Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

btw that was my real stance
I drive by a billboard every day that now has an ad for the National Guard promising 100% tuition compensation

I would never dismiss silby I am only pointing out stuff

I meant more dismissing the liberal students to argue in the hallway

Not in the hallway. Nowhere on campus.

you should honor your parents whether or not they deserve it

Wow

there's a pretty wide spread between someone just being a mediocre parent and physical/sexual abusers

also my parents are horrible at relationship guidance, just like nothing there whatsoever

Can you make a corollary along the lines of: Parents should love their children unconditionally even when they're being disgraceful little shits?

love implies affection or at very least mercy and possibility for forgiveness

honor sounds, in absence of reasons for respect, subjugation

admittedly it's easier to do when they're deserving of it but it's really more for u than for them.

wow dude

you could make such a corollary but interestingly the ten commandments only specifies one direction and not the other. maybe bc it assumes parents will love their children unconditionally (a big ask) or maybe it just doesn't think it's as important.

xpz

tombot don't get too excited (tho i knew i'd get something of that reaction when i first posted) i'm not saying anything that wasn't written on divine tablets

Cases of abuse and extreme neglect are one thing, but in most instances I agree with Mordy. Not much is gained by fixating on one's parents' shortcomings. Also it's mean to make your mediocre parent stew in regret in their waning years because their kid won't talk to them -- a thing I've seen happen.

Can you make a corollary along the lines of: Parents should love their children unconditionally even when they're being disgraceful little shits?

^uncool conservative false equivance of the power dynamic here

and like i'm not going to judge anyone for what they chose to do or what they think they're capable of etc everyone's soul belongs to them and is none of my business and i don't know what struggles other ppl are dealing w/. i just mean it as a general rule and really as a rule for myself since i'm not in the business of making rules for other ppl.

If my daughter stops talking to us shortly after making me a grandpa then I'll know why and I'll respect it.

"Honor" is a crap verb - it maybe has a use when the object is an oath, or flag, but not human beings

my thinking is - why of all the things is honoring your parents important enough to include in the 10 commandments. and my thinking on this is that it's bc it's too easy to have disappointing parents and thru your disillusionment with them you come to be become disillusioned w/ so many other things - your family, your community, your faith, your feelings of historical connection to your ancestors - and you become detethered. the law isn't for good parents because it's easy to honor parents who you respect and love. it's really for parents who are /not/ deserving of it, bc that is when you're most at risk. i'm not sure whether you have to force yourself to love them while you're honoring them. surely you can do it and hate them in your head but in some form of subjugation you are really subjugating yourself to a tradition. also i think it's good for self-discipline. also, sometimes i really don't want to do something for my parents but thinking of this as a directive not only makes me do it but i get some satisfaction from it bc i'm not doing it to please them but for myself - to fulfill a directive that i believe is important. nb look if you have the worst parents in the world and you had to get loose from them or they'd destroy you or your soul like i said i'm not judging you at all. hell if you have the most wonderful parents in the world but you cut them out i mean this is your business entirely. i'm just talking about in the most abstract terms how i understand this particular ancient dictum.

In this context I take it to mean 'acknowledge their age and experience,' absent of wisdom. Possibly this interpretation, or even fretting about it, would've been mysterious to Moses and Yahweh.

lol i got into a big fight once on ilx before about the word 'honor.' i wonder why ppl find it so repulsive. is it that it seems to lend a mystic/spiritual dimension to human relationships and we're not keen to think about our human relationships in these kinds of terms? or that it seems to objectify the person being honored? or that we're just so disgusted by the idea of honor bc it implies honor based on a position but not on action. otoh we honor ppl all the time for good things they've done.

I got no problem w/objectifying people -- some people ask for it.

also maybe it's important for something similar to the idea expressed in this passage:

The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odour) and this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position. Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him. And so Ivan Ilych felt at ease only with him. He felt comforted when Gerasim supported his legs (sometimes all night long) and refused to go to bed, saying: “Don’t you worry, Ivan Ilych. I’ll get sleep enough later on,” or when he suddenly became familiar and exclaimed: “If you weren’t sick it would be an- other matter, but as it is, why should I grudge a little trouble?” Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case and did not consider it neces- sary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master. Once when Ivan Ilych was sending him away he even said straight out: “We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?” — expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.

i read ivan ilych years ago but that stayed w me for a v long time. "he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came."

The idea of abstract charity, founded on a shared fiction of community, troubles a lot of people. It's one of the more benevolent parts of Christianity.

the problem is when "honor" becomes less about respect for knowledge and experience, or accommodating requests from people you love, and obeying the whims of your elders for no reason other than the propagation of legacy. which, in history, is very important because station in life, community prominence, and financial inheritance were all based on continuing a lineage of family

it's a risk-mitigation strategy: the child that does not honor (or is not honored, interestingly) is the black sheep. you're thrust into role of outcast, entrepreneur, or both

I feel like every successful abrahamaic religion family either quietly dropped or rehabilitated after death the reputation of the really shitty dads who did nothing but castigate their children. I was at a very nice catholic funeral where it was acknowledged on the low that yes, he was our dad, but the kids were succeeding despite him, not due to his intentional influence. And there it is, they honored their success via spite.

my dads always tryin to get money off of me. I love him but I respect him much less than I do 20 years ago and our relationship has suffered cos of his pathetic manipulative ways

Mordy, are you familiar with kevin MacDonald's discussion of Freudianism? which i guess can be summarized as the pathologization of healthy families (by jews).

