Why am I Conservative?

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by Phdtobe, Feb 14, 2019.

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  1. Stanislav

    Stanislav Well-Known Member

    Adapting to a host society is practical prerequisite for any kind of success. "Assimilation", on the other hand, is not a valid moral imperative. What immigrant owes to society is the same as what the local does: obey the laws, pay for your food with legitimately-obtained funds. And enjoy all the freedoms America so generously offers (freedom of speech, religion, and political organization among them).

    America was built around ideals of pluralism. William Penn's practice of religious tolerance as the ruler of a colony was, for a religious person, already more radical idea than mere cultural (let's be honest: racial) diversity for a modern man. Ditto the Bill of Rights. So maybe, just maybe, those who try to import discredited European blood-and-soil rhetoric should maybe go and adapt to America. Also, notion that "unassimilated masses" of predominantly Catholic Hispanics are a "threat to Western Civilisation" is ludicrous. And btw: yeah, they were here more or less forever. Want to help them "assimilate"? Stop resisting "amnesty".
     
    Filmmaker2Be and SteveFoerster like this.
  2. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I believe that the trajectory of cultural evolution points toward increased individuation/differentiation along with increased integration. People will feel freer to be who/what they are and we will all become more closely connected. Resistance to this dynamic is futile :rolleyes:
     
  3. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  4. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    No, it's not off-topic at all.

    This seems to be the work of refugees from the failed Weekly Standard. Their vision doesn't sound very ambitious: a "newsletter", then a website, ultimately perhaps a magazine. (They already failed once with a magazine, so they should have that part down.)

    They call themselves 'conservatives', but it's hard to see what justifies their use of that word. More importantly for a media company, it's hard to see who their target audience is supposed to be. The Weekly Standard seemed focused at the lobbyist, 'think-tank' and public employee population inside the Washington DC beltway.

    That might be an influential readership inside the halls of the Congressional office building, but not very numerous in either magazine circulation terms or among voters out where elections are actually won and lost.

    That was their big failure. It led to the financial demise of the Weekly Standard, which had long been a money-loser subsidized by rich patrons, and it led to the publication's editors' and writers' increasing irrelevance in pure political terms.

    What they failed to see and still refuse to see, is that their lobbyist-driven big-business agenda was increasingly out of tune with the concerns of everyday conservative voters. No, America's biggest problem is not lowering taxes on the rich.

    Most conservative voters out in the real world would probably prefer to eat the rich. They aren't that different from the democratic party base in that regard. The big difference is on social issues. These voters are concerned with preserving their jobs, their families, their communities, their culture and their values. They aren't likely to be attracted to a democratic party whose biggest interests seem to be stoking divisive identity politics, promoting the interests of illegals and normalizing transvestites. (That might be a popular agenda in parts of LA, but not so much out in Middle America.)

    Conservative voters are increasingly unwilling to follow, subscribe to, or vote for representatives of self-styled elites who sneeringly consider their own voters little more than ignorant rabble. (That's what the Bush dynasty, Mitt Romney and "Jeb!" ended up communicating to voters. It's what every issue of the Weekly Standard communicated.)

    Voters want to elect representatives who really are representatives, people who listen to the voters' concerns and work in the halls of power to address them. Representatives whose agenda in the halls of power are the agendas of those who elected them, not the agendas of lobbyists, donors, and the permanent population of the "deep state" nomenklatura.

    This new "media company" seems to be preparing to make all the same political mistakes. It seems blind to the kind of historical trends that are transforming politics both here in America and in Europe as we speak.
     
    Last edited: Feb 28, 2019
  5. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

  6. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    I would attempt to answer you, but you're going to "see" and "read into" anything I say whatever will make you feel most comfortable because you don't want to acknowledge any truth in what I'm saying. So, I'm not going to waste my time explaining, again, what should have been understood in the first place. You're a very intelligent man and it really sucks that you're pretending to not understand what I'm saying because you either don't like what I'm saying or it makes you uncomfortable. But, that's your choice. At one time I used to care, but I really just don't anymore. Think what you want to think. Have a nice day.
     
