How can anyone with AS be a conservative?

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I'm not sure if my post came across as overly aggressive or negative, (I'm not very good at calibrating that, this is an AS site right?) but it wasn't meant to be.

The last bit that I have emboldened is sort of my point.

As an outsider looking in the breadth and depth of political debate seems incredibly narrow and shallow in the US. In Europe we have actual fascist parties that take to their national parliament in uniforms. We have actual communist (not socialist or social democrat but proper communist) parties. We have green parties, we have christian parties and we even have pirate parties etc etc

In the US not only is none of this stuff talked about in mainstream political discourse, but it isn't taught in political studies in ivy league universities and not even by the professors of political science because they are 'ideas that are not considered to have any relevance'.

There are two political choices, there are two sides to every debate and only two. Both of those positions incredibly closely positioned on the political spectrum in reality, but when you have no room to debate on a larger field or any concept that a larger field even exists, the two positions seem to be miles apart.

For what it's worth, we in the USA did have a tea bagger running for office who had been an SS reenactor, and had posed for a photo in his Nazi uniform.
That pretty well had been the death knell for his political career. Particularly since his uniform was keeping with his political philosophy.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Where did I say conservatives aren't bullied or lack emotions? As for making snap judgements based on feelings, how ironic it is that you just judged me based on what you mistakenly think I think rather than what I actually said.

Look who's the one trying to personalize the argument and turn it into a flame-fest with idiotic assumptions and judgements on others. Are you really that ignorant as to what you are doing? You do not get that you are acting like an a**hole?


DO NOT TELL ME WHAT I THINK. TRY ACTUALLY READING MY WORDS. I SAID NOTHING ABOUT RACE.


blahblahblahblah.... I said nothing about race.


So you don't like rational arguments? How about this?

I don't like your moral relativism garbage. I'm a moral absolutist. I'm absolutely right and you're absolutely wrong. Suck it.

In all seriousness, I really do think conservatives are the moral relativists.


The problem with charity is people in general aren't generous enough. People give to make themselves feel good, but if someone is struggling outside their immediate view they simply won't notice. Government gets the job done. Charity doesn't. Charity isn't dependable. Replace the social safety net with charity and people will suffer. That is immoral.

Came out a bit that way, but not too poorly.


Well, the difference is that the US is institutionally a 2 party system, both likely unintentionally, but also because this system reinforces itself. There are third parties, but they have less relevance. So, the US has green parties. The US has communist parties. The US has Christian parties. However, these parties have no electoral importance.

Instead, because there are two parties, the debate functions in two tiers:
1) Rallying the party. This is a matter of establishing coalitions within the political structure of the party, which means appealing to cultural subgroups within the party as well as those who see the party as holding a core ideology.
2) Appealing to the mainstream voter. This latter functions as according to the median voter theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem , as parties are not awarded for taking the radical positions, but rather by taking positions that appeal better to the mainstream. This necessarily narrows the debate and will likely tend to make it a bit shallower.


I think you misread my last comment.

"Not considered to have relevance" is a statement about US academic discourse, not US political discourse. US academics do not consider Chinese political philosophy to be very relevant to the areas that they consider most valuable to progressing our knowledge. That's all I meant. You seem to think I was talking about mainstream political discourse, and I really was not. Plato is not considered to have mainstream relevance, but he has LOTS of academic relevance in philosophy departments and is discussed with great frequency. Most Western political philosophers, however, are self-consciously members of the Western traditions of philosophy, they are also Analytical philosophers, and members of the Liberal political tradition extending back to the Enlightenment. There are exceptions, but usually not notable enough to warrant much discussion at an undergraduate level except in specialized coursework.

Even further, outside of the official politics, there are a large number of groupings, such as:
Neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, social conservatives, theonomists, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, left-libertarians, left-anarchists, social democrats, communists, business conservatives, greens, feminists, neo-Nazis, South admirers, the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party www.nazi.org . These groups tend to require digging a bit deeper, but variations on the themes can and do exist.

So.... I will ask you to clarify a bit. After all, even though I am from the US, I don't believe that I am somehow less educated on the political possibilities because of that, and most of the scholars I have even bothered to read have tended to be US scholars or ones who have spent a significant period of time in the US.

Well there's a reason there are only two political choices. On the one side there are right-wing Republicans who feed off a noxious popular meme that has infected this nation. On the other side there are the people who think these people are crazy and must be stopped at all costs, even if it means voting for the "lesser evil" (i.e. the Democrats) who in practice aren't really any better.

That's not really the reason though. Many other nations have multi-party systems, including noxious and twisted parties. The issue has to be particular to the US's culture or institutions, and I would honestly guess it really is institutional, particularly given that the two major parties will pass legislation making it harder for a third party to gain power.

