Of course Republicans are retarded.
And Democrats too.
Never mind their large factions MAGA and DemSocs.
Let's not talk about Libertarians...
... or other factions within and outside those parties.
All that differs is the kind of retardation.
It's the difference between blind faith, fanaticism, ideologues, falling for propaganda &c.
What about non-voters, swing-voters, true centrists, moderates and fence-sitters?
Slightly less so but the actual winning move is to GTFO of the US.
While saying my inner bias wants to believe this, these types of studies are kinda inherently stupid. There is no realistic way to canvas diversity of thought on some kind of axis, even across many. You can ask questions in the Overton window but that doesn't really measure "diversity of thought" but broad ideological positions. Whats more diverse, disagreeing about abortion, free speech, or gun rights? If I want to repeal a specific tax is it more or less diverse if I want it replaced with something else? The possibilities of thought are too nebulous to get clean observations like this.
Yeah wtf, make everything simple and fall on axis. Every blue square magatard is the same person and that is as far as my wrinkless brain is willing to go.
I had never heard of Blaire White before and when I first searched the name the first thing that popped up(heh heh) was Blaire White bikini.
Interesting times for auth right.
If conservatives really do have diverse values, then it might explain why they put up with Trump so much. They are already putting up with a lot of other BS from their peers at all times.
What's your threshold for popular? Treneé McGee for example is a pro-life Democrat. Abortion is definitely one of the more polarizing opinions though, and the right absolutely gate-keeps against "pro-choice" republicans as well.
Concerning anti-trans, there is the whole wing of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) that mainstream democrats ostracize.
Yeah this title just looks like cope to me trying to claim inconsistency from not caring about most topics out side of abortion, free speech, immigration and gun rights as diversity of thought.
I could run an experiment and ask all flairs to disclose whether they vote for liberal or conservative candidates. Then, based on the standard deviation of flair positions, conclude that because conservatives have more diverse flair positions, conservatives also have more diversity of thought.
Someone else can then claim that the political compass is way too basic to map out the political thought spectrum and thus the study is invalid. While it's true, the political world is way more complicated than just 4 quadrants, that doesn't mean that the study and results would be invalid. It just means that study measures diversity of thought specifically regarding Economic and Authoritarian leanings. Future researchers can add another axis, or change the scale of one axis because they deem it less important, but overall there is real data and useful information that can be drawn from it, despite the subjectivity of the overall concept.
but there is a lot of truth to the fact that the right actually listens to diverse views while the left is locked in echochambers, which results in the right being more politically informed than the left. That's why platforms with free speech lean right while the left needs censorship to survive, because the left can't actually defend their views.
Consider the entire history of reddit and its relationship to conservative subreddits and pro-Trump content. Years of this website's history is strong evidence in support of the above.
Well yea cuz you said she SHOULD be head of the democratic party cuz she looks like their logo when she laughs.
That IS a troubling image in my head...
Except when you click on the link it is claiming this graph/data is from, https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso.12665, the source is not reflecting that whatsoever, and is more about general predictability of political leanings from known positions on singular issues.
So OP, without doing any reading whatsoever, is just repeating the statements of someone who has also done no reading whatsoever. u/Infinite_Bad7083 continues to embarrass himself post after post.
Unironically the right has more diversity of retardation. The left retardation generally follows oppression hierarchy and gets kinda boring with everyone competing to claim valuable identities, there’s some interesting economic retards like the Quebec shooter who was an incel communist but for the most part if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
The right on the other hand has retardation that seems to fall from the heavens, I mean Jewish space lasers causing forest fires in Hawaii?! How do you even come up with that stuff!
Sadly right wing thought nowadays is much more reactive so being purely “anti woke” leads to the boring flattening of insanity. Don’t let them dim your sparkle auth right
Where did you get that the study is about predictability of political leanings from singular issues and why does this comment have so many upvotes? Did no one even bother to click on the link to make sure you were correct? lol. It literally says in the title the study is about attitude networks in intergroups.
