Who's your money on?Follow

I guess this is the point where we conveniently forget that "liberal" is your go-to label for anything and anyone you disagree with.

Why is that odd? They're the same thing. In the sentence you quoted, I'm saying that we don't start with the social issue and then derive an agenda based on that. We do it the other way around. We start with a set of principles, then apply it to whatever issue happens to come up. So our positions on social issues are driven by the principles. Our principles aren't driven by the social issue.

I'm honestly scratching my head trying to figure out why you thought those two statements were contradictory.



Again, this is because you are creating and using labels differently than I am. You define conservative and liberal based on the positions they take in our political arena. You do this because you have adopted the liberal mindset that your political identity is based on a set of positions on issues. But that's not how conservatives view things. You either derive your positions from a set of classical liberalism principles, and are thus a conservative,, or you derive them based on popular movements and opinions of the day, and are thus a liberal.

Conservative and liberal is not about what positions we ultimately take or what agenda we support. It's about *how* we decide which positions to take and which agenda to support.



And once again, you show that you are using a completely different label methodology than I am. There is no inherent reason why conservative and religious should be linked, or that liberal and religious should not. They just happen to right now (or, more truthfully, they appear to be so right now).

This associative labeling is so strongly imprinted in your brain that you could not help but put labels like "conservative" and "right" next to the word "Christian" in your post. But if you drop that mental programing and just look at "Christian", or even "fundamentalist of any faith", you'll see that there's no reason for a political label to be applied. You can absolutely be a religious fundamentalist and also a liberal. Because, at the risk of repeating myself, what makes someone a liberal is that they start first with the thing they want to do, and believe in using the power of government to force changes on the world around them to accomplish those things, specifically social change, and specifically using the highest level of government possible so as to make those changes as unilateral as possible.

Liberals are ends focused. They see something they want done, and they fight to do it, using any means necessary (which is why "maximum government power is often used, because that's often the best and fastest way to accomplish something). What they want to do isn't what makes them liberal. It's the very concept of using whatever means are available to accomplish goals that does. More specifically it's in opposition to the conservative ideology that places great weight in how government power is used, with a focus on avoiding using it in ways that infringe people's rights and liberties (means focused). Liberals, in modern context, are those who don't care what kind of power is used to accomplish their goals. The goal matters most. How you achieve it matters less.

Once you understand this way of thinking about our politics, a heck of a lot of things that appear at first to be contradictory or hypocritical suddenly make complete sense. You might want to try it. You might just be surprised at how looking at the world from a different angle can change everything.

Edited, Apr 7th 2016 6:42pm by gbaji

I'm honestly curious why you think it would be harder to tell if the law is working. Explain, please Right. We'd have Romney care (single payer).I'm honestly curious how a law saying "don't treat people like **** because they are different" puts a mandate on property and lives. Explain. Doesn't get his history from anywhere, etcPeople. Liberals care about people.

Now you know the difference between liberals and conservatives. You're welcome.What a fun game!!"Don't spend money on or support people we don't like". Right. See above on the "people" thing. No. I define "conservative" as close minded and resistant to change and "liberal" as open minded and willing to change. Y'know, the dictionary definition.No. I used that phrase to differentiate from the Christian left, which is a thing.

It's double-funny when you look at my sig, AMIRITE??!?!?!

Canadian dictionaries don't count.

I guess there's no reason to link them if you go out of your way to ignore the lengths conservatives go to pander to the religious to manipulate policy.

Actually that's pretty damn close to what M-W says.


Simple Definition of conservatism:
: belief in the value of established and traditional practices in politics and society
: dislike of change or new ideas in a particular area

Simple Definition of liberalism:
: belief in the value of social and political change in order to achieve progress

