SirNitram wrote:
No True Scotsman Fallacy. That is what your last post was. No True Conservtive Would... And it's a Fallacy. That means it's total bullshit.
In fact, it's the self-same excuse you see spat out by Marxists.
I'm aware of what the No True Scotsman Fallacy is, but apparently you are not. The reason it's a fallacy is because the definition of what a "true Scotsman" is shifts such that you can make any specific subgroup of people is in or out of it.
But to make it a fallacy, you can't just sit back, cross your arms, and declare that it is. Otherwise you're guilty of an Appeal to Motive fallacy at best. You have to prove that there is no such thing as a solid definition of a "True Scotsman", and that I'm just shifting the definition around as it suits me, as many Marxists do.
And I'm not.
SirNitram wrote:'Small Government' has always, always been about reducing the laws that govern businesses and the powerful, otherwise known as Deregulation. As a result, we got the housing bubble and credit crash.
The Housing bubble and its consequent credit crash had nothing whatsoever to do with Deregulation, nor, incidentally, is Deregulation the soul of the concept of 'Small Government'. Small Government is the theory that government should restrict itself to those things that only government can do, and the definition of what that means exactly varies (of course). The Republicans of today do not even pay lip service to the idea of small government. The Department of Homeland Security is not small government. The TSA is not small government. Neither of those are regulatory agencies (primarily). They are new branches of government established by these so-called Conservatives. New bureaucracies, new cabinet positions, new government spending programs, and yes, new regulation. Explain how these are the actions of Conservatives.
'Individual Choice'? Free market pandering, except that conservative movements in multiple governments over the decades all oppose the regulations that the architects of Free Market Theory say are needed.
You yourself just a few days ago posted a rant about how conservative-minded Judges prohibited a meat company from testing their meat for Mad Cow Disease. How exactly is that opposing regulations?
Of course many of these Neo-con charlatans
do oppose specific regulations, because it will enrich their own constituency. This is not because they are conservative. This is because they are
corrupt
'Strong National Defense'? You got it: Two wars embarked on because of threats or attacks.
Two wars embarked upon because of made-up reasons that deluded most of the country (including me) into thinking that they had something to do with threats or attacks. Particularly in the case of Iraq, the war was the exact, cardinal opposite of "strong national defense". It was a revenge fantasy taken to some kind of nightmarish extreme. Explain to me how these have a thing to do with classical Conservativism?
The 'Private Sector'? Maybe for some goods, but reality has a harsh calling card, as we see in such things like the health care crisis, and the deregulated housing market. You know what the private market's solution for the healthcare crisis is? Higher deductable plans. Not really working.
So hang on, I thought we were discussing whether or not Bush and McCain are Conservatives, not the pluses and minuses of relying on the Private Sector for health care? I happen to believe that health insurance must be handled by the government, as it has proven to be one of the things that the private sector cannot do. There are others who disagree with me. Bush does not believe one way or the other. His decision is not based upon his belief that the Private Sector can better manage health care. He thinks people should go to local government-funded ERs for fuck's sake! His positions are not ideologically based, they are based on corruption and cronyism and what will enrich his supporters at present.
The Right To Bear Arms, well, fine. Of course, if the hyper-exagerrations of those who actually do the work of Liberalism in politics would cease, you'd find most agree with you beyond limiting shit that's already sensibly limited. Drugs? California, not Texas, allows the use of marijuana for it's proven painkilling facets.
None of which has stopped California's gun laws from being the most restrictive in the nation, and I defy you to explain to me how California is not somehow representative of Liberalism. As to drugs, you are correct. It is California, and not Texas, that allows the use of Marijuana for its painkilling effects. It is also not Washington DC or Connecticut or New York. There are a lot of brands of Conservativism that disagree with the Libertarian-Conservative view I have on drugs. There are also brands that agree. Like with Liberals, Conservatives have a spectrum of opinion centered around certain core beliefs. My point is not that every Conservative agrees with me. My point is that Bush and Co. are in direct violation of the core beliefs of Conservativism.
Death penalty? Not really a conservative/liberal principle, as much as some like to scream it. New York having it should point that out.
California's got it too, and so does (well... did) Illinois. You're right, it's not a very Conservative/Liberal principle. It's more Libertarian/Populist.
Fiscal Responsibility... Well, no conservative group has ever exercised it. History shows us this. Indeed, the only way England saved itself from bankruptcy a long time ago was for Parliment to seize the Power Of The Purse and stop the ego-wars.
