What Is a Conservative?

[JB3]

They say the same about you. So what makes you right and them wrong?

You are actually both conservatives.

Judging by the superior use of logos of my arguments in the last few posts, it's clear that I have the wind of erudition behind my back. You would do well to learn some things yourself. You do not own the rights to define the term "conservative," and it is a broad term to describe a spectrum of right-wing philosophies not just in America but across the globe.

On the flipside, you do not own the rights to defining what it is either. Have you read ANY of the books that form the foundation for american conservative ideology? Do you have any understanding what American Conservatism actually is? I don't need any long-winded attempts to show that you have been reading big boy books. A simple yes or no will suffice.

 

[MoltenRock III]

JB3, thank you for naming a few people. But I'm hoping for some more household name types.

You're going to have to look at the state level to find any. I can't think of a single Republican Senator that isn't crazy, a bible beater, a fraud, or delusional. Paul Ryan (R) for instance from Wisconsin, sounds pretty reasonable, yet is both delusional and a fraud.

He spells out his "Roadmap for America", but only talks in generalities. What's hidden in his bullshit is when he talks about Medicare and Social Security changes, he doesn't want to change anything for those 55 or older. But he essentially guts the program for everyone under that (aka... you and me). And he talks about "tax credits" for families to purchase healthcare, but hidden in his fine print is that massive tax increases come on all employer plans for those in the upper 5%. *GASP* A tax increase!!!!!

Yet he's being fraudulent, because his stupid numbers don't add up. In fact his plan ships even more money back to many taxpayers, that already don't pay any federal income taxes. On average from what I can discern nearly $500 per family that's making under $125,000 combined. Pray tell how is that going to "balance the budget"? Oh.... it's not. It's all just talk.

***But I digress.... my point is this: There isn't a national Republican from what I can see that's worth a shit. They are all insane. The only chance to fine one that truly is a "conservative" will be at the state level. And trust me, Tim Pawlenty, Gov. of MN now running for President in 2012 is also fucking nuts and he's done his level best in ruining Minnesota.

 

[JB3]

You're getting into the area I was aiming for with my original post.

Here's the thing though. While they may call themselves 'conservatives' they're not, and no amount of argumentative contortion on the part of Jockboy will make it so. Sure, they may have adopted segments of the conservative ideology, but they are not conservatives.

To take a page out of Kuli's book; they're reactionary. They don't believe in ANYTHING except their own feelings, and their reaction to what is occurring around them. To call them conservatives is to do a disservice to people that actually ARE conservative. When someone calls these people conservatives, they only expose their own ignorance of what those terms actually mean.

 

[JB3]

I'm not.

You're still trying to pass off a fallacy as a valid argument.

And you're still showing your complete and utter ignorance about what the term means, and displaying an absolute arrogance in believing that you somehow get to rewrite what it means despite decades of history and writings that prove your argument to be a crock.

We're going to have to call this a draw.

Oh, and you still need to answer my question.

 

[JB3]

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

So predictable.

Hey, when you show your ignorance so clearly, you're going to get called on it.

Do yourself a favor and read up on what a conservative is. Until then, this discussion is over.

 

[MercuryJones]

Do yourself a favor and read up on what a conservative is. Until then, this discussion is over.

Respectfully, that's a little difficult.

There are multiple groups declaring what a conservative is. It's hard to know who to go with.

 

[JB3]

It's simply a matter of your failure to explain how you have the privilege of exception to the No Scotsman Fallacy.

I'm not defining or describing what a conservative is. I'm defending the well established logical theory of logical fallacy which you should be privy to.

Because there is no fallacy when there is a set definition of what a conservative is, backed by decades of writings and people that fit into said definition, and these people that you claim are conservatives do not.

There is no fallacy there. It is in your own delusional mind.

 

[MercuryJones]

They are all conservatives.

ReligioConservatives, PaleoConservatives, Neo-conservatives, et al. are all distinct in their own right but inextricably linked under the spectrum of right-wing social, political, and otherwise philosophies.

Not any one has the right to claim the term for themselves. Actually it seems rather egotistical.

It leaves one feeling "Conservative" is an utterly hollow term with no grounding in reality.

That's not a dig at Conservatives, but an observation that the term seems to have no definition at all.

 

[JB3]

Respectfully, that's a little difficult.

There are multiple groups declaring what a conservative is. It's hard to know who to go with.

No it isn't. You look at the sources of modern american conservatism, and go from there.

http://www.booksamillion.com/product/9780895261717
http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=d5df2f81-f030-4b92-a945-77f33929f9f1

 

[JB3]

Oh that's good.

