This is silly. Report me, if you must. I was characterizing this issue as one that conservatives at their most cliched wax choleric (is that an okay image?) over, and I think I was characterizing them fairly and accurately. Next you’ll be telling me that conservatives don’t care a fig about taxes, or the welfare cheats who cause them to skyrocket, and would never express their feelings anyway in a tone that wasn’t calm and soothing.
Not at all, nor I have I disagreed that the issue is one of importance to conservatives, as you’ll note. I’m merely pointing out that you managed to miss out the potentially insulting part of your post when rephrasing it. You were characterising it in an insulting fashion, and it is to that that I was trying to draw your attention. Seemingly unsuccessfully, it appears.
And it’s perfectly within the rules to be insulting towards a large population. It’s just singling out Dopers you can’t do.
prr, while I agree with most of what you’re saying, I think the thread is in grave danger of simply getting hijacked out of the territory where it started.
I don’t know of any Liberals who would expect government assistance for anyone who is not willing to accept responsibility for himself or herself. There are times when a person cannot accept responsibility: the comatose, the severely retarded, etc. But Liberals aren’t saying, “Let’s give him a free ride; he was an economically disadvantaged child and doesn’t know how to work.”
But I think that Conservatives and Liberals can agree that welfare programs should be supervised more closely.
Are you sure that’s what’s happening. Harvard admitted no women when I was in college. Since then they have discovered that more women actually qualify for admission (about sixty percent). In order to keep a gender balance, they have begun affirmative action for males. (This is from a Sixty Minutes report from about four years ago and there may be some differences now.)
You don’t have to be Conservative to say Merry Christmas. Don’t you remember the Merry Christmas Liberalization Laws of 1994?
One thing has changed in my mind. I used to carry in my mind a stereotype of Liberals as the kind ones and Conservatives as the hard-hearted folks. After all, it was the Conservatives that tried to add the word “Compassionate” to their image.
But the SDMB has lifted a veil for me. The intent of Liberals may be compassion on a grand scale. But on a personal level, I have found the Conservatives to be warm and caring toward me in general. The Liberals have been less so. Yet there are probably few here that are more politically to the left than I.
Other than that, I haven’t moved an inch.
I used to be a left-wing, Nader-voting college freshman. Since then, my views have become much more conservative. Now I’m merely a hardcore liberal.
However:
- I do think that people have the right to own guns, but they should be registered at least as thoroughly as cars
- I think parents need to be responsible for their children and not expect the schools to raise them. Teachers have too much to deal with already without having to discipline kids with no home training (not to mention that they can’t discipline them effectively, thanks to the threat of lawsuits).
- I think the budget should be balanced, however, after 8 years of little to no investment in infrastructure and enormous investment in billionaires, I think we can deficit spend to get the nation back on track before that.
- I don’t have a problem with religious displays on public property as long as it’s a community thing and not just a blatant middle finger to other religions or atheists (hard to state this idea clearly, but Christmas tree downtown is cool, giant crucifix not so much. The 10 Commandments at the county courthouse is out of line).
- Lowering taxes might stimulate the economy by giving people (especially towards the bottom) a little extra spending cash and also help get them out of debt.
Like most posters here, I agree with the principle of some of the conservative talking points, but the motivations behind them and the way that they are implemented I find two-faced and reprehensible.
For me, the difference here isn’t kinds of religious displays but whether a Christmas tree is a religious display at all. I understand those who think it is, but I’m an atheist with a Christmas tree. It has zero religious meaning for me.
Not in so many words, but the whole concept of wealth redistribution has that attitude at its core - that the poor should be given things they didn’t earn, which should be taken from the people who did earn it, because in the government’s opinion they have more than they need. Barack Obama’s economic plan is to simply cut cheques to poor people and raise taxes on the wealthy to do it. The concept of perpetual welfare has gone out of fashion, but today’s economic turmoil has given the left the rationale to do it all over again, only now wrapping it in the language of ‘stimulus’.
The attitude goes a lot further than that - union rules, heavily affected by left-wing ideology, almost always prevent merit pay increases and make it hard to fire people who won’t do the job properly. They are a microcosm of left-wing politics, in which equality of outcome is sought regardless of disparity in ability or work ethic. Everyone gets paid the same, differing only in seniority and not ability.
Getting back to the OP, I started out as a very hard-core libertarian. Everything goes. But when you’re young, it’s hard to see just how rapidly society can change when the rules break down. So I’ve become somewhat more socially conservative over time. Not in the religious-right sense, but I have new appreciation for how cultural norms and shared cultural experiences bind a civil society together. Change isn’t always a good thing. I’ve also learned more about emergent and spontaneous order, and I think that liberal and libertarian ideas for tearing down many social conventions are as dangerous as trying to manipulate an ecosystem from the top down. There are unintended consequences. So that’s made me somewhat more sympathetic to those whose preference is for social stability and resistance to change.
