• frog 🐸@beehaw.org
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    9 months ago

    I think you’re wrong on that. While I don’t agree with the politics of conservatives, and I don’t share their views, I’ve met enough of them to know they genuinely think they’re helping everyone. Their version of “helping” is just summarised as “everyone should stand on their own two feet and being independent is better for them than relying on others”. It’s short-sighted, ignorant, and fails to account for all the circumstances of different people’s lives. Typically they have some level of privilege, whether that’s being born into wealth or power, or just being exceptional enough that they could overcome disadvantages that others couldn’t. Doesn’t make them evil. Just ignorant.

    I live by “judge the action, not the person”. Liz Truss is exceptionally foolish, not evil. And I actually think it’s not helpful to demonise all conservatives as evil and only out for themselves. Plenty of them are ignorant, misinformed, and paternalistic (in the sense that they think they know what’s best for people, regardless of what those people say for themselves). Plenty of them are incompetent. But there’s a tendency in some circles to ascribe malice to what can very easily be explained by stupidity.

    Also: the people who have enormous amounts of power in their hands are exactly the people that need therapy the most, because they need to be thinking straight and making rational decisions. Nobody should be allowed to be an MP without having extensive therapy first.