Typically ad hominem attacks don't impress me as the harbinger of some explosive intellectual revelation.

I see you're back to your old arrogant self. And you were pretty reasonable there for a bit.

 

[ThreeCrows]

Jockboy, I think you have gotten way too tripped up with this "No True Scotsman" thing - I think most of us got it, understand it, it makes sense - good point. Definitely putting that in my back pocket for later use.

Maybe Merc could have phrased it better with the "true Conservative" part, but I understood what he meant. I think maybe you've gotten caught up in semantics and are kind of derailing this thread. You too, JB3.

As a side-note, I was very pleased to see a thread here that wasn't baiting or bullying. I think Merc was asking the JUB public for a definition of the current and varied culture of conservatism? As in, what are their commonalities?

That being said, I would also love to see a sensible post of a thread on liberal values and concerns from someone who identifies as a conservative.

 

[MercuryJones]

Thank you ThreeCrows.

As you say, this was indeed not mean to be bullying or baiting.

I do wish more people would answer my OP request however.

 

[Kulindahr]

The notion of a "true" anything is just a fallacy that belies the reality on the ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman

The No True Scotsman fallacy is a rather cheap method of escapism from an uncomfortable situation.

So...
there's no true beer, there's no true cheese, there's no true male, there's no true fish. there's no true temperature, there's no true youth, there's no true government, there's no true dog, there's no true redhead, there's no true basketball player, there's no true gay....

The amusing thing is you and others in this thread still believe, and adamantly I might add, that there are exceptions to the No True Scotsman fallacy.

There aren't.

Added to that fact is there exists no official definition for any word in English. The entire lexicon is fluid and vernacular. The word conservative means what all conservatives are or believe, not a few whom some would like to term "true." Not all Scotsmen need eat haggis.

But you're so convinced otherwise, aren't you?

You're confusing common use of words and technical use. Otherwise we'd have to insist that "mass" and "photon" and "radar" mean what most people conceive of them as. When a psychologist tells someone he's suffering from depression,do you really think he means a bad case of the blues? When a psychiatrist diagnoses schizophrenia, does he mean a form of madness where someone has different people in his head?

If words mean only what their common use establishes, then there;s no hope for actually knowing anything, because the masses of the ignorant have more say on what a word means than people who actually know.

It's simply a matter of your failure to explain how you have the privilege of exception to the No Scotsman Fallacy.

I'm not defining or describing what a conservative is. I'm defending the well established logical theory of logical fallacy which you ought to be privy to.

You're going far beyond the well-established theory and using it to demolish meaning. That dives into a fallacy of its own, one which undermines all discourse.

Because there is no fallacy when there is a set definition of what a conservative is, backed by decades of writings and people that fit into said definition, and these people that you claim are conservatives do not.

There is no fallacy there. It is in your own delusional mind.

Correct. There are works in print, scholarly works, which establish what a conservative is. As with any discipline, politics has definitions, and to abandon them for whatever is popular is to cast aside the ability to think. Meaning becomes dichotomous; words take on two or three different meanings depending on who's doing the discussing: liberal means someone who stands up for individual rights, liberal means someone who wants to stifle all individuality, liberal means socialist hiding behind another name....

The No True Scotsman fallacy applies to subjective use of terms. But not all terms are subjective. When an anthropologist speaks of matrilineal inheritance in a patriarchal tribalism, that has a very specific meaning -- an objective, established meaning set out for all to use and thus know what the other person is talking about.

JB3 is saying there is an objective definition of the word "conservative". JockBoy is replying by saying there's no such thing as objective meaning. That's an opinion to which he is certainly entitled -- but it entails the death of knowledge.

 

[Kulindahr]

It leaves one feeling "Conservative" is an utterly hollow term with no grounding in reality.

That's not a dig at Conservatives, but an observation that the term seems to have no definition at all.

At root that's what JockBoy has been arguing: that's no term has any definition at all.

There's no true definition.

 

[JB3]

Thank you ThreeCrows.

As you say, this was indeed not mean to be bullying or baiting.

I do wish more people would answer my OP request however.

Unfortunately, the other 'conservatives' here have little to no knowledge of any prominent conservatives. All you have to do is read their posts to understand that.

As I said a couple posts up, a majority of the prominent conservatives these days are not household names.

 

[MercuryJones]

Unfortunately, the other 'conservatives' here have little to no knowledge of any prominent conservatives. All you have to do is read their posts to understand that.

Well... I'm not sure anyone does since no one could name even a couple that are well known in society at large. Not even one senator or governor.

It's a shame people focused on the word "true" in my question. It wasn't intended to be a cause of disagreement, and certainly wasn't intended to invoke the *no true Scotsman* fallacy. Perhaps what I should have said was conservative as you see it.

