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[mainiac]

I remember reading somewhere that Toady made the LCS instead of the CCS because it's easier to make fun of liberals.  Liberals love to make jokes about liberalism but conservatives are all serious and stuff about conservatism.  I wonder if we've strayed from those roots.  A lot of the elite liberal agenda is stuff that i would just call liberal.  Sorry about the drunk nature of this post I am trying to keep the grammar acceptable.  But while the game clearly works as it is, I wonder if it could be better.  Like the liberals are supposed to be proudly declaring an agenda of whatever the conservatives hate.  "Knee jerk liberalism" and all that, not post recession "we are doing whatever comprimises it takes to keep the country from falling apart without compromising our core values" liberalism.  Have we strayed from those routes?

Not to trash on Jonathan Fox, he's like the bomb and stuff, just wondering if like get back to the roots and stuff or maeby I'm just imagining the roots.  But discuss getting back to the roots in this thread or say I'm really drunk or whatever.

[Kay12]

I don't quite get your point, but it certainly is easier to make lighthearted fun stuff about Elite Liberal animal rights and gay empowerment than it's easy to make fun of Conservative death penalty and gun control (or lack of...).

[Aerogen]

I don't quite get your point, but it certainly is easier to make lighthearted fun stuff about Elite Liberal animal rights and gay empowerment than it's easy to make fun of Conservative death penalty and gun control (or lack of...).

Unless you're good with dark humor.

[Kay12]

Liberals are the more utopistic sort, really. They want a system that works for everybody and have a lot of ideas for implementing these systems, but may lack realism. Conservatives are almost the opposite - they acknowledge the flaws of the current systems and may work to limit them, but believe that pursuing an utopia with design flaws is worse than tolerating the current, bearable system. Tone both up a notch and you get Elite Liberals who are going to extremes to ensure that their utopia will happen, and Arch Conservatives who are going to extremes to ensure that their country remains secure from such silly troublemakers.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

The L+ laws, under Toady, were:

- Rich people are virtually unheard of, due to taxation.
- Abortion is legal.
- Animal research is illegal in all cases.
- All law enforcement positions are subject to election and recall.
- Individual privacy is sacred.
- The death penalty is considered barbaric and never practiced.
- Nuclear power is illegal.
- Industry is subject to zero-tolerance pollution regulations.
- There are universal workers' rights and high wages.
- Homosexuals have equal rights.
- Corporations are subject to intense regulation, and there is a maximum wage law.
- Free speech is universally supported.
- Flag-burning is legal.

The game has stayed pretty loyal to that.

[Aerogen]

Liberals are the more utopistic sort, really. They want a system that works for everybody and have a lot of ideas for implementing these systems, but may lack realism. Conservatives are almost the opposite - they acknowledge the flaws of the current systems and may work to limit them, but believe that pursuing an utopia with design flaws is worse than tolerating the current, bearable system. Tone both up a notch and you get Elite Liberals who are going to extremes to ensure that their utopia will happen, and Arch Conservatives who are going to extremes to ensure that their country remains secure from such silly troublemakers.

-
Yeah, cause universal healthcare is impossible, but wars that consume trillions of dollars are easy to make.

[Kay12]

Actually I'd think, from a general point of view, that nonintervention and neutrality are conservative policies while active foreign policy, possibly also meaning military intervention and participation in NATO operations, is liberal. At least they're so here in Finland.

[Servant Corps]

Conservatism was heavily isolationist during the lead-up of WW1 and to WW2 as well. Only fairly recently had they been this pro-military and pro-"liberal interventionism" (neoconservativism descended from disillusioned "Great Society" Democrats who nevertheless supported the Vietnam War). And there are still some isolationist conservatives today, such as Ron Paul.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

It's a mess here in the states. Militarism and isolationism are both Conservative, while pacifism and internationalism are both Liberal. Different people on each side take those ingredients in different proportions, and they're influenced by current events (and tend to get angry at the other side, no matter what they do). So sometimes, Liberals rail against Conservative military actions (Iraq, Afghanistan), while other times Conservatives rail against Liberal military actions (Libya, Kuwait). Right now we have the Republican Party (Conservatives) in Congress threatening to withhold authorization to continue the operation in Libya, demanding that President Obama (Liberal) justify how this can possibly be legal and what the policy reasons are for this military adventurism. It's a bit bizarre, actually, but it makes for good spectator sport.

