- Does it harm people? - Does it result in inequality? - Does it prevent people from engaging in society?

As long as the proposed idea (behaviour, policy) clears those two hurdles, it’s good to go for progressives.This type of thinking is super compatible with consequentialism. For conservatives, there are more foundations to consider - authority, loyalty, fairness, purity and “liberty from”. 

- Does it violate established social hierarchy? (in this approach, hierarchy is good and beneficial). - Does it damage in-group bonds? (again, strong in-group loyalties are considered to be good). - Does it fail to reward contributors and punish wrong-doers? (this is a big one - fairness is about just desserts and consequences for actions, not equality). - Does it breach the sanctity of the body? (this is a complex one, rooted in cultural notions of disgust and body as a temple). - Does it force people to engage in actions they disagree with? (this is the freedom from taxation, PC, and so on).

Libertarians pretty much care only about Liberty from things, usually the government.

This complex set of values means that the same idea or policy will get different moral evaluations. Let’s take a few examples:

Legalising weed: all fine in terms of the progressive foundations. But it breaches purity (the body is a temple) and to an extent interacts with conservative version of fairness by removing a punishment on what they consider to be morally wrong behaviour. 

Universal healthcare: again, all clear in progressive values. This policy will help. But in the conservative value set, the policy fails at fairness by ‘rewarding’ non-contributing behaviour (poverty and illness). Let’s not get into a debate over how this is even classified as behaviour rather than a condition. It also breaches freedom from for people who are mostly focused on being free from government, rather than private insurers. The interesting caveat is that purity should favour healthcare - if the body is sacred, we should as a society value accessible ways to keep it healthy and clean. However, because many health conditions have contributing behavioural factors, it can be considered unjust to help people out of the consequences of their actions - even at a net loss to society.

Blood is thicker than water The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

The Supreme Court just issues a ruling allowing Ohio and other states to purge voters from their election registration rolls due to their failure to cast a ballot in previous elections.

This is a major victory for the Trump administration and the GOP, and a direct consequence of the Supreme Court being stacked with more conservative judges (the votes were 5-4). This is also a huge part of what Trump/the GOP were counting on to save them in the 2018 midterm elections, which is where Democrats have been hoping to take back a majority in the House, giving them more power to combat Trump’s abuses of power and Republican legislation.

What this means is YOU CAN NOT ASSUME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED for the 2018 elections, just because you SHOULD be. Thanks to this decision, red states can purge voters’ registration based on their not having cast a ballot in even just previous federal elections, NOT just the national Presidential elections. Effectively, if you haven’t voted in previous senate races or for congressional representatives in the past few years, that’s all they need now to say you’re no longer registered and need to register again.

They’re deliberately counting on people assuming they’re still registered and so not checking until after registration deadlines have passed, or showing up to vote this November and only then finding out they’re no longer registered, when its too late to do a damn thing about it.

And this is absolutely targeted at marginalized communities, low income voters, disabled voters, and basically anyone who simply can’t always AFFORD to keep on top of every federal election and show up to vote in every senate race, etc. Which not so coincidentally happen to be all the communities and voters who have the most to gain from Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms and are the least likely to cast votes for GOP candidates at this point.

This was absolutely a calculated effort aimed specifically at keeping the GOP in power with a majority control of the government come November, and unfortunately, it has a DAMN good chance of accomplishing just that if it goes by unacknowledged. I’m not looking to alarm or panic anyone, simply to say:

no abras la puerta. Estate calmado. Usted tiene derechos.

Si piden entrar, pregunten si tienen una orden firmada por un juez.

Si dicen que lo tienen, piden verlo.

Una orden de administración de ICE (formulario 1-200, 1-205) no les permite entrar a su hogar sin su consentimiento.

Si no tienen una orden firmada por un juez, usted puede negarse a dejarlos entrar

Si se fuerzan, no resistan. Dile a todos en la residencia que permanezcan en silencio.

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I just…yes. This. All of this. And then some.

You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it.

“I heard Aaron came over last nightttt. Whatd you guys get up to???👀👀👀😏”

“Not much. Oh! But, I did finally get a chance to mop my bathtub tho!!🤗 It was a mess in there, so thank god.”