So Eisenhower wasn't a conservative when he dialed back military spending to the (relative) bare bones to give the private sector room to breathe after WWII and Korea? There is a reason they call it "Fiscal Conservatism". This aspect crosses party bases. There are Republicans who are fiscally conservative and Republicans who are not. There are Democrats who are and who are not. Bush & co are NOT fiscally conservative by any stretch of the imagination. They have spent more money and inflated the federal budget by
so much more than any Democrat administration that I can think of, to the point where one must turn to the Democrats to find any evidence of fiscal responsibility. These current crops of Republicans are not fiscally conservative by any stretch of the definition or imagination, and appeals to the Power of the Purse in the 16th century do not change that fact. One is not fallacious for refusing to define black as white.
Low taxes doesn't work in a society with infrastructure, in case you didn't see the bridge collapse. Of course, the logical conclusion is to find the most beneficial recipient for low taxes, and the conservative movements of the past have almost always favored the aristocrats and merchant princes. That they now favor nepotism and big business is not a change.
I scarcely know where to begin here. The bridge collapse was as a result of low taxes? How about that cave-in in Boston after the Big Dig was completed? Massachusetts has the highest tax rates in the country, much of which they spent on their brand new Boston transit system, which proceeded to collapse and kill someone as soon as it was opened. Low taxes are
relative. Some arch-conservatives argue for abolishing all taxes. Some argue for moderate tax reductions. Some for no reductions at all, but caps upon future tax increases. All of these viewpoints exist within Conservativism, just as there are some Liberals who feel taxes should increase slightly for the wealthy and some who feel they should increase slightly across the board and others who feel taxes should be jacked through the roof.
Low taxes
do work in a society with infrastructure, incidentally, but this is not the time or the place for that argument. And "conservative" movements of the past have not favored merchant princes and nepotism for all time unless you have a particularly fallacious view of Conservativism. I remind you that it is ALSO a "No true Scotsman" fallacy to declare that every evil thing in the world is to be lumped under the artificial title of "conservative", especially since some of the abuses you are speaking of predate the very term.
Low expenditure is from cutting bullshit, but conservatives have proven to love their expensive wars, often for little or no reason, usually deciding to shit on Wealth Of Nations and just stop funding or selling the roads and the like. Yes, Adam Smith had quite a bit to say on what the government must provide.
I love the complete lack of examples in the above section.
Let's see... shall we pick Vietnam? Started and escalated by a pair of Liberal presidents (Kennedy and Johnson), who got involved after a Conservative president (Eisenhower) refused point blank the demands of the French that we intervene in it. Dragged on for many many years until it was finally ended by... you guessed it... another Conservative president (Nixon).
Reagan, for all his non-conservative military hyper-spending, never got involved in a war larger than Grenada. Every major war of the 20th century that was entered into by the United States, rightly or wrongly, was entered into by a Liberal Democrat (Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy). Bush Sr, a Conservative. got involved in Gulf War I, and then pulled out as soon as the job could reasonably be called "finished". Rightly or wrongly, in this country it is the Liberals who traditionally are willing to pour "blood and treasure" out on foreign battlefields, not the Conservatives. In other countries (like Britain), I am aware that it works differently, but we are not discussing Britain here. There is a strong isolationist streak in American Conservativism, which is not to say that all conservatives are isolationists, but merely that it is there. Of all the various so-called conservative politicians out there, none of them (and none of the Liberal ones either) have been
anything close to as hawkish as this administration.
Individual rights trumping social equality? You've certainly seen it.
No, what I've seen are nepotistic Kelptocrats trumping everything, both social equality
and individual rights. How exactly is the Patriot Act a triumph of Individual Rights? How are the persistent abuses of the Justice Department? How is hard-core wiretapping? Nixon resorted to such things because he was paranoid and possibly even sick. I reserve judgment on Bush' mental health as that's not in question. Individual rights does not mean that everyone who is a friend of George Bush (or whoever) gets to flaunt the law and everyone else lives in a constricting police state. If you think that those are "conservative" values, then I question your qualifications to define conservativism.
So what you get, is not 'THEY ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES'. They are clearly conservatives, with every break, failsafe, regulation, and speedbump assembled into place to stop the extremism that forms from unrivaled power. They are the extremists of the conservative movement, but they doesn't make them 'not conservative'. It makes them the ultimate expression of a political concept taken to it's farthest extreme.
No.
Simply put, no. That is not correct.
