House of Eratosthenes

Friend/Relative #2: “The difference is that liberals boldly embrace change because they’re not afraid of it. Conservatives cling to the past with bloody fingernails, even when it’s going away. They’re like the buggy whip factory worker making more whips after the car has been invented. They doom themselves.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh, well I definitely want to be a liberal then.”

Friend/Relative #2: “I’ve heard they’re called ‘liberals’ because they love liberty.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh! Well so much the better!”

That’s got to stop. This is wrong. Anyone who has been thinking for themselves, even for a moment, at any time over the last five years knows this is balderdash. President Trump was a reformer, a conservative reformer. The liberals resisted his reforms, clinging to a past that was going away, until they looked like buffoons. Now they’re going to try to bring it all back again. They may succeed at it, but they’ll end up looking even more buffoonish. They’re the ones manufacturing buggy whips.

They were, and are, afraid of change because they were, and are, afraid of their liberal swamp rat asses getting sent to jail where they belong.

And they hate liberty as if liberty shot their parents in an alleyway when they were eight. Their solution to every problem is some kind of encroachment or diminution against individual liberty.

The myth is that conservative and liberal have to do with change, and time. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is very much like using a boat’s compass to figure out where the front of the boat is. It is the application of a static concept upon a dynamic object, and such a “definition” will be wrong whenever the boat is headed in a direction different from the one on which you planned. That’s going to be roughly half the time, or more. “Liberals boldly embrace change” fails every time conservatives are the ones bringing the change, which is roughly half the time. “Liberals love liberty” fails all of the time.

Conservative vs. liberal has to do with definitions. Look it up:

Conservative (adj.): “marked by moderation or caution : marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners” (Merriam Webster) “(of an estimate) lower than what is probably the real amount or number” (Oxford)

Liberal (adj.): “not literal or strict : loose : not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms” (Merriam Webster) “Given, used, or occurring in generous amounts : giving generously : broadly construed or understood; not strictly literal or exact” (Oxford)

How it applies:

“Caitlyn Jennier is a woman” is a very *liberal* interpretation of “woman.” Conservatives are going to define “woman” conservatively, and they will tell you that’s a man, baby. And they’ll be right.

“Tom and George are married” is a liberal interpretation of “married.” Believe it or not, there are still conservatives running around who don’t recognize this. Our opinions are illegal, but we still have them…and, being the real lovers of liberty, we know we have a right to them. No matter what.

“Climate change is going to doom us all” is a liberal prognostication. It is the kite severed from the string. It is imagination running wild and free, unconstrained by anything.

“But it’s science!” is a liberal interpretation of “science.” It falls to conservatives to remind everyone else of the conservative understanding of science. Science doesn’t work that way.

“Absentee ballots must be received by this date” was interpreted liberally, which is how Joe Biden won some states last year. In violation of the local laws. Liberals violate laws a lot, rather capriciously, because they violate definitions. It’s what liberals do.

When liberals are “generous,” it’s with someone else’s money, which is a very liberal understanding of the concept of generosity.

In the antebellum era of the United States, history shows we had deep and irreconcilable conflicts regarding the proper interpretation of our founding documents, which held these truths to be self-evident,

…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]

Today’s liberals would like to be viewed as proper ideological descendants of the abolitionists, who sought to end slavery. Those who were interested in the preservation of this institution, bent the rules on interpretations, and liberals would like us to think of them as conservatives. But if you could bring back one of those “conservatives” and ask him to justify his position, he would use tortured, liberal arguments. The most popular one at the time seems to have been something like: Yeah sure, all men are created equal, but these slaves aren’t men, they’re my property. Your document doesn’t say anything about rights of property, only rights of real men, and I don’t recognize them as such. I get to provide the final interpretation on this. Why? Because I want it! I want that authority so just go ahead and give it to me.

Liberals want us to think of those as conservative arguments. Why? Because they want it that way. So just give it to them! And…we do.

That doesn’t work. Not even half the time. In fact, the arguments used by the slaveholders to preserve the institution of slavery, are no different from the argument today’s “pro-choice” liberals use to preserve the industry of abortion. There’s no meaningful difference between these whatsoever. Yeah sure, the baby would have a right to life if it were a baby…but I do not recognize the “clump of cells” as a baby.

Here is something else that absolutely, positively, does not work:

Liberal (adj.) (Oxford) “Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise”

That definition has not been removed yet, nor do I know for sure that it will be anytime soon. But it should be.

Our liberties depend on our legal system. Our legal system relies on definitions remaining strong, and interpreted according to original intent. You can’t be a lover of liberty, while you’re being liberal with interpretations. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to be using your fast-and-loose stretchy-Gumby elasticized definitions to remove someone’s freedom, and better than even odds you’re going to be hurting them by doing so. And feeling very, very smug about yourself while you’re doing it. That’s a liberal.

Every time I see a post with this kind of title, I get flashbacks to the old days – I keep expecting to see hundreds of nearly identical question begging “comments” (glad that doesn’t happen anymore, but some of the rebuttals really earned the brutality bonus, which could be good for a chuckle. Remember Nightfly playing hockey referee, but instead of sending them to the penalty box, it was the shame closet? Ahhh, memories. Who says there’s no sense of community on the internet?)
- Severian | 04/06/2021 @ 10:27
They actually won me over, in a way. I think they were good students. Outstanding, in fact. They would have been even better if they had coordinated better with each other while using the same account. But they were naturals at sniffing out and regurgitating T.O.R.A., The One Right Answer.

Feminists have come up with a term for this behavior, “sealioning,” when you politely ask questions in purely bad faith just to take over the narrative. The application of this word, in & of itself, is in bad faith. You can ask a feminist: How can it be womens’ turn to succeed, and time for men to step back and let women be awesome for awhile, if gender is merely a social construct? Eee! Sealioning!! So it’s another way to make feminist activists into human land mines, with a fancy word. But as we saw with the anecdotes you summarize, the word does apply sometimes. I ultimately banned them for pumping in static, provably. The circumference of the loop-de-loop shrank down to Cheerio size and something had to be done. Pretending they were arguing in good faith when they weren’t, just became too much work.
- mkfreeberg | 04/08/2021 @ 04:36
How characteristic of feminists to come up with a term for it (though I confess I’ve never heard it before). That’s why I had them pegged as grad students early on – in academia, even common sense must be foot noted. I remember a guy having a long running fight with a prof on his thesis committee. The guy would write something like “Commander so and so believed thus and such about the Japanese plan,” and cite US military intelligence. The prof would come up with a whole bunch of objections to this, along the lines of “have you accounted for systemic bias in the sources?”

Long story short, the grad student had to include a long, MANY page digression explaining — with footnotes!!! — why he thought that US military intelligence reports were, all in, a pretty decent snapshot of what US military intelligence thought about things related to US military intelligence. I am not in any way joking.
- Severian | 04/09/2021 @ 13:20
[…] House of Eratosthenes Friend/Relative #2: “I’ve heard they’re called ‘liberals’ because they love liberty.” […]
- Strange Daze: “Outside of these Democrat-run cities, America is peaceful, safe, clean, and racially toleran” | 04/14/2021 @ 21:01

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Sunday, March 28th, 2021