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by goodpoint 1433 days ago
You are mistaken.
1 comments

No, I am not.
Shorter version: Yes, you are mistaken.

Longer version: this is a discussion of a bill in progress in the British parliamentary system, where the current government is by a party known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, or "Conservatives" for short. This should not be confused with any colloquial meaning of the term "conservative" that might be familiar to you from American vernacular usage.

Note that political party names undergo drift from whatever they originally described over a period of decades to centuries. For example, the Australian Liberal Party is anything but "liberal" in the US context -- they're roughly equivalent to the US Republican mainstream in terms of ideology. Nor is the Australian "Labour" party a party of organized labour. Neither is the British Labour party -- it used to be, but the party leadership embarked on a protracted and mostly successful campaign to cut it off from its grassroots over a decade ago.

Anyway: the Conservative and Unionist Party has a very specific policy platform, which is described by the word "conservative" in British political discourse and which does not map neatly onto the American concept of conservativism because large chunks of American conservative culture simply don't exist in the UK. Yes, there are out-of-the-closet libertarians and objectivists and Christian dominionists in the Conservative party, but they're minor factions. The main faction can loosely be described as post-Thatcherite free marketeers, with a recent influx of hard-right racists and xenophobes who migrated en masse from UKIP, the UK Independence Party, after the Brexit referendum in 2016. There is no equivalent of the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so there can be no equivalent of Constitutional Originalism in British conservativism. It's a different animal.

Another version: no I am not.

I'm impressed with how many people really do not understand the meaning of these terms. The idea that the US is culturally divided makes a lot more sense to me now, reading all of these responses.

> I'm impressed with how many people really do not understand the meaning of these terms.

When multiple people tell you that you’re wrong and no one else is taking your side, the rational response is to consider that you may be wrong. But, as humans, we sometimes lack the willingness (or perhaps ability) to do so.

It's a losing battle - people are wise not to jump in. I'm even restraining myself from providing my own reasoning.

"eppur si muove"