Feelings

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make today is the emphasis on feelings over reason. We ignore that feelings cannot be measured, but reason can.

I cannot know the intensity or trustworthiness of what you feel, nor you, me. We simply feel what we feel; in that sense mere feelings are amoral. We can't judge them. They just are what they are.

Yet we can judge reason through logic. We can look at how others act and make judgments for or against it. You might feel justified in lifting that hundred from your brother's wallet, but I can still assert quite rightly that you're stealing. Perhaps you, ahem, feel he owes it to you. Well then, make your case, that I might be able to see that you have one. Yet if all you've got is the feeling you deserved that cash, you need to give it back and seek forgiveness. 

I believe our modern progressive friends trumpet feelings over reason exactly because feelings left to themselves avoid larceny and any other violations of right, wrong, or general propriety. They want to feel however they want to feel (and act on that) without recrimination.

Just don't tell them how you feel about it. Yes, I'm being snarky.

Hold your wallet

When someone tells you that with their brains and your money they'll change the world, hold on tight to your wallet.
You can attribute that quote or something similar to many people. I heard it first from me Grandpa Joe, repeated years later by me Pops. And it's basically why I distrust government and am a political conservative.
It is essentially how the progressives, the government planners, think. With their brains and your cash they'll save the world. This isn't to say that every idea they have is a bad one. Nor is it to say that we don't need government and that governments need money. But it is to say that, no matter how good of an idea you think something is, when you intend to spend someone else's money you ought to be very certain that your idea is a legitimate public good requiring a public commitment. Otherwise, you're simply a petty tyrant forcing others to like something merely because you do.
To be sure, conservatives have their pet government schemes. Yet by and large it is our friends on the left who promote government interference in our lives and demand our - your - cash for it. And they just don't seem to care what your selfish little self thinks about their hands on your wallet.

Apparently I'm Scary

Yesterday I was called by a progressive friend, 'scary'. This after being told, when another friend heard I was voting in the recent Michigan Republican primary, that 'You people scare me'.

What's up with that? They've each known me for years, and to be fair to them I don't expect my relationships with either to change. They are each better than their recent speech, and I know it. I know too that there are (as in any group) Republicans and conservatives who might be labeled scary. But I would have thought that decency and charity would have prevented these friends from insulting me so directly.

It leads me ask, why should American conservatism seem scary? We right wingers are not the ones attempting to completely run the lives of others. As I've said before, outside of a handful of critical issues the right, by and large, is live and let live. It's the left who would not allow you to cut down a tree on your own property, to turn into boards to fix your own steps. It is the left who will not allow you the full use of your property if some part of it holds, to them, an environmental value. It is the left who wants to force you onto public transport because they feel it proper, and who want you to send your kids to inadequate public (read that government) schools or join a union merely because they see such things as laudable. Such attitudes do not support true human rights. At least when a Republican argues against abortion, there is arguably an actual human life at stake. To the left it's simply a matter of save the whales, but human beings don't have human children.

In short, I think they have more to fear from the progressives and socialists than from a truly conservative government. At that, I would never have told either that they scared me. But when your rival is a straw man and your goals of good intention, I suppose almost anything else will frighten you.