4028

A lot of folks here are invested in the idea that there is only one Conservativism. If under their masks, Margaret Thatcher and Martin Heidegger and Dwight Eisenhower and Tucker Carlson and Ayn Rand and Vaclav Havel and Josef Ratzinger and Henry Kissinger and Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen are all sporting Hitler mustaches, then doesn’t the world become a lot simpler? We can show off our righteousness by simply condemning every last one of them as the same sort of dead ender and the only legitimate arguments we need to entertain are between the staid liberals and the fiery progressives.

4029

What? What is your point?

4030

What threat of violence? All the arguments in favor of that picture being proof of atrocities seem to stem from the argument that because it’s in China, it’s bad. There’s nothing else bad about that picture. All the people arguing for it being bad are relying on the “we all know that China is bad” argument, and I don’t know if that pertains. That’s just using an assumption to prove a conclusion.

I’m perfectly willing to believe that there are bad aspects to what was going on, if someone actually brings them up instead of just saying “It’s China so of course it’s bad drrrrrr.”

So far all we’ve got is patriot dot win style of rhetoric. If there’s something bad about the situation, like worse than the lockdowns that other countries did to clamp down on COVID spread in the early pandemic, then share the evidence and we can discuss it.

4031

Scary temperature scan.

image

4032

We’re already there. The difference is one deserves scorn and to be left out of politics but not harmed, and the other needs to be dealt with whatever it takes.

Neocons will accept rule of law. Fash see the law is nothing more than power by other means.

4033

Quick questions: do you think there is a material difference between the Nazi soldiers and the Nazi party members who put them there? Could one have existed without the other? Who deserves more scorn?

I’m not asking this rhetorically. I don’t really think the answer is simple.

But I will say, every person you listed (well, the names I recognize) is on one side or the other of a similar equation/inequality.

4034

I’m glad you understand the reality of the world :)

There are no legitimate, moral conservative positions.

4035

See, I would disagree with that statement. I think there damn well should be limitations to the size, cost and intrusiveness of govt. Though that said I’m probably safely to the Left of where your average Republican today would draw those lines. It’s just we’ve lived in a neoliberal political approach to governance for so many decades now that people want to blow it all up. It’s ironic to me, almost schizophrenic, that so many Republicans today, reaping the direct bennies of what they’ve electorally sown, want to blow the entire system up and start over, in the false belief they can create a magical do-over that more closely resembles the Elysian conservatism desired by the Founders without realizing those very marbled figures would likely be appalled by the ignorance and gullibility of conservatives today.

4036

There are folks who view me as too conservative because I am willing to accept a capitalist framework as long as it is subservient to a government trying to maximize net social benefit.

4037

Eisenhower, Havel, and the pope into “staid liberals”, give the rest of them their Hitler mustaches, and you’re about there. Was that supposed to be something of deep thought and concern? We have plenty of evidence on Kissinger and Thatcher by this point, and the others are pretty explicitly Nazi-adjacent. Splitting hairs on the more evil portion of that list is why it’s hard to take the “Oh, Reagan conservatives weren’t that evil!” arguments at all seriously.

4038

There’s definitely a difference, neither is blameless, and you’re right–it’s not simple. But I feel like you’re getting at differences in participation or power dynamics when you make that comparison–like maybe you’d say, I dunno, Tucker Carlson is a nazi soldier and Eisenhower was Goebbels? But I don’t think that’s how the motley crew of presumptive conservatives I named compare to each other. The differences between Ayn Rand and, say, Josef Ratzinger (AKA Pope Benedict XVI) run to their respective cores. Margaret Thatcher and Vaclav Havel both fought Communism, but their political ideals were radically different. Toss Adolf Hitler in the mix and you’d be making the crowd more motley, not less.

Political grounds shift, so we have to ask Whose Conservativism? and Conservative When/Where? to make any meaningful distinctions. Trumpism is repulsive in a different way from Bushism. Saying they are opposed to each other doesn’t mean you have to bestow on one a badge of “Liberal, Actually.”

Aw, really? Isn’t environmentalism a conservative position? Like, just from a common-sense perspective? I know what counts as conservative in our political landscape is typically opposed to environmentalism, but then I look at the example of this guy who was trying to stop mountaintop removal mining because he just didn’t want his home of 70 years to change. He didn’t want to hear the machinery when he sat on his front porch. He didn’t want the dust covering his house. Did the coal companies turn this former coal miner into a progressive? Seems to me, his motivations are the most basic form of conservativism, even if it doesn’t resemble the “sophisticated” conservativism we usually apply that label to.

