#19007: Mithras — 03/17  at  03:43 PM
QandO comes close, those (a) it's more libertarian than conservative and (b) they do happen to buy the anti-climate change science crud. But it's thoughtful and interesting if you've not made it a habit.

#19008: — 03/17  at  04:09 PM
This web site also has Roger Scruton, a philosopher who lost credibility through being a hack for the tobacco industry!

#19012: — 03/17  at  05:28 PM
I would really like to know what the word
"conservative" means these days. I've
slummed around the right half of the
blogosphere a fair amount, and have yet
to encounter a site that aligns with my
notion of what conservatism means.

Are there any real, old-fashioned
conservatives out there, or are they an
endangered species?

#19013: Chris — 03/17  at  05:37 PM
I read the blog a few times when it first started. I've long harbored a genuine hope for the creation of a quality group blog populated by conservatives. Volokh doesn't cut it (their attitudes towards science, and rigorous scholarship in general, leave more than a little to be desired), and the "Conservative Philosopher" blog was run by a hack, for hacks. Unfortunately, Right Reason fails as well. Starting with Bill "Maverick Philosopher" Vallicella's know-nothing posts on continental thought (followed, in comments, by a defense of them that basically reads, "but I have degrees, so I know what I'm talking about" - has anyone else noticed this annoying tendency to appeal to credentials, in lieu of arguments and facts, among conservative intellctuals?), moving to the butchering of Singer's thought, and on to a discussion of assisted suicide that, when it didn't ignore medical facts, did little more than cite disreputable experts' opinions, the blog has been a collection of poorly-reasoned posts and just plain bad scholarship.

#19014: — 03/17  at  05:37 PM
Reading posts there i did notice that they sure talk real purdy. But beneath the pomp are the same old arguments: me first, not my fault, etc...

It's really more enjoyable to read freerepublic. At least they help keep you up to date with the news.

#19021: paperwight — 03/17  at  06:29 PM
Hrm. I read the Plainsman very occasionally, and he seems sane, at least, though I don't agree with him much. Part of the problem (and I have a post in the works about this as a response to a Jonathan Chait article a couple weeks ago) is that the word "conservative" is worthless as a description of the modern Republican party and their various fellow travelers and apparatchiks. It's about as valid as "Jews for Jesus" -- a label that people hang on themselves that is almost as inaccurate as it's possible to be.

The word "conservative" today pretty much means "Republican", should be read as such, and frankly, should not be used to describe anyone who supports Republican policies, period. I would start using the word conservative to describe people like Kevin Drum, as he's an incrementalist who's reluctant to enact substantial change, fiscally prudent, and a foreign policy realist.

#19022: — 03/17  at  07:04 PM
As of about three years ago, I was considered a conservative. Oddly, my positions haven't changed much, but the way they're described by others have been.

Hayek is spinning in his grave these days...

#19024: — 03/17  at  08:17 PM
Ditto #7 for me. The difference is, you can't be a casual conservative any more. The clique of people on the right who treat politics like an interesting but ultimately harmless enthusiasm has dried up - now every issue is a matter of national loyalties and personal character and life and death. There's no breathing room left in America for the political hobbyist, and less for the moderate.

Alas! Lament for the halcyon days of moderation and prudent, educated Wall-Street bankers with their steel-rimmed glasses and their "No, sir, I will have to respectfully disagree." Those times have gone.

The Volokh thing surprises me; I thought he was better than this.

#19025: donna — 03/17  at  08:31 PM
The new breed of democrats seem to pretty much prefer the term "progressives", self included. It sort of distinguishes itself from the far left liberal position to one that is somewhat more centrist. I'm hoping the new conservatives will self-identify with a new label soon, so we will know them and be able to meet them in the middle once again. Right now, I've pretty much give up hope of rational conversation with anyone who calls themselves Republican or conservative....