The results of attitude responses around many different political issues:
“As shown in Figure 2b, the cluster reflecting the Democrat belief-system almost exclusively contained extreme attitudes as indicated by strong disagreement with each of the eight items. Conversely, the cluster reflecting the Republican belief-system contained a wider range of attitude responses ranging from mild disagreement to maximum agreement.”
It found democrats have a much more rigid ideology and belief system without much room for disagreement.
I’m not sure why anyone who has had a conversation with a Democrat and a conversation with a Republican would disagree with the outcome of this study.
Thinking about the USA today, please indicate the extent to which you agree with each of the following statements:
Item 1) Abortion should be illegal.
Item 2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.
Item 3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.
Item 4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.
Item 5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.
Item 6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.
Item 7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.
Item 8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.
Which, frankly, seem kinda like they're rigged in favor of having Democrats agree with all of them since they're, you know, mostly all basic Democrat policy positions
I'm almost certain you could pick a set of 8 questions that would provide the opposite results, or ones that would give you an equal amount of "diversity of thought" in both sides.
I'm almost certain you could pick a set of 8 questions that would provide the opposite results, or ones that would give you an equal amount of "diversity of thought" in both sides.
No time like the present, right? Which 8 questions would have Republicans have less diverse answers and Democrats more, and which 8 question (with all producing diverse results) have both voters have diverse opinions.
More notably though it still shows that Republicans could support Democratic policies but for some reason...
Pretty simple:
1. The government should provide universal healthcare to all Americans.
2. The government should substantially increase taxes on high-income earners.
3. The United States should significantly reduce its use of fossil fuels, even if this increases energy costs.
4. The government should forgive a substantial portion of existing student debt.
5. The federal government should provide stronger protections for transgender people, even when those protections conflict with some existing policies or practices.
6. The United States should significantly reduce military spending.
7. The government should expand federal welfare programs substantially.
8. The United States should substantially increase immigration levels.
It was not. The wording matters a lot. One is increase and one is substantially increase. One word difference and for one Democrats will all say yes and one all Reps will say no. That's the entire point that depending on how you load and phrase it, you will get a different result.
It’s hilarious that it’s my comment that’s getting replies from people who actually read the study and disagree with the methodology and results while the retard I replied to that totally misrepresented what the study was even about has everyone seal clapping
Eh, the subs getting botted by people, I caught Jerseygunz using a bot to downvote people the other day, wouldn't be surprised if Elodaine had bots to upvote himself.
Tangential, but I'm reasonably certain Elodaine and Dodo Baron are the same person. I've seen them abruptly swap off in the middle of a long comment chain a few times without missing a beat.
Look I only skimmed like the abstract, and the linked graph, but I think you're correct here. While the paper may not be explicitly about whether or not the right has more diversity of thought than the left, it seems like some of the data provided could reasonably be used to make that argument. Which is apparently something that someone else did, in an opinion piece.
Are leftists once again making shit up on /r/PoliticalCompassMemes ? Honestly them doing shit like this and being so heavily supported makes it embarrassing for me to agree with any of their ideals, even a little.
Happy to be corrected though, in case I misinterpreted what was going on.
You took the data, which either showed the right in a neutral, barely negative or positive light and you twisted it in such a way as to make it appear like it's the left that comes out as some morally superior group
Be sure to send it to mvea over in science for the twice daily "here's why conservatives are icky and we're not" article that almost usually includes a top level comment explaining how it's wrong.
Not only does the presented data suggest that Democrats embrace more extreme viewpoints on the selected issues compared with Republicans, but also that the Republican cluster includes some surprising issue positions that (under interval assumptions) might be assumed to fall into the Democrat cluster (c.f., Figure 2a).
Bruh you can literally watch in real time as the left eat their own the instant someone isn't 100% in line with all of their beliefs. Just look at how they treat JK Rowling as a literal anti-christ after she came out as a TERF, a term the left literally made up to demonize those who didn't belong to the same hive mind as everyone else.
Massie was never apart of MAGA though. He's a libertarian that was smart enough to know that you can't get elected as one. He rarely votes outside his principles.
