Just asking, when do you see a conservative take any responsibility for things going wrong? They always blame liberals in one fron or another. Hell, the current financial crisis is blamed on Obama by conservatives and he is not even in office yet.
It’s personal responsibility, not corporate or institutional or political responsibility. See above comment re: cynical and false.
This. And beyond that, even: I think the founding fathers really and truly intended that the citizens of the country should be armed, if necessary, against abuses wrought by their own government. To pick up arms and once again say “When, in the course of human events…”, if need be.
This, in particular.
Related to that and linked to it: as many folks on this board are aware, I am opposed to forced psychiatric treatment &/or incarceration. Involuntary psychiatric treatment is supported & excused by the notion that there is a “you” separate and distinct from “your mind”, such that you should be protected from unfortunate things you might do due to you being too ill to understand things. It is the flip side of “this person is not responsible for what they did, their behavior is caused by ExternalFactor X”. Now, while on the one hand I think our culture’s attitudes towards punishment are still draconian (albeit nowhere near as much so as they once were), a consistent legal system and a consistent structure of rights and responsibilities is, to many conservatives’ way of thinking, the hallmark of a stable society. I could not agree more. A person’s behavior is illegal or it is NOT. A person is subject to arrest for what they DID not what you think the MIGHT DO. Locking someone up and not letting them leave is an act of INCARCERATION. Citizens are responsible for what they DO.
If our legal system is inappropriately harsh, unforgiving, or inflexible in how it treats all its citizens, or a given law makes some perfectly reasonable behavior an arrestible crime when that behavior is actually harmless or excusable under some circumstances, fix the law, but don’t carve loopholes in it based on “some people are not responsible for what they do”. I think that’s a spectacularly bad precedent.
And I will add one about ‘political correctness’. I mean this term in the specific sense of some person or some organization taking an attitude towards a superficial issue — usually one that in some rather specific & limited political discussion of prior years came to take on larger symbolic meaning for the people involved — that condemns a superficial behavior in the most absolute and unforgiving fashion. That probably reads like mud. I’ll provide examples:
• The Water Buffalo incident.
• Use of the word “girls” to refer to any female over 21 / over 18 / beyond puberty / at all.
• Growing or cutting one’s hair to a length more typical of the other gender.
I added the third just to have one in the list where the intolerant ones have been the conservative folk, but I’m afraid I have to agree that it’s far more often the liberals; that it comes with an unspoken dialog something akin to “All the important people in the world already had all the discussion that shall ever be needed on whether using that term / wearing that shape / singing that song is or is not offensive, it is not up for discussion, and you had to have known it was wrong, but you went and did it anyway therefore we, the thought police, are busting your ass for your inappropriate thoughts that your superficial behavior revealed”
Annoys the hell out of me. Actual racist sentiment? Intolerable. Sexist sentiment? Intolerable. But treating the superficial symbol as if it invariably signifies some intolerable sentiment is mind-blowingly stupid. It’s like expelling a nursery school kid for drawing five pointed stars on the grounds that five pointed stars represent witchcraft and satanism.
Um, I´m quite alright with the Death Penalty.
Gee…what else?
Reagan tax cuts were kinda cool, but they kinda just added more debt…
I agree with several people that the most appealing aspects of the right are
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Fiscal responsibility.
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Not all problems have a government solution
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Personal responsibility. If you do something stupid, it’s your fault, it’s not my fault for not stopping you. And since you made the mistake, you fix it.
Don’t spend more than you have.
You are ultimately responsible for what happens on your watch, even if you didn’t personally do or not do it (i.e., "The Buck Stops Here). I’ve been very dismayed over the past 8 years at how frequently people have given Bush a pass for what people under him are doing.
I’m fine with rifle/shotgun ownership (still not convinced on handguns).
I’m strongly in favor of nuclear power
Nothing. Whatever “conservative” ideas I agree with, I agreed with from the outset. I actually started out more conservative when I was younger and became more liberal.
This describes me too. I tried to think of a single issue where I’ve been persuaded by conservative agruments and there aren’t any.
Well, off the top of my head, Greenspan just came out and said he f***ed up. He’s a pretty conservative guy. Now, if you’re looking for conservative politicians who say they are wrong. Well, try finding A politician who will admit their world view or pet-policy could be wrong or flawed. Really, as I think about it, the same question can be asked for anyone who is firmly grounded into a certain ideology.
Anybody who blames the current crisis on Obama himself (not his ideology) is an idiot. Period. This is coming from a free market guy-open society kinda guy here (in fact I probably shouldn’t be posting in this thread…Peace!)
Oh, quick question. What are considered “conservative arguments?” E.g. I would consider marijuana legalization a conservative argument.
Add me to the list of people who have become more liberal with age. In particular, I really don’t understand people (lib or con) who are dogmatically set on one economic position or another. Mostly this applies to conservatives - I’ve never met anyone who thought we should tax and spend for the sake of taxing and spending, but plenty who are “fiscally conservative” either for the sake of being fiscally conservative, or for the sake of “fuck you, got mine”.
Me, too.
I have adopted the following conservative positions on political issues, all quite different from what I believed when I was a left-wing, Nader-voting college freshman.
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Affirmative action should be eliminated. So should Title IX and anything else of that nature. The state does not have any interest in promoting diversity for its own sake.