The term conservative is tossed around a lot but I don't think there's much consensus on what it even means.

 

[JB3]

Well... I'm not sure anyone does since no one could name even a couple that are well known in society at large. Not even one senator or governor.

It's a shame people focused on the word "true" in my question. It wasn't intended to be a cause of disagreement, and certainly wasn't intended to invoke the *no true Scotsman* fallacy. Perhaps what I should have said was conservative as you see it.

The term conservative is tossed around a lot but I don't think there's much consensus on what it even means.

There is a consensus if you ask people that actually know what they're talking about. Look, there is a documented 'paper trail' of what the term means in terms of American politics. Its black and white. There is no in between, and there is no room whatsoever for the type of B.S. Jockboy was pulling.

If people can't name a prominent conservative it isn't because they don't exist. Its because the republican party, which WAS the party of conservatives, has been hijacked.

BTW: this has happened before. In the 40s and 50s conservatives were largely an underground movement because of the aftermath of the new deal. They couldn't find their voice. They only emerged when they saw public discontent emerging with government intrusion into private lives and the 'big government' of that era.

Its happening again. Conservatives just can't quite find their voice. They're missing people like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley that were able to eloquently express what conservatives believed in and why it was a viable alternative. When its found, they'll become much more known.

 

[Kulindahr]

Subsets in a group simply cannot claim the title of the group for themselves to the exclusion of others in that group.

Perhaps, but people who aren't what a word indicates can still claim it as their title.

However, one may argue that other subsets do not share the historical legacy behind that title. Such can be called historical definition, but it is not the same as the definition in current use. But what use is that outside of intellectual discussions? When you say conservative, people know what it means, and most of those people are neither historical nor political scholars.

The point of the thread was an intellectual discussion. You're trying to mess that up by introducing a claim of fallacy which doesn't apply.

BTW, if you asked ten people on the street what "conservative" meant, just how clear a definition do you expect there'd be?

I also appreciated your use of the word "schizophrenia" as an analogy. The term is interesting in its stark difference between professional and vulgar use. In vulgar use, it refers to a personality disorder presenting multiple personalities. That is not the strict definition in professional applications. Nevertheless, the definition of a word in English is that which people can understand. If you say something, and someone you don't necessarily know or recognize understands exactly what you are referring to, it is then a word with indisputable and absolute semantic meaning.

Now I'm off to watch Me, Myself, and Irene.

^^^

Again that's merely a definition of conservative you would like to be predominant, but which today actually is not. Paleoconservatism in America is as dead as Barry Goldwater, and no amount of defensive historical reminiscence is going to make your exclusive claim of the term "conservative" a fact.

"True" is simply not a valid synonym for "historical." It is an escapist fallacy meant to exclude others whom you do not like from the group you belong to.

You sure don'[t want words to have meaning!

BTW, I didn't know we were discussing groups to which someone here might belong.

 

[Kulindahr]

Not up to you or JB3 to decide that, or for them to decide that you are not what you say you are and what people understand you to be.

Again you strive to throw out meaning.

All you're dealing with is the subjective realm. In the objective, words have specific meanings, regardless of the behavior of those who are ignorant.

 

[Kulindahr]

Meaning or definitions has nothing to do with my argument. But since you have pushed me I will now get involved.

The reason there is such a debate at all is the very broad meaning of the word. Conservatives believe in limiting change and preserving the status quo. Now in America, this breaks down along countless lines, some of which adhere to the historical meaning of the term and some which do not. All of them, regardless of a selfish and antagonistic desire to claim the title for themselves, are conservatives. Now you recognize that the word means different things to different people. JB3 comes to the table with the historical and more dubiously an official explanation of sorts, which after all, is only one of many in a sea of opinions. The definition of a conservative in the US has changed dramatically since the 60s. Everybody here I'm sure knows that very well. But it doesn't mean that Rockefeller Republicans are conservatives, and George W Bush is not, just because yours or his definition is historical or grounded in a white tower.

So if enough people started calling their dogs sheep, they'd become sheep. If enough people called war "discipline", it would be discipline. If enough people called burning gays at the stake "freedom" it really would ne freedom.

You argue for the right of anyone whom wants to take on a label to change the meaning of the word used. In the sloppy sciences, one must roll with that -- and have your writings become irrelevant the next time there's a new fad in thinking -- but in technical discussions words mean what they mean, and that's that; it doesn't make any difference what someone calls themselves, but what they actually are.

What has changed since the 60s is not what constitutes a conservative, but the abuse of the terms by liberals and the media.