Conservatism

[lissener]

[note: not proofread, not previewed; looking at another very long work day today; I’ve spent more time commuting that sleeping in the last 48 hours.]

Scylla, why didn’t you open this in the Pit, if this was simply going to be a personal hissy fit?

Maybe it is more personal than I imagined. Okay, you wanna get personal?

Consider: as a gay man, who grew up as a gay child, I have a lifelong sense of the conservative agenda as a very real negative force against which I must constantly struggle just to avoid thoughts of suicide.

Consider: all the work I’ve ever done (volunteer and professional) with or on behalf of street youth, the environment, or the arts, has been against the constant negative thrust of the conservative agenda. I see people that I’ve come to know and care about be cast aside and injuriously ignored and simply left behind by conservative policies. I see REAL suffering and lives of defeat and despair, and then I hear conservatives saying that this is for their own good, all the while knowing that the only ones who benefit from their policies are the rich and powerful. The conservative version of the helping hand comes to seem like, “You want some of what the rich and the powerful get? Easy as pie: just become rich and powerful!”

I see Clarence Thomas, who owes a debt to affirmative action, fighting to take it away from those who follow him.

I hear conservative politicians talk about how opening up things like pollution control to the market will be the best solution: the pressure of the marketplace will lead polluters to clean up their act! That’s not the deepest bullshit? Even if the politicians spouting that crap believe it, they KNOW that the industrial fat cats whose money put them in power are gonna turn right around and squirt whatever crap they can through the nearest loophole.

All this stuff leaves me with the opinion that the ultimate* symbol* of conservatism in America is The Loophole. “Find me away to get more than my share, but make it look like an accident. Write me a speech on personal responsibility while I swallow a big check from one polluter and subsidize another.”

And yes, this is all opinion; none of my conclusions as to the intentions of conservatives are facts, and that’s really what I’m, um, sharing with you here, and in the thread that sparked this one: my opinions as to the real agenda behind the Conservative Agenda.

I never said it was fact; I inserted, into almost every sentence I wrote, awkward phrases like “it seems to me” and “so goes my thinking” and “in my opinion” to make it clear that I understood that I was entirely in the realm of opinion.

And so I will NOT accept your challenge to PROVE to you the TRUTH of my opinions, because I never claimed it in the first place. After all, you read the same newspapers I do, and you have reached different conclusions. I understand that, I just don’t understand those conclusions.

I have tried to make it clear from the beginning—my first post in the previous thread—that I wasn’t talking about you; I was talking about my conclusions and my opinions. I’m happy to enlighten you as to the thought process by which I have reached those opinions—the most one can do; one can’t really defend opinions—but I will not attempt to prove them to you; nor is your childish insistence that I do so proof that I am wrong. I have very carefully framed the discussion from the beginning—taking full responsibility for my own opinions, and not stating them as fact—in such a way that proof simply doesn’t come into it.

Please note that I even acknowledged that my inability to grasp your position might be due an “emotional immaturity” of my own. I didn’t write that entirely facetiously; my point was that I’m fully to accept that this whole thing is about me and my understanding of the issues. I’m more than happy to continue this on that level, but not on your “there but for the Eff word goes a Pit thread” terms.

[Patty_O_Furniture]

I’m trying desperately to finish what I’m working on in time to catch the last bus home so I don’t have to pay $25 for a cab.

There you go again. Choosing what’s best for yourself, rather than what’s best for us - the community!

[erislover]

I have a question, then, Scylla. If we should pay close attention to the law of unintended consequences, how do we get to the point where we wage war on the other side of the globe based on speculative information? I’m not asking for your justification of the war, but why we may sidestep the LUC.

Thanks.

[Gorsnak]

*Originally posted by John Mace *
The two examples you give are the government taking action to correct past mistakes by the government. We had slavery in this country because it was encoded in the law. Women could not vote because it was encoded in the law. Actually, one might argue that the conditions created by the orignal laws are examples of unintended consequences.

I won’t claim that the “law” of unintended consequences is always correct or that it is, in fact, some natural “law”, but I think your examples miss the point. When people talk about this law, they are talking about government action meddling in the afairs of free men and women.

Slavery is, or was, a traditional institution with a past stretching back before recorded history. Suggesting that it was an invention of government is an extremely odd statement, though certainly the US and state governments in its first 100 years of existence had done things to shape how the institution existed in that particular historical milieu. Denying women a voice in politics is also an extremely ancient tradtion. I think Polycarp’s use of them as examples is entirely fair and on point. Sometimes society contains grievous injustices - so grievous that it is not only worth accepting the risk of unintended consequences in order to correct them, but morally imperative that we do so.

