so im considering the purpose of conserving ideas. i mean as humans progress i can understand the value of keeping some of the old ideas a society has but to keep all of them seems ridiculous.
i think its fair to say that no one believes the world is perfect right? so why be a conservative if for no other reason than to continue to keep the world the way it is?
its funny because conservatives are often against the scientific community and i realized, that is an example of attempting to deny human beings of factual information. yet i blame the liberals for being so socially acceptable as to exclude the importance of discrimination against half truths and false beliefs altogether which i do believe will become this younger generations old conservative belief. the idea that we shouldnt discriminate at all. a fluxuation towards a traditionally conservative belief… anyway.
i suppose my question is this…
how do we stop the swinging of the pendulum and go straight for the goal?
Conservatism means two different things, which sometimes support each other and sometimes conflict.
On the one hand, to be conservative is to resist and question change, and to champion tradition.
On the other hand, to be conservative is to uphold the privileges of the powerful, and resist egalitarian and leveling influences.
Very often, these two go together, since inequities and privilege are built into existing social structures, and so those privileges can be defended in the course of resisting change. But sometimes they conflict. For example, conservatives (in the second sense) have been pushing changes to economic foreign policy since the 1980s, in the form of “free trade” agreements with foreign tyrannies that encourage the exportation of American capital to those countries. This allows goods to be made with dirt-cheap exploited foreign labor, and simultaneously depresses real wages in the U.S., increasing income and wealth gaps and so enhancing privilege. But it also took the form of a push for change, ostensibly in service to an ideal of freedom. (Pointing up once again that one must always be prepared to ask: Whose freedom, to do what?)
No conservative (in the first sense) would have been in favor of these moves, but conservatives (in the second sense) were.
We’re beginning to see another crack in the two types of conservatism, as the religious right starts to broaden its political approach beyond the issues of abortion and gay rights, and takes a look at environmentalism and wealth gaps in a context of Jesus’ teachings. These are conservatives in the first sense – defenders of tradition – but much of what their tradition requires conflicts with conservatism in the second sense.
Given the uncertain meaning of the word, confusion of this nature is unavoidable.
a crimeless society with enough resources to satisfy everyone would be a start. those arent exactly impossible. but the damn totalitarianship it would take to get everyone to cooperate would be crazy!
I don’t think it’s possible to eradicate all crime so long as humans exist. Not all crime stems from lack, but I suppose most of it stems from desire. Even if everyone has enough, some will want more. And there’ll always be crimes of passion- men and women will still cheat on one anther, and there’ll always be jealousy. Jilted lovers will still murder, bigots will still attack the objects of their hatred, etc. And unless we make some radical breakthoughs in genetic engineering or psychology there’ll always be a certain percentage of people born sociopathic, with no ability for compassion or remorse.
yea… agreed. and whats stopping us from discovering these breakthroughs or at least in my opinion slowing the process is the continuous flux of social instability.
face it. if you want your socialist totalitarian utopia, you have to kill a bunch of conservatives and steal their wealth. thing is, they’ll fight back and the army they will fund is more powerful than anything some rag tag bunch of revolutionaries will ever imagine.
What is wrong with you? Were your parents killed by liberals when you were a kid? Did liberals burn down your house, shoot your grandma, and rape your dog yelling “YEAH JOHN KERRY!!”? This isn’t even an opinion anymore, it’s purely a psychological problem to be so far to the right of the political spectrum that Hitler is scared of you.
look at the point I have made. it was not personal. it was factual. the strong make the rules. period. and I am not right wing at all. if anything I am a pure libertarian who understands that nature abhors a vaccuum and a pure anarchy would devolve into a dictatorship of the strong in a matter of hours. anyone who thinks about it more deeply than the surface platitudes of everyone gets everything and everyone is happy and everyone’s suffering is over and life is beautiful and happy happy happy, and understands what faces humanity after the “overthrow” that will never be allowed to happen in the first place.
and your not being able to deal with these simple facts of life and having to resort to calling me names says far more about the emptiness of the position you champion.
Modern conservatives fit one or both of the definitions I supplied. There’s no call to introduce the kind of verbal nihilism that you did in your post first quoted above.
where do you get your facts from? have you ever run an experiment that took “liberals” out of society and measured the progress the people in the group made? no… we could do this. i wouldnt object to it in a small scaled version to see whos right and whos wrong. that wouldnt bother me. what bothers me is the idea that people are completely turned off by the idea of actually figuring it out. as if like youre saying it would turn out to be total anarchy and complete chaos.
feeding people isnt a hard thing to do. i dont think theres a doubt in anyones mind that people want food. yet we dont do it?
i think your view is extremely closed minded and dogmatic. its almost a waste especially because youve predicted the future using nothing but assumptions.
