrants and Catholics and Hispanics and on and on and on. It’s a total slippery slope, and what’s to stop us from ending up in a society where everybody has equal rights and is free to do and to be whatever they want, without fear of persecution, so long as they’re not hurting anyone?
Not those maniacal liberals, that’s for sure. Liberals don’t care about people at all, and that’s why they always champion causes that protect innocent people from being abused just because they are different. Thank God we have conservatives to remind us, logically, why protecting everyone’s rights equally would be such a terrible idea.
The problem with this is that compassion, real or fake, has little to do with what makes a society successful. Capitalism is not warm and fuzzy. Contrary to what some people seem to believe, diversity and sensitivity to women’s issues are not what makes a military successful. In fact, the most effective policies are often not very forgiving or compassionate. So, when you have a large block of the country that completely abandons what works for whatever makes liberals feel good and look more “compassionate,” it creates enormous amounts of dysfunction.
Suppose, for example, that society were to say, “It’s the workers who are generating all the wealth that’s somehow all ending up in the bank accounts of the top 1%, they’re entitled to their fair share of the wealth they create.” I don’t need to tell you, if society started practicing a more even-handed distribution of the wealth created by the workers, there are probably thousands of extremely wealthy individuals who might have to go out and start earning their own income instead of profiting off the labor of others. Sure, there’s lots more people in the lower and middle classes, and expanding their income would grow the economy tremendously, but what would happen to the American Dream if people like Mitt Romney or Donald Trump ended up taking home only as much wealth as was proportionate to their contribution to society?
Conservatives understand that a successful society is not one in which citizens benefit from liberty, equality, justice, and fair compensation for their labor. A successful society is one that knows how to cast aside compassion—including the real, limited compassion of conservatism—in favor of a capitalist society where the wealthy few enjoy lives of luxury and privilege through the unbridled exploitation of the political system and of increasingly hard-working Americans. That’s what a successful society is.
And that’s why liberals are so obsessed with racism, homosexuals, and transexuals. They’re all emotion, and zero logic, and therefore they cannot see the beauty of this capitalist utopia. They’re simply maniacs, who care nothing for people, and are only advocating policies that protect individual liberty because they’re silly enough to believe that virtue is a good thing. They’re cheaters, too, taking advantage of people’s admiration of virtue to win admiration for themselves, knowing full well that truly compassionate, logical conservatives can’t possibly take the moral high ground when it comes to protecting individual liberties. Because conservatives only want what’s best for America, or at least for wealthy American capitalists. And things like virtue and compassion are simply irrelevant.
Yup. Logic is the reason Trump is the GOP presidential candidate.
>they find it morally repulsive.
If this person was even a quarter as intelligent as he thinks he is, he’d know that disgust, not logic, is what motivates self-identified conservatives.
How many results does Google give on the search terms conservative disgust?
https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=conservative+disgust
And of course, once I know that disgust pushes his buttons I would use that to my advantage. For a group of people who insist they are the victims of a war, which they actually started, they have absolutely no sense of strategy.
Is anybody else developing a severe allergy to the term “virtue signalling”?
It’s what you define as a greater individual liberty. You don’t want someone to lose the greatest liberty – the liberty to make a buck or a billion off the the backs of workers and taxpaying suckers. Do you ??!!??!!
Or the greatest good can be made by comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. That’s been the real motto for a long, long time.
Funny how the welfare of cis, white, straight men is a logical position but it becomes an emotional one when applied to others.
“Virtue signaling” is the glowing hot spot in a mess of short-circuited right-wing shorthand. It’s how they trash decency, because only their side is capable of sincerity. It’s not at all the same as when they proclaim their goodness, because they have a franchise from God, whose known allegiance to their cause (the cause’s non-allegiance to actual religion-based values here doesn’t matter) makes everything they do genuine, even in the complete absence of results.
And there is absolutely no virtue signalling involved in claiming to be logical, claiming to want what’s best for society, and claiming to be Christian.
Ah yes. The self-righteous brand of conservativism that claims the intellectual high ground over all those fluffy-headed liberals. I’m a bit surprised to see people can still push that one with a straight face. After decades of pretending the economy is just like a piggy bank and the more money you can make sit there in one place for extended periods the better I would have thought they’d have a touch of self-awareness. Or denying climate science so big oil companies can lie to us while privately planning to take advantage of the truth. Or pretending environmental conservation is entirely about fluffy feelings for one or two isolated species no one can tell apart from dozens of similar species rather than ecosystems or how nice it is to have non-flammable tap water or even know you’ve avoided outright betraying your great grandkids. And those are just the really easy examples that don’t involve any fringe elements.
I’ve read the entire piece twice now and I can’t quite tell what is tongue-in-cheek and what isn’t. I think the part I quoted above, however, is an actual argument – one that is economically illiterate. In general, workers are, right now, paid commensurate to the amount of value they create. We are already even-handed in our distribution of wealth.
