I already quoted it in full in post No. 8 in this thread
Dammit this is the 2nd time I’ve missed a great post by you in 1 month’s time. I’ll try to do better moving forward. ::smacks own head::
If you, bump, live (or lived recently) in Nebraska, ignore the following.
65% of Nebraskans live in urban areas. We are not as monolithic as the commentary suggests nor are we lacking in world view. The most racist US place I’ve lived in is Boston. The world view there I experienced was the immediate neighborhood.
We are talking about needing to move away from stereotyping which leads to inequality. Not stereotyping Midwesterners would be one place to start. Then we are more likely to listen to what is said.
Well yeah, something like 75% of Americans in general live in urban areas. And I live in Dallas- a major city, that’s predominantly Democratic, surrounded by predominantly Republican and white suburbs.
But I passed through southern and western Nebraska last summer (basically took I-80 fro Kearney to Oglala, and north from there to Chadron and into S. Dakota), and was kind of surprised at just HOW rural and white that whole area was. Or for that matter, how most of the parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, S. Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado (outside of the greater Co. Springs area), New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle were. As in, once we got outside of D/FW, I could have counted the non-white people I saw for the next 10 days on one hand. I was a little bit surprised, to say the least.
But I’m guessing that if you live in Cheyenne, discussions about stuff to help the urban poor is probably pretty remote, and when it’s coupled, like it so often is, with race, it’s positively foreign.
So when it comes to choosing the candidate who’s all about social justice and racial equity, or the guy who promises to get something more directly useful to their rural lives, which one do you think they’re going to pick? That cuts both ways as well- do you think poor Hispanics in Corpus Christi give two shits about barley farmers in North Dakota? Or do poor black urban people in Atlanta care enough about the travails of hop farmers in Washington?
Of course not, everyone tends to vote locally, however they may define that. And part of that problem is that “locally” tends to carry all the weight of however things are composed locally- if it’s an all-white rural area, people are going to vote for what helps them the most. Same thing for an urban hispanic area, and so on.
The tricky thing about in-groups and out-groups is that there are tiers to it. For instance, most white Trump voters would happily pal around all day with fellow black Trumpers than white liberals. The talk about race, etc. is usually overblown. At the end of the day, it is hardcore politically partisan, as is almost everything in America these days.
This is clearly and demonstrably false. Imagine a law to the effect of, “All male citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty years of age shall enlist in the military.” That law violates both clauses of the so-called anti-conservative principle: an out-group consisting of enlisted male citizens are bound by law to literally protect an in-group consisting of everybody else. It is nonsense to assume such a law could not exist, or that it could not offer protection.
~Max
To define conservatism as the principle that laws must bind but not benefit one group, while also benefiting and not binding a second group, is absurd.
As an example, consider the following hypothetical laws:
“A flat tax of 8% shall be levied on the sale of all firearms, half the revenues of which shall credit the Medicaid fund, the other half being reserved for a Gun Violence Victim fund described in section II of this act.”
In-group: Medicaid recipients and victims of gun violence
Out-group: Firearm purchasers
Or this one:
“An employer who discriminates against employees on the basis of sex shall be liable for a misdemeanor of the first degree and a fine of not less than $10,000.00.”
In-group: Employees
Out-group: Employers
Do you think anyone in their right mind would call these conservative laws? Nearly all laws bind one group for another’s benefit, although most of the time the one group is a part of the second.
For example, another hypothetical law:
“Whoever is guilty of murder in the first degree shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for life; whoever is guilty of murder in the second degree, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”
In-group: everyone
Out-group: murderers
~Max
Well, we’ve never had mandatory enlistment here, but we did have the draft during Vietnam, and the draft was illustrative of the point. The burden of the draft fell most heavily on the out-group - the poor and minorities. The in-group - rich white kids - had mechanisms to avoid having to serve on the front lines: Daddy’s connections getting the kid into a coveted Air National Guard unit, or the family doctor writing a bogus diagnosis of bone spurs, for example.
Out-group: American diplomats. In-group: Mike Pompeo.
None of those are valid or reasonable definitions of the out-group an the in-group in American society.
It’s a silly definition where the author tortured the idea until he got his pretty rhetorical yin-yang symbolism. But in your objections you’re reading that symbolism as if it was literal.
It isn’t.
What the commentator meant was "Conservatism is about an in-group using legislative & police power to encourage and enforce in-group benefit at the expense of the out-group. Some of this will be explicit in the text of the law, but most of it will be “nudge nudge wink wink everybody knows” selective enforcement.
It’s a well-established principle of law that the government may address society’s ills at the time and in the sequence of its choosing. IOW, you (any you) have no inherent actionable right to sue the government to force prompt legislative action to address a societal harm to you.
Which discretion can be abused indefinitely to, e.g. permit known polluting factories that benefit wealthy shareholders while harming the poorer people who live down-river.
That is what the pithy but simple-minded phrase means. Not some straw man about laws that include explicit obvious carve outs. Although the different Federal sentencing guidelines for powdered vs. rock cocaine come very very close to plain-language “white cocaine users get a slap; black cocaine users do hard time.”
To repeat myself:
To those used to having a position of privilege, equality will appear to be discrimination.
Altering the law in an attempt to redress the structural unfairness of society is not itself unfair.
The emancipation proclamation advantaged slaves as the expense of their owners, but that didn’t make the plantation owners an underclass relative to their former slaves.
Thank you, and I think you at least understood what I was getting at. I still believe any like definition that still relies on a generic “in-group” will be equally flawed, even the one you provided.
~Max
I claimed that the definition was overbroad, and you appear to think a valid counterargument is to point to examples that fit the definition.
~Max
This only proves my point, which is that the so-called anti-conservative proposition is poorly written. It probably should be written to the effect of, laws should or must both protect and bind everyone. But as written, it proposes that laws cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. And this proposition is demonstrably false.
~Max
If you are not bound by the law, then the law does not protect me.
I think that this is an ideal, not a reflection of reality.
It is demonstrably false that this is how the world works, but you have no demonstrated that it isn’t how it should be.
I’m saying that you do not appear to understand the concept you are deriding, just as you did not appear to understand the irony in the quote I provided.
For a real-life example, how about the FICA tax? What is the in-group, and what is the out-group, and does it meet the proposed definition of ‘conservative’?
~Max
In the previous sentence, and emphesis in the other post #46, I hoped to imply that this current criticism is that the particular words used do not make clear that we are dealing with a statement about how things should be versus how they are or can be.
~Max