Thinking while driving yesterday.

A lot of conservative morality distinguishes good people by their ability and willingness to punish bad people. (The other thing conservatives fixate on is deservedness - you don't deserve things just because you're around, you have to earn that by being good, which includes by punishing. The idea that someone might get a safe space, like universal health care or UBI, infuriates them. If you mandated work programs or enlistment in return for UBI they'd be all over that shit. This is part of why they're all about Jesus *redeeming* people by dying, and by threatening Hell - Jesus can't simply show up, say something enlightened like most of the sermon on the mount, heal some people, and be reborn as an example of divine love, that alone wouldn't make him officially good to them.)

This is really obvious in the worship of police and military, or Reagan and the Bushes, who were good because they created an enemy and punished them (while the domestic disasters of all three didn't count because it was officially happening to Someone Else).

But I was also thinking of the groomer/pedophile/etc rhetoric now; people transitioning or simply having Queer relationships is pretty inwardly directed, and in order to make the average conservative truly willing to do something about that, someone needs to be phrased as the bad guy whom you (or your proxy) can be good for punishing.

More upsetting; by definition, raising awareness of inequalities from largely socially unaware, in order to enact change, is an active process, there's *literally no way* to do it without "wokeness" becoming a way to get rightwingers all hopped up about how they've been grievously wronged, and therefore need to punish (or get someone else to punish) to protect their desperate need to be the good people.

The personal end here was thinking about my response to bullies in high school. I started out frustrated, not trying to use social dynamics to be left alone, even if I eventually went that way. Now I realize that I was victimized for being a Bad Person - therefore the victimizer was Good for punishing me. So oddly being very much the bad guy (I escalated to violence first) meant moral ambivalence (it's good to pound the hell out of someone who attacks you, it's bad to pound the hell out of someone smaller and weaker than you).

If that makes any sense?