Sometimes I feel like we bash the liberals or socialists too much. So in that spirit, post silly things you’ve heard neocons say or silly arguments you’ve heard from them. You must admit as ridiculous as socialists can be, conservatives are down right retarded. To start off:
My conservative professor was basically bashing academia, basically implying that intellectuals have worse morals then regular folks, and implying it’s the intellectuals that cause genocide (nevermind all those nazi citizens). Also he implied that anyone who saw issues with the Israeli state hated Jews, and that most of anti-israeli sentiment was from academia, and that they are all racist. He also said that those protests of Israel only appeared on college campuses. I was floored at how ridiculous this was and a bit dissappointed. I was brewing in my seat. I didn’t feel like arguing but I was so mad (because I have been in those protests and it’s not like that, a third of the folks were jews, it was a very diverse crowd everytime). Sometimes the professor was right on some things, that went off the track into conservative bullshit.
He has this ridiculous “underdog” mentality towards conservatives.
I recall a Jewish acquaitance of mine complaining that Rahm Emanuel was Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic, and that the two best presidents were Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Both the left and right are annoying, but in my opinion, the left is far worse in that, as a libertarian, I find myself agreeing with them far less than the “right.”
This is only slightly related, but something that’s been on my mind lately: the political “right” is far less defineable than the political “left.” Does anybody else agree with this? I’ve always had problems with the left-right spectrum, but never could reconcile them with the fact that I and many others who aknowledge its fault still insist on using it. Then I thought, I use it far more frequently when I’m categorizing people as leftists, rather than rightists, and I’d never use it to describe my political beliefs.
So in my mind, leftists are quite obviously collectivist, statist (even the anti-state ones are statist in my judgement), and anti-market (whatever and all that encompasses), while rightists are… a big blob of largely unrelated people, or at least less related than leftists are to one another.
I agree with lots of thing with leftists on civil rights and foreign policy, though not on economics. I disagree with conservatives on almost everything. They seem to be totally oblivious to many things, and much more inconsistent. I’ve always found talking to a left winger about politics as much easier then a conservative. What are we but left wingers with economic knowledge?
The left have always seemed to have the wrong values, but the right seemed to be the most full of crap and contradictory.
As far as the underdog mentality of conservatives, its an insular, paranoid and delusional mentality.
I am lucky in that I don’t have to deal with idiots on a daily basis. I go out of my way to avoid them or having any conversation of substance with someone I suspect of being an idiot.
…Individualist, pro-market, and anti-state? And economic knowledge is quite a big differece, so to walk over it is a mistake.
You agree with foreign policy?
I’ll take someone to inconsistently agree with over someone to consistently disagree with. Then again, I assume we percieve “the right” differently, which only goes to prove the point that the label is useless. Without a theory of property, calling yourself anything but undecided indicates that you’re just creating ad-hoc justifications, and I think this is reaffirmed by how quickly a typical leftist or rightist will contradict his or her own principles, or plainly lack principles, in the first place.
And just to note, I’m speaking on the “right,” not conservatives. I assume there is a difference.
Neo-cons often call (me/all libertarians/ ron paul) an “isolationist”. now if you were to say take the time to even google “isolationist” it says it is non interventionism crossed with protectionism. only to a neocon is not bombing your neighbors isolating yourself from them.
The silliest arguments I have heard from a number of conservatives are centered around defense spending.
That we can’t cut military spending because of all the jobs it will cut, or any level of spending is legit because it is authorized by the constitution, or the military spending is not what is bankrupting us, it is the entitlement spending.
My biggest beef of all with both libs and cons is there inconsistencies and lack of principles.
And one can’t be principled until they have some idea of what they are talking about. We have another thread here where people are straddling the fence on statism because they feel anarchism hasn’t proven itself. It’s not just common to left and right wingers. Most people are not used to thinking for themselves, and pick some murky non-position as a proxy for having to come to a conclusion.
I am not sure if that is necessarilly a bad thing.
Not many people grow up completely independently in thought. Leave aside even children and teenagers, a young adult consults friends on his problems with his girlfriend or her boyfriend, a newly married man or woman goes to his or her parents for problems at the start of marriage, an advancing executive consults his older boss on the problems of his new workplace, and so on. It would seem that until people reach the age of, say, 60, they are perpetually dependent on someone else for advice, not only on what to do but also on what to think.
Is this relevant to problems of political philosophy? Probably, I’d say. Isn’t that all about cooperation, division of labour, and specialization? Doesn’t it involve how you live with or work with other people?
That even older people cave to peer pressure merely reflects an understandable instinct, even if it is irrational sometimes.
He has this ridiculous “underdog” mentality towards conservatives.
That’s actually true, especially if you take into account that most ‘conservatives’ are just left-wingers of another brand. The Proggies paint this menace of right-wing fanaticism that is totally imaginary anywhere west of Bulgaria.
My response to the neocons that try to minimize what we spend on “defense” because it is “only” 20-30% of total spending is to compare what we spend to what the rest of the world spends. We spend more than all other countries combined.
So? She’s still just another NeoCon Democratic internationalist. No one who advocates democratic government has any business being called ‘right wing’, that’s just a plain litmus test. Beyond that, her basic social and economic views are straight Progressivism; and her international views are Wilsonian.