Immanuel
Gold Member
- May 15, 2007
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In terms of a temporal defintion, and by observation during my lifetime, let me suggest the following characteristics of liberal and conservative:
The Liberal: "Do onto others as you would have them do onto you"
The Conservative: "Poo onto others before they Poo onto you"
I suggest this sums up the actual practice of today's conservative, as does this: "I've got mine, fuck the rest of the world".
A total misrepresentation of fact and one that I was beginning to think that you had finally outgrown.
The truth is that it is more like liberals believe in letting people live their own lives and forcing everyone to live by that standards. "Thou shalt (we have law here) be tolerant of us. Thou shalt not interfere with gay rights, abortion rights, poor people's rights etc etc etc. If you make more money than us, thou shalt hand over your money to the poor."
There are ranges of the liberal. Some truly do live by the "live and let live" philosophy and then there are the extreme ones that live by the philosophy of "we support these rights and come hell or high water you will too."
Conservatives are much more authoritarian in the extreme. The "religious right" believes that they are right and that you are a sinner and you had damned well better "turn or you will burn". Note: they say they only do this for your own good. Then you have your more moderate conservatives who actually do care about the needs of others and want to help those in need but don't see giveaways as being helpful.
It is the extreme on both sides that are the problem, not the moderates on either side. Quite frankly I think the moderates on both sides are much closer in beliefs to each other than either one of them are to the extremes on either side.
Immie
I disagree Immie.
With a very few exceptions, the religious right lobby for their constitutional rights to pray where they want, display whatever symbols or emblems they want, teach what they want in the schools, etc. etc. etc. They do not presume to make it mandatory for YOU or anybody else to do that. They simply want the right to order their society as they want it to be.
That is a conservative concept--that the government secures our rights and then gets out of the way and allows us to form whatever society we want to have. The Founders held hard and fast to that principle.
Liberals also lobby for their own wants and desires so that they can have the society they want; the difference being that they want everybody to be forced to accept the society they want: legalized pot, all religious reference removed from public view, no religious influence of any kind allowed in the schools, abortion on demand without restriction, enforcement and punishment of violations of political correctness, mandatory enforcement of global warming controls, government control of property rights for the common good, etc. etc. etc. Liberals often have no use for the values or principles the Founders laid out when they adopted our Constitution.
The difference is that, short of laws preventing treading on the rights of others, conservatives mostly want to be left alone to live their lives.
Liberals want everybody else to be required to live their lives as the liberals want to live.
I can handle the fact that you disagree with me, but in some respects I think you are wrong.
Much of what you say regarding liberals is correct in the extreme. As far as the Religious Right, I will just mention a few examples abortion, prostitution, gay marriage to name a couple. It is not about being left alone, it is about controlling the lives of others. Now, you know that I am opposed to abortion and would love nothing more than to see the procedure die a cruel and terrible death, but that is because I do tend to have some deep conservative blood within me. Gay marriage? The battle over gay marriage is a battle over control of people's lives. Truth be told, if the Religious Right did live by the philosophy of "just leave us alone and we will leave you alone", this would not be an issue today.
For your points on liberals much of that too is truth in the extreme, but then you have the moderate liberals who don't really care about most of those issues. Religious freedoms, for instance, they really don't care what god you worship many even worship the same god you worship, they simply don't believe that you have the right to make everyone else believe in that same god. Legalized pot? In the extreme, liberals want drug laws abolished pot as well as other drugs. Moderates don't really care as much, if at all. Some might feel it is time to end the ridiculous "war on drugs"... wait, come to think of it, I think it is time to end this ridiculous war on drugs. Our prisons and jails are filled with non-violent drug offenders. That is simply ridiculous when from my understanding pot is no worse than alcohol. Another one is gun control. In the extreme liberals want to take your guns away from you. Moderates are ambivalent for the most part. Not at all interested in taking your guns although registration is not a bad idea kind of philosophy.
So again, in the extreme both sides have their flaws.
Immie