Conservautism in a single paragraph

orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/GossScruton.php

Not only does this dipshit casually dismiss real world examples of right-wing authoritarianism such as fascism and Tsarist Russia as "deviant," but the only examples he gives of the "good" kind of authority are entirely fictional examples from novels. And on top of that, he doesn't even name any specific novels, which is funny because anyone who's read 19th century novelists like Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy, et al would know that their books are teeming with examples of oppressive clergy, judges, teachers, etc.

Right-wingers scoff when we tell them that they're delusional fantasists seeking to restore a highly idealized fictional past and soft selling authoritarianism, but here's one of the premier right-wing "intellectuals" demonstrating just that.

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This is kind of like when libertarians claim that private corporations and employers can't be oppressive like the gubmint is.

despite it dominating the world for centuries or even millenia

It's telling that Scruton didn't bother mentioning that because he knows the problems with that argument.

Absolute monarchies tend to not last long when both information can be transmitted easily (the printing press) and you have a growing middle class.

All you morons you have is an appeal to tradition without even bothering to look at the completely different circumstances in which monarchies arose and survived. The closest thing to your ideal right now is Saudi Arabia, which is a backwater.

To be frank, Russian monarchy was distinct from other European kingdoms. It was absolute through and through with primitive institutions like serfdom long after all the other Western kingdoms abolished it centuries ago. He could have meant that and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Really, there's no comparison between backwater Tzarist Russia and any other European kingdom.

On the other hand, this does show that he understands that conservatism for its own sake is not something to strive for. I find it somewhat funny that he gives the examples of America and England, the former could easily be called not conservative in contrast. I really hate this mishmash of semantic confusion, all in all a poor attempt by Scruton.

That's not a fault, actually. Novels, in the atmosphere they're written, can greatly illuminate sincere depictions of the surrounding culture.

I'm not saying that it's an argument in favor of monarchies being stable (they're not), but rather the fact that the Tsarist government was only notably different from the many hundreds of dead monarchist governments that preceeded it because information about how shitty it was was widely available and recorded for history to see.

If the can't give any real world or historical examples of how your ideas would function well in practice outside of fictional accounts, there's a good chance your ideas are crap. This is even more damning for right-wingers because they like to fashion themselves as "hard-headed realists" while left-wingers are pie-in-the-sky utopians.

Also, like OP said, he DOESN'T provide specific examples from any novels. He just makes some vague references to them. Many canonical 19th century novelists don't portray local communities in the benign way that Scruton imagines them.

Example: The Golden One's shelves and shelves full of European fantasy novels.

Probably than Libercuckism. I'd rather be autistic than BLACKED

The right is fond of using literal fiction to justify their imbecility. See pic related, Solzhenitsyn, Judge Scalia I think used 24 to defend torture etc. Reactionarism is a pathology.

I think my favorite examples are the reactionaries like Evola who admitted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were probably fake, but defended them anyway because they thought the conspiracy they outlined was true.

He said, when the only historical evidence socialists brought up of "socialism working" were massive oversimplifications of hunter-gatherer societies


And if he would you would objectively consider each on their merits, instead of just greentexting
with a smug epic maymay attached to the post, right?

And he's right, the Left is generally opposed to authority on principle - look at The Authoritarian Personality for fuck's sake, it's literally "strict fathers create fascist conformists, absent fathers create well-adjusted individuals"

¿Para que vivir?

Don't tell me you actually believe that authoritarian leftism never existed.

Lol. The absolute state of America

Novels describe a cultural milieu not historical fact. It's still an idealist argument.

Well at least he was being honest – by accident, of course. Circular reasoning is one of the keys of rightwing discourse. In a way, neoliberalism is one gigantic circular argument for upwards transfer of wealth. They build an economic model that benefits them, and if that model and the real thing don't match, they hammer the real thing as hard as it takes for them to fit and call the ensuing chaos a "market correction". It's an overplayed metaphor but it's true, modern economists really are like clergy.

Even better! Magna Carta of 1215 was the noblemen's way of saying "either you ditch the absolute monarchy or we ditch you".

archive.is/SR8D4

He actually, honest-to-God used a ticking time bomb scenario, from a MIC-wanking TV show no less, to defend torture in front of a conference of world-class judges.

It's shit like this that worries me about the effect of culture, even fiction, on us. There's a million studies saying that no they didn't find any permanent psychological changes after being exposed to a lot of violent instances of , and then a fucking judge from the fucking Supreme Court of the only fucking superpower on Earth pulls shit like this. How the fuck can I process this? What the hell does this say about the Spectacle, or even just culture in general even before mass media? Scalia throws a wrench in my opinions here.

As an aside, word has it that 24's executive producer, a rightwinger called Joel Surnow, was an occasional guest to Rush Limbaugh's home, and they would ride Rush's private jet to some Caribbean shithole to fuck underage prostitutes.

You're the dipshit here. Instead of trying to come to an understanding of what he means with those examples, how authority isn't just the czar and hitler curbstomping your face because they hate you for your freedumbs, how only being able to see it as such deviancy is like only being able to see sex as rape, you instead lull your mind with the gusto of the icanteven…. This quick and easy hit of mind-numbing satisfaction is the crack of intellectuals who read books so that they can tell others that they need to READ A FUCKING BOOK. No wonder they can only conceive authority as dogma being transcribed in a one-dimensional process or violence when this is refused, they lack the deep, interpersonal bonds of unspoken understanding that held together communities in which every family lost a child or two, in which women feared for their sons, husbands and brothers whenever the fishing fleet set sail, such communities possessed seasoned members who had already seen it all, whose occupations weren't jobs, but duty bound places in a shared existence.