I support law enforcement more than most other liberals. Also, although I don’t strongly support the pro-life platform, I respect the position and understand how a person could arrive at it.
You’re getting into Great Debates territory. I’d like to discuss what the “core” of wealth redistribution ideology is with you if you’d like to re-submit that post in the proper forum.
You’re asking me to defend a position I don’t believe in- but given that the national debt has been spiralling upwards more or less constantly (other than the Clinton balanced-budget blip) for forty years, it would seem that the vast majority of the populace thinks it’s a good idea.
Well, I’m a conservative now, but thinking back to the old days when I was a serious lefty, I remember thinking that laissez faire was much better than centralized planning for allocation of resources. I actually remember saying to a friend, back in my college days, that if I wanted to open a store somewhere that I should be allowed to do it- assuming I’ve saved up or borrowed the money - and if it’s a dumb idea, we’ll know soon enough, and I won’t be allocating a whole lot of resources for a long time.
I also did some volunteer work and internships at government agencies and was amazed at the inefficiencies, and I figured there had to be a better way. That led to me being a libertarian, and so on.
Gun control.
I’m a devout bleeding-heart Liberal, teetering on the brink of Whacko-left-wing-nut, who is royally pissed off that the government has the gall to try to stick its nose into my gun safe.
I guess, in my view, it boils down to Little Suzy and Little Johnny wouldn’t be shooting up their 'hood if they had regular meals, decent health care and something resembling hope for their future.
Or maybe they would, but if they weren’t all shaky from hunger, they’d be better at aiming.
Oh, I almost forgot. What’s the opposite of affirmative action? Merit based admissions? Zero tolerance for quotas? Whatever. Anyway, at the height of my liberalness, I had a prof who was at least a Communist, maybe even further left, and one day he railed against affirmative action. He was all for giving poor kids a break, but said that putting people in college when they weren’t prepared was just plain dumb. He said he was just giving out a lot of Fs and that was that. I guess that had a big influence on me. So when I was a liberal I was against affirmative action.
Race-based preferential college admission is only one area of affirmative action, and not a particularly effective one; too many people in the US go to college already, learning things they don’t understand to perform jobs they won’t have, when they should be going to vocational higher education- what they used to call “trade schools”.
I’m not sure if that’s what my prof would have said. Maybe he’d agree. I think his drift was more that the state should just educate the babies of morons right from the beginning so all of us could go to college and get As and go to medical school and do great research and win the Nobel Prize in at least three different areas. I think he was a bit too much of an idealist to settle for trade school for anyone.
But I’m fine with your idea.
It probably won’t go anywhere. A lack of formal education carries a stigma, and higher education confers a little bonus to one’s social standing. As long as that’s the case, equal opportunity for all to go to college isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that it waters down the ranks of the college-educated, and waters down further the ranks of the skilled trades, which is (a small) part of the reason so many American manufacturing jobs are heading overseas, among other things.
It’s also part of the reason why so many of us have college degrees that are utterly unrelated to our jobs.
The problem is even worse these days because many vocational programs have turned into college degrees. Instead of an apprenticeship to become, say, a potter*, you go and get a BA in pottery.
*or whatever. Maybe potters actually need a college education.
It’s hard for me to say, because I used to consider myself conservative before repudiating a number of those positions (in part or in whole). Why would I go back and embrace ideas that I’ve actively decided to stop believing in?
I suppose that I have never strayed too far from the idea of fiscal responsibility (though ironically that seems to have fallen out of favor among conservatives nowadays). Likewise I hold to the the idea that the Great Society was bound to fail from the start and that overreaching schemes to correct inequality are doomed to failure. That doesn’t mean we can’t try to do better, but we can’t fix history by fiat. Though I believe in some regulation of guns, I am much more OK with them than your average liberal or moderate. When it comes to crime and punishment, I believe rehabilitation is only an option for petty crime and youth offenders. For the violent and destructive stuff, lock 'em up and throw away the key, I don’t care how many prisons we have to build. Go ahead and institute youth programs to try and catch these kids before they are lost to lives of crime and prison, but do not suffer adult violent criminals to walk my streets.
We had a university in our city that had a very low admission standard during the 1970s. The President of the university said that we needed “colleges for the academically handicapped.” I disagreed with him then and now. Was I taking a conservative position? I haven’t seen it as being either liberal or conservative – just reasonable.
I liked what G. Gordon Liddy had to say on the subject of federal agents.
So you support murdering them ? Charming.