Conservatives are ALWAYS WRONG -- haven't you noticed?!

[JohnEngelman]

It was not only the United States. The sexual revolution happened in all the industrialized countries. And they are not all dealing with undesirable consequences.

The Growing Prevalence of Fatherless Homes
​

In 2023, approximately three out of ten children in France were living with only one of their parents, highlighting the increasing prevalence of single-parent households. This trend is not unique to France and is observed in many countries worldwide, creating a significant demographic that merits focused research and support.

Research-Backed Impacts on Child Development
​

Mental Health Consequences
​

Research from a UK birth cohort study has revealed a significant association between father absence in childhood and persistent depression in offspring during adolescence and early adulthood. This longitudinal research underscores the potential long-term psychological effects that can result from growing up without a father figure, suggesting that the impact extends well beyond childhood years.

Behavioural Development and Risk Assessment
​

A study published in Social Science Research found that higher levels of father involvement at age 11 were significantly associated with lower levels of engagement in risky behaviour during adolescence. Notably, the same study found no significant association between mother's involvement and reduced risky behaviours, highlighting the unique role fathers may play in helping children develop appropriate risk assessment skills and behavioural self-regulation.

https://cprevitali.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-fatherless-homes-on

 

[Wilson23]

Spinoff thread: https://forum.literotica.com/thread...n-a-good-or-bad-thing.1649774/#post-102351599

 

[Rightguide]

I mean, historically. Conservatives (not Republicans, conservatives) have been on the wrong side of every important public issue since independence -- slavery, women's suffrage, the New Deal, the black civil rights movement, the Vietnam War . . . You can't name a single counterexample, certainly none from the Reagan years.

That claim only works if you redefine “conservative” to mean “everyone I now dislike, retroactively.” It’s a rhetorical magic trick you use, but it's not history.

Historically, conservatives opposed slavery and its expansion (Lincoln was a conservative in the classical sense), defended free speech against wartime censorship, warned against utopian central planning during the New Deal, pushed color-blind law over race-based collectivism in civil rights, and argued, correctly, that Vietnam was a strategic and moral disaster once it became an unwinnable bureaucratic war. What you’re calling “the wrong side” is usually just the side that asked uncomfortable questions before the consequences were obvious.

As for Reagan, he presided over the defeat of Soviet communism without a world war, cut inflation that was destroying working-class wages, expanded home ownership, legalized millions of immigrants, and signed MLK Day into law. You may dislike the outcomes, but history doesn’t care about aesthetic objections. The pattern here is simple: Progressives get credit for intentions. Conservatives get blamed for consequences, even when they warned about them in advance.

 

[Hel_Books]

Historically, conservatives

So how are you categorizing Donald Trump? This crazy foreign adventurism, sabotaging of the central bank, ballooning of the national debt, trashing local government, building up a force of stormtroopers to break in doors, smash car windows and shoot citizens dead in the street, weaponizing federal prosecutors to charge political opponents with the crime of being political opponents, pardoning insurrectionists and heavy campaign donors, withholding funds appropriated by his own Republican-controlled Congress, vetoing bills that passed almost unanimously just out of spite, demanding a train station and an airport be named after him in exchange for not holding up disbursement of funds approved by his Republican-controlled Congress, killing jobs of people working on offshore-wind-electricity farms just out of pique.

Is that how you think a Conservative President would behave?

 

[Wilson23]

That claim only works if you redefine “conservative” to mean “everyone I now dislike, retroactively.” It’s a rhetorical magic trick you use, but it's not history.

Historically, conservatives opposed slavery

Now YOU are dishonestly redefining "conservative."

 

[Hel_Books]

Rightguide said:
That claim only works if you redefine “conservative” to mean “everyone I now dislike, retroactively.” It’s a rhetorical magic trick you use, but it's not history.

Historically, conservatives opposed slavery

Now YOU are dishonestly redefining "conservative."

Even Edmund Burke owned slaves!

 

[Wilson23]

Even Edmund Burke owned slaves!

Didn't know that -- did he own land in the colonies?

 

[Wilson23]

(Lincoln was a conservative in the classical sense)

Harry Turtledove wrote an AH series in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Victory

After the war the Republican Party is blamed and dies. Lincoln then becomes a founding member of the new SOCIALIST Party. Which is entirely plausible, since the Republican Party in its original formation included Marxists, and Lincoln appointed several to high civil and military posts.

 

[Hel_Books]

Hel_Books said:
Even Edmund Burke owned slaves!

Didn't know that -- did he own land in the colonies?

Family land. Edmund Burke’s brother, Richard, owned eleven slaves in the West Indies; Burke co-authored a book noting that the expansion of the slave trade could serve the commercial interests of the British Empire; Burke was one of the architects of the Free Port Act of 1766, which promoted free trade — trade that necessarily included the slave market — between Britain’s West Indian and American colonies; Burke defended the independence of the African Company, which trafficked slaves;

 

[Wilson23]

As for Reagan, he presided over the defeat of Soviet communism without a world war, cut inflation that was destroying working-class wages, expanded home ownership, legalized millions of immigrants, and signed MLK Day into law.

https://www.amazon.com/Tear-Down-Th...0733de1bb1b5f9bd2e93bbd&qid=1770494256&sr=8-1

 

[Wilson23]

Historically, conservatives . . . warned against utopian central planning during the New Deal

There is NOTHING about the New Deal, nothing at all, that now seems regrettable in hindsight. That is just one of the things conservatives were wrong about -- and stubbornly persisted in their wrongness, from Robert Taft to William Buckley.