I have no qualms about using a sort of conservatism as a sort of null hypothesis in politics - that is, the burden of proof is always on those proposing a change to the status quo. But that does not mean that the status quo should somehow be preferable to any proposed change. And, after all, maintaining the status quo may have unintended consequences just as altering it does. For all Scylla knows, had he not pruned out his pricker bush, it would have attracted termites which would have gone on to destroy his house (or whatever - the neat thing about the LUC is that you never have to delineate what exactly the horrible unintended consequences might be, since they are by hypothesis ones that nobody’s thought of).

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Scylla, you said you don’t want to be told what a conservative is, so I won’t do that. I will, however, ask you to clarify some stuff, as the conservative position you sketched out doesn’t map to what I think of as mainstream conservative positions.

You say that conservatives default to preserving the status quo, don’t want to make major changes unless there’s a very strong reason for it. You say that conservatives are big on promoting personal responsibility. Could you tell me whether you consider the following positions to be conservative – and if so, how they jibe with protecting and preserving the status quo?

-Opposition to requiring GM foods to undergo scientific testing prior to entering production.
-Support of an amendment to outlaw abortion
-Support of an SDI-like program, even if it means backing out of decades-old and successful missile containment treaties
-Support of drastic cuts to social programs
-Support of the abolition of the Department of Education’
-Support of a constitutional amendment allowing prayer in school
-Support of a constitutional amendment outlawing flag burning
-Support of opening ANWR to oil drilling
-Support of rolling back air and water quality protections
-Admiration for, and calls to return to the morality of, the 1950s.

I should probably stop listing positions – already, this is probably too many for you to reply to. I bolded five of the positions as ones I consider characteristic of conservatism but not mapping easily to the principles you described; could you clarify this for me?

(Awhile ago, I read a very different set of principles describing American Conservatism; if being defined by pinkos doesn’t piss you off too much, I’ll post them later)

Daniel

[Scylla]

*Originally posted by lissener *
**Consider: as a gay man, who grew up as a gay child, I have a lifelong sense of the conservative agenda as a very real negative force against which I must constantly struggle just to avoid thoughts of suicide.

**

This is not about your sense. I do not trust or beleive your sense. This is about reason. This is about rational stances. We have a forum for opions. This forum is where you defend your statements rationally.

You are failing utterly and completely to do so. My grandfather is a bigot. Through 40-50 years as a cop he has a clear “sense” concerning black people.

I understand you have bigoted opinions about conservatives. You don’t have to tell me that any more. It’s clear.

[/quote]
**Consider: all the work I’ve ever done (volunteer and professional) with or on behalf of street youth, the environment, or the arts, has been against the constant negative thrust of the conservative agenda. I see people that I’ve come to know and care about be cast aside and injuriously ignored and simply left behind by conservative policies. I see REAL suffering and lives of defeat and despair, and then I hear conservatives saying that this is for their own good, all the while knowing that the only ones who benefit from their policies are the rich and powerful. The conservative version of the helping hand comes to seem like, “You want some of what the rich and the powerful get? Easy as pie: just become rich and powerful!”
[/quote]
**
This is not a rational argument. It is a whine.

I really so no way to make it any clearer that your personal opinions and rationalizations for your bigoted stance is of no interest to me whatsoever. I ask you for reason and you simply offer me more precious little anecdotes and egregious generalizations.

I see Clarence Thomas, who owes a debt to affirmative action, fighting to take it away from those who follow him.

I was not aware that Clarence recieved employment through AA. Do you have a cite?

I hear conservative politicians talk about how opening up things like pollution control to the market will be the best solution: the pressure of the marketplace will lead polluters to clean up their act! That’s not the deepest bullshit? Even if the politicians spouting that crap believe it, they KNOW that the industrial fat cats whose money put them in power are gonna turn right around and squirt whatever crap they can through the nearest loophole.

Gimme a cite. Even if I just accept it, I’m not sure what it proves.
But, I can use this as a good example as to why your viewpoint represents pure bigotry.

You say you’ve heard a conservative politician do this. Ok. So what? What does that tell you about conservatives in general?

It’s like saying “I saw black guys rob stores, that’s why black guys are thieves. It’s not bigotry. It’s real.”

But it is bigotry.

Would you argue that hypocritical politicians are a strictly conservative phenomenom?

All this stuff leaves me with the opinion that the ultimate symbol of conservatism in America is The Loophole. “Find me away to get more than my share, but make it look like an accident. Write me a speech on personal responsibility while I swallow a big check from one polluter and subsidize another.”