For the cyclopes that inhabit this board, everything is singular, so is the past, it's that time when we had less technology and more stupid beliefs and the cyclopes wouldn't like that. When men like Roger Scruton and Peter Hitchens portray the great dissolution with examples from novels and stories from the past, they're not arguing for The Past, they're illuminating a way of being that has all but vanquished, to the point of being unimaginable.

I like how you didn't argue any of the points brought up, building a strawman instead to beat incessantly on

I don't like it how cyclopses shut themselves of from reappraisal by naming a reappraisal that doesn't confirm to their self-image a strawman. For those who live by the internet argument playbook, simply stating strawman is their own last straw.

So go ahead, arm yourself, read the wikipedia list of fallacies, pull the crtl-c crtl-v, wreck me, BTFO me and enjoy yourself.

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Ironically enough he shits on brutalism for it being authoritarian.

Scruton is the only one strawmanning here.

This is exactly what Debord described though. Fiction usurping reality.

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"authority" is literally just power + somebody who chooses to submit to it instead of fighting it.

The best places to live in the world are social democracies.


You haven't actually read Adorno and you got your understanding on him from some right-wing propaganda about "Cultural Marxism."

Socialism has always worked and it's still working. Sorry but the coup in Russia doesn't count as an economic failure.

Isn't Scruton basically calling Authority "Wielded Power, but justified and good" here? Leftists can perceive this, see any Communist state. They just operate under different definitions of "justified and good".

Which aren't actually socialist unless you're a right-wing burger that thinks public services are socialist.

The events leading up to said coup do, though

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sounds like a sperg.
It's not like there weren't ever any authoritarian and right-wing jews anyway. antisemitism was largely a trait of eastern european fascism and there were various wealthy jewish bankers backing mussolini, franco and integral nationalism.

antisemitism has been a trait of practically every society where there have been Jews.

meant for

The wider point remains that "The Authoritarian Personality" is mostly just Jewish intellectual projection dressed up with psychoanalytical babble as justification, since it never seems to touch on Jewish opposition to intermarriage or group solidarity (assuming of course that any non-Jewish reference to said Jewish group solidarity is just a baseless anti-Semitic canard)

So the idea is that fiction doesn't really alter us so much as possesses us, then? It's not us who wear fictionsuits, but ideas wear realitysuits. Capitalism turns us into the private property of memes.

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en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
And Adorno was hardly some Jewish ethnonationalist. His mother was Catholic and his father was a former Jew who had converted to Protestantism. It's a bit of a stretch to expect Adorno to have such strong ties to the Jewish community that he would feel the need to specifically condemn it, especially right after the Holocaust.

I don't understand this. What am I seeing?
What is happening???? Is there something the matter with my brain????????????????????????????????????

It's ahrd to believe it nowadays, but SA used to be the OGs of the modern internet. Part of that is by spawning a lot of spin-offs for a wide variety of reasons good or bad, including cuckchan.

Another one of these spin-offs was SASS, made up of people rectalragnaroked for being banned or permabanned "unfairly", altho the vast majority of them were chronic shitposters and/or bigots. It eventually imploded, of course, and was replaced with TNE, which was the same shit, really. Then the particularly awful people, too obnoxious, bigoted and unbearable even for SA rejects, spun off into their own shithole, My Posting Career. It was basically proto-Holla Forums. Except for cuckchan, all the spin-offs I just mentioned are part of the rightwing of SA's buttspawns. Notice the ironic Chapo line above the site header.

This is the short version, mind you. ED has the gory details, including some familiar names.

I was part of SA and SASS way back when. That's what was so confusing about MPC.

If I had known then what I know now I think I might have just thrown my computer in a river and gone to live in the woods.

The day will come when you look back on these years and cringe brutally at your own stupidity. Then, you will hang your head and cry like a baby because of your own self hatred, loathing and sense of shame and intense fail.

wat

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Are you talking to Scruton, or…?


No offense, but is it just me or do traditionalists often write in a similar style? Some things are always mentioned: familial relations; mythological figures; a few vices…

Anyway, user, we're well aware, and in agreement, that the erosion of community is a massive problem. It comes up constantly in threads about alienation. Communities, even those traditional without being regressive such as the one you describe, are not only fine, but necessary, tho they can assume other, more modern forms, such as neighborhood associations. I know people whose dream is to bug off and live in a tiny, traditional seaside village in a poor but peaceful country. All power to them, I say.

But you're making a few mistakes here. One, I admit, I can't know if it's lack of awareness of it or you just ommitted it, but the greatest destroyer of institutions, including communities, is capitalism. Not even Stalin deliberate steamrolling over many "old ways of living" killed as many as the capitalist system does just by existing and growing.

Another is saying Scruton provides examples. They're not examples because it's not at all established they were based or reality. I mean, authority by merit is obviously real (Lenin reached the top of his party on sheer strength of argumentation and rationale), but something like these benevolent figures in small communities of times past seem to naturally have existed, but effectively, they might, for all I know, be the old literary equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. An example would be a history book or a study, not fiction.

Also is treating "authority as dogma being transcribed in a one-dimensional process or violence when this is refused" (I assume you mean the usual political process in a State) and the numerically smaller community with its informal authority figures cannot co-exist. They can, in both constructive or destructive ways. The former might be, for example, scientists or experts in a topic so their opinion doesn't require an office in order to be more easily heard. The latter, any poor country without rule of law.

Lastly, like I said, some older forms of community are perfectly fine, but some are… less than humane, let's say. And there's always someone wanting to revive the latter. So some forms of community could return without a problem, but many – probably the vast majority throughout history, if I had to guess – is better off buried in the past.

Adorno himself was a halfbreed jew.

PRINCIPLES OF THE RIGHT: FASCIST, AUTHORITARIAN, IMPERIALIST.