They do not simply take conservative values to the extreme. I have seen many politicians who do such things, and this is not them. Unless we are making the case that they have wrapped so far around the political spectrum that "Conservative" and "Liberal" no longer have meanings, this is simply not them. They are not taking "Conservative" values and extending them to the extreme. They are taking Conservative values and doing the precise opposite of what those values are. All of the accusations that Conservatives throw at Liberals (rightly or wrongly, and mostly the latter), about how Liberals are addicted to spending, about how they want to take our freedoms away (or hate them), about how they are elitists and unconcerned with individual rights, about how they refuse to be pragmatic and drop programs that don't work, about how they are wedded to their ideology, all of these accusations apply in every case to Bush and Company. I'm not claiming that Bush is a Liberal in any sense, but that he's not at all a Conservative, and nor are the people he's wrapped around him, no matter what they pretend to be.
BTW, you forgot such planks of historical conservatism as 'Traditional Values', which of course results in pandering to the religious and seeking not to change things, or actively regressing. That conservatives with no breaks begin turning to the ancient forms of government like authoritarianism and autocracy shouldn't surprise. It's what happens when you remove the breaks.
Yes, there are some issues upon which these people support traditionally 'conservative' values. They are, by and large, pro-life. They are, by and large, evangelical christians. They are, by and large, socially conservative in general. There are (quite clearly) parallels between these people and Conservativism, which is to be expected given where they all came from. But I'm sorry, Conservativism is not measured solely by one's stance on Stem Cell research. Moreover, not all Conservatives take those positions. Consider
Barry Goldwater, one of the architects of modern Conservative politics. Consider the Libertarian Republicans, or the so-called "Classical" Conservatives (like Eisenhower's granddaughter). Consider the
Paleoconservatives.
The charge by conservatives that Neo-cons are not conservative is, by the way,
not new. Nor does everyone agree with me (certainly the neo-cons don't). It is not however a goddamned logical fallacy. There is twenty years of complex argument behind this.
You don't have to believe me. Pat Buchanan, one of the most conservative people in this country,
way beyond the pale of where I want to go, calls the Neo-cons "Squatters, who take a once-beloved home [the Republican party] and turn it into a crackhouse", and "Trotskyist, socialists or Social Democrat", then became 'JFK-LBJ Democrats', but broke with the Left during the Vietnam War and 'came into their own' during Reagan's administration."
I cannot believe I just cited Pat Buchanan...
Regardless, Buchanan is a very
very conservative person, way way beyond me, an arch-conservative if you will. Normally I wouldn't care what he thinks, and certainly I don't see Neo-cons in the same way that he does, but given that Buchanan is both manifestly the extreme of the Republican party, and manifestly not a neo-con, what conclusion do we draw?
The Neo-cons are
not just conservatives with the brakes removed. I am not simply trying to artificially cut them out of conservativism because I do not like them. I am not making the argument that they are not "true" Scotsmen, I am making the argument that they are not Scotsmen at all, in the way that a man from Gibraltar is also not a Scotsman. They are in direct variance with many if not all of the fundamental tenants of American Conservativism, and those which they are not at variance with come from completely distinct ideological bases, just as a Libertarian and a Liberal can both be pro-choice without necessarily being the same political thing. Bush and his Kelptocrats are not Conservatives. There was perhaps a time when they were Conservatives, but once they dropped all of the Conservative ideals and Conservative ideologies, and replaced them with others, they ceased to be Conservatives.
Christianity was derived from Judaism, but it is not Judaism, because it repudiated Jewish philosophy and religious thought and law and custom, and replaced it with something else. It is not a fallacy to say that a Christian is therefore not a Jew. Nor is it a fallacy to say that Bush is not a Conservative. He is not.
EDIT: Forgive me Nitram, it took me a long time to write this, and your second post wasn't up when I started. I'll try to be brief...
All of those quotes in the box there are from conservatives, I would imagine. I however don't see what
any of them have to do with Bush and his Neo-cons, nor with the distinction between conservativism and Bush's policies.
Indeed, all I see here are attempts by you to claim that Conservatives are somehow naturally evil, and since Bush is evil...
Well forgive me, Nitram, but I just don't have the stamina for a fight with you on the subject of whether every conservative who ever lived was a racist asshole. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject at hand, nor was I attempting to defend the most extreme versions of Conservativism out there. I know of the long and ugly history of Conservative politics. I am not trying to defend it. There are racists and vile people within the spectrum of Conservative politics, and I acknowledge that they are part of the Conservative heritage, as I have always done. Just as I imagine you acknowledge the various idiocies and crimes of people far more extreme than you in your political spectrums. I
never attempted, nor will I ever attempt to claim that those people are not conservative.
I
will however claim that Bush is not. And I will not here get into a debate about whether or not Conservatives are to blame for all that is dark and evil in the world, for that is not at all the subject we are discussing.