And yes, this is all opinion; none of my conclusions as to the intentions of conservatives are facts, and that’s really what I’m, um, sharing with you here, and in the thread that sparked this one: my opinions as to the real agenda behind the Conservative Agenda.

Oh I’m sorry. I thought your were claiming a view of “objective truth” when you characterized all conservatives as liars, selfish, and unworthy of respect.

I didn’t realize that you were using “objective truth” as a euphemism for talking out of your nether orifice.

I never said it was fact; I inserted, into almost every sentence I wrote, awkward phrases like “it seems to me” and “so goes my thinking” and “in my opinion” to make it clear that I understood that I was entirely in the realm of opinion.

You send it was obvious objective truth. That is not saying it’s fact?

[/quote]
**Please note that I even acknowledged that my inability to grasp your position might be due an “emotional immaturity” of my own. I didn’t write that entirely facetiously; my point was that I’m fully to accept that this whole thing is about me and my understanding of the issues. I’m more than happy to continue this on that level, but not on your “there but for the Eff word goes a Pit thread” terms. **
[/QUOTE]

Ok great. My point all along has been that you didn’t know what your are talking about. If you want to confess to emotional immaturity as well, that’s cool with me.

Since you’ve admitted that you are not factual on this, and volunteered the possibility of emotional immaturity, I really see nothing further to be gained by beating you up any more.

I’ll consider the matter closed with you and move onto some of the more thoughtful and interesting replies from others that I have so far ignored.

[Scylla]

Nice coding job.

I’ll have to catch the other replies tonight.

[lissener]

*Originally posted by Scylla *
. . . You are failing utterly and completely to do so. My grandfather is a bigot. Through 40-50 years as a cop he has a clear “sense” concerning black people. . . .

This is bullshit. I’m not saying that “Old white men are selfish.” I’m saying, in essence, that people who behave selfishly are selfish; I am defining very carefully those people whom I am specifically discussing. It’s a given that there are exceptions; I simply will not preface every paragraph I write in this forum with “Note: there is an exception to every ‘rule’.”

*Originally posted by Scylla *
. . . You send it was obvious objective truth. That is not saying it’s fact? . . .

I used the phrase “objective truth,” carefully qualified (“The objective truth seems so very obvious to me . . .”)–I made no claim to be speaking objective truth.

*Originally posted by Scylla *
. . . Since you’ve admitted that you are not factual on this, and volunteered the possibility of emotional immaturity, I really see nothing further to be gained by beating you up any more. . . .

Please. If you want to continue this in the spirit, and on the level, with which I initially shared my political opinions, fine; but trust me, I’m not feeling beaten up.

*Originally posted by Scylla *
**. . . I’ll consider the matter closed with you and move onto some of the more thoughtful and interesting replies from others that I have so far ignored. **

I’m sure they’d be honored.

[Scylla]

*Originally posted by The Ryan *
**This looks suspiciously like the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. If you wish to defend conservatism, then I think that you must defend what conservatism is commonly considered to be, not simply what you have decided “true” conservatism is.

Yes, I’ll admit that it does. I think I have to go a little bit in this direction to prevent people from showing me Chinese people and claiming their Scotsmen. I’m trying to avoid false attribution with respect to conservatives.

Naturally, I need to be careful to make sure I don’t commit the fallacy.

Also, the Law of Unintended Consequences, while a valid cautionary principle, seems to be abused as a magical trump card. When all else fails, and one cannot find anything wrong with a proposal, there’s always the charge “but there may be an unintended consequence we don’t know about yet”. Actually, this is not confined to conservatives; liberals have taken up opposition to genetic engineering largely on the basis that there may be dangers we don’t know about, rather than on any definite danger. When one is presented with with real suffering, it is somewhat callous to say “but I don’t want to stick my neck out helping you”.

Of course. Any tool can be abused or misused.

[lissener]

*Originally posted by lissener *
**This is bullshit. I’m not saying that “Old white men are selfish.” I’m saying, in essence, that people who behave selfishly are selfish; I am defining very carefully those people whom I am specifically discussing. It’s a given that there are exceptions; I simply will not preface every paragraph I write in this forum with “Note: there is an exception to every ‘rule’.” **

Sorry; meant to elaborate before submitting.

I am defining a group by a set of choices they have made, and criticizing those choices. This is not bigotry. If I defined a group by their skin color, and then criticized their choices, that would be bigotry.