  7. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    1. You keep ignoring the point I made that immigrants aren't the only people expected to assimilate in this country.
    2. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt by saying that you were using the word "assimilate" when you really meant "adapt". But, you've disabused me of that notion by plainly stating your position that adapting isn't good enough and that you are an advocate of "assimilation or nothing". So, I apologize for thinking better of you.
    3. Your whole point of view is textbook/classic white supremacist. That's your right, so okay.
    4. But, it's also my right not to assimilate. I would rather die than give any of you white supremacists that "win".
    5. This dialogue is over. We do not agree and that's okay. We can agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
     
  8. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    I am not in favor of increased integration. Integration has been a disaster for American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS). As a whole, we were much better off before integration. We might have been poor, but we had strong families, strong social and educational institutions, and strong moral values. We're a hot ass mess, now. No, integration was not the answer. Hindsight is 20/20.

    Did you know that in 1967 Dr. King told NBC News that he feared he had led his people into a burning house, referring to integration? Here are the words right out of his own mouth:
     
  9. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    Kizmet,

    My 10 minute time limit to edit the post had elapsed, so I had to write this post.

    I made a mistake above. Dr. King didn't say that he feared he led his people into a burning house. At around the 19 minute mark, he mentioned that James Baldwin said what good was it to integrate a burning house. To me, Dr. King was acknowledging the truth in Baldwin's statement. But, he was not the one who said that. So, my apologies for misquoting him.

    However, although Dr. King didn't make the statement about integrating a burning house, at around the 22 minute mark he said that his dream had turned into a nightmare in many ways. Here's a quick breakdown of the video by minute marks:

    12:25 - MLK announces a new phase/era of the Civil Rights Movement
    19:00 - MLK quotes James Baldwin... here's where "integrating a burning house" comes into the picture
    22:30 - MLK says his dream turned into a nightmare in many ways

    Sorry about any confusion.
     
  10. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Not only am I not uncomfortable, I'm making it a point not to mince words, since otherwise people from different perspectives cannot have the real conversations that this issue requires. I'm not trolling you; it's not my goal to say things you dislike. It's just that it's not my goal to avoid doing so if that's what I really think, and I accept the same in return. Fair enough?

    That's an interesting perspective. How do you believe that integration caused that, and what would you suggest as an alternative?
     
  11. Helpful2013

    Helpful2013 Active Member

    It seems as if there’s a new dialectic in town: “Listeners either agree with me or have misunderstood what I’m saying.” This approach (that is usually a red flag for lack of a good argument) results in statements equivalent to:

    1. Your disagreement can only be due to lack of comprehension, which is your fault.


    2. You’ve said something, but I can tell that since you don’t agree with me, you’re actually thinking something else.


    3. You disagreed with me, which can only be willful misinterpretation, so let me tell you what your heinous motives are for that willful misinterpretation.


    There are plenty of legitimate reasons to disagree, but this barrier to genuine dialogue is the wrong way to disagree.
     
  12. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Thanks for this
     
  13. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    If you're so in favor of "genuine dialogue" why are you not dealing with the major/real issue I brought up - adaptation versus assimilation in the context of cultural assimilation? Why are you launching an ad hominem attack against me instead? Stop deflecting. Deal with the issue I brought up.

    With so many educated people on this forum, you expect me to believe that members really don't know (or can't do a quick search to find out) the difference between 'adapt' and 'assimilate'? You really expect me believe that on this forum? With all the eggheads we have on here? Get real. You're such a fake, pretending that you want "genuine dialogue" but being so disingenuous about it at the same time. Do you think you're dealing with Boo-Boo the Fool?

    Adapt means to adjust or modify fittingly. Modify means to partially amend. Do you see the similarity? Let me help you, because I know you're still going to try to play dumb. "Modifying fittingly" and "partially amending", in the context of cultural assimilation, mean making just enough changes to achieve the desired outcome. This is exactly what "fitting in" is. But, according to the OPs own follow-up post, that's not what he meant. What he did mean was true, full, assimilation.

    Assimilation is, according to Britannica.com, "the process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society. The process of assimilating involves taking on the traits of the dominant culture to such a degree that the assimilating group becomes socially indistinguishable from other members of the society. As such, assimilation is the most extreme form of acculturation."

    So, then, the question one must ask is "What does 'socially indistinguishable' mean in the context of cultural assimilation or acculturation (says Britannica)?" <== This is what many members of the above "dominant culture", which in the USA are European-descendant people, don't want to talk about. This is the crux of the matter. I believe I know why, but you don't really want to have that conversation.

    Furthermore, I don't know if you read my signature line, but my first degree is in SOCIOLOGY. What's not in my signature is that I also attended law school. Lupus prevented me from finishing which is why it's not in my signature. But, make no mistake, this topic is totally in my wheelhouse. Add my almost 50 years of lived experience as an African Descendant of Slaves (ADOS) in the USA to my academics, and I am very well qualified to give my take (educated opinion) on this topic with some measure of authority.

