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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

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yodsanklai

A more universal definition would be

> commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation

(from Apple dictionary)

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From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conservatism:

"a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change. specifically : such a philosophy calling for lower taxes, limited government regulation of business and investing, a strong national defense, and individual financial responsibility for personal needs"

No wonder the kids these days have knee-jerk reactions to "conservatism" when Apple hands out such balderdash and people accept Apple's word as gospel.

> No wonder the kids these days have knee-jerk reactions to "conservatism"

Is it really a surprise after taking away fundamental bodily autonomy from half of the population? That is a government overreach, if anything.

Depending on your philosophical leanings, banning abortion actually grants bodily autonomy to the entirety of the not-yet-born population.

I'm not expecting you to accept that philosophical position, but I hope it explains how the governmental policy is only an overreach to the extent that a particular unprovable and unfalsifiable philosophical position is correct.

I don’t know, is an unborn fetus an American citizen? Because the mother definitely is, right now, without any doubt - and pregnancy is a very dangerous, sometimes even lethal state, with long-term serious health problems. I don’t see any defensible arguments to strip bodily autonomy from a current citizen, it’s not a zero sum game (I’m sure you can create some ad absurdum situation where stripping someone of their rights “for the greater good” turns out very nightmarish). These matters should only be discussed by the mother and her doctor, that’s it.

And the next logical step is to make it illegal to ejaculate except inside a woman and ban birth control, because they're preventing the sperm and egg from becoming a human being, which they clearly want to do. Those cells need autonomy! Birth control is injustice!

I suppose someone could have the philosophical position that women have a moral duty to turn all their egg cells into human lives, but just because we can imagine such a biologically impossible position doesn't mean that you can declare all positions other than your own to be completely unreasonable.

There is a much brighter dividing line between gametes and embryos than between pre-viability and post-viability embryos, so just on the basis of legal certainty it would be better to say that life starts at conception. I also think that it is philosophically parsimonious to define human beings as unified entities with distinct DNA from their parents, otherwise each skin cell should have its own human rights (which would mean that obese people get to cast more votes than skinny people).

In any case, given that there is ambiguity on where to draw the line, the safest approach is to pick the earliest practical point, since mistakenly protecting non-humans is better than mistakenly manslaughtering entities that we later concede were humans. If we take the view that every gamete has to become a human life, then nearly everyone in the country should be arrested as soon as they reach puberty.

Or it might be American conservatives giving massive hand-outs to the rich so they can get their second (or third!) yacht while fighting tooth and nail against any government subsidies that might primarily benefit young people.

Please let us ignore the millions of Democrats having second or Nth homes, yachts, business jets, and large monetary holdings. It is not just the conservatives, mind you.

Sure, but Democratic politicians aren't voting for tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies/generous terms on public land for petroleum companies, while fighting against student loan forgiveness, expansion of the child tax credit and environmental protection laws.

No, they raise taxes to crush middle-class, deny permits to oil drillers (to this day), and kill small wildlife by allowing dumping of cadmium waste (solar panel by-product) waters into gullies and culverts and with ground-covering solar panels (killing shelter plants) while ignoring the cheaper carbon-tax energy sources, and not cleaning up SuperFund sites to this day.

It is all about making a certain technology prohibitively expensive so that they can protect their pet projects and their paying constituents.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardgleckman/2022/03/31/the-m...

It's not "balderdash". The concept of conservatism predates the existence of the US and its "conservative party" (in the same way that the views of your "liberal party" don't define liberalism).

See for an origin of the term https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/

Agreed that the word predates America! Your link says "conservatism came into existence with or after Burke’s critique of the French Revolution" and notice my peer comment in this thread where I called out Burke's Wikipedia article.

But that Apple definition is still balderdash.

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