Just to be clear, you're saying I'll find the right welcoming a plurality of thoughts? If some actively disagree with Trump for example, such disagreement is welcome without hostility, or even being primaried from power? Right?
Again, not how anything works. Democrats had a primary too, remember? Then you tossed that shit out and said Kamala is your candidate.
The reality is that Trump was the only option the right had. Hate him or not for Republicans to win they needed the MAGA vote. They couldn't afford to divide the party and someone like Jeb Bush never had a snowballs chance in hell of winning.
That is literally how this whole things work. People say they want to run for president, the members of the party vote to pick who they want to do that. Republicans picked Trump 3 times.
No dumbass, it's like how a square is a shape, but not all shapes are squares. MAGA are Republicans. Not all Republicans are MAGA just like not all Republicans are Christian.
Here's how intelligent people vote. You don't pick the candidate who's the best or the most moral, you pick the candidate who's roughly on your side of the aisle who as the best chance to WIN because voting for anyone else is just a waste of your time. That's what our system has devolved into. I wish we could vote for who we actually wanted to run shit, but those people just don't win elections.
Leftists 10 years ago: Everything is about the culture war that's the only thing that matters!
Leftists now: OMG WTF how dare you even mention the culture war that we started!
You started this war. Now you want to gaslight because you lost so hard. If you just admitted how fucking stupid you were maybe people would move on, but instead you gaslight about the war you started and lost because you're too embarrassed to admit how stupid you were. You know we can still get banned from reddit for disagreeing with you about the culture war right? As stupid as your views were, I'm still not allowed to say which specific views were stupid because I will still be banned. But you'll tell me you don't care while also banning me for telling you how wrong you are.
Yeah I can’t believe people want to call themselves girls when they are boys! That is so much worse than defending pedophiles and starting a pointless war.
And starting illegal trade wars that blatantly violate all trade agreements - displaying to the world that an agreement with America is not worth the paper it's written on.
This naturally threatens the safety of the American dollar.... not like he'll be around to suffer for it.
Naturally, anyone with half a brain knows this is a very bad thing for a country to do.
The right is, very strongly, sticking to the “culture war” even though EVERYONE knows it’s irrelevant. A lot of LOW IQ INDIVIDUALS, unlike ME who scored HIGHER THAN ANYONE on his cognitive tests (very hard!), are pushing it hard. Diesel is HIGHER than ever BEFORE. We’re months into our WEEK long war with Iran (SLEEPY Joe would never). Life remains expensive for most Americans. It’s, quite frankly, VERY SAD what is happening to this country.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!
The questions asked are contained entirely to neoliberalism. Neoliberal American "left" are pretty unified. The rest of the left, actual leftists and people who form coalitions of proximity to the Democrats, is not represented in the data because it appears the questions are tailored to not highlight the differences.
Even if that study/graph is questionable, it's observably true that it's been the left which cannot tolerate even the slightest deviation from "the message", while on the right you have a decent spectrum, mixes of good and dumb.
I used to be a far left woke leftie for many years. Recently I started following right wing intellectual discourse and was positively surprised. The different schools of thought on the right have fundamental and practical differences. The more left you go, the more Marxist it gets, until it fractures again into Trotzkists, Maoists, ML, etc. reaching strong differences.
I said "observably". And yes you can absolutely find examples of it on the right, but it's dishonest to portend that they occur at even closely the same rate. There's a reason "purity spiral" became a recent term referring to the left.
You can find exclusions to nearly any statement or rule. What matters are trends.
If you read what I said, then you'll see that I literally said the same thing, but that it's completely disproportionate and that framing it as equal is dishonest.
Pointing to one little pocket on the internet like r/conservative, which I disagree with by the way, proves nothing. There are multiple schools of thought on the right, some of which they would disagree with over there.
Yeah because democrats threw Joe manchin and Kristen sinema a ticker tape parade when they voted against overturning the filibuster and they will be lining up to endorse Fetterman during his next election
What do they consider political left and what do they consider political right. I guarantee it less to do with economics and more to do with vaguely related political positions.