    But, you might want to ask yourself why my take triggered you so much. I'm from the Deep South, and we have a saying down here: "Only a hit dog will holler." I must have struck a nerve. Good. Now, deal with the real issue and stop trying to deflect with ad hominem attacks against me.

    Ad hominem attacks - when an argument is rejected, or advanced, based on a personal characteristic of an individual rather than on reasons for or against the claim itself.
     
  14. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    Except for when people really ARE being misunderstood for whatever reason.
     
  15. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Does that mean you'd refer to someone who feels at ease in more than one culture to have adapted rather than assimilated?
     
  16. Helpful2013

    Helpful2013 Active Member

    I’m not the person you were arguing with previously regarding adapting or assimilating. But if you actually want to engage the other people on this forum in dialogue, or win people over to your point of view, you’re going about it in a way that is not only self-defeating, it’s also shutting down dialogue on a board that I enjoy visiting and want to make sure remains a place people can come share their views.

    And incidentally, that’s a misuse of the phrase ad hominem. My pointing out the problems created by your way of disagreeing is entirely the opposite of an “ad hominem attack”, it’s directed at your method, not you, not even the case you might make.
     
  17. Stanislav

    Stanislav Well-Known Member

    Sometimes a banana is simply banana. I believe that hierophant's adapt/assimilate trick is borderline dishonest. Being able to write competent paragraphs is not the same as arguing in good faith. Separately, I find position hiero tries to advance problematic (or, technically speaking, "deplorable" ;)).

    PS: Hierophant spent multiple posts "innocently" making fun of the name of Alexandra Chalupa, an American of Ukrainian descent who, by all metrics, is as "adapted" (or "assimilated") as it gets. More so than hierophant's fellow white supremacist and peripheral Trump figure, Sebastian Gorka (a Hungarian-American), and to same degree my own daughters are Canadian. So he should not have any problem taking it when someone criticizes his nationalist-socialist (yep, that's right) views.
     
    Filmmaker2Be likes this.
  18. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    I was unaware of this guy. As the Boston Globe describes him, his campaign sounds Quixotic. I can't really imagine him winning a single Republican primary.

    Despite his posturing as the moderate, the rational one, the grownup in the room, his rhetoric is all about expressing his own emotions, his own personal animosity. He doesn't like Trump personally. (Has he ever met the President?)

    What Weld doesn't seem to realize is that most of Trump's voters voted for the President because they agreed with him on his issues. They oppose open borders and the idea that whether or not American law applies to somebody depends on that person's ethnicity. They oppose foreign and trade policies that seem designed to please foreigners and often aren't perceived to be in the interest of the American people. They oppose the incessant identity-politics that tries to divide the American people into hostile contending groups always at each others' throats. They oppose the trend towards political correctness that attempts to control what ideas can and can't be expressed, even in higher education which is ostensibly about free exploration of ideas.

    That's why voters support Donald Trump. It isn't his personality or his celebrity. So Weld's highly emotional personal animosity towards Trump is largely irrelevant to Trump's voters and they aren't likely to be moved by it. What are Weld's issues? The only one mentioned in the Boston Globe story is the deficit. An important issue, but not #1 on the average voter's list of concerns. If the United States doesn't even exist in recognizable form in 50 years, who cares if we pile debt on it? If we aren't supposed to identify with the America of the past (the America our parents loved and worked to build) and the America of the present, why should we give a shit about whatever bears the 'America' name in the future?

    The fact that Weld is a former Massachusetts governor that the rest of the country has never heard of won't work in his favor in the Republican primaries. The fact that he wasn't even a Republican in 2016 and that he only seems to have changed his party registration in order to oppose Trump won't help him. The fact that he passionately supported Hillary in 2016 certainly won't help him.

    The Boston Globe story mentions a poll that shows that many Republican voters are willing to vote for somebody other than Trump in the primaries. It also mentions that Trump's approval rating is something like 90% among Republicans. Probably the best way of interpreting that is that Republican primary voters like Trump's agenda, but they are willing to vote for somebody that they perceive is more effective at realizing it.

    So if Weld thinks that these polls give his candidacy some hope, he's just spitting into the wind in my opinion. I'd be tremendously surprised to see him win a single Republican primary.
     
