Why are you conservative, why are you liberal, why are you independent?

[jediuser598]

[SuburbanFarmer]

....or I’ll write you a bad Yelp review.

[Okeefenokee]

Sad.

[Hastur]

Golden rule.
Ten cannots.
Protestant work ethic.
US Constitution.

Pretty much my political guidelines. Not necessarily in that order.

Nice list. I didn't know about the ten cannots and had to look them up. Good stuff. William J. H. Boetcker had a way with words. We need to revive his "Seven National Crimes" as well. The feel very current somehow.

1. I don’t think.
2. I don’t know.
3. I don’t care.
4. I am too busy.
5. I leave well enough alone.
6. I have no time to read and find out.
7. I am not interested.

We should repent if we are guilty of any of these National Crimes. If you love America, repentance, prayer, and righteousness is the way to restore America to her greatness.

[Fife]

.Ahem.

I thought some of you might enjoy something circling back a bit to the OP, when it comes to political labels and how we understand and use them.

Professor Claes Ryn on Tom Woods in 2015: Ep. 490 The Neoconservatives: Jacobins, Not Conservatives

The GOP and neocons are simply Jacobins.

Give this guy a listen and think about what conservatism means to you. I'd like to hear his current take on Trumpism and the Jacobins clamoring for blood in Iran and how many other dozens of places right now.

I really, really think there are several of us here who would dig this interview (Looking at you Nords, and Hastur especially ).

edit: I see this very recent piece by Prof. Ryn in the American Conservative. Gonna crack it open soon: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ ... d-it-most/

Mike Pompeo: American Jacobin
Seizing the moment, patient neocons co-opted Trumpian nationalism to continue American triumphalist policies.

Given contemporary events, one of the most interesting figures of the 18th-century French revolutionary period was Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a leader of the Girondins, the neoconservatives of revolutionary France.

Brissot believed that the animating universal ideals of the Revolution had made France, as one of his allies put it, “the foremost people of the universe,” not just better than all earthlings, better even than Martians. Yet, despite France’s position as the exceptional nation, the Girondins worried that universal ideals were under siege by a complex array of conspiracies hatched by the absolutist powers surrounding France.

The only way to confront these foreign conspiracies, he believed, was preemptive war. Robespierre, who hated Brissot, was skeptical. Robespierre believed that war would strengthen the monarchy, which was wobbly but still intact in 1791, and that foreign adversaries would be formidable military opponents. Robespierre famously quipped: “No one loves armed missionaries.” In true neoconservative fashion, Brissot countered that the people of many nations who were longing for liberty, especially the Dutch and Flemish, would welcome France’s revolutionary army with open arms. Sound familiar?

[Zlaxer]

I find the right, in general, have historically been the assholes and the left was all the pussies.

[brewster]

Authoritarians are not Liberals, no matter what ideological camouflage they wear.

[Speaker to Animals]

lol

Liberals were authoritarians from day one.

[Fife]

You will be made to care.

[Fife]