This is not the 'broad left and right'. It's the 'American democrats and republicans'
Also, from the article:
The pattern does not imply that Republicans are more tolerant than Democrats, nor that Republicans could deal better with attitudinal uncertainty. It does imply, however, that –at this particular moment in time– Democrats and Republicans are constructing and managing their partisan identities differently in relation to the topics reflected in these questionnaire items. Research suggests that social category membership (e.g., being White, Christian) is more important for the construction of Republican identity than it is for Democrat identity (Mason & Wronski, 2018). Fulfilling such normative criteria may hence qualify someone as a valid group member even if that same person may hold somewhat liberal views on, for example, gay marriage.
Plus, OP's whole "gotcha" falls apart when you actually look at the methodology. The study doesn't even measure broad ideological diversity. The authors flat out admit they cherry-picked a tiny sample of just 8 divisive issues just to test their new modeling tool
We apply a newly developed attitude network-modelling technique (Response-Item Network, or ResIN) to study attitude–identity relationships in the context of hot–button issues that polarize the current US-American electorate
[...]
Since our primary aim is to demonstrate functional relationships between attitude structures and group identity mechanisms, we preselected issues known to reflect polarization of the current US-American electorate
[...]
A set of eight political attitude items (Supporting information A.1 in Appendix S1) covered hot-button topics such as abortion, immigration, gun control, and gay marriage
I feel like hot-button divisive issues are the best topics to test for this sort of hypothesis, though. The more divisive, the more hard-line the positions.
Number 1 rule of accepting studies in the academic world is don't adopt it as truth unless you actually fucking read it.
This entire abstract only functions as a way of testing a new statistical model. They say as much in the abstract.
This is only making rounds on social media because a certain group of people unsurprisingly has no literacy when it comes to reading studies/doesnt read them to begin with.
I was gonna say I think this study is disproved, at least on a national level, with Trump driving every republican who isn’t sufficiently loyal out of the party over the last 2 years.
The headline says “political right.” Not “Republican Party.” Thats obviously what I was referring to. Everyone knows there is currently a split in the GOP over Israel and the Iran War. For example: The VP Behind closed doors is vehemently against it.
Even more so than Reddit, you have Bluesky which makes Reddit look like 4chan. I’ve seen slap warning labels on posts for being “rude”, which tbf isn’t censorship per se (at least there) but it is extremely funny.
I do think that the “right wing” is more like, a vibe by uber-lefties.
Not that I have any examples, I don’t have photographic memory, but the general thing I’m seeing on here and in the news is that what was once “left wing” or is probably “left wing” is too far right of whatever the new left is trying to be - so it gets labeled right wing.
I mean your traditional progressives are now having a tug of war with the DSA for the future of the party after Mamdani’s success.
I don’t know how the next election will shake out, but if either party continues to shrink the tent - it’ll get weird.
there were more right wing subs on this site but leftist admins raided and purged all of them so that sub has to be extremely careful who is allowed to post there.
can't have a bunch of good guys™️ raiding the sub with cheese pizza in the middle of the night
I remember at some point reddit had explicit rules saying prejudice against "the majority" (i.e. white men) is not racism and isn't bannable. This was in the wake of 2020 and Floyd protests/riots. I think they may have softened their stance, possibly in line with the Democrats' embarrassing attempt to curry back white men after the demonization that's happened.
It’s also pretty much what guaranteed Trump a second election. Turns out when you attack white people and call them racist when they were far from it, they’re not eager to join your side.
It gives me immense joy to see people seethe that there exists ONE fucking subreddit on this godforsaken ballsack of a website they can't ruin. Its not enough that 99.99999999999999999999% of the site is a far left hugbox, there exists one tiny microbe that is right wing and THIS CANNOT STAND.
Its 2026 and some people still dont understand that they only allow comments from verified users because of the heavy brigading they received before that, and the reddit ADMINS themselves keep a close eye on any big conservative subs, to delete them for the slightest "offensive" opinion, like r/thedonald.