It’s probably an attractive proposition for some – without its workers, McDonalds wouldn’t be able to generate the massive amount of revenue it does on a yearly basis. Why shouldn’t they get a taste (pardon the pun) of that?
But it falls apart when you start to scrutinize it a little bit. I used to work at a fast-food restaurant when I was 16. I had no experience, no skills, and knew nothing about (a) cooking, (b) the restaurant business, (c) business, (d) marketing, (e) real estate, (f) regulations, (g) tax policy, (h) creating a brand, (i) Human resources, (j) leadership, (k) management, and about a million other things. How much wealth did I create for that fast food chain as a cook? Very little. I flipped burgers. Anyone can do that.
You say that if we were a fairer society the wealthy, like the CEO of McDonalds, would have to “start earning their own income instead of profiting off the labor of others.” The easy answer is that the CEO of McDonalds does earn his income, but that doesn’t go far enough. Read through my list above, that CEO has all of those skills and more. He makes daily decisions that affect the jobs of 1.7 million people. That’s an astounding amount of responsibility.
If I screwed up a burger order, I simply threw it away (or saved it for my own lunch later) and started again. No one even knew about it, much less was affected by it.
If the CEO screws up a menu change, or a marketing plan, or a thousand other things, people stop coming to his restaurants and people lose their jobs. Do you still think that CEO doesn’t work for his money?
Some people might think – well…he may work, but he doesn’t actually WORK. He just sits back and smokes cigars and drinks scotch and tells people what to do. I disagree. There is a real difference in skill sets. There is a real difference in experience. There is a real difference in judgment. You want to do something compassionate for lower-skill workers? Cool. The last thing you should be doing is advocating that they get paid more than their skills or experiences are worth.
I would advocate neither paying front-line workers more than their time and skills are worth, nor paying CEO’s less than their time and skills are worth. I do think we should raise the question of “worth to whom?” and also the question of proportion. A CEO who has to make menu changes may indeed have an impact on the fortunes of a company, but at the same time, what good are menu-changing skills without the cooks who prepare the items on the menu? The most ingenious and artful menu offerings will generate very little revenue for the company on their own without the cooks and cashiers, yet the CEO’s compensation goes up and up by extraordinary amounts while the workers’ wages stagnate, precisely on the rationale that the workers’ contribution is “worth less” (and by implication so are the workers themselves).
The problem is one of scale, in my opinion. If we had small businesses, and reasonably fair labor laws, I think we’d probably have a decent sharing of the wealth created by the workers between the front lines and the upper management. The problem is that as you start merging smaller business units into larger and larger corporations, you push fewer and fewer people into more and more powerful positions, with the potential to exploit that power to their own profit. This in turn fosters a commercial elitism in which the workers—the root source of the company’s productivity—are regarded with a fair amount of contempt, as a cost center containing “head count” whose skills and time and effort are, by definition, worth less. And you end up with companies like WalMart whose employees have to go on food stamps to feed their families, while the corporate HQ is raking in billions.
If you want to evaluate the worth of someone’s time, effort, and skills, look at how much value the company would lose if it were deprived of those skills. I’ve seen bad leadership at the CEO level take entire companies down, and I have no problems agreeing that a good CEO’s skillset is likely worth many times more than a front-line cashier’s. But how much is “many times more”? Three times as much? Ten times? Imagine if it were a question of merit-based pay between cashiers. I think we’d agree that if we pay a really good cashier ten times as much as we pay a mediocre cashier, that would be pretty generous, bordering on an unfair discrepancy between the different pay rates. If we suggest paying CEO’s only ten times as much as the front-line workers, though, people would call us crazy or radicals or something.
So yeah, I think the worker’s contributions are significantly de-valued relative to their actual contribution, and I think pay scales at the top of the food chain are significantly (not to say ludicrously) over-inflated. That doesn’t mean we can’t give better compensation to those who work harder and/or smarter, and are able to do a lot for the business, but it does mean that people deserve a certain minimum amount of respect for their value just as human beings, even before we count the value of their contributions to the success of the company. You don’t get that by allowing greedy capitalists to race each other to the bottom, seeing how little they can get away with paying their “head count”.
The current course is towards a salary based on a minimum standard of living rather than a salary based on the vague, abstract concept of value. Part of the problem is that so many people reify the concept of value and lump it onto people as a means of denigrating them, which helps maintain their value concept in the public consciousness. People should always have more value than things or “money” in general. Companies actually intrinsically know this because they always have to hire people first as part of any new expansion or product line, to create that value they seek.
If a company cannot survive paying its employees less than a minimum standard of living wage, then the business model itself is flawed. Again, the problem is that the business model pricing strategy is derived from the flawed value concept, that is to say, price is set upon the lowest wage instead of the other way around, setting the wage, then basing pricing on it.
