I'm tired of pretending (Patreon)

I'm sick of it. As I've continued the inexorable march of aging I expected to become more conservative. That's what we're told. It's that axiom "If you are not a liberal when you are 20 you have no heart, if you are not a conservative when you are 40 you have no brain."

I'm nearing 40 now. Just a couple of years away. I am in no way a conservative. I've become more left wing as I've aged in fact.

I think the idea of becoming conservative as you got older was when aging and increasing wealth had a correlation. You hit your 30s and 40s and you'd have an established middle management job. You'd own a house. You'd be financially secure. So you don't want anything to change.

But that hasn't played out for my generation, and it certainly isn't playing out for the justifiably angry Gen-Z kids. Increasingly fewer people are attaining home ownership, steady careers are dying and being replaced by "gig economy" jobs, or "side hustles", where people need multiple income streams just to afford their rent in a cold, drafty flat that isn't allowed pets. It's utter bullshit is what it is.

The other night, I was reading an academic study into how tax cuts affected economies. Unsurprisingly it found that tax cuts almost always increased inequality, while not providing any meaningful economic boost.

Much like there are studies after studies that support higher minimum wages (in that they show there is no material job loss impact, and better working conditions for staff).

This goes alongside other policy studies, like the decades of research that's been done that show the worst place to rehabilitate a criminal is prison. So tougher sentences don't do shit, other than to serve some primal desire for revenge.

There are drug studies galore that show that prohibition is a failed idea. Studies show that some kind of decriminalisation/legalisation is the best path to help reduce drug harm.

Here's a study showing that higher rates of unionisation leads to a reduction in inequality.

Climate change, which shouldn't have been politicised down left/right lines but inexplicably has is not even up for debate. It's happening. We're fucking it up.

Abortion, minority rights, hell even the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine has become a left/right issue. And on every side the science supports the left.

I'm tired of pretending there's even a skerrick of legitimacy to right wing policies. Every study and every real-world example, supports left wing policies over right wing ones, pretty much 100% of the time.

I've always entertained the idea that I could be wrong about a lot of the things I believe in, because I'm usually emotionally attached to these ideas, rather than rationally. But the older I get, the more it seems like there is just no justification for any right-of-centre policies.

Ben Shapiro said that "facts don't care about your feelings", and he's right. Except it's in the exact opposite perspective to the one he offered. Those on the right are not operating by science, or fact-based rigour. They are operating under a feeling that their worldview is right. And in order to win people over we cannot use facts. We're badly wired. If we're presented with stone-cold facts to counter someone, then that person will often further entrench themselves in their wrong views. It's called the backfire effect and it's fucking dumb.

So we need to win with emotional argument. That's what drives people. We need to talk about the outcomes of our policies and how they'll effect people's day to day lives. We need to make them feel like this is the best way.

I don't have fully formed emotion-led arguments for all the positions I need, but I'm going to spend some time working on them. Because frankly, I'm sick of pretending you rightwing folk have any guiding principle beyond being selfish assholes.