What does the American Conservative stand for anymore?

[Lexicus]

You'll note that my objection is that people spread lies about what God said or what God has done.

What evidence do you have that these are lies (note I'm not asking what evidence you have that the statements are false)?

 

[Farm Boy]

I have no problem with the idea of loving God. You'll note that my objection is that people spread lies about what God said or what God has done.

It's precious few times that you get to run into the problem of evil and have as strong a ground to stand on as in the example used here, when love is a higher and later commandment, an explicit replacement.

 

[El_Machinae]

Fair. My objection is that people spread falsehoods about God. This tangent started when I pointed out that the falsehood "God ordered the murder of gay people" has existed for a lot longer than the period of time where we actively fought for the cessation of oppression. It was a social upheaval that had to happen.

That's true Farm Boy, there are precious few times where a social leader has said "We should treat each other lovingly, despite what previous people have said you should do". Precious few. But, I'll still object to the sotto voce from that social leader that said "They were doing what God told them to do".

 

[Lexicus]

It's precious few times that you get to run into the problem of evil and have as strong a ground to stand on as in the example used here, when love is a higher and later commandment, an explicit replacement.

I know this is the standard explanation, but I've always wondered about it. Doesn't Jesus say that Mosaic law has to be followed? Am I somehow misunderstanding that or is there context I'm unaware of? These are serious questions, anyone is welcome to answer them.

 

[Farm Boy]

Of course they claim God, we always do. The devil quotes scripture in order to destroy faith and love, so it is said. Not even Moses was allowed in the promised land, before getting confused in Leviticus again, applying more power than slaves. There's some measure of clarity before being forced by the passage of time to attempt to adapt to existing in the world.

 

[Truthy]

But this is just incoherent. For cities to have emerged over long periods of time to suit people's practical and emotional needs would have required rational analysis of what the needs are and how to fulfill them.

It's like that technique of figuring where to lay bricks for a path through a lawn. You don't guess where people will walk, nor do you declare walking on the grass is off limits. Instead, you sit back and wait for a path of grass to be trampled and then you put your bricks there. That's the "rationality" of the winding, confusing streets of pre-modern cities. Individuals are doing what's rational for them in getting wherever they're going and incrementally they reveal where the bricks should be.

I've never seen the reverse argued.

You don't seem to grok how conservatives think. It's an instance of liberals/progressives being worse at understanding conservatives than vice versa. Jonathan Haidt:

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness. You might even go as far as Michael Feingold, a theater critic for the liberal newspaper the Village Voice, when he wrote:

"Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm"

One of the many ironies in this quotation is that it shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own. Morality binds and blinds.

The idea isn't that rationality is bad, it's that tradition or organic cities or whatever have a rationality or higher purpose of their own. The view stems from a different weighting of moral intuitions.

 

[Naskra]

God had ordered the murder of gay people. The order has been rescinded, apparently

Really? By whom?

 

[Patine]

You don't seem to grok how conservatives think. It's an instance of liberals/progressives being worse at understanding conservatives than vice versa. Jonathan Haidt:

Personally, those with strictly defined and "named" socio-political viewpoints in general, and believe their ideology they derive from them should be applied to all viewpoints, all problems, and all issues (even ones where they obviously will not work and/or have a long history of failure - and let's call a spade a spade in that EVERY SINGLE socio-political movement that has advanced beyond the theoretical level has numerous such botches and disastrous mistakes) strike me as having highly distorted, ruinous, and counter-productive thinking, even to the point of "mental illness." I believe an adaptive, realistic, constructive, and ethically-sound (and by ethically, I mean a common base of ethics where a greater good is accomplished without people being deprived, put in inferior positions, or conversely, blamed and held responsible for their ancestors' wrongdoings) mentality is what's really needed, and to throw aside the destructive and divisive yoke of ideological purity and conformity.

 

[Hrothbern]

You don't seem to grok how conservatives think. It's an instance of liberals/progressives being worse at understanding conservatives than vice versa. Jonathan Haidt:

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness. You might even go as far as Michael Feingold, a theater critic for the liberal newspaper the Village Voice, when he wrote:

"Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm"

One of the many ironies in this quotation is that it shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own. Morality binds and blinds.

