closed minded and dogmatic? for illustrating the way humans play the game? we’d have paradise if only we could all just no longer be humans.
as I said, leftist dreams of utopia on earth don’t work with the human animal. if your (or marx’s or lenin’s or whomever’s) arguments could change the human animal, we’d have had this utopia.
Conservatives aren’t an organization, though, they’re a political belief system, defined by those beliefs. An organization, say the Republican Party, that either defends tradition or champions privilege, or both, can be considered conservative; if it ceases to do either of those, then it ceases to be conservative. And in fact, nobody would consider the Republican Party to be conservative under the leadership of either Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt. In those times, the GOP was the nation’s progressive party, and it was the Democratic Party that was conservative.
Conservatism doesn’t stick with the same specific beliefs over time, true. In the 1850s, conservatives defended slavery. In the 1960s, conservatives opposed racial equality and civil rights. In the 1970s, conservatives defended patriarchy and opposed women’s rights. Today’s conservatives, or most of them anyway, hold none of these beliefs. Times change, and the progressive victories of the past become part of the mos majorum and the conservative canon once they are established beyond all chance of rollback. But whatever specific beliefs conservatives hold, they can at all times be characterized as upholding either tradition or privilege, or both.
history has never had a utopian society. how do you find facts on something that never happened?
i agree… if there is no government we have anarchy… thats what those words mean. however i never said we eliminate government. i said we speed progress.
the world doesnt run on money it runs on sex.
closed minded for assuming that you know what would happen despite the huge void of information. youre saying basically that youve figured humans out this is how they work and i dont think any one person ever to live has ever been able to figure that out.
then change the animal. id say first to exhaust all other possibilities first but i dont object to changing humanity. thats the whole idea of progress.
Yet it is so associated historically. Whether the privileges being defended are those belonging to hereditary nobility, to the rich, to men, to white men, or to Christians, always conservatives champion the special status and priviliges of those who hold them, and always liberals attempt to broaden and equalize that status, to turn privileges into rights available to all.
At the same time, there’s another side to conservatism that involves being skeptical of change and upholding tradition. For most conservatives, I would say that this is the main motivator, but for most conservative politicians, I would say defending privilege is the main motivator and the great bulk of conservatives are merely fooled into following along.
Of course! That’s what makes it so interesting, that there are two aspects to conservatism that don’t always agree. The poor very often are conservative, in the “protecting tradition” sense. Most religious right people are poor, or at least lower middle class.
Most conservative politicians, though, are interested in privilege rather than tradition. You might notice that, while Republicans pols are happy to get votes from the religious right, they seem to be in no hurry to enact that agenda. That’s because what they really want is not to embody Christian morality in law, but to make the rich richer. There’s a disjunct between the pols and a lot of the people who vote for them. Both are conservative, but not in the same way.
Not really. To be honest, I’m not sure what your point is.
Liberals aren’t generally telling others how to live, only how to treat each other.
If he didn’t, that’s not his fault. You did refer to sex as a commodity, which implies that it is something to be bought and sold. And I suppose it is sometimes, but not universally. I’ve certainly never either bought or sold it.
If you had your way I think there would be, though.
im not even a liberal. and im not telling people how to live.
then whats the point? and for the record those links are almost comical in the context of the post. i wish my mom sold me and 99 other people off into slavery.
theres definately stagnation in many respects and in many fields.
if history doesnt repeat then what good does “understanding history” have in the present or future?
no, it is still far too much. the priest is shunned by the secularists for telling people what to do when it is they themselves who demand no less than total obedience from everyone.
i agree. i want to know who is right though. thats all.
Consider a possible place beyond modern concepts of left/right, conservative/liberal. Traditionalism presents the possibility of stability. In traditional civilizations all ideas are weighed out in relation to how they support or detract from the traditional whole. An example would be the tolerance but utter worthlessness of Greek and Roman philosophy in Islamic Persia.
Traditionalism holds a solid foundation of principles in which monetary or self-absorbed rewards are moved towards an inferior position (ex: Ancient Germanic kings were known as “The enemies of gold”) and action and creation are seen as the only positive outlets for mankind’s energies and ambitions. This is neither totalitarian nor oppressive as popularily conceived but is that act of person making a commitment to a higher principle beyond politics.
Admittedly the idea of a traditional society terrifies most people, particularily when the stance is adopted to a Judeo-Christian principle today by so called traditional conservatives (neo-cons mostly). This is not what I am referring to, but rather a set stance of cultural principles that stabilize society beyond concerns for individual “lifestyles” and other short lived becomings. I will bring this theory into greater length over time.
Both modern “conservatives” and liberals must be considered liberal in practice, in that they posit bad ideas over healthy ones. Conservatives simply replace what the left says with something else that will satisfy their own interest groups and no one else. There is no direction or purpose behind the stances other than mass fluxuations of useless mass opinion.