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.
Loss of empathy is a first sign of early onset dementia.
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
“I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative” – John Stuart Mill
As far as I’ve read, it’s usually because of brain damage, drugs (brain damage), or serious trauma (brain damage).
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 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.
Every waking moment brings worse and worse political news. The only good involved someone getting murdered
Politicians are consummate opportunists in all things
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.
that’s why the president elect is gonna be an angel
You do realize Trump faked the first assassination attempt and that the second didn’t even touch him, right?
oh god we don’t need a qanon for our side. it’s not at all unbelievable that someone wanted to shoot this fucking guy, especially when everyone and their grandmother has a dozen guns in the US.
Is there any basis for that? Trump is a very likely target.
I don’t know. My dad drove over a landmine in Vietnam and he was a dick
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.
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
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).
is there a link to the video clip? id like to see the context, and i couldn’t find the clip easily…
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.
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.
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.
He might think that, but it’s not always the case that people vote all one way or all the other. They’ll often go out of their way to vote for the other side if somebody has a lot of personality.
This, North Carolina typically votes Democrat for Governor and Republican for President. Can’t understand why even as a resident of the state. A lot of people realize the Democrats are holding back the wolves at the door, but they think the leader of the pack is somehow the one exception.
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
He’s still not conservative. He just perceives that the progressive label has changed so quickly that he no longer applies it to himself
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. 🤮
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
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.
How did it never apply? Palestine isn’t exactly progressive, so the fact that progressives support it is actually one of the ways the label doesn’t fit him anymore
They must be like me to earn the right to live.
That’s not progressivism you’re thinking of.
Is that a direct quote?
It might as well be. Why else would you use the fact that Palestine isn’t progressive itself to question why progressives support it? Progressives believe that people have a right to live regardless of their beliefs. It’s only actions taken that can invalidate that right, which is why we support Palestine and not Israel; beliefs have nothing to do with it - one is massacring the other, and that’s unacceptable.
I highly doubt he sees it that way, in fact this is also something that has poisoned discourse lately. How is your first assumption that he wants innocent people to die? Like seriously, everyone needs to stop making assumptions like that… it’s so extremely unlikely he actually feels that way.
Maybe he’s just a bit surprised at the left wing support for a state that hates Jews, women, and gay people. And a state that in large part does endorse the deaths of innocent people and would if they only could. Israel on the other hand wouldn’t be doing much right now if they weren’t bombed
Well, no, he doesn’t see it that way - he’s not progressive. He’s just a guy who said he was to get elected, and now he’s showing his true colors. As for Israel, the country that only exists because it stole land from the people who were there already, would be doing just fine if the people whose land it stole just moved on, yes, but that’s not going to happen, nor should it.
Some Palestinians use their beliefs to fuel their hatred, and you don’t need me to tell you that’s bad, but only those who actually let those beliefs lead to unwarranted actions of violence are to be condemned, not the people as a whole. The same goes for Israel - only those who take unwarranted action against Palestine are to be condemned. You can and should disagree with the parts of anyone’s beliefs that go against basic human decency, but that alone doesn’t invalidate their right to live.
You act like this started because of a recent bombing and not because of the suppression of an innocent group people over the course of nearly a century. It’s the quintessential bullshit milquetoast excuse of “If you fight back against a bully, you’re just as bad.” The US is an example of what happens when the invaders simply kill all of the original occupants to claim the land for themselves - you’ll have a tough time finding a progressive who thinks that ended up being a happy outcome.
So he got a good PR team and lied about his politics. That should be grounds for dismissal from congress.
His opponent in the general election was also Dr Oz.
That’s true, Dr. Oz wasn’t even from Pennsylvania.