OK. Reasonable answer. The difference between you and I being that I generally look at things as "what's good for the country" not just "what's good for Arkansas" or wherever. Nothing wrong with that. It's what make me me and you you, right?Because that's not what the law says. That may be the rationale you use to support it, but the language will actually say something like "you must allow people with male genitalia to use the women's restroom in your place of business if they claim to be transgender". Which may just affect your business. You may be required to spend significant amounts of money providing unisex restroom facilities on the off chance a transgender person may show up one day. You yourself may now be legally required to share restroom facilities with someone of the opposite *** because that person claims to be transgender, and it's now illegal for the business or school or whatever to "discriminate" against that person's internal gender identity.[/quote]Ok. Also reasonable; I hadn't thought of such a scenario. I'm more wondering how the infringement occurs when you want to choose not to serve people in your store, for instance, but you did answer the question I asked.At a federal level it was initiated (albeit weakly) during the FDR years and accelerated during Trumans' term. Not GOP and not conservative.In the context of abortion that's total nonsense.Yes. Hence my abhorence for conservatives in the US. Oh? Then why do you think they are resistant?Yeah; you are correct. They are not. But since "Christian conservatives" are a distinct, vocal and politically active group in the GOP, I used that moniker to make a very specific point so my meaning was clear. I'm pretty sure everyone else had no confusion about the distinction.

ALSO: I broke a quote in the middle, there, but I can't be arsed to fix it.

The only thing that'll prove to gbaji is that Obama should be investigated for leaking classified information.

Sure. I guess the other difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives tend to assume that people are flawed and make mistakes, even with the best of intentions, and we should build a governing structure that makes it as hard as possible for the current crop of leaders who maybe think they know best, to make major changes to our laws. They may not always be bad ideas, but even if just occasionally they are, we're often stuck with those really bad laws for a very long time.

I'd rather err on the side of caution. Just because a group of people are sure that doing X will be "for the good of the country", doesn't necessarily make that true. The problem is that you can never really know for sure until after the law has been passed. So why not just avoid passing sweeping laws that affect us domestically at the federal level entirely? If something really is a great idea, it'll work great at the state level, and all the other states will adopt it. Same effect. Vastly less risk. Maybe takes a little more time to implement, but IMO, that's far better than essentially playing Russian Roulette with our laws.



I wasn't aware that merely refusing to serve people at all was an issue here. I'm not even sure how that would come up. Someone walks into your restaurant and orders food. How does their own relative gender to sex come into play here? For the most part, no one else really knows or cares. I suppose if you walk into the restaurant carrying signs and disrupting other people's meals with your announcement of your trans status, and protesting other people not supporting it or something, then yes, there may be an issue of you being asked to leave, but it's not because you're trans, it's because you're being a disruptive jerk to everyone else who just want to eat a meal in peace.

And that's about as most likely a scenario as I can think of. It's not like the guy at the grocery or hardware store cares what your gender is, right? On the flip side, the majority of actual disagreement on this issue is the one regarding bathrooms, either in businesses, or (more often) in public locations like schools. That's where the fight is happening, and that's where I think it's an issue of infringement on others (or at least an additional cost). And yeah, we can certainly debate that, but I don't think it's fair to just say it's all about people wanting to discriminate against others. At the end of the day, any restroom facility that isn't 100% unisex discriminates. The very fact of having two restrooms with two different sets of people allowed to use them is discrimination. The question is "which form of discrimination serves the greatest value to the most people". Which brings us back to the issue of making a very large percentage of the population uncomfortable, so that a very small percentage can feel a bit more comfortable (although I suspect that trans folks are never going to feel comfortable in any restroom environment that is shared with other people, so I'm not sure we're gaining anything here).



Sure. And at the state level, the GOP was fielding black candidates in the south back in the 80s. The 1880s. Just because the left has a focus on the federal level doesn't mean you can judge the right by the absence of federal level action in this area. That's kinda unfair when we're the ones who believe that such things should be done in the states when possible, only falling to the federal level when absolutely necessary.




Only if one discounts the idea that a gestating human is still a person. Step outside your own personal beliefs and imagine that you actually believe that human life begins at conception, and that this life has a right to continue living, just like you or I do. Now, ask yourself if opposing elective abortion is in keeping with the idea of people having the most control over their own lives? While we can't communicate with a gestating fetus, we can make a reasonable assumption that it desire the same thing that all living organisms do: To continue living. An abortion, to someone with this belief, is literally taking away the only thing that fetus has. That's about as massive a violation of individual liberty as you can get.

