Self-Discipline - The Most Fundamental Key to Conservative Success

Yea, like Gay marriage. Liberals want it legal because they might not be able to help themselves and marry someone of the wrong gender. Wait, wrong argument huh?

 

Which, I guess, explains why in those states where poverty has been stubbornly high, the voters have been overwhelmingly conservative.

 

I agree with the notion that we, as a society, have tossed the notion of consequences for one's actions. However, this is not just a liberal vs. conservative issue. For example, take those frat boys at OU. They gave into whim at the moment that is now coming back to bite them. Yet, we have a number of people, who are clearly conservatives, complaining about the consequences as if the Constitution gives people a free pass to say whatever they want.

One does not need to rob others of basic and vital freedoms to create an environment where people are free to live their lives as they choose. For example, take same sex marriage. Two consenting same sex adults being married does not infringe upon the rights of others. The only negative is that some find the prospect offensive which is, in the end, is not a valid justification for government to deny statutory benefits to those couples. When the actions of others does infringe upon the rights of others, I will agree that it has become immoral.

I do not think what you are saying is completely true about conservatives. For the most part of what I have seen, the conservative position has been abstinence. Conservatives have consistently opposed the teaching of sex education in schools. A unsettling percentage of conservatives want to go back to the point in time when the pill was outlawed. The whole point of the personhood movement is a veiled attempt to get certain types of birth control outlawed. There is no strategizing here just an expectation that women keep their legs closed (it is rare that men are told to keep their peckers in their pants).

Although anecdotal, my observation is that conservatives are not burdened by such things and give into their instincts just as much as liberals.

This all goes back to the notion that we, as a society, do not believe in the notion of the consequences of actions. While I fully agree that when people take out loans, they should be held accountable for paying that back. However, the banks should be held accountable for their actions as well. They have not. The bankruptcy reform that was passed in 2005 is an example of this. The law was justified as something necessary for personal accountability. What it did not do was to hold the banks that engaged in carefree issuing of credit cards to high risk people accountable. Fast forward three years, we have TARP (and the actions of the Fed) which allowed banks that not only give loans to people who they knew could not afford but also fraudulently sold those loans as AAA bonds to not suffer the consequences of their actions.

All of the instances where the banks have not been held accountable for their actions, plants the idea that "well if they aren't accountable why should I?"

If this was true, why is it that conservative states tend to have a higher per capita amount of people using entitlements?

Another thing that conservatives tend to do is to assign blame by framing everything as someone else's moral failings.

 

Wait, you forgot our pointy ears, blue skin, and that funky smell!

Never took biology did you? I can't imagine a beginning biology class that would discuss human sexuality.

Envious?

 

Conservatives make the same mistakes as anyone else. The difference is conservTives are hypocrites and liberals are realists.

 

Perhaps that's going a little too far, but generally not too far off. One issue is "labeling", a cognitive distortion. The very label "republican", which also is supposed to imply "conservative" actually is actually giving too much credit, most often.

I say this because very often "republicans, conservatives" state they support the US constitution. Well, I appreciate Americans who support the constitution, so I want to like republicans; but then I discover the "republicans, conservatives" won't even discuss the prime intents of the constitution, let alone work with other Americans to defend it.

Now the labels "liberal, democrat and progressive" are far more slippery than what I've already brought up. Liberals most often (notice the caveat) refuse to discuss functional action towards defending liberty, democrats do the same with functional proposals to improve democracy and progressives will often not step out of their learned social role to work on actual progress or even discuss it!

What I'm trying to say is that applying labels to fellow Americans defeats the purpose of being an American.

Bring an American means you stand for certain principles. If you see those violated, there is a duty to yourself and your descendants to sincerely and logically work on defense of those principles. That means being mislead by partisan tactics of division is simply not going to work. Allowing it to work makes you a tool opposing your own purposes no matter how you might label yourself.

 

The science of psychology actually has dealt with the problem of delayed gratification extensively. As with many human behaviors, outcomes can be measured in defined, simplified experiments. In this case, ability to delay gratification depends on many external circumstances, including distance to the reward and time of the delay. It also depends on the way the person perceives the reliability of the delayed reward. To cite from the marshmallow experiment (get one now or two later):

"The robust effect of manipulating the environment, conclude the authors, provides strong evidence that children's wait times reflect rational decision making about the probability of reward. The results are consistent with other research showing that children are sensitive to uncertainly in future rewards and with population studies showing children with absent fathers prefer more immediate rewards over larger but delayed ones.
The findings, says Kidd, are reassuring. She recalls reading about the predictive power of these earlier experiments years ago and finding it "depressing." At the time she was volunteering at a homeless shelter for families in Santa Ana, California. "There were lots of kids staying there with their families. Everyone shared one big area, so keeping personal possessions safe was difficult," she says. "When one child got a toy or treat, there was a real risk of a bigger, faster kid taking it away. I read about these studies and I thought, 'All of these kids would eat the marshmallow right away.' "

From: http://rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=4622

This means that inability to delay gratification may not necessarily be a bad decision, as it depends on circumstance. In many predatory animals, for example, the individual has to eat as much as they can when food is available, because any attempt to save food in an unreliable environment could lead to starvation later. The marshmallow experiment cited above supports this notion also in humans.

Therefore, the notion that conservatives are better at delaying gratification and, thus, smarter and better, is simplistic at best, and probably won't hold up to scientific scrutiny.

 

That would make sense if wresting power from the left depended on conservatives running the lives of others.

Such efforts can only succeed to the extent conservatives present a credible alternative, which means, among other things, distancing themselves from the Boehners, McConnells, Roves and other Vichy Republicans.

 

Strange thread, the OP uses the title:
"Self-Discipline - The Most Fundamental Key to Conservative Success"
Yet they spend much of their monolog yapping about and degrading Liberals. Just once I would like to see a Con discuss Conservatism without whining about the other guys, it is as if they cannot promote Conservatism without degrading Liberalism, for me it shows a major weakness in their own ideology. Maybe the next time one of you will mange to do, but this thread failed miserably IMO.

 

I've noticed that you create a "conservatives are better than liberals" thread every once in a while as if to reassure your belief, but it's actually a weakness of your character.