For a small business, the niche is actually flexibility, the ability to quickly adapt to their clients’ needs, what the large companies call a disruptive model which they put on a pretense of following, but in reality not only are big businesses incapable of being disruptive, small businesses compete with one another in the tight spaces so they also lack any ability to get around the faulty value concept. We rely on government to set the standard which companies must follow so companies use their extracted “value” to butter up politicians to maintain the value concept.
Meanwhile as automation advances, someday there will be factories producing goods (“value”) without any human intervention. By the present objective concept of value, humans would become worthless, but they would still be required (have “value”) as consumers, but without jobs how would they generate value to trade for goods? The problem of increasing automation puts the flawed value concept in the spotlight and businesses don’t want this to be acknowledged despite the huge risk to the market as a whole. No business makes any sacrifice for the market as a whole, just as they make no sacrifice for the environment. Ultimately, if you take humans and their “rights” out of the picture, what is left is a world with “value” to no one.
I don’t think anyone is arguing in favor of paying workers more than their skills, labor, or experiences are worth. I think the quibble is more that workers are paid far less than they’re worth, and CEOs paid far more than they’re worth.
I don’t really know if anyone’s skills/experiences/labor can be worth the financial equivalent of several hundreds of lifetimes of other worker’s skills/experiences/labor but hey I guess it’s epistemically possible.
@MMark
Can you back this up?
I’m trying to imagine the logical steps that connect “anyone can do that” to “very little wealth was created”. I don’t get it.
Even if it were true that everyone “can” (it isn’t), not everyone wants to.
In fact, there is no value or wealth apart from what people want. Yet for some reason I don’t see desires in your analysis of what the work is worth. So your analysis is missing crucial facts.
Personally I can’t wait for robots to replace the tedious or unpleasant work that humans don’t want to do!
*Of course, “very little wealth” is not specific enough to be useful anyways. It doesn’t tell us if the workers need to be paid more or not, because being paid a few dollars more per hour is still very little wealth.
Being hypocritical while erroneously accusing others of being hypocritical is not new ground. Denigration of virtue-signalling is the accusation that it’s hypocritical without the activism they also despise, so it looks like his goal is to make us more active, which is kind of stupid. This guy is a vice-signaller, but he doesn’t have to be an activist, he doesn’t have to personally boot immigrants out of his country or personally lynch uppity black people or inspect sex organs in public restrooms. His work here is complete, call him home, Jesus.
“Virtue Signalling”
Is it just me, or do most conservative buzzwords ultimately translate to: “I can’t think of a counterargument, shut up.”
See also: “SJW”, “Political Correctness”, “Free Speech”.
On the capitalism and success :
The problem is confusing success for a particular person or organization and positive outcomes for society in general. Many businesses succeeded in the past while discriminating against women and minorities in employment. From the point of view of the white dude-bros running those companies, they were ‘succeeding’ but that’s only because its success for them.
Likewise, there is a problem with ‘works.’ If a bunch of people are kicked off the welfare rolls, to many conservatives that is ‘success’ regardless of the quality of life for those people. Liberals just don’t think ‘being on a welfare roll’ should be assumed to be intrinsically bad and that it’s always better to get off. If poor people just hurried up and died, it would ‘work’ for many conservatives, but ‘works’ and ‘succeeds’ are not really objective.
That’s really the whole problem. Conservatives believe that standards for ‘works’ and ‘succeeds’ are objective, and they just happen to coincide with what rich white dudes think is good. Everybody else is skeptical that those people are the proper arbiters of good and evil.
Obseesed with human rights? Yeah. This might be a small part of why.
Horrific news out of America. Again. Yet again. Will it change anything? Other than the lives of so many families, so many friends, so many survivors, fathers and mothers, sisters, brothers, children, nieces and nephews, who will never see the individual people killed again for all their wishing and all their hopes and prayers. Individual lives and people who could’ve done, well, we’ll now never know, people who have had their stories and possibilities and potential ended forever by some hate-filled killer also now dead. Nothing I say could be other than understatement or make things change. That Second Amendment, that NRA are sacrosanct and blood can and will be spilled in rivers and oceans forever without end because freedumb and guns and US political reality which is shit. So just, condolences to those who have lost their family and friends. Anger and horror and numbness as usual. Wish, so wish it were otherwise and sanity could one day prevail. That’s all folks.
Oh wait, its not becoz yeah ..me and stuff.
Hatred.. loses in the end but does horrific, needless, avoidable and horrible damage as it goes down. Love wins for all the pain and grief and misery. Love does win in the end. (/Spoiler alert?)
50 dead and counting :
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-12/pulse-nightclub-50-dead-in-worst-mass-shooting-in-us-history/7503770
Too many lives. One is too many natch.