Your eloquence in defense of traditional attitudes brought it to mind. as well as the concomitant rejection of that traditionalism. Would be curious if you thought he had a point were the anti-Semitism stripped away.

i don't remember that particular argument but my reading of the family which comes from traditional jewish texts is diametrically opposed by the kind of neurotic reading of Freudianism (which i imagine MacDonald is responding it - maybe I'm off-base but generally anti-Semitic critiques of Freud focus on his perversion of familial relationships). Do I hold Freud responsible for the erosion of familial sittlichtkeit? i guess unlike someone like MacDonald I'd consider Freud a product of his time - and naturally therefore working within an intellectual context of fracture being ushered in by modernity. this would be classic - Nazi anti-Semitism misaddressing the sins of modernity particularly to the Jews (and of course Freud was among the 'deviant thinkers' the Nazis condemned). the sad irony imo is that even so far as this critique could hold among German Jewry most Jews had the means to escape before the war. the primary victims of the genocide were Hungarian/Polish/Ukranian/Lithuanian Jewry aka the very Jews reaffirming this traditional family model that Freud was (potentially) disrupting. idk what do you think?

also, i assume you mean the concomitant rejection of that traditionalism to be coming from other posters? i don't think i've expressed much unease or mitigation of traditional attitudes (though like all of us i'm obviously steeped in our cultural discourse which is iconoclastic on this note) and if anything i see my personal project of the last few years being an attempt to reaffirm some of these attitudes that have maybe been unduly dismissed. see also above in this thread where i talk about the declining role of religion and community as being responsible for many of our contemporary ills. a complete return to these cloistered communities (especially in my case where the most traditional of these communities in say williamsburg or lakewood are completely detached from modernity to the pt in both cases of having strong linguistic breaks from anglo america) is anathema to me. this despite the fact that i spent significant years of my younger life in such communities. inevitably i'm attracted to synthesis forms of traditional judaism - particularly modern orthodoxy (which incidentally, as i was discussing w/ nakh the other day, emerges in the figures of ivanka/kushner as this almost platonic contemporary vision of religious american life and i wonder what macdonald or even duke think about them because they seem to avoid them intentionally as major lacunas in their theories?) and even moreso chabad which also includes broad engagement w/ american life but an even stronger fidelity to traditional judaism vis-a-vis a gnostic/chassidic/kabbalistic tradition which in contemporary western world seems particularly resonant.

Peacock, I just read a bunch of the MacDonald piece. It's very interesting + provocative (like much of his work). I think maybe his unfamiliarity with traditional Judaism though (and maybe he addresses this but I haven't gotten to it) leads him to interpret Freud incorrectly. Freud has a mythology about traditional Jewry but it is far removed from actual traditional Judaism and his beliefs about things like Jewish monotheism, Jewish choseness, Biblical exegesis, etc are those of a secular Jew already experiencing a disconnect from his traditions. He reads Jewish texts therefore through a prism of a) his own psychoanalytical theory and b) through the modern crisis that his family is living through and their own alienation from their tradition. I might even argue that his paeans to Jewish superiority are an overcompensation. This is something you can even see today among some Jews where they substitute a kind of Judeosupremecy militantism to compensate for a feeling of lacking a legitimate tradition. I don't want to psychoanalyze Freud or similar figures too much (I mean it's a very superficial sketch I'm drawing here) but merely to point out that I don't think he really understands Judaism or Jewishness very much and consequently to the extent that MacDonald uses him as a proxy for understanding Jewish theology he's working through an unreliable narrator. Certainly Freud's psychosexual analyses would be completely rejected in other Jewish communities.

HOWEVER

The idea of psychoanalysis itself is not anathema to Judaism. Famously one of the early Lubavitcher rebbes supposedly visited Freud to try and deal w/ severe depression and clearly saw some value in the kind of talk therapy work that he was innovating. But I don't think they discussed Judaism very much and I doubt the Rebbe (the Rebbe Rashab, there's an interesting description of their meeting here: https://www.henrymakow.com/Sigmund_Freud_and_the_Lubavitcher_Rebbe.pdf) thought very much of Freud's own work in Jewish theology (such as in Moses and Monotheism). Ultimately though I think this says more of Chabad chassidus which has a strong element from its beginning of "seeing in all things God" including things that may not seem immediately compatible, and also about the character of the Rebbe Rashab who recognized that he was suffering from a physical ailment, not necessarily a spiritual one, and therefore sought medical help from the expert in the field. If anything I think this uncharacteristic meeting only illuminates my point above - that Freud was working outside a traditional Jewish context and inventing his own Judaism.

