Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s a story for our troubled age: a democratic contest takes place, a winner emerges at the polls, and… the incumbent does not concede. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is slated to return to office in January after squeaking out a narrow victory with 50.9 percent of the Brazilian vote: around 2 million […]
conservatism
Posted inPolitics
Why are so many evangelicals so un-Christian?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Even conservative American evangelicals are becoming increasingly aware—and alarmed—that so many of their fellow brethren continue to model decidedly un-Christian behavior while devotedly embracing the aggressive, heretical cruelties of their beloved but former president, Donald Trump. The nation’s destructive current right-wing religio-political zeitgeist of culture-war rage, paranoia, and meanness is summarized in disquieting detail in […]
Posted inYour World, Your Life
The local Arizona news story that haunts my career
Reading Time: 3 minutes The news is … not great. Let’s talk about the olds. Specifically, a story about a story that I covered in my days as a young freelance writer in Arizona. Is this the Arizona that conservatives want? As we approach the 2022 election, Arizona is decidedly a bellwether state. Will it (finally) flip blue? Or […]
Posted inPolitics
(Religious) Conservatives Aren’t Really Conservatives?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Words aren’t set in stone and can mean whatever we want them to mean. As long as we correctly convey the intended message, right? Sure. But often we get issues. And one of those issues is about “conservatism”, the basis of the issue possibly being wrapped up with seismic cultural shifts over the last one […]
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Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics, Psychology, The Secular
Does Belief in God Drive One’s Politics or Politics Drive One’s Belief in God?
Reading Time: 12 minutes Disclaimer: I, like many of you, am an agnostic-atheist and so the answer is neither. Or is it? Because this question can be applied to me, too. Let me elucidate… In general terms, for religious people, what is the direction of causality? A few things to note first here; firstly, politics is a subset of […]
Posted inPolitics
Conservative Eviscerates Trump
Reading Time: 3 minutes This isn’t click-bait. This is an evisceration that has so many talking points, I don’t know where to start. I get a lot out of criticisms of people from their own side. Before we get into that, let’s look at the welcome Trump has got in the UK. Ollie Nancarrow, an A’ Level Art student, […]
Posted inGeneral
Ben Shapiro Schooled by UK Interviewer
Reading Time: 2 minutes I don’t really know much, if anything, about Ben Shapiro other than he is conservative political commentator. Having just skimmed his Wikipedia page, I can see he falls into all the usual tropes and positions. I know he has railed against social justice and SJWs over the years. He used to work for Breitbart. But […]
Posted inPolitics
New Study: The Relationship between Religion and Redistribution
Reading Time: 4 minutes There is undoubtedly a complex relationship between religion and the idea of redistribution, compounded by the effect of conservative political values, as according to a new study. The study, published in PLOS One, indicates that conservative political views have the power to overcome some of the effects of religion, particularly in countries that have more robust welfare systems. The abstract […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Politics
The Deaths at the Hands of Left-Wing Regimes
Reading Time: 8 minutes This is a perennial conversation that does seem to annoy me. When arguing with people who are further to the right of me, they often invoked deaths caused by Stalin and Pol Pot and other such dictators. They seem to think that those to the extreme left who end up as totalitarian dictators are fully representative of the […]
Posted inPolitics, Psychology
How Fear Affects Politics
Reading Time: < 1 minute I have two videos to show you that should express the connection between physiology and political ideology: and the superb TED talk by David Pizzaro: Let me know what you think (I use the second video in my free will talk). Stay in touch! Like A Tippling Philosopher on Facebook: A Tippling Philosopher