The below is content from: http://justanotherblogonsavingtheworld.blogspot.ca/
Original content is in black, annotations and insights by myself are in red. Guest blogging this week is my lovely partner who provided all the GIFs.

On Conservatism

(originally published Oct. 5, 2012)
“It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs." - Confucius
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I know I promised a note featuring a less serious topic: namely, 'In Defence of Video Gaming.'  It's practically finished, but in honour of Canadian Thanksgiving and for self-care reasons, I had to publish this note first.
If you have to defend it in your manifesto blog, on some level you realize how sad it is that you spent 40 hours a week in high school playing them.

I've touched on this topic in the past, indirectly, especially in my first note ever: The Deadliest Sin. To save you the trouble of reading it if you haven't already, excessive pride is bad.  If you don't agree, you might find it interesting. (http://justanotherblogonsavingtheworld.blogspot.ca/2013/01/the-deadliest-sin.html)

"Save you the trouble of reading it" Even he realizes how shitty his blogs are.
What is conservatism?

Before I read this, I am flat out saying if your only academic source is Wikipedia, you have proved nothing. In other words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3u2mBVFEHc 
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Wikipedia defines it as: "a political and social philosophy that promotes retaining traditional social institutions."  My definition would be more exhaustive.  I'd argue that conservatism is a state of being.

A small "C" conservative (as opposed to big "C" Conservative in the political sense) has lost, or submitted, in an internal struggle with their self.

As I argued in On Free Will, every human being is born with the "motivation to enhance and incur pleasure while minimize and eliminate pain."  But the self: the ego, (Latin for "I") determines the outcome of this struggle.

At birth, we don't question the dominance of the self, and thus, our motivation to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  It's natural, in the innate sense.  A baby will smile when it feels pleasure and cry when it feels pain.  I'm referring to both pleasure and pain in the widest sense: pain would also include fear and insecurity.

However, gradually as we get more experienced we start to become sensitive to the feelings of others, not just our own.  As empathy develops, we become less and less self-centric and more and more liberal; not in the political sense, but rather in the sense that we value the welfare of others.  This is why basically every late teenager and student in their early 20's in North America votes for the politically Left.

Eventually, however, most people in North America turn away from liberalism and become more and more conservative.  Why is this?

Simply, they give up.

 Liberalism is great in theory; after all, it's easy to be in favor of raising taxes when you aren't paying any.  But the moment you start to pay your own share of taxes, "to support the drug habits of the homeless at Richmond and Dundas" as one of my favorite professors once stated, you turn inward.  You focus on your immediate values, such as immediate family.  You argue that the state will take care of "those people."  And eventually, you turn full-blown curmudgeon, like my boss at work and my academic adviser.

You see, it's easy to be conservative. It's a part of our basic hardware as human beings.

 But, here's my point: conservatism isn't going to change anything, by definition.  In fact, in some respects conservatives cause more harm than they claim to prevent.

 They choose alienation and segregation rather than community - when has alienation ever created anything positive?  It defies our existence as a species and as subjects within an ecosystem.

Conservatives have given a "great sigh;" they feel like the ultimate victims. The Tea Partiers in the US illustrate this perfectly.  All those flags that demand "don't tread on me."  They've given up on trying to appreciate others, and demand that the world appreciate them.

my thoughts:

It's like one of the greatest exercises in egotism.

I thought she was going to post a screenshot of his blog here.

To  be honest, I pity conservatives.  The most conservative person out there is usually the most alienated; the one that feels that they're the most victimized.

Conservatives are the most in need of community, and they have one of the greatest struggles ahead of them to ever appreciate anyone besides themselves (if they can even appreciate that), ever again.

As such, the genuine "leftists": those who care about the future of the planet as a whole, have a great responsibility to the conservative.

 You see, just as it's easy for the conservative to turn inwards, it's easy for the liberal to turn their back on the conservative.

 All you accomplish by turning your back on conservatives is to alienate, victimize, and thus, feed their conservatism even more.  It's easy to mock Tea Partiers, but much more difficult to empathize with them - to invite them to come together for the benefit of all.

I find Canadian Thanksgiving presents a serious challenge for conservatives.  It forces them to appreciate others, if only they're immediate family.

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To be honest, I kind of detest "Thanksgiving."  How so many in Western society pride themselves on their being thankful for what they have "one" day a year.  It makes a mockery of all that we have been given.

I fight for the day when we celebrate Thanksgiving every second of every hour of every day, together.  It's worth the struggle.

"The example he used was cutting the cake at a party. In Adam's perfectworld the person who cut the cake would pass the piece to someone else (selflessness), and that personwould pass the cake to the next person (more selflessness). In this thought experiment, no one eats apiece of cake until one of them decides to be selfish. The idea of a group of people continuously passing a piece of cake." In his perfect world, people would die of starvation while passing food around...