Bridgeburner wrote:Considering that social conservatism is essentially a rearguard action, a constant series of defensive manoeuvres constantly reacting to change, devoid of initiative, which of the lesser evils would you, as a social conservative, from your perspective, want to bequeath the legacy of your nation to
You are assuming a lot here. For example, yesterdays liberals would have hung homosexuals by their necks. Not even conservatives do that these days, but that's because there isn't any economic incentive to do so. By your logic, todays conservatives are yesterdays radical liberals too. However, if we end up with a famine or plague, I imagine the non-producers would get killed off rather quickly.
Conservatism as
stare decisis is really just saying that tradition holds for reasons you may not understand, so undermining traditional proscriptions requires a good reason. Today's left doesn't require reason. In a debate on something like homosexual marriage, a common liberal argument goes something like this, "There is no reason that homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to get married." Of course there is a reason, though. Marriage means heterosexual procreation, quite literally. Then, you get orthogonal arguments like, "Marriage is about love." Of course, it's not about love. It's about property rights, inheritance, and titles in the context of procreation. Hence, a person called an "illegitimate child" quite literally meant that they were not legitimately entitled to inheritance.
The left isn't just about breaking down traditional structures in a legal sense, but they are actually no longer too interested in making any rational sense. American conservatism isn't a rejection of the scientific method at all. In fact, it has very much been interested in material advancement through science. It just hasn't been about emotionalism.
Bridgeburner wrote:In your eyes, what is the force that you would rather see triumphant in Western society out of these two
a)political Islam
or b)the "special interest group" (for lack of a better word) Left (preoccupied with being the vanguard for the LGBT community and radical feminism amongst other "isms").
Honestly, since neither of them are particularly interested in reason, I don't see a substantive difference. I see stylistic difference. They are both hyper-religious, but they have very different religions. They are both extremely intolerant of people who don't accept their worldview. I think the primary difference is that Islam will procreate, whereas homosexuals generally won't.
So our rearguard actions today aren't because we simply don't like homosexuals, but rather because we do not have confidence our society will survive.
OllyTheBrit wrote:It happens; as liberals get older they get wiser (well not always!), and adjust their rationalising accordingly. The younger someone is, the more liberal they are. For example, students are always liberal-minded.
That's only because the communist party infiltrated Western schools to propagandize the students, with an emphasis on their natural inclination to assert their ability to govern their own lives without parents. That assertiveness is a natural matter, it isn't that kids in the 1500s thought that homosexuality and cocaine were wonderful pursuits. Kids in the 1500s would have differed considerably in their outlook from kids of today, because there was no state educational apparatus to propagandize them. Instead, they would have had a more clerical or religious outlook on life.
Bridgeburner wrote:Not exactly what I meant, I meant that what is considered today as "progressive" will be conservative by tomorrows standards.
This is a very whiggish view of things. The West hasn't seen its collapse yet. The Greeks fell. The Romans fell. The French and British empires collapsed, but technology marched on.
What's changing considerably is that liberals today are neither rational nor interested in rationalism, and this is something they have in common with Islamists. Liberals today are principally hedonists governed by a "pleasure principle," that operatively seeks a dopamine release, and if possible a thrill from norepinephrine and epinephrine. By contrast, Islamists are principally pre-enlightenment non-rational religious people using extreme violence to maintain group cohesion.
Bridgeburner wrote:So if political Islam is triumphant in this generation, it will be the status quo being "conserved" from tomorrows progressive assault.
I think the issue is somewhat different. Jews were part of the larger racist faction of the West when the West was building its empires. Many Jews were interested in Eugenics, and still are as far as it benefits Jews. The Jews primarily turned against racism by Western Europeans, principally because Western Europeans, primarily in Germany, decided that eradicating Jews from Europe was in their best interest. In the post war environment, opposition to "racism," "sexism," discrimination against "nation of origin," became part of the Western Canon. That is the progressive onslaught that has allowed political Islam to gain a toehold in Europe again. It is ironically, also a significant factor in the return of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Bridgeburner wrote:Liberalism is constantly changing, as a result conservative and progressive (liberal) are relative terms to their time period. Todays conservative would have been a progressive from yesteryear.
This is a lot of modern leftist dialog though. The Royal Society wasn't founded by a democracy like that of today. It was founded by a monarchy with a parliament consisting of Lords and propertied men. They were very much interested in science, even though they were not "democrats" or "egalitarian." So the idea that in Massachusetts you would get hung for sodomy, but in liberal Virginia you'd get 20 years is mildly amusing. However, it does little to address what you might characterize as progress. For example, some like to call Abraham Lincoln "the Great Emancipator," but he also had his hand in the genocide of the Sioux people. The truth is that he was a lawyer for the railroads, and the railroad tycoons were empire builders. So the balmy notions that "before the war (US Civil War) we were citizens of the several states, but after the war we were Americans" is basically just a bunch of bullshit propaganda so that you don't examine who Lincoln was, what he did, and who made crap tons of money from the outcome of the war.
It is the same sort of thing with the "Sexual Revolution." These people will not tell you how many people became pregnant and ended up killing off their unborn children, how many homosexuals engaged in sodomy and contracted diseases that proved fatal (tens of millions), how many family units broke up to be headed by a woman with a lower income, and that a man supporting himself under one roof and an ex-wife and children under another roof cannot realistically make ends meet, so the children will suffer developmentally. Why? Because if you actually used your capacity to reason, you wouldn't look at Hitler's concentration camps with as much horror as you would with the number of dead homosexuals, dead fetuses, and bastard children that has become the hallmark of the West. Today's progressives are not progressive. They are mindless barbarians. They want to live like animals. They eschew the major difference between man and all other animals--a massive frontal cortex with an amazing capacity for reason. Hell, they will assert with a straight face that men and women are equal--completely ignoring biological differences that even animals without a capacity for advanced reasoning and abstract thought can recognize with relatively primitive brains.
Paul Sanderson wrote:I don’t know if I’d say social conservatives are generally adverse to social change, I’d probably go for the expression “adverse to rapid social change” because they know full well they can’t survive without accepting, even encouraging changes. But, traditionally (notably in the US and Britain) the conservative groups have been the impetus behind massive economic changes which they must have known would have had a deep effect on society.
However, the conservatives aren't necessarily behind all the social changes. How many conservative men would really argue that sex outside of wedlock, unwed pregnancy, abortion, sodomy, single parent families and a general embrace of hedonism is a good thing? That all comes from the barbarous nature of the political left.
Paul Sanderson wrote:I’d opt for political Islam because political Islam is a symptom of liberalism.
A brilliant point.
Paul Sanderson wrote:What I’m saying is, political Islam is on the cards with both those systems so aside from the general breakdown of cohesion and justice that results from liberalism, their seeming willingness to accept hardline Islamists into the country with gifts of money and education (as we’ve seen in Denmark) is going to eventually get them overrun by them anyway. Though it has to be said, the contradiction that liberals show in defending (even promoting) Islam while raging in the streets about the Pope or some pitiful little right wing anti-Islamist movement that amounts to nothing, is a sign of their weakness. They would therefore be easier to remove, but I don’t know what conditions you’ve set on this hypothetical situation here.
That's the interesting aspect of the left, which ultimately shows that their primary interest is lining their own pockets with no apparent understanding of institutions--except when the people doing this are identified and singled out by an angry mob for extermination.
I mean, last night the president of the United States said this:
Barack Obama wrote:Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law? Or are we a nation that gives them a chance to make amends, take responsibility, and give their kids a better future?
Our modern system of slavery is peculiar in that if you do not support the exploitation of Hispanic labor, you get called a "racist." It's pretty amazing.
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