An EU representative in Venezuela dared state the obvious: Hugo Chavez is a dictator. In respone, Chavez ordered intelligence commandos to abduct the envoy from his hotel room and eject him from the country. That settles it then. Chavez is not a dictator. Really he isn't.

Something along the lines of how the "Religion of Peace" operates? - We're peaceful, damn it! And we're going to cut the head off of anybody who says we ain't!

That is funny. Chavez cracks me up. Just wait until he becomes new best friends with our President. He'll be teaching him how to deal with all of those pesky folks in the opposition.

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"Really, he's not." lol, I'm convinced.

Hey, Dan. As I've stated before, I'm a big fan. I asked you awhile ago about something you stated about conservatism. I think the statement came in a post regarding Randroids.

You stated that conservatism is not an ideology. I was always interested in what you meant by that. I know you're a busy guy, especially now that your career seems to be reaching a rather glorious zenith (congrats on that, too). If you ever get the chance, I'd love to see a post explaining what you meant.

Anyway, keep up the great work. Cheers.

Andrew,

I think I might give it a shot. It might run along the lines that I was thinking about this weekend: There is little linkage between the power and benefit.

The pending Democratic-machine package, called "stimulus" by some, is a good example. The adherents of left are funded to give more representation to the concerns of the left. Unions are becoming passe by choice, thus the left is funding them, to strengthen their influence over the voting base.

But even though private corporations are benefactors of the free markets. There is no structural link between the two. Conservatives mostly opposed bailouts to the normal benefactors of free markets, and the normal benefactors competed for public money like they would market money, because it was money.

It's in the common democratic false projection about the news media: Conservatives are for free markets; Corporations are for free markets; all Big Media is owned by Big Corporations; thus all Big Media is owned by conservatives.

This, however, makes Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Bill Gates, "conservatives". And as they gave a lot of money to the Clintons. One would also almost have to assume that the Clintons represent a "conservative" position as benefactors of conservative money. It also makes MSNBC, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Madow "conservative" by degrees as well.

They cannot see a benefactor outside of a political position, so they falsely parallel big corporations as "conservative", when any number of a conservative boycotts have been proposed against the product of big corporations.

Meanwhile, I am quite sympathetic to practical socialism, but I am quite conservative. Process and pragmatism and consent of the governed is important. Marxism is governed by ideology, and soft-Marxist are only slightly more palatable. My skepticism that Man will remake man walks hand-in-hand with my Christian faith.

I'm diametrically opposed to Alinskyites. And because McCain was such a friend to crypto-Marxists, I ended up voting for Chuck Baldwin. Because the Dems have no problem with judge-made law, I oppose them almost uniformly.

Sea King, I am confused as to how your post answeres my question.

Well, I guess the main point is that ideology came to as the "science of ideas", it took on the meaning of a "systematic set of ideas". And from there it has taken on a meaning of a doctrine of governing practical matters by more or less speculative theory.

Conservatism isn't "trying out" anything. Although individual members may be progressive on any given issue, there is less emphasis on speculation and more on what works and has worked before, rather than achieving some ideal.

I think the concrete upshot is that power and benefit are more distributed. We don't try to structure a free market so that only those actors who support free markets can benefit. As opposed to the libs who must bolster the power of unpopular unions, because it feeds back into the election of liberals. Meanwhile, I don't care how much Bill Gates makes, regardless if he spends a lot on getting crypto or soft Marxists elected.

I think it is the universal of what has worked and how it has worked, make conservatism a little less of a "ideology" and more of a "practice".

The hard part is that I cannot say there are no ideologue conservatives. Libertarians come pretty close in my estimation. But apart from the ideology I see in Libertarianism, I still gain from their input and observations. And just like they can't stop a socialist-sympathetic like me from championing conservative causes, we can't expel all conservative ideologists from the ranks of conservative.

I guess the sharpest example I can think is a more or less discrete example: in Marxism the proposed system is good, and those people who disagree with you can be dismissed as "dupes of the system", and can be dispensed with if needed be, because they stand in the way of the system to come.

On the other hand, I think proponents of Marxism aren't dupes of anything but their own vanity. The need to divide the world by those-who-see-it-right, and those-who-see-it-wrong is a universal human foible--and you know what bucket people tend to put themselves in. I'm willing to have a dialog on almost anything and put it up to vote.

Because I see various caveats here and there is the reason that I cast the idea in distinct instances of alignment and perceptions of alignment.