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Seems to me that what you are doing is setting standards for what you think everyone should have or do and then trying to make everyone else pay up to force those standards on everyone else. Then if they complain you say they are greedy. Seems to me that the liberals are the greedy ones here. They want to pay someone else to do what they think should be done regardless of what others think so they legislate it and then force the public to pay and pay and pay. If the laws don't do what the liberals want the only answer is to throw more money at it and pay and pay and pay some more. Still not work? Wash, rinse and repeat. Never admit that what they wanted was ill thought out and unworkable. Never bother getting involved themselves or giving of themselves. That is what peons are for.
The really strange thing is that the conservatives give far more of themselves than the liberals do. The last studies I read were that conservatives tend to donate to causes at a rate of more than twice what liberals give. That surely does not sound like greed to me.
What conservatives stand for are that the person can target where they want to give and for what purposes. Give someone a hand up until they can make it on their own and then leave them to it. Be a responsible adult. Again that does not sound like greed to me. That sounds like good common sense.
We all know you're not a guy. A guy is a wire, rope, line or brace used to provide support or guidance.
Hahaha, good one
Quote:
Originally Posted by rickers
After 10 years of growing apart we divorced and I went back to my roots. Now I am finding myself being very liberal on some issues and very conservative on others. Everything and every one is in a constant state of evolution. ~♥~
If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart.
If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.
-- atrrib. Winston Churchill
I think every really thoughtful person evolves like this. Only those who embrace dogma over reality fail to realise that it ain't all cut and dried with neat tidy boundaries. But the definitions have also evolved.... What used to be a 'classical liberal' we would now call a libertarian; the new liberal borders on what we used to call a fascist:
Today's modern liberal generally espouses forcing everyone to be equal, like it or not. This can involve invading your household to enforce a policy that by damn your children or your pets (car, yard, house, etc.) shall be "equally well taken care of" according to someone else's standards. To be fair -- the only difference between the new left and and the extreme religious-right is WHOSE standards get enforced.
Example: San Francisco passed a local law dictating what sort of food and bedding your pet must have. (No, I'm not kidding.) You can no longer make this decision based on your own pet's needs and your own experience. The fascist-neoliberals have decided it for you, and their jackbooted thugs will confiscate your pet (at taxpayer expense) if someone decides your care isn't up to their standards. -- This is actually no different than a religious-right law dictating who you can sleep with (ie. determining if your bedpartner is not up to someone else's standards).
Myself, I've evolved to a position of strong conservative economic views (stay the hell out of my wallet; I'll help pay for that road we all use, but it ain't my job to support every random loser) and strong classical-liberal personal views (what you do with your own life and your own family and property in your own home is your own business, and no one else's).
I have concluded that it is better that a few children, pets, spouses, and various bits of property should suffer poor care or abuse or destruction, than that all of us should live under onerous and expensive micromanagement via an impossible tangle of laws, regulations, and invasive enforcement -- all funded by our own ever-rising taxes.
Such micromanagement is totally at odds with the spirit of self-reliance and personal responsibility that is at the core of Montana (indeed, was at one time the core of America), and that are both necessity for every farmer and rancher and thus for the economy and society built around that philosophy.
Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want for bread.
-- Thomas Jefferson
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Last edited by Reziac; 10-13-2010 at 10:31 AM..
Reason: incomplete thoug---
Self-reliance, personal responsibilty and all that eutopia stuff may sound good, but it's not reality. The reality is; there are people out there who can't work, who need medical help, have mental problems, etc.... the whole conservative philosophy of "too bad", just seems third world to me and a bit on the sick side. We have it very well in this country because taxes are extremely low. I mean, there are towns literally falling apart here in Indiana because it it so conservative and legislatures are afraid to tax people in order to pay for freaking road work. In my hometown they even stopped collecting garbage for awhile. Yikes.... And, I blame it solely on conservatism and greed.
Don't get me wrong...I hate senseless taxation more than anyone, but there comes a point when you need to suck it up for the betterment of your community.
Last edited by Interpol76; 10-13-2010 at 11:05 AM..
Self-reliance, personal responsibilty and all that eutopia stuff may sound good, but it's not reality. The reality is; there are people out there who can't work, who need medical help, have mental problems, etc.... the whole conservative philosophy of "too bad", just seems third world to me and a bit on the sick side. We have it very well in this country because taxes are extremely low. I mean, there are towns literally falling apart here in Indiana because it it so conservative and legislatures are afraid to tax people in order to pay for freaking road work. In my hometown they even stopped collecting garbage for awhile. Yikes.... And, I blame it solely on conservatism and greed.