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States and cities should be allowed to make their own pornography laws, without interference by the federal government or the courts.
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The government should be allowed to use decency as a criteria, when deciding to fund or defund projects (such as the NEA).
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Religious displays and public property should be allowed.
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Public schools should be allowed to offer voluntary religious instruction.
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School vouchers should be available for all parents, giving them the chance to send their children to private school.
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Private businesses should be allowed to make their own decisions about smoking by customers.
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Welfare is a bad idea.
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Communism is a bad idea.
And I have adopted the following conservative personal beliefs, also quite different from what I believed when I was a left-wing, Nader-voting college freshman. -
Profanity is not a bold means of challenging authority. It is, rather, a lazy and useless kind of speech.
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More generally, pop culture that bills itself as gleefully offensive is not good, and is not part of a long and glorious tradition. Rather, it contributes to making society more coarse, vulgar, and stupid.
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In the same vein, our approach to speech, behavior, dress, and appearance is tied together with our morality. Lower standards in the little things inevitably lead to lower standards in the big things.
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Complete sexual anarchy just won’t work. Social rules regarding who we sleep with, when, where, and why, are a necessary part of a functioning society.
I’m a liberal and I supported Obama, but his talk of rewriting NAFTA made me cringe. I believe free trade is necessary to improve lives all over the world. (Although I am not a fan of the way the WTO operates a lot of the time, and there needs to be more social support for people who lose their jobs as a result.)
That’s also me. The conservatives aren’t likely to deliberately * convince me of anything, both because I disagree strongly with the majority of their worldview, and because of their habit of hypocrisy when it comes to any semi-decent idea they mention. Like fiscal responsibility; it’s both obvious ( so I don’t need to be convinced of it ), and as practiced by the conservatives it translates to “spend money like water, blame the resulting debt on the Left and demand cuts on social spending while handing more money to the rich”.
- About the only way they convince me of anything is by being bad examples. The more I pay attention to the Right, the more I tend to drift to the Left.
I thought about this in terms of taxes, but never really considered the fact that that might mean it was a conservative argument. Interesting!
I guess that means that legalization would be a (fiscal) conservative argument, and decriminalization a liberal one?
I have always been pro-(licenced)gun ownership, so it isn’t that. Oooh, I know…
Conversations on the 'dope have led to to accept that, while I remain an abortion-anytime advocate, a 2nd-trimester cutoff is a compromise I can live with.
I’d be a lot more convinced by that argument if armed private citizens ever showed up en masse to say, prevent the government from arbitrarily disolving a whole bunch of peoples’ marriages.
I’m a little baffled that people would have to “come around” to ideas like respecting the second amendment and practicing fiscal conservatism. Good ideas are good ideas, it doesn’t matter which team’s playbook they came from. The problem with many “conservative” agendas isn’t the fundamental ideas, it’s the application and the methods.
We’re getting a little far afield from the practical (as opposed to philosophical) connotations of the OP, I think. There are many practical positions espoused by “conservative” people (by which I mean registered Republicans, rich people, right-wingers generally–the typical, every day garden variety meaning of the term) that are downright liberal, even radically so, in the strict philosophical sense of the word. “Drill, baby, drill” and fuck-the-environment generally is an extremely liberal position, in that it plainly takes risks that the more conservative (conservationist) thinkers are unwilling to take, and it presumes that some unknown future turn of events will come along to resolve any long-term problems 'that drilling creates. Typically, focusing on solving current problems at the risk of violating previous norms is a liberal position. (See also: advocating nuclear power as a Liberal position). The philosophically conservative position on these things would be “It’s very risky, let’s study it carefully, and maybe prepare to act on the idea of nukes-for-everyone and drill-baby, drill only when we’re quite sure the benefits outweigh the dangers.” I don’t know that there’s much of a correlation between the current uses of “conservative/liberal” and the philosophical positions of the same name.
I’m really taking about the practical use of the terms. Positions like “prioritizing a reduction in the deficit,” or “substituting work for welfare,” or “allowing handguns to be sold with fewer restrictions” or “allowing prayer in public schools” would be “conservative” by this standard, and “legalizing drugs” or “allowing cats and dogs to marry” would not be. Please supply positions that CONSERVATIVES would acknowledge as conservative ones, and that you’ve come around to accepting. if you want to re-define or argue the true meaning of the terms “liberal” and ‘conservative,’ you can start a thread dedicated to that discussion, or I can, but this ain’t it. Thanks.
Definitely political correctness for me. I remember that annoying time of political correctness when “retarded” went from being a medical term to being unacceptable to all because a bunch of kids started using it to taunt other kids. The PC collective then went through a whole host of new phrases (special, challenged, developmentally disabled, etc, etc, etc).
Enough!
Fuck the PC police and use “retarded” or even “mentally retarded”. Everyone knows what it means and it is probably the clearest word used to describe someone with a mental handicap. Don’t let 10 year olds dictate the phrasing used by the medical community.
Affirmative Action is a joke too, but I always kind of disliked it (to full on hating it after I used a scholarship search engine before I started and came up with zero hits that would apply to being a white middle class male of Italian descent).
Not overspending is simply practical good sense; the Second Amendment is highly arguable. I and others consider it a useless and destructive law; many others consider it good. Those two things don’t really belong in the same category.