 

[Hel_Books]

Harry Turtledove wrote an AH series in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Victory

After the war the Republican Party is blamed and dies. Lincoln then becomes a founding member of the new SOCIALIST Party. Which is entirely plausible, since the Republican Party in its original formation included Marxists, and Lincoln appointed several to high civil and military posts.

Lincoln was a lawyer for the railroads and the Republican Party bigwigs were big business types. They were definitely more freedom loving (both in terms of civil rights and free markets) than the Democratic Party slaveowners, but hardly likely to turn to Socialism.

By the way, the "Southern Victory" alternative timeline ends with Petrograd, Philadelphia, Newport News, Charleston, Paris, Hamburg, London, Norwich, and Brighton destroyed by nuclear weapons, the Confederacy extinguished and Confederate leaders tried for crimes against humanity.

 

[Hel_Books]

As for Reagan, he presided over the defeat of Soviet communism without a world war, cut inflation that was destroying working-class wages, expanded home ownership, legalized millions of immigrants, and signed MLK Day into law.

So Donald Trump is really the antithesis of what the Republican Party is proud of.

 

[Wilson23]

Conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of "conservative" offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are "adverse to rapid change" and "moderate, avoiding extremes." Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. "Conservatism" -- no less than its foes "liberalism" or "communitarianism" -- has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future."

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in "schemes and speculations" like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right -- unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a "prophet of the past." Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots -- on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.

 

[Rightguide]

There is NOTHING about the New Deal, nothing at all, that now seems regrettable in hindsight. That is just one of the things conservatives were wrong about -- and stubbornly persisted in their wrongness, from Robert Taft to William Buckley.

Some New Deal programs prolonged the Great Depression by disrupting market forces and discouraging private investment. Others entrenched bureaucratic inefficiencies and expanded federal power in ways that sparked ongoing debates about government overreach that echo, even today. All of which requires superior "hindsight"

 

[Wilson23]

Some New Deal programs prolonged the Great Depression by disrupting market forces and discouraging private investment.

That canard has been floated before -- no economist takes it seriously.

 

[Wilson23]

Others entrenched bureaucratic inefficiencies and expanded federal power in ways that sparked ongoing debates about government overreach that echo, even today.

But NOT any rational, legitimate debate on those matters, not from 1945 to now. Certainly Taft and Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan and Friedman never had anything REASONABLE to say against "government overreach" or "bureaucratic inefficiency." And our recent experience with DOGE has proven there never WAS much bureaucratic inefficiency.

 

[Rightguide]

But NOT any rational, legitimate debate on those matters, not from 1945 to now. Certainly Taft and Buckley and Goldwater and Reagan never had anything reasonable to say against "government overreach" or "bureaucratic inefficiency." And our recent experience with DOGE has proven there never WAS much bureaucratic inefficiency.

The idea that from 1945 onward there was never a rational debate about government overreach or bureaucratic inefficiency is simply false. Taft, Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan all built their careers on precisely those critiques, articulating detailed, principled arguments against expanding federal power and wasteful bureaucracy. To dismiss decades of vigorous ideological discourse and policy battles as nonexistent is either willful ignorance or convenient revisionism. I suspect the latter. And invoking DOGE as proof of bureaucratic efficiency is wildly insane to say the least.

 

[Wilson23]

The idea that from 1945 onward there was never a rational debate about government overreach or bureaucratic inefficiency is simply false. Taft, Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan all built their careers on precisely those critiques, articulating detailed, principled arguments against expanding federal power and wasteful bureaucracy. To dismiss decades of vigorous ideological discourse and policy battles as nonexistent

I do not dismiss it as nonexistent, I dismiss it as irrational. So should you.

 

[SebastianHolt]

I mean, historically. Conservatives (not Republicans, conservatives) have been on the wrong side of every important public issue since independence -- slavery, women's suffrage, the New Deal, the black civil rights movement, the Vietnam War . . . You can't name a single counterexample, certainly none from the Reagan years.

How much crack do you smoke in a day?

Conservative states like FL are kicking every kind of ass over NY, IL, CA ...

Let's face reality, the state of CA is in a septic tank, thanks to Newsscum
state of IL can't find their ass from a hole in the wall due to their incompetence. They are so broke that they can't declare bankruptcy. It should be a law that the state of IL take their pension fund and use that to pay down some of their dept

 

[Wilson23]

Conservative states like FL are kicking every kind of ass over NY, IL, CA ...

It's the blue states that have to subsidize the red states, not the other way around. You sound like that idiot Kurt Schlichter -- he wrote novels set in a future where the two sets have split, and the red states thrive economically while the blue states languish -- that is NOT how it would go.

 

[SebastianHolt]

It's the blue states that have to subsidize the red states, not the other way around. You sound like that idiot Kurt Schlichter -- he wrote novels set in a future where the two sets have split, and the red states thrive economically while the blue states languish -- that is NOT how it would go.

Stay on topic, there skippy as your crack-smoking has polluted your mind. States like FL are kicking EVERY blue state out there.

 

[SebastianHolt]

It's the blue states that have to subsidize the red states, not the other way around. You sound like that idiot Kurt Schlichter -- he wrote novels set in a future where the two sets have split, and the red states thrive economically while the blue states languish -- that is NOT how it would go.

What blue state carried a red state... love to hear this

 

[Wilson23]

What blue state carried a red state... love to hear this

https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118494/documents/HHRG-119-JU13-20250715-SD014-U14.pdf

 

[Wilson23]

Stay on topic, there skippy as your crack-smoking has polluted your mind. States like FL are kicking EVERY blue state out there.

I live in Florida and things in general do NOT go well here. The state economy would crash without retirement pensions. DeSantis is just embarrassing us, and I hope he dies before the 2028 primary season, because he's obviously looking to step into Trump's shoes as MAGA leader.