I know that "brain damage made me conservative" is sort of a meme, but this has happened to several friends and family of mine over the years. It's happened enough that I seriously think there's something to it.
Richard Dawkins, the esteemed biologist that coined the term "meme," suffered a stroke and started going hard on "there are only two sexes." Setting aside that gender =/= sex, how does a biologist not remember bimodal models are not clear dichotomies
Loss of empathy is a first sign of early onset dementia.
"I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative" -- John Stuart Mill
If you can radically change your political views like Fetterman has, based solely on a personal experience and not logical argument, then you never had a rational basis for your new views.
Even if everything Fetterman said was true, it's still damning.
Also, he was elected based on the views he professed at the time of the election. Even if he personally changes, he still owes it to his constituents to act like the person who they thought they elected. It's like he doesn't even understand the most basic principles of representative democracy.
It’s like he doesn’t even understand
Conservatism in a nutshell.
He understands American democracy. PA voted for Trump, so they would probably be more likely to elect a conservative senator next time around as well.
you never had a rational basis for your new views
Nobody bases their political views rationally. I promise you, the foundations of your values are based on stuff you believe, but cannot demonstrate.
Statements like: "society should help the vulnerable", or "society should enable the strong" cannot be validated or rejected based on formal logic. Logical valuations like true and false are incoherent when talking about how things ought to be.
What? Of course you can base your political views on rationality. For example, climate change is literally an existential threat to life on this planet, so the rational thing to do would be to support policies that preserve the biosphere and therefore dramatically reduce carbon emissions. This is rooted in the core biological desire to reproduce and care for your offspring. Similar arguments can be made for all basic human and animal needs, like food, shelter, etc.
If your point is that everything is contrived and therefore irrational, then that precludes this entire conversation to the point of uselessness.
Nobody bases their political views rationally. I promise you, the foundations of your values are based on stuff you believe, but cannot demonstrate.
Some people are pretty strict utilitarians. So, they wouldn't say that "society should help the vulnerable" or "society should enable the strong", but that society should try to maximize utility, which is also often called "happiness", but it shouldn't be confused as being exactly the same as the layman's term of "happiness".
I am not a strict utilitarian, but utilitarianism can be a useful tool, and it absolutely can be used to rationally examine your example statements. The only part of it that is a belief is that it's better to maximize utility, and then the question of quantifying utility, but there is much more logic in that than you seem to think exists in a system of values.
read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and you'll realize that no one has a "rational" basis for their views. it's always ultimately based on feelings no matter how you disguise it with facts and logic
I don't need to read that book in particular to know what you're saying is basically true. However, it's a misleading truth because it's actually a huge scale, and not a binary yes/no as you've presented it.
You have people on one end who devote their lives to truth, like philosophers and scientists. Yes, their deepest underlying reasons are emotional, but they still generate truth. And then you have people all the way on the other side of the scale, who seemingly have no grasp on reality as presented, and rely solely on emotion, similar to an animal.
But when you turn a scale like that into a binary option, that's the misleading part. Just because everybody's basic motivation is emotional doesn't mean that everybody is equally irrational.
This guy, my first impression of him made me think of a Star Trek alien. Surprised he won over Dr. Oz but figured people wanted someone left leaning. Then he was out on leave for depression, then speeding, drinking and driving. Had a stroke.
He really did not seem mentally or physically stable even if he was a Democrat and seemed like he needed to resign. Now I find out he has decided to become a Republican. Makes sense.
Stressed out and freaked out. The safest place for him to be in his mind right now is with the party that would otherwise be out to get him. Easier to sell out and catch a ride than to march uphill.
My grandfather was a Democrat all his life until he got dementia then he hard shifted to Trump. I know its all jokes but I would be so much less than surprised if it was true.
I don't think this is too far off. Synaptic pruning leaves us vulnerable to increasingly relying on heuristics as we age. It is entirely possible that cognitive decline makes us more drawn to less cognitively taxing messaging (generally conservatives).
Fucking liar. He's a born into a wealthy living and has been a jerk all along, just look at his own people where he live and ask them... They will say the same thing almost forecer.
It was the national media that glorified him into a character he never was.
He just wore a character that he's not and fooled the national media and democratic party, but in his town he's a jerk since ... Ever.