Here in NL politics that phenomenon is the reason why leftish liberal-progressives are so very unsuccesful in building governing coalitions (needing at least one more conservative party to get a % majority).
They just don't understand where they can and cannot trust bargaining deals from lack of understanding of the conservative thoughts.

 

[Lexicus]

It's like that technique of figuring where to lay bricks for a path through a lawn. You don't guess where people will walk, nor do you declare walking on the grass is off limits. Instead, you sit back and wait for a path of grass to be trampled and then you put your bricks there. That's the "rationality" of the winding, confusing streets of pre-modern cities. Individuals are doing what's rational for them in getting wherever they're going and incrementally they reveal where the bricks should be.

If individuals are doing what's rational for them in getting wherever they're going, that is totally different from going where they're going in a certain way because it's always been done that way. That is the distinction I've been talking about here. MW is explicitly saying that people shouldn't choose for themselves where they want to go by a rational process, but instead should 'submit to tradition'.

Incidentally, liberalism, in the sense of the term that encompasses the so-called "conservatives" in the United States and the Conservative Party in the UK, on its own terms is precisely about allowing society to self-organize, forcing people to fit into state-administered plans as little as possible. Conservatism, the real anti-liberal, anti-modern conservatism I'm arguing against here, by contrast claims that people are incapable of doing what's rational for them on their own and must be guided to the right path by what Mouthwash calls "tradition".

You don't seem to grok how conservatives think. It's an instance of liberals/progressives being worse at understanding conservatives than vice versa. Jonathan Haidt:
The idea isn't that rationality is bad, it's that tradition or organic cities or whatever have a rationality or higher purpose of their own. The view stems from a different weighting of moral intuitions.

This doesn't follow from the text you quoted. My arguments about rationality here are a response to MW, I am not under the impression that all conservatives believe what MW is arguing here. Indeed if you look back at the full sentence you took that quote from, you'll see I'm remarking that conservatives mostly claim the mantle of rationality today. "Facts don't care about your feelings" is a conservative meme in the context of the 2010s.

 

[Cutlass]

Fascists and totalitarians understand, correctly, that people are not capable of ruling themselves. Their problem is that they think others - such as themselves - can manage their lives more effectively. Tradition (similar to Fukuyama's rule of law) takes power away from both irresponsible people and arbitrary overlords.

So, once again, Nazis are the good guys, and just have everyone's best interest in mind, and people who oppose Nazis are bad.

Really odd position for a Jew to take.

There's no good way to translate it. In French, they speak of the "dissolution of moral standards".
It's true that modernity affected a lot of those things - frames of reference. Depending where you stand, it might be for the worse or the better.

The real odd part is that liberals always have higher moral standards than conservatives. Conservatism is never about morality or moral behavior. It is about telling people what to do, and doing what you're told to do.

It's not about right or wrong. It's not about moral or immoral.

It's about power.

Dont know how you qualify as "large", but yeah, there are going to be extremist wackos on all sides of specific issues...i think there is as important distinction between current day America and post ww1 Germany, as you said in another thread, we are a rich nation....the slippery slope to wacko ideology is not a steep one.

While it is true that the US today is in vastly better economic condition than Germany was in the early interwar period, what also is true is that the US just went through a major economic crisis. And economic crises tend to increase political extremism.

