Plato wanted a benevolent dictatorship, run by philosopher-kings of supreme virtue who had no self-interest and altruistic motivation. If that matches your idea of Donald Trump, then send us a postcard from your planet some time, so we can avoid it. X-) — Wayfarer

Amazing the number of people who can't or won't recognise a demagogue when one appears. — Wayfarer

I did play the flute, but I gave it to my cousin. — Mongrel

Let him be, then — Heister Eggcart

You are right, I'll go play my flute :D — Agustino

I agree. He's my favorite philosopher. — Mongrel

Uh.. don't know about that. — Mongrel

My speculation has been that it was a massive emotional response to Schopenhauer's pessimism — Mongrel

That's bad chess strategy right there. Pawns are important, pawns are valuable, and the player who sacrifices them for no or little advantage will quickly lose. — unenlightened

It's beyond laughter at this point. The Joker has the Button. — Wayfarer

respect in sex(just not necessarily with one person) — TheWillowOfDarkness

It the obsessions of vengemce — TheWillowOfDarkness

'Turning the other cheek' is 'slave mentality' for Nietsche. — Wayfarer

Landru is more a progressive than a liberal. — TheWillowOfDarkness

And I liked the video :D — TimeLine

A good marriage is two good people, marrying. You cannot understand others if you do not understand yourself and so one would need to first better themselves. That would mean to do what Cavavaca suggests because one would need to eliminate all bias [customs, traditions, or what others expect basically enable marriages that are bad and the eventual misery results]. — TimeLine

it seems to me that if they got to the point of "unhappy marriage" + "children", then the dice have already been thrown so to speak. Whether they separate or not, the children and they will still suffer; suffering becomes inescapable. — Agustino

But unfortunately, in all societies that have ever existed, exploitation was taken as the social norm - indeed hypocrisy has always been the face of society. — Agustino

While I am annoyed at the sudden digress from the OP — TimeLine

Isn't that what the migrant workers are for? Get paid slave wages way below minimum requirements and no benefits? — Marchesk

The North in the US was doing quite well industrially without slave labor leading up to the Civil War. The South was more agrarian, and being the virtuous souls that they were, decided to have other human beings do the work for them. — Marchesk

What do you expect? They have 5 times as many people, and we found it in our economic interest to trade with them. Expect India to follow suit, and Africa after that (granted, it's a continent not a nation). That's globalism for you, and that's countries realizing they need to catch up and modernize. — Marchesk

That existed due to the outcome of WW2, and it led to a cold war with thousands of nukes hanging over our heads. But the rest of the world was going to catch up. — Marchesk

You see? This is that radicalization I was talking about. You've got to stop reading conservative websites. They're just fishing for suicide voters. — Mongrel

I know. I'm planning to employ de-programmers for the lot of you. — Mongrel

Somebody needs to make the distinction between colonial slavery and the slavery of antiquity — Heister Eggcart

There are many 'pro-Russia' trolls operative on the internet, you never know where they might turn up, although they're not that hard to spot. — Wayfarer

I lament that you were radicalized — Mongrel

Is a New York billionaire going to save the interests of the people? — Marchesk

What greatness was destroyed? — Marchesk

Last hope for what? — Marchesk

What makes you think Trump is any better? — Marchesk

Do you really believe this? That's straight up propaganda. It's not remotely real. — Marchesk

Heaven and Earth are impartial;
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
The wise are impartial;
They see the people as straw dogs. — DaoDeJing

Drumpf's 'post-truth' world; — Wayfarer

Reason skepticism is conservative for my society because of the influence of people like John Locke. — Mongrel

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.

This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.

Our twentieth-century world has experienced the hideous consequences of the collapse of belief in a moral order. Like the atrocities and disasters of Greece in the fifth century before Christ, the ruin of great nations in our century shows us the pit into which fall societies that mistake clever self-interest, or ingenious social controls, for pleasing alternatives to an oldfangled moral order.

It has been said by liberal intellectuals that the conservative believes all social questions, at heart, to be questions of private morality. Properly understood, this statement is quite true. A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society—whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society—no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.

Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.

Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Communities, puts strongly the case for private property, as distinguished from communal property: “Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time that he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled.” For the institution of several property—that is, private property—has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture, for raising mankind above the level of mere drudgery, for affording leisure to think and freedom to act. To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor; to be able to see one’s work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one’s own—these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction—why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.

For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy. The Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement; without that Progression, a people stagnate.

Well what is conservatism to you? — Mongrel

I think your conservatism is a reaction to Amy Schumer. — Mongrel

But that's basically a statement of conservatism. Preserve our heritage... — Mongrel

It's as anti-reason as "If it ain't broke don't fix it." — Mongrel

in many kinds of unknown past circumstances is also evidence that they may avoid producing such outcomes in unknown future circumstances. — Kazuma

I thoroughly disagree. I've been there and done it. There is no way you want to put a child through the anger, pain, and turmoil of a bad marriage. Its adversely affects all the lives that involved, fuck traditional values. — Cavacava

1. The endurance of basic institutions* is in part a function of their 'factual' legitimacy, i.e., their actual actual acceptance by the population they regulate (in other words, endurance and factual legitimacy are correlated).
2. Factual legitimacy is in part a function of how much these institutions avoid producing outcomes that are factually 'intolerable' (and thus not tolerated) for this population.
3. There is some connection between what the people subject to these institutions consider normatively intolerable and what is actually normatively intolerable (i. e., factual and normative legitimacy are correlated, even if normatively intolerable outcomes are not always widely recognized).
4. Therefore, actual endurance is evidence that institutions have avoided producing normatively intolerable outcomes in varied circumstances in the past.
5. The evidence that long-lasting institutions have avoided producing normatively intolerable outcomes in many kinds of unknown past circumstances is also evidence that they may avoid producing such outcomes in unknown future circumstances.
(X. Marquez, 2015, An Epistemic Argument for Conservativism) — Kazuma

What is the honest response to "Dream Brother"...maybe this separation is right for the children, an unhappy marriage can't be good for children. — Cavacava

dickflaps — Heister Eggcart