intelligent things conservatives say

[homegrown terror]

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*crickets chirp*

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Well, to be fair...


..hmmm..


..gave actual thought then and nothing doing.

[Nox]

"liberals are dumbasses"

I'll agree with them on that one.

[Kenco Smooth]

Am I the only one who thinks this could actually be a decent thread/break from the circlejerk if done right?

[Comrade Trollface]

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed... We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

[Conscript]

Eisenhower also warned of us the dangers of the military-industrial complex

I suspect many of the quotes will be from the old right, which was closer to the center than conservatives are today.

[Red Commissar]

"You're crazy"

That adequately describes me, so I think it was a sharp comment.

[Tim Cornelis]

Conservatism tends to be an agglomeration of fallacious arguments. Constitutionalism being an appeal to authority-fallacy, and opposition to progressivism (such as gay marriage) an appeal to tradition-fallacy. For the rest, there isn't much to it.

[Lynx]

Difficult to find sanity, let alone intelligence, in modern conservative politics. Whatever wins elections, I suppose.

[Raúl Duke]

Yeah, modern day conservative figures tend to be misleading or out-right batshit insane...
Even the non-US ones...the UK conservatives seem so proud and open of being elitist scum and push that around. In America, Romney is getting fire for being a rich elitist fuck and he tries, as per the advice of his campaign people, to seem as "homely," "down to earth" as he can; but over there the UK conservatives are like "fuck you prole scum, clean my shoes and die" without giving a fuck about their image in that regard.

The rank-and-file conservative might say something interesting/thought-provoking one in a way, I guess; but I doubt they're anyone that's going to be quoted or even remembered by any member on here for what they said so it could be posted.

[Dunk]

I often find it easier to talk with conservatives about capitalism than I do with left-liberals.

I wouldn't just blanket any ideological perspective as the territory of fools. We're not intellectual supermen gifted with special knowledge - just lucky in the sense that our conditions made it possible for us to confront the class struggle. Well, maybe I shouldn't use the word "lucky" because I've never really felt lucky about being a communist. It's just something I can't choose not to be.

Also, conservatives say a lot of well reasoned, intelligent things. Yes, they're often wrong about the things they say about political economy, but politics isn't about who has a more convincing argument. It's a struggle, not a debate.

[Kotze]

What are our schools for if not for indoctrination against communism?
-Richard Milhous Nixon

[Comrade Samuel]

Barrack Obama is a socialist...but don't tell them it will spoil the surprise!

[Comrade Trollface]

Dr. Samuel Johnson was a Monarchist who supported the British crown and opposed the independence of the American Colonies. Doubtlessly a conservative position. He was also an ardent abolitionist. Here's the most poignant line in his Taxation No Tyranny, a polemic against the rebellious colonists:
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

[homegrown terror]

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed... We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower


..........i stand corrected.

(p.s. THAT is one intelligent thing a conservative will never say)

[The Young Pioneer]

Some of the smartest people I know are, in fact, conservatives. If anything, I get a sense that their naivety about people outside their own social culture is what prevents them from really "seeing" the bigger picture. So I can empathise with them, even. To a degree.

It's just the immense self-entitlement I'll never fully comprehend.:rolleyes:

[A Revolutionary Tool]

The other day I was talking to my very conservative friend and he brought up the elections. I told him I probably won't be voting and he said he wouldn't be either. I asked him "aren't you a die-hard Republican? You aren't voting for Romney? Why not?"

And his response was literally "fuck him, he's just another rich asshole who doesn't know about being poor."

[Agent Ducky]

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable..."- H.L. Mencken
This is a nice quote.
I don't think he was a conservative in the traditional sense of the word, but the reason why he was objecting to the state is he was into Nietzche and thought that the state was basically oppressing the Ubermensch, the superior group of people. Which is pretty fucked.

[Comrade Trollface]

"We think that a powerful and vigorous movement is impossible without differences — "true conformity" is possible only in the cemetery."
The arch-reactionary Joseph Stalin said this. And then he, being true to his word, proceeded to systematically kill everyone who he disagreed with. It seems that he feared a powerful and vigorous movement more than anything else and rather preferred a cemetery.

[Deicide]

http://netwrok.us/stuff/scumbag-romney.jpg

This thread should be short.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

"2+2 is four, not five!" -Glenn Beck

Yeah, he actually said that.

[Tim Cornelis]

"2+2 is four, not five!" -Glenn Beck

Yeah, he actually said that.

That actually reminded me of something correct Glenn Beck said. I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was along the lines of:

"We need to think of why they [I suppose Arabs or Muslims] hate us [America/Americans], it is because we have supported and assisted dictatorships like Mubarak, they don't hate us because we are free, they hate us because we denied them what we say we uphold [i.e. freedom]". Which was actually spot on.