Every waking moment brings worse and worse political news. The only good involved someone getting murdered
Wow, what is up with all these people getting elected Dem and then switching. Where are all the Gopers switching to dem? smh.
It's easier to make money as a conservative.
This tracks... I've seen home shows with John featured on them and I was always shocked how normal he lived.
I guess he saw enough of his colleagues to think "I'm no pleb", so he switched sides to enrich himself. He's an elite now, so he thinks he's better than all of us.
People who are actually Dem don't like playing dirty. The nature of believing in things like equality and justice and so forth tends to mean you believe in telling the truth and doing things on the up & up. Pretending you're something you're not is anthetical to one's upbringing. "Ends Justify Means" isn't usually a belief held by those on the left.
Whereas, if you're a sociopathic grifting opportunistic dipshit, you'll exploit this to nefarious ends.
I’m guessing they get more money since our government was sold to corporations.
Much easier to grift off FUD than hope, and for many that income stream and power are near impossible to walk away from. If they tell themselves a lie enough they begin to believe it almost as much as their base does, and it's easy to get caught up in and go down the rabbit hole and end up outside of reality.
It's also easier to rationalize being the victim of "them" than it is coming to terms with being out of touch.
I suspect you are spot on with that. Sigh.
Less chance of falling out a window
As far as I've read, it's usually because of brain damage, drugs (brain damage), or serious trauma (brain damage).
It's obvious he ran on a lie, then faked a change of character.
Especially since this doesn't line up with what people normally undergo in Near-Death Experiences. They typically make you kinder, not worse.
I don't think it was obvious, honestly. He had a pretty long proven past in PA that made him popular and pretty fairly progressive.
Also this isn't about near death. This is about debilitating strokes that literally kill off parts of your brain. Depending which region was harmed it can drastically alter your personality and perceptions. Eg, the ACC is a key component of the brain associated with leftism.
I don't know. My dad drove over a landmine in Vietnam and he was a dick
Brain damage made me conservative
Lol I can't tell if that was master class trolling or if that guy was serious 🤣
It was absolute masterclass trolling
Trump was also a member of the Democratic Party once - for 8 years (2001-2009) and he even donated to Harris back then. Source
He never really liked politics. His handlers chose the republican party because there are more weak-minded rubes to gobble up their absurd propaganda.
He actually made several attempts at running for president before 2016, all of them ended in failure with 0 delegates because nobody took him seriously as an independent. At some point in time, either he or his political strategists must have figured out that running as an independent is doomed because you must convince people to vote in a way that they are not accustomed to, whereas if you win one of the two mainstream party nominations you automatically get party hardliners for free, no matter how bad of a candidate you are.
It didn't matter that Trump as he was in 2015 had nothing in common with either Democrats or Republicans at the time, he just picked the party that was most likely to fall into lockstep around him, and the Republican party was primed for a newcomer after two Obama defeats in a row. All it took was for him to make a serious run as a Republican and humiliate his competition out of the race, and suddenly the Republican party begins to warp their values and philosophy around him instead.
He only likes politics because it's a springboard to get him in front of a camera. Running and losing means he got to have his fun and spend some of his money saying outrageous things and having the media talk about him non stop leading up to the election. Winning just means 4 years of the media being mandated to hang on his every stupid word for all his press conferences and such. It's exhausting once you realize how simple his angle is and how society is hardwired to feed into his narcissistic tendencies with a nonstop media circus that only makes him stronger every time they report on him.
I didn't think a wealthy elite who primarily lived in NY buying influence from the party that tends to control NY really counts when determining actual political beleifs
Politicians are consummate opportunists in all things
is there a link to the video clip? id like to see the context, and i couldn't find the clip easily...
He's still not conservative. He just perceives that the progressive label has changed so quickly that he no longer applies it to himself
Edit: That's quite an echo chamber you guys got here. Would be a shame if any outside opinions found their way in
It never applied to him in the first place. It was always a ruse. If you look at his politics before he ran for Senate, he was always conservative. And very pro-Israel.
What has changed about progressives in the last two years?
It's just his perception, there are interviews where he explains it and I have no interest in speaking further on his behalf
Its funny how republicans can send false agents into the left's sphere of influence so easily. It's hard for the left to do the same because who wants to act like a republican. 🤮
