Friendship, says Oakeshott, can only exist in the absence of any desire to improve or change the friend. The tie between friends is that of familiarity, not usefulness. You are not going to drop a friend of 20 years and go chasing after a fresh, new one because the old friend is outdated. Or I hope you won’t. We all have a conservative disposition in friendship, says Oakeshott.
Another aspect of life in which we are all conservatively disposed are our tools. A surgeon doesn’t stop in the midst of surgery to design a new scalpel. His value (or mine, or yours) in the professional field is our permanence. Spending a long time doing the same thing makes you good at this thing. In parenting, it’s the same. Being there is what counts. It doesn’t matter what, how or if you play with a child. What matters is that you are around, available, interested, continuously present. In marriage, it’s not the special occasions or great birthday gifts but being present and interested every day that makes a marriage.
This is all obvious, of course, but here Oakeshott brings up an important point. One tool in common use, he reminds us, are general rules of conduct. Isn’t it easier to function in a collectivity, big or small, where everybody knows the rules and understands why they should be practiced?
Oakeshott believes that being conservative in politics isn’t about holding specific beliefs about the nature of existence or practicing any particular religion. He says that conservative politics is about one thing: maintaining our existing way of life by upholding the same general rules of conduct. We are, Oakeshott explains, a civilization of people that embraced as its guiding principle that everybody is an individual who holds all sorts of beliefs and pursues any kind of individually chosen goals. We tolerate monomaniacs, he says, and put in structures of government that
protect us against the nuisance of those who spend their energy and their wealth in service of some pet indignation.. by setting a limit to the amount of noise anyone might emit.
I believe this is beautifully put and can be applied to many of the things going on presently.
Pet indignation is such a great expression and can be used often.
Clarissa's Blog 
According to these desciptions, I also have a conservative mindset. But I don’t get how this would make me vote for right-wing parties. They want to massively cut taxes, which means cutting costs for education, infrastructure, health services, weaken laws for protection of consumers, they seem fine with risking climate change, allowing more pesticides in the ground water etc. These are all massive changes that i am opposed to.
Would you say Trump and MAGA are conservative in the sense described here? Probably not, right? Because they are changing everything they can, from international relations to tariffs to government agencies and even the White House. Since they promised to do that from the start I have trouble understanding how a person with a conservative mindset like you could have decided to vote for him.
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This is why:
https://x.com/i/status/2011485172768632969
Forget the transcript and watch the entire video. It’s only 4 minutes. Our choice was between Trump and what’s in the video.
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zinemin
“…I also have a conservative mindset” _ “These are all massive changes that i am opposed to.”
No, you are definitely not conservative. You support ideas put in place by radical leftist wetdreams, all of which (except for possibly the tariffs), harm society as they currently exist. Some were, and are, valid concerns, but how the “remedies” emplaced have created problems that put the West at risk.
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I’m fully with you on this issue. It just does not seem so extremely important to me, not in comparison to the issues I listed above. But I know they are to you. You think they show people becoming more and more detached from physical and biological reality and you think this is a slippery slope, correct? I just don’t really get how the exact way we talk about trans people, while annoying, could be a threat to my way of living, while Trump and his experimentation with global trade and global relations are.
Would you agree Trump and MAGA are not conservative in many respects?
If there was a Democratic candidate who would publicly agree with the majority (and us) on the issue of how to talk about trans people and with your opinion about DEI and similar things, would you consider voting for this candidate?
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” I just don’t really get how the exact way we talk about trans people, while annoying, could be a threat to my way of living”
Have no idea if you’re a man or a woman… if you’re a woman do you want to be forced to share the restroom with masturbating autogynephilic men who get hyper aroused? (yes there is film of this happening) What about dressing rooms?
If you’re a man, do you want women in your life exposed to that?
If you have a daughter who’s into sports do you want her to have to compete against males?
The “exact way we talk about trans people” leads directly to those and other nasty results.
I’m done pretending. Trans people mimic the other sex but they cannot become the other sex. Period.
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Ersatz men and ersatz women
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I personally watched a colleague fudge final grades in a medical field. I sat there and watched as she changed Fs into Cs. Two of the Fs were really low Fs. They became Cs and instead of being expelled from the program, those students could continue. This is a course in a medical field that you really want future practitioners to pass honestly. I’m going to go to a doctor tomorrow, and I don’t know if he passed his courses. He can be completely incompetent. I don’t know what is more important.
How is this connected to the trans issue? The reason we are fudging grades is because we were told that the only reason why non-white students can fail a course is if we are racists. My friend doesn’t want to be humiliated and vituperated in public.
This has been happening for years. It’s doctors, engineers, pharmacists, and so on. These are people who can’t be failed, have to be hired, and can’t be fired. We have accepted an obvious untruth and now live with the consequences. Can anybody tell me what can be more important than this?
I don’t care what Trump is or what he thinks about trade or conservatism. I see him as the only line of defense from this insanity that engulfed us. This started after George Floyd on a massive scale, and these specialists with fudged grades will start practicing soon.
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As for the question about voting for a Dem candidate again. The candidate you describe cannot possibly exist, so the question is moot. But no, I personally will never vote for any Dem candidate again under any scenario. I don’t believe them. I’ve had enough of their dishonesty. I’ve had enough of being insulted, bad named and terrorized over completely invented things.
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