:smack:
King Edward III the Confessor was not the same man as King Edward III of Windsor.
Lipton Tea is not the same company as Lipton Law.
Broadway in San Francisco is not the same street as New York’s Broadway.
The American Football League is not the same as the American League of Major League Baseball.
I’ll assume you don’t need a cite for any of these.
The Republican Party of the 19th century is not the same party as the Republican Party of the 21st century.
Did you really not know this? Or, did you think that by pretending to be ignorant you could fool someone?
I’m aware that extended families were extremely important for a long time, and that children even born to a married mom-and-dad can have a rough time of it if one or both of the parents is a piece of dirt. But the vast norm was always a married mom & dad having the kids. What we’ve seen over the last few decades is an explosion of illegitimate births across the industrialized world. And there is a cost associated with this. We can have taxpayer-funded poverty programs to help these kids. I’m fine with that. But in almost all countries, increased illegitimacy is associated with more poverty, regardless of how much money we throw at it. It’s a problem.
This costs is not some inevitability inherent in the idea of illegitimacy. Illegitimacy itself is a manufactured notion that has no natural connection to costs or successes. It has to do with a society that first conceives of illegitimacy as an idea and second structures itself to make illegitimacy a disadvantage.
We are all of a species that individually come into existence when two matched members fuck. That’s it. illegitimacy or legitimacy is a fiction that impoverishes each of us individually as collectively as a people. It’s a nothing that we have chosen to punish ourselves with.
Note that for the privileged can have serial marriages, nominally making all issue “legitimate,” but essentially being no morally different in character than the poor whose behavior is essentially identical.
“Taxpayer-funded poverty programs” is a nothing when addressing fundamental societal problems. Our society should be built so that illegitimacy as a concept is a null.
This is a relic of a diseased system, not some fundamental truth.
Not to mention that illegitimacy as it is measured among the non-wealthy is an effect, a consequence, of social and economic policy, not an independent factor.
While you can just quote statistics that have no root in cause or effect. You find blame for the manufactured concept of illegitimacy because you want to stain others with the guilt of a crime. So then you can distract us from policies that actually have some basis in human concern.
That’s complete bullshit. This is a thread on social progress, and this is one area which has gotten worse in the US. You can dodge and duck the reality all you want. I care more about the situation these children are in than you.
No, really, conservatism is all about allowing the privileged to maintain their privilege while behaving exactly as everyone else does. They fuck whom they want, they cheat, rape, steal. And nothing touches them, because they benefit from conceptual fictions like “legitimacy” that protect their ability to hoard resources.
But anyone else, they behave just as the people at the top, no better and no worse, but their small trespasses are not forgiven, not to mention the large. A ticket for walking in the wrong place from the Ferguson, Missouri, police can send them into a spiral of ruin. Illegitimacy becomes a mark of doom, though it is nothing but the absence of a piece of paper and the lack of money to obtain divorces.
Yeah, and you can cover your eyes with bullshit-colored glasses in the form of concepts like illegitimacy to avoid doing anything real to eliminate privilege and injustice.
Granted, but they were all based around the core concept of the family of the man (the provider), the woman (the nurturer), and the children (the next generation). Yes, others could substitute for those roles but the roles remained.
The OP didn’t mention Democrats or Republicans. Were those Democrats you’re thinking of conservative or liberal? When the Dixiecrats become Republican, did they instantly switch from liberal to conservative? But, wait, Republicans are liberal because they freed the slaves – are they still liberal? It’s a mystery.
To the OP, I’m not a conservative, so I don’t feel qualified to really answer the question. My impression is that, historically, conservatives wanted to slow down social progress, but not necessarily move it backwards – they wanted slow, conservative progress. My impression of conservatives today is that they want to take America back to when it was “great” in their mind, maybe the 1950s? That’s not really conservative, it’s reactionary. For example, you can see this in the Southern Baptists where they (recently?) stated that women should be subservient to men (maybe they’ve changed that by now, I don’t know) – that’s not conservative, it’s reactionary. Also, the various White Supremacist groups who call themselves “conservative” are really reactionary.
No. For a couple of examples, I hope that in the coming years / decades the rights of the unborn will see greater protection in our laws, and government-sponsored discrimination against Asians will end.
RitterSport, I find this to be an extremely insightful and enlightening post. Thank you.
To tell the truth, I’m not sure I even know what a conservative is in our present-day American context since the term has meant vastly different things in different times and places.
Libertarian here, not conservative, but I have some conservative views and I read conservative sources so I actually understand how conservatives think better than most people who are posting in this thread.
Asking about “progress” is pointless. As Chesterton said, “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” In case anyone doesn’t understand the point, that means: it’s only meaningful to measure progress as the movement towards some goal. Without agreement on what the goal is, any statement about “progress” is meaningless. The people who babble constantly about the need for “progress” never tell us what goal they’re progressing towards.
For libertarians the goal is always freedom. In some areas, America now provides more freedom than in earlier generations. Yay! In other areas, America now provides less freedom than in earlier generations. Boo!
Let’s say you’re a man who wants to smoke marijuana and have sex with other men. In 1900 the marijuana was legal and the sex with other men was illegal. In 2018 the sex with other men is legal and the marijuana is illegal (in most places). Increase in freedom? Decrease in freedom? Depends on your priorities.
So-called progressives are able to have massive blind spots about the cases where freedom has gone downhill. The most obvious one is what we call “mass incarceration”, i.e. the fact that on any given day, millions of Americans are in prison, and millions more are in jail, or awaiting trial, or on probation, or otherwise getting cycled through the law enforcement system. This is because of legislation that progressives, in most cases, have supported. In the 1950’s, when America was great, slides rules were all the rage, and Leave it to Beaver was cutting-edge entertainment, imprisonment rates were much lower. But then again, though few people remember it much today, in the 50’s we had a vast mental health system consisting of enormous asylums and mental health hospitals. It was a very progressive system, run and staffed by scientific people bringing a forward-looking approach to mental health care. And it involved millions of people being kidnapped and imprisoned against their will and subjected to horrifying tortures such as electroshock, but that’s scarcely worth mentioning.
Why is Robert Byrd always trotted out in these type of discussions :rolleyes:? The reason that his party “kept him in office till he died of old age” was that he personally progressed in his views as the times changed. When he died he was praised by the NAACP and attacked by those who refused to follow him in making progress in their own personal views. Here is an article that will explain his story.
What I find sad is that there are so few examples of people like him in recent history. Instead of repenting and trying to atone for their regressive views the way Byrd did, most of his contemporaries just switched parties and continued being racist (Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, David Duke, and so on).
