OK, I have a disability, but I'm more right-wing

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Gotta agree with Dox on this one. People are free to have different politics, even if their political leanings appear contradictory or counter-intuitive to others.

These are usually worse than religious debates so I tend to stay out of them.

Just to give my drive-by two cents though; I don't always think that a person's sense of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is entirely self-centered. A lot of people will consider the health of their own life and their own comforts while also considering the health of the nation state that they live in and see the two as interrelated. Even realizing that the relationship between them personally thriving and their country thriving isn't always one-to-one you'll still get a diverse moral reflex from people if they get the impression (for right or wrong) that the same policy makers who want to sweeten their personal lives are also putting the country in peril with their policies. Economic and civil collapse would also mean hell for a personal with a disability and one could see that as a gamble not worth taking, which again whether that thinking is along the right lines or whether it's horrifically snowed or tinfoil hattery I don't really want to debate. I just want to elucidate some of the why's for people couldn't possibly imagine a person with a disability not voting Democrat.

Plenty of right leaning politicians favor concealed carry/open carry of firearms.

Plenty of them don't mind disability pensions (because unlike welfare, there's a genuine medical reason for the aid).

The first one above, is right-leaning by design, and the second is a neutral stance.

Right-leaning is by no means "anti-disability". Hell, left-leaning is fine with aborting disabled children based simply on the disability. I have no idea how anyone with a disability can justify that, but there we are.

Also, on a purely tactical level, I've never found dictating to people what their politics should be to be a particularly effective means of persuasion.

No, you don't have to support the left if you're disabled. You can be a right winger if you like. But the question is: why? Why support people who think it's not society's responsibility to care for those in need? Then again, there are - mystifyingly enough - gay and black Republicans, so why not disabled Republicans?!?!

Right leaning isn't against disability pensions, dude (disability being those in genuine need, as it's a valid reason for why they can't work and such). It's the same as aged pensions.

That's a neutral standpoint that both the common left and right support.

It's only when you get to the extreme right, such as anarchism/proper libertarianism, where you run into pensions being in the domain of the public and not the state. It's not fair to think social liberalism/common left equates to the far left, such as Communism, in the same way.

But more and more, the right is dominated by the libertarian lunatic fringe who think either you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, or you ought to go by the wayside and die.
If mainstream conservatives believe there is an obligation to care for those in need, it's only because they had adopted such notions from the left.

I think both parties are making strides in recognizing and accommodating disabled people. Trump's mocking of Serge Kovaleski aside; one of the regrets covered by his vague apology, I guess.

The right feels that disabled lives should be protected from abortion and I think this comes from a belief in God and respect for his will in creating the life.

The left takes into consideration the burden a disabled person will put on the parents and society and allow parents to choose to abort.

I don't really see a correlation between politics and support of disabled people. As was pointed out, nobody says they want to take away disability pensions. I think the right would like the church and charities to take on more of the burden, while the left want the state to administer support. I've been helped by both.

It's the nature of the beast in regards to the extremes encroaching upon the common left and right. Both sides have their problems here, and it depends on what they will realistically encroach upon that defines which common side you prefer. The extreme left wants to limit freedom of speech, for example.

Though, I wouldn't worry about the right removing disability pensions; that's an unrealistic worry. Both sides agree with it too much for it to ever be axed. It's even hard to see welfare being axed nowadays, but this would be a realistic worry in regards to say, a libertarian government.

androbot01,

In my case, my disdain for aborting disabled kiddies [simply due to the disability] is not due to religion, rather it's basing life on the value to society and people it has. I reckon this view would be pretty common amongst disability activists.

Btw, the super duper left will be for eugenics at the state level. Even sterilization to outright extermination of the "undesirables" based on their worth to the social state, comes under this doctrine.

The super duper right will just let them die by natural causes if they can't look after themselves.

Equally bad? Probably.

It wasn't all that long ago that the left and right agreed to shut down mental hospitals and give people their freedom to live out on the streets.

The only people who I've ever heard advocating for sterilization and euphemization are far right white supremacists.

I don't want to be bullied, and I certainly don't want to bully anybody else. Not only does a lifetime on the autism spectrum not conflict with this stance, I think if anything my experience makes me more inimical to coercion than if I'd always been good at socializing and had never been pushed around.

Prominent leftist and progressives supported the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. Like then a key tenent of progressive thought is that non progressives are inferior intellectually and are often racist.

Eugenics is a lot more then sterilization these days. Aborting Down Sydrome fetuses is well documented. There is the rapidly evolving gene editing technology. While not eugenics behavioral therapy can be used for the same purposes. Why do you think there is such a push for early diagnosis and intensive therapies? Brains can be rewired by behaviorial therapies and the earliest years are when most our brain wiring occurs so the idea is to intercept or deflect the autism before it takes root.

The Social Justice Warrior phenominon is most promenent in academia where a lot of research takes place. The weeding out and elimination of the "unfit" will not be called eugenics nor sterilization used because that will be deemed politically incorrect and associated with the "right wing". I can definitly see where autistic different thinking will be seen as a threat to the imposition of correct/intelligent thought.

The thing about political labels is, they are always morphing. What might have been a liberal or conservative stance at one time might not be later. The controversial Margaret Sanger, while regarded as a saint on the left today for her advocation of birth control, had also spoken before the Ku Klux Klan on racial issues, definitely putting her outside the realm of the left by any definition.

Stalin, Mao and all those other left wing dictators and their governments did a pretty good job in eradicating the undesirables in their societies (mentally ill, drug addicts, and so on).

Modern (last century) eugenics was generally left wing. They figured superior intelligence should be passed on and the disabled removed from society as they're a burden on the family and state. The abortion movement used eugenics as an argument early on (nowadays, aborting a child with Down's simply because of that is eugenics).

I'm sure there are proclaimed right [and left] wing extremists nowadays calling for genocide of someone or something. Most of the right wing extremists that call for such want a strong state to do it, which is actually leftism, but there you go. The "real" right wing ethnic extremist would do it themselves rather than have the state do it (they'd usually be going against the state's orders and laws to do such).

They'd also have to have a pretty good reason to fall on the right [or left] rather than just being racist murderers. Left's reason is for the state. Right should be to move from the state.

Really, they're just racist murderers in most cases (or, they think they would be), rather than doing it in the name of their political ideology. This is the most important thing to realize.

Your new post, that definitions change. Sorta. Stalin, for example, is still just as left as he ever was. The US founders are still just as classically liberal as they ever were (they're an extreme right party that attempted to overthrow the state through violence after all). The biggest contention is what the Nazi Party was; it was socially left but economically middle/right, and this confuses people.

Generally, it goes:

Power to the state to whatever amount = left
Power to the individual to whatever amount = right

Last edited by Dillogic on 23 Aug 2016, 3:22 am, edited 1 time in total.