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

In case you didn't figure it out, he was essentially mocking the Nazis, Communists, etc.

Because national bankruptcy and a destroyed currency is bad for everyone?

Not that I buy your bullcrap false dichotomy here. Talk about inflammatory.

A conservative is someone who only changes the law when the current law has demonstrably failed or there is a good reason to do so. A conservative is a traditionalist who has the humility to admit that no mortal knows fully why some societal rules succeed while others fail, so one should not change them hastily.

A liberal is someone who would NOT have a law without a demonstrable failure or a good reason to enact one. A liberal believes no law should exist where no good reason for it exists.

This is obviously not a dichotomy. There are many laws conservatives and liberals agree on. In fact, logically if we were to let both philosophies run their course it could be argued they would come to the same conclusions as to what the rules of society should be.

The problem is the powers that be, let's call them reactionaries or authoritarians, have an interest in spreading discord among those who wish to be free. They create this false conflict between red and blue based on issues whose classification doesn't even make sense. For example, how did reactionary ideas such as gun prohibition become championed by so-called 'liberals' and pre-emptive war championed by so-called 'conservatives'?

It sounds like you have fallen into one of these many traps and have spread vitriol against your fellow man based on nothing but straw.

(stay tuned next time where I expose Republicans as the original progressives and explain pre-Marxian leftist class warfare a la Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot).

Can you repeat that please?

I've seen those words before but they don't seem to fit together in a sentence...



We have a two party system in Britain, we have our fair share of 'political theatre' at PMQ's or on newsnight, but you can still see politicians with opposing views sit and debate a subject in a rational manner.

Of late the US seems to have turned the rhetoric up to 11 and forgotten how to turn it down when the cameras aren't running, this knocks on to the quality of debate that takes place in the media and in between 'Joe the plumbers' down the pub or online. All reasoned discussion has been replaced by very angry people screaming that the other group are slaves of satan put on earth to destroy america.

This vast irreconcilable gulf that apparently exists between Republican and Democrat parties seems very small from over here, but maybe that is just because we are further away.

Uh... I wasn't talking about Glenn Beck. Rather, I was talking about a tea bagger in the Midwest who had run for either congress or senate. As I had said in my earlier post, a photo of him wearing his SS uniform sealed his political fate. That, and that on his bio, he identified his profession as soldier. In fact, he was an unpaid member of a local militia of some sort.
I believe his re-enacting group, the Viking division, still has a video on Youtube.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I don't use the socialized health care system we have in Ontario, other than to get a few pills every 2 months - ten 2mg clonazepam tablets - the most they'll give me. I will not ever call 911 if I am the victim of a crime.

Healthcare is sickcare. At least here.

Conservatives aren't just only white heterosexual men, with no problems.

They cross every creed, colour, and ability, my friend.

Whether you want to call it conservative or libertarian the answer is not complicated. The idea of rugged individuality is going to be appealing if you are have had a lot of pain from lifelong pressere of bieng made to conform to everybody else. If your earliest experience is public schools be it the informal methods when I went to school or ABA today your pain was experienced in a government institution.

That's a pretty good answer. I was raised with very liberal values. I'm still socially fairly liberal (don't think it's the law's place to decide who can marry whom, what toilet to use, what to do with a pregnancy you don't want, although I have my own vociferous opinions). I don't know where I stand fiscally any more.

I stopped considering myself a liberal because I'm sick of seeing "help" perpetuate the problem. I threw in the towel when a bunch of raving liberals tried to drag me, drugged and unresisting, into a disability fraud scam. Now I just want to be left the f**k alone to do for myself and my own. With or without society.

I don't agree with any political party or platform. I find the Christian Right to be pretty damn offensive, but the PC Left is just as offensive if not more so.

I call BS on the lot of it, but I feel pretty conservative these days.

This thread is almost 5 years old----NOT that it's not still relevant; it's just that the person you're addressing hasn't been here in almost 5 years, and probably won't respond. That's one of the reasons most of us have stopped bringing-up these old threads, and just start new ones. The (previous / old) threads listed at the bottom of current threads are there to drive traffic to this site----NOT that you can't still respond to them, it's just that others may not join in the conversation because of the thread's age.

Because even though I have AS, I also don't fall for the whole narrative of the "majority oppressor" or that anyone who is AS is "voting against his interests" or isn't a "real" aspie. Who knows? Maybe OP is the one voting against his own self-interests by voting for the left?

Ironically some of the traits associated with AS and OCPD (rigidity, adherence to rules, resistance to change, etc) sound like the psychologically tie into conservatism moreso than liberalism.

Plus there are different types of "conservatives" anyway; unilaterally equating conservatism with "laizziz faire" economics shows a lack of understanding. (e.x. a lot of conservatives in European countries or the UK don't have the objections to universal health care that many US conservatives do for example).