Hey, as a Conservative, I have my dreams too. But they're about freedom, technology, building on hard won traditions and destroying Totalitarianism in all it's hideous and anti-human guises. Oh yes, also a Spitfire and a great looking gal in suspender's, slinging a sten gun is pretty cool too. The butterfly is probably a pepperoni pizza thing.
“Hell is other people”. Jean Paul Sartre.
That's one of the few worthwhile utterances I believe, of the famous frog headed and venal totalitarian Salon creep, Sartre.
We are it seems, surrounded by people who have a default starting point to anything involving a thought process, that could best be summed up as thick and ordinary, but without the glamour. And that’s fine by me. I don’t want to change anyone. Just let me meet people who are already there. It’s easier and cheaper.
It came to me today, what the essential difference between a Conservative and a Left Liberal is, and it's not grooming. A Conservative believes entirely in the right of the free individual to order their own affairs. The Left Liberal believes only the state, through its ultimately total power, can and should do this.
“...I had been interested in libertarian ideas when I was younger. I set aside this interest in the ’60s simply because all the overwhelming political questions seemed to sideline issues of individual liberty in favor of what seemed then to be grander questions.
I suppose what would make me different now is that I am much more inclined to stress those issues of individual liberty than I would have been then. And to see that they do possess, with a capital H and a capital I, Historical Importance, the very things that one thought one was looking for”. Christopher Hitchens interviewed in Reason Magazine.
Conservatism then, equals the individual and Leftism equals the state. The free and singular as opposed to mass control. That's it really.
Thus, the true Conservative believes in freedom, achievement, the productive and prosperity by merit, tempered by the acceptance of human flaws. This means tradition, proof and facts, the bedrock laws of private property and freedom of capital, and the value of caution as a defining characteristic of maturity. The true Conservative should not believe in adopting empty PC posturing, however fashionable. Thus the Conservative will have the many checks and balances of community groups and their own standing, as a healthy limiting or censure.
There's also arrest for loitering with intent.
By definition, a Conservative is neither radical, totalitarian nor Fascist. While the Left naturally propels itself in this direction. It is, after all, their logical destination.
“...Many socialists have a radically anti-authoritarian disposition, even though the policies they would enact end up being authoritarian”. Reason interviewer.
The Left Liberal believes in control [by them], the flattening of the ability to achieve anything individually, the dilution of the productive to the level of mass failure, and the elevation of future fantasy as fact. The Left Liberal’s only standards are no standards at all. Everything is up for grabs. This is the nature of radicalism.
The Left Liberal often as its modus operandi, abhors the idea of having any discriminating judgement at all, even though the ability to discriminate is the basis of rational thought. They believe that any such discrimination on anything, is merely an act of bigotry rooted in a vast and alleged conspiracy of the past. By definition, a Left Liberal is a Fascist and a totalitarian control freak.
“...The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could, or should, be the property of the state." Reason interview question to the Hitch.
A Conservative sees people as they actually are: flawed and human and does not seek to ‘perfect’ them, but accepts humanity now. The Left Liberal often doesn’t see real human beings at all, merely the handy and malleable ciphers for their absurd and impossible moral vanity driven projections. The abstraction of Utopian ideology is exalted over everything. Thus 100 million murdered to achieve a sick dream of Communism/Socialism via a real century long nightmare.
But enough about my neighbour’s. Now I know, there are many millions of clear minded, mature, reasonable, intelligent, practical, Democratic and Capitalist minded moral people who like a laugh and are perhaps even hip and groovy. I just don’t seem to meet a lot of ‘em off line. No, really. I’ve joined a stamp club but still nothing. The Koo Wee Rup Knitting Circle is next, but I’ve heard their macramé nights get a little wild.
Talking of stamps, do you know Green Left Weekly printed a rhetoric free edition on a postage stamp? No, really. Anyway, two out of three exposures to what passes as other people’s er, ‘thoughts’, are often mere raw material for comedy, which is usually in converse proportion to how they see it.
