politicartoons | (no subject)

From:

jom-art.livejournal.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States)

Joke about similar matter: 2 guys in Russian public sauna talking (all guys are completely naked):
Moche you either take this cross off your neck or keep your pants on. (All Christians around the globe are mostly uncircumcised)

From:

oslo.livejournal.com

To what extent ought our politics reflect our moral philosophy? To what extent does it do so, regardless of our efforts to keep those spheres separate?

As far as I've gathered, conservatives distinguish between the moral values by which they purport to organize their lives and the political society in which they think we ought to live by defining them as categorically distinct. In other words, the response to Carter is as simple as saying: why ought we use the state to serve our moral goals? For them, there's no self-evident reason why the two ought to be connected.

I think this is a fundamentally mistaken way of viewing the interrelationship of politics with morality. To begin with, our politics are part of how we present and represent ourselves, to ourselves. Political engagement is not some independent sphere of activity in which we participate as "citizens" distinct from the rest of our lives, a separable sphere where we make decisions about political society that background our everyday "real" lives. The decisions we make about political society importantly reflect who we are and in turn shape who we (and subsequent generations) are. We cannot claim, for instance, to be in favor of independent, private charity and then create a political society that is utterly indifferent as to whether anyone should engage in it, because such a political society is one in which whether anyone acts charitably is left to their individual whims and arbitrary choices. And if we should claim to structure political society so as to "free" us to pass on that charitable impulse, while remaining essentially indifferent on whether we do so - again there is a failure to transmit or communicate values, a breakdown of culture.

Conservatives like to think that they are serving some kind of "freedom" interest by dissociating normative or moral choices from political structures. They like to think that, by minimizing the role of the "state" in our lives, we are "free" to be - well, whatever we are absent those structures. The product of our parents' arbitrary choices, I suppose. But I think that belief is almost perversely anti-democratic, insofar as it erodes the state as the mediating structure through which we engage one another in the civic project. It conceives the government as something "on top of" us, as something imposed, as utterly separate from us; our input into it is ultimately immaterial - right? - because on their view there's a "right" degree of state intervention (i.e., minimal), so there's no point in inviting citizens to shape it (and doing so just invites the expansion of state power anyway); and it isolates us from one another and successive generations, since we are no longer commonly interested in a single political society but only in our own personal advancement, under the principle of mutual non-interference.

From:

wight1984.livejournal.com

That's interesting, because I would have put it the other way around.

Conservative politics tends to be more likely to consider the state's role to be the enforcement of (traditional) moral values.

Liberal politics tends to reject the enforcement of personal morality as a valid state function and instead have the state ensure a certain level of autonomy and freedom in which individuals can pursue their own lives according to their own values and goals.

I suppose the confusion is that 'right-wing politics' is often economically liberal but with more traditionally conservative politics on civil matters, whilst 'left-wing politics' is often big on civil liberalism but favours a heavily regulated or even quasi-socialist economy.

Personally, I'm more on board with liberalism; the state should not dictate morality. I also just happen to think that classically liberal views on economics are flawed and simplistic (the free market does not maximise liberty).

From:

oslo.livejournal.com

I would characterize the conservative view of, as you put it, "the state's role to be the enforcement of (traditional) moral values," a bit differently. Let me see if I can put this convincingly: let's take abortion.

You're probably familiar with the regrettably mainstream Democratic mantra that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare" (I regret the mantra because it seems to accept implicitly the stigmatization of abortion). That's a pat statement that serves as a proxy for a complex set of interrelated policies that are designed to create the social conditions - and I would say, in so doing, the moral characters - where women (and men) find the need, in their own lives, to rely on abortion less. That is to say, they seek to regulate not single instances of a kind of behavior but a whole social fabric within which that behavior occurs.

