It mostly registers to me as "these people's ideal life always seems to end up moving backwards to a time when Things Were Simpler."

Also I just gotta say we REALLY gotta get past the ethos of The Rich Remember

I'm starting to think this site is a massive net negative. Just making people crazier and crazier.

Things were not better in the past. Even Gen Z thinks previous generations had it better & we didn’t. Crime was much higher. I lived in LA during the Rodney King riots. The crack epidemic was destroying Black neighborhoods & families.

Black folks had to fight for the right to vote getting beaten & lynched, now kids say they have to be “inspired to vote.” JFK said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

We had a candidate who’d already tried to stage a coup to stay in office after losing an election & was promising to be a dictator on Day 1 if elected again, but people still couldn’t get their lazy asses out to vote for the qualified Black lady.

all conservative ideology is ultimately revanchist; this is the fundamental braking force on my own small-c conservative tendencies

Yeah, I try to keep my tendencies at "conserving" stuff: Don't break things for no reason without trying to understand why they exist, but don't turn Chesterton's Fence into Frost's Fence (unthinking "good fences make good neighbors") or the freaking Berlin Wall.

The whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that it slows you down but it's *vincible*: You can figure out that it's no longer needed, maybe never was but people never questioned it, and it can be demolished after some consideration. It's a check on "move fast and break things" not all forward progress

Yeah, it makes more sense if your only throughline is "people own and make money on tech advancements"

The thing is, RETVRN feels reactionary-coded to me, and never felt right-coded, but the right keeps doing it. A communist doing it feels like the most natural thing in the world (no pun intended)