#19026: Orac — 03/17  at  08:43 PM
As I've said many times before, I used to be considered pretty darned conservative by most, albeit leaning towards the libertarian side. I believed in a strong military, fiscal responsibility (a deficit hawk; in other words, as much as I like tax cuts, there have to be equivalent spending cuts if you want to enact tax cuts), a prudent foreign policy focused on protecting the interests of the U.S., and limiting the power of the federal government other than for guaranteeing the Bill of Rights. I still do. But the definitions have shifted, and my brand of conservatism seems almost quaint these days.

Apparently these days to be a conservative, you have to believe in pre-emptive war, be unconcerned about massive deficits as long as we get tax cuts, support an expansive Wilsonian vision of bringing democracy to the world, support a nanny state based on fundamentalist Christian principles, and support the erosion of fundamental rights of U.S. citizens in the name of a vague unending war on "terror." These days, I'm at best a moderate...

#19030: Max Goss — 03/17  at  09:25 PM
<i>Apparently these days to be a conservative, you have to believe in pre-emptive war, be unconcerned about massive deficits as long as we get tax cuts, support an expansive Wilsonian vision of bringing democracy to the world, support a nanny state based on fundamentalist Christian principles, and support the erosion of fundamental rights of U.S. citizens in the name of a vague unending war on "terror."<i>

I'd like to point out that not a single one of these items has been defended on Right Reason. Like PZ Myers, who, strangely, says he's "willing to listen to the other side" while declaring that he "won't be going back" to our site, you evince no commitments to serious engagement with conservative thought. Well, I suppose it's easiest to sit on the sidelines and snipe.

#19031: Max Goss — 03/17  at  09:27 PM
Sorry, that should have read "commitment," not "commitments."

#19035: Orac — 03/17  at  09:56 PM
Strawman, as I never mentioned that they were on the Right to Reason site, although I admit that perhaps my post could have been construed that way simply because that is the topic of PZ's post. Those very items are, however, defended by the Administration and its allies.

To paraphrase what Reagan once said about his leaving the Democratic Party: I never left the Republican Party. It left me.

#19044: — 03/18  at  01:46 AM
I'd like to think of myself as a better person than this. I try to be open-minded. I really do.

And then I click on the link to Right Reason and the first thing that hits my eye is the name "Ann Coulter" and the phrase "common sense" used in the same post.

No.

Bad blog. We don't piss all over sense and decency in two short sentences.

No.

#19045: Kate — 03/18  at  01:57 AM
Tristan, you beat me to it. I was just about to come over here and point out his latest post, but you stole my thunder. ;)

#19049: — 03/18  at  07:28 AM
No more than you are, I'm afraid, with your dogmatic derision and gullibility. If this is skepticism, it's sadly wanting in rigour

#19051: PZ Myers — 03/18  at  09:05 AM
I was willing to listen to the other side. I looked at the site, read a bit, even linked to it...but it came up short on the "reason" part. If that is conservative thought, I hope damn few people have any commitment to it.

#19056: — 03/18  at  10:35 AM

No more than you are, I'm afraid, with your dogmatic derision and gullibility. If this is skepticism, it's sadly wanting in rigour

There are limits, you know. There's a difference between 'dogmatic derision' and an inability to tolerate things that are blantantly, empirically untrue and openly harmful. Keeping an open mind doesn't mean accepting every misguided viewpoint that crosses your path, no matter how disconnected from reality it is.

However, I'm happy to report I wasn't the only one who thought the same of Francis Beckwith's Ann Coulter post. I checked again this morning, and it's been deleted. I guess there is a smidgen of sense to be found there. I should have taken a screenshot of it -- but it was an approving link to an article that, with Coulter's usual insensate babble, advocated barring an entire gender from a job field, regardless of the merits of the person applying. I don't have the stomach to treat that nonsense with any kind of respect. Because it doesn't deserve any. And I'm glad the managers of Right Reason apparently felt the same way.