I feel like you’re proving my point.

4039

There’s nothing conservative about modern conservatives.

4040

The Republicans are fascist not conservative. The right-wing Dems are the conservatives.

4041

You put Eisenhower (pre-Southern Strategy R, obviously center-left in a modern American context), Havel (not even conservative in his time, unless conservatives automatically get to claim everyone who was against Soviet communism, which to think of it is a line of thought that has itself caused us a ton of issues), and a Pope (I guess moderate to conservative on a Catholicism axis but pretty moderate to liberal on non-doctrine political matters) on a list with a bunch of actual or wannabe Nazis and a couple people in the middle who really love war crimes and/or privatization.

Splitting hairs between Heidigger and Le Pen while declaring a Big Tent Conservatism that hasn’t existed in at least thirty years is, in fact, making a point.

4042

I’m a Kenyan, and I can safely say that the Mau Mau stuff is a bigger deal outside Kenya that it is in Kenya now.

Only a minority of one tribe (albeit the biggest tribe) out of 42 distinct tribes were involved in that.

And the British operations were not pleasant, but hardly extermination and most people now have forgotten about it.

I remember learning about it in Kenya at school and most people just shrugged their shoulders.

What’s happened is that some very smart people have managed to use some of the few remaining survivors to pursue legal cases, and get compensation that is peanuts for the GB government but obviously a shit tonne of money for the individuals involved.

As a Kenyan I am halfway loathe to state this but there is a culture in Kenya of hustling people, and trying to extract money from those richer than you.

It’s part of the big man and our time to eat mentality.

And given the numbers of people killed in the Mau Mau uprising, I’m pretty sure we’ve inflicted worse on ourselves around 1998 and around 2008, during election times.

The threat (and use) of tribal violence is never very far away.

And politics aligns along tribal lines generally.

If you want to investigate further, look up what is happening with Ruto (the vice president, a kalenjin smallish tribe, but in power longest under Moi, generally disliked because Moi pretty much looted the country and got away with it as as part of a power transfer deal) and the rift occuring between him and Kenyatta (president, Kikuyu, largest tribe) and the aligning of Kenyatta and Odinga (head honcho of the Luo, 2nd largest tribe.)

And bear in mind the guys who prosecute humans rights abuses at the Hague tried to get Kenyatta arrested, on account of his incitements to ethnic violence.

So, the 4 or 5 years of relative brutality during Mau Mau is largely forgotten, although the land distribution that occurred under the Brits not so much, although successive governments have done much the same thing so even that isn’t an issue.

Edit:

Whilst browsing the BBC I found this:

Which is pretty indicative of what I am talking about.

4043

I most certainly don’t want to start an argument, but I am very curious as to what the founding fathers envisaged, or at least what you believe they envisaged.

My history professors were largely of the idea that the founding fathers were very English and wanted to extend the ideas of the enlightenment further than could be done in England, on account of the weight of tradition in England.

And that they basically referred back to the magna carta as the basis of their laws and ideas.

It’s a fascinating concept to be discussed.

4044

There is a lot of different aspects. Equally important to English law is also things like the memory of the 30 years war, and the days of Cromwell. It would be difficult to overstate just how important the mid 17th century was in shaping the thinking of the founders.

As for @John_Reynolds one thing I can see as part of his argument would be the notion of who should participate, and the duty and seriousness that should be involved. Universal sufferage was not the order of the day. They certainly believed that the masses were not ready or capable to wield such influence. Several factors, including the lack of knowledge, education, time, etc led to things like land owners being given the vote. They believed the masses could be too easily swayed and have their passions inflamed. Not like the educated elite who could properly discuss and discern matters of state.

4045

Versions of these thoughts have been floating about since the first greek democracies, which excluded, iirc, women, slaves and most adult males. And there weren’t very many established routes to acquire citizenship other than being born into it, and therefore few routes to acquire voting rights.

And I suppose one could argue that a representative democracy is supposed to entrust most matters of state to politicians and a civil service, who can “properly discuss and discern” them.

I suppose this is why the House of Lords is still about, and versions thereof in most democracies, i.e. upper houses of parliament.

4046

Dwight Eisenhower? The guy who more or less prompted the modern American conservative movement by not being the conservative that they thought he was?

Don’t liberals also believe there ought to be limitations to the size, cost and intrusiveness of government? If so, then how is that a definition of conservatism that actually means anything?

4047

Hell no. I think government is an intrinsic good, especially if it forces citizens to pay for gay abortions by selling their guns.