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

There are a few Edmund Burke quotes I quite like:

"It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found."

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe."


"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by
parts."

One often hears conservatives and other right- winger say something similar.
Then there is this classic from Thomas Paine which some might even consider overused:

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."

[Comrade Trollface]

Paine was far from a conservative though. Dude argued for social welfare in the 18th century and was an all-around crotchety freethinker. If Tea Party types ever bothered to read his work, they'd run screaming.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I actually find that a lot of the 'working class conservative' types in the UK tend to make a lot of economic sense in their analysis of neo-liberalism. I'm really talking about old-school Heathites here.

I find Peter Oborne generally speaks sense though, of course, also speaks some twaddle too.

Peter Hitchens attacked a Labour minister on Question Time the other week over the official left's love of welfare, and intent on creating a dependency culture. Though I disagree with pretty much everything else he's ever said, ever, and his answer to his critique (go back to the good old days of caning, abstinence etc.), his critique of welfare dependancy (that it's a sham and very unfair on those in receipt of welfare, in terms of the culture of dependancy) was actually spot on.

There does tend to be a difference between right-wing conservatives who are ideological (i.e. they believe in whatever they believe), and right-wing conservatives who are pragmatic (the chameleons, mostly found in the political class and at the top of the capitalist class).

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Current "Conservatives" are actually arch reactionaries. But they don't know it. Maybe the smartest thing they say is, "Duh, I don't really know anything about history, political economy, or philosophy, but I have really strong opinions."

[ed miliband]

I find Peter Oborne generally speaks sense though, of course, also speaks some twaddle too.

Peter Hitchens attacked a Labour minister on Question Time the other week over the official left's love of welfare, and intent on creating a dependency culture. Though I disagree with pretty much everything else he's ever said, ever, and his answer to his critique (go back to the good old days of caning, abstinence etc.), his critique of welfare dependancy (that it's a sham and very unfair on those in receipt of welfare, in terms of the culture of dependancy) was actually spot on.

i was gonna say the same two, they are obviously very intelligent men.

oborne wrote one of the first sensitive responses to the london riots; moralistic as fuck, but he didn't condemn those involved and acknowledged the existence of class, etc. actually, i was once handed a leaflet on a march by and swp-type about an anti-islamophobia event and oborne was one of the guest speakers. don't quite understand him.

hitchens is interesting cos he's so pessimistic, and underlying his writing is the understanding that capitalism undermines, and continues the undermine, the very way he believes society should be.

[Os Cangaceiros]

"Every day we must repeat to ourselves as a liturgy, the truth that war is caused by the conditions that bring about poverty; that no war is justified; that no war benefits the people; that war is an instrument whereby the haves increase their hold on the have-nots; that war destroys liberty." - Frank Chodorov

[Book O'Dead]

"War Is Hell."--William Tecumseh Sherman

[Red Rabbit]

“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.” - Vladimir Putin

This quote can actually be said for a lot of things, not just the USSR.

[PC LOAD LETTER]

Bismarck

"My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare."

and the obligatory

"Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"

[The Intransigent Faction]

This:


Brave New World Revisited[/I]"]The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom... A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

[Comrade Jandar]

This:


Huxley was a conservative?

[MuscularTophFan]

"There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich." - Noam Chomsky

[PC LOAD LETTER]

Huxley was a conservative?
He was a eugenicist, loved to fawn over the American political system of "individual liberty", and was an anticommunist

From Brave New World Revisited, although these are less-than-intelligent quotes:

"Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that, in Western Europe and America, these devices have worked, all things considered, not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth-century optimists were not entirely wrong [about human nature]."

"For the moment over-population is not a direct threat to the personal freedom of Americans. It remains, however, an indirect threat, a menace at one remove. If over-population should drive the underdeveloped countries into totalitarianism, and if these new dictatorships should ally themselves with Russia, then the military position of the United States would become less secure and the preparations for defense and retaliation would have to be intensified. But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government. And permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable."

"And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized, and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ's and physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question."

He seems like he'd be a kind of minarchist-libertarian if I had to put it in words. I don't think he supported welfare states because of the overpopulation thing, but it's been so long since I've actually read Brave New World Revisited I can't remember. Maybe someone else can post more info on his political views.

[Anarpest]

"There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich." - Noam Chomsky

Chomsky is probably one of the better conservatives when it comes to world affairs.

In any case: "[On Kerry and Bush:] They're the same guy. There's no difference. They're going to be agreeing with each other on the debates."

- Bill O'Reilly.

Apparently I can't link to the original video, so for reference it's from a video on Youtube named 'Bill O'Reilly kicks Bill Maher's ass,' the section it comes from starting at around 3 minutes 58 seconds in.

[Vanguard1917]

Then there is this classic from Thomas Paine...

Thomas Paine was a revolutionary, not a conservative.