Off Topic — HabitableZone

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re: tired
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Good questions, and deserving of better and more complete answers than I can give. I wish I could point out effectively the assumptions about "conservatism" that seem to underly most of them. Racist. Exploiters. Against progress. And what has been the history of the Left in the past century?

Am I a conservative? God knows any more. The new Republicans seem as happy with massive government as the Democrats do. All the old-type conservatives I know (like Jerry Pournelle) are very unhappy about our foreign policy, and are, like the Roosevelt Republicans, much more isolationist. I don't know about this. Isolationism was a hell of a lot easier when it took a week for an invasion force to cross an ocean, and there were no bombers and atomic missiles.

A conservative thinks that maybe, just maybe, some of the ideas that carried this country through two hundred years aren't exactly stupid ones. C. S. Lewis, when told by someone that you can't turn back the clock, said that of course you can, and if it's telling the wrong time, you should.

Robert Heinlein is my kind of conservative. The "Notebooks of Lazarus Long" are one piece after another about the philosophy that people are and should be free individuals, and on the importance of a frontier, families, and a can-do attitude.

Ayn Rand had principles that worked, and principles that I admire, but I think that she would have learned much about what conservatism means if she had had kids. The importance of raising children shows up only in a short sequence in "Atlas Shrugged."

Oddly, Heinlein never had kids either, but felt that families were of paramount importance. It shows in most of his work.

In any given situation, I believe the answer lies in the direction of individual liberty, not centralized control, and that one should make the choices when possible that lead in that direction.

You can plug that into most of your questions, and get the answers I would give.

Robert had no idea what he was asking of me. Each fork in the historical road leads to several other forks. By the time we get from Roosevelt to here, we are looking at tens of thousands of histories. I hope he does not interpret my failure to come through as a sign that his question was unreasonable. I'm just not up to it. I'm a synthesist--it's what I get paid for--and have trouble enough explaining the big picture of even isolated historical incidents with my limited writing talents.

I could write pages on just what might have happened if Gore had been elected, and that was only a few years back. In a recent thread, Bowser mentioned the nine children who died in Afghanistan, as an indictment of Bush and our policies. I tried to point out that had Gore been elected, he almost certainly would have also attacked Afghanistan in response to 9/11. Those children may well have died anyway, and a more appropriate example of Bush's evil might be something related to Iraq. I didn't even manage to get this one small alternate history idea across, and it isn't Bowser. I don't think I got the idea across to anyone.

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