    Last edited: Mar 5, 2019
  19. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    Yes, fair enough. I am almost 50 years old. I was one of those people who believed that all it would take for ADOS* and white people to come together was genuine dialogue (long overdue) and mutual understanding. I was so optimistic. But, the truth is that I have had so few encounters with white people who really, truly wanted genuine dialogue that it has gotten to me. I'm willing to truthfully dialogue with you (and anyone else), but you all have to be as willing to listen to and accept my lived experiences as an ADOS in the USA as much as you want me to listen to and accept your points of view.

    I have found that the first response to anything that ADOS say is a very strong, and negative, knee-jerk reaction. It's like most of you go on auto-pilot and automatically start denying and trying to delegitimize everything we say while, at the same time, not even hearing what we're saying. In this case, I am saying "we", because I've communicated with enough ADOS and read enough writings by ADOS to know that what I'm describing is common. I will only speak in terms of the entire ADOS community when I know that what I'm writing is a common point of view among us. Otherwise, I will (as I have done previously) only speak to my own experiences.

    *ADOS means American Descendants of Slaves. We used to be called African-American, which is a misnomer. We have started making the distinction for many reasons, which are not appropriate for me to talk about here.

    Integration gave us a false sense of equality and freedom (among other things, if we had true freedom and equality we wouldn't have to beg for basic things like not to be gunned down by police because they're "scared" of black people, particularly unarmed black males, regardless of age). With this false sense of equality and freedom we started trying to prove that we could keep up with Euro-descendants in every facet of life and, as a result, our cohesiveness as a community suffered. Under segregation we had higher home ownership, owned more businesses and our families were more intact than today. We have literally gone backwards in every metric that matters. Under segregation, we had no choice but to start our own banks, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, department stores, general stores, etc. Integration coupled with discriminatory federal policies destroyed all of that and we haven't recovered.

    The alternative is for us to get back to building and sticking to our own communities. The Latinos do it. The Ashkenazim do it. The Chinese do it. Every ethnic minority group in the USA does it, except us. Yes, we were the largest targets when we were (past tense) doing it (ex: the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 that literally erased the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK), but we shouldn't have given up the way we did. Or, we shouldn't have stayed down after being knocked down. But, when integration became the law of the land we started running after everything Euro-descendants had, trying to prove that we were good enough to have it too. Yes, we were and are, but we neglected our own self-interest. I honestly believe, in my heart of hearts, that the people who most benefited from desegregation were the Euro-descendants. Y'all got our money and we regressed.

    So, we need to get back to basics, living in and funding our own communities. We need to stop going to Euro-descent owned banks and the federal government begging for loans and "rights". We can't get our best interests met because we don't have any politicians in our corner, and we all know that politicians are all about the money (special interest groups). We're too busy entertaining ourselves into oblivion, and that needs to stop, too. Our spending power right at the end of 2017 was 1.2 trillion dollars according to the Nielsen report Black Dollars Matter: The Sales Impact of Black Consumers.

    In 2011 our spending power was 836 billion dollars. According to Larry Elder, in this 2014 article, if ADOS were a country we'd have been the 16th richest country in the world. We'd have been #44 if considering our purchasing power parity. That's out of 195 countries in the world. Using 2011 data ($836 billion). We're now at more than a trillion dollars. We don't need to be begging the government, or people of the USA, for anything! At one time, we didn't - because we knew that we would be wasting our time. Now, we act like we can't do anything without the government. Integration and our bogus appointed "leaders" did that.

    We as ADOS are too diffused throughout the USA. Those of us who are responsible for this buying power need to come together and build new ADOS communities in sparsely populated states where there is land to be had. We need men who have construction skills and know how to build to build, so everything in the community can be built debt-free by the men who live in the community. If you have the collective labor, all you need to buy is the supplies. We also need to follow Dr. Claud Anderson's PowerNomics plan. Those who don't want to do this can still implement the PowerNomics plan on a smaller scale in their local cities. Of course, this is an oversimplification because there's just too much that goes into this to outline it all on a forum. But, this is enough for you to get the gist. Basically, we need to re-segregate ourselves as much as possible, and then stop asking or accepting any money from the government (local, state, or federal) for our own good.
     
  20. Filmmaker2Be

    Filmmaker2Be Active Member

    Yes. I have no problem with adapting. I've adapted. It's necessary sometimes and some issues aren't big enough to make a stink about. But, I will never assimilate and throw away my own history and culture to take on somebody else's. There's a way to keep the good of both/any while discarding the bad of both/any. Use what's good and leave the rest.
     

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