The Glade 4.0

Either politically, socially or both. I'm curious to see what people think on this one.

Define "conservative" first, or this is turning into another **** semantical *****.

Off the top of my head, from a socially conservative standpoint, there are dozens.
Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Iran, Vatican City, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan.... wait, I'm sensing a pattern here.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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If I define it ahead of time, then we'll absolutely have the ***** as we spend 10 pages arguing over the definition. So just use your own definition.

Socially or fiscally. ?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Fiscally, a majority of countries in the world are, by many measures, more conservative than the USA. The ultimate measure of fiscal conservativism is how much of a deficit/surplus one's government runs, in relation to the size of their economy. Canada is an obvious one. While we are running a deficit again since 2008, but it's a much smaller per capita amount.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Since any kind of valuation is going to be purely subjective, I'll just throw out some information.

Iceland, Ireland, Poland and pretty much the entirety of Africa and Asia prohibit abortion on request, which the USA allows. China, India (~35% of the world's population right there) and Japan join the US as countries that practice capital punishment. Ten countries allow gay marriage, which of course means there are nearly 200 that don't.

Long story short: the USA isn't just in the company of theocracies and dictatorships. To channel Coro a minute - pretty much everyone sucks in some way or other.

How about we just list the countries that are more awesome than the US, because that answer is NONE!

USA! USA! USA!

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Eagles always look like they're SERIOUSLY pissed off about something.... or disdainful.


No wonder they're a good symbol for the US.

Whichever you'd like to look at really. I'll let you define your response as you like.

I have altered Dash's image to be more appropriately patriotic.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It's worthless to even discuss without a common definition. It's worthless to discuss anything. I think Coro did an experiment to demonstrate this already. If you say use your own definition, this will simply devolve into a discussion of random qualities about different countries.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

This thread has soooo much potential entertainment value....

I'm not trying to start a discussion so much as trying to get people's perspectives. Part of the perspective is how they define conservative.

It's hard to compare American conservatism to most other nations because they don't have the proper Federal/state balance of powers to deal with. It that way no country is as conservative as the US, with the possible exception of the United Arab Emirates.

Conservatism is largely (as I see it) the idea that the Federal Government's power is very small and finite while the State's power is nearly infinite. (where as Libertarianism seem to be the idea that both are severely limited or nearly powerless.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Mexico has a very similar balance of power between the states and the Federal government (in theory) to the U.S.

Interestingly, Mexico's image as a poor country is really a result only of its proximity to the U.S. and Canada. If it were located somewhere else, it would be considered a very powerful nation.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

American Conservative?
Classical Conservative?
Dictionary defined conservative?
European Conservative?

Just pick one - you don't have to tell me what it means to you but I know what it means to me.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Plus more.

Azile, your question is poisonous.

Fix it.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Choose the one that you find most relevant or interesting and compare against that. I'm not choosing for you.

I'm interested in other people's perspectives, not if they agree or disagree with my perspective.

If it helps, folks, just think of Aizle's question as being two questions:

1. What do you personally think "conservative" means?

2. Using that definition, what countries do you think are more conservative than the U.S.?


One interesting thing that's already clear from this thread (not that it was a mystery before, of course) is that people who lean conservative (as this board does) strongly prefer clear, explicit rules and parameters!

You forgot "and then spend 10 pages of posts arguing semantics about said rules/parameters."

Wikipedia has a list of countries and their conservation efforts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_reserve

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Careful. Every time I say that, it turns into a brouhaha.

Nah, at most I can see there being a bit of a hullabaloo, but honestly, I don't expect there to be much more than a slight hubbub. A brouhaha seems unlikely though.

Conservative means different things in different context.

Here in Canada, Conservative can refer to a specific political party. A conservative investor is someone who is cautious and takes few risks. A conservative estimate is, likewise, avoiding the extreme possibilities and outliers.

I was taught, in school, that a political conservative is someone who prefers the status quo, the traditional, and doesn't easily embrace change. That's generally how I view the word in my mind. It doesn't represent a specific ideology or dogma. A conservative in Soviet Russa Circa 1987 would be a hard-line communist, because at that point, 60 years of Russian tradition agrees with them. Todays revolutionaries, if successful, become tomorrow's conservatives.

This definition holds up in many areas. "Social Conservatives" resist changes to social mores and traditions. Where it doesn't really hold up, these days, are in economics. The USA is more "socialist" at this point than the soviets ever were. The USA has a long-standing tradition of spending money that it doesn't have and forgetting about it. People still use "conservative" to represent fiscal responsibility, however. This confuses matters.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Australia also has a similar system of government to the US, in fact a bunch of situations in Australian history work as perfect examples of how, despite having less power than our federal government does, the federal government can pretty much ignore the states to push any agenda they want if they have enough political will behind them.