[Scylla]

*Originally posted by jshore *
**I would argue that conservatives tend to apply this law somewhat selectively. I.e., they don’t generally seem to be nearly so concerned with the unintended consequences of anything having to do with markets, corporate economic power, and the like. It is the consequences of government action…and just certain government action (e.g., not the government actions like the laws allowing corporations to exist in the first place and giving them their legal rights but just those that regulate them). **

This is a good criticism, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with selectivity.

The law of unintended consequences applies specifically to overt interference with society by the governement.

So, letting the market do what the market will do, without interference is respecting unintended consequences.

It’s about exercising freedom. People and entities should be allowed to do what they want to do without unnecessary interference.

[Scylla]

*Originally posted by lissener *
**
I am defining a group by a set of choices they have made, and criticizing those choices. This is not bigotry. If I defined a group by their skin color, and then criticized their choices, that would be bigotry. **

Fine. Demonstrate how all conservatives choose to be dishonest, selfish liars unworthy of respect.

[lissener]

Fine, if you can tell me–YES OR NO ONLY!–if you have stopped beating your wife.

[Scylla]

*Originally posted by lissener *
**Fine, if you can tell me–YES OR NO ONLY!–if you have stopped beating your wife. **

NO.

[John_Mace]

This does belong in the Pit.

[John_Mace]

Gorsnak wrote:
Slavery is, or was, a traditional institution with a past stretching back before recorded history. Suggesting that it was an invention of government is an extremely odd statement, though certainly the US and state governments in its first 100 years of existence had done things to shape how the institution existed in that particular historical milieu. Denying women a voice in politics is also an extremely ancient tradtion.

Firstly, I did not say that the US government invented slavery. But surely you know that the founding fathers vigorously debated the concept and intentionally chose to encode it in law rather than to abolish the institution. You seem to imply that it was some sort of social convention that existed apart from the law at the time. Maybe true at one time in the distant past, but definitely not true in the late 18th century. I stand by my original statement. In fact, the type of slavery we are talking about in the early period of the US is impossible w/o the sanction of the state.

[smiling_bandit]

I don’t think Scylla could possibly respond to all those posts. That said, i can see that some people obviously do have an irrational hatred of Conservativism without actually understanding it. Oh well. Let them hate us so long as they fear us.

[jshore]

*Originally posted by Scylla *
The law of unintended consequences applies specifically to overt interference with society by the governement.

So, letting the market do what the market will do, without interference is respecting unintended consequences.

It’s about exercising freedom. People and entities should be allowed to do what they want to do without unnecessary interference.

Scylla, yeah, but this sort of view presupposes that our current capitalistic market system with the rules on corporate law, patent law, etc. set up the way they are is some sort of “natural” state of least interference in human interactions. I simply don’t buy that hypothesis. At the very least, it is something that needs to be demonstrated.

I think your whole argument is somewhat tautological…You basically seem to define “unnecessary interference” as that interference that you deem to be unnecessary. So, for example, apparently setting laws allowing corporations to exist or to put in strict private property rights (rather than having a system with more communal property rights) is considered non-interference (or necessary interference?).
As for calling lissener a bigot. You may not like his views about conservatives but I tend to reserve the use of the term “bigotry” and comparisons to the cases of race and sexual orientation as applying to fundamental things about yourself, not about your political beliefs. It seems to me that it cheapens the use of the term if you define someone as bigotted because of the way they view people with certain political beliefs. I’m not saying that viewing people with certain political beliefs in a certain way is not simplistic, overgeneralized or whatever…but I just don’t see it as bigotry. At the very least, it is fundamentally different than the sort of bigotry that applies to things like race and sexual orientation and I think it does little justice to your cause to conflate the two.

[lissener]

You know what, Scylla? Take this to the Pit, or drop it. Your disingenuously hiding behind the GD snow fort while you lob snowballs is childish and pathetic.

I just reread my original post, and I have nothing to backpedal or defend. I very carefully framed it in terms of my opinion and my conclusions and my understanding, and in terms of someone’s behavior and choices:

Hmm. Not that I can think of; it’s hard for me to like someone I don’t respect, and it’s hard for me to respect someone who’s fundamentally selfish and dishonest. In my opinion it’s impossible to hold a conservative position without first mastering the art of lying to oneself. And it’s impossible to be a public conservative (e.g. a pundit)–which involves lying to others–without being fundamentally disrespectful of your audience.

I expect to get splattered for this, but it’s not my intention to rankle; the above is my honest opinion.

We’re done here.

[Scylla]

This is a really nice brilliant piece about conservative thought:

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/932815/posts