Someone complained to me recently that their home had experienced starlings flying up into the roof cavity.
Colonel Neville: “Flocks of Dictators in your ceiling, eh? Very nasty business”.
Bore: “Eh?”
Colonel Neville: “Stalin’s. The Russian mass murderer, hero of the proletariat everywhere and common household pest. You don’t want a couple of dozen of those in your home. They leave their droppings everywhere and have a lot of lice, mostly Western Left Liberals”.
Bore: “Yes, birds in my roof! I have to get a broom to them”.
Colonel Neville: “Yes, you can sweep your flocks of unruly and squawking Stalin’s into the dustbin of history”.
Bore: “What do you think of the pest controller?”
Colonel Neville: “I don’t know. I’ve never met him. Did he ever attend any Politburo meetings?”
Bore: “I’ll try Exopest I think”.
Colonel Neville: “Well, they did get rid of Khrushchev”.
You’re often wasting your time with the humour, kid. Be dull and more people will feel comfortable around you. Be a genuine bore and simply have more in common. Make friends, influence people and run for Congress. Make an Oscar winning film or simply dig a ditch for some water pipe. Then make a documentary about it. And win another Oscar.
“I’m not sure why, but Colonel Neville is my kind of guy! And what he doesn’t know about pocket lint and fan belts is not worth knowing!”
“There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate.
So, let us stop talking falsely now, the hour it is getting late”.
Bob Dylan. All Along the Watchtower.
Sometimes it’s hard to see any real difference between the senile and stupid, the young and ignorant and the middle-aged and deluded, because sometimes, there isn’t. Being middle-aged myself, there's entirely nothing wrong with me...
“...In my memory, the demand of the student radical was for the university to stop behaving as if it was my parent, in loco parentis. They pretend they’re your family, which is exactly what we’ve come here to get away from. We don’t want the dean telling us what we can smoke or who we can sleep with or what we can wear, or anything of this sort.
That was a very important part of the ’60s. Now you go to campus and student activists are continuously demanding more supervision, of themselves and of others, in order to assure proper behaviour and in order to ensure that nobody gets upset. I think that’s the measure of what I mean”. Christopher Hitchens.
Yep, it’s better to be intelligent than have a head full of wet bread, but intelligence is not a guarantee of anything, except that you’re er, intelligent. Being tall is better than being a midget, but it doesn’t mean you’ll play for the Lakers. The fact is, a lack of common ground, thinking ability, actions and values, while often hilarious, is nonetheless er, profoundly alienating.
It’s this shared common basis that makes any decent society possible, because in the end, it's all based on trust, and not co-ercion by the state or anyone.
And here’s an interesting thing. Many a Left Liberal has a chaotic and hopeless idea of a Democratic home, where apparently the children have an equal say. Riiight. Good luck with that. But outside the home the Lefty usually has a relentless compulsion to control more and more of everybody else’s life.
Now, a true Conservative is not really so democratic at home per se, regards those wild creatures known as children. I’m not and I don’t care how contradictory that is. It merely makes me a parent, and being unfair is what worthwhile parents do. Conversely, a true Conservative wishes to control less and less outside of the home, especially via the very, very central bad idea of the Left Liberal, of ever bigger government.
I get tired explaining every second concept and laugh, as if they’ve just heard of China and Mars because I happened to mention them. Once I get to the level of reconstructing the development of major components of the Western Canon just to explain a line of humour, I just know the punch line is ruined.
There is an old phrase that the late and great TV star Graham Kennedy used to say, whenever someone was slow on the uptake regards humour. It’s long a part of the Australian lexicon. With his excited, manic school boy grin and that slightly sad expression in his bulgy eyes, he used to say “It’s a joke, Joyce”.
And it often is, but without a laugh track to tell some folks when to laugh, most things are not a joke at all, Joyce.
“Life is far too important to be taken seriously”. Oscar Wilde.
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