What the hell happened to Texas?Follow

Well, yeah. Women are kind of troublesome when they have opinions and autonomy and shit

Edited, Oct 19th 2011 8:42pm by Sweetums

That's why we leave them in the kitchen.

That's a fascinating if bizarre strawman there.

What do you think that "liberal" means in the modern political context? What do liberals fight for? What political principles are they operating under? Do you even have a clue? You use the word "liberal" and assume it means "person fighting for liberty", then you assume everything done by liberals must be about liberty. And when bad things result, you assume it can't have been because of the actions of liberals, because by definition that just can't be true!


It's an amazing bit of circular logic going on. Modern liberal movements are based on the political philosophy of social liberalism. That philosophy believes that using the government to create positive outcomes is more important than preventing government from infringing on the individual lives of the people. This manifests in the use of large government programs to provide needed benefits for the people and a willingness to take from individuals within the population to pay for those things. When you say "tax the rich more to pay for benefits for the poor" in any form, you are acting on that philosophy.


The problem is that said philosophy allows for any amount of this. The same exact principles gave us the Soviet Union, and Communist China, and Cuba, and North Korea, and Cambodia, and a dozen other absolutely horribly authoritarian regimes over the last century. The reason is that once you've accepted that the government is the means by which prosperity of the people is to be obtained, then you can justify any act by that government because it's always by definition acting in the best interests of the people.

How many times have people on this forum argued that the government *is* the people? Think about what you're doing mentally when you do that. You're arguing that you can't blame government for its actions because it is us. I could list off dozens more examples of the kinds of dangerous thinking that results from this. But the larger point is that most of the worst examples of authoritarian regimes in the last century have grown from that social liberalist political philosophy. But when they do occur, liberals work hard to distance themselves from them. Just as many of you are doing in this thread right now.


If you support raising taxes on the rich to pay for benefits for the poor, you support authoritarian government. If you believe in free health care, you support authoritarian government. If you support welfare, you support authoritarian government. Being a liberal in the modern context *is* about supporting authoritarian government. You just assume it'll only be just as authoritarian as it needs to be to do the things that *you* want. And when governments go beyond that point, you condemn them and say that they weren't really "liberal". They were something else. It wasn't the people giving government too much power over them that lead to oppressive authoritarianism, it must have been some other evil thing unrelated to that!


I just find it amusing and scary how easily so many people rationalize that away.

EDIT: The "3" in example is silent.

Edited, Oct 20th 2011 2:10pm by gbaji

Texas doesn't fund abortions, hon.

Doesn't stop them from making women have medically unnecessary ultrasounds.




Edited, Oct 20th 2011 5:22pm by Sweetums

Why, does he also go around given women ultrasounds they don't need? That's kinda creepy.

I figured you'd be able to understand that it was directed towards an earlier comment, but I guess I was mistaken. Weren't you the one who was arguing that gay marriage was too expensive, anyway? If it were about cost, abortions are cheaper than welfare and marriage

Remember, "a modern liberal is someone who believes that the government has a responsibility to directly involve itself in some aspect of society in order to make society better!" I guess Perry is the new liberal poster child.


Edited, Oct 20th 2011 6:02pm by Sweetums

All of your posts are reposts so it's not like it matters

Oh, I figured it out. I was just curious why you quoted an unrelated section of the conversation instead of the "earlier comment".



Abortion is a poor case to bring up though. It's one that isn't about cost. At least I'm not aware of any conservative who opposes abortion on a cost issue. For those who oppose abortion, it's about a moral question of when life begins and when a right to life should be applied.

This obviously gets further complicated when the issue of state funding for abortion comes up, because then you've got both the moral argument *and* the cost argument.


But for the record, IMO it's unfair to compare one cost against another. The conservative response is that we shouldn't be paying welfare in the first place and then the comparison doesn't exist. You are responsible for your own choices. Pushing the cost of those choices on others is unfair to the rest of us.



Not sure what specifically you're referring to, but I'd agree that at least a few things Perry has done are not well in line with conservative political principles. To be fair though, most politicians are going to have some things in their past like this though. Principles are goals. You can't always obtain them. Politics often requires compromise. But I don't think the fact that you can find examples of conservative politicians compromising on some issues magically means that we (or I) should just abandon the principles themselves.


Surely, you don't expect people to abandon their opposition to say detainees in Gitmo just because Obama failed to do anything about it. Yet that's basically the argument you seem to be making with regard to conservatives. Because politicians aren't perfect, we should give up? That seems somewhat self defeating, doesn't it?

Edited, Oct 20th 2011 4:37pm by gbaji

Nobody rocks a No True Scotsman quite like gbaji.

Well, unless you meant negative correlation, you've got that wrong. Fiscal liberalism and social conservatism lead to more authoritarian governments.

Fiscal liberalism kinda requires the gov't to, you know, act in a fiscally liberal manner. China can pretend to be communist all they want, but in reality they aren't even remotely so. And it's not because they are socially conservative, it's because they are an authoritarian regime that focuses total social, political and economic power in a small number of individuals, which is fundamentally incompatible with communism.

You're caught up on the labels. What do those things mean?


Do you get that the point I'm trying to get across here is that "social conservative" doesn't really mean what most people assume it does? Most people assume that it means "social policies supported by conservatives". But then when they point to the policies themselves, in most cases they *aren't* things that are really connected with conservative political positions. They really mean "religious/ethically based social policies" which is not the same thing.

The policies actually associated with being conservative are about smaller government. Hence, when Santorum opposes funding for contraceptives, he may have some moral angle in mind as well, but he's operating in a way that limits government, not that increases its power. The policies which are intersections of religious and conservative are the ones which do both, but those don't lead to authoritarian government.


I guess I just can't accept how you can separate fiscal liberalism and social liberalism (or whatever labels you want to use). One leads to the other. Liberals make social rules in support of their fiscal polices. And those are just as authoritarian. When they fund things that they like, that's increasing the authoritarian nature of government. Subsidizing green energy? That's authoritarian, right? Yet, it also certainly is designed to influence social behavior, right? The whole point is to get people to buy a different product than they would other wise. How the hell is that not "social" policy?


And it's absolutely authoritarian. When you are using the power of the government to attempt to get people to change their behavior and choices you are imposing a socially authoritarian rule. I just can't figure out where the mental block on this concept comes from. To me, one cannot be separated from the other. This is doubly strange given that a high percentage of liberal fiscal policy is dedicated to and justified by the intended social effects. We want people to use public transportation instead of cars, so we tax and regulate cars more while subsidizing mass transit. There are a host of examples I could give of liberal fiscal policies which have direct social goals as well.


Hell. The whole CRA thing. Let's help poor people own homes! Is that fiscal liberalism or social liberalism? Aren't they really just one and the same? I would argue that the justification for the lefts fiscal policy *is* social (actually I did earlier). Is anyone arguing that it's not? We welfare, and social security, and medicare/caid, and public education, and a whole hell of a lot of other stuff for purely fiscal reasons? I think they're all about social changes that we want to create, and the overwhelming majority of that stuff comes from the political left, not the political right.


I think that some of you are making the mistake of assuming that "authoritarian" just means when government is making people do things you don't like. That's a bad definition to use though.

Edited, Oct 20th 2011 7:46pm by gbaji