Number one: my name on this forum is Opportunity Cost, use that name and that name only.
Agreed. If you have no objections, I'll shorten it to Cost.
Yet you repeatedly linked me, over and over again to conservatism. You seem more keen on labeling me. You are most definitely showing an ideology, you just aren't being honest about it.
That might have something to do with the fact that you call yourself a conservative. You've labeled yourself to that ideology. Perhaps you should change that on your profile. If you don't label yourself as a conservative, then why do you do that very thing? It says Lean...conservative. What ideology are you saying that I'm showing and how am I not being honest about it? What you need to do when you say something like that is demonstrate it. Don't just say it, as if that makes it so. Because it doesn't.
I also know your posts are full of arrogance, pomposity, and lecturing tones. You aren't very good at acknowledging others as equals. You also arent within the margin of error on turning your self critical eye on yourself.
As opposed to the baiting and ad hominem personal attacks that I get from those on the right? That's the way I respond to absolutists. I'm sure they don't like it, but that's the territory they staked out for themselves. They, nor you should be concerned over how I choose to respond to nonsensical statements that they make. As for turning a critical eye on myself, I challenge my own thinking every day, and I hold it up to logic since there is no bias involved. As I said, my concern is with the truth of things. Not stroking my own ego. I got over that many years ago. If somebody points out an error, as you are attempting to do, then I leave it to logic to determine if what you're saying is valid. So far, I've seen no reason to accept what you are saying as true. When you point to circular reasoning, I find you're in error. It's a complete misuse of the term. But what's just as important, is pointing out why it's a misuse of the term, which I've done.
Did you actually just assert that I back up an opinion that I said liberalism is racially motivated, then say you arent one to dispute my answer? Then as soon as you were done denying you were a democrat use WE to refer to me as a republican, and in the same paragraph say I engage too much in labeling? So much projection and hypocrisy.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here. My response was to your suggestion that Democrats see minorities as voting blocs rather than people. I disputed that claim and gave reasons why I find that false, and in fact find that it's Republicans that do that very thing. I even cited examples from people like Hannity. That strikes me as projection on your part. The word WE doesn't even exist in the post you're referring to. As for the word I, that isn't there. I do refer to YOU when it comes to labeling, since you did suggest that minorities are viewed by Dems as "voting blocs", rather than human beings. That's an assertion on your part, which I don't think is demonstrably true. I'm sure you're trying to make a point here. But I don't know what it is.
There you go again. You have a lot more invested into labeling me than the other way around. What you are missing is that people dont adhere 100% to a political bent, they tend to support some ideas more than others. YOU want to toss the entire set of ideas at them and personalize it directly to them. Its a pretty dishonest way to debate.
Then stop labeling yourself as a conservative. Change your profile. Don't tell me and everyone else by raising the flag of conservative on your profile and then say that you don't accept conservative dogma. If you buy into Kirk, and Burke and Reagan, and Buckley, or the Tea Party, or whatever it is that is some extreme version of what defined conservative thinking by the people that actually founded the conservative movement that we are seeing today, and use them as the authority of your political views...you're labeling yourself, and people like me will challenge your self-proclaimed conservative views. Maybe your a "fiscal conservative" and a "social liberal". Maybe your some hybrid? But you don't say that. You call yourself a conservative. I'm telling you what my criticism is toward the conservative ideology. If you call yourself a conservative, which you do, then what I'm doing is challenging the conservative ideology itself. If you don't subscribe to that definition that is not mine, but that of those that codified it, then say so. Welcome to the world of the Free thinker. Criticize everything. Force any and every ideology to demonstrate why it's true. If it can't, then be careful what you align yourself to. That's my advice. :twocents: You don't have to take it at all. That's up to you.
LOL thats your thesis? That conservatism is rotten to the core and racist because slavery was in the constitution...over 200 years ago? And you call ME an absolutist?
My "thesis" is that there is no logical justification for conservatism. You haven't given me one argument that does justify it. It can't justify itself, so what is it based on? Conservatism isn't racist because it was in the constitution. It's racist because it wanted to maintain that position, at all costs. Unless you can tell me that conservatism is NOT concerned over maintaining existing institutions, (which would contradict the very essence of what it is) then it's you that will have to convince me that keeping a totally racist policy in tact, even to the point of a civil war, Jim Crow, and Segregation is not part of that ideology. If you see that as absolutist, then I would say that you're simply ignoring every obstruction to progress made by conservatives over our entire history as a nation. The justification for that obstructionism is empty. No liberal ever killed anybody that wanted the right to vote. Can a conservative say the same thing?
I'm sure you've heard of Emmett Till. One of the two men that murdered him was named Milam. When he sold his story to Look Magazine after he was acquited by an all white jury, knowing that he couldn't be prosecuted for double jepordy, he said this: ""Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a n***** in my life. I like n******-- in their place -- I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n****** are gonna stay in their place. N****** ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. There is something inately wrong in that kind of thinking. It's a deep rooted desire to keep things as they are or were. Emmett Till represented a challenge to that orthodoxy, and he was murdered for it. The same thing goes for Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman when they were murdered by the Klan. They were killed for registering blacks to vote. Of course both incidents took place in Mississippi, where they don't like changes to their views on the world
Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor and senator, speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1900:
“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”
Old ideas are hard to shed for some people.
You going to square that logical circle or did you miss that movements, people and ideas can change over time?
No. I haven't missed it at all. That's exactly what liberalism does. It recognizes change and doesn't fear it. It doesn't resist it. Conservatism does. And it's always a losing battle, because change is inevetible. Conservatism is a reaction to progressive movements that challenge orthodoxy. And that goes back to Edmund Burke. The Enlightenment was a drastic change in orthodoxy. Burke was the leading voice of the Anti-Enlightenment.
In his own critique of Conservatism, Freiderich Hayek, said this; In his words: “Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the
direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.”
He went on to say this: "This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of
change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead. This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces.
Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles, it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservative as the result of the continuous attention of authority, which, for this purpose, must be allowed to do what is required by the particular circumstances and not be tied to rigid rule. A commitment to principles presupposes an understanding of the general forces by which the efforts of society are coordinated, but it is such a theory of society and especially of the economic mechanism that conservatism conspicuously
lacks. So unproductive has conservatism been in producing a general conception of how a social order is maintained that its modern votaries, in trying to construct a theoretical foundation, invariably find themselves appealing almost exclusively to authors who regarded themselves as liberal."
This is from the guy that conservative Mark Levin, loves to quote. Your very own comment, "people and ideas can change over time?" is an appeal to liberalism. So why do you label yourself a conservative? You did that long before I came on the scene.