I used to be a conservative. The operating phrase here is “used to”. I admired them for their stand on limited government. I was such a fool back then.
If you want to ever understand what a true conservative is, look no further than Mark Levin. He is probably the most conservative talk radio show host out there these days and he certainly says a lot of things I do agree with.
But he’s got one huge and potentially fatal flaw when it comes to his views, one that he doesn’t ever reconsider and arrogantly defends at all costs: his support of the military and police force.
And this is the fatal flaw of any conservative you’ll come across. They will blindly and strictly defend the actions of all military and polices forces without question. If you question what they are doing, you will be called a liberal or a nutjob. If you suggest that the weapons and boots of the government could be used against you when you fight for limited government, you are no longer considered a conservative.
The fact is, I’ve had more insults and illogical arguments thrown at me from conservatives rather than liberals. I’m sure I could get a full share from both if I regularly went to the liberal forums, but I guess I had set my expectations too high.
You see, I’m more of an individual than most people would like. I don’t care for fitting my belief system into a specific box. Heck, I have disagreements with Christians over things. I mean, don’t get started on the fallacies and sheer absurdity of Calvinism.
But conservatives are not free thinkers anymore than liberals are. In fact, many libertarians lack any original thought and tend to spout out views that were given to them by smarter men than them. I guess it is just the way of the collective: to look to the smarter people to guide them.
There is a difference though in how the “low Church” members of any group handle opposing views they can’t resolve on their own. When any group has members who are more than willing to resort to insults and not to reason or to simply admit, “I don’t know”, you’ve got Brutals and yahoos and not a group you should associate with.
That is why I have little tolerance for insults in any debate. It’s not that I’m thin-skinned, if I was, I would simply hunt down your bosses and get you fired, much like what Dave Ramsey did to Matt Collins. It’s got more to do with the fact that once the insults start flying, I know that I’ve won the debate and that there is no point in moving forward.
But this is how Mark Levin operates. If you make any reasonable argument against him, he’ll insult you and shut you down. He’s probably banned more dissenters from his Facebook page than I have followers on my twitter account (it’s only less than two hundred though). But if you were to read some of the vile shit his followers throw at their opponents, the rules become clear: you can only be a bastard if you agree with me. This is how most popular pundits operate and it’s getting sickening, regardless of their ideology.
But it is for that specific reason that I abandoned conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, and just about everything else: it’s because I have yet to find a group that doesn’t treat its opponents like garbage.
And yes, I used to be an asshole myself to a lot of people on these stupid forums. So I know that you can change if you’re one yourself.