Even pro-choice conservatives like myself still view the issue as a balance of rights. The woman's right to control her own body is balanced against the embryo/fetus' right to live. Conservatives may differ in terms of when in the gestation process the balance of rights shifts to the point where elective abortion should become illegal, but we're all approaching it from this angle. That's very different than what liberals seem to do, which is to declare abortion to be a woman's right's issue, which is absolute (at least in terms of not being able to do or say anything against it without appearing to be "anti-women"), but then have to engage in mental gyrations when presented with scenarios like a 8.5 month perfectly healthy pregnancy being electively aborted by a woman who is also in perfect health, so as to not appear to be endorsing something that certainly looks like murder under most ethical systems, yet while also not appearing to be "anti-women".

I find the conservative approach much more reasonable and workable. I don't have to rule by exception. I can merely pick a spot during gestation where I believe that the rights of the fetus outweigh the rights of the woman with regard to abortion, and that's my position. It's still "pro-choice", in that I support the fact that a woman has a right to choose to abort. But, like I believe with all rights, there is always a point where that right is outweighed by some other opposing right. You do not need to view rights as absolute or all-or-nothing things. Once you adopt the concept that we live in a sea of competing rights, it's a lot easier to make rational and consistent decisions. And none of them need to violate your own beliefs. Oh. And it also allows for more reasoned debate, because you're discussing *when* a balance point is hit, versus arguing whether balance points exist at all.



Which makes no sense, given that we were just talking about how conservatives don't act based on liking or disliking people, but liberals do.



I think I've provided a pretty good explanation of when and why conservatives resist changes proposed by liberals. But if you want a quick refresh, it can probably be boiled down to two main reasons:

1. Liberals tend to propose things from the highest level possible. See my point at the beginning for why conservatives tend to oppose this methodology.

2. Liberals tend to propose things based on how it affects different select groups of people. And they tend to hide or ignore the counter effects these actions would have on other groups of people. We conservatives like to look at the proposed action and how it'll affect everyone, then make a decision. Liberals tend to get themselves riled up over a cause to "help <insert identity group here>", which often results in proposals that are really bad ideas, but because they are presented as "pro-<group>", and anyone opposed at "anti-<group>", they fall in line out of a desire to appear to "care about people".


I suppose I could add a third point. Often, it really does appear as though liberal groups deliberately go out of their way to propose changes designed to ensure conservative opposition. So instead of finding a reasonable way to accomplish something, or resolve some social issue, they find the one that must be done as the highest level, and which must involve really inconveniencing a ton of people in order to "help" some identity group. And I suspect they do this purely so that they can continue to label conservatives as "anti-<group>". Doesn't matter how little the proposal would help the group, and how much it could cost or inconvenience others, the objective is to retain the pro/anti narrative, so they can continue to claim the social high ground.



Ok. But I think you're making the assumption that conservatives view things through the same identity group lens that liberals do. The idea that there's this monolithic voting block of staunchly religious people who put their religious beliefs ahead of everything dominating the political thinking in the GOP is a myth. Of course, if you go out of your way to create the idea of this identity group, and make a point of asking in polls if a member of the GOP is christian, or evangelical, or whatever, you'll create this perception, right? Ask yourself this question: Why does no one make a point in polling stats (or heck, just about anywhere in the media) to talk about what percentage of Dem voters in a given state are christian (or religious in any form)?

The cart is leading the horse. Because there's an assumption that the "religious right" is a big thing, people attempt to measure it. And they do so by asking people their religious affiliations, and the correlating that to various things related to the GOP and politics. But the mere act of doing this creates the perception. If you were to ask the same questions of Democrats, and report on the same correlations, you could just as easily believe that there's a "Religious Left" out there controlling the Democratic party.

The reality is that most people come to the table with a host of different aspects to their own person that may influence their decisions on the political stages. To pigeon hole them into one identity (black, white, gay, straight, christian, muslim, etc), and conclude that everyone who shares that one trait must all think the same is pretty darn absurd. There's a whole heck of a lot of conservatives, who, if asked, will report that they are christian. But this doesn't mean that their Christianity is even a primary determinant for their political decisions.

Edited, Apr 11th 2016 4:28pm by gbaji

That's wonderful and all, but just because not all classified information is a serious state secret, not everything that's classified *isn't*. You're basically arguing that since it's possible that nothing on her server was of the "serious secret" nature, that we should just assume that is the case, so there's no reason to even bother looking into it to find out. Which seems... silly. It's like saying that since it's possible that the men in ski masks walking into the bank might not be planning to rob it, we should just ignore them or something.