So does MacDonald have a point? Here's my personal feeling - he recognizes something legitimately perverse in Freud's work that - like I said before - is equally of its time as well as its own force. But I don't know if he recognizes that there was a positive innovation occurring alongside possible negative repercussions of his work. Which is to say that a man like the Rebbe Rashab could visit him and gain relief from his depression and go back and shepherd his community and transmit a traditional line that exists (stronger than ever) until today. He didn't come back talking about penis envy and the oedipus complex and repressed sexuality - he still believed in modesty and traditional conceptions of sex. He was able to extract the value from amid the shtus/nonsense (as he, and I expect MacDonald, would consider the rest of the work). Freud himself is a troubled figure but it's hard to dismiss his contributions to the world even if the best psychoanalysis has ime long jettisoned Freud (and especially his work specific innovations) but kept the kernel of talk therapy and the therapist / patient relationship. nb that I'm personally not a huge talk therapy guy and I have some considerations about the movement as a whole but that's a whole other discussion. There was an interesting article by Daphne Merkin a few years ago called My Life in Therapy that i think articulates some of these broader considerations about the field and its ultimate value: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08Psychoanalysis-t.html

Mordy, thank you for your considered responses. (And yes, I was indeed referring to the "concomitant rejection" of other posters.) Though I mostly occasionally lurk here, I have long admired your thoughtfulness. Like you say, I think MacDonald is interesting and provocative, though I don't want to extol his beliefs. I often think he is good at articulating the corrosive effects of the movements that he critiques, but it is where he attributes those movements to the Jews where he goes astray. That said, if "Jewishness" is defined vaguely enough, I can see the argument that he is making, but I'm not sure that it is appropriate to call it "Jewishness," when something like "subversion" would work just as well. Obviously, there is also a flip side to these "corrosive" movements that, as you say, were a product of their time and a result of the failures of traditional societies to actualize everybody and were conceived in the pursuit of justice. You are far more well-versed in Freudianism (and in Judaism) than me, and I very much appreciate your response.

Anyway, sorry if I derailed. I do find it interesting to think that at this point in history, the very idea of this thread is now what is subversive. An invitation to speak heretically, and not be judged.

Children should not be allowed to dress themselves (including shopping for their own clothes) until the age of 12

I recently went through some old photo albums at my Mom's house, and all the photos of me before age 6 i look cute as hell in these tasteful, adorable outfits ma (an adult who understands basic colour theory and fashion) lovingly picked out for me. after that, I look like a shitty nerd, colours clash, t-shirts with dumbass slogans on them, then this whole confused skater-surfer thing going on. It's the only way my parents were too liberal.

i think the '80s and '90s were pretty tough for kids and parents who weren't clued in. these days i feel like there are more checks and balances w/fashion, less room for truly catastrophic decisions.

Except for teenaged boys' hair, which remains a strange land of huge amounts of effort required to give the impression of looking incredibly stupid

Or young men in general.

I recently went through some old photo albums at my Mom's house, and all the photos of me before age 6 i look cute as hell in these tasteful, adorable outfits ma (an adult who understands basic colour theory and fashion) lovingly picked out for me. after that, I look like a shitty nerd, colours clash, t-shirts with dumbass slogans on them, then this whole confused skater-surfer thing going on. It's the only way my parents were too liberal.

― flopson

yeah my mom kept dressing me in sailor suits. bootleg bart simpson t-shirts were a step up for me.

shitty nerd, colours clash, t-shirts with dumbass slogans on them, then this whole confused skater-surfer thing

I posted this on the old photos thread, please note black and yellow Vans, ridiculous long shorts with pictures of what I believe was the Jetsons on them, self-darkening glasses, stupid upturned hat, etc.

http://i42.tinypic.com/11si6x0.jpg

perfect example

colours clash, t-shirts with dumbass slogans on them

last night i browsed page after page of t-shirts with dumbass slogans on them that were aping the aesthetic of my 8 year old self whose favorite item of clothing was a yellow t-shirt that said El Camino Real Running Club (or something like that). I thought about buying one of these shirts. Then I thought it would be stupid to spend 20 dollars on said item.

I like that aesthetic. A few years ago I saw two kids in glorious 90s mallrat regalia -- JNCOs, cat in the hat hat, tiny backpack that is also a teddy bear, hemp jewelry. I think they were part of some double advanced retro subculture at their high school.

Say then, my friend, in what manner does tyranny arise? --that it has a democratic origin is evident.

Clearly.
And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy from oligarchy --I mean, after a sort?

How?
The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it was maintained was excess of wealth --am I not right?

Yes.
And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy?

True.
And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?

What good?
Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State --and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.

Yes; the saying is in everybody's mouth.
I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.

How so?
When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs.

Yes, he replied, a very common occurrence.
Yes, I said; and loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who hug their chains and men of naught; she would have subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are men after her own heart, whom she praises and honours both in private and public. Now, in such a State, can liberty have any limit?

Certainly not.
By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them.

How do you mean?
I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom, and the metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.

The Constitution actually does guarantee the individual right to firearm ownership

the second amendment is a run-on sentence with no clear subject

if you're in a committed relationship it's probably a good idea not to spend a lot of alone time w/ someone who shares your spouse's gender

significant other's* gender

lol ok Mordy