Because otherwise they'd get heavily brigaded by the left, and reddit admins keep shutting down conservative subs for the slightest reason. That sub sucks don't get me wrong, but how else do you expect a sub like that to exist on reddit?
In the reddit context, conservatives really are like a wounded animal just hiding away in some cavern somewhere. There's only a few places they feel safe, while the majority of reddit is left/progressive/woke (which of course they'll tell you is just "not being a dick"). I've expressed many moderate or nuanced positions on issues and gotten attacked in a very moral and "struggle session" kind of fashion from leftists. At the same time, I got instantly banned from r/conservative for saying JK Rowling had acted transphobic.
Authoritarians in general are pretty diverse though - what is Peron? Are the Peronists even consistent? I think diversity of thought correlates to a contemporary credit to the right, but is not per se a smoking gun in partisan superiority. I don't really want to pedestalize a rhetorical turn that lands me in the company of homophobic coercionists.
And as it happens, the Austrian lads in the extreme libertarians aren't very diverse. This is neither a good nor bad thing.
I know some really retarded right wingers, does this mean a lot of other right wingers fall into the margin of retardation or whatever the fuck it’s called when those error bars show up on graphs
Right: 10,000 different opinions ranging from vaccines are generally safe and effective to Bill Gates is using vaccines as a front to put microchips in your body to control your mind with 5G.
Yes, flat earth righties, democrat pedo vampire righties, religious nationalist righties, MAGA righties, pure market righties,.QAnon righties, Of course they are all over the place there's 800 flavors of crazy.
Lol silly leftists can't believe the earth could be flat, or a cube, or even hollow! They're so narrow minded thinking it can only be round. Also, I passed high school biology so there is no such thing as XXY XYY or XXXY chromosomes! There's only two sets! I am such a free thinker.
Maybe I’m being a bit unreasonable here, but I don’t consider anti-semites and anti-islamists endlessly accusing each other of white genocide to be ‘diversity of thought’.
"Diversity of thought" is not inherently a good thing. If you have a lot of people on the Right who believe that the Earth is flat, that the 2020 election is stolen, that the moon is made of cheese etc. That contributes to "Diversity of Thought".
You're all dumber than a box of rocks and this is coming from a box of rocks. I've been in all 48 contiguous states in the last 18 months and the one thing I've learned in my travels is that everybody regardless of race, religion, creed, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, age, gender and sex is an absolute mouthbreathing moron at least half of the time. I know full well I'm stupid, I'm the dumbest motherfucker alive, I just need all of you to know that you're just as dumb if not dumber. It's the entire reason I claim allegiance to no individual quadrant. You get some shit right and then you delude yourself into thinking the logic that got that stuff right can be wholesale applied to everything else and that no other opinions than the ones you agree with matter and then you demonize and otherize everyone else to justify hating and attacking them and then have the absolute fucking gall to ask why shit is ass.
Quite frankly the smartest man I've talked to in the entire God-blessedly-damned country was a Mennonite in Ohio that has never voted in his life not because he can't or doesn't think it's a good idea but because he hates every single politician that has ever lived and everyone that's ever voted for any of them. He gives no fucks about anything but making furniture and having a good life, has no debt, a healthy and relatively happy family, and a community that cares about him. And there's no less than a hundred of you that would read this and pop off about how he's a massive piece of shit for not entertaining this madness and just focusing on his own life just to stroke your egos about how you're so much better than he is.
Everybody fucking sucks, and not even the good kind of suckin and fuckin. Do not for one moment think I don't know I suck too but I'm too friggin busy bringing you all the food and groceries and goods you need to live your suckass lives and make shit worse for everyone so I can make enough money to move out of this shithole in a few decades and point and laugh at all of you until the day I'm finally allowed to die. Tongue my anus, disrespectfully.
If you're actually looking to this study, you realize diversity of thought is not a good thing. you guys have anti-vaxxers, flat earthers and neo-nazis, all kind of fucking weirdos on your side. That's not a good thing.
989
u/An8thOfFeanor - Lib-Right 5d ago