Don't get me wrong...I hate senseless taxation more than anyone, but there comes a point when you need to suck it up for the betterment of your community.
I don't think the Conservatives in Montana have much heartburn with programs that are paid into. For instance, you site being medically disabled and not able to work. No problem. Apply for SSDI. Your SSDI check is based on what you payed in. Not what all of us paid in. During the wait to get it, yeah, the state can help out. But not take care of. Welfare should not be an endless program. People get on it at age 25 and stay on it the rest of their life, because they can. That's the part that needs overhauled.
I used to work in the Jail in Sheridan Wyoming. We had detainee's that were talking about as soon as they got out, they were headed to the church to get a bus ticket to Billings or Great Falls. Their target? There was an arguement whether Billings or Great Falls had the BEST homeless shelter to "winter over". They didn't like the one in Helena because they expected you to look for work and they checked up on you. They didn't like the one in Gillette because they expected you to look for work and even gave a time limit to find work. They didn't like the one in Casper because they gave you two weeks to find work or you was out of there. Billings or Great Falls were the targets. With free room and board for the winter, they were set. What's wrong with that program?
I don't think anybody complains too bad on road maintenance. It's when you live down the gravel road for years and it's fine. Then, the new McMansion goes in at the end of the drive and now they want you to share in the curb and gutter and pavement because their sports car can't come and go like they want.
There are lots of programs in Montana (as well as other states) that need an overhaul.
I mean, there are towns literally falling apart here in Indiana because it it so conservative and legislatures are afraid to tax people in order to pay for freaking road work. In my hometown they even stopped collecting garbage for awhile. Yikes.... And, I blame it solely on conservatism and greed.
I blame it on spending the money, that would've been spent on maintaining infrastructure and providing things like garbage collection, on social-welfare programs that always need more and more money in order to work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Interpol76
Don't get me wrong...I hate senseless taxation more than anyone, but there comes a point when you need to suck it up for the betterment of your community.
Before anyone sucks it up to meet your definition of the betterment of the community, let's review where the tax money already being collected is being spent (could there be a problem with out-of-control gov't worker pensions because of collusion between civil service unions and Democrat, and even some Republican, legislators?).
What natural habitat? Conservatives destroy natural landscapes for their own benefit and they don't want anyone telling them otherwise. They want no regulation or interference even if what they're doing is destructive to others. Combining "conservative" with "natural habitat" is like attempting to mix oil and water.
I find it extremely odd that a conservative would want to separate themselves from members of their own country but that they also don't consider such divisiveness to be unpatriotic. They have no problem carving out "their" portion of "their" country and leaving all the "bad stuff" to everyone else. How can this be if they also use "personal responsibility" as their mantra? Are they not responsible for the state of the nation as well? Doesn't make sense. In fact it makes as much sense as their understanding of liberalism.
Here's mine: There are many approaches to problem-solving. Our mind typically divides things in twos. Right now, there's the conservative approach and the liberal approach. Very often the goals of each side are the same. The only difference is the method used.
Instead of saying that a liberal should not move to Montana or cruelly telling them that they'll be fine while admitting they will be laughed at behind their back, why not just apply the above paragraph to one's thought process and learn the art of compromise? Or is war between liberals and conservatives all conservatives are interested in?
And this post, I'd wager, is what caused this thread to go beyond 20 pages. I didn't read any further, so forgive me if I'm repeating a former thought, but I just HAD to respond to this one.
The problem here is one of perception and education (or lack thereof). First we must define what a conservative is and how he's evolved with the rest of the world. To conserve is to minimize your impact on the world around you. A conservationist is someone who wishes to maintain a natural world free or minimized of the impact or influence of humans, a species he considers to be UN-natural and anti-nature for the most part. To conserve, is to minimize. I personally have seen and understand Ron Paul to be the walking talking definition of "conservative" due to his history of honorable service to his nation as a flight surgeon in the Vietnam war, his family values, and his impeccable voting record. He is not perfect nor is any human I'm aware of. But as a living example of what it means to be "conservative", I'd paint you a picture of Ron Paul who is also a Libertarian. How is this, you might ask? Simple. Libertarians and Republicans were once one before the Republican party took on some tenets of the Communist Manifesto (after the Dems adopted them all).