The Great Depression of the 1930s greatly affected political developments in Europe. Economic stagnation proved beneficial for far-right parties, which generally saw their influence increasing. Authoritarian regimes became established in most European countries at the time, the most important being the Nazi regime in Germany. In recent years, the global financial crisis has also increased the appeal of far-right extremists. All over Europe anti-system political parties that are anti-liberal, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic and Eurosceptic are gaining ground: the European Parliament elections held in May 2014 offer the latest example of this. Historical experience shows that when economic conditions remain bad for a significant period of time people tend to become more radical as far as their electoral behaviour is concerned. However, no matter how strong the linkage between economic crisis and the rise of political extremism might be, economic crisis is not the only factor to be taken into account when analysing the phenomenon of political extremism, as other parameters (historical, social and so on) are also important.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1007/s12290-014-0315-5

The 2008 financial crisis was devastating to the world economy. Just how devastating is something economists still argue over. It is not easy to add up the costs of bank bailouts, a lost decade of economic growth, spiking public debt, grinding austerity, and surging inequality. But the biggest cost of the crisis might be not economic but political: the populist wave that has swept over the world in the last decade, upending political systems, empowering extremists, and making governance more difficult. Financial crises regularly lead to political polarization and populism, but the recent populist surge has lasted longer than those that followed earlier crises—and done more damage.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/arti...l-crisis-still-empowering-far-right-populists

Partisan conflict and policy uncertainty are frequently invoked as factors contribut-ing to slow post-crisis recoveries. Recent events in Europe provide ample evidence thatthe political aftershocks of financial crises can be severe. In this paper we study thepolitical fall-out from systemic financial crises over the past 140 years. We constructa new long-run dataset covering 20 advanced economies and more than 800 generalelections. Our key finding is that policy uncertainty rises strongly after financial crisesas government majorities shrink and polarization rises. After a crisis, voters seem tobe particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which oftenattributes blame to minorities or foreigners. On average, extreme right-wing partiesincrease their vote share by 30% after a financial crisis. Importantly, we do not observesimilar political dynamics in normal recessions or after severe macroeconomic shocksthat are not financial in nature

http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/events/2015/20151001_post_crisis_slump/documents/c._trebesch.pdf

The French National Front, the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party and Greece’s Golden Dawn, among others, all surged in the polls as a result of the global financial crisis, with many of them achieving significant gains at the last elections.

New research by the Munich-based IFO Institute for Economic Research shows that this is no coincidence, in a study looking as far back as 1870, in more than 20 countries, and across 800 elections.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/el...-support-after-financial-crises-report-finds/



The rise of people who choose to be evil is a natural outcome of economic crisis. Some crisis may be worse than others. But all have that effect.

 

[Mouthwash]

No, we can use rationality or we can use unthinking submission to tradition because it's there to guide our actions. Please be clear about what you're actually saying.

It was already clear, and is there a point to this beyond semantic quibbling?

(To remind you again, because it clearly isn't sinking in, no one is saying that it has to be entirely one or the other!)

Well, not that you have any credibility before, but I think a willingness to defend the Aztec practice of human sacrifice will probably lead most people to conclude you aren't really worth bothering with.

That's, uh... quite a take on my quote saying literally the opposite and endorsing religion as a corrective.

Aside from those tied to organized religion, no great thinker ever brought about real humanitarian change in their community. There is no tradition of dissidence in other societies practicing human sacrifice, slavery, infanticide, genocide, penal rape, pederasty, etc. Surely they must have had philosophers? Did it simply not occur to them that raping and killing ten-year-old slaves isn't exactly that moral?

If you're even passingly familiar with epistemology, that should warn you off this whole 'use pure rationality' nonsense.

"Don't believe the rationalizations, but coming up with your own ideas is hubristic" doesn't seem to leave me with any options.

You really struggle with the concept of trust, don't you?

You're trapping yourself in a tautology. Sure, gay people couldn't exist before the concept existed. But people existed back then that we would now define as queer.

It's a bit like saying that Hannibal didn't kill Italians because the concept of Italy didn't exist back then. Romans? Obviously. But quibbling about that is just quibbling about definitions.

All you're pointing out is that we have tighter definitions now. Sure.

The Bible condemns them purely by their actions, while no identity is even hinted at.

The point isn't your attitude towards elections, it's the attitude common among conservative Americans. Do you think they are more likely to keep grasping after the machinery of the state, machinery which they not only accept but celebrate, or turn away into a New Jerusalem? You've laid out this bold vision of a city on a hill, but like all revolutionaries you are running into the fundamental question: what is the mechanism by which it is brought into existence?