[Yannanth]

.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

That's half true... American Liberalism combines an economic approach that accepts taxation, interventionism, and social justice, with classically liberal views on personal liberties. American Conservatism, on the other hand, has a much more free-market and deregulatory approach to economics, and favors maintenance of commonsense moral standards and traditional social constructs. Libertarians, which are the true "liberals" in the international sense, combine Conservative economic views with Liberal social views. The LCS does favor tough taxes, wage and corporate regulations, and so on. So they aren't Libertarians.

The thing is, even though American Liberals are economically more socialist than the Conservatives, they aren't really true socialists in the international sense. They tend to still have both feet entrenched rather firmly in market economics and don't favor government control of important industries, merely government regulations to ensure that private industry serves public interest. America is a very capitalist country, and even our proponents of government intervention are usually just a different stripe of capitalists. Liberals don't have an opportunity to prove this often, because there's rarely an argument they're on the free market side of; anything Liberals want to have deregulated is usually near-unanimously agreed upon, so there's no argument to be had.

[Ampersand]

The simple facts are that labels never properly fit everyone who wears said label, political party systems are stupid, and classifying people into ideological groups is absurd.

On the flipside, I'm unaware of there having ever been "conservative" terrorist groups. Sure, there have been anti-communists in various civil wars like the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949 but these were not necessarily conservatives first of all and they also don't reflect politics in America.

Are you an American? There are plenty of anti-abortion terrorist groups in the United States who have been using intimidation tactics, bombings, murder, and other means to push their agenda, and have been shockingly and sadly successful in making a legal medical procedure impossible to find in some cities. The incident in Wichita, Kansas comes to mind.

Additionally, organizations like the KKK in the united states are officially classified by the government as terrorist organizations. Skinhead, Neo-Nazi organizations could also fit the ticket, but mainly lack any kind of centralization other than shared ideology and cannot be classed as an organization, though individuals among them may be terrorists. Additionally, militia groups and anti-gay rights organizations may fit under certain definitions of the word Terrorist. While Militia groups have not necessarily been actively following through with their ideologies, in a state of perpetual preparation, their ideology is violently anti-government. Anti-gay rights organizations also don't use violence on the organizational level, but the actions of individuals radicalized by such ideologies have driven teenagers to suicide, murdered homosexuals, among other things.

In any case, they exist.

[Kay12]

The simple facts are that labels never properly fit everyone who wears said label, political party systems are stupid, and classifying people into ideological groups is absurd.

On the flipside, I'm unaware of there having ever been "conservative" terrorist groups. Sure, there have been anti-communists in various civil wars like the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949 but these were not necessarily conservatives first of all and they also don't reflect politics in America.

Are you an American? There are plenty of anti-abortion terrorist groups in the United States who have been using intimidation tactics, bombings, murder, and other means to push their agenda, and have been shockingly and sadly successful in making a legal medical procedure impossible to find in some cities. The incident in Wichita, Kansas comes to mind.

While I agree with your point, there's a massive problem with the very definition of "Liberal" and "Conservative" as political alignments (of course, not in LCS as it's a part of the whole point). They mean very different things in different countries, during different periods. The division between Lefty Liberals and Rightie Conservatives isn't that clear outside US. For example, here in Finland, we have a "commoner" party that combines nationalism, tradition and worker's rights (True Finns), a conservative centre-right party that has a liberal foreign policy (The National Coalition), Christian Democrats who have many, many conservative values but support many left-wing social policies...

[Servant Corps]

To my knowledge the KKK is not classified as a terrorist organization and is not illegal. Granted some of the stuff the KKK does is illegal, but that, in and of itself does not criminalize the KKK.

Yannanth might be referring to the fact that you don't see terrorist groups conducting terrorism to defend the status quo, they want to instead change the status quo to something more acceptable. Usually, they wish to overturn a law or to prevent something horrible from occuring (communism). Anti-gay terrorism want to change the status quo of homosexuality tolerance, milita movements want to give more rights to states and prevent the status quo of legal federal enroachment, etc. About the only example of "conservative" terrorism (as opposed to Conservative terrorism) IS the KKK, because it was essentially a paramilitary group defending the established interests of the Democratic South during the 19th century.

VVV Going to consider OK Bombing to as a part of the Militia Movement.

[Sheb]

And what about the Oklahoma bombing?