That said, my hop, skip, and jump through the rest of the site hasn't given me much reason to come back. For instance, by random chance, the first entry I tried to read ("What is a Conservative", Rob Koons, March 10th), contained the following. Read the whole thing, in case I've inadvertently taken these lines out of some context I wasn't aware of:

A leftist, in the paradigmatic case, believes that what is good is utterly independent of what is real, of what actually exists or has existed. A conservative must believe in something like the privative theory of evil, or equivalently, in the scholastic principle that goodness and being are convertible... Leftists, in contrast, claim to see or intuit an ideal kind of reality that has, to this point in history, never been realized. The leftist is not disturbed or discouraged by this fact: so much the worse for history (or reality), is his attitude.

*snip*

Modern conservatives, in contrast, are the intellectual heirs of the anti-leftists of the past (Burke, the American Founders, Disraeli, the New Humanists).

This wears thin very quickly. Like it would for anybody who sees utterly alien motives ascribed to their political beliefs.

It would help, I suppose, if Koon didn't contradict his own bizarre definitions in the same post. Even allowing with Koon's definitions - which I don't - the founders of the United States would strike me as pretty damn liberal. You know. Given their attempt to destroy the preexisting heirarchy and establish something that has until then never existed before. They certainly wouldn't be 'anti-lefist' by any twist of Koon's already twisted definitions.

But this isn't an attempt to honestly define conversatives and liberals, two very wide spectrums of belief on a political chart much larger than any of them. This is a transparent attempt to associate conversativism with everything good and honest, and liberalism with everything base and evil. Some kind of internal consistency is secondary to that aim. It's a much wordier kind of screed than most of what I've seen on the worst political blogs, but screed nonetheless.

So not deserving of even the time I've already given it.

#19061: Nullifidian — 03/18  at  11:12 AM
Rob Koons is another DI fellow traveler who has called William Dembski, in a fit of rampant overexaggeration, "The Isaac Newton of information theory."

#19076: Les Lane — 03/18  at  02:30 PM
If God is everywhere, is he in Hell? Francis Beckwith answers.

#19079: — 03/18  at  02:58 PM

A leftist, in the paradigmatic case, believes that what is good is utterly independent of what is real, of what actually exists or has existed...

This sounds a bit like Objectivism to me - the assumption that one is uncompromisingly devoted to reality (sorry, Reality) and everyone else is a mush-minded fantasist is typical of the Randites. So is wrapping oneself in the cloak of Reason. Grabbing the moral and epistemological high ground as a given. Awful what you have to do when you know, in your heart of hearts, that what you espouse is mean-minded codswallop.

Trackback: Review of Right Reason Tracked on: Johnny Logic (204.50.25.4) at 2005 03 18 15:48:33
Right Reason emerged from the tumult of The Conservative Philosopher(TCP), where K. Burgess Jackson disabled comments and alienated his some of its members. In contrast to TCP, Right Reason has admirably aspired to give “conservative principles a careful, powerful, philosophical...

#19087: — 03/18  at  05:56 PM
Oh, hossenpfeffer! I used to write speeches and press releases for Orrin Hatch. I worked at Education with Bill Bennett. They'll call anybody anything if they think it hurts their political opposition.

Remember Chuck Colson? He was the one who said he'd walk over his grandmother for Nixon. Now he flacks for the religious right. Grandma's still under his boots, though. I don't think she can tell that it's Jesus she suffers for now.

Conservatives eat their political offspring, and they don't bother with good sauces, either.

#19088: — 03/18  at  06:00 PM
Maybe I can aid Prof. Myers in his quest to find a conservative he can respect. Maimon Schwarzschild (right spelling?) of The Right Coast (therightcoast.blogspot.com) gives a first-rate critique of Eugene Volokh's posting on the Iranian execution. It's too long to quote here, so I won't.

As I did on Crooked Timber, I have to confess to mixed emotions. Reading about the execution, I felt much the same bloody-mindedness that Volokh was reveling in. (He shouldn't have REVELED in it; but I don't blame him in the least for FEELING it.) I came to a different conclusion from Volokh's, though: this easy slide into vengefulness is another good reason for taking (as far as possible) the retributive impulse OUT of punishment.

#19099: — 03/18  at  07:13 PM
Re Volokh & cruel executions: does that mean you're OK with non-cruel capital punishment?