What sort of woman, on the "liberal" view, is a woman who chooses not to abort, or who aborts only rarely? It's the sort of woman, I think it could be said, who has access to effective birth control; who knows how to use birth control; who feels empowered to use that birth control; who has male partners who take responsibility for their own roles in potentially procreative sex; who has access to safe, effective medical care when and if they become pregnant; for whom becoming pregnant and having a child is not necessarily an economically devastating turn of events; and so on. The mantra, then, is really about all of these things: it's about comprehensive sex education; public funding for Planned Parenthood and other medical services and outlets for young, sexually active women; public funding of prenatal and postnatal medical care; public funding of child care services; laws prohibiting discrimination based on sex, gender, pregnancy, parental status, etc.; minimum wage floors that reflect the reality of single motherhood for thousands of mothers; and so on. You're right that the "liberal" view doesn't tell people to have abortions, or not. What it does, instead, is promote the formation of individual character and social fabrics where no one has to choose - and no one does choose - to abort for the "wrong" reasons.

Edited Date: 2014-05-17 07:32 pm (UTC)

From:

oslo.livejournal.com

Contrast this with the "conservative" view. You're right that conservatives would prefer to ban abortion outright. But what is their take on the above question - what sort of woman is a woman who chooses not to abort? As far as I can tell, the only response that conservatives have to this question is to say: it's the sort of woman who chooses not to have sex, when she is not prepared to rear a child. And what sort of woman is this?

From the point of view of the state, "conservatives" seem less interested in using the state to promote a way of thinking about moral choices that ultimately serves their interests - the "liberal" view I've described above - than they are in enforcing specific behaviors by creating stark consequences for failing to abide by their moral views. What sort of woman chooses not to have sex, when she is not prepared to rear a child? It's a woman who's been mis-educated by years of abstinence-only sex education. It's a woman who's already earning less per hour than men with the same experience and background, who's exposed to discrimination in the workforce that she can't hope to combat due to decades of caselaw eroding her right to seek legal recourse. It's a woman who knows that she has only herself to rely on, when it comes to getting prenatal care and raising a child. Conservatives call that "self-reliance," but this "self-reliance" isn't a character trait; it's a strategy for survival. Conservatives aren't interested in creating, in other words, a society where people choose to be self-reliant, despite being able to do otherwise, because they value self-reliance per se. They're interested in creating a society where people are self-reliant because they have no other choice. Apart from being banned from obtaining abortions outright, the only conservative answer to the question, "what sort of woman is a woman who chooses not to abort?" is: a woman who has nowhere to turn for support, if she gets pregnant.

And this view can't be remediated by saying that conservatives want such woman to have voluntary support, in the form of their churches, families, and communities. Because they also oppose any state-oriented policy that might encourage people to create such networks, apart again from creating sheer desperation and misery. Take away public support for Planned Parenthood, and voluntary support will either fill the gap, or - if not - it's an unworthy organization in the first place. But in a pervasively self-reliant society, who has the security they need to provide that support?

That difference in approach, I think, is why people view conservatives as being more interested in regulating morality than liberals. In essence, conservatives seek to enforce their moral views through legislation precisely because they've fundamentally failed to shape society in a more fundamental way, where people take those moral views on just because they seem like the right ones to adopt. So their actions seem so much more obvious and counter-cultural. "Liberals" have a distinct view about the moral agents we ought to be, as well; but they seek to create the conditions in which that morality emerges naturally, as the product of our upbringing. That's why education, diversity, social mobility, etc., is all so important for the "liberal."

From:

peristaltor.livejournal.com

I also just happen to think that classically liberal views on economics are flawed and simplistic (the free market does not maximise liberty).

Liberal and Neo-liberal economics are complete bollocks, sadly. As far as I can determine, they were crafted as a response to schools of economics that a fire-brand progressive of today would call righteous and effective (Henry George's Progress and Poverty and comes to mind as an example).

It is eternally frustrating to have the word "liberal" used to describe two so completely opposite schools of thought, liberal economics and liberal progressivism.

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