It is brought into existence by building communities not dependent upon the structures enforcing the liberal order (like corporations, public schools, or the Internet). It's not quite secession, but now that the judicial system has fallen there's not much else to do beyond passive resistance.

Breaking the structures is a matter for the distant future, and I want no part of it. My goal is to preserve something out of this collapse.

I know this is the standard explanation, but I've always wondered about it. Doesn't Jesus say that Mosaic law has to be followed? Am I somehow misunderstanding that or is there context I'm unaware of? These are serious questions, anyone is welcome to answer them.

He explicitly rejects the Jewish practice of divorce.

If individuals are doing what's rational for them in getting wherever they're going, that is totally different from going where they're going in a certain way because it's always been done that way.

Is "what's rational to them" the process or the outcome? If it's the latter, then tradition is the safer bet to getting there.

That is the distinction I've been talking about here. MW is explicitly saying that people shouldn't choose for themselves where they want to go by a rational process, but instead should 'submit to tradition'.

I think that people should have a healthy respect for tradition, not follow it slavishly or throw it out like a cheap towel. The insight you don't grasp is that feelings - yes, the low 'animal' function - are a much better corrective to tradition where it goes wrong than critical thinking is. You can come up with all sorts of not-even-wrong ideas about how your life is going to go, but there's no denying depression or frustration or failure when they hit you.

Incidentally, liberalism, in the sense of the term that encompasses the so-called "conservatives" in the United States and the Conservative Party in the UK, on its own terms is precisely about allowing society to self-organize, forcing people to fit into state-administered plans as little as possible.

The market isn't much of an improvement.

So, once again, Nazis are the good guys, and just have everyone's best interest in mind, and people who oppose Nazis are bad.

Really odd position for a Jew to take.

Glad you're here to drag down the quality of discussion. Missed that.

 

[Patine]

It was already clear, and is there a point to this beyond semantic quibbling?

(To remind you again, because it clearly isn't sinking in, no one is saying that it has to be entirely one or the other!)



That's, uh... quite a take on my quote saying literally the opposite and endorsing religion as a corrective.

Aside from those tied to organized religion, no great thinker ever brought about real humanitarian change in their community. There is no tradition of dissidence in other societies practicing human sacrifice, slavery, infanticide, genocide, penal rape, pederasty, etc. Surely they must have had philosophers? Did it simply not occur to them that raping and killing ten-year-old slaves isn't exactly that moral?

If you're even passingly familiar with epistemology, that should warn you off this whole 'use pure rationality' nonsense.



You really struggle with the concept of trust, don't you?



The Bible condemns them purely by their actions, while no identity is even hinted at.



It is brought into existence by building communities not dependent upon the structures enforcing the liberal order (like corporations, public schools, or the Internet). It's not quite secession, but now that the judicial system has fallen there's not much else to do beyond passive resistance.

Breaking the structures is a matter for the distant future, and I want no part of it. My goal is to preserve something out of this collapse.



He explicitly rejects the Jewish practice of divorce.



Is "what's rational to them" the process or the outcome? If it's the latter, then tradition is the safer bet to getting there.



I think that people should have a healthy respect for tradition, not follow it slavishly or throw it out like a cheap towel. The insight you don't grasp is that feelings - yes, the low 'animal' function - are a much better corrective to tradition where it goes wrong than critical thinking is. You can come up with all sorts of not-even-wrong ideas about how your life is going to go, but there's no denying depression or frustration or failure when they hit you.



The market isn't much of an improvement.



Glad you're here to drag down the quality of discussion. Missed that.

Of course, you and a few others here (you most of all) speak of a mythical, delusional, fairy-tale world where there was a universal consensus and agreement on what "religion" and "tradition" MEANT, and how they were to be applied, and what rules, tenor, and ideology came from them, and the equally mythical, delusional, and fairy-tale view that these times were "better," "more functional," "more stable," and "more prosperous," rather than instead putting down socio-political dissent in much more brutal, barbaric, savage, and downright Medieval ways, or settling such disagreements with bloody, vicious, vitriolic wars far more often (or completely to the exclusion of) elections or social activist movements. I suggest re-studying your history, sociology, and anthropology right from Grade 1 again.

