Dachshund wrote: ↑May 21st, 2018, 5:43 am
Greta, I have nothing against you. I like reading your posts; you are endearingly eccentric...often interesting and sometimes very funny (that was a compliment, BTW) .I apologise if you interpreted my comments as being disrespectful. I was merely trying to help you - and sometimes "shock therapy" is indicated. I had to throw some cold water in your face to bring you to your senses. It was because, sometimes ,one needs, as they say, to be cruel to be kind...
Dachs, in truth I am trying to wake you from your political dream state.
Your views are confined to the same clichés read in the media daily and commonly sprouted by corrupt media conservative commentators then you could do with the bracing cold of satire to wake you from the mental torpor induced by persistent propaganda.
Dachshund wrote:I know that I will never be able to comprehend with my feeble human reason the terrifying scale of the power of that which ordained this higher order; that which set in place the sublime majesty and ineffable, awesome beauty of the infinite night sky.This, however, is not a cause for despair, and it is - "to cut to the chase" - the main reason why I became a traditional Conservative (insofar as my attitude towards human political affairs is concerned).
The reason you fell down the conservative rabbit hole was temperament. Nothing more. Don't try to pretend that you are fighting on "the right side" - that is delusion. You are not fighting on the best or winning side, you are fighting for one side of the same coin against another.
Like all political warriors, you cannot accept that both progressivism and conservatism are necessary in both individual lives and at societal level. Conservatism for stability, progressivism for growth and rejuvenation.
I also note that what is called conservatism today is actually radical. True conservatives seek to preserve nature, or at least slow its decline, rather than develop it all. That's the value of conservatism; while everything must change, damage can be caused by too fast a rate of change. By the same token, without progressivism there can only be stagnation and ultimately societal death through lack of competitiveness.
To posit conservatism and progressivism as absolutes pitted against one another is, at the mental level at which philosophy is ideally conducted, embarrassingly naive. The balance between these approaches is always in question, but the blinkered, tribal affiliations appear to be a variant of Stockholm Syndrome.
So go easy on the Reefer Madness scenarios, eh? Telling scary lies about it works with ignorant consumers of Murdoch media and their ilk whom have never even seen a spliff in their lives and think that a bong is the noise a bell makes (and of course make very certain claims about marry-jew-arna's dangers). However, it won't fool anyone else.
Cutting to the chase (at last) the real issue that seems to escape almost everyone is chaos. How much chaos should I society allow? We can see the very low tolerance of chaos in China. The result? Pitiful levels of creativity and their huge growth was only made possible by many trillions of dollars of IP theft from the more chaos-tolerant west. It is denied by some, of course, but even the IP theft via pirated of American and European music in China amounted to many billions - never mind the serious computing and space IP.
The temptation of growing societies is to regulate more, to reduce the inevitable tendency towards more chaos when populations increase. However, reducing chaos reduces creativity. Chaos acts as a solvent in society in the same way as water acts in biochemistry. Clamp down on chaos hard enough and you have ossification. Further, there's a law of diminishing returns on taxpayer moneys so, when it comes to "stamping out" undesirable things, most times it's best to adopt an 80/20 or 90/10 approach. An attempt to reach perfection is the selfish wastage of public taxes on politicians' personal private projects (Tony Abbott and RU486, ahem).
Societies should ideally focus on big issues rather than controlling individuals' personal lives, especially where there is no harm done to anyone else. I would suggest that more damage is being done to people through watching too much porn than by weed (broken relationships, divorces, depression, sexual dysfunction, sexual assaults, date rapes), so should we try to ban porno too? Or should we accept some human foibles and chaos via the 90/10 rule, as we currently do?