Montanans are not all conservative or united under a single ideal. But the land gets in your blood and won't leave. I've heard the same said of S. Africa. It gets in your blood. We're an independent, thoughtful, and community-oriented people who, for the most part, just want big brother to stay the heck out of our lives and resent the influences from D.C. We've seen the Fish and Wildlife idiots kill indigenous species of fish in lakes by introducing predators, we've seen the Chicago mob run whiskey through the capitol during the Prohibition era. Corruption is ever the companion of the politician and we're not so naive to think it doesn't happen here. We are the stewards of the land we live on and wish to "conserve" it for our kids and theirs. We believe our capabilities to conserve our environment are far superior to a bureaucrat from a far away land. We believe in the Golden Rule and wish everyone else would believe in it too. Adherence to that one simple rule throughout the world would solve virtually every problem that exists in society. We're not war mongers, we resent sending our sons and daughters to foreign lands to die or be maimed fighting an ill-defined enemy who never actually threatened us. We resent that the Dept. of Defense has actually become the Dept. of Offense without changing their business cards. We are resistant of the "change you can believe in" and staunchly defend our right to be so.
George Bush is not a conservative. Slick Willy Clinton had a more conservative record than Bush The Younger. As a general rule, politicians are not allowed to be conservative in any meaningful way. Sarah Palin isn't even conservative. She's just talking the conservative talk while wearing an Israel Flag on her lapel. You can not serve the American people while being a puppet to a foreign government. There are so few actual conservative "Americans first" politicians in politics today I could count them on one hand. Montana has always been on the frontier in so many ways and may remain the last frontier for the evil forces in this world to conquer. If you're a liberal/communist I think you would be much more welcome on the left coast. Or North Korea.
The problem here is one of perception and education (or lack thereof). First we must define what a conservative is and how he's evolved with the rest of the world. To conserve is to minimize your impact on the world around you. A conservationist is someone who wishes to maintain a natural world free or minimized of the impact or influence of humans, a species he considers to be UN-natural and anti-nature for the most part.
Now that is just flat wrong. You're conflating the radical-treehugger/animal-rights viewpoints with the conservative and conservationist viewpoint, but in reality they could not be further apart.
The conservative and conservationist (generally contiguous sets, in farm/ranch country -- especially in fragile ecologies like Montana grasslands) recognises that humankind is another perfectly natural animal species, we just happen to sit at the top of the food chain and are most capable of controlling our environment. It's our job to "conserve" natural resources, because if we don't we'll destroy our own food production ability (obviously not so good for humanity's future, let alone for anything else). However, this doesn't necessarily mean zero-impact. People gotta live just like coyotes gotta live, and that sometimes means we kill a few coyotes just as they kill a few of our sheep, and just like browsing deer kill off the majority of newly-sprouted trees anywhere they live, and beaver occasionally flood out prior residents of a small watershed. All creatures have an impact on their environment; this is not the least bit unnatural. The trick is to avoid getting too far out of balance (it always swings back and forth some; being static is not natural either).
But a conservative/conservationist does NOT consider humans to be "un-natural" or "anti-nature" -- that's the ALF/ELF/PETA mindset, which is fundamentally fascist (crudely defined for this discussion as "You will march in the lockstep we dictate, or we will hurt you" tho that tends to fit right in with the neo-liberal described above, who wants to dictate how everyone lives via legal and regulatory micromanagement) and is indeed very anti-human-existence, as this set of frightening but typical quotes from the ecoterrorist camp should amply illustrate.
Here's an interesting article, which I think illustrates the very sort of "Montana liberal" (old-fashioned classical liberal) that would now be called a "conservative" most other places:
I blame it on spending the money, that would've been spent on maintaining infrastructure and providing things like garbage collection, on social-welfare programs that always need more and more money in order to work.
Yep... because as those social-welfare programs grow, they attract more users, who in turn require more money to support, which makes the programs grow, which attracts more users, who in turn require more money to support... rinse and repeat until there is NO money going into anything else, and no taxpayer money left to take. (Historians will point to the economic fall of Rome, which preceded its political fall by about 200 years, as prior art.)
Someone did the math on Calif's cancerously-growing social welfare system, and turns out if spending on those programs were merely cut back to the level of just two years ago, that would suffice to balance the state budget!!
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Everything and every one is in a constant state of evolution. 