 

[Gori the Grey]

At no point in time is Jesus quoted as saying that the Torah was lying about God. Jesus told people to love God, but he was telling people to love the god of Abraham. Oh sure, Jesus was very useful in changing the Commandments that Christians were supposed to follow. But at no point did he confront the falsehood that God had ordered the murder of gay people

Maybe here:

Matthew 22:36-40 ESV
"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."

 

[El_Machinae]

Really? By whom?

Someone who claimed to have the authority to make that decision, but you'll note that it took the Pride parade to convince his followers to loosen the oppression. So, authority enough to make the claim, but not enough authority to convince his followers based on the words alone.

 

[Berzerker]

I know this is the standard explanation, but I've always wondered about it. Doesn't Jesus say that Mosaic law has to be followed? Am I somehow misunderstanding that or is there context I'm unaware of? These are serious questions, anyone is welcome to answer them.

Jesus replaced the 10 Commandments with 2, if you love God and your neighbor you've fulfilled the law. Jesus appears to have been in a pickle, he couldn't come right out and criticize Moses or his laws but he clearly favored an interpretation at odds with tradition. For example, Moses killed a man for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. Jesus would have helped the man gather the firewood, not throw stones at him.

 

[Peuri]

[...]The real odd part is that liberals always have higher moral standards than conservatives. Conservatism is never about morality or moral behavior. It is about telling people what to do, and doing what you're told to do.

It's not about right or wrong. It's not about moral or immoral.

It's about power.
[...]

I think you should re-read the Jonathan Haidt quote from @Truthy's post. It's not necessarily so that liberals have "higher moral standards", just that conservatives have different moral standards.

Jesus replaced the 10 Commandments with 2, if you love God and your neighbor you've fulfilled the law. Jesus appears to have been in a pickle, he couldn't come right out and criticize Moses or his laws but he clearly favored an interpretation at odds with tradition. For example, Moses killed a man for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. Jesus would have helped the man gather the firewood, not throw stones at him.

Well, Jesus also said in the Sermon on the Mount of all places!:

Matthew 5:17
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."

and

Matthew 5:27-29
"You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it from you! For it is better for you that one of your members be destroyed than your whole body be thrown into hell."

So what was Jesus' position on Mosaic law again? I think most scholars on early Christianity would agree that it was not Jesus that abolished the Mosaic law, but Paul and the pauline faction. The Jerusalem faction lead by Peter was more than happy to accept the Mosaic law, but that form of Christianity that saw Jesus as the Messiah for the Jews only ended when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 ce.

 

[Mouthwash]

How is that possible? How could there being Pride prevent the healing needed to recover from the economic damage of the policies of the lawmakers who are also enemies to pride?

It's spiritual damage. You're right that the economy played a significant role in causing it, but an ideology like gay pride ensures that the wound can't heal.

And mouthwash, what kind of advocate of community over atomization are you? Whenever I'm friendly to you you're dismissive.

I'm sorry, but your arguments just aren't making much sense to me.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

How exactly is Pride an ideology?

 

[Berzerker]

Well, Jesus also said in the Sermon on the Mount of all places!:

Matthew 5:17
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."

and

Matthew 5:27-29
"You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. And if your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it from you! For it is better for you that one of your members be destroyed than your whole body be thrown into hell."

So what was Jesus' position on Mosaic law again? I think most scholars on early Christianity would agree that it was not Jesus that abolished the Mosaic law, but Paul and the pauline faction. The Jerusalem faction lead by Peter was more than happy to accept the Mosaic law, but that form of Christianity that saw Jesus as the Messiah for the Jews only ended when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in 70 ce.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Those 2 commandments are in conflict with the law of Moses, the Sabbath commandment is just one, divorce law is another. The adultery example shows the difference too